Sacred Clowns

“Bluehorse told us Dorsey’s gay,” Chee said. “Or supposed to be gay. He said he drove the water truck. The one the mission runs to refill water barrels for old people who can’t get around. He took them meals. All that.”

“That’s right. You better read the file on it,” Leaphorn said. He dug it out of the basket on his desk, handed it to Chee. “See if what you know about the Sayesva case co

“Okay.”

“And one more thing. I still want you to find Delmar Kanitewa.”

Chapter 10

THE TROUBLE WAS Chee couldn’t find the Kanitewa boy. Neither could Harold Blizzard. Now both the Albuquerque and Gallup offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, each with its own separate and individual federal-reservation homicide case, decided it was important to have a chat with Delmar. Gallup was wondering how on God’s green earth Chee had let him slip away and Albuquerque was asking the same question of Sergeant Blizzard.

Blizzard resented this. “The son-of-a-bitch looks right at me and says, ‘You lust walked into the school and made the telephone call and left him sitting there?’” Blizzard had raised his voice two notches to represent the voice of the agent-in-charge at Albuquerque. “And I say, ‘That’s because there’s no telephone in the patrol car.’ And he says, ‘You didn’t think about taking him into the school with you?’ and I say, ‘If I had known he was going to slip away we wouldn’t be having this stupid conversation.’”

Chee laughed. “Did you really say that?”

They had met at the Gallup police station and decided to leave Blizzard’s car there and take Chee’s pickup to begin another phase of what Blizzard called The Great Delmar Hunt. Now they were jolting down Navajo Road 7028 about fifteen miles west of the Torreon Trading Post, looking for a dirt road which would, if they could only find it, lead them across the south fork of Chico Arroyo and thence to the place of Gray Old Lady Benally, who was some sort of paternal clan relative of Delmar’s. Blizzard was driving, giving Chee a rest. It was early afternoon, and both were tired of driving down bumpy dirt roads, tired of searching for people who weren’t at home, of asking questions of people who didn’t know the answer – and maybe wouldn’t have told them if they did know. Besides, Chee’s back hurt. His lower back, about where the hips co

“Well,” Blizzard said. He had been silent so long that Chee had forgotten what they were talking about. “Maybe not exactly those words, but he got the idea.” He gestured out the windshield. “Look at that,” he said. “Those colors. In the clouds and in the sky and in the grass. I think I could get used to this. Nothing much to do out here in the boonies, but lots to look at.”

Chee shifted his thoughts from back pain to landscape. Indeed it was beautiful. The sun was in its autumn mode, low in the southwest, and shadows slanted away from every juniper. They formed zebra stripes where the slopes ran north and a polka-dot pattern where they slanted. The grass was never really green in this land of little rain. Now it was a golden autumn tan with streaks of silver and white where the sickle-shaped seeds of grama were waving, tinted blue here and there by distance and shadow. Miles away, beyond the hills, the vertical slopes of Chivato Mesa formed a wall. Above the mesa stood the serene blue shape of Tsodzil, the Turquoise Mountain which First Man had built as one of the four sacred corner posts of Navajo Country. And over all that, the great, arching, multilayered sky – the thin, translucent fan of ice crystals still glittering in the full sun. Thousands of feet lower, a scattering of puffy gray-white cumulus clouds – outriders of the storm the weatherman had been predicting – marched eastward ahead of the wind.

“It’s beautiful. I’ll give you that,” Blizzard said. “But you need some way to pull it together a lot better. Everything is too damn far apart.”

“You get used to that, too,” Chee said. “Somebody once wrote a book about it. They called it The Land of Room Enough, and Time.”

“We’re sure wasting enough of that today,” Blizzard said. “You keeping track of the mileage?”

“The man said it was 16.3 miles from the gas pump at the trading post,” Chee said. “That ought to be it there.”

Up ahead, tracks led from the gravel into the roadside borrow ditch, climbed out of it, crossed a cattle guard between two fence posts, and wandered erratically through the grass toward the horizon, disappearing on down-slopes and reappearing on ridges.

“Not exactly the Pe

“She’s home,” Chee said. “But it’ll turn out she’s the wrong Mrs. Benally.”

“She won’t be home. I’ll bet you,” Blizzard said. He reached for his billfold.

“You lose,” Chee said. He pointed. “See the old boot stuck on the fence post? The toe’s pointed in. If it’s pointed out, they’re gone to town and you save yourself the drive.”

Blizzard stared at him, impressed. “My God,” he said. “That’s pretty damn clever. Wonder if us Cheye

“You’ve really never been to your reservation? Never lived out there with your people at all?”

“Just once,” Blizzard said. “When my dad’s mother died, we went out for the funeral. I think we just stayed couple of days. I remember the night. I was little and about all I could think of was how cold it was in my uncle’s shack. And I remember the other kids didn’t seem friendly.”

“You were a town boy,” Chee said. “They were country kids. Bashful. They figured you’d be stuck-up.” He gri

The dirt track to the Benally place proved to be smoother than the washboard gravel of Route 7028. It led a mile and a half to an expanse of packed dirt on which stood a log hogan with a dirt roof and one of those small frame houses which, before the era of aluminum mobile homes, were hauled around on flatbed oil-company trucks to shelter crews of drilling rigs. It had been painted white once but not much paint had survived the winters. Two standard fifty-five-gallon oil drums stood on a platform beside the door. An empty corral was behind it, with too many poles missing to make it useful, and behind the corral, a brush arbor sagged.

A woman with a shawl over her head leaned in the open doorway, watching while Blizzard parked. To Chee, she looked about eighty, or a little older, with a once-round face now shrunken by the years.

“I hope you are well, Grandmother,” he said in Navajo. He told her his mother’s clan, and his father’s, and that he was a tribal policeman. “And this man beside me is a Cheye

Gray Old Lady recited her clans, including being born to the Bitter Water People of Delmar Kanitewa’s father. She invited them in, signaled them to seat themselves on a bench beside the table, and offered them coffee. While the pot heated on the wood stove against the wall, Chee made his pitch. It was the fifth time he’d made it since morning and he hurried through it, making sure the old woman knew they didn’t want to arrest the boy – only to talk to him.

She poured the coffee into two tin cups. The pot held only enough for a half-cup for Chee and Blizzard. None for her. She put it back on the shelf.

“I know the boy,” she said. “My grandson’s son. We called him Sheep Chaser. But I haven’t seen him this year. Not for a long time.”

Chee sipped the coffee. It was strong and stale. Through the doorway into the other room he could see a form lying motionless under a blanket. “Does Sheep Chaser have any good friends around here? Somebody he might be visiting?”