The Wailing Wind Page 5

  “I heard about that Halloween evening call, got the name of the caller, and went out to see her. She’s a teacher out at McGaffey School. Said these kids showed up at her house that Halloween night—students of hers. They told her about cutting across the corner of the fort to get out to the road and catch a ride into Gallup, and they heard these awful terrifying moans and crying sounds. She said they seemed genuinely frightened. She’d called the sheriff.”

  “And his deputy found absolutely nothing?”

  Leaphorn chuckled. “Nothing. But she told me it turned out to have a healthy benefit because two of the kids were Hispanics, who connected the sounds with the Wailing Woman ghost story, and one was a Zuñi. She thought they were hearing a skinwalker, or another of the Navajo version of witches, or maybe that Zuñi spirit who punishes evildoers, and the white girl thought it might be an ogre, or vampire, or one of their things. So the word spread around McGaffey School, and it put an end to the student body’s practice of taking that forbidden shortcut.”

  “Did you talk to any of the kids?”

  “Somebody from the sheriff’s office did.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Not yet,” Leaphorn said. He picked up the old notebook, flipped through it.

  “I still have the names. You want to go with me?”

  “Golly,” she said. “I wish I could. I’ve got to meet with an old man named Beno out at Nakaibito. He’s supposed to know a story about his great-grandmother being captured by the Mexicans when she was a child. His daughter is bringing him into the trading post there to talk to me. Could it wait?”

  “It could,” Leaphorn said. “But it’s already waited a long, long time.”

  7

  The first name on Leaphorn’s old list was a Zuñi girl whose father worked at Fort Wingate and who was now a student at the University of New Mexico and out of reach. The second was Tomas Garcia, now a husband and father. Leaphorn found him at his job with a Gallup lumber company.

  Garcia threw the last bundle of asphalt shingles on the customer’s flatbed truck, turned up his shirt collar against the dusty wind, and grinned at Leaphorn. “Sure, I remember it,” he said. “It was a big deal, getting interviewed by a deputy sheriff when you’re in high school. But I don’t think it ever amounted to anything. At least not that any of us ever heard about.”

  “You mind going over it again? They didn’t put much in his report.”

  “There wasn’t much to put,” Garcia said. “I guess you know the layout at Wingate. Miles and miles of those huge old bunkers with dirt roads running down the rows. It’s easy to get through that fence the army put up in the olden days when it was storing ammunition out there, and we’d cut through there to get to the highway when we wanted to go into Gallup. That evening one of the kids was having a sort of Halloween party in town. So we were going to that. Catch a ride in, you know. Cutting across through the bunkers, we started hearing this wailing sound.”

  Garcia paused, recalling it, bracing himself against the west wind that was blowing dust around their ankles. “I guess it was just the Halloween idea in our heads. Kids, you know. But it was spooky. Just getting real dark, and a cold wind blowing. At first I thought it was the wind, whistling around those bunkers. But it wasn’t that.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  He shook his head. “Why don’t we talk about this where it’s warm,” he said. “Get Gracella in on it, too. She might remember it better than I do.”

  “Is that Gracella deBaca?” If it was, Leaphorn had found the fourth person on his list.

  “Gracella Garcia now,” Garcia said, looking proud of that.

  Leaphorn followed Garcia’s pickup home and got a free lunch of excellent posole generously seasoned with pork. Gracella was on maternity leave from her job at the McKinley County hospital, and to Leaphorn’s unpracticed eye she seemed extremely close to motherhood. Her account of that twilight Halloween was much like her husband’s—as Leaphorn had expected. They would have relived the affair and more or less agreed on the memory.

  “It was very, very scary,” Gracella said, as she dished Leaphorn another dipper of posole. “Tomas pretends he thinks it was just some sort of a practical joke for Halloween. That’s what the cops told us.” She gave her husband a stern look. “But he knows better,” she said. “He’s just macho. Doesn’t want to admit he believes in La Llorona.”

  Garcia let that pass. They’d been over this before.

