Sacred Clowns

Sergeant Blizzard was trying not to look impatient. He failed.

“But after what happened to Mr. Sayesva, you didn’t see him any more after that?” Chee asked. “He didn’t come home to get his extra clothes or anything like that?”

Mrs. Kanitewa had raised her defenses. Her expression was blank. “No,” she said, “he didn’t.”

Chee was looking past the woman into the kitchen, letting some time pass. He heard Blizzard shifting uneasily on the sofa. Blizzard, he thought, must be a city Cheye

“I ran away from boarding school myself once,” Chee said. “The man was waiting for me to take me back when I got home. But it worried my mother.”

“It does,” Mrs. Kanitewa said. “It worries you.”

“I guess you thought maybe he’d gone on back to school with his cousin. But that would worry you, too. Because why wouldn’t he come home and say good-bye? It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Where was he? He wouldn’t just go like that. He would stay for the funeral.”

“You would want to bury Mr. Sayesva right away,” Chee said. “Isn’t that the rule of the Pueblo? You want to do the burial before sundown.”

“That’s the way it is supposed to be. But they wouldn’t let us do it. There was a deputy sheriff here when it happened, and Mr. Blizzard was here. And the police said they had to take him into Albuquerque to get an autopsy done to find out what killed him.” Mrs. Kanitewa’s expression suggested she considered this hard to understand. “He’d been hit on the head and his head broke, but they said they had to let the doctor see him anyway, to get it all down on paper, and they would try to get him back in time.”

“They didn’t, though,” Chee said, making it a statement rather that a question. It would have been clearly impossible. Chee had seen a funeral at Zuni Pueblo. The body would have to be washed and dressed, the hair combed out, everything made ready for Sayesva’s four-day journey through the darkness toward his eternal joy. A Tano child of God going home. And he was probably a Roman Catholic as well. The parish priest would also send him on his way with another blessing.

“It takes too long to get the body back,” she said. “Then his wife and some of his people had to go there and get him. To make sure they didn’t embalm him. They do that if you’re not careful. The undertaker gets a lot of money for it.”

“We Navajos have that trouble, too,” Chee said. “If you’re not there to stop it, the funeral home people will get the body and mutilate it and charge you a lot of money for doing it. Like they do with white people.”

“They charge you a lot of money,” Mrs. Kanitewa agreed. “I read in the papers that the funeral home people even got a law passed so you can’t have the corpse incinerated. Even if you say so yourself, you got to get all the kinfolks to sign papers.” She rubbed her fingers together – society’s universal metaphor for the greed of its predator class. “They want to squeeze that money out of the widow.”

Blizzard shifted his weight on the plastic sofa, creating a round of crackling and signaling his impatience with this philosophizing. “Well,” he said. “You got about all you want?”

Chee ignored him.

“I’m not supposed to be asking anything about Mr. Sayesva because they handle that out of Albuquerque,” he told Mrs. Kanitewa. “I’m just interested in talking with Delmar. Do you know why he came home?”

“Yes,” she said. “He said he had to talk to his uncle.”

Ahh, Chee thought. He glanced at Blizzard to see if he’d noticed this, if he was aware that Sayesva was the kid’s uncle. Blizzard was. Too late now.

“To your brother?” Chee asked.

She nodded. “Yes. To my brother.”

“He came to tell your brother something?”

She nodded.

Blizzard ceased being the stoic Cheye

“We’re talking about Mr. Sayesva now,” he said. “What did your boy tell him? What did he want to see him about?”

“It was religious business,” she said. “He didn’t tell me.”

Sergeant Blizzard looked skeptical. “So how did you know it was religious if he didn’t tell you?”

The question surprised Mrs. Kanitewa. “Because he didn’t tell me,” she explained. “If it wasn’t religious, he would have told me.”

Blizzard’s expression changed from skeptical to blank. He said, “I don’t quite…” and then stopped. Chee considered interrupting to explain things. To give Blizzard a little lecture on how the Tano people, and most of the other Pueblos, kept their religious duties very much to themselves. Neither the boy nor any other citizen of the pueblo would ever discuss the business of his particular religious society with anyone not initiated into its kiva. Not even with his mother. Nor would she ask him to. If Delmar’s discussion with his uncle was religious, only his uncle would know about it. Chee respected that. To hell with Blizzard. Let the sergeant handle this himself.

It took a little longer that way, but Blizzard eventually got it straightened out. Delmar had arrived at the pueblo the afternoon before the ceremony. He had dropped off his backpack and gone to the house of Sayesva. Then he had come home, eaten supper, talked to his mother about school. He had told her he would go back after the ceremony. Then, before he went to bed, he’d gone to see his uncle again.

“Saw him again?” Blizzard asked. “Why?”

Mrs. Kanitewa considered. “I don’t know. He didn’t say. But I think now that it might have been something he heard on the radio.”

Blizzard’s expression suggested this conversation was full of surprises. “Like what? What did he say?”

“Well, he said he had to see Mr. Sayesva again. And he ran out of the house.”

Blizzard was leaning forward now. “I mean, what did he say he’d heard on the radio? Was it a news program or what?”

“He just said he had to go see his uncle. I didn’t hear what he was listening to.”

“What did he tell you when he came back?”

“I was asleep when he came back. It was late. Here we get up early, so we go to bed early.”

Blizzard leaned back, looking thoughtful. Digesting all this. Chee formed a question. What station was the radio tuned to? What time was it when Delmar heard whatever he’d heard? He stirred, took a deep breath.

“Could you estimate what time it was when you were out in the kitchen? When Delmar…”

Blizzard held up his hand. “Officer Chee,” he said. “Hey, now.”

“Suppertime,” Mrs. Kanitewa said. “Just getting dark.”

Blizzard was glaring at him. Chee swallowed the next question. The radio was on the end table beside the sofa. He looked at the dial. It was tuned to KNDN. “Kay-Indun.” The fifty-thousand-watt Farmington voice of the Big Rez. KNDN-AM was all-Navajo, but the FM version was mostly English. The Kanitewa radio was tuned to FM.

“Sayesva had a telephone,” Blizzard said. “At his office in Albuquerque and in his brother’s house here. The boy could have called him from school.”

“He was bringing him something,” Mrs. Kanitewa said.

Another surprise. “What?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t tell me. Something for Mr. Sayesva. Not my business.”

“Something he wouldn’t tell his mother about?” Blizzard asked.

“Not my business.”

“Didn’t you ask? Weren’t you curious?”

“Not my business.”

“Did you see it?”

“I saw a package.”

“What did it look like?”

“Like a package,” said Mrs. Kanitewa, whose expression suggested to Chee that what little patience she once had for police had worn thin. But she shrugged, and described it. “Sort of long.” She held her hands about three feet apart. “Not big around. I thought maybe it was a poster or a picture or something like that. It was round, like one of those cardboard tubes people get to mail big pictures in.”