Joe Leaphorn parked his truck a respectful distance from Mrs. Nez’s hogan and waited. Not much had changed.
“Are you sure this is the right house?”
“Ya.” He nodded in Louisa’s direction.
“I’m amazed that you could find it after all those years. You drove straight here.”
He hadn’t actually. He’d made a couple wrong turns that looped back to the road he wanted without his having to turn around. Louisa had been sleeping and hadn’t noticed.
He waited for the front door to open, but it didn’t. He saw no vehicles in the driveway either.
Louisa stretched in her seat. “Either nobody’s here or nobody wants to talk to you.”
Then, just as he had begun to consider leaving, a truck pulled up next to them with two women inside, an old one and an even older one who was driving.
The truck’s passenger cranked down her window, and Leaphorn lowered his. The warm air escaped quickly.
The woman driver leaned across the seat toward him and spoke in Navajo. “I remember you. I have been thinking about you after what happened to my grandson. Come inside and help us start the fire.” She moved her lips toward Louisa. “You come, too.”
Leaphorn was glad he kept some work gloves in the truck. It had been a long time, before his head injury, since he’d done much physical work. Splitting the firewood into burnable pieces got his blood moving. Louisa assisted with hauling it into the house, and they filled Mrs. Nez’s bins.
Mrs. Nez’s sister put the coffeepot on and then settled on the couch with what looked like a quilt under construction. When the coffee was ready, Mrs. Nez served them each a cup, already sugared. Louisa said she would sit by the fire with her book and let them talk. Leaphorn knew she’d want him to give her the details later.
Mrs. Nez opened the conversation in Navajo. “You still a policeman, or did you get too old?”
“I work now and then giving police officers advice and helping people with problems. Grandmother, do you remember how we met?”
She nodded. “You brought my grandson here to keep him safe when he was a little boy. You were kind to him.”
“There was another child at his mother’s place, a baby that cried a lot. When the ambulance took his mother to the hospital, they also took the baby with them. I could tell you had worries about him.”
“That one is dead now, too.” Mrs. Nez swallowed. “Gone a long time ago.”
Just as Butterfly’s notes had said.
Mrs. Nez stirred her coffee. “Why are you here?”
Leaphorn had anticipated the question. “The woman officer who talked to you about your grandson had some questions about what happened to him and she asked me to help. I knew you would be the best person to come to for the answers. I would like you to tell me about the one who died, how he grew up and what kind of a man he became. Because of my work as a policeman, I know he had some trouble.”
Mrs. Nez let the request and Leaphorn’s statement linger for several minutes, hanging in the air with the aroma of piñon and juniper from the fire. She sat back in her chair. She was thinking, Leaphorn knew, and missing the young man who had shared her home and her life.
“Yes, that grandson had trouble his whole life but he was a good boy. I called him Zoom because when he was little he liked to push those little toys cars around and he’d make that zooooom sound. So cute and funny.” Her smile faded. “Zoom’s mother would drink and find mean men. The boy would come to me. Then she would stop for a while, and Zoom would live with her. She loved him, but she loved beer better. By the time that second son came, she was using drugs, even though she lied about it, and had more boyfriends. One of those men hit the little one. When the baby died, she sank down further with more men, more drugs, more beer. Mrs. Nez looked past Leaphorn, out the window toward the mountains. “When the baby died, Zoom changed. He felt guilty. He thought he should have saved him, even though he was still a little boy himself.
“Zoom lived here with me here for a while, and that was good. His uncle, the one we called Bizaadii helped him, taught him how to be a Navajo. But then those people who think they know everything said that my grandson should be back with his mother.”
Leaphorn knew she meant the child welfare workers.
“He met some bad boys. He starting drinking, not going to school much, stealing little things, They said he tried to drive off in someone else’s car. I knew he was going around in cars he didn’t buy. When he had no place to live, he asked if he could stay with me again. We had a ceremony for him. He stopped drinking and smoking naakai binát’oh. He wanted to become a good man.”
Naakai binát’oh, Mexican cigarettes, marijuana, was common on the reservation even in Leaphorn’s early days as a policeman. It was as easy to find on the rez as it was in the rest of America.
Mrs. Nez sipped her coffee. “I forgot something. When Bizaadii moved away after the baby died, that’s when Zoom started having problems.”
Mrs. Nez sipped her coffee and Leaphorn used the pause to ask a question.
“Can you tell me about Bizaadii?” The nickname referred to someone who liked to talk.