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t Gracella’s mythical lost mother, but how about the music?”

  “We always get to that,” Gracella said. “I’m not even sure I heard the music. Maybe you talked me into that.”

  “What sort of music?”

  “Not my kind,” Garcia said. “I’m into hard rock, or heavy metal. This sounded like classical stuff.”

  “You could barely hear it,” Gracella said. “The wind was blowing. Sometimes you thought you heard like a piano playing. Sometimes not.”

  “The wailing and the music came together?” Leaphorn asked.

  “I better explain,” Garcia said. “We were hurrying along, cutting across where the rows of bunkers are lined up. And we heard a scream. Or sort of like a scream from a long ways off. So we stopped and tried to listen. And we heard it again. Plainer this time. More like wailing.” He glanced at Gracella. “Right?”

  She nodded.

  “So we stopped and just stood there awhile,” she said. “We heard it some more. And we decided to turn around and go back and report it to the police. While we were talking about that, the wailing stopped. And then after a while we heard the piano music. Tomas thought that proved it was just Lloyd Yazzie trying to scare people. Playing a recording, you know?”

  “Why Lloyd Yazzie?”

  “He was a guy in the band,” she said. “And the music sounded like a piece we practiced. A real jerk.”

  After that, nothing. The wind had risen. They walked back to McGaffey and got the teacher to call the sheriff.

  “What do you think was causing it?” Leaphorn asked.

  They looked at each other. “Well,” Gracella said. “Nobody has proved there aren’t any ghosts.”

  Garcia laughed, which irritated Gracella.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can laugh. But remember that one deputy didn’t laugh. He thought it was serious, and he came back to talk to us later.”

  Garcia’s expression dismissed that. “That was old Lorenzo Perez,” he said. “That was after Mr. Denton was in jail and started running those advertisements asking his wife to come home. Lorenzo thought Mr. Denton had got jealous and killed her, and he was running those advertisements to make himself look innocent.”

  “I don’t care,” Gracella said. “Anyway, he didn’t act like he thought it was just a joke.”

  The last name on Leaphorn’s list seemed to have vanished with time—apparently part of the nomadic movement of belagaana families who follow jobs around the country. He spent the rest of the afternoon taking a look at part of the 130 square miles that make up what was, when Leaphorn was a lot younger, the Fort Wingate Army Ordnance Depot, finding the approximate place where the Garcias had their fright, and trying to imagine what might have been happening to cause it. When Leaphorn had driven past this place on U.S. 66 as a very young man, it had been busy. Its bunkers, built for World War II, had been full of the shells and gunpowder of the Vietnam War. With the end of the Cold War it had been “decommissioned” and had slipped into a sort of semi­ghost town identity. The Navajo Nation stored records in a couple of bunkers; the army used a bit of it on the edge of the Zuñi Mountains to launch target missiles to be shot at by the Star Wars scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds; other agencies used a bunker here or there for their purposes, and TPL, Inc., had machinery set up in others converting the rocket fuel still stored there to a plastic explosive useful in mining.

  What made the old fort interesting to those who persisted in hunting the several legendary gold mines of
the adjoining territory was its checkered history. The so-called “fort” had originated about 1850 when the Americans were replacing the Mexicans as landlords of the territory. It was called Ojo del Oso then, after the spring where travelers had stopped and bears came down out of the Zuñi Mountains to get a drink. Next it was called Fort Fauntleroy, honoring a colonel who had served bravely in the Mexican war. But said colonel went south in 1860 to serve bravely in the Confederate Army, causing the name to be changed to Wingate, after an officer free of secessionist loyalties. During the efforts of Carlton to round up the Navajos into the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo and clear the Four Corners mountains for prospectors hunting the gold he coveted, it had been used as a sort of holding pen for Dineh families being herded eastward into captivity. It played the same role in reverse when President Grant let the tribe go home to their “Dine’ Bike’yah,” their land between the sacred mountains, in 1868.

