Hillerman, Tony (35 page)

Time to change the subject. “Since we’re getting personal,” Moon said, “I have a question for you. In fact, two questions.”

“Answer mine first. And then I have another one. Does what you told me at the hotel just now about Caloocan City mean you are going to run the business?”

“I’m going to try,” Moon said. “But there’s been too much talking about me already. Listen carefully.

Question one: Mr. Lee told me that when he called you this morning to say good-bye you seemed very sad. He thought it was because of Damon. And you said it was another loss.”

Moon stopped, swallowed. There was no way to say it that wasn’t rude, intrusive, presumptuous. Osa was looking at him, attentive, waiting, lips slightly parted, amusement fading into something very serious. Beautiful. Waiting. For what, the Moon of Durance to chicken out or the super-Moon of Ricky’s legend to demand a solution to this little oddity?

“I remember,” Osa said.

“He asked me if I understood what you meant. I said I didn’t.” He hesitated again. But to hell with it. Otherwise he was losing her anyway. “But I hoped I did understand. I hoped you meant me.”

Osa looked at him, biting her lip. Looked away.

“I have that hope because when we were in the delta you seemed so sure he was dead. You didn’t want to go into Cambodia. When I said I had to go anyway, you insisted you’d go along. But when we got there and found he was actually dead, you were genuinely surprised. Shocked.”

Moon stopped. Osa walked three steps away from him and stood at the streetside railing staring out into the yacht harbor. The mast lights were making their colored patterns on the water.

“I think all along you really believed Damon was alive. Probably getting him out alive was hopeless, but you still believed you should try.”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“So now I’m going to guess at why you didn’t want me to go into Cambodia to bring him out. And if I guess wrong, you have to tell me I’m wrong. Even though it means I’ve made myself look like a damned fool.”

“You don’t have to guess. I’ll tell you.”

“I guess you didn’t want me to get killed. I guess you knew I’d fallen in love with you, and I guess you’d begun caring some about me yourself.”

Moon joined her at the railing. He took her hand.

“Anyway, you didn’t want me to get killed.”

“Oh, Moon,” Osa said. Her eyes were wet but she was smiling. “Do you want me to answer the first question?”

“Only if it’s the right answer. Only if you feel sad because you think you are losing Moon Mathias. But Mathias is not getting lost. As soon as I get little Lila back in the States and settled in, I’m coming back here. I’ll chase you down wherever I can find you and I’ll talk you into marrying me. Or try to. So what’s the answer to that question?”

“The answer is Moon,” she said. And put her cheek against his shoulder, her arms around his waist, and squeezed. “M-O-O-N,” she said. “Moon.”

He took her in his arms then, engulfed her, surprised at how small she seemed, conscious of the perfume of her hair, of her smooth skin beneath the silk, that when he tilted up her chin she was returning his kiss.

“It shouldn’t take me more than eight or ten days,” he said. “Where will you be in eight or ten days?”

“You’re going to fly back with Lila? You’ll try to take care of her on the plane?”

“Why not?” Moon said. “I can change diapers. Feed her. She can say ‘Moon’ now. I’m learning.”

“Not very fast. I watched you on the aircraft carrier. You weren’t designed to be a nanny. And that Baby in Space game you play with her is dreadful. You will break her neck. It scares her.”

“It just scares people who’re watching it. She likes it. Makes her giggle. She knows I won’t drop her.”

Osa was shaking her head. “And feeding her. Keeping her clean and comfortable. Getting her to sleep.”

He hugged her to him. “Can you think of an alternative?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So can I,” Moon said. “With a Dutch passport you don’t need a visa. So I postponed my flight a day and made reservations for Osa van Winjgaarden.”

“No Mrs.?”

“No Mrs.,” Moon said. “Until we can make it legal.”

I
thought you might like to know the roots of my two favorite characters — Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (now retired) and Sgt. Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police.

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green “crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers — my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.

When I needed such a cop for what I intended to be a very minor character in
The Blessing Way
(1970), this sheriff came to mind. I added on Navajo cultural and religious characteristics, and he became Leaphorn in fledgling form. Luckily for me and Leaphorn and all of us, the late Joan Kahn, then mystery editor of what was then Harper & Row, required some substantial rewriting of that manuscript to bring it up to standards and I — having begun to see the possibilities of Leaphorn — gave him a much better role in the rewrite and made him more Navajo.

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of
People of Darkness
(1980) make sense — and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheevy’s “days of old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in a universe of consumerism.

I’ll confess here that Leaphorn is the fellow I’d prefer to have living next door and that we share an awful lot of ideas and attitudes. I’ll admit that Chee would sometimes test my patience, as did those students upon whom I modeled him. But both of them in their ways, represent the aspects of the Navajo Way, which I respect and admire. And I will also confess that I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood.

—Tony Hillerman

Leaphorn novels:
The Blessing Way
;
Dance Hall of the Dead
;
Listening Woman

Chee novels:
People of Darkness
;
The Dark Wind
;
The Ghostway

Leaphorn/Chee novels:
Skinwalkers
;
A Thief of Time
;
Talking God
;
Coyote Waits
;
Sacred Clowns
;
The Fallen Man
;
First Eagle
;
Hunting Badger
;
The Wailing Wind

Standalone novels:
The Fly on the Wall
;
Finding Moon

All titles were published in New York by Harper & Row, until 1993’s
Sacred Clowns
, by which time the house, still based in New York, had become HarperCollins.

~

Lt. Joe Leaphorn must stalk a supernatural killer known as the “Wolf-Witch” along a chilling trail of mysticism and murder.

