Sacred Clowns

“Right in here,” Chee said. “Just a minute now. She’ll be the first girl you see doing the drumming. There she is. That’s Irma. My oldest sister.”

The scene was solemn. Three Navajos playing the roles of three Cheye

“How about the song?” Blizzard asked. “Is that Navajo, too?”

Blizzard was leaning forward, chin on the seat back, his big ugly face between Janet and Chee.

“Sort of,” Chee said. “It’s a kind of modification of a song they sing at Girl Dances, but they slowed it down to make it sound solemn.” This was not the way Chee had intended this date with Janet Pete to turn out.

Richard Widmark, commanding the cavalry detachment in charge of keeping order at this powwow between government bureaucrats and the Cheye

And so it went. Scenes came in which somber-looking Cheye

But they produced more happy bedlam among the audience, and prompted the “What did he really say?” question from either Janet or Blizzard – and often both. What he really said tended to have something to do with the size of the colonel’s penis, or some other earthy and humorous irrelevancy. Chee would sanitize this a bit or put the humor in the context of Navajo customs or taboos, or explain that the celebratory honking was merely noting the screen appearance of somebody’s kinfolks.

It was a long movie, but not long enough for Chee to come up with a plan that would have disposed of Blizzard. The most obvious solution was to simply drive by the Navajo Nation I

And so, movie finally over, Janet drove them home. And there, with the car still rolling to a stop, Harold Blizzard did something to reestablish himself in Jim Chee’s esteem.

“Janet,” Blizzard said, “this has been a lot of fun, and I hope to see you again, but now I’m going to rush right in and get some sleep.” And he had the door open and was out even before he finished the sentence.

Janet turned off the engine. And the lights. Without a word they watched Blizzard disappear into Chee’s trailer.

“I like him,” Janet said.

Chee considered what had just happened. “Me, too,” he said. “And he was right. It was fun.”

“It was,” Janet said. “And it was sweet of you to bring him along.”

“It was, wasn’t it,” Chee said. “But why do you think so?”

“Because you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yep,” Chee said.

“About what?”

“Us.”

“Us?” Light from the autumn moon lit her face. She was smiling at him.

“We’ve been friends a long time,” Chee said.

“Two years, I guess. More than that. Ever since you were trying to nail that old man I was representing up at Farmington. Almost three years if you add in that time I was away at Washington.”

“I wasn’t trying to nail him,” Chee said. “I was looking for information.”

“And you tried to trick me?”

“I did trick you,” Chee said. “Remember? I found out what I needed to know.”

“I remember,” she said. “But now I think I’m ready to forgive you.”

And with that, Janet Pete leaned across, put her hand behind Chee’s head, pulled his face down, and kissed him, and sighed, and kissed him again.

It was quite a while later, although the moon was still illuminating Janet’s face, when she said, “No, Jim. No. Time to stop.”

“What?” he said. “Why?”

“Because,” she said. “I think we sort of stopped being just friends. So now we have to get better acquainted.”

“That’s just what we were doing,” Chee said.

“No,” Janet said, sitting up straight, buttoning buttons. “I tried that way once. It doesn’t work. It hurts too much if you’re wrong.”

“In Washington?”

“In Washington, and in law school.”

“Not this time,” Chee said. “This time you’re not wrong. It’s me. And you’re right.”

Janet looked at him, and then out the windshield, thinking. “When you’re a certain age,” she said, “when you’re young, and you fall in love – or think you have – then you think that sex is the way you prove it. Prove that you’re in love.” She was still staring out the windshield, straight ahead. “But it doesn’t prove a damned thing.”

Chee thought about that. “What you’re saying-”

“What I’m saying is I know I like you. Maybe I like you a lot. Even an awful lot. But it doesn’t have anything at all to do with-” She paused. Looked at him. Gri

“If I had known that, I would have been even kinder,” Chee said.

“But I’m not going to be just another of Jim Chee’s girlfriends.”

“Hey,” Chee said. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean we hear about things. We women.”

“No truth to it,” Chee said. “I’m too busy.”

Janet laughed. “Exactly what I hear,” she said. “Very busy. A girl at every chapter house.”

“Come on, Janet,” Chee said. “Knock it off.”

“Remember,” she said. “You told me about the schoolteacher at Crownpoint. The one you were in love with.”

“A long time ago,” Chee said.

Janet was silent for a moment. “How about her? Are you still in touch?”

“She sent me a Christmas card,” Chee said. “Wrote ‘Happy Holidays’ on it.”

Janet smiled at him, her face illuminated by the moon. “That sounds safe enough,” she said.

“Now it’s your turn. How about The Attorney at Law?”

It took her a while to answer. And while he waited, Chee felt his stomach tighten. What would she say? How would she say it?

She said, in a small voice, “I don’t like to think about him.”

And Chee, who really wanted to drop it, knew that he couldn’t. He said, “Tell me why not.”

“Because it makes me feel so totally stupid. Naive. Dumb.” She slammed her fist against the dashboard. “What the hell was I thinking of? I get so angry I want to cry.”

“You don’t love him anymore?”

“I don’t think I ever did. I’m sure I didn’t. I thought he was sophisticated. And glamorous. He made me feel important, or something, to have an important lawyer interested in me. But, actually, I don’t even like him.”

He put his arm around her, pulled her against him, and talked into her hair. “I can understand that,” he said. “I’ll tell you why. Because way back when you and I got acquainted, fairly early on, I got to thinking sort of like that. I’d think, ‘I’m a kid out of a sheep camp. Janet’s beautiful. She’s a sophisticated city girl. A lawyer. All that. Yet I think she likes me.’ It made me feel great. Made me feel about nine feet tall.”