Sacred Clowns

own recognizance.”

Leaphorn thought a moment. “All right,” he said.

Miss Pete looked startled. She picked up the purse and put it down again. “All right? You mean you’ll do it?”

“I’ll call him this evening.” Leaphorn looked at his watch. “I’ll give him time to eat his supper. I think he’ll go along with it. Mr. Streib is usually pretty reasonable.”

He was watching Miss Pete, who was struggling to replace the amazement on her face with something less revealing. She won the battle, and then produced a nervous laugh.

“You know,” she said, “Jim said: ‘Tell the lieutenant Ahkeah is innocent and he’ll turn him loose.’ I thought he was just kidding.”

“He was,” Leaphorn said, smiling at her. “It just happens that I agree with you. Even if Ahkeah did it, he isn’t going to run anywhere that we can’t find him. And you may be right about him being not guilty.”

Miss Pete had recomposed herself. “I wish the police would concentrate on finding who it was who set Ahkeah up. I think that’s what happened. Whoever killed Mr. Dorsey saw Ahkeah at the Bonaventure Mission. They noticed he was drunk and decided he’d be perfect as the fall guy.”

“Possibly,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking, I like this young woman. I like the way she works for her client, and maybe I will be needing a lawyer myself if they decide to charge me with concealing evidence of an illegal wiretap. And he was thinking that he could see now why she appealed to his assistant.

“Do you know where I can find Jim Chee?”

Miss Pete looked surprised. “No.”

“Or how to get a message to him?”

“No.”

Leaphorn allowed himself to look disappointed, which was easy, because he was.

“I thought you might,” he said. “I have gotten the impression that Jim counts his time wasted when you are not nearby.”

It seemed to Leaphorn that Miss Pete looked sad to hear this.

“We’ve been friends a long time,” she said. “He tells me his troubles. I tell him mine.” She dismissed all this with a shrug, but her expression canceled that.

“It’s good to have someone you can talk to like that,” Leaphorn said. “I apologize. I must be sounding like an overaged cupid. I guess I read Jim all wrong. We have an old hit-and-run case – totally hopeless – but the chief wants it solved and there’s probably a promotion there for whoever can nail the guy. I think Chee’s working on it hard because he thinks with sergeant stripes he would look to you more like a worthy marriage prospect.”

Miss Pete’s expression, if Leaphorn read it right, went from irritation, to surprise, to sorrow.

She exhaled, picked up the purse again, and put it down.

“I don’t normally behave like this,” Leaphorn said. “Normally I’m pretty good at minding my own business. ‘Herd your own sheep,’ as my mother used to teach us. I’m Jim’s boss and I like him, and I worry about him sometimes.”

“I worry about him too,” she said. “But I think you have sort of misinterpreted things.” She produced a weak smile. “So did I. I was thinking in terms of Romeo and Juliet. The wrong families and all that.”

It took Leaphorn a moment to understand. “Clans,” he said, and made a wry face.

“Well, actually I think the clan business is all very ambiguous. Only my father was a Navajo. And it’s hazy on his side, too. But Jim, you know, I think maybe he’s not the marrying kind. So, even a hazy, ambiguous clan taboo can be useful.”

“Ummm,” Leaphorn said. What in the world was he doing, he thought, behaving just as Emma would behave, trying to be a matchmaker? This was absolutely none of his business. But he had found that he liked Janet Pete. He hadn’t expected to like her. And when you looked past his various flaws, you had to like Jim Chee, too. So, to hell with it, he would continue interfering. Emma wouldn’t believe he was doing this, but she would certainly approve.

“There’s something hard for normal people to understand about Jim Chee,” he said. “He’s an odd sort of idealist. He wants to become a practicing hataalii. He wants to be a bona fide traditionalist. To be a singer of the curing ceremonials. Not just to be a shaman, but to be a really effective one.” Leaphorn paused, looking for some general statement to sum this up, and his own attitude toward it. “It makes any sort of taboo more powerful than it would be to me – and probably to you. Officer Chee wants to save his people from the future.”

Janet Pete had listened to all this intently, without fiddling with her purse. Now she picked it up, and got up, and said, “I have to go.”

Leaphorn escorted her to the door. “Well,” he said, “I guess Officer Chee will show up again someday.”

“I guess so,” she said, and turned to look at him. “Were you serious about calling Mr. Streib?”

Leaphorn looked at his watch. “Right now,” he said.

Chapter 24

JIM CHEE, born to the Slow Talking Dinee’, born for the Bitter Water Clan, whose real, ceremonial, and secret name was actually Long Thinker, awoke on the floor of Gracie Cayodito’s hogan just when dawn was invading the extreme eastern edge of the night. He was awakened by the voice of his uncle, who was standing outside the east-facing door of the hogan, singing his blessing song to the new day.

As Chee lay there, stiff from a night on this unyielding bed and still only half-awake, a second voice joined the husky baritone of Frank Sam Nakai. This one was older, cracked and scratchy – the sound of Hosteen Barbone shouting his greeting to the great yei Dawn Boy. Normally, Chee sang his own dawn prayer a bit later, after he’d started the coffee perking and the eastern sky was red with morning. He groaned, pushed himself upright, tucked in his shirt, and fished out from under it the buckskin medicine pouch, which contained his corn pollen. When in Rome, he thought, one does as the Romans do. He didn’t want to worsen the bad impression he had already made on these old men.

But later, with the sun up and the town of Window Rock in view through his windshield, he was pretty sure the perfect knowledge he’d displayed of the morning blessing hadn’t made any difference. The problem was the generation gap. The problem was theological. The problem was how one defined the concept of hozho, that idea of harmony which was the very root and foundation of the Navajo religion. This kind of problem wasn’t what he wanted when he’d gone back up the mountain to find his uncle again. He’d been in a crazy mood. Having that hit-and-run case turn out the way it did had been the last straw. Too much ambiguity, uncertainty, indecision. He wanted no more of that. He would go to the mountains and get a ruling on whether he could marry Janet Pete and still be a Navajo in the traditional sense. That took him through Farmington, right past the Quikprint shop. He slammed on the brakes, backed, pulled into a parking place. He had three different bumper stickers made, timing the process. It took almost thirteen minutes and, yes, it was expensive. Then he drove faster than the law allowed, making up for the lost time.

He’d wanted a favorable ruling. He had imagined the scene – an old, old man recounting the history of the Hunger People from the clan’s day one, proving that these people had never joined with his own ancestors, never made common cause, never did any of those things that would make them linked in blood. Then he would tell Janet. And what would she say? So what? You think you can tell me I’m taboo. Like maybe I had AIDS. And I don’t meet your high Navajo standards. And then you can come back and say I passed your test. Well, screw you, old friend. Or maybe the ruling would be negative. Even a negative ruling was better than this ambiguity. With that he could at least make a clear-cut decision.

But the great conference at the Cayodito hogan had drifted away from anything specific into the misty world of Changing Woman, First Man and First Woman, Talking God, and the great galaxy of other yeis.

Frank Sam Nakai had heard Chee’s truck coming up the muddy road and was standing in the doorway of his hogan.

“I have been asking and I have found the man who will know about the Hunger People and your own clans,”