Thunderhead

“It was my cousin who found the body,” Beiyoodzin said, resuming his story. “It was lying in a cave at the top of a small rise. Seemed to have been there about six months. The coyotes couldn’t reach it, so it hadn’t been disturbed.”

“How did your cousin find it?” Skip asked.

“Looking for a lost sheep. He saw some color in the rock-shelter, climbed up to take a look.” Beiyoodzin paused to clear his throat. “Next to the body was the notebook—the one Nora has now. Sticking out of the front shirt pocket was a letter, stamped and addressed. And beside him was a satchel holding the skull of a mountain lion, inlaid in turquoise. So my cousin went back to Nankoweap, and he was a talker, and soon the entire village knew of the dead white man in the canyon to the south. And because of the turquoise skull, they also knew this white man had found the city we had kept secret for so many years.”

His voice trailed away for a moment before returning, softer, more thoughtful. “This was not a city of our ancestors. Those few who had been there—my grandfather was one—said it was a city of death, of oppression and slavery, of witchcraft and evil. There are stories in our past of a people who came out of the south, who enslaved the Anasazi, and forced them to build these great cities and roads. But they were destroyed by the very god who gave them power. Most who went to the city came back with ghost sickness and soon died. That was many, many years ago. None of my people have returned to the city since. Until recently.”

Beiyoodzin deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand. “The discovery of the body caused a problem for the tribe, because the secret of the city lay with the body of the man. To reveal the presence of the body would be to betray the secret of the city.”

“Why didn’t you just destroy the letter and notebook?” Nora asked.

He lit the cigarette, inhaled. “We believe that it is extremely dangerous to handle the effects of the dead. It is a sure way to get ghost sickness. And we all knew what the white man had died from. So, for sixteen years, the body lay there. Unburied. It just seemed that the simplest thing to do was to do nothing.”

Beiyoodzin stopped his horse abruptly and turned toward Nora. “That was wrong. Because we all knew that the body in the cave had a family. That somebody loved him, wondered where he had gone and whether he was still alive. It was cruel to do nothing. Still, doing nothing seemed the easiest, safest course of action. But doing nothing caused a small imbalance. And this imbalance grew, and grew, until it ended in you coming here and all these terrible killings.”

Nora reined in her own horse beside Beiyoodzin’s. “Who mailed the letter?” she asked quietly. It was the question she had been burning to ask for many, many weeks.

“There were three brothers. They lived in a trailer outside our village with their alcoholic father. The mother had run off with someone years before. These were smart boys, though, and they all got scholarships and went down to Arizona for college. They were hurt by this contact with the outside world, but hurt in very different ways. Two of the boys dropped out and came back early. They were disgusted with the world they had found, and yet changed by it. They had grown restless, angry, eager for the kind of wealth and power that you can’t come by in a village such as ours. They no longer fit in with the rest of my people. They began turning from the natural way of things, searching out forbidden knowledge, learning forbidden practices. They found an old man, an evil man—a cousin of the man who murdered my grandfather. He helped them, revealed to them the blackest of all the arts. The village began to shun them, and they in turn rejected us. In time, they turned to the greatest taboo of all—the ancient ruins—and eagerly picked up what dark hints of its history still remained among our village.

“The third brother graduated and came back home. Like the other two, there were no jobs here for him, and no hope of finding one. Unlike his other brothers, he had converted to the Anglo religion. He despised our beliefs and our fear of ghost sickness. He thought we were superstitious and ignorant. He knew of the body in the cave, and he felt that to leave it there was a sin. So he searched out the body, carefully arranged the man’s possessions, covered the body with sand, planted a cross. And he mailed the letter at a trading post.”

Beiyoodzin shrugged. “Of course, some of this is just my guess. I’m not sure why he sent the letter. He couldn’t have known if it would ever reach its destination, sixteen years after it had been written. Maybe it was to atone for a wrong he perceived. Or maybe he was angry at what he thought were our superstitions. Perhaps he did the right thing, I don’t know. But what he did caused a terrible break with the other two brothers. There was drinking, there was an argument. They accused him of betraying the secret of the city to the outside world. And the two brothers killed the third.”

Beiyoodzin fell into another silence. He turned his horse’s head and they resumed their slow journey up the canyon, the horses splashing across the stream at each bend. At one turn they surprised a mule deer, which ceased drinking and raced away from them along the bed of the stream, sending up crystal cascades of water that glittered and fell back through the sun-drenched air.

“Those two brothers rejected anything to do with the Anglo world outside. But they also rejected the good ways of the people. They saw the evil city as their own destiny. Based on the whispered stories of our people, they eventually found the greatest secret of all—the hidden kiva—and entered it. They would have broken inside only once—not for its treasures, of course, but for its lode of corpse powder. It would be their own weapon of fear and vengeance. Afterwards, they would have carefully resealed the kiva, in the proper ma

“Do you think they actually had supernatural powers?” Skip asked.

Beiyoodzin smiled. “I hear the doubt in your voice. It is true that the forbidden roots they chewed gave them great strength and great speed, the ability to absorb pain and bullets without feeling. And I know the white people think witchcraft is a superstition.” He looked at Skip. “But I have seen witches in Anglo society, too. They wear suits instead of wolfskins. And they carry briefcases instead of corpse powder. As a boy, they came and took me to boarding school, where I was beaten for speaking my own language. Later, I saw them come among our people with mining contracts and oil leases.”

As they rounded another bend, the canyon gave way to a small grove of cottonwoods. Beiyoodzin halted, and motioned for them all to dismount. Turned loose, the horses wandered off to graze the rich carpet of grass along the stream. Teddy Bear leaped onto a large rock and stretched out, looking for all the world like a lion, keeping guard over his pride. Skip walked over to Nora and placed his arm around her shoulders.

“How are you doing?” he asked, giving her a squeeze.

“I’m okay,” she said. “You?”

Skip looked around, took a deep breath. “A little nervous. But actually, pretty good. To be honest, I don’t remember feeling better.”

“I’ll thank you to take your paws off my date,” said Smithback, ambling over and joining them. Together, they watched as Beiyoodzin untied his medicine kit from the saddle strings, examined it briefly, then nodded toward a gentle path that led up the side of the hill to a small rounded shoulder of rock. Above, Nora could see the rockshelter where their father’s skeleton lay.