Sacred Clowns (12 page)

“Oh,” Janet said.

“The catch being that there isn’t a clue. Everything you can check out in a case like that has already been checked. The garages, paint shops, people who might have seen something. There’s nothing to go on.”

“That’s not fair,” Janet said. “You should have been promoted a long time ago anyway. But so what?”

“But what you said about burning my hand reminds me,” Chee said. “I’ll tell you what made me really feel great about you. I’ll never forget it.”

He waited. She snuggled again. “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead and tell.”

“They let me out of the hospital at Albuquerque with that hand all wrapped up so I couldn’t use it, and when I got home I found you’d gotten into my trailer and washed all the dishes, and swept, and got the windows all shiny, and cleaned out the refrigerator, and put in some fresh milk and eggs and things like that, and did the laundry, and—”

“Women lawyers like to play housekeeper now and then,” she said. “And you had the blues, too. Remember that? You were really down. I didn’t want you to come home to a dirty house. All alone, and everything’s a mess. I’ve done that often enough to know it’s awfully depressing.”

“Anyway, I loved you for it. And I still do.”

And having said that, he put his hand under her chin, and treasured the silky feel of her skin, and raised her face and kissed her. And she kissed him. And this went on for quite a while.

And, having done that, he knew it was time—in fact it was way past time—to pose the question he had been dreading to ask.

“You remember when I asked you about your dad? About where he was from. What part of the reservation. And what his clans were. And you said he was just little when his parents were relocated to Chicago and he never talked about it, and you said you really didn’t know. You remember that?”

Janet’s head moved against his face, her hair incredibly soft, smelling clean, smelling beautiful, looking beautiful in the moonlight. It was an affirmative nod.

“And you said you’d ask him next time you talked to him? Get him to be more specific.”

Another nod.

Chee took a deep breath. He should have handled this a long time ago. But he was afraid to press it because it seemed presumptuous. After all, they were only friends. Now he was afraid of what the answer might be. Chee’s mother’s clan was the Slow Talking People, and his father was born to the Bitter Water Clan. If Janet Pete’s father belonged to either of those on either side of his family, then what he and Janet had been doing here was wrong. It violated one of the most stringent taboos of the Navajos—the rigid and complex rules by which The People prohibited incest. Probably Mr. Pete didn’t belong to either of them. There were about sixty-five other clans he could belong to. But then there was Janet’s paternal grandmother’s paternal clan, and his own family’s linked clans. They, too, would make any sexual relationship between Janet and him taboo. He had to find out.

But Janet wasn’t saying anything.

“Did he tell you?”

“He wasn’t sure,” Janet said.

Chee wanted to think about that. He had never known a reservation-born Navajo who didn’t know his clans. It was almost like not knowing whether you were man or woman. But perhaps this man’s mother—living in a white man’s city a thousand miles from the sacred mountains—had wanted to make a white man out of her son. That sometimes happened. Or maybe Janet’s father simply didn’t want to tell her. Or was kidding her for some reason. Chee couldn’t imagine why he’d do that.

“Did he have any idea? Could he tell you anything helpful?”

“He was sure he didn’t know about my grandfather’s clans, because Grandfather had died before they moved. When Dad was just a little boy. But he said he thought his mother might have belonged to the Hunger People. He said he remembered her joking about that. Saying it was appropriate for their family.”

Chee probed through his memory. “Hunger People,” he said. “That’s the
Dichin Dine’e.”

Janet sensed his mood.

“Why all the questions?” she said. There was no snuggling now. “As if I hadn’t been out here long enough to know the answer to that one.” She pushed herself away from him. “Well,” she said. “How did I do? Am I eligible?” She laughed as she said it.

“I’m like your dad,” Chee said. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m poison for you.” He tried to make it sound like a joke.

They sat in the cold moonlight. Janet sighed. “You know what?” she said. “I have a long day tomorrow. And you have to do whatever you policemen do on Tuesdays. So, if I can think of a way to get you out of the car, I’ll go on home and get some sleep.”

This was not the way Chee wanted this evening to end. He wasn’t ready to step out into the cold night.

“I want to ask you about something,” he said. “Did you notice when we were—”

“No more questions, Jim. I don’t feel like any more questions.”

“This one’s about Blizzard,” he said. “Did you notice how different his reaction was to some of the scenes in that movie? We Navajos would be laughing and honking our horns at our private joke, and he would be looking sad. Same scene, exactly. He’d be watching the destruction of his culture. We’d be watching our kinfolks making fun of the white folks in the movie.”

