Sacred Clowns (22 page)

“The usual. Middle-aged, middle-sized, average-looking Navajo male, wearing average-looking Navajo clothing. He was wearing one of those long-billed baseball caps with the bill bent, and he smelled like onions, and he drove a middle-aged, middle-sized, middle-green pickup truck with a bumper sticker which said ‘Ernie is the greatest.’”

“Smelled like onions?” She looked at him, eyebrows raised with the question.

“Middle of the morning,” Chee said. “Too early for your Lottaburger onion fix.”

“Now you see why I think Lieutenant Leaphorn thinks you’re going to nail this guy?” She was smiling at him.

Which Chee enjoyed. But this was not the time for basking. He said, “This stopped being a tough one as soon as he walked into that radio station. It’s not tough now. Now we catch him because of that bumper sticker.”

“Surely he’d have gotten rid of that. He’d have soaked it off as soon as he got home.”

“I don’t think so,” Chee said. “Neither do the Farmington police, or the New Mexico state cops. He’ll keep driving that pickup out on the highway and sooner or later a cop drives up behind him and sees it.”

Janet looked unpersuaded. She shrugged. “I defer to your experience in such matters. As for me, I’d have painted over it, or something.”

Chee thought about that. “No,” he said, looking at her. “I have a feeling you’d turn yourself in.”

They were driving almost due north through a landscape devoid of humans and the signs that humans leave. Jim Chee loved it for its emptiness. Its beauty had always stirred him and it now stirred him out of his pessimism. Things will work out, he thought. Somehow they’ll work out. They passed the junction that offered thirty miles of dirt road and the White Rock Chapter House to the left, and the much shorter dirt road to the Lake Valley Chapter House to the right. Behind the grassy hills to the right, Kenbeto Wash, and Bettonie Tsossie Wash, and Escalvada Wash, and Fajada Wash all got together after draining thousands of square miles of mountain slopes and mesas, and moved enough water to be called the Chaco River. On this afternoon of a dry autumn, the Chaco bridge crossed a broad expanse of sand on which dust devils were being produced by the autumn breeze (or, as his mother would have assured him, by those playful
yeis,
the Blue Flint Boys).

Janet broke the long silence. “Why do you think I would give myself up?”

“I’m going to answer that the Navajo way,” Chee said, and laughed. “That means you have to be patient, because it’s very roundabout. It’s all about culture.”

“I don’t want to talk about culture,” she said.

“For convenience, let’s call our hit-and-run driver Gorman. Let’s say he’s a widower. Doesn’t drink much, usually. We’ll follow the script in the radio tape but give him more of a personality. He’s a hard worker. All the good things. Something comes along to be celebrated. His birthday, maybe. His friends take him out to a bar off the reservation. Driving home he hits this pedestrian. Like in the tape, he hears something and backs up. But he’s drunk. He doesn’t see anybody. So he drives away. Now I’m a member of the Navajo Tribal Police, also deputized by a couple of the counties in Arizona and New Mexico, sworn to uphold the law. My boss wants me to catch this guy. So one day I catch him. What do I do?”

“Is that the question?” Janet said, surprised. “That’s what you want to ask me?”

“That starts it,” he said.

“Well, it’s not pleasant, but it’s not too hard either. You just think about why you have laws. Society puts a penalty on driving drunk because it kills people. It puts a penalty for leaving the scene of an injury accident for pretty much the same reason. So what you do is arrest this guy who broke those laws and present the evidence in court, and the court finds he was guilty. And then the judge weighs the circumstances. First offense, solid citizen, special circumstances. It seems unlikely that the crime will be repeated. And so forth. So the judge sentences him to maybe a year, maybe two years, and then probation for another eight years or so.” She studied him. “You agree?”

“That was phase one,” Chee said. “I’m going to make it harder for you now. We’ll give this guy some social value. Let’s say he is taking care of a disabled kid. Maybe a grandchild whose parents have dropped him on our Gorman while they do their thing. Maybe a broken family. Father took off, mother a drunk. You make your own plot. Now what do you do?”

