Blizzard’s BIA office in Albuquerque. There was no reason for Blizzard to act like this. He knew how the feds worked. The kid’s name was on the FBI list along with everybody known to have talked to Sayesva in the day or so before he was killed. That included just about everybody at Tano Pueblo and a lot of other people. There was no reason for Blizzard to be such a hardass over this, and Chee was tempted to tell him so. But he didn’t. He was in Blizzard’s jurisdiction, but that wasn’t what inhibited him. Blizzard was a Cheyenne. And even with the Yankees cap on, he looked like a Cheyenne. He had that hard, bony face. Profile like a hatchet. Chee had grown up seeing the Cheyennes and the Sioux with their war bonnets and lances, fighting the cavalry in the drive-in movie at Shiprock. Even when the movie had been made south of Gallup and you knew the Cheyennes were actually Navajos making some beer money as extras, they took on the aura of warriors under those war bonnets. When Chee and his friends at boarding school played cowboys and Indians, the Indians were always Cheyenne. It was a hang-up Chee hadn’t quite grown out of. To Jim Chee the man, as to Jim Chee the boy, the Cheyenne was the Indians’ Indian.
“I’m not going to cause anybody any trouble,” Chee said. “Your FBI wants you to find the kid. My boss has ordered me to find Delmar Kanitewa. I’m just supposed to give his big-shot grandma a chance to talk to him about running away from school. So, like I said, if I can find him, I’ll tell you first, and then I’ll tell my boss. You tell the FBI in Albuquerque, and my boss tells the tribal councilwoman. Then I get to go back to doing something useful. Everybody’s happy.”
Harold Blizzard didn’t look happy. He said “Uh-huh,” filling the sound with skepticism, and turned the car onto the road into Tano Pueblo.
“Trouble with all that is this boy is about name number sixty on the list the feds gave me,” Blizzard said, “and the list looks to me like they copied the son-of-a-bitch out of the Tano Pueblo census report. I think it’s everybody who’s been around Sayesva for the last month or so, plus his kinfolks. And I think everybody out here is kinfolks. And having a Navajo cop underfoot, and having to squire you around, is trouble. It’s both a pain in the butt and a time waster. You find the kid, and tell me, and I tell the feds, and by then they forgot what they wanted to ask him. So don’t try to tell me you’re going to make me happy.”
Mrs. Kanitewa didn’t look happy either. She was standing in the door of a fairly new frame-and-stucco house – one of twenty or thirty such houses built on the fringes of the pueblo to meet the specifications of Indian Service housing. She was holding a box of frozen green beans and a butcher-paper package which Chee guessed would be ground beef to be thawed for supper. Through the doorway behind her, Chee could see a great pile of shucked corn filling a corner of the room. Mrs. Kanitewa gave them the smile made mandatory by traditions of hospitality. She didn’t look like she meant it.
“Well, come on in then,” she said. “Delmar’s not home yet, but if you want me to tell you about it again, then come in.”
“In” did not prove to be in the frame-and-stucco Indian Service house. She led them across the hard-packed yard toward an adobe. It slouched under an immense cottonwood which looked almost as old as the building. A fringe of ragweeds and Russian thistle growing in its dirt roof gave it a disreputable, unshaven look. But paint on the window frames was a fresh turquoise blue and geraniums were blooming in boxes beside the door. Mrs. Kanitewa seated them in the front room, which served as parlor, living room, and dining room. They sat side by side on a sofa whose plastic upholstery creaked and crackled under their weight.
“I guess you haven’t found him yet, either,” she said. She looked worried now, as if maybe they had found him and were bringing sorrowful news.
“No ma’am,” Chee said.
Blizzard had been looking around the room. Its brick floor was uneven in places, but mostly covered with cheap made-in-Mexico throw rugs and one pretty good Navajo horse blanket. Its ceiling was that crisscross pattern of willow branches supported by ponderosa poles which New Mexicans call “latilla.” Its corners were obviously off square by three or four degrees and the white plaster covering its walls wavered with the irregular shapes of the adobe blocks behind it. Blizzard cleared his throat.