Mrs. Nez nodded. “Did you know I had two daughters? The younger one, she had a baby in high school and that boy, we called him Rocket, stayed with me, too. Then she married the baby’s father, the one we called Bizaadii, and they moved away. But in Arizona it was just the three of them. No, the two of them, because her husband was at work or in school and didn’t have time for her or that boy. After they divorced, my daughter found a better man, that Mr. Lee. I thought he was Navajo when she told me his name. I never met him, but he’s a bilagaana like your lady.” Mrs. Nez turned her chin toward Louisa, who was engrossed in her book. “My daughter said he liked to wear a white cowboy hat. Mr. Lee treats my grandson Rocket real good but my daughter kicked him out because she still loves that Bizaadii. That’s all I have to say.”
Leaphorn watched Mrs. Nez raise her gaze to the window and the vast spaces of Navajoland beyond. He let the silence sit, watching the vehicles in the yard catch the cool fall sunlight. Then he spoke. “Officer Manuelito noticed that your grandson’s truck was here at the house, not at the gym where he got hurt. The officer thought his girlfriend might have picked him up.”
Mrs. Nez squeezed her lower lip with her teeth, then released it. “It could have been.”
“But it wasn’t, correct?”
“The girlfriend wanted to marry Zoom, but they couldn’t until he saved money, so they broke up last month. A few days before the big basketball game, Rocket came over. He was doing some work out here somewhere with Mr. Lee. He said Mr. Lee had a friend, a man with a funny name, who needed to hire someone who knew about cars. The next day my grandson went to Shiprock, and when he came back, his spirit was restless, like when he used to get into trouble. I asked what worried him. At first he didn’t answer, but then he showed me money in an envelope. He said the job was putting something in a car and that he would be paid more after the job was done.”
Leaphorn straightened in his chair.
“I asked what he had to put in the car and whose car it was, and my grandson said the man would tell him at the basketball game. Zoom needed money, but the secret part made him nervous. That’s why he asked Rocket to pick him up to go to the game. He wanted to talk to Rocket about the job.”
Mrs. Nez looked at the back of her hands. “If it was something bad, I know my grandson wouldn’t do it. He left the envelope here with money to go back to the man.”
“Did you ever meet that man?”
Mrs. Nez said, “No, but I saw him once, just as I got to the house and he was leaving. A tall, thin bilagaana. He wore a white hat.”
She rose and refilled their cups. The liquid looked darker now and smelled more acidic. Leaphorn sipped the coffee, seeing the pieces of the puzzle fall into place and knowing what he had to ask next.
“Someone saw a man who looked like your grandson inside Mr. Palmer’s car before it blew up. Why would that be?”
Mrs. Nez’s face fell slack. She shook her head.
Leaphorn put his cup down. “Was your grandson angry with Bizaadii?”
“Not Zoom. Rocket was the angry one. Rocket wanted Mr. Lee to be his dad, and I know Mr. Lee treats him good. But my daughter said no because her heart still belonged to Bizaadii.”
Leaphorn told Mrs. Nez a little about the shooting that left him walking with the cane. After answering his questions, it seemed only fair that he answer hers—even those she left unspoken. They listened to the crackle of the wood in the stove and the gentle snoring of the sister, who had fallen asleep over her quilt.
As he rose to leave, Leaphorn recalled Bernie’s suspicion that Mrs. Nez had lied about Rick knowing Palmer. Mrs. Nez told Bernie that Rick never mentioned Aza Palmer, never said Palmer’s name.
“You and your daughter called Aza Palmer Bizaadii. Did Zoom call him that, too? Or did he call him Mr. Palmer, or Aza?”
She raised an eyebrow, surprised at the question. “He called him shidá’í. He called him uncle, of course.”
“Did Sergeant Chee take care of that envelope?”
“I don’t know.”
“I found it here with funny name on it, and I remembered Zoom said that he would have to go to the meeting in Tuba City to give it back. They wouldn’t let me in the meeting, so I gave it to Chee. I thought I could trust him.”
“I’ve trusted him with my life,” Leaphorn said. “I’m sure he did the right thing.”
As soon as he and Louisa left Mrs. Nez’s house, Leaphorn started an e-mail. He flinched at the idea of Louisa driving his truck, but he wanted to focus his full attention on writing what he needed to tell Bernie, including the strange notion of two bilagaanas in Mrs. Nez’s circle, each wearing a white cowboy hat.