  The gold prospectors of the time had come often to the fort. They found a little gold here and there, but the huge bonanza discoveries always seemed to be “lost” before they could be exploited. They produced more legends than wealth. As Leaphorn recalled its history, the fort had been expanded from 100 square miles to 130 square miles in 1881 for reasons no one seemed to understand. It had been used as a sort of internment camp for Mexicans fleeing Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, as a center for sheep research, as a vocational school for Indians, etc.; but its major role came as the place where the military could store immense amounts of high explosives that, as Leaphorn’s uncle had explained it to him, “wouldn’t kill nobody important if they blew away this whole part of the world.”

  There had been times when the fort was busy, with trains rolling in and out on the network of spur tracks from the main lines and hundreds of employees kept busy with the loading. But on this afternoon, as Leaphorn drove under the rusty iron arch over the main entrance, all was quiet. Two pickups were parked down a side street in front of a warehouse, and a car sat in front of the modest old headquarters building. Leaphorn parked beside it, went up the steps into the office, and looked around. He hadn’t been here in years—since the first year he had been called in from Crownpoint and assigned to run the special investigations office in Window Rock. But nothing seemed to have changed.

  A gray-haired woman arose from behind the counter, where apparently she had been filing something. She hadn’t changed much either—had already been wrinkled and gray last time he’d seen her close up. Teresa Hano was her name. He was amazed that he remembered it.

  “Good to see you again, Lieutenant,” she said. “You law enforcement people seem to be taking a lot of interest in us all of a sudden. What brings you out here? And in plain clothes, too.”

  And now he was surprised she remembered him. He laughed, patted his denim jacket, said: “This is what I’m wearing all the time now. No more policeman.”

  “No?” she said. “I was guessing you’re interested in the killing of the Doherty boy. If you were, I couldn’t tell you anything much. Nothing I didn’t already tell the FBI men.”

  “Actually I’m more interested in an old Halloween prank—if that’s what it was.”

  Teresa Hano said, “Oh?” and looked puzzled.

  “It was the night Mr. Wiley Denton shot that swindler at his house over near Gallup. That same night some kids from McGaffey were cutting across the fort and heard—“

  “Yes, Yes,” Mrs. Hano said. “And called the sheriff. Lot of excitement over that.” The memory produced a happy smile. Excitement must be as rare at a closed-down army base as it was for a retired policeman.

  “That wasn’t a criminal case, of course,” he said. “But I always wondered about it. Four teenagers hearing that crying or wailing and thinking it must be a woman. I know your security folks helped the deputy check around the next day and no one ever found anything. Has anything interesting turned up since then?”

  “Not that I heard of,” Mrs. Hano said.

  “But since you mentioned the Doherty boy,” Leaphorn said, “what was it he wanted to look at in the archives when he was out here?”

  “The gold-mining stuff,” Mrs. Hano said. She made a wry face. “We don’t get many archive customers out here. And they come in two kinds. They’re either students working on stuff in history or anthropology. Writing something about the ‘Long Walk’ you Navajos went on, or about the time we were keeping the Mexican Revolution refugees out here. Or wanting to look at the Matthews papers.”

  She had pulled open a drawer below the counter, extracted a ledger and flopped it open.

  “Are the ethnography professors still going over the Matthews stuff?” Leaphorn asked. He’d done it himself when he was working on his master’s thesis at Arizona State. Dr. Washington Matthews had been a surgeon at the fort in the 1880s and ’90s, had learned the language and had written report after report on the religion and culture of the Navajos—pretty well laying the groundwork for scholarly studies of the tribe. But by now Leaphorn guessed the anthropologists had pretty well plowed the Matthews papers.

  “Washington Matthews,” Mrs. Hano said. “Your hataalii neez. Your ‘tall doctor.’ Haven’t had any ethnographers rereading his stuff lately, but the gold hunters have discovered him.”

  “Really,” Leaphorn said. “What’d he know about that?”

  “Wrote a letter about some of the tall tales the prospectors coming in here were telling back then. I think that’s it.”

