Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] by Listening Woman [txt] Page B

Leaphorn. “You just plain know a feller would have to have a real reason to do something like that.
    Just think about it.” Joe Leaphorn thought about it. Outside there was the sound of hammering, of laughter, of a pickup engine starting.
    Leaphorn was oblivious to it. He was thinking. He was again recreating the crime in his mind. The reason for what had happened at the Tso hogan must have been real—desperate and urgent—even if it had been done by the sort of person who laughed as he ran over a strange policeman beside a lonely road. Leaphorn sighed. He would have to find out about that reason. And that meant he would have to speak with Margaret Cigaret. “You were right about Mrs. Cigaret not being home,” Leaphorn said. “I went by there to check. Nobody there and the truck’s gone. You got any ideas where she is?”
    “No telling,” Mcginnis said. “She could be anyplace. I’d guess visiting kin, like I told you.”

“How did you know she wasn’t home?” Mcginnis frowned at him. “That don’t take any great brains,” he said. “She come through here three or four days ago. Had one of Old Lady Nakai’s girls driving her truck. And she ain’t been back.” He stared belligerently at Leaphorn. “And I =new she didn’t come home because the only way to get to her place from the outside is right past my place here.”
    “Three or four days ago? Can you remember which day?” Mcginnis thought about it. It took only a moment. “Wednesday. Little after I ate. About 2 P. M.” Wednesday. The Kinaalda where Leaphorn had arrested young Emerson Begay would have been starting about then.
    Begay was a member of the Mud clan. His niece was being initiated into womanhood at the ceremony. “What’s Mrs. Cigaret’s clan?”
    Leaphorn asked. “Is she a Mud Dinee?”
    “She’s a born-to Mud,” Mcginnis said. So Leaphorn knew where he could find Mrs. Cigaret.
    For a hundred miles around, every member of the Mud People healthy enough to stir would be drawn to the ritual reunion to share its blessing and reinforce its power. “There’s not many Mud Dinee around Short Mountain,” Mcginnis said. “Mrs. Cigaret’s bunch, and the Nakai family, and the Endischee outfit, and Alice Frank Pino, and a few Begays, and I think that’s all of them.” Leaphorn got up and stretched. He thanked Mcginnis for the hospitality and said he would go to the sing. He used the Navajo verb hodeeshtal, which means “to take part in a ritual chant.” By slightly changing the guttural inflection, the word becomes the verb “to be kicked.” As Leaphorn pronounced it, a listener with an ear alert to the endless Navajo punning could have understood Leaphorn to mean either that he was going to get himself cured or get himself kicked. It was among the oldest of old Navajo word plays, and Mcginnis—grinning slightly— replied with the expected pun response. “Good for a sore butt,” he said.
    The wind followed Leaphorn’s carryall half the way across the Nokaito Bench, enveloping the jolting vehicle in its own gritty dust and filling the policeman’s nostrils with exhaust fumes. It was hot.
    The promise of rain had faded as the west wind raveled away the thunderheads. Now the sky was blank blue. The road angled toward the crest of the ridge, growing rockier as it neared the top. Leaphorn down-shifted to ease the vehicle over a corrugation of stone and the following wind gusted past him. He drove across the ridge line, blind for a moment. Then, with a shift in the wind, the dust cleared and he saw the place of Alice Endischee. The land sloped northward now into Utah, vast, empty and treeless. In Leaphorn the Navajo sensitivity to land and landscape was fine-tuned. Normally he saw beauty in such blue-haze distances, but today he saw only poverty, a sparse stony grassland ruined by overgrazing and now gray with drought. He shifted the carryall back into third gear as the track tilted slightly downward, and inspected the place of