Tony Hillerman - Sacred Clowns

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.

THE NEXT DAY was a day off for Officer Jim Chee. He drove Blizzard to Gallup to pick up his car at the police station. He went to the office on the chance he might catch Leaphorn and didn’t. He typed up the intended memo and put it in the in-basket on the lieutenant’s tidy desk. He spent a moment examining the oversized map that decorated the wall behind Leaphorn’s desk. The symbolic pins with which the man marked locations still connected the Tano Pueblo homicide with the one at Thoreau. He nodded to Virginia on the way out and spent the rest of the morning at Gallup Quality Electronics getting the Citizens Band radio in his pickup truck back in working order. That done, he drove north on U.S. 666, along the east flank of the Chuska Mountains, past Tohatchi, and the Naschitti Boarding School, and the Sheep Springs Chapter House, to the Newcomb turnoff – and then climbed westward, past the little cluster of buildings that was Two Grey Hills, past the old Toadlena boarding school, and onto the old rutted road that led to the sheep camp of Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the elder brother of his mother.

He had been thinking, as he left Gallup, of anything except Janet Pete. Time enough for that later. After he had talked to Hosteen Nakai. After he knew what to think. Now he thought about his vehicular homicide case. Apparently hopeless. Nothing to go on. Nothing to hope for except luck. And Lieutenant Leaphorn did not approve of luck. He thought about why Leaphorn, in the face of fairly solid evidence, didn’t seem to believe that Eugene Ahkeah had killed Eric Dorsey, or anyone else. He thought about where he might look next for Delmar, his sneaky little problem. And about why the crowd had fallen silent when the clown’s wagon appeared in the Tano plaza. If Leaphorn was interested how that crime connected with the Dorsey case, he would ask the right people at Tano and find out about that.

Then, as his truck jolted higher into the summer pastures of the Chuskas, and ponderosa pine replaced juniper and piñon, and the air was colder in his nostrils and brought the old high-country smells back to him, he thought of Hosteen Nakai, the Little Father of his boyhood.

Nobody was home at the summer shack of Hosteen Nakai. Chee found Nakai’s mixed flock of sheep and goats in a meadow a mile away, and his uncle sitting on a rotted log with his horse grazing under the aspens. A ghetto blaster sat on the log beside him, apparently tuned to KNDN. From it came the impassioned voice of D. J. Nez singing, “My heroes have always been Indians.”

“ Dichin Dine’e ,” said Hosteen Nakai. “That would have been way back, a long time ago when we got mixed up with them. Let me think about that a little bit.” While he thought he extracted a package of cigarette papers and a sack of Bull Durham from the pocket of his shirt, offered both to Chee, and made himself a cigarette. “It would have been back when the army made us prisoners and herded us off to Bosque Redondo. Back when we made the Long Walk. Everybody got mixed together then and there was some marrying back and forth. Even some marrying with the Apaches. They had a bunch of Mescalero Apaches penned up there with us.”

He lit the cigarette. Exhaled. “Why you interested in the Hunger People? It sounds to me like you finally found yourself a Navajo girl.”

Chee nodded.

Nakai said, “I don’t know. Her father’s mother was born to the Dichin Dine’e , you think. But what’s her father’s clan? What’s the rest of the family connections?”

“She doesn’t have a ‘born to’ clan,” Chee said. “Her mother is a white woman. Her dad’s a Navajo. But they’re one of those relocation families. The government moved his family off the reservation in the l940s. He was just a kid when it happened and I guess his family raised him white. He thinks his mother was Dichin Dine’e . Says he doesn’t know about his father’s clan.”

Hosteen Nakai considered this, exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, muttered some imprecation under his breath.

“Tell me about this woman,” he said. “And tell me about yourself. Tell me about the work you are doing.”

Chee told Hosteen Nakai about Janet Pete, the city Navajo. And he told him about the driver who had hit the old man walking beside Navajo Route 1 and left the man to die beside the highway. Could Hosteen Nakai spread the word about this man among the small fraternity of medicine people? Nakai said he would. Chee told him about the deaths of the Christian at Thoreau and the koshare at Tano, and how nobody seemed to know why either one had died, and about his frustrating hunt for Delmar Kanitewa.

Nakai asked questions, about the Christian, about the koshare, about the grandmother of Delmar, about the package Delinar had carried.

Five goats had separated themselves from the flock and drifted downslope. Nakai whistled to his dogs, resting in the tall grass beside the aspens. He pointed. The dogs raced down the slope, circled, brought the reluctant goats back to the fold. The autumn sun was low enough now to begin giving shape to rolling plains far below them. Chee could make out the dark line of shadows cast by Chaco Mesa forty miles to the east. North of that, the yellow-tan of the grama grass prairie was marked by spots of darkness and color – the slate erosion of the Bisti Badlands and the De-Na-Zin Wilderness. Beautiful. Peaceful. But Chee was nervous. Pretty soon Hosteen Nakai would be finished thinking and be ready to talk. For the first time Chee noticed that his uncle had become an old man. Now, what would he say?

“The man who hit the old man, and left him to die,” Nakai said. “I will ask the right people. You are right, if he is following the Beauty Way of the Navajos he would want to be cured of that. But why do you want to find him? What good does it do for the man he killed? What good does it do him? I think you would put him in jail. That won’t help him.” Nakai shrugged, dismissing it. He allowed the silence to take over, giving Chee time to frame his response. Chee simply nodded.

“The Christian and the koshare. Two good men, you tell me. Valuable men. But somebody killed them. Usually the people who get killed like this have worked at it themselves.” He puffed on the cigarette, exhaled. “You know what I mean. They fooled with somebody’s wife. They got drunk and hit somebody. They butchered somebody’s cow. Did something wrong, usually. They got out of harmony with everything so somebody might kill them. But not this time, you tell me. Two good men who helped people, hurt nobody. And they were a lot alike in other ways. The koshare, you know about them. I used to know a Hopi man who was a koshare at Moenkopi. He would say to me: ‘Compared to what our Creator wanted us to be, all men are clowns. And that’s what we koshare do. We act funny to remind the people. To make the people laugh at themselves. We are the sacred clowns,’ he said. He is dead now, a long time, but I remember that. And now you have told me that this teacher at Thoreau was funny, too. A good man and he made the children laugh.”

Hosteen Nakai tapped the ash from his cigarette and looked at Chee, thoughtfully. As if wondering whether Chee could extract any meaning from this. Chee gave no sign that he had.

“Two good men who made fun and helped people. Valuable men. But somebody killed them. There has to be a reason. Everything is connected. So you have to look for something outside of them. Something evil that somehow both of them touched. If you find the driver who killed the man, you do nothing for anybody. But if you find out why it was that these valuable men were killed, you do good work then.”