Talking God

Janet Pete correctly read the tone of that.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea what I was getting you into. I never would have—”

Chee, a believer in the Navajo custom of never interrupting anyone, interrupted her.

“I wanted to come,” he said. “I wanted to see you.”

“Do you still want to see me? I’ll come over and take you to the airport.” A long pause. “If you really do have to go. You’re on vacation, aren’t you?”

“I’d like that,” Chee said. “A ride to the airport.” So now he waited again. He was able now to think about what had happened yesterday. The D.C. police would probably catch Santero sooner or later. He found he had no interest in that. But he wondered what Leaphorn had done to keep Santero from pushing the button. Chee retraced it all in his memory. Handing the museum guard the ball of plastic explosive. (“Here. Be careful with this. It was a bomb. Give it to the cops.”) He'd walked back to the STAFF ONLY elevator carrying Talking God's mask. He had pushed his way through the uproar of scurrying and shouting. He’d gotten off at the sixth floor and walked back to Highhawk’s office. He’d emptied an assortment of leather, feathers, and bones out of a box beside Highhawk’s chair. He placed the mask gently in the box and closed it. Then he searched the office, quickly and thoroughly, without finding what he wanted. That left two places to look.

He picked up the replica mask Highhawk had made, laid it atop the box, and carried it down the elevator to the exhibit hall.

By then the spectators were gone and two B.C. policemen were guarding the corridor. He saw Rodney, and Rodney let him through. Rodney was holding the plastic explosive.

“What the hell happened?” Rodney had asked. “Joe tells me this bomb was under the mask and you pulled it off. That right?”

“Yes,” Chee said. He handed the replica to Rodney. “Here,” he said. “Whoever did it sort of molded the plastic into the mask. Jammed it in.”

Leaphorn was standing there, his face gray. “You all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Chee said. “But you don’t look so hot.”

On the floor between the Yeibichai exhibit and the Incan display three men were sprawled in that totally careless attitude that only the dead can manage. One of them matched Leaphorn’s description of the little redhead with the shape of a weightlifter. Sooner or later he would wonder about what the redhead was doing here, and what had happened. When he did, he’d ask Leaphorn. Now it didn’t seem to matter. And then the morgue crew began arriving. And more plainclothes cops, and men who had to be, by their costume, the feds.

Chee had not been in the mood for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He walked out of the Tenth Street entrance and around the building. He checked parked cars. A wrecker was hauling an old Chevy sedan away from the towaway fire zone, but Chee was looking for Highhawk’s Ford Mustang. He finally found it in a staff parking lot.

It was locked. What he was looking for wasn’t visible inside, and it was too large to fit under the seat and out of sight. If it wasn’t in the car, he’d have to take a cab out to Highhawk’s place and look for it there. But first he’d check the trunk. Locked, of course. Chee found a slab of broken concrete near the sidewalk. He slammed it down on the trunk lid, springing it open. There was a box inside, wrapped in an old pair of coveralls. Chee took off the lid and looked in. The fetish representing the Tano War Twin smiled its sinister, malicious smile up at him. He took Talking God's mask out of the box from Highhawk's office, packed it carefully in with the fetish, put the empty box in the trunk, and closed it.

Two young men, each holding a briefcase, were standing beside a nearby car watching him break into the Mustang. Chee nodded to them. “Had to get this fetish out,” he said, and walked back to the Natural History Museum. He had left the box in the checkroom and went back to the exhibit.

There the FBI had taken over. Chee had unchecked his box and walked to his hotel.

Now, in his room, he was coming to terms with yesterday when the telephone rang again.

“Jim?”

It was Mary Landon’s voice.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s me, Mary.”

“You weren’t hurt? On the news they said you weren’t hurt.”

“No. Not at all.”

“I’m coming to Washington. To see you,” she said. “I called you yesterday. At the police station in Shiprock. They said you were in Washington and told me your hotel. I was going to call you and come. And then last night—That was terrible.”

Jim Chee was having trouble analyzing his emotions. They were turbulent, and mixed.

“Mary. Why do you want to see me?” He paused, wondering how to phrase it. “I got your letter,” he said.

“That was why,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that in a letter. It’s the sort of thing that you say in person. That was wrong. It was stupid, too. I know how you feel. And how I feel.”

“How do you feel about living on the reservation? About the reservation being home?”

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “Let’s not—” She left it unfinished.

“Not get into that? But that’s always been our problem. I want you to come and live with me. You know how I am. My people are part of me. And you want me to come out to the world and live with you. And that’s only fair. But I can’t handle it.”

A moment passed before she spoke again, and her voice was a little different. “I wish I hadn’t told you in a letter. That’s all. That was cruel. I just didn’t think. Or, I did think. I thought it would hurt too much to see you like that, and I would be all confused about it again. But I should have told you in person.”

There was not much to say after that, and they said good-bye. Chee washed his face, and looked out his window into the window of the office across the narrow street. The man into whose office Chee’s window looked was looking down at the passing cars, still with his vest and tie neatly in place. The man and Chee were looking at each other when Janet Pete tapped at his half-opened door and came in.

He offered her the chair, and she took it.

“You don’t look like you feel like doing a lot of talking,” she said. “Would you like to just check out now, and drive on out to the airport?”

“No hurry,” he said. She was not exactly a beautiful woman, he thought. She did not have the softness, the silkiness, the dark blue, pale yellow feminine beauty of Mary Landon. Instead she had a kind of strong, clean-cut dignity. A classy gal. She was proud, and he identified with that. She had become his friend. He liked her. Or he thought he did. Certainly, he pitied her. And he was going to do something for her. What was happening to her here in Washington was nothing but miserable. He hated that.

“And before we go,” Chee added, “there’s something I want to give to you.”

Chee got off the bed and unsnapped the suitcase. He took out the hotel laundry sack in which he’d wrapped it and extracted the fetish.

He handed it to her. “The Tano War God,” he said. “One of the twins.”

Janet Pete stared at it, and then at Chee. She made no move to accept it.

“I didn’t think he should be so far away from home,” Chee said. “He has a twin somewhere, and people who miss him. It seemed to me that the Smithsonian has plenty of other gods, stolen from other people, and they could keep the replica Highhawk made and get along without this one. I thought this one should go back to its kiva, or wherever the Tanos keep him.”

“You want to give it to me?” Janet asked, still studying his face.

“That way he will get home,” Chee said. “You can turn him over to John McDermott, and John gives him to what’s-his-name—Eldon Tamana, wasn’t it? That lawyer from Tano. And Tamana, he takes it home.”

Janet Pete said nothing. She looked down at her hands, and then up at him again.

“Or,” Chee added softly, “whatever you like.”

Janet held out her hands. Chee laid the Twin War God in them.

“I guess we should go now,” Chee said, and he relocked the suitcase. “I think I’ve been in this town long enough for a country boy Navajo.”

Janet Pete was rewrapping the Twin War God in the laundry sack. “Me too,” she said. “I have been here for months and months and months.

So long it seems like a lifetime.“ She put her hand on Chee’s sleeve.

“I will take this little fellow home myself,” she said.

TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master Awards. Among his other honors are the Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award. His many bestselling novels include Finding Moon, Sacred Clowns, Coyote Waits, Talking God, A Thief of Time, and Dance Hall of the Dead. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.