Sacred Clowns jlajc-11

by Tony Hillerman

  "I would," Leaphorn said. He glanced at his watch.

  Penitewa hoisted himself out of the chair, took the black cane from the wall, and handed it to Leaphorn.

  The weight surprised Leaphorn. Ebony was a heavy wood indeed. He ran his hand down the smooth surface, looked at the tip—which seemed to be made of steel—and then at the head. Silver, inscribed A. LINCOLN, PRES. U.S.A. and 1863.

  Above that was the name of the pueblo. He ran his thumbnail under the L and examined the nail. What it had scraped away looked a little like wax but it was probably something more professional than that. Probably some sort of molding putty sold in art supply houses for just this purpose.

  Penitewa was watching him. "Are you checking whether I'm a neat housekeeper?"

  "No sir," Leaphorn said. He got up and showed Penitewa first the head of the cane and then the residue on his thumbnail. "I think someone stuck the head down into some sort of molding clay. I think they made an impression of it to make the copy. Could that be possible?"

  Penitewa looked surprised. "Who could it have been?" He sat again, put the cane on the table in front of him. "Lot of people, I guess."

  'It's always left on the wall like that?" Leaphorn said. "Or do you lock it up somewhere?"

  "It's the governor's symbol," Penitewa said. "Whoever is governor, it hangs on the wall in his office. It's the tradition. When I was a little boy, my great-grandfather was governor. It hung on the wall in his house."

  Leaphorn wanted to ask if anyone had ever stolen it, which would have been a stupid question since there it was, in the governor's hand. But Penitewa seemed to sense the thought.

  "I think President Lincoln sent nineteen of them out from Washington—one for each of the pueblos. The Spanish started it in 1620." He pointed to the heavier cane. "Some of the pueblos got another one—three canes altogether— one from the Mexican government when Mexico won its independence. And a couple of pueblos, so I'm told, don't have any anymore."

  "Stolen?"

  Penitewa shrugged. "Disappeared," he said. "Who knows what happened to them. But nobody has ever tried to steal ours."

  "If someone made a molding of the head of this one, it probably happened fairly recently.

  Have you had any unusual visitors this month? Anyone you left alone in here long enough for that to be done? Anyone suspicious?"

  Penitewa considered, shook his head.

  "How about Delmar Kanitewa? We think he brought the replica from Thoreau to his uncle."

  "Delmar," Penitewa said. He thought. "No. He's been away living with his dad."

  "How about Francis Sayesva?"

  If the governor had needed to think about that, it had been long ago. His answer was instant.

  "Francis was my friend."

  "I heard that," Leaphorn said. "But I was told you disagreed about a lot of things. Where to put the grade school when it was built. Whether the pueblo should lease the old Jacks Wild Mine for a dump. Where to locate the new housing when the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted it built. Things like that."

  Penitewa laughed. "Francis loved to argue," he said. "Somebody would want to do something, Francis was always the one to tell the council why not. Somebody wanted to stop something, Francis was there saying why to do it. But he was a good man. He was one of the valuable people."

  "You don't think he had the copy made?"

  "No. Not Francis."

  "Teddy Sayesva said that Francis told Henry Agoyo to put the Lincoln Cane in the wagon.

  Teddy said this would be a terrible insult to you and that Agoyo didn't want to do it, but Francis told him to. Did you know that?"

  "Of course I knew it. One of my nephews was the other clown helping with the wagon."

  The governor smiled. "Tano is a small place, Lieutenant. Not many interesting things happen. Everybody was talking about that cane."

  "Was it an insult? You said Francis was your friend. Why did he do it?"

  The governor smiled again. "If you had known Francis you would know the answer. He must have thought I was going to sell the cane. That would be terrible. So he was willing to do whatever he could do to stop it. Even if it was against an old friend. He was what you call 'an honorable man.'"

  Leaphorn considered this. It demanded another question that was hard to ask. He cleared his throat.

  "I am a stranger to Tano culture," he said, "but it would seem to me that if Francis was your old friend, and an honorable man, he wouldn't insult you that way in public if he didn't think it was true. Do you really believe he thought you were going to sell the Lincoln Cane?"

  "He must have believed it," he said. "That bothered me, too. It still does. I don't think he would have done it if he didn't believe I was about to betray the people."

  Another hard question. "What would have caused him to think that?"

  "I don't know," Penitewa said. "I am trying to find out." He looked at Leaphorn. "It hurts when you think an old friend like Francis died thinking you were a traitor."

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  19

  THE NAVAJO Agricultural Industries project tended to affect Jim Chee in different ways—

  depending on his mood. If he drove past it in a "patriotic Navajo mood" it filled him with both pride and regrets. He was proud of what the tribe had done with its water rights from the San Juan River and an expanse of once-worthless sagebrush hills. His regrets focused on what might have been had not the whites wrested all the good rich bottom land away from the tribe.

