Talking God

Highhawk was waiting for him at the employees’ entrance on Twelfth Street. He handed Chee a little rectangle of white paper with the legend VISITOR printed and Chee’s name written on it.

“What do you want to see first?” he asked. Then paused. “You all right?”

“There’s a man out there. Sick, I guess. Lying out there under the bushes across the street.”

“Drunk maybe,” Highhawk said. “Or stoned on crack. Usually there’s three or four of them. That Department of Justice building grass is a favorite spot.”

“This guy wasn’t drunk.”

“On crack probably,” Highhawk said. “These days it’s usually crack if they’re dopers, or it can be anything from heroin to sniffing glue. But sometimes they’re just mental cases.” He considered Chee’s reaction to all this. “You have them too. I saw plenty of drunks in Gallup.”

“I think we have more drunks per capita than anybody,” Chee said. “But on the reservation we try to pick them up. We try to put them somewhere. What’s the policy here?”

But Highhawk was already limping hurriedly down the hallway, not interested in this subject, the braced leg dragging but moving fast. “Let me show you this display first,” he said. “I’m trying to get it to look just like it would if it was really happening out there in your desert.”

Chee followed. He still felt shaken. But now he was thinking again, and he thought that he hadn’t looked for the small man around the Twelfth Street entrance to the Natural History Museum. And he thought that possibly the reason he hadn’t seen the small man following him was because the small man might not have needed to follow. He might have known where Chee was going.

Henry Highhawk’s exhibit was down a side hall on the main floor of the museum. It was walled off from the world of museumgoers by plywood screens and guarded by signs declaring the area TEMPORARILY CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC and naming the display THE MASKED GODS OF THE AMERICAS. Behind the screen was the smell of sawdust, glue, and astringent cleaning fluids. There was also an array of masks, ranging from grotesque and terrible to calm and sublimely beautiful. Some were displayed in groups, one group representing the varying concept of demons in Yucatan villages, and another Inca deities. Some stood alone, accompanied only by printed legends explaining them. Some were displayed on costumed models of the priests or

“This one is mine, of course,” Highhawk said. “I did some of the others, too, and helped on some. But this one is mine.” He glanced at Chee, waiting a polite moment for a comment. “If you see anything wrong, you point it out,” he added. He stepped across the railing to the figure and adjusted the mask, moving his fingers under the leather, tilting it slightly, then readjusting it. He stepped back and looked at it thoughtfully.

“You see anything wrong?” he asked.

Chee could see nothing wrong. At least nothing except trivial details in some of the decoration. And that was probably intended. Such a sacred scene should not be reproduced exactly except for its purpose—to cure a human being. Talking God was frozen in that shuffling dance step the yeis traditionally used as they approached the patient's hogan. In this display, the patient was standing on a rug spread on the earth in front of the hogan door. He was wrapped in a blanket and held his arms outstretched. Talking God's short woven kilt seemed to flow with the motion, and in each hand he carried a rattle which looked genuine. And, Chee thought, probably was. Behind Talking God in this diorama the other gods followed in identical poses, seeming to dance out of the darkness into the firelight. Chee recognized the masks of Fringed Mouth, of Monster Slayer, of Born for Water, and of Water Sprinkler with his cane and humped back. Other yei figures were also vaguely visible moving across the dance ground. And on both sides the fires illuminated lines of spectators.

Chee's eyes lingered on the mask of Talking God. It seemed identical to the one he'd seen in Highhawk's office. Naturally it would. Probably it was the same one. Probably Highhawk had taken it home to prepare it for mounting. Or, if he was copying it, he would be making the replica look as much like the original as he could.

“What do you think?” Highhawk asked. His voice sounded anxious. “You see anything wrong?”

“It looks great to me. Downright beautiful,” Chee said. “I’m impressed.” In fact, he was tremendously impressed. Highhawk had reproduced that moment in the final night of the ceremonial called the Yei Yiaash, the Arrival of the Spirits. He turned to look at Highhawk. “Surely you didn’t get all this from that little visit out to Agnes Tsosie’s Night Chant. If you did you must have a photographic memory.” Or, Chee thought, a videotape recorder hidden away somewhere, like the audio recorder he had hidden in his palm.

Highhawk grinned. “I guess I read about a thousand descriptions of that ceremonial. All the anthropologists I could find. And I studied the sketches they made. And looked at all the materials we have on it here in the Smithsonian. Whatever people stole and turned over to us down through the years, I studied it. Studied the various yei masks and all that. And then Dr. Hartman—she’s the curator who’s in charge of setting up this business—she called in a consultant from the reservation. A Navajo shaman. Guy named Sandoval. You know him?“

“I’ve heard of him,” Chee said.

“Partly we wanted to make sure we aren’t violating any taboos. Or misusing any religious material. Or anything like that,” Highhawk paused again. He started to say something, stopped, looked nervously at Chee. “You sure you don’t see anything wrong?”

Chee shook his head. He was looking at the mask itself, wondering if there was an artificial head under it with an artificial face with an artificial Navajo expression. No reason there should be. The mask looked ancient, the gray-white paint which covered the deerskin patterned with the tiny cracks of age, the leather thongs which laced up its sides darkened with years of use. But of course those were just the details Highhawk would not have overlooked in making a copy. The mask he’d seen in the box in Highhawk’s office was either this one or an awfully close copy—that was obvious from what he had remembered. The tilt of the feathered crest, the angle of the painted eyebrows, all of those small details which went beyond legend and tradition that had lent themselves to the interpretation of the mask maker, they all seemed to be identical. Except in its ritual poetry and the sand paintings of its curing ceremonials, the Navajo culture always allowed room for poetic license. In fact it encouraged it—to bring whatever was being done into harmony with the existing circumstances. How much such license would Highhawk have if he was copying the Tano effigy? Not much, Chee guessed. The kachina religion of the Pueblo Indians, it seemed to Chee, was rooted in a dogma so ancient that the centuries had crystallized it.

“How about the basket?” Highhawk asked him. “On the ground by his feet? That’s supposed to be the basket for the Yei Da’ayah. According to our artifact inventory records, anyway.”

Highhawk’s pronunciation of the Navajo word was so strange that what he actually said was incomprehensible. But what he probably meant was the basket which held the pollen and the feathers used for feeding the masks after the spirits within them were awakened. “Looks all right to me,” Chee said.