Talking God

Henry Highhawk

I am enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Leaphorn reread the letter, trying to connect these words, this odd plea, with the arrogant face of the man with the pointed shoes.

“Did you answer it?”

“I told him to come,” Agnes Tsosie said. She sighed, shifted her weight, grimaced.

Leaphorn waited.

“I told him there would be a Yeibichai for me after the first frost. Probably late in November. That would be when to come. There would be other Bitter Water People there for him to talk to. I said he could talk to the hataalii who is doing the sing. Maybe it would be proper for him to look through the mask and be initiated like they do with boys on the last night of the sing. I said I didn’t know about that. He would have to ask the hataalii about that. And then he could go to Window Rock and see about whether he could get on the tribal rolls. He could find out from the people there what proof he would need.“

Leaphorn waited. But Agnes Tsosie had said what she had to say.

“Did he answer your letter?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Or maybe he did and his letter is down at Beta Hochee. That’s where we pick up our mail.”

“Nobody has been by the trading post there for a while,” Jolene Yellow said. “Not since last week.”

“Do you think you know who this man’s grandmother was?” Leaphorn asked.

“Maybe,” Agnes Tsosie said. “I remember they said my mother had an aunt who went away to boarding school and never did come back.”

“Anyway,” Jolene Yellow said, “he’s not the same man.”

Leaphorn looked at her, surprised.

“He sent his picture,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

It was about two inches square, a color photograph of the sort taken by machine to be pasted in passports. It showed a long, slender face, large blue eyes, and long blond hair woven into two tight braids. It was a face that would always look boyish.

“He certainly doesn’t look like a Navajo,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking that this Henry Highhawk looked even less like the man with the pointed shoes.

Chapter Four

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From behind him in the medicine hogan, Officer Jim Chee could hear the chanting of the First Dancers as they put on their ceremonial paint. Chee was interested. He had picked a spot from which he could see through the hogan doorway and watch the personifiers preparing themselves. They were eight middle-aged men from around the Naschitti Chapter House in New Mexico, far to the east of Agnes Tsosie’s place below Tesihim Butte. They had painted their right hands first, then their faces from the forehead downward, and then their bodies, making themselves ready to represent the Holy People of Navajo mythology, the yei, the powerful spirits. This Night Chant ceremonial was one that Chee hoped to learn himself someday. Yeibichai, his people called it, naming it for Talking God, the maternal grandfather of all the spirits. The performance was nine days long and involved five complicated sand paintings and scores of songs. Learning it would take a long, long time, as would finding a hataalii willing to take him on as a student. When the time came for that, he would have to take leave from the Navajo Tribal Police. But that was somewhere in the distant future. Now his job was watching for the Flaky Man from Washington. Henry Highhawk was the name on the federal warrant.

“Henry Highhawk,” Captain Largo had said, handing him the folder. “Usually when they decide to turn Indian and call themselves something like Whitecloud, or Squatting Bear, or Highhawk, they decide they’re going to be Cherokees. Or some dignified tribe that everybody knows about. But this jerk had to pick Navajo.”

Chee was reading the folder. “Flight across state lines to avoid prosecution,” he said. “Prosecution for what?”

“Desecration of graves,” Largo said. He laughed, shook his head, genuinely amused by the irony. “Now ain’t that just the ideal criminal occupation for a man who decides to declare himself a Navajo?”

Chee had noticed something that seemed to him even more ironic than a white grave robber declaring himself to be a Navajo—a tribe which happened to have a fierce religious aversion to corpses and everything associated with death.

“Is he a pot hunter?” Chee asked. “Is the FBI actually trying to catch a pot hunter?” Digging up graves to steal pre-Columbian pottery for the collector’s market had been both a federal crime and big business on the Colorado plateau for generations, and the FBI’s apathy about it had been both unshakable and widely known. Chee stood in front of Largo’s desk trying to imagine what would have stirred the federals from such historic and monolithic inertia.

“He wasn’t hunting pots,” Largo said. “He’s a politician. He was digging up belagaana skeletons back East.” Largo explained what Highhawk had done with the skeletons. “So not only were they white skeletons, they were Very Important People belagaana skeletons.”

“Oh,” Chee said.

“Anyway, all you need to know about it is that you go out to the Lower Greasewood Chapter House and you find out where they’re holding this Yeibichai. It will probably be at Agnes Tsosie’s place. She’s the one they’re doing the Night Chant for. Anyway, this Highhawk nut is supposed to come to it. Probably he’s already there. The FBI says he rented a Ford Bronco from Avis in Washington. A white one. They think he drove it out here. So you get yourself to Old Woman Tsosie’s place. If he’s there, bring him in. And if he’s not there yet, then stick around and wait for him.“

“Nine days?”