Read Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] for Free Online Page A

can’t
get used to how everybody knows everybody.”
    “You mean that guy at the store recognizing me? I was a cop out here
for years.”
    “But living where? About a hundred and fifty miles away. But I
didn’t mean just you. The cashier knew all about Everett Jorie. And
people know about Baker and Ironhand living"—she waved an expressive
hand at the window—"living way the hell out there someplace. Where I
came from people didn’t even know who lived three houses down the
block.”
    “Lot more people in Baltimore,” Leaphorn said.
    “Not a lot more people on our block.”
    “More people in your block, I’ll bet, than in a twenty-mile circle
around here,” Leaphorn said. He was remembering the times he’d spent in
Washington, in New York, in Los Angeles, when he’d considered this
difference between urban and rural social attitudes.
    “I have a theory not yet endorsed by any sociologist,” he said. “You
city folks have so many people crowding you they’re a bother. So you
try to avoid them. We rural people don’t have enough, so we’re
interested. We sort of collect them.”
    “You’ll have to make it a lot more complicated than that to get the
sociologists to adopt it,” Louisa said. “But I know what you’re driving
at.”
    “Out here, everybody looks at you,” he said. “You’re somebody
different. Hey, here’s another human, and I don’t even know him yet. In
the city, nobody wants to make eye contact. They have built themselves
a little privacy bubble—hard to get any privacy in crowded places—and
if you look at them, or speak on the street, then you’re an intruder.”
    Louisa looked away from the road to give him a sidewise grin.
    “I take it you don’t care for the busy, exciting, stimulating city
life,” she said. “I’ve also heard it put another way. Like “rural folks
tend to be nosy busy-bodies.”’
    They were still discussing that when they turned off the pavement of
U.S. 160 onto the dirt road that climbed over the Utah border onto the
empty, broken highlands of the Casa Del Eco Mesa. She slowed while
Leaphorn checked the map against the landscape. The clouds were
climbing on the western horizon, and the outriders of the front were
speckling the landscape spreading away to the west with a crazy-quilt
pattern of shadows.
    “If my memory’s good, we hit an intersection up here about seven
miles,” he said. “Take the bad road to the right, and it takes you to
the Red Mesa Chapter House. Take the worse road to the left, and it
gets you to Highway 191 and on to Bluff.”
    “There’s the junction up ahead,” she said. “We do a left? Right?”
    “Left is right,” Leaphorn said. “And after the turn, we’re looking
for a track off to our right.”
    They found it, and a dusty, bumpy mile later, they came to the place
of Madeleine Horsekeeper, which was a fairly new double-wide mobile
home, with an attendant hogan of stacked stones, sheep pens, outhouse,
brush arbor and two parked vehicles -an old pickup truck and a new blue
Buick Regal. Madeleine Horsekeeper was standing in the doorway greeting
them, with a stern-looking fortyish woman standing beside her. She
proved to be Horsekeeper’s daughter, who taught social studies at Grey
Hills High in Tuba City. She would sit in on the interview with Hosteen
Cayodito, her maternal grandfather, and would make sure the
interpreting was accurate. Or do it herself.
    Which was fine with Joe Leaphorn. He had thought of a way to spend
the rest of this day that would be much more interesting than listening
for modifications and evolutions in the legends he’d grown up with.
That talk with Louisa about how folks in lonely country knew everything
about their neighbors had reminded him of Undersheriff Oliver Potts,
now retired. If anyone knew the three on Gershwin’s list, it would be
Oliver.

----
 Chapter Seven
    Oliver Potts’s modest stone residence was shaded by a grove of
cottonwoods beside Recapture Creek, maybe five