The Blessing Way Read online

  He snapped on the radio and stood by the glass door opening on his apartment balcony. The wind had raveled away the cloud cover over Sandia Mountain and its dark outline bulked against the stars on the eastern horizon.

  Ten stories below, the lights of the city spread toward the foothills, a lake of phosphorescence in an infinity of night. Behind him the radio announced that tomorrow would be cooler with diminishing winds. It then produced a guitar and a young man singing of trouble.

  “But,” the singer promised, “life goes on.

  “And years roll by,

  And time heals all,

  And soon we’re dead,

  We’re peaceful dead.”

  The sentiment parodied McKee’s mood so perfectly that he laughed. He walked back to his desk—a bulky, big-boned, tired-faced man who looked at once powerful and clumsy. He shuffled the ungraded exam papers together, dumped them into his briefcase, poured a final martini from the shaker, and took it into the bedroom. He looked at the certificate framed on the wall. It needed dusting. McKee brushed the glass with his handkerchief.

  “Whereas,” the proclamation began, “it is commonly and universally known by all students of Anthropology that Bergen Leroy McKee, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., is in truth and in fact none other than MONSTER SLAYER, otherwise identified as the Hero Twin in the Navajo Origin Myth;

  “And Whereas this fact is attested and demonstrated by unhealthy obsession and preoccupation of said Professor McKee, hereafter known as MONSTER SLAYER, with belaboring his students with aforesaid Origin Myth;

  “And Whereas MONSTER SLAYER is known to have been born of Changing Woman and sired by the Sun;

  “And Whereas the aforesaid sexual union was without benefit of Holy Matrimony, and is commonly known to have been illicit, illegal, unsanctified and otherwise improper fornication;

  “Therefore be it known to all men that the aforesaid MONSTER SLAYER meets the popular and legal definition of Bastard, and demonstrates his claim to this title each semester by the manner in which he grades the papers of his Graduate Seminar in Primitive Superstition.”

  The proclamation had been laboriously hand-lettered in Gothic script, embossed with a notary public’s seal, and signed by all seven members of McKee’s seminar. Signed six years ago, the year he had won tenure on the University of New Mexico anthropology faculty—full membership in the elite of the students of man with W. W. Hill, and Hibben, Ellis and Gonzales, Schwerin, Canfield, Campbell, Bock and Stan Newman, Spuhler, and the others. The year he became part of a team unmatched between Harvard and Berkeley. The last good year. The year before coming home to this apartment and finding Sara’s closets empty and Sara’s note. Fourteen words in blue ink on blue paper. The last year of excitement, and enthusiasm, and plans for research which would tie all Navajo superstitions into a tidy, orderly bundle. The last year before reality.

  McKee drained the martini, switched off the lights and lay in the darkness, hearing the wind and remembering how it had been to be Monster Slayer.

  > 3 <

  BERGEN MCKEE APPROACHED his faculty mailbox on the morning of May 26 as he habitually approached it—with a faint tickle of expectation. Years of experience, of pulling out notices to the faculty, lecture handbills, and book advertisements, had submerged this quirk without totally extinguishing it. Sometimes when he had other things on his mind, McKee reached into the box without this brief flash of optimism, the thought that today it might offer some unimaginable surprise. But today as he walked through the doorway into the department secretary’s outer office, said good morning to Mrs. Kreutzer, and made the right turn to reach the mail slots, he had no such distraction. If the delivery was as barren as usual, he would be required to turn his thoughts immediately to the problem of grading eighty-four final-examination papers by noon tomorrow. It was a dreary prospect.

  “Did Dr. Canfield find you?” Mrs. Kreutzer was holding her head down slightly, looking at him through the top half of her bifocals.

  “No ma’am. I haven’t seen Jeremy for two or three days.”

  The top envelope was fromEthnology Abstracts. The form inside notified him that his subscription had expired.

  “He wanted you to talk to a woman,” Mrs. Kreutzer said. “I think you just missed her.”

  “O.K.,” McKee said. “What about?” The second envelope contained a mimeographed form from Dr. Green officially reminding all faculty members of what they already knew—that final semester grades must be registered by noon, May 27.

