Tony Hillerman: Sacred Clowns

Book five in the Joe Leaphorn And Jim Chee series, 1992

AT FIRST, Officer Jim Chee had felt foolish sitting on the roof of the house of some total stranger. But that uneasiness had soon faded. Now this vantage point on the roof had come to seem one of Cowboy Dashee’s rare good ideas. Chee could see almost everywhere from here. The drummers directly beneath the tips of his freshly shined boots, the column of masked dancers just entering the plaza to his left, the crowd of spectators jammed along the walls of the buildings, the sales booths lining the narrow streets beyond, he looked down on all of it. And out over the flat crowded roofs of Tano Pueblo, he could rest his eyes on the ragged row of cottonwoods along the river, golden today with autumn, or upon the blue mountains blocking the horizon, or the green-tan-silver patchwork of farm fields the Tanoans irrigated.

It was an excellent perch from which to witness the Tanoan kachina dance – for duty as well as pleasure. Especially with the warm, jeans-clad thigh of Janet Pete pressed against him. If Delmar Kanitewa was present, Chee would be likely to see him. If the boy didn’t show up, then there was no better place from which to watch the ceremonial. Such mystical rituals had always fascinated Chee. Since boyhood Chee had wanted to follow Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai. In the Navajo family structure Nakai was Chee’s “Little Father,” his mother’s elder brother. Nakai was a shaman of the highest order. He was a hataalii - what the whites called a singer, or medicine man. He was respected for his knowledge of the traditional religion and of the curing ways the Holy People had taught to keep humankind in harmony with the reality that surrounds us all. Nakai worked along that narrow line that separates flesh and spirit. Since boyhood, that had interested Chee.

“On the roof is where they like visitors to sit when they’re having a kachina dance,” Dashee had said. “It gets you tourists out from underfoot. Unless you fall off, there’s a lot less chance you’ll do something stupid and mess up the ceremony. And it leaves room around the dance ground for the Tano people. They need to exchange gifts with the kachinas. Things like that.”

Dashee was a sworn deputy sheriff of Apache County, Arizona, a Hopi of his people’s ancient Side Corn Clan, and Jim Chee’s closest friend. But he could also be a pain in the butt.

“But what if I spot the kid?” Chee had asked. “Is he going to wait while I climb down?”

“Why not? He won’t know you’re looking for him.” Cowboy had then leaned against Janet Pete and confided in a stage whisper, “The boy’ll think Detective Chee would be over there in Thoreau working on that big homicide.”

“You know,” Asher Davis said, “I’ll bet I know that guy. There was a teacher at that Saint Bonaventure School – one of those volunteers – who called me a time or two to see if I could get a good price for something some old-timer had to sell. One time it was a little silver pollen container – looked late nineteenth century – and some jerk in Farmington had offered this old man two dollars for it. I got him two hundred and fifty. I wonder if that was the teacher who got killed.”

“His name was Dorsey,” Chee said, sounding slightly grouchy. He didn’t know Davis and wasn’t sure he’d like him. But maybe that was just the mood he was in.

“Dorsey,” Davis said. “That’s him.”

“See?” Cowboy said. “Officer Chee keeps up on those serious crimes. And he also has time to write letters to the editor telling the Tano council what to do with its old uranium mines.”

“Hey,” Janet said. “Watch it there, Cowboy. That was a darn good letter. It was good advice. The paper thought so, too. They put the big headline on it.” She punched Cowboy on the shoulder. “Do you want to see us being used as the world’s toxic waste dump?”

Chee had been ignoring Dashee’s needling all morning. At first it had been based on the letter, published in that morning’s edition of the Navajo Times . In it, Chee had opposed a proposal to use the open pit of the abandoned Jacks Wild Mine as a toxic waste dump. He had called it “symbolic of the contempt felt for tribal lands.” But then they had heard of the homicide on the car radio. A school shop teacher at Thoreau had been hit fatally on the head. Some materials were reported missing and no suspect had been identified. It was a pretty good murder by reservation standards. Certainly it was more dignified than this assignment. It had happened yesterday, on Chee’s day off. Still, Lieutenant Leaphorn might have assigned him to work on it. Or at least mentioned it. But he hadn’t, and that burned a little.

What burned more was Janet. Janet had encouraged Cowboy’s needling with amused grins and occasional chuckles.

But now, warmed by her praise of his letter, Chee was willing to forgive all that – even to feel better about Cowboy. He had to concede that he had started the exchange by kidding Cowboy about the Hopi tendency to grow wide, instead of high. And he had to concede that what Cowboy had said about the roof was true enough. If Kanitewa was down there in the crowd watching his pueblo celebrate this autumn feast day, the boy would be feeling secure among family and friends. But, on the other hand, kids who run away from boarding school know someone will be coming after them.

Chee had been just such a kid himself, once. That feeling of fear, of being hunted, was one he could never forget. You can’t relax even when, as in Chee’s case, the hunt was brief and there was little time for the fear to build. The man from the boarding school had been parked out of sight behind the sheep pens, waiting, when Chee had walked up to his mother’s hogan. Seeing him had been almost a relief. The memory of that offered another excuse to avoid the roof.

“Kanitewa, he’ll be nervous,” Chee said. “He won’t be easy to catch.”

“Tell you what,” Dashee said. “We’ll sit on the roof. If we see him, you watch him while I climb down. Then you signal me where he is and I grab him.”

Chee thought about it.

“If these people were Hopis we wouldn’t have to worry about this. They have the men all sitting on the roofs, and the women and children on the chairs down there around the dance ground,” Dashee said. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Not at all Hopi villages,” Chee said.

“At mine, anyway,” Dashee said. “We do it the traditional way.”