“That other house,” he said. “The new one. Does that belong to you?”
The question surprised Chee, and Mrs. Kanitewa too.
“Yeah. The government built it. We use it to store stuff. They put a big refrigerator over there.” She laughed. “They wanted us to live in it.”
Blizzard opened his mouth, and closed it, leaving the question unasked. Chee answered it for him. After all, this Cheyenne was new to adobe country.
“This one’s warm in the winter, and cool in the summer,” he said.
“This one’s home,” Mrs. Kanitewa added.
Chee waited a moment in deference to Blizzard. But Blizzard seemed to have assumed the role of spectator. After all, he had already gone through questioning Mrs. Kanitewa once before.
“When Sergeant Blizzard was here,” Chee began, “before the ceremonial, Delmar had just got home then. Is that right?”
Mrs. Kanitewa hesitated. “That’s right,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I didn’t say that when he first asked me because I thought it was just about his running away from school. I wanted to talk to Delmar before they took him back to his dad.” Clearly Mrs. Kanitewa lied reluctantly, even for her son.
“That day at the ceremonial, I saw Delmar at the kachina dance,” Chee continued. “Sergeant Blizzard told me he understood that Delmar had come back to the pueblo but he hadn’t had time to come by the house.”
Mrs. Kanitewa looked uneasy. She glanced at Blizzard. “It wasn’t quite like I told him,” she said. She sighed, the weight of motherhood heavy. “He got home the day before the ceremonial. And he told me he was going back to school right after the ceremonial. Robert Sakani was going to drive him back. That’s his cousin.”
Sergeant Blizzard was trying not to look impatient. He failed.
“But after what happened to Mr. Sayesva, you didn’t see him any more after that?” Chee asked. “He didn’t come home to get his extra clothes or anything like that?”
Mrs. Kanitewa had raised her defenses. Her expression was blank. “No,” she said, “he didn’t.”
Chee was looking past the woman into the kitchen, letting some time pass. He heard Blizzard shifting uneasily on the sofa. Blizzard, he thought, must be a city Cheyenne. With a clock for a brain. What the hell was the hurry?
“I ran away from boarding school myself once,” Chee said. “The man was waiting for me to take me back when I got home. But it worried my mother.”
“It does,” Mrs. Kanitewa said. “It worries you.”
“I guess you thought maybe he’d gone on back to school with his cousin. But that would worry you, too. Because why wouldn’t he come home and say good-bye? It doesn’t make much sense to me.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Where was he? He wouldn’t just go like that. He would stay for the funeral.”
“You would want to bury Mr. Sayesva right away,” Chee said. “Isn’t that the rule of the Pueblo? You want to do the burial before sundown.”
“That’s the way it is supposed to be. But they wouldn’t let us do it. There was a deputy sheriff here when it happened, and Mr. Blizzard was here. And the police said they had to take him into Albuquerque to get an autopsy done to find out what killed him.” Mrs. Kanitewa’s expression suggested she considered this hard to understand. “He’d been hit on the head and his head broke, but they said they had to let the doctor see him anyway, to get it all down on paper, and they would try to get him back in time.”
“They didn’t, though,” Chee said, making it a statement rather that a question. It would have been clearly impossible. Chee had seen a funeral at Zuni Pueblo. The body would have to be washed and dressed, the hair combed out, everything made ready for Sayesva’s four-day journey through the darkness toward his eternal joy. A Tano child of God going home. And he was probably a Roman Catholic as well. The parish priest would also send him on his way with another blessing.
“It takes too long to get the body back,” she said. “Then his wife and some of his people had to go there and get him. To make sure they didn’t embalm him. They do that if you’re not careful. The undertaker gets a lot of money for it.”
“We Navajos have that trouble, too,” Chee said. “If you’re not there to stop it, the funeral home people will get the body and mutilate it and charge you a lot of money for doing it. Like they do with white people.”
