Sacred Clowns

Chapter 26

“THE OLD BATTLE-AX did a lot of talking,” Harold Blizzard said. “She’d talk about absolutely everything except where she was hiding the kid.”

“I can see I’m going to have to go out there myself,” Chee said. “You just don’t seem to be catching on about how to interrogate people.”

“I can interrogate people all right,” Blizzard said. “Normal people, I have no problem. It’s you Navajos. You know that stereotype about us Indians being taciturn?” Blizzard raised a huge palm toward Chee and growled “Ugggh” to illustrate his point. “Well, that’s based on the rest of us Indians. Cheyennes, Cherokees, Choctaws, Comanches, Chippewas, Modocs, Kiowas, Seminoles, Potts, Hopis. Normal Indians. But whoever decided Indians were silent hadn’t run into you talkative Navajos.”

“You’re telling me she didn’t just flat-out deny she knew where Delmar could be located? Is that right? She just wasn’t willing to tell you?”

Blizzard used his big right hand to demonstrate lips flapping. “She’d just talk about what a lousy job we policemen did in protecting people, enforcing the laws and all that. And how would she know Delmar would be safe if we had him in our custody? And how she knew we wouldn’t post a guard on him, or anything like that. And on, and on.”

“Did you ask her why she thought he needed a guard?”

“Sure, I did. And she’d then just give me five more minutes about how lazy we cops were. And then I’d tell her she was judging us by the performance of you guys.” Blizzard cut off his own chuckle and Chee’s response to that by signaling the waitress and pointing to their coffee cups.

“Hey,” he said. “There’s your lawyer lady. We’re going to need another cup.”

There, indeed, was Janet Pete, standing in the entrance of the Navajo Nation Inn coffee shop, looking hesitant. She saw that Chee had seen her, and turned away. Pretending, it seemed to Chee, to be looking for someone.

“Hey, Janet,” Blizzard shouted. He stood, waving. Harold Blizzard was far too large, far too loud to be ignored.

Janet came. She looked at Chee and looked away. “Hello, Harold,” she said. “Hello, Jim.”

Chee stood and pulled back a chair for her.

“I met a friend of yours the other day,” Blizzard said. “Jim’s friend, too, I guess. Fellow named Asher Davis. He said if he wasn’t about sixty pounds overweight, you two could provide him a perfect alibi in that homicide over at Tano Pueblo.”

“Oh,” Janet said. She glanced at Chee, and away.

“He’s on the list the feds gave me of people to check out. About a thousand or so.”

“I guess he’s right,” Janet said. “He went there with Mr. Chee and Cowboy Dashee and me. And when we decided to watch the ceremony from the roof, he decided he was too heavy for it to hold him.”

“That was before the clowns came out with the wagonload of stuff?” Blizzard asked. “Or was it after?”

“I think it was before,” Janet said. “Yes, it was right at the very beginning.”

“That’s the way I remember it, too,” Chee said. He was thinking Leaphorn told Streib about the Lincoln Canes, and Streib told the Albuquerque FBI, and Blizzard knows his business better than I gave him credit for. “Are you thinking of Davis as maybe a suspect?”

Blizzard gave him a stern look. “Just my native curiosity,” he said.

“I understand Davis looked good for it after the business of the Lincoln Canes came out,” Chee said. “But it turns out he was with an Apache County deputy sheriff over on the Hopi Reservation when Eric Dorsey was killed.”

Blizzard looked surprised, then angry. “Goddammit,” he said. “Why don’t anybody ever tell anybody anything?”

“I had no idea Davis was a suspect,” Janet said. “And wait a minute. I thought you were talking about the Sayesva case. What’s the Dorsey killing have to do with that? Which one are you talking about?”

“Nobody tells me about anything either,” Chee said. “I’ve been out of touch. I just heard about the phony Lincoln Canes this morning.”

“Phony Lincoln whats?” Janet said. “I still haven’t heard about them.”

And so Chee explained, skipping – Navajo fashion – back to the very beginning with the Spanish King Charles sending canes to the Indian pueblos in the seventeenth century, from there to 1863, thence to Leaphorn’s discovery of the sketch on Dorsey’s desk. He concluded finally with the presumption that the package Delmar Kanitewa had taken to his koshare uncle was a copy of the Tano cane, and the koshare put it in the wagon to warn against selling pueblo artifacts.

“I’d never even heard of Lincoln Canes,” Janet said, looking thoughtful. “Is it your official ‘theory of the crime’ now that this cane ties the two homicides together? Same killer for the man who made it and the man who used it?”

“I’d say so,” Chee said. “More or less.”

“How’s it work?” Janet asked.

“Sort of like this,” Chee said, happy that Janet was once again talking directly to him and even looking at him. Maybe we’re almost back again to being old friends, he thought. And maybe that was all he could ever hope for. “Somebody hires Dorsey to make the Pojoaque cane, knowing he can sell it to a collector of Lincoln rarities because the cane from that pueblo disappeared generations ago. So he has Dorsey make such a cane, not telling Dorsey what it is or about the fraud. Then he decides to try again with the Tano cane and gets Dorsey to make it. Delmar Kanitewa shows up at the shop while Dorsey is finishing it. He shows it to the boy since he’s a Tano kid. Delmar tells Dorsey what it is.”

