Haves, have-nots and intrigue in Southwest

IN February 2002, Tony Hillerman joined N. Scott Momaday and Rudolfo Anaya at a tri-cultural panel discussion in northern New Mexico’s Jemez Valley High School. The three writers discussed their roots, their ties to the Southwest and its complex history, as well as how these influences affected their books. Hillerman said he is often asked how he, “a redneck white guy,” can write about Navajos. His answer revealed a theme that recurs in his work and stands center stage in his marvelous new mystery.

Growing up in rural Pottawatomie County, Okla., Hillerman said he attended an Indian school and soon learned that society was divided into “us and them.” In his case, “us” refers to the country boys who wore bib overalls, rode the bus and brought sack lunches; “them” means the town kids who wore low-cut shoes, pants with belts and had money to buy lunch. He explained he always felt “at home” writing about Navajos because among them, he immediately “recognized us.”

In “The Shape Shifter,” Hillerman again contrasts haves and have-nots. But this time, they are what one character, the wealthy Jason Delos, calls predators and prey. He counts himself proud to be a predator.

Then there is recently retired Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn, who is old enough to have been taken from his family by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a child and sent to a boarding school off the reservation. Educated by whites whose primary aim was to rid Native American children of their culture and language, Leaphorn continues to compare us and them daily. A “good life,” he believes, is to “be happy, stay happy by loving your neighbors, feeding the poor, not being selfish. Not chasing after fame, fortune, three car garages, all that.”

Still, Leaphorn is struggling to find his path to harmony. He misses his wife, Emma, who died of cancer; he has proposed marriage to professor Louisa Bourbonette without success, and he finds retirement, frankly, a bore.

When a former colleague, Mel Bork, sends a page torn from Luxury Living magazine, the photograph perplexes Leaphorn. It shows a priceless tale-teller rug woven by Navajo women during the sufferings of the Long Walk, when the tribe was forced from its traditional lands by white soldiers in the 1860s and herded 300 miles east to the Pecos River Valley. But how could this weaving be hanging in someone’s home when both it and a man identified as one of the FBI’s most-wanted criminals had burned up years earlier at Totter’s Trading Post near Tohatchi, N.M.?

Back then, Leaphorn had been a young cop investigating the theft of two buckets of pinyon sap from an old woman named Grandma Peshlakai. Who would steal pinyon sap? Witches maybe, Grandma suggested, or shape shifters. But to law enforcement agencies, pinyon sap didn’t stack up against death and possible arson. Leaphorn, to his continuing shame, tried to justify having to drop Grandma’s complaint to delve into the other crime.

Leaphorn, still dissatisfied by both cold cases, calls Bork in Flagstaff, Ariz. Bork’s wife answers. He has been missing for two days, she says, then plays a phone message, a voice warning Bork to “stop trying to dig up old bones.”

Of course, Leaphorn heads straight for Flagstaff, launching a story that goes far beyond solving a whodunit. Hillerman, a student of history, a former journalist and teacher, is deeply taken with the Southwest’s intriguing mix of modern and traditional cultures. The vivid exploration of these interests through the characters and the setting of “The Shape Shifter” make this another of his books likely to cross over from the mystery genre to find wide general popularity.

The central image of changing identity -- of shifting shapes -- and of finding one’s place and a good life, leads to philosophical discussions between Leaphorn and those he encounters. His inquiry unfolds as a long flashback, a story he is telling Jim and Bernie Chee after their return from a honeymoon. Readers learn everything. Jim and Bernie, however, must be content with an edited version. Leaphorn avoids revealing details that might cause trouble should a trial over the case involve them because they work for the tribal police agency. One day, perhaps, he can say more. In the meantime, it’s another instance of Hillerman’s us versus them.

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Irene Wanner, a New Mexico- based writer, is the author of “Sailing to Corinth.”