forth.
And so, movie finally over, Janet drove them home. And there, with the car still rolling to a stop, Harold Blizzard did something to reestablish himself in Jim Chee’s esteem.
“Janet,” Blizzard said, “this has been a lot of fun, and I hope to see you again, but now I’m going to rush right in and get some sleep.” And he had the door open and was out even before he finished the sentence.
Janet turned off the engine. And the lights. Without a word they watched Blizzard disappear into Chee’s trailer.
“I like him,” Janet said.
Chee considered what had just happened. “Me, too,” he said. “And he was right. It was fun.”
“It was,” Janet said. “And it was sweet of you to bring him along.”
“It was, wasn’t it,” Chee said. “But why do you think so?”
“Because you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yep,” Chee said.
“About what?”
“Us.”
“Us?” Light from the autumn moon lit her face. She was smiling at him.
“We’ve been friends a long time,” Chee said.
“Two years, I guess. More than that. Ever since you were trying to nail that old man I was representing up at Farmington. Almost three years if you add in that time I was away at Washington.”
“I wasn’t trying to nail him,” Chee said. “I was looking for information.”
“And you tried to trick me?”
“I did trick you,” Chee said. “Remember? I found out what I needed to know.”
“I remember,” she said. “But now I think I’m ready to forgive you.”
And with that, Janet Pete leaned across, put her hand behind Chee’s head, pulled his face down, and kissed him, and sighed, and kissed him again.
It was quite a while later, although the moon was still illuminating Janet’s face, when she said, “No, Jim. No. Time to stop.”
“What?” he said. “Why?”
“Because,” she said. “I think we sort of stopped being just friends. So now we have to get better acquainted.”
“That’s just what we were doing,” Chee said.
“No,” Janet said, sitting up straight, buttoning buttons. “I tried that way once. It doesn’t work. It hurts too much if you’re wrong.”
“In Washington?”
“In Washington, and in law school.”
“Not this time,” Chee said. “This time you’re not wrong. It’s me. And you’re right.”
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
“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
“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