Chee paused, looked at Janet. “You have to understand this Dorsey is a genuine straight arrow. Into doing good. Now he figures something crooked must be going on and he’s being used. Probably he figures the real cane is going to be stolen and this one used to replace it so the theft won’t be noticed. So he gives it to Delmar to take to his uncle with a warning about the impending theft. And then the guy who commissioned it shows up to collect it, and Dorsey jumps on him about it and the guy kills Dorsey to protect his secret.”

Blizzard made a wry face. “It sounds too damned complicated,” he said. “I like ’ em simpler. Like the janitor walks in drunk and tries to borrow money and gets turned down and gets mad and knocks off Dorsey and steals some stuff.”

“I don’t like that Blizzard theory at all,” Janet said. “But I don’t know about the other one either.” She thought. “How could this guy sell the second cane? Nobody would buy it. Collectors know about these things or they wouldn’t be collecting them. They’d know that Tano Pueblo still had its Lincoln Cane. And so they’d know that the one they’d bought was a fake, or, worse yet, the one they bought was stolen.”

“So they couldn’t brag about it. Or show it off,” Blizzard said. “So why buy it?”

“And why use Dorsey?”

“He had connections with some traders,” Chee said. “We know that because he was helping some of the Navajos out on the Checkerboard get better prices for their stuff.” He paused, remembering what the old woman with the ill husband had told him. “Including some old stuff that the real collectors go for.”

“Okay, but I still see holes in it,” Janet said.

“I have trouble with it, too,” Chee admitted.

The waitress arrived, bringing Janet a cup of coffee and a refill for Chee and Blizzard.

“You know,” Blizzard said. “I think maybe all three of us are in the same boat I was in at that Cheyenne Autumn movie the other night. I couldn’t understand why all the Navajos were hooting and blowing their car horns. Different culture. Different perceptions. There’s probably some Tano Pueblo connection here we just don’t fathom.” He made a wide, Blizzard-style gesture with his hands. “Different value systems, you know. Hard for us outsiders to comprehend.”

“Yes,” Janet said in a voice almost too low for Chee to hear. “Hard to comprehend.”

“Janet,” Chee said. He reached his hand toward her. “There’s something I’d like to explain.”

She put down her cup and sat back, not looking at him.

“Well, now,” Blizzard said, hastily. “I’ve got work to do.” He picked up the ticket. “You get the tip,” he said to Chee. “See you later, Janet.” And he was gone.

“Me too,” Janet said. “I’ve got to go.”

“Where?” Chee said.

“First to Crownpoint. The federals are releasing Ahkeah and I have to do the paperwork.”

“I’m going that direction,” Chee said. “Could I give you a ride?”

“I have to go on from there up to Aztec. I have some business at the San Juan County courthouse.”

“That’s right on my way,” Chee said.

“I’d better take my own car,” she said. “You’d have to wait for me.” She got up, dropped a dollar on the table. “My share of the tip.”

“Janet,” Chee said. “I want to talk to you.”

“I’m not sure I’d care for that.”

Chee sat looking up at her. He could think of nothing to say. But his expression must have said something to her.

“What could we talk about?” she asked. “Do you think we can go back to being friends?”

Chee shook his head. “I doubt it. I don’t think I could.”

He put his hand out. She looked at it. Then took it. Her fingertips felt soft and warm against his skin.

“Just a few hours,” he said.

“What do we talk about?”

“The weather. The landscape. Old times, maybe, if we’re careful how we handle it. And I think maybe I want you to help me make up my mind about something.”

She extracted her hand.

“Not about Navajo clans,” he said. “About something you must have studied in law school. Justice. Retribution. Social revenge. Ethics. All that.”

She managed a smile. “I’m good at that kind of talk.”

In fact, they talked very little on their way to Crownpoint. East of Gallup, Chee pointed to the places along the red sandstone cliffs of Mesa de los Lobos where various movies had been shot. He explained that Thoreau was pronounced “threw” because the village had been named after a railroad engineer and not the poet-essayist. He pointed southward to Little Haystack Mountain and told her how a Navajo prospector named Paddy Martinez had found a vein of radioactive pitchblende near there and opened the great Ambrosia Lake uranium mining district. He told her, finally, about the chain of events that had gotten Leaphorn suspended, and had caused the lieutenant to miss his trip to China.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” he said. “Leaving that tape in there, I mean. Leaphorn didn’t make much out of it, but I feel terrible about it.”

“I didn’t think I would like that man at first,” Janet said. “But I really do. I think he’s a kind person. I used to just think he was smart.”

“He’s smart, all right.”

“That’s what he thinks about you, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The way he talked about you.”

“What do you mean? When did you talk to him?”

