a little. I’m getting old, and I get stiff.” 190
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“Sure,” Vang said.
Leaphorn got out, stretched, leaned against the fender, admired the view, planning his tactics. Vang joined him, glanced at Leaphorn inquiringly, and leaned against the car door.
“Not many people,” Leaphorn said. “A few down below, then miles and miles and miles in every direction, no sign of people.” He pointed down the road toward the village. “ ‘Torreon’ means tower, and when that little valley was first occupied by people, they built one out of stones because enemies kept attacking them.” Vang considered that. “Like what they say about Hmong. Everywhere we went people attacked us.” He glanced at Leaphorn, a wry smile. “We even had a god like that. His name was Nau Yong, and they called him
‘the Savage One’ because what he liked to do was capture lots of Hmong people, and tear them apart and drink their blood.” Vang grimaced. “Like he was a great tiger in the forest. They said he was the chief of all the bad spirits.
Sort of like their king.”
Leaphorn considered this. “Did he live on top of a mountain?” Leaphorn asked.
Vang looked surprised. “How did you know?”
“Maybe I read it somewhere,” Leaphorn said. “But that’s usually how it worked.”
He pointed toward the south, where Mount Taylor’s crest was visible against the horizon. “That’s our Sacred Mountain of the South, our boundary marker. According to my clan’s traditions, it was the home of a supernatural named ‘Ye-iitsoh.’ He was our version of your, ah, Nau Yong. Sort of in charge of all the vestiges of greed, hatred, malice, selfishness, cruelty, and so forth. The way THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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our origin worked, our First Man spirit when he was escaping the flood that forced us to move up here, he sent a diving bird back into the water to recover what he called his ‘way to make money.’ In other words, it contained everything that caused the greed and selfishness.” Leaphorn was watching Tommy Vang’s expression through every word of this.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
“Sure,” Vang said. He threw out his hands. “Everybody fighting everybody else to collect more money, bigger car, bigger house, get famous on television. Get to the top of that mountain yourself. Step on the Hmong people. Climb over them.”
Leaphorn chuckled. “That’s the general idea.”
“I heard that you Navajo say the way to find witches, anybody evil, is to look for people who have more than they need and their kinfolks are hungry.” Leaphorn nodded. “And also according to our origin story, two good
They killed the Ye-iitsoh up on the mountain, cut his head off.”
Leaphorn pointed at Cabezon Peak. “That’s his head,” he said. “It rolled all the way down there and turned into stone. And Ye-iitsoh’s blood flowed down the other side of the mountain and dried into all the back lava flow along the highway around Grants.”
“So I guess everybody has this idea about evil. Pretty much alike,” Vang said.
“And people who fight evil, too,” Leaphorn said.
“Sometimes that’s got to be policemen.” 192
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Vang looked at him. “Like you?”
Leaphorn considered that. “Maybe like both of us,” he said. “I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions.”
“Oh,” Vang said. And thought for a moment. “What do I know?”
“First, when Mr. Delos brought you from Asia, you came to San Francisco, right?”
“Yes. We stayed in a hotel there.”
“What year was that?”
“Year?” He shook his head.
“Then how old were you?”
“I was ten. Or maybe eleven. Mr. Delos had to buy me some new clothes because I had gotten a little bigger.”
“And what did you do at the hotel?”
“A woman came in every day. A Chinese woman. And she would help me some with learning better English.
Like we would watch the children’s program on television, and she would help explain. And then she started teaching me how to cook, and how to iron shirts, and how to keep everything neat and clean. Things like that. And sometimes she would take me out in a taxicab and show me the city. And every evening we would sort of plan a dinner if Mr. Delos was going to be home, and she would teach me how to cook it. And then I would put out the plates and the silver, and she would go.” Vang looked at Leaphorn, smiling. “That was fun. And good, good food.”
“She didn’t stay at night.”