TH: It was easy enough to make the Enemy Way ceremony germane to the plot. It is used to cure illness caused by exposure to witchcraft and my villain was trying to keep the Navajo away from his territory by spreading witchcraft fears. The problem was devising a way for Joe Leaphorn to connect the ceremony and the killer. The solution came to me when I noticed the peculiar pattern of sweat stains on a felt hat caused by a silver concho hatband. With that in mind, I skip back to an early chapter, write in Leaphorn at a trading post seeing the villain buying a hat to replace one stolen and wondering why someone would steal an old hat and not the expensive silver. That done, I then skip forward to the “scalp shooting” phase of the ceremony, have Leaphorn notice the “scalp” is a sweat-stained hat, find the “scalp shooter” who has delivered the hat to the ceremony, learn from him where (and why) he stole the hat, and thereby solve the mystery.

~

A dead reporter’s secret notebook implicates a senatorial candidate and political figures in a million-dollar murder scam.

TH: Motivating my unheroic hero [reporter John Cotton] to pursue a news story after a death threat was the problem. I hit on having him flee to New Mexico, go fishing at my favorite little stream in isolated Brazos Meadows, and realize the death threat was merely a ruse to get him away from the state capital to somewhere he could be murdered quietly. Thus he knows his only hope is to solve the crime.

~

An archaeological dig, a steel hypodermic needle, and the strange laws of the Zuni complicate Lt. Leaphorn’s investigation into the disappearance of two young boys.

TH: The problem here was how to have Leaphorn understand what was motivating the behavior of George Bowlegs, a fugitive Navajo boy. To do this I had Joe gradually understand Zuni theology as a Navajo (or a white mystery writer) would, and realize the boy was trying to make contact with the Zuni Council of the Gods. Thus the boy (and Leaphorn) would come to the Shalako ceremony, at which these spirits make their annual return to the pueblo, and thus I would have my excuse to describe this incredibly beautiful ceremony.

~

A baffling investigation of murder, ghosts, and witches can be solved only by Lt. Leaphorn, a man who understands both his own people and cold-blooded killers.

TH: This book taught me that inability to outline a plot has advantages. The plan was to use Monster Slayer and Born for Water, the hero twins of the Navajo Genesis story, in a mystery involving orphaned brothers (a “spoiled priest” and a militant radical) who collide in their campaigns to help their people. I would use a shaman, the last person to talk to my murder victim before he is killed, as a source for religious information meaningless to the FBI but revealing to Leaphorn. After a series of first chapters that led nowhere, I wrote a second chapter in which Leaphorn stops the villain for speeding and, more or less out of whimsy, I have him see a big ugly dog in the backseat of the car, intending to use the delete key on my new (and first) computer to delete said dog later. That unoutlined dog became crucial to the plot. No more trying to outline.

~

An assassin waits for Officer Jim Chee in the desert to protect a vision of death that for thirty years has been fed by greed and washed by blood.

TH: Older, wiser, urbane Leaphorn refused to fit into my plan to set a plot on the Checkerboard Reservation, in which the government gave alternate square miles of land to the railroads and in which Navajo was intermixed with a plethora of whites, Zunis, Jemez, Lagunas, etc., and a dozen or so missionary outposts of different religions. Since Joe wouldn’t be surprised by any of this I created younger, less culturally assimilated, Jim Chee.

~

Officer Jim Chee becomes trapped in a deadly web of a cunningly spun plot driven by Navajo sorcery and white man’s greed.

TH: One of the many facets of Navajo culture that appeals to me is the lack of value attached to vengeance. This “eye for an eye” notion pervading white culture is looked upon by the Dineh as a mental illness. I planned to illuminate this with a vengeance — motivated crime — the problem being how to have Joe, who doesn’t believe in vengeance, catch on. The answer came to me in the memory of a long interview I once did with a private detective about his profession. I never used any of that, but a card trick he showed me proved to be just what I needed. My villain, a trading post operator, showed the same trick to Chee, and when he solved it he knew how the crime was done.

~

A photo sends Officer Chee on an odyssey of murder and revenge that moves from an Indian hogan to a deadly healing ceremony.

TH: The trigger for this book was a roofless stone hogan with adjoining shed in a little spring-fed pocket on Mesa Gigante, which dominates the Canoncito Navajo Reservation. I happened across it one autumn afternoon, noticed a hole had been knocked in its north wall, the traditional exit route for the body when death has infected the hogan. But why had the dying person not been moved outside before he died, so the chindi could escape?

~

Three shotgun blasts in a trailer bring Officer Chee and Lt. Leaphorn together for the first time in an investigation of ritual, witchcraft, and blood.

TH: How do I awaken Jim Chee, sleeping in his cot beside the paper-thin aluminum wall of his trailer home, so he will not be killed when the assassin fires her shotgun through said wall? Everything I try sounds like pure psychic coincides — which I detest in mysteries. Nothing works until I remember the “clack, clack” sound made when a friend’s cat goes through the “cat door” on his porch. I write in a spooky stray cat, for whom Chee makes this cat door (thereby establishing him as a nice guy and giving me a chance to explain Navajo “equal citizenship” relationships with animals). The cat, spooked by the assassin’s approach, darts from its bed under a pinon into the trailer and awakens Chee. At book’s end, when I need to terminate a budding romance, the cat serves a wonderfully symbolic role. This was the first book in which I used both Leaphorn and Chee. It made a great leap forward in sales and hit a bunch of bestseller lists, but not the crucial one in
The New York Times
.

~