“I went to see him about Ahkeah. Exactly like you told me to do.”

Chee took his eyes off the road to stare at her. She was looking amused. “I told you to go see Leaphorn? When did that happen?”

“Don’t you remember? I told you Eugene Ahkeah was not guilty. You said go tell Lieutenant Leaphorn that and he’d turn him loose. So I did. And he did.”

“Did you really,” Chee said. “Wow.”

“I think it was just good timing. He’d figured out someone else had done it.”

“But what makes you think he has this high opinion of me?” Chee said. “I don’t often get that impression.”

“The hit-and-run case. He thinks you can solve it.”

“No he doesn’t. Or he didn’t. He doesn’t think anyone can solve it.”

“He told me that, too,” Janet said. “No clues. But really, he thinks you can do it.”

Chee took his eyes off the road again. She was looking straight ahead so all he could see was her profile. Hard to understand, but a beautiful profile.

She spent only a few minutes in the Crownpoint station and emerged with Eugene Ahkeah in tow. Ahkeah looked tired and disheveled. “I told Mr. Ahkeah we’d give him a ride home,” she said. They did, dropping him off at his mobile home.

“Blizzard was kidding me about Navajos being talkative,” Chee said. “He should meet your client.”

“He’s resentful,” Janet said. “He thinks he was arrested just because he was handy.”

“Well, now,” Chee said, feeling a touch resentful himself, “there was the matter of finding all that stolen stuff under his house.”

“Yes, but-” Janet said, and stopped. “Let’s not argue.”

They drove in silence through the rolling, autumn grassland. It is a hundred and five miles from Thoreau to Farmington and there were days when Chee had made the drive without seeing another vehicle. Today they had met a car and two pickups before they were ten miles north of Crownpoint.

“Heavy traffic day,” Chee said, hoping to restart a conversation.

“You wanted to ask me about something. Remember?”

“I do,” Chee said. He fished the tape out of his glove box and put it into the tape player and pushed the play button. “But first I want you to listen to this.”

Janet listened.

“That doesn’t happen very often,” she said. “I heard about this but it didn’t seem real. Did he send any money?”

“Six twenties, two tens, and a five,” Chee said. “In the U.S. mail.”

She thought about that. Shrugged. “And nobody recognized him of course, or he’d be in jail by now. How about the description?”

“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.”

Ernie reached across Janet, took the sticker, and inspected it. “Grandfather’s teaching me to read,” Ernie said. “But I don’t do it yet.”

“It’s hard,” Janet said. “You really have to work at it.”

“Now here’s what you have to tell your grandpa. Tell him he has to take off the bumper sticker that’s on his truck now or put this one on over it. It would be better to scrape off the ‘Ernie is the greatest’ sticker, though.”

Ernie looked sad. “I like it,” he said.

“Can’t leave it on, though, and this new one is better. It says you’re the champion.” Chee reached across Janet and took Ernie’s hand. “Now this is important, Ernie. Remember this. Tell your grandpa he might get arrested if he has that old sticker on his tailgate. Tell him a lot of people saw it at the radio station. You got that?”

“Get arrested because a lot of people saw it at the radio station,” Ernie said.

“Right,” Chee said. “Will you tell him that?”

“Okay,” Ernie said. “You want to see the truck now?”

“Maybe later, Ernie,” Chee said. “Now we’ve got to go to Aztec.”

They drove up the hill and over it in silence. Then Janet said, “Fetal alcohol syndrome, wasn’t it?”

“Looks like it to me.”

“When did you get the bumper sticker made?”

“Yesterday.”

Silence again.

“I asked you what you found out from the three shamans about me. You said ‘just a second.’”

“They didn’t know.”

“So maybe I’m taboo?”

“I told you how they were. I got the history of my clans and the history of your dad’s clan, with nobody knowing of any linkage. But since they didn’t know there wasn’t one, maybe there was. It was that kind of thinking. And Janet, you know, I don’t care what they think.” He was looking straight ahead, gripping the steering wheel. “Not if you don’t. I mean if you’re taboo for me, I’m taboo for you. I know you’re not my sister because if you were I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you, and I wouldn’t be thinking about you all the time, and longing for you, and-”

“You said there was an old, old, old woman there. The wise woman. What did she say?”

“Well,” Chee said, and laughed. “We were talking all the time about your dad’s clan, of course, since your mother isn’t Navajo. And she said we were wasting everybody’s time because only the maternal clan really mattered.”

“Stop the car,” Janet said.

Chee pulled off on the shoulder. “What?” he said.

“I want to go back to that ‘what to do’ question. About which justice you use on your hit-and-run case. I want to talk about that.”

“Okay,” Chee said. “What?”

“First, I want to tell you I decided I’m a Navajo. And I love you for how you handled that. And second I want to tell you I called my mother. And she told me that her clan, and my clan, is MacDougal, and we have this funny red and green and black tartan, and the MacDougals are in no way linked to anybody named Chee.”

“Not yet,” Chee said, and pulled her to him.