Talking God

“Tonight’s the last night of the Yeibichai,” Largo said. “That’s when Mrs. Tsosie said she told him to come.”

“What makes us think this guy is coming all the way out here for a Yeibichai? Sounds strange to me.” Chee had been looking at the sheet in the folder when he said it. When he looked up, Captain Largo was glowering at him.

“You don’t get paid to make decisions on whether the feds know what the hell they’re doing,” the captain said. “You get paid for doing what I tell you to do. But if it makes you happier, we’re told that this Highhawk told it around back in Washington that he was coming out to the Navajo Reservation to attend this specific Agnes Tsosie Yeibichai. Is that good enough for you?”

It had been good enough. And so for the past four hours Chee had been at the Agnes Tsosie place waiting for Henry Highhawk to arrive at this Yeibichai ceremonial so that he could arrest him. Chee was good at waiting. He waited at his favorite lurking point near Baby Rocks Mesa for the endless empty miles of U.S. 160 to provoke drivers into speeding. He waited at the fringe of rodeo crowds for unwary bootleggers, and in the hallways outside the various Navajo Nation Department of Justice courtrooms to be called in to testify. Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee, his good friend who had tagged along on this venture, complained endlessly about the waiting their jobs required. Chee didn’t mind. He had one of those minds in which curiosity is constantly renewed. Wherever he waited, Chee’s eyes wandered. They always found something that interested him. Here, waiting for the white Ford Bronco to appear (or fail to appear), Chee was first fascinated with the ceremonial itself. And then he’d noticed the Man with Bad Hands.

Bad Hands was curious indeed.

He had arrived early, as had Chee, a little before sundown in that recess between the afternoon singing in the medicine hogan and the dancing of the yeis, which would begin only when the night was totally dark. He was driving a green four-door Jeep Cherokee which bore a Farmington car rental company’s sticker. Chee had identified him at first as a belagaana, that grab bag of social-ethnic types which included whites plus all those who were neither fellow members of the Dineh (Navajos), nor Nakai (Mexicans), nor Zunis, nor Hopis, nor Apaches, nor Utes, nor members of any of the other Indian tribes who lived near enough to the Navajos to have earned a name in the Navajo language—which had no noun for “Indian.” Thus Bad Hands was belagaana by default. Bad Hands wasn’t the only white attracted by this ceremonial, but he was the only one who defied Chee’s personal classification system.

The handful of other whites standing around the bonfires or keeping warm in their vehicles fit neatly enough. Two were “friends.” They included a lanky, bald-headed man from whom Chee sometimes bought hay at a Gallup feed store, and Ernie Bulow, a towering, gray-bearded desert rat who’d been raised on the Big Reservation and had written a book about Navajo taboos. Bulow spoke coherent Navajo and had developed close personal relationships with Navajo families. He had brought with him today in his dusty station wagon a fat Navajo man and three middle-aged white women, all of whom stood beside the vehicle looking cold, nervous, and uncomfortable. Chee put the women in his “tourist” category. The remainder of the belagaana delegation were mostly “Lone Rangers”—part of the liberal/intellectual covey. They had flocked into the Navajo Mountain territory and declared themselves spokesmen for, and guardians of, the Navajo families facing eviction from their lands in what had become the Hopi part of the old Joint Use Reservation. Lone Rangers were a nuisance, but also a source of anecdotes and amusement. There were three of these, two males not much older than Chee and a pretty young blonde woman with her hair rolled atop her head. All wore the ragged jeans, jean jacket, and horse-blanket uniform of their clique.

Bad Hands’ necktie, his neatly fitted business suit, his white shirt, his gloves of thin black leather, his snap-brim felt hat, his fur-collared overcoat, all disqualified him as a Lone Ranger. Like them he was a city person, but without the disguise. Total disinterest in the ceremonial ruled him out as a tourist, and he seemed to know no one here— most of them Bitter Water People of the patient’s maternal clan. Like Jim Chee, Bad Hands was simply waiting. But for Bad Hands, waiting was a joyless matter of enduring. He showed no sign of pleasure in it.

Chee had first noticed him when he emerged from the Jeep Cherokee. He’d parked it amid a cluster of shabbier vehicles a polite distance from the dance grounds. He had stretched, rotated his shoulders in his overcoat, bent his knees, bowed his back, went through those other movements of people who have been confined too long in a car. He gave no more than a glance to the men who were unloading sawmill waste from the tribe’s lumbermill to help fuel the fires which would warm the spectators and illuminate the dancing tonight. He was more interested in the parked vehicles. These he inspected carefully, one after another. He had noticed Chee noticing him, and he had noticed Chee’s police uniform, but he showed no special interest. After stretching his muscles he climbed back into his vehicle and sat. It was then that Chee noticed his hands.

He had opened the door by grasping the handle with two fingers of his left hand, then pressing in the release button with a finger of his right hand. It was obviously a practiced motion. Still it was clumsy. And as he did it, Chee noticed that the thumb and little finger of the right glove jutted out stiffly. The man was either missing that thumb and finger, or they were immobilized. Why then didn’t he open the door with the other hand? Chee couldn’t get a look at it.

But now Chee’s curiosity was clicked up a notch. He prowled the dance ground the Tsosie family had cleared, he chatted with people, he watched the fire builders build the stacks of logs and waste wood which would line the dancing area with flames. He talked to the husband of the woman whose mother was the patient. Yellow was his name. Yellow was worrying about everything going right.

Chee helped Yellow check the wiring from the little generator he’d rented to provide the electric lighting he’d rigged up behind the medicine hogan. Chee kept an eye on five boys wearing Many Farms football jackets who might become trouble if their group became large enough to reach teenage critical mass. Chee prowled among the parked vehicles on the lookout for drunks or drinking. He stopped where Cowboy Dashee was parked in his Apache County Sheriffs Department patrol car to see if Cowboy was still asleep. (“Wake me when your criminal gets here, or wake me when the dancing gets going,” Dashee said. “Otherwise, I need my rest.”) But always he wandered back to where he could see the Jeep Cherokee and its driver.

The man was sometimes sitting in it, sometimes leaning against it, sometimes standing beside it.

He’s nervous, Chee decided, but he’s not the sort who allows himself to show his nerves in the usual ways. When the light of an arriving car lit his face, Chee noticed that he might be part Indian. Or perhaps Asiatic. Certainly not Navajo, or Apache, or a Pueblo man. In the same light he saw his hands again, gloved, both of them, this time resting lightly on the steering wheel. The thumbs and little fingers of both hands jutted out stiffly as if their joints were frozen.

Chee was standing beside the medicine hogan thinking of these odd hands and what might have happened to them when Henry Highhawk arrived. Chee noticed the vehicle coming over the rim of the mesa and jolting toward the parking area. In the reflected light from the fires it seemed to be small and white. As it parked he saw it was the white Ford Bronco he had been waiting for.

“… Wind Boy, the holy one, paints his form,” the voices behind him chanted in rhythmic Navajo.

“With the dark cloud, he paints his form.