Sacred Clowns jlajc-11

by Tony Hillerman

  Janet looked at him, and then out the windshield, thinking. "When you're a certain age."

  she said, "when you're young, and you fall in love—or think you have—then you think that sex is the way you prove it. Prove that you're in love." She was still staring out the windshield, straight ahead. "But it doesn't prove a damned thing."

  Chee thought about that. "What you're saying—"

  "What I'm saying is I know I like you. Maybe I like you a lot. Even an awful lot. But it doesn't have anything at all to do with—" She paused. Looked at him. Grinning at him now. "To be exactly correct, it doesn't have much to do with your pearly white teeth, and your long, lean, lanky frame, and all those muscles. I started liking you because you're kind to people."

  "If I had known that, I would have been even kinder," Chee said.

  "But I'm not going to be just another of Jim Chee's girlfriends."

  "Hey," Chee said. "What do you mean by that?"

  "I mean we hear about things. We women."

  "No truth to it," Chee said. "I'm too busy."

  Janet laughed. "Exactly what I hear," she said. "Very busy. A girl at every chapter house."

  "Come on, Janet," Chee said. "Knock it off."

  "Remember," she said. "You told me about the schoolteacher at Crownpoint. The one you were in love with."

  "A long time ago," Chee said.

  Janet was silent for a moment. "How about her? Are you still in touch?"

  "She sent me a Christmas card," Chee said. "Wrote 'Happy Holidays' on it."

  Janet smiled at him, her face illuminated by the moon. "That sounds safe enough," she said.

  "Now it's your turn. How about The Attorney at Law?"

  It took her a while to answer. And while he waited, Chee felt his stomach tighten. What would she say? How would she say it?

  She said, in a small voice, "I don't like to think about him."

  And Chee, who really wanted to drop it, knew that he couldn't. He said, "Tell me why not."

  "Because it makes me feel so totally stupid. Naive. Dumb." She slammed her fist against the dashboard. "What the hell was I thinking of? I get so angry I want to cry."

  "You don't love him anymore?"

  "I don't think I ever did. I'm sure I didn't. I thought he was sophisticated. And glamorous.

  He made me feel important, or something, to have an important lawyer interested in me.

  But, actually, I don't even like him."

  He put his arm around her, pulled her against him, and talked into her hair. "I can understand that," he said. "I'll tell you why.

  Because way back when you and I got acquainted, fairly early on, I got to thinking sort of like that. I'd think, 'I'm a kid out of a sheep camp. Janet's beautiful. She's a sophisticated city girl. A lawyer. All that. Yet I think she likes me.' It made me feel great. Made me feel about nine feet tall."

  Janet snuggled against him. "Ummmmm," she said. "You know how to make me feel good. My mother's a Scot, but if she was Irish, she'd say you were full of blarney."

  "Blarney?"

  Janet laughed. "I don't know if the Navajos, if we Navajos, have a word for it. But we certainly should. Sort of like baloney. Or maybe bull."

  "No, I'm not," Chee said. "But if real lawyers impress you, I should tell you I might get made into a real sergeant."

  "Well, I think it's high time that happened. But weren't you already a sergeant once?"

  "Acting sergeant," Chee said. "But that only lasted a few months."

  "I remember. It was when you worked at Crownpoint. Before you burned your hand so terribly. Trying to open the door on that burning car." She snuggled against him again.

  "But tell me about getting promoted."

  Chee found himself wishing he hadn't brought it up. It wasn't likely to happen.

  "I probably won't," he said. "It's really more like a joke. But the lieutenant told me that the chief himself is personally interested in nailing the guy in that Todachene hit-and-run thing I told you about. The one where the driver backed up and took a look at the pedestrian he'd hit and then drove away and let the man bleed to death." Chee produced a mirthless chuckle. "The lieutenant says that if I can find the guy, I'll get promoted."

  "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 jo
king 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 link-age 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.

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  12

  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 over
sized 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.