“Different for me, too,” Janet said. “My Navajo wasn’t good enough to get the joke most of the time.” She frowned at him. “How do you know how Blizzard was taking it? You were watching him in the rearview mirror, weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Chee said.

“And me too, I bet.”

“Mostly you,” Chee admitted.

“Sneaky,” Janet said. “Why watch us?”

He wanted to say
Because you’re beautiful. Because it makes me feel good to look at
you.
Because I have stupidly, hopelessly, allowed myself to fall in love with
you. But he didn’t say it. There was the problem of the
Dichin Dine’e.
Was his memory correct? Was there some linkage of that little clan and one of his own? A long time ago, on a winter night when such teaching is appropriate, Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, his Little Father, had given him the history of his Slow Talking People—tracing it all the way back to the mythic times just after Changing Woman had left The People to rejoin her lover, the Sun. He had been a boy then, and some of the clan connections had seemed vague and unimportant. But now the name of the Hunger People stirred something in his memory. And now it had become terribly important. It determined whether Jim Chee and Janet Pete were permissible as friends but taboo as lovers.

So instead of saying what he wanted to say, he said, “I was thinking about you and me and Cowboy sitting on the roof at Tano—watching the kachina dance. Cowboy’s Hopi, and he’s in one of the Hopi kachina societies himself, so he saw a lot that we missed. But not as much as the Tano people. All of us up there on the roof were outsiders, I mean. Like the Cheyenne watching the Navajos pretending to be Cheyennes. He missed a lot. We missed a lot, too. I wonder what.”

“Me, too,” Janet said, voice glum. “I mean, me and Blizzard, too. There was a lot I didn’t understand at the movie. Not understanding Navajo very well. And to tell the truth, not understanding about being a Navajo.”

Chee studied her profile. He realized, abruptly and with shock, that she was trying not to cry. He experienced a sudden jarring enlightenment. He was seeing a Janet Pete he had never even dreamed existed. He was seeing a lonely girl. He, who had been a sheep camp boy surrounded by the town kids in boarding school; he, who had been the country bumpkin among the sophisticates at the University of New Mexico; he, of all people, should have recognized what Janet would have encountered on this Big-Reservation-Full-of-Strangers. But he hadn’t. He had seen only the shrewd attorney who looked great in expensive clothing, who wore the armor of wit, humor, education, intelligence. He hadn’t seen the girl who was trying to find a home. He felt an almost overpowering urge to pull Janet Pete to him, wrap his arms around her, comfort her, warm her against this cold moonlight, tell her he understood, tell her that he loved her and would care for her forever, and would die to make her happy.

Almost overpowering. He could have done it a week ago when they were friends. Now there was the question of the Hunger People. They had moved into that territory beyond friendship and Chee didn’t know the way back. If there was a way. Perhaps there was, but Chee couldn’t think of it. So he simply looked at her profile, as she sat, forlorn, shoulders slumped, staring out the windshield. And he said:

“Remember at Tano? The koshare had come tumbling down off their roof and a couple of them had grabbed one of the kachinas. They were doing a lot of loud talking, gesturing, that sort of thing. And the crowd was laughing. Good-natured. Everybody was having fun. Getting into what was going on. And then the clown came in dressed up like a cowboy, riding the stick horse. And the clown with the little toy wagon, selling their stuff to the guy dressed up like he was supposed to be a tourist, or a trader. And remember, sort of suddenly the laughing stopped there for a moment. Everything got quiet.”

“Okay,” Janet said. “Okay. I remember.”

“I wonder what we missed,” Chee said. “I wonder what that meant.”

“I don’t know what that meant,” Janet said. “I have no idea. But I guess this conversation we’re having right now means we have reverted back to our traditional status.”

“Traditional status?”

“Back to being old friends,” Janet said. “Good buddies. Remember? Back to telling each other our troubles. Giving each other all sorts of bad advice. About our love affairs with other people.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Chee said. He couldn’t think of anything more sensible to say. “But don’t you have any ideas about what might have been going on there at Tano? Any—”

Janet leaned across him and opened his door. “Out,” she said. “Go to bed. Be a cop tomorrow.”

