The Shape Shifter (5 page)

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear he doesn’t have a wife. Nobody seems ever to have met her. He has a middle-aged Asian man living out there with him. Sort of a butler, I think. And he uses a maid/laundry service, and so forth. And that butler leads into another story.” With that Tarkington shook his head and laughed, signaling to Leaphorn that this story did not carry his certification.

“This one makes Mr. Delos some sort of CIA agent, did a lot of work in the Vietnam War, retired after that and went into some sort of investment business. Then another version is that he got kicked out of the CIA because a bunch of the money our government was using to pay off South Vietnam government types when they were arranging that coup to get rid of President Diem—you remember that business?”

“I’ve read about it,” Leaphorn said. “As I remember, it blew up into a big battle in Saigon with paratroopers attacking Diem’s bunch in the Presidential Palace.”

“Yeah. It brought in a new president more popular with President Kennedy. Well, anyway, the way the gossip
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TONY HILLERMAN

goes, the CIA, or whatever they were calling it then, had been handing out bags of money to help arrange that, and some of the generals who were getting it thought they were shorted. One of those quiet investigations got started, and it was concluded that some of those money bags got lighter when in the custody of Mr. Delos.”

“Oh,” Leaphorn said, and nodded.

Tarkington shrugged. “Well, you could probably find a couple of other versions of the Delos biography if you wanted to ask around in Flagstaff. He just sits up there all alone on his mountain and gives us somebody interesting to talk about. Take your pick, whichever version you prefer. Like a lot of rich folks, he’s into protecting his family’s privacy, so our gossiping fraternity has to be creative.”

The Hopi girl returned, smiled at Leaphorn, refilled his coffee cup, refilled Tarkington’s glass, and left.

“What I really want to know, I guess, is how he got that rug. Then I track it back, find out who made it, and that’s the end of it,” Leaphorn said. “So I need to know his telephone number so I can go ask him.” Tarkington was grinning. “So you can be done with this case, and go back to your usual police duties?”

“So I can go back to being a bored-stiff-by-retirement former policeman.”

“Well,” Tarkington said, staring at Leaphorn. “If you do learn anything interesting—for example, who copied it if anyone actually did, and why, and so forth—I’d sure appreciate hearing all about it.”

Leaphorn considered that. “All right,” he said.

Now Tarkington took a moment to think. He sipped his water again, while Leaphorn sipped coffee.

THE SHAPE SHIFTER

35

“You may have noticed I love to talk,” Tarkington said, emphasizing the statement with a wry smile. “That would give me something new to talk about.” Leaphorn nodded. “But you haven’t told me his number.”

“You had the name right,” Tarkington said. “Jason Delos.”

Leaphorn picked up a second sandwich, took a bite.

Judged it as very good.

“Of course I collect stuff myself,” Tarkington said, and gestured into the gallery to demonstrate. “And I collect stories. Love ’em. And that damned
Woven Sorrow
tale-teller rug collected them like dogs collect fleas. And I want to know what you find out from Delos, if anything, and how this all turns out. Will you promise me that?”

“If it’s possible,” Leaphorn said.

Tarkington leaned forward, pointed at an odd-looking pot on a desk by the wall. “See that image of the snake on that ceramic there? That’s a Supai pot. But why is that snake pink? It’s a rattler, and they’re not that color. Well, I guess they are in one deep part of the Grand Canyon.

There’s a very rare and officially endangered species down there in Havasupai territory, and they have a great story in their mythology about how it came to be pink.

And that’s going to make that pot a lot more valuable to the fellow who collects it.”

He stared at Leaphorn, looking for some sign of agreement.

“I know that’s true,” Leaphorn said. “But I’m not sure I understand why.”

“Because the collector gets the story along with the pot. People say why is that snake pink. He explains. That
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TONY HILLERMAN

makes him an authority.” Tarkington laughed. “You Navajos don’t practice that one-upmanship game like we do.

