Sacred Clowns

Janet snuggled against him. “Ummmmm,” she said. “You know how to make me feel good. My mother’s a Scot, but if she was Irish, she’d say you were full of blarney.”

“Blarney?”

Janet laughed. “I don’t know if the Navajos, if we Navajos, have a word for it. But we certainly should. Sort of like baloney. Or maybe bull.”

“No, I’m not,” Chee said. “But if real lawyers impress you, I should tell you I might get made into a real sergeant.”

“Well, I think it’s high time that happened. But weren’t you already a sergeant once?”

“Acting sergeant,” Chee said. “But that only lasted a few months.”

“I remember. It was when you worked at Crownpoint. Before you burned your hand so terribly. Trying to open the door on that burning car.” She snuggled against him again. “But tell me about getting promoted.”

Chee found himself wishing he hadn’t brought it up. It wasn’t likely to happen.

“I probably won’t,” he said. “It’s really more like a joke. But the lieutenant told me that the chief himself is personally interested in nailing the guy in that Todachene hit-and-run thing I told you about. The one where the driver backed up and took a look at the pedestrian he’d hit and then drove away and let the man bleed to death.” Chee produced a mirthless chuckle. “The lieutenant says that if I can find the guy, I’ll get promoted.”

“Oh,” Janet said.

“The catch being that there isn’t a clue. Everything you can check out in a case like that has already been checked. The garages, paint shops, people who might have seen something. There’s nothing to go on.”

“That’s not fair,” Janet said. “You should have been promoted a long time ago anyway. But so what?”

“But what you said about burning my hand reminds me,” Chee said. “I’ll tell you what made me really feel great about you. I’ll never forget it.”

He waited. She snuggled again. “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead and tell.”

“They let me out of the hospital at Albuquerque with that hand all wrapped up so I couldn’t use it, and when I got home I found you’d gotten into my trailer and washed all the dishes, and swept, and got the windows all shiny, and cleaned out the refrigerator, and put in some fresh milk and eggs and things like that, and did the laundry, and-”

“Women lawyers like to play housekeeper now and then,” she said. “And you had the blues, too. Remember that? You were really down. I didn’t want you to come home to a dirty house. All alone, and everything’s a mess. I’ve done that often enough to know it’s awfully depressing.”

“Anyway, I loved you for it. And I still do.”

And having said that, he put his hand under her chin, and treasured the silky feel of her skin, and raised her face and kissed her. And she kissed him. And this went on for quite a while.

And, having done that, he knew it was time – in fact it was way past time – to pose the question he had been dreading to ask.

“You remember when I asked you about your dad? About where he was from. What part of the reservation. And what his clans were. And you said he was just little when his parents were relocated to Chicago and he never talked about it, and you said you really didn’t know. You remember that?”

Janet’s head moved against his face, her hair incredibly soft, smelling clean, smelling beautiful, looking beautiful in the moonlight. It was an affirmative nod.

“And you said you’d ask him next time you talked to him? Get him to be more specific.”

Another nod.

Chee took a deep breath. He should have handled this a long time ago. But he was afraid to press it because it seemed presumptuous. After all, they were only friends. Now he was afraid of what the answer might be. Chee’s mother’s clan was the Slow Talking People, and his father was born to the Bitter Water Clan. If Janet Pete’s father belonged to either of those on either side of his family, then what he and Janet had been doing here was wrong. It violated one of the most stringent taboos of the Navajos – the rigid and complex rules by which The People prohibited incest. Probably Mr. Pete didn’t belong to either of them. There were about sixty-five other clans he could belong to. But then there was Janet’s paternal grandmother’s paternal clan, and his own family’s linked clans. They, too, would make any sexual relationship between Janet and him taboo. He had to find out.

But Janet wasn’t saying anything.

“Did he tell you?”

“He wasn’t sure,” Janet said.

Chee wanted to think about that. He had never known a reservation-born Navajo who didn’t know his clans. It was almost like not knowing whether you were man or woman. But perhaps this man’s mother – living in a white man’s city a thousand miles from the sacred mountains – had wanted to make a white man out of her son. That sometimes happened. Or maybe Janet’s father simply didn’t want to tell her. Or was kidding her for some reason. Chee couldn’t imagine why he’d do that.

“Did he have any idea? Could he tell you anything helpful?”

“He was sure he didn’t know about my grandfather’s clans, because Grandfather had died before they moved. When Dad was just a little boy. But he said he thought his mother might have belonged to the Hunger People. He said he remembered her joking about that. Saying it was appropriate for their family.”

Chee probed through his memory. “Hunger People,” he said. “That’s the Dichin Dine’e.”

Janet sensed his mood.

“Why all the questions?” she said. There was no snuggling now. “As if I hadn’t been out here long enough to know the answer to that one.” She pushed herself away from him. “Well,” she said. “How did I do? Am I eligible?” She laughed as she said it.

“I’m like your dad,” Chee said. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m poison for you.” He tried to make it sound like a joke.

They sat in the cold moonlight. Janet sighed. “You know what?” she said. “I have a long day tomorrow. And you have to do whatever you policemen do on Tuesdays. So, if I can think of a way to get you out of the car, I’ll go on home and get some sleep.”

This was not the way Chee wanted this evening to end. He wasn’t ready to step out into the cold night.

“I want to ask you about something,” he said. “Did you notice when we were-”

“No more questions, Jim. I don’t feel like any more questions.”

“This one’s about Blizzard,” he said. “Did you notice how different his reaction was to some of the scenes in that movie? We Navajos would be laughing and honking our horns at our private joke, and he would be looking sad. Same scene, exactly. He’d be watching the destruction of his culture. We’d be watching our kinfolks making fun of the white folks in the movie.”

“Different for me, too,” Janet said. “My Navajo wasn’t good enough to get the joke most of the time.” She frowned at him. “How do you know how Blizzard was taking it? You were watching him in the rearview mirror, weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Chee said.

“And me too, I bet.”

“Mostly you,” Chee admitted.

“Sneaky,” Janet said. “Why watch us?”

He wanted to say Because you’re beautiful. Because it makes me feel good to look at you. Because I have stupidly, hopelessly, allowed myself to fall in love with you. But he didn’t say it. There was the problem of the Dichin Dine’e. Was his memory correct? Was there some linkage of that little clan and one of his own? A long time ago, on a winter night when such teaching is appropriate, Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, his Little Father, had given him the history of his Slow Talking People – tracing it all the way back to the mythic times just after Changing Woman had left The People to rejoin her lover, the Sun. He had been a boy then, and some of the clan co