In the trailer, Chee dropped on his bunk still in his jacket and boots and managed not to think of Janet Pete. He thought of the Todachene case. The case without leads. He considered where it had happened-on a light-traffic byway used mostly by reservation locals. That meant the driver was probably a Navajo. No matter how drunk he’d been, he must be aware by now of the nature of his crime. He would feel the guilt. It would force him out of
hozho,
out of that state of harmony which is the goal of Navajo metaphysics. If he was traditional, he would be calling on a shaman for help. Tomorrow, Chee thought, he would begin putting out the word to the medicine people in the Checkerboard and on the northeast side of the Big Rez. If he was patient, maybe some information would come drifting back. A ceremonial cure for a man who had been involved with death. The man was probably a drunk, someone who had left the Navajo Way. But it was worth a try.

The second thing he would do tomorrow would be to provide the lieutenant with a memo about the Sayesva homicide. Leaphorn had made it clear he didn’t want Chee intruding in that very federal, very off-reservation affair. But rigid as he was, Leaphorn was also smart. He’d earned his reputation. The memo would inform the lieutenant that something odd seemed to have transpired at the Tano ceremonial, something involving the performance of the clowns. Leaphorn could take it from there.

And with that thought, Chee sat up, undressed, and got under his blanket. He listened to the night sounds, which on this night included the heavy breathing of a sleeping Cheyenne. And he thought about the choice he might have to make between Janet Pete and the religion that had always given his life its purpose.

THE NEXT DAY was a day off for Officer Jim Chee. He drove Blizzard to Gallup to pick up his car at the police station. He went to the office on the chance he might catch Leaphorn and didn’t. He typed up the intended memo and put it in the in-basket on the lieutenant’s tidy desk. He spent a moment examining the oversized map that decorated the wall behind Leaphorn’s desk. The symbolic pins with which the man marked locations still connected the Tano Pueblo homicide with the one at Thoreau. He nodded to Virginia on the way out and spent the rest of the morning at Gallup Quality Electronics getting the Citizens Band radio in his pickup truck back in working order. That done, he drove north on U.S. 666, along the east flank of the Chuska Mountains, past Tohatchi, and the Naschitti Boarding School, and the Sheep Springs Chapter House, to the Newcomb turnoff—and then climbed westward, past the little cluster of buildings that was Two Grey Hills, past the old Toadlena boarding school, and onto the old rutted road that led to the sheep camp of Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the elder brother of his mother.

He had been thinking, as he left Gallup, of anything except Janet Pete. Time enough for that later. After he had talked to Hosteen Nakai. After he knew what to think. Now he thought about his vehicular homicide case. Apparently hopeless. Nothing to go on. Nothing to hope for except luck. And Lieutenant Leaphorn did not approve of luck. He thought about why Leaphorn, in the face of fairly solid evidence, didn’t seem to believe that Eugene Ahkeah had killed Eric Dorsey, or anyone else. He thought about where he might look next for Delmar, his sneaky little problem. And about why the crowd had fallen silent when the clown’s wagon appeared in the Tano plaza. If Leaphorn was interested how that crime connected with the Dorsey case, he would ask the right people at Tano and find out about that.

Then, as his truck jolted higher into the summer pastures of the Chuskas, and ponderosa pine replaced juniper and piñon, and the air was colder in his nostrils and brought the old high-country smells back to him, he thought of Hosteen Nakai, the Little Father of his boyhood.

Nobody was home at the summer shack of Hosteen Nakai. Chee found Nakai’s mixed flock of sheep and goats in a meadow a mile away, and his uncle sitting on a rotted log with his horse grazing under the aspens. A ghetto blaster sat on the log beside him, apparently tuned to KNDN. From it came the impassioned voice of D. J. Nez singing, “My heroes have always been Indians.”

“Dichin Dine’e,”
said Hosteen Nakai. “That would have been way back, a long time ago when we got mixed up with them. Let me think about that a little bit.” While he thought he extracted a package of cigarette papers and a sack of Bull Durham from the pocket of his shirt, offered both to Chee, and made himself a cigarette. “It would have been back when the army made us prisoners and herded us off to Bosque Redondo. Back when we made the Long Walk. Everybody got mixed together then and there was some marrying back and forth. Even some marrying with the Apaches. They had a bunch of Mescalero Apaches penned up there with us.”

He lit the cigarette. Exhaled. “Why you interested in the Hunger People? It sounds to me like you finally found yourself a Navajo girl.”

Chee nodded.

Nakai said, “I don’t know. Her father’s mother was born to the
Dichin Dine’e,
you think. But what’s her father’s clan? What’s the rest of the family connections?”

“She doesn’t have a ‘born to’ clan,” Chee said. “Her mother is a white woman. Her dad’s a Navajo. But they’re one of those relocation families. The government moved his family off the reservation in the l940s. He was just a kid when it happened and I guess his family raised him white. He thinks his mother was
Dichin Dine’e.
Says he doesn’t know about his father’s clan.”