“Come on, Jim,” she said. “Why not make him a biologist? He’s about to unlock the secret of the AIDS virus. But he can’t leave his laboratory even for one minute to be arrested or his test tubes will all dry up and his cultures will die. It doesn’t change the basic principle. Society passes laws to ensure justice. The guy broke the society’s laws. Justice is required.”

“Okay,” Chee said. “Now we get to the next phase. More complicated. We’ll say this bird is a Navajo and the guy he killed was a Navajo.”

“What’s the difference?” Janet asked. “He violated the laws of the Navajo Nation, too. If you have justice, it spells out the punishment in advance. It tells you if you do this harm to society, then society does this harm to you. We’ll lock you up, for example. Or fine you. The idea is prevention.”

“Right,” Chee said. “Now we enter phase two of this problem.”

“We just finished phase two,” Janet said. “But it’s better than talking about culture.”

“Okay, now for phase three,” Chee said. “We’re dealing with justice. Just retribution. That’s a religious concept, really. We’ll say the tribal cop is sort of religious. He honors his people’s traditional ways. He has been taught another notion of justice. He was a big boy before he heard about ‘make the punishment fit the crime’ or ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Instead of that he was hearing of retribution in another way. If you damage somebody, you sit down with their family and figure out how much damage and make it good. That way you restore
hozho.
You’ve got harmony again between two families. Not too much difference from the standard American justice. But now it gets different, If somebody harms you out of meanness—say you get in a bar fight and he cuts you, or he keeps cutting your fences, or stealing your sheep—then he’s the one who’s out of
hozho
. You aren’t taught he should be punished. He should be cured. Gotten back in balance with what’s around him. Made beautiful again—” He glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead, apparently listening.

“Beautiful on the inside, of course. Back in harmony. So this hypothetical cop, that’s the way he’s been raised. Not to put any value on punishment, but to put a lot of value on curing. So now what are you going to do if you’re this cop?”

Chee waited for an answer.

Janet looked at him, raised her hand. “I want to think about this one,” she said. “Time out.”

They were driving past the Bisti Badlands now, looking into the edge of a wilderness where eons of time had uncovered alternating layers of gray shale, pink sandstone, yellow caliche, and black streaks of coal. Wind and water had played with these varied levels of hardness and carved out a weird tableau of gigantic shapes—toadstools and barrels, gargoyle heads, rows of fat babies, the raw material for the most frantic imaginations.

“Wow,” Janet said. “This country is always ready to surprise you.”

“Okay. Time back in,” Chee said. “What’s the answer?”

“If this is hypothetical, it’s just partly hypothetical,” she said. “You agree with Leaphorn. You think you can find him and you’re getting ready for it.”

“Either way, what’s the answer?”

“It’s hard to apply normal city-street law-school solutions where you’re looking at this,” Janet said.

“Maybe the landscape is part of the answer,” Chee said. “Maybe it makes the answer a little different.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see what you mean.” She looked at him a while, her face sad. “Maybe the hypothetical cop would have to quit being a policeman,” she said.

Chee made a left turn onto the dirt road which led, if you followed it long enough, across the southernmost boundary of the Navajo Agricultural Industries project, and if you followed it ten miles more, and made the proper turns, to the house where Clement Hoski lived.

“I’ve thought about that. It’s one solution.”

“What’s another one?”

He didn’t answer for a while. “I’ll show you,” he said.

He stopped at the same place he’d parked before, and glanced at his watch. It was a little too early for the school bus. As before, Clement Hoski’s green pickup truck was not visible—either away somewhere or parked behind the house.

“What are we doing here?” Janet asked. “And I’ll bet I know the answer. Your hit-and-runner lives right there. And you want me to see he’s a real, live fellow human with all sorts of good traits.” Janet’s tone said she wasn’t happy about this. “You’re forgetting my job. Right now I have about seven or eight clients who are genuine humans, and I like them even though they robbed somebody, or cut somebody. You have to believe in justice or you get out of the business.”

“I don’t disagree. The question is
bilagaani
justice, or Navajo justice. Or maybe it’s, Do you try for punishment or do you try for
hozho
?”

