his best felt reservation hat with its silver band, his best leather jacket, his best boots, his rawboned, weather- beaten, homely Navajo face. But the only glances he drew were quick and secretive. He was politely ignored. That seemed odd to Chee.
And there were other oddities. He’d presumed the subway would be used by the working class. The blue-collar people were here, true enough, but there was more than that. He could see three men and one woman in navy uniforms, with enough stripes on their sleeves to indicate membership in the privileged class. Since rank had come young for them, they would be graduates of the Naval Academy. They would be people with political connections and old family money. At least half the white men, and about that mix of blacks, wore the inevitable dark three- piece suit and dark tie of the Eastern Establishment, or perhaps here it was the Federal Bureaucracy. The women wore mostly skirts and high heels. Chee’s study of anthropology at the University of New Mexico had led him into sociology courses. He remembered a lecture on those factors which condition humans and thereby form culture. He felt detached from this subway crowd, an invisible entity looking down on a species that had evolved to survive overcrowding, to endure aggression, to survive despite what old Professor Ebaar called “intraspecies hostility.”
On the long ride up the escalator to what his own Navajo Holy People would have called the Earth Surface World, Chee mentioned these impressions to Janet Pete.
“Will you ever feel at home here?” he asked. She didn’t answer until they reached the top and walked out into the dim twilight, into what had become something between drizzle and mist.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought so once. But it’s hard to handle. A different culture.”
“And you don’t mean different from Navajo?”
She laughed. “No. I don’t mean that. I guess I mean different from the empty West.”
Henry Highhawk’s place was about seven blocks from the Metro station—a narrow, two-story brick house halfway down a block of such narrow houses. Tied to the pillar just beside the mailbox was something which looked like a paho. Chee inspected it while Janet rang the bell. It was indeed a Navajo prayer stick, with the proper feathers attached. If Highhawk had made it, he knew what he was doing. And then Highhawk was at the door, inviting them in. He was taller than Chee remembered him from the firelight at Agnes Tsosie’s place. Taller and leaner and more substantial, more secure in his home territory than he had been surrounded by a strange culture below the Tsosies’ butte. The limp, which had touched Chee with a sense of pity at the Tsosie Yeibichai, seemed natural here. The jeans Highhawk wore had been cut to accommodate the hinged metal frame that reinforced his short leg. The brace, the high lift under the small left boot, the limp, all of them seemed in harmony with this lanky man in this crowded little house. He had converted his Kiowa-Comanche braids into a tight Navajo bun. But nothing would convert his long, bony, melancholy face into something that would pass for one of the Dineh. He would always look like a sorrowful white boy.
Highhawk was in his kitchen pouring coffee before he recognized Chee. He looked at Chee intently as he handed him his cup.
“Hey,” he said, laughing. “You’re the Navajo cop who arrested me.”
Chee nodded. Highhawk wanted to shake hands again—a “no hard feelings” gesture. “Policeman, I mean,” Highhawk amended, his face flushed with embarrassment. “It was very efficient. And I appreciated you getting that guy to drive that rent-a-car back to Gallup for me. That saved me a whole bunch of money. Probably at least a hundred bucks.”
“Saved me some work, too,” Chee said. “I would have had to do something about it the next morning.” Chee was embarrassed, too. He wasn’t accustomed to this switch in relationships. And Highhawk’s behavior puzzled him a little. It was too deferential, too—Chee struggled for the word. He was reminded of a day at his uncle’s sheep camp. Three old dogs, all shaggy veterans. And the young dog his uncle had won somewhere gambling. His uncle lifting the young dog out of the back of the pickup. The old dogs, tense and interested, conscious that their territory was being invaded. The young dog walking obliquely toward them, head down, tail down, legs bent, sending all the canine signals of inferiority and subjection, deferring to their authority.
“I’m Bitter Water Dinee,” Highhawk said. He looked shy as he said it, tangling long, slender fingers. “At least my grandmother was, and so I guess I can claim it.”
Chee nodded. “I am one of the Slow Talking Dineh,” he said. He didn’t mention that his father’s clan was also Bitter Water, which made it Chee’s own ”born for“ clan. That made him and Highhawk related on their less important paternal side. But then, after two generations under normal reservation circumstances, that secondary paternal link would have submerged by marriages into other clans. Chee considered it, and felt absolutely no kinship link with this strange, lanky man. Whatever his dreams and pretensions, Highhawk was still a
They sat in the front room then, Chee and Janet occupying a sofa and Highhawk perched on a wooden chair. Someone, Chee guessed it had been Highhawk, had enlarged the room by removing the partition which once had separated it from a small dining alcove. But most of this space was occupied by two long tables, and the tables were occupied by tools, by what apparently had been a section of tree root, by a roll of leather, a box of feathers, slabs of wood, paint jars, brushes, carving knives—the paraphernalia of Highhawk’s profession.
“You had something to tell me,” Highhawk said to Janet. He glanced at Chee.
“Your preliminary hearing has been set,” Janet said. “We finally got them to put it on the calendar. It’s going to be two weeks from tomorrow and we have to get some things decided before then.“
Highhawk grinned at her. It lit his long, thin face and made him look even more boyish. “You could have told me that on the telephone,” he said. “I’ll bet there was more than that.” He glanced at Chee again.
Chee got up and looked for a place to go. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he said.
“You could take a look at my kachina collection,” Highhawk said. “Back in the office.” He pointed down the hallway. “First door on the right.”
“It’s not all that confidential,” Janet said. “But I can imagine what the bar association would say about me talking about a plea bargain with a client right in front of the arresting officer.”
The office was small and as cluttered as the living area. The desk was a massive old roll top, half buried under shoeboxes filled with scraps of cloth, bone fragments, wood, odds and ends of metal. A battered cardboard box held an unpainted wooden figure carved out of what seemed to be cottonwood root. It stared up at Chee through slanted eye sockets, looking somehow pale and venomous. Some sort of fetish or figurine, obviously. Something Highhawk must be replicating for a museum display. Or could it be the Tano War God? Another box was beside it. Chee pulled back the flaps and looked inside it. He looked into the face of Talking God.
The mask of the Yeibichai was made as the traditions of the Navajos ruled it must be made—of deerskin surmounted by a bristling crown of eight eagle feathers. The face was painted white. Its mouth protruded an inch or
