Sacred Clowns

Chapter 11

LOOKING BACK on it, trying to analyze how it came to be, Chee finally decided it was partly bad luck and mostly his own fault. They had left Blizzard’s car at Gallup. Bad luck. It meant they had to head back in the direction of Chee’s place to get it. Bad luck, again. It happened that way because the very last people they’d wasted their time checking lived over by the Standing Rock Chapter House. So they drifted homeward past Coyote Canyon on Navajo Route 9. That took them right past the Yah-Tah-Hay intersection, which put them almost as close to Chee’s trailer in Window Rock as to Blizzard’s car in Gallup. And somewhere before then Blizzard had said he was just too damned tired of driving to drive home. That brought them to the part that was Chee’s own fault.

“Why don’t you get a motel room in Gallup?” Chee said. “Then you can just call your office tomorrow. Find out if they’re ready to let us give up on this one.”

“I’ll just sleep in my car,” Blizzard had said.

It was at that point Chee had screwed himself up once again. Maybe it was being tired himself – not wanting to drive into Gallup and then back to Window Rock – or maybe it was feeling sort of guilty for thinking Blizzard was such a hardass when actually he was just new and green. Or maybe it was sympathy for Blizzard – a lonesome stranger in a strange land – or maybe he was feeling a little lonely himself. Whatever the motive, Chee had said, “Why don’t you just bed down at my place? It’s better than the backseat of a car.”

And Blizzard, of course, said, “Good idea.”

And so there they were, Blizzard deciding he’d sleep on the couch and saying he’d volunteer to cook supper unless Chee wanted to go back into Window Rock and eat someplace there. Then the telephone rang.

“It’s Janet,” the caller said. “I got the impression the other day at the Navajo Inn that you wanted to talk to me about something. Was I right?”

“Absolutely,” Chee said.

“So I have an idea. Remember you telling me about that old movie that used Navajos as extras, and they were supposed to be Cheyennes but they were talking Navajo, and saying all the wrong things? The one that they always bring back to that drive-in movie at Gallup? Sort of a campy deal, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show?”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Cheyenne Autumn. A couple of my relatives are extras in it.”

“Well, it’s back again and I thought-”

But Blizzard was eavesdropping. He overheard. He entered the conversation. “Cheyenne Autumn,” he said. “Yeh!”

“Who was that?” Janet said. “You have company?”

“A BIA policeman. Harold Blizzard.”

“You told me about him,” Janet said. “He’s a Cheyenne himself, isn’t he? I bet he’d like to see that movie. Why don’t you ask him to come along?”

“I’m sure he’s already seen it.”

“No, I haven’t seen it,” Blizzard said, in a voice Chee felt was inappropriately loud. “I’ve heard about it, but I never have seen it.”

“He hasn’t seen it,” Janet said. “I heard him. Why don’t you bring him along? Don’t you think it would be fun to get a Cheyenne’s reaction?”

Chee didn’t think so. Janet didn’t know this Cheyenne. He glanced at Blizzard, sitting on the edge of his couch, looking expectant. “You wanna go?”

“Sure,” Blizzard said. “I’d love to go. If I won’t be in the way.”

“We can talk after the movie,” Janet said.

Of course. But they could have also talked during the movie. And talking about the movie during the movie – celebrating the small victory of The People over the white man that this John Ford classic represented – was the reason Navajos still came to see it, and the reason the owner of the Gallup Drive-In still brought it back. And besides talking during the movie, if things developed as Chee had hoped, there were things to do besides talk.

So here they were in Janet Pete’s Ford Escort, parked fifth row from the screen with pickup trucks on both sides of them, with Janet sitting beside him and Sergeant Harold Blizzard hulking over them in the backseat. But one might as well make the best of whatever fate was offering.

“Right in here,” Chee said. “Just a minute now. She’ll be the first girl you see doing the drumming. There she is. That’s Irma. My oldest sister.”

The scene was solemn. Three Navajos playing the roles of three Cheyenne shamans were about to pray to God that the U.S. government would keep its treaty promises – a naive concept, which bad drawn derisive hoots and horn honkings from the rows of pickup trucks and cars. A row of Cheyenne maidens were tapping methodically at drums, accompanying the chanted prayers.