  “Something about the Navajo Reservation,” Mrs. Kreutzer said. “She’s trying to locate someone working out there. Dr. Canfield thought you might know where she could look.”

  McKee grinned. It was more likely that Mrs. Kreutzer had decided the woman was unattached and of marriageable age, and might—in some mysterious way—find McKee attractive. Mrs. Kreutzer worried about people. He remembered then that he had met a woman leaving as he came into the Anthropology Building, a young woman with dark hair and dark eyes.

  “Was she my type?” he asked. The third and last letter was postmarked Window Rock, Arizona, with the return address of the Division of Law and Order, Navajo Tribal Council. It would be from Joe Leaphorn. McKee put it into his pocket.

  Mrs. Kreutzer was looking at him reproachfully, knowing what he was thinking, and not liking his tone. McKee felt a twinge of remorse.

  “She seemed nice,” Mrs. Kreutzer said. “I’d think you’d want to help her.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “Jeremy told me you were going to the reservation with him this summer,” Mrs. Kreutzer said. “I think that’s nice.”

  “It’s not definite,” McKee said. “I may have to take a summer-session course.”

  “Let somebody else teach this summer,” Mrs. Kreutzer said. She looked at him over her glasses. “You’re getting pale.”

  McKee knew he was not getting pale. His face, at the moment, was peeling from sunburn. But he also knew that Mrs. Kreutzer was speaking allegorically. He had once heard her give a Nigerian graduate student the same warning, and when the student had asked him what Mrs. Kreutzer could possibly have meant by it, McKee had explained that it meant she was worrying about him.

  “You ought to tell them to go to hell,” Mrs. Kreutzer said, and the vehemence surprised McKee as much as the language. “Everybody imposes on you.”

  “Not really,” McKee said. “Anyway, I don’t mind.”

  But as he walked down the hall toward his office he did mind, at least a little. George Everett had asked him to take his classes this summer, because Everett had an offer to handle an excavation in Guatemala, and it irritated McKee now to remember how sure Everett had been that good old Bergen would do him the favor. And he minded a little being the continuing object of Mrs. Kreutzer’s pity. The cuckold needs no reminder of his horns and the reject no reminder of his failure.

  He took the Law and Order envelope from his pocket and looked at it, neglecting his habitual glance through the hallway window at the chipping plaster on the rear of the Alumni Chapel. Instead he thought of how it had been to be twenty-seven years old in search of truth on the Navajo Reservation, still excited and innocent, still optimistic, not yet taught that he was less than a man. He couldn’t quite recapture the feeling.

  It wasn’t until he had opened the blinds, turned on the air conditioner and registered the familiar creak of his swivel chair as he lowered his weight into it that he opened the letter.

  Dear Berg:

  I asked around some in re your inquiry about witchcraft cases and it looks only moderately promising. There’s been some gossip down around the No Agua Wash country, and an incident or two over in the Lukachukais east of Chinle, and some talk of trouble west of the Colorado River gorge up on the Utah border. None of it sounds very threatening or unusual—if that’s what you’re looking for. I gather the No Agua business involves trouble between two outfits in the Salt Cedar Clan over some grazing land. The business up in Utah seems to
center on an old Singer with a bad reputation, and our people in the Chinle subagency tell me that they don’t know what’s going on yet in the Lukachukai area. The story they get (about fourth-hand) is that there’s a cave of Navajo Wolves somewhere back in that west slope canyon country. The witches are supposed to be coming around the summer hogans up there, abusing the animals and the usual. And, as usual, the stories vary depending on which rumor you hear.

  The first two look like they fit the theories expressed in Social and Psychotherapeutic Utility of Navajo Wolf and Frenzy Superstitions,but you should know, since you wrote it. I’m not sure about the Lukachukai business. It might have something to do with a man we’re looking for up there. Or maybe it’s a real genuine Witch, who really turns himself into a werewolf and wouldn’t that knock hell out of you scientific types?