You fellows who stay in that harmony philosophy.” Leaphorn grinned. “Be more accurate to say a lot of Navajos try, but remember we have a curing ceremony to heal us when we start getting vengeful, or greedy, or—

what do you call it—‘getting ahead of the Joneses.’”

“Yeah,” Tarkington said. “I could tell you a tale about trying to get a Navajo businessman to buy a really fancy saddle. Lots of silver decorations, beautiful stitching, even turquoise worked in. He was interested. Then I told him it would make him look like the richest man on the big reservation. And he took a step back and said it would make him look like a witch.”

Leaphorn nodded. “Yes,” he said. “At least it would make the traditional Dineh suspicious. Unless he didn’t have any poor kinfolks whom he should have been helping. And all of us have poor kinfolks.” Tarkington shrugged. “Prestige,” he said. “You Navajos aren’t so hungry for that. I’ll ask a Navajo about something that I know he’s downright expert about. He won’t just tell me. He’ll precede telling me by saying,

‘They say.’ Not wanting me to think he is claiming the credit.”

“I guess I’ve heard that preamble a million times,” Leaphorn said. “In fact, I do it myself sometimes.” He was thinking that at his age, already retired, left on the shelf like the pink snake, he should understand that white cultural values were different from those of the Dineh, remembering how Navajo kids were conditioned by their elders to be part of the community, not to stand out, not to be the authority; remembering how poorly that attitude THE SHAPE SHIFTER

37

had served his generation, the age group that had been bused away to Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools to be melded into the
belagaana
culture.

“Who discovered America?” the teacher would ask.

Every student in the class knew the
belagaana
answer was Christopher Columbus, but only the Hopi and Zuni kids would hold up their hands. And if the teacher pointed to a Navajo kid, that kid would inevitably precede his answer with the “they say” disclaimer. And the teacher, instead of crediting the Navajo with being politely modest, would presume he was taking a politically correct Native American attitude and implying that he was refusing to agree with what textbook and teacher had been telling him. Remembering all that, and the confusion it sometimes produced, caused Leaphorn to smile.

The smile puzzled Tarkington. He looked slightly disappointed.

“Anyway, I’d like to hear more about the stories you’ve collected about this tale-teller rug,” Leaphorn said.

“I’ll tell you what I hear if it’s anything new.” Tarkington took another sandwich. He passed the tray to Leaphorn, his expression genial again.

“First one I’ll tell you is pretty well documented, I think. Probably mostly true. Seems the rug was started by a young woman named Cries a Lot, a woman in the Streams Come Together clan. It was in the final days of the stay in the Bosque Redondo concentration camp. She was one of the nine thousand of your people the army rounded up and marched way over to the Pecos River Valley to get them out of the way.”

Tarkington paused, raised his eyebrows. “But I guess
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TONY HILLERMAN

I don’t need to refresh your memory about the Long Walk.”

“No,” Leaphorn said, smiling. “My maternal grandfather used to tell us about freezing to death out there in his winter hogan stories when I was a boy. And then my paternal great-grandfather had his own stories about the bunch who escaped that roundup, and spent those years hiding out in the mountains.”

Tarkington chuckled “And the government then makes sure you don’t forget it. Calls a big piece of your space out here the Kit Carson National Forest, in memory of the colonel in charge of rounding you up, and burning down your hogans, and chopping down your peach orchards.”

“We don’t blame Kit Carson much,” Leaphorn said.

“He comes out pretty decent in the hogan stories, and the history books, too. It was General George Carlton who issued that General Order 15 and gave the shoot-to-kill and scorched-earth orders.”

“Most Americans never heard of that, I’m afraid,” Tarkington said. “We don’t teach our kids our version of how we tried Hitler’s final solution on you folks. Round you all up, kill anyone who tries to escape, drive off the cattle, let the Indians starve. We ought to have a chapter in all our history books describing that.” Tarkington took the final bite of his sandwich, considering this, seeming to Leaphorn to be more troubled by the failing of historians than by the deed itself.

