Tony Hillerman - Sacred Clowns

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.