  There were two more paragraphs, one reporting on Leaphorn’s wife and family and a mutual friend of their undergraduate days at Arizona State, and the other offering help if McKee decided to “go witch-hunting this summer.”

  McKee smiled. Leaphorn had been of immense help in his original research, arranging to open the Law and Order Division files to him and helping him find the sort of people he had to see, the unacculturized Indians who knew about witchcraft. He had always regretted that Leaphorn wouldn’t completely buy his thesis—that the Wolf superstition was a simple scapegoat procedure, giving a primitive people a necessary outlet for blame in times of trouble and frustration.

  He leaned back in the chair, rereading the letter and recalling their arguments—Leaphorn insisting that there was a basis of truth in the Navajo Origin Myth, that some people did deliberately turn antisocial, away from the golden mean of nature, deliberately choose the unnatural, and therefore, in Navajo belief, the evil way. McKee remembered with pleasure those long evenings in Leaphorn’s home, Leaphorn lapsing into Navajo in his vehemence and Emma—a bride then—laughing at both of them and bringing them beer. It would be good to see them both again, but the letter didn’t sound promising. He needed a dozen case studies for the new book—enough to demonstrate all facets of his theory.

  Jeremy Canfield walked in without knocking. “I’ve got a question for you,” he said. “Where do you look on the Navajo Reservation for an electrical engineer testing his gadgets?”

  He extracted a pipe from his coat pocket and began cleaning debris from the bowl into McKee’s ashtray. “Just one more helpful hint. We know he has a light-green van truck. We don’t know what kind of equipment it is, but this research needs to be away from such things as electrical transmission lines, telephone wires, and stuff like that.”

  “That helps a lot,” McKee said. “That still leaves about ninety percent of the Reservation—ninety percent of twenty-five thousand square miles. Find one green truck in a landscape bigger than all New England.”

  “It’s this daughter of a friend of mine. Girl named Ellen Leon,” Canfield said. “She’s trying to find this bird from U.C.L.A.” He was a very small man, bent slightly by a spinal deformity, with a round, cheerful face made rounder by utter baldness.

  “Goddamn flatlanders never know geography,” Canfield said. “Think the Reservation’s about the size of Central Park.”

  “Why’s she looking for him?” McKee asked.

  Canfield looked pained.

  “You don’t ask a woman something like that, Berg. Just imagine it’s something romantic. Imagine she’s hot for his body.” Canfield lit the pipe. “Imagine she has spurned him, he has gone away to mend a broken heart, and now she has repented.”

  Or, McKee thought, imagine she’s a fool like me. Imagine she’s been left and is still too young to know it’s hopeless.

  “Anyway, I told her maybe in the Chuska Range, or the Lukachukais if he liked the mountains, or the Kam Bimghi Valley if he liked the desert, or up there north of the Hopi Villages, or a couple of other places. I marked a map for her and showed her where the trading posts were where he’d be likely to buy his supplies.”

  “Maybe they’re married,” McKee said. He was interested, which surprised him.

  “Her name’s Ellen Leon,” Canfield said with emphatic patience. “His is Jimmy W. Hall, Ph.D. Besides, no wedding ring. From which I deduce they’re not married.”

  “O.K., Sherlock,” McKee said. “I deduce from your attitude that this woman was about five feet five, slim, with long blackish hair and wearing…” McKee paused for thought, “…a sort of funny-colored suit.”

  “I deduce from that that you saw her in the hail,” Canfield said. “Anyway, I told her we’d keep our eyes open for this bird and let her know where we’d be camping so she could check.” He looked at McKee. “Where do you want to start hunting your witches?”

  McKee started to mention Leaphorn’s letter and say he hadn’t decided yet whether to go. Instead he thought of the girl at the front entrance of the Anthropology Building, who had looked tired and disappointed and somehow very sad.

  “I don’t know,” McKee said. “Maybe down around No Agua, or way over west of the Colorado gorge, or on the west slope of the Lukies.” He thought a moment. Canfield’s current project involved poking into the burial sites of the Anasazis, the pre-Navajo cliff dwellers. There were no known sites around No Agua and only a few in the Colorado River country. “How about starting over in those west slope canyons in the Lukachukais?”