Hosteen Nakai considered this, exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, muttered some imprecation under his breath.

“Tell me about this woman,” he said. “And tell me about yourself. Tell me about the work you are doing.”

Chee told Hosteen Nakai about Janet Pete, the city Navajo. And he told him about the driver who had hit the old man walking beside Navajo Route 1 and left the man to die beside the highway. Could Hosteen Nakai spread the word about this man among the small fraternity of medicine people? Nakai said he would. Chee told him about the deaths of the Christian at Thoreau and the koshare at Tano, and how nobody seemed to know why either one had died, and about his frustrating hunt for Delmar Kanitewa.

Nakai asked questions, about the Christian, about the koshare, about the grandmother of Delmar, about the package Delinar had carried.

Five goats had separated themselves from the flock and drifted downslope. Nakai whistled to his dogs, resting in the tall grass beside the aspens. He pointed. The dogs raced down the slope, circled, brought the reluctant goats back to the fold. The autumn sun was low enough now to begin giving shape to rolling plains far below them. Chee could make out the dark line of shadows cast by Chaco Mesa forty miles to the east. North of that, the yellow-tan of the grama grass prairie was marked by spots of darkness and color—the slate erosion of the Bisti Badlands and the De-Na-Zin Wilderness. Beautiful. Peaceful. But Chee was nervous. Pretty soon Hosteen Nakai would be finished thinking and be ready to talk. For the first time Chee noticed that his uncle had become an old man. Now, what would he say?

“The man who hit the old man, and left him to die,” Nakai said. “I will ask the right people. You are right, if he is following the Beauty Way of the Navajos he would want to be cured of that. But why do you want to find him? What good does it do for the man he killed? What good does it do him? I think you would put him in jail. That won’t help him.” Nakai shrugged, dismissing it. He allowed the silence to take over, giving Chee time to frame his response. Chee simply nodded.

“The Christian and the koshare. Two good men, you tell me. Valuable men. But somebody killed them. Usually the people who get killed like this have worked at it themselves.” He puffed on the cigarette, exhaled. “You know what I mean. They fooled with somebody’s wife. They got drunk and hit somebody. They butchered somebody’s cow. Did something wrong, usually. They got out of harmony with everything so somebody might kill them. But not this time, you tell me. Two good men who helped people, hurt nobody. And they were a lot alike in other ways. The koshare, you know about them. I used to know a Hopi man who was a koshare at Moenkopi. He would say to me: ‘Compared to what our Creator wanted us to be, all men are clowns. And that’s what we koshare do. We act funny to remind the people. To make the people laugh at themselves. We are the sacred clowns,’ he said. He is dead now, a long time, but I remember that. And now you have told me that this teacher at Thoreau was funny, too. A good man and he made the children laugh.”

Hosteen Nakai tapped the ash from his cigarette and looked at Chee, thoughtfully. As if wondering whether Chee could extract any meaning from this. Chee gave no sign that he had.

“Two good men who made fun and helped people. Valuable men. But somebody killed them. There has to be a reason. Everything is connected. So you have to look for something outside of them. Something evil that somehow both of them touched. If you find the driver who killed the man, you do nothing for anybody. But if you find out why it was that these valuable men were killed, you do good work then.”

Nakai pushed himself up from the log, stretched, looked down at Chee. “But you want to hear about the woman. That’s why you came here. The incest taboo. You know about it. How it makes you sick, makes you crazy. How it hurts your family. Gets everything out of harmony. So be careful about that woman for a while.” He took another drag on the cigarette.

“I know an old man who lives over near Crystal. That’s where the Hunger People used to be a long time ago before the army moved them to Bosque Redondo. He’s a
hataalii.
He sings the Mountain Top Way, and the Red Ant Way, and some of the other cures. I will talk to him about this woman. I think he will know something about the Hunger People and our Slow Talking Clan. When I know, then I will tell you.”

“How long will—”

“Young men are impatient when they see the woman they want,” Nakai said. “I know that. I will start tonight.”

“Thank you,” Chee said.

“One more thing. This boy you are looking for. You think he is running away because he is afraid. Does his grandmother still call the lieutenant to ask about him?”

“Ah,” Chee said. Why hadn’t he thought of that? “No. Not for several days.”

“Then the grandmother knows where to find him,” Nakai said. He exhaled smoke and stood looking into the blue cloud hanging in the still air. “And she also knows, I think, that the boy has some reason to be afraid.”