“How about the song?” Blizzard asked. “Is that Navajo, too?”

Blizzard was leaning forward, chin on the seat back, his big ugly face between Janet and Chee.

“Sort of,” Chee said. “It’s a kind of modification of a song they sing at Girl Dances, but they slowed it down to make it sound solemn.” This was not the way Chee had intended this date with Janet Pete to turn out.

Richard Widmark, commanding the cavalry detachment in charge of keeping order at this powwow between government bureaucrats and the Cheyenne, was now establishing himself as pro-Indian by making derogatory remarks about the reservation where the government was penning the tribe. Since the landscape at which Widmark was pointing was actually the long line of salmon-colored cliffs behind the Iyanbito Chapter House just south of Gallup, this produced more horn honking and a derisive shout from somewhere.

And so it went. Scenes came in which somber-looking Cheyenne leaders responded to serious questions in somber-sounding Navajo. When converted back into English by the translator the answers made somber sense.

But they produced more happy bedlam among the audience, and prompted the “What did he really say?” question from either Janet or Blizzard – and often both. What he really said tended to have something to do with the size of the colonel’s penis, or some other earthy and humorous irrelevancy. Chee would sanitize this a bit or put the humor in the context of Navajo customs or taboos, or explain that the celebratory honking was merely noting the screen appearance of somebody’s kinfolks.

It was a long movie, but not long enough for Chee to come up with a plan that would have disposed of Blizzard. The most obvious solution was to simply drive by the Navajo Nation Inn, drop him off, and tell him you’d pick him up in the morning. But that was blown by the fact that Blizzard had left his briefcase at Chee’s place and the briefcase contained (as Blizzard had proudly told him) “everything you have to have if you get caught somewhere overnight.” Coming up with something better, such as sending Blizzard off to the snack bar at the projection center to buy another bucket of popcorn and driving off without him, was ruled out by Janet’s unexpected behavior. She seemed to have developed a liking for the man, laughing at his jokes, engaging him in discussions of their mutual childhoods as city Indians, quizzing him about what he knew about his tribe, and so forth.

And so, movie finally over, Janet drove them home. And there, with the car still rolling to a stop, Harold Blizzard did something to reestablish himself in Jim Chee’s esteem.

“Janet,” Blizzard said, “this has been a lot of fun, and I hope to see you again, but now I’m going to rush right in and get some sleep.” And he had the door open and was out even before he finished the sentence.

Janet turned off the engine. And the lights. Without a word they watched Blizzard disappear into Chee’s trailer.

“I like him,” Janet said.

Chee considered what had just happened. “Me, too,” he said. “And he was right. It was fun.”

“It was,” Janet said. “And it was sweet of you to bring him along.”

“It was, wasn’t it,” Chee said. “But why do you think so?”

“Because you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yep,” Chee said.

“About what?”

“Us.”

“Us?” Light from the autumn moon lit her face. She was smiling at him.

“We’ve been friends a long time,” Chee said.

“Two years, I guess. More than that. Ever since you were trying to nail that old man I was representing up at Farmington. Almost three years if you add in that time I was away at Washington.”

“I wasn’t trying to nail him,” Chee said. “I was looking for information.”

“And you tried to trick me?”

“I did trick you,” Chee said. “Remember? I found out what I needed to know.”

“I remember,” she said. “But now I think I’m ready to forgive you.”

And with that, Janet Pete leaned across, put her hand behind Chee’s head, pulled his face down, and kissed him, and sighed, and kissed him again.

It was quite a while later, although the moon was still illuminating Janet’s face, when she said, “No, Jim. No. Time to stop.”

“What?” he said. “Why?”

“Because,” she said. “I think we sort of stopped being just friends. So now we have to get better acquainted.”

“That’s just what we were doing,” Chee said.

“No,” Janet said, sitting up straight, buttoning buttons. “I tried that way once. It doesn’t work. It hurts too much if you’re wrong.”

“In Washington?”

“In Washington, and in law school.”

“Not this time,” Chee said. “This time you’re not wrong. It’s me. And you’re right.”

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 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.