“There’ll never be a chapter on that,” Leaphorn said.

“And I’m glad there isn’t. Why keep that kind of hatred alive? We have our curing ceremonials to get people back in harmony. Get rid of the anger. Get happy again.” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

39

“I know,” Tarkington said. “But according to the stories I hear, a lot of memories of that brutality live on in that
Woven Sorrow
rug. They say that when the Navajo headmen signed that treaty with General Sherman in 1866 and the survivors started their long walk home, that young woman and her sister brought the beginnings of the rug with them and kept working on it, working in little reminders of their treatment. Little bit of a root woven in here, and rat hair there, and so forth, as reminders of what they were eating to keep from starving.

Anyway, so the story goes, the weaving went on when the families began getting their flocks reestablished for some good wool. And other people heard about it, and more weavers got a hand in it and added another bitter memory of misery and murder and dying children. And then, finally, one of the clan headmen, some say it was either Barboncito or Manuelito, told the weavers it violated the Navajo way to preserve evil. He wanted all the weavers to arrange an Enemy Way sing to cure themselves of all those hateful memories and restore themselves to harmony.”

Tarkington took a sip of water. “What do you think of that?”

“Interesting,” Leaphorn said. “My mother’s mother told us something like that one winter when I was about ten or so. She didn’t approve of what those weavers were doing either. She told us about three of the shamans in her clan getting together and putting a special sort of curse on that rug.”

“I heard something like that, too,” Tarkington said.

“They said it had too many
chindi
associated with it. Too many ghosts of dead Navajos, starved and frozen and
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TONY HILLERMAN

killed by the soldiers. The rug would make people sick, bring down evil on people involved with it.”

“Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. You keep your bad memories, grudges, hatreds, and all that alive with you, and it makes you sick.” Leaphorn chuckled. “Not bad reasoning for people who never enrolled in introduc-tion to psychology.”

“Christians have that thought in their Lord’s Prayer,” Tarkington said. “You know: ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Too bad a lot of ’em don’t practice what they’re preaching.”

Leaphorn let that pass.

Tarkington stared at him. “I’m thinking about people crying when the judge gives the guy who killed their kid just life in prison instead of the death penalty they were praying for.”

Leaphorn nodded.

Tarkington sighed. “But back to the rug. I’ve heard bad luck stories about people who owned it down through the years.” He shrugged. “You know. Murders, suicides, bad luck.”

“We Dineh don’t believe much in luck,” Leaphorn said. “More in a sort of inevitable chain of causes producing naturally inevitable effects.”

And when he said that, he was thinking of Grace Bork’s fear, and of what sort of cosmic cause-and-effect chain might involve that
Woven Sorrow
rug, the photo of it, the fire at Totter’s Trading Post, the wanted murderer burned in there, Mel Bork’s being sucked into it, and the death threat taped on his answering machine. Then, suddenly, he was thinking of himself being sucked in as well. By being at Grandma Peshlakai’s THE SHAPE SHIFTER

41

hogan and having his hunt for her pinyon sap bandit being interrupted by the fire because it destroyed the FBI’s most wanted murderer. He shook his head, produced a rueful smile. No. That seemed to be stretching the Navajo cosmic natural connection philosophy a little too far.

6

Luxury Living
magazine protected the privacy of those who allowed its photographers access to their mansions.

It published neither names nor addresses. Leaphorn had concluded, by studying the view through the window beside the
Woven Sorrow
rug, that the house was in the high slopes outside Flagstaff—one of the handsome residences built as summer homes for those who enjoyed the long views and the cool mountain air and could afford a second home. After some stalling, Tarkington checked his address file and read all the information off it that he considered pertinent to Leaphorn. But the telephone number? It’s unlisted, Tarkington said. But you’d certainly know it, Leaphorn had insisted. Well, yes, Tarkington had admitted. But don’t let anyone know you got it from me.