  On the north side of Highway 44, the ocean of sagebrush stretched away into the Angel Peak badlands. On the south side of the highway where the NAI held domain, the black-gray-silver of the sage had been replaced by mile after mile of green, the shade depending on the crop and the season. Dense stands of cornstalks alternated with thousands of acres of potato fields, followed by great circles of kelly green alfalfa, and incredible expanses of onions, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, sugar beets, whatever crop the market demanded. And all of this had been made possible by a rare and seemingly small Navajo victory over white land-grabbers. Chee had found an account of it in the depths of the Zimmerman Library while a student at the University of New Mexico and had read it happily. Way back in Civil War times, and maybe before, the Navajos had built a header dam in the San Juan River to divert waters and irrigate their cornfields. Whites had already driven the Navajos off most of their rich bottom-land farms along the river and seized it for themselves. They moved in on this irrigated land as well, even though it was part of what had by then been declared Navajo Reservation. But when the Navajos prepared to fight for their homes, the U.S. Army moved in and—for the first and only time—sided with the tribe and made the squatters move out. The old Cornfield Ditch was expanded into the Fruitland Canal in the 1930s, irrigating almost 1,500 acres.

  More important, it maintained Navajo legal rights to the river water. While the whites had taken nearly all the good bottom land, the Navajos still owned the water and an infinity of worthless high desert hills. Now, from planting season until harvest, that water was showered out over the desert through elaborate mobile sprinkler systems. It turned the hills lush and green and produced jobs for hundreds of Navajos.

  When Jim Chee was feeling patriotic, he was proud of this—proud that his people were using their water and not letting it drain down into the Colorado to produce golf courses in Las Vegas and fill the hot tubs of Beverly Hills.

  Today, however, he was feeling religious. When he felt that way, the NAI bothered him.

  He had stopped at the NAI administrative offices and gotten directions from a puzzled clerk, who obviously wondered about this policeman's interest in the processing of the onion crop. He turned off Highway 44 southward on the road to the warehouse complex where marketing and shipping were handled. He looked out at the stubble fields of autumn, at millions of dollars' worth of mobile irrigation pipes parked for the winter and already being buried under
the tumbleweeds blowing in from the desert; at the power lines that made it all work, and beyond this to the hills sloping southward toward the Bisti Badlands and the De-Na-Zin Wilderness. The hills were still black and silver with sage—

  as nature had made them before the NAI bulldozers had ripped away plant life, and the insects and mammals that fed upon it, and the birds that fed upon them. He saw the hills as the great spirit Changing Woman must have seen them. She who had taught that the earth was our nurturing mother and that earth, and all She produced, must be treated with respect. Was this business of reducing nature to great irrigated circles becoming the Beauty Way of the Navajos? This and the immense scar of the Navajo Mine, and the sawmill operations in the Chuska Mountains, and—

  What was wrong with him? Why this lousy mood? He knew why. Her name was Janet. But what was her clan? And what the hell was he going to do about it? He didn't know that. He couldn't decide what he would do until he knew for certain that he had to decide. First he was going to catch this hit-and-run son-of-a-bitch and then he was going to drive back to Frank Sam Nakai's place and find out what his uncle had learned. And if his uncle had learned nothing yet—had not yet gone to find the old man who was supposed to know—

  then he would take Hosteen Nakai to find the old man. Or if his uncle wouldn't go, he would go himself. He didn't want to wait.

  But it is a policeman's fate to wait. The working day had not yet ended at the produce warehouses. He cruised slowly through the gravel parking lot, looking for a dark green pickup truck with an ERNIE is THE GREATEST bumper sticker. There were seven greens among the ranks of trucks and cars, three of them about the right vintage to match the description. If any of them had ever worn the bumper sticker, they weren't wearing it now.

  Chee parked his own pickup where it was partly concealed by an old Chevy conversion van, then glanced at his watch. Seven minutes until five, when the warehouse closed. He sat, not thinking of Janet Pete. He switched on the radio, still tuned to KNDN. A group Chee remembered hearing at a Tuba City Girl Dance was singing a lament about a woman who loved them, but loving them or not, had still stolen their Chevy Blazer. All was in Navajo except the truck's trade name. The reader of the commercial that followed had a similar problem— there are no Navajo nouns for Purina Pig Chow.

  A door at the side of the warehouse slid open. A man emerged wearing coveralls, followed by a procession of other men. Still more men emerged from around the building, with a scattering of women. Chee scanned them, studying them without knowing what he was looking for. A medium-sized, middle-aged, Navajo male. That narrowed it a little. It left out the women, and the very tall, and the very round, and the young bucks whom Ellie would definitely have been able to describe in more detail. Eight or ten fit the medium-middle category—probably more. One of them was standing beside the warehouse door, holding a clipboard, discussing something with two younger workers. Another was walking almost directly toward Chee. He gave Chee a glance and then climbed into the van and started the engine. Chee looked back at the man with the clipboard. Probably a foreman. He was wearing jeans and a jean jacket and a long-billed cap. The bill seemed to be bent sharply upward as if the cardboard stiffener in it had been broken.

  "Aah," Chee said. He leaned forward. Staring. Too far away. He started the pickup engine and eased it forward into the stream of vehicles leaving the lot, then turned out of the traffic flow to coast past the door. The man was still talking to the two, his back turned.

  Chee drove past the doorway, circled, and parked again where he could watch Clipboard.