  “Was Doherty one of them?”

  “I guess indirectly,” she said. “What he wanted was to see whatever that McKay fellow looked at. The man Mr. Denton shot.”

  “Doherty, too? From what I’ve read there are several reports in these files about the troubles the prospectors were having with us, and the Apaches and the Utes, and what they were reporting about their finds. Would Doherty run across the Matthews stuff looking through that? Sort of on a fishing expedition?”

  “I don’t think so. I remember him real well because he came in here several times and he’d spend a lot of time reading and I didn’t know him and I didn’t want him slipping out with anything. But no. The first time he was here he asked about the Matthews letters, and if we had copies of his correspondence with a doctor back in Boston. He had the doctor’s name and the dates with a bunch of filing cards in his briefcase. He pretty well knew what he wanted.”

  “You know, Mrs. Hano, I think I should take a look at that correspondence. Could you help me find it?”

  She did.

  The letter Doherty had wanted to see came out of a carton labeled “Box 3, W.M. Correspondence (copies).” Most of it was devoted to telling a friend at Harvard of the way in which one must go about his hobby of collecting Navajo history—of knowing the season and the place where certain stories should be told, and the social ritual of brewing the coffee, of preparing the “mountain tobacco” to be rolled in corn shucks and smoked, and of assuring each of the elders assembled in the hogan that you really wanted to know the story he had to tell. Leaphorn found himself smiling as he read it, thinking how nothing had changed from that day in 1881. The old traditionalist still, as Matthews reported it, refrained from “telling the complete story,” and would hold something back, passing the account along to the next speaker, so that all of it would not emerge “from one man’s mouth.”

  True as that material remained, it couldn’t have been what had drawn Doherty here. That came on the final page. There Matthews reported that “many of these old fellows take great pleasure in misleading us whites, trying to see how gullible we will be. That, of course, makes it necessary for us belagaana who are serious about understanding their culture to make sure that we don’t swallow stories which come just ‘from one man’s mouth.’

  “One of their sources of private amusement are tales of how they have misled this plague of gold prospectors—the men who swarmed into these mountains with their greed inspired by the great discoveries in California and the Black Hills. For example, th
e records here at Wingate suggest the famous ‘Lost Adams diggings,’ of which I have told you previously, are ‘two days travel’ from the fort, and the equally notorious ‘Golden Calf’ bonanza was also said to be ‘an easy day’s ride’ from our post here. Among the gold seekers, the universally accepted dogma is that the direction from here is south, over the Zuñi Mountains. My old, old friend Anson Bai tells me, and the same comes from other mouths, that both of those gold deposits were actually found in the opposite direction—north of the fort toward Mesa de los Lobos and Coyote Canyon. They say this misdirection was provided deliberately by various Navajo guides partly because of these people’s ineffable sense of humor and partly out of patriotism. They understand that the worst thing that can happen to a tribe is to have whites discover gold deposits on the tribe’s land.”

  Leaphorn reread the letter, returned it to its place, and closed the box.

  “You don’t need a copy?”

  “No thanks,” Leaphorn said. “I can remember it.”

  “You read that last part?”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “Like what happened to those tribes in California,” Mrs. Hano said. “Pretty well exterminated. The Nez Perce, and the people up in the Dakotas.”

  Mrs. Hano was a Zuñi married to a Hopi, Leaphorn remembered. But if he had her family properly sorted out, then one of her daughters married an Osage. Finding oil on Osage land had pretty well killed off that tribe.

  “Mr. Doherty had you make copies of that letter. Is that right?”

  “Just one,” Mrs. Hano said. “He said he was in a hurry.”

  “Did he say why?”

  Mrs. Hano shook her head. “None of my business, and I didn’t ask. I remembered that Mr. McKay was in a hurry, too. He had someone waiting for him in his car.”

  “He did? Did he say who?”

  “No. I noticed it was a woman, and I told him to bring her on in to be comfortable, and he said she was taking a nap and he didn’t want to bother her.”