  “That’s good for me,” Canfield said. “If you’ve got some witches in there to scrutinize, there’s plenty of ruins to keep me busy. And I’ll take my guitar and try to teach you how to sing harmony.”

  At the door, Canfield paused, his face suddenly serious.

  “I’m glad you decided to go, Bergen. I think you need…” He stopped, catching himself on the verge of invading a zone of private grief. “I think maybe I should ask a guarantee that your witches won’t get me.” It came out a little lamely, not hiding the embarrassment.

  “My Navajo Wolves, being strictly psychotherapeutic, are certified harmless,” McKee said. He pulled open a desk drawer, rummaged through an assortment of paper clips, carved bones, arrow heads and potsherds, and extracted an egg-sized turquoise stone, formed roughly in the shape of a crouching frog. He tossed it to Canfield.

  “Reed Clan totem,” McKee said. “One of the Holy People. Good for fending off corpse powder. No self-respecting Navajo Wolf will bother you. I guarantee it.”

  “I’ll keep it with me always,” Canfield said. The words would come back to McKee later, come back to haunt him.

  > 4 <

  BERGEN MCKEE HAD spent most of the afternoon in the canvas chair beside the front door in Shoemaker’s. It was a slow day for trading and only a few of The People had come in. But McKee had collected witchcraft rumors from three of them, and had managed to extract the names of two Navajos who might know more about it. It was, he felt, a good beginning.

  He glanced at Leaphorn. Joe was leaning against the counter, listening patiently to another of the endless stories of Old Man Shoemaker, and McKee felt guilty. Leaphorn had insisted that he needed to go to the trading post—that he had, in fact, delayed the call to take McKee along—but more likely it was a convenient piece of makework to do a friend a graceful favor.

  “There is a young man back in there we want to pick up,” Leaphorn had said. He pushed a file folder across the desk. “He cut a Mexican in Gallup last month.”

  The file concerned someone named Luis Horseman, aged twenty-two, son of Annie Horseman of the Red Forehead Clan. Married to Elsie Tso, daughter of Lilly Tso of the Many Goats Clan. Residence, Sabito Wash, twenty-seven miles south of Klagetoh. The file included three arrest reports, for drunk and disorderly, assault and battery, and driving while under the influence of narcotics. The last entry was an account of the knifing in a Gallup bar and of a car stolen and abandoned after the knifing.

  “What makes you think he’s over in the Lukachukai country?” McKee had asked. “Why not back around Klagetoh with his wife?”

  “It isn’t very comp
licated,” Leaphorn had said. Horseman probably thought he had killed the Mexican and was scared. His in-laws detested him. Horseman would know that and know they would turn him in, so he had run for the country of his mother’s clan, where he could stay hidden.

  “How the devil can you find him, then?” McKee had asked. “It would take the Marine Corps to search those canyons.”

  And Leaphorn had explained again—that the knife victim was now off the critical list and that if the good news was gotten to Horseman one of two things would happen. He would either turn himself in to face an assault charge, or, being less frightened, would get careless and show up in Chinle, or at Shoemaker’s, or some other trading post. Either way, he’d be picked up and the file closed.

  “And so I go to Shoemaker’s today and spread the word to whatever Red Foreheads come in, and one of them will be a cousin, or a nephew, or something, and the news gets to Horseman. And if you don’t want a free ride you can stay and help Emma with the housework.”

  And now Leaphorn was spreading the word again, talking to the big bareheaded Navajo who had been collecting canned goods off the shelves. “He’s sort of skinny,” Leaphorn was saying, “about twenty-two years old and wears his hair the old way.”

  “I don’t know him,” the Big Navajo said. He inspected Leaphorn carefully, then moved to the racks where the clothing was hung. He tried on a black felt hat. It was several sizes too small, but he left it sitting ludicrously atop his head as he sorted through the stock.

  “My head got big since the last time I bought a hat,” the Navajo said. He spoke in English, glancing at McKee to see if the white man appreciated Navajo clowning. “Have to have a seven-and-a-half now.”