  The man was still talking, his cap still met the description. But a bent-billed cap is scanty proof. The truck would be crucial to any chance of getting a conviction. Where had the man parked it?

  At the warehouse door, the conversation ended. Clipboard disappeared inside. The two young men split. One disappeared around the warehouse and the other walked along the wall toward Chee. He was grinning. Chee got out of his pickup, glad he wasn't wearing his uniform.

  "That guy you were talking to," he said. "With the clipboard. Was that Billy Tsossie?"

  "You mean the foreman?" He looked back toward the warehouse door, now closing. "No.

  His name's Hoski. Clement Hoski."

  "Clement Hoski," Chee said. "Yeah, I thought he looked familiar. I need to talk to him. You know where he parks his truck?"

  "I think he's in a carpool," the man said. "He comes in with a bunch who live out in NAI housing."

  Clement Hoski emerged from the warehouse, shut the door behind him, and trotted to a white Dodge Caravan. He climbed into the back and it pulled away, spraying gravel.

  "Thanks," Chee said. "I'll try to catch him."

  The Caravan delivered the first two of its riders at a cluster of frame-and-plaster houses built for NAI on the hillside north of the marketing center. It pulled back onto the asphalt road. Chee gave it almost a quarter-mile start. The empty road made undetected following difficult but it also made losing someone almost impossible. About three miles later the van pulled off on the shoulder. Chee slowed. Hoski emerged, waved at the departing van, and walked up the hill where, Chee guessed, his house must be located.

  Right. As Chee drove past, Hoski was walking up a dirt road toward a plank house with a pitched tin roof. An outhouse stood some fifty yards down the hill, proclaiming that unlike the NAI houses this one lacked plumbing. A pole supporting a power line behind the house declared that it did have electricity. A pile of firewood against the wall suggested that it wasn't served by a gas line. But where was the green pickup?

  Hoski was out of sight now. In the house, Chee guessed. He continued past Hoski's access road and up the next hill. He stopped there, turned the pickup around, and got his binoculars out of the glove box.

  From here he had a better view across the fold of the hill. A basketball backboard and net had been mounted on the electric pole—suggesting that Hoski had school-age children.

  He seemed old for that. Maybe someone lived with him. A single-wide mobile home sat on blocks behind the house. It was windowless and empty as far as Chee could tell through the binoculars. The green truck might be parked between that and the house. If it was, there would be no way to see it short of driving in there and looking. Why wait?

  Chee started the engine and drove down the hill. But at the access road he parked again.

  Where was the truck? If he alerted Hoski and the truck wasn't there, he would never find it.

  The truck was the key. When a fender hits a human hard enough to kill, there's always evidence. If he picked up Hoski without the truck, they'd have to release him. And if Hoski had any sense, he would then make sure that the truck would never be found. Chee thought about it.

  A yellow van pulled up across the highway from him. It was small for a school bus but the legend on its side read BLOOMFIELD SCHOOL DISTRICT. A boy climbed out. He was about fourteen, Chee guessed, a tall, skinny boy wearing a black jacket and blue pants and carrying a blue backpack. He walked across the asphalt toward Chee's truck, smiling.

  "Hello," he said. "Hello, mister."

  "Hello," Chee said. What would he tell the boy he was doing, parked here? He'd say he was looking for someone.

  "Is this your truck?" the boy asked, still smiling. "It's pretty."

  The boy's eyes were a little too far apart, the bone structure of his face just a little wrong.

  The smile a little too innocent for fourteen. The bus was for Special Education kids. The kids with damaged brains, or bodies, or emotions, or sometimes all of those. And Chee recognized this boy's problem. He had seen this physical evidence before. Seen it too often. They called it fetal alcohol syndrome—the doom the mother imposes on her child when she drinks while pregnant. It was another of the reasons Chee hated alcohol, hated the people who made it, and advertised it, and sold it, and poisoned his people with it.

  "It's my truck," Chee said. "But it looks prettier when I get all the mud washed off it."

  "I t
hink it's pretty now."

  "I think maybe I'll get it painted. Would green be a good color?"

  "Sure," the boy said, his smile unwavering. "Green's good."

  Chee was aware that he was not feeling good about this. But he said, "Do you know anybody who owns a pickup that's green?"

  "Sure. My grandfather. His pickup is green."

  "Where does your grandfather live?"

  The boy pointed over the hood, at the house of Clement Hoski.

  "Have you come to see your grandfather?"

  "I live there," he said. "Me and Grandfather Hoski, we live there." The boy laughed, a sound full of absolute delight. "Sometimes he lets me do the cooking. I cook eggs in the morning. And I make oatmeal. And I make tortillas. And Grandfather Hoski is going to show me how to make a pumpkin pie, and mutton stew. And how to roast piñon nuts."

  "Your mother and dad? They live there, too?"

  The boy looked puzzled. "They're gone," he said. "It's just me and Grandfather. He's my friend. He goes to work and I go to school and then when we get home he teaches me how to read, and about numbers, and then we play games, with cards, and at the end of the week we do things together. We hunt rabbits and sometimes we go look at things."