Janet looked at him, and then straight ahead out the windshield, her face grim. “We are about to talk about culture,” she said. “Let’s not. Let’s talk about where you’ve been the last couple of days. I get the impression the lieutenant was trying hard to find you. Aren’t you supposed to check out, and leave a number, and all that?”

“I was unhappy,” Chee said. “I had acted like a damn fool and I felt like I’d earned your contempt and all of a sudden I had to go someplace and see if I could find some wisdom, so I went to see Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai.”

“Your uncle,” she said. “Your teacher. The
hataalii.”

“I think probably my former teacher,” Chee said. “I think I am considered sort of a semi-heretic.”

Janet was no longer staring out the windshield. She was looking at him. Concerned.

“Aw, Jim,” she said. “Really? I know you were close to your uncle. What happened?”

“Well, it got complicated. We had two other shamans involved—man and a woman, and an old, old, old woman who sort of represents the clan’s accumulated memory and wisdom. We talked for three or four hours and the upshot of it all is I don’t think I’m traditional enough to meet their standards.”

Janet looked stricken. “It was because of me, wasn’t it?”

“It was because of how you understand the Beauty Way,” Chee said. “This business of
hozho.
The way I understand it—” He paused. The way he understood
hozho
was hard to put into words. “I’ll use an example. Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried out. No water. The Hopi, or the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, and then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.”

“A lot like psychiatric therapy,” Janet said.

“Well, sort of,” Chee said. “Now another example. Now we are engulfed by, buried under, modern American materialism. The eight-hour day, the five-day week. But your curing ceremonials, most of them anyway, can only be performed in the ‘season when the thunder sleeps.’ The cold months. Not normal vacation times. And most of the most important ones are supposed to take seven or eight days. So I think the concept of
hozho
means you adjust the ceremonial system like you adjust everything else. You keep it in harmony with the inevitable.”

Chee’s passion on this subject was showing in his voice and Janet’s expression made him aware of it.

He made a wry face and shook his head. “Well, that’s why we Navajos have endured. Survived with our culture alive. This philosophy of
hozho
kept us alive. And some of the shamans I know, mostly the younger ones, they split a long ceremony over two weekends, so working people can take part. That’s the way I’d do it. And Hosteen Nakai knows it, and it’s poison to him, and the other two. They say done that way, the ceremony does more harm than good.”

“They won’t let me vote,” Janet said. “But I would agree with you. They sound like some fundamentalist Christians. Can’t see the metaphor in the gospel.”

Chee didn’t comment. The school bus was coming over the hill.

“You went up there to see about me, didn’t you? To find out if I was taboo?”

Chee nodded.

“What did you find out?”

“Just a second,” Chee said. “I want you to meet somebody.”

Ernie had climbed off the bus. He stood looking at Chee’s pickup, then walked toward them, grinning.

“Who?” Janet said.

“Ernie,” Chee said. “Ernie who is the greatest.” Ernie was standing at Janet’s window, looking at her and then at Chee.

“Hello,” he said. “I saw mister before. You came back, didn’t you? Now do you want to see Grandfather’s pickup truck?”

“Not today, Ernie,” Jim said. “But we want to talk to you a little.”

“It’s green,” Ernie said. “Real pretty.”

“Is that backpack full of your homework?” Janet asked.

“I have to draw pictures tonight,” Ernie said. “When Grandfather gets home from work, he helps me.”

“After he cooks supper?”

“After that. Now he lets me peel the potatoes. And he let me cook the oatmeal yesterday. And he lets me drive the truck.” Ernie turned away from the window and pointed at the dirt road which wandered toward infinity behind Clement Hoski’s place. “Down there,” Ernie said. “He keeps his foot on the gas but he lets me steer.”

“I’ll bet that’s fun,” Janet said.

Ernie laughed, his face contorted with delight. “Lots of fun,” he agreed.

“I brought something for your grandpa,” Chee said. He opened the glove box, took out a Quikprint sack, and extracted from it a bumper sticker. He unfolded it and showed it to Ernie.

“What does it say?”

“It says, ‘I have the world champion grandson,’” Chee said. “That’s you. You’re the grandson, and your grandpa knows you’re a champion.”