Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 09 - Talking God

by Talking God(lit)

  "I don't know," she said. "I thought so once. But it's hard to handle. A different culture."

  "And you don't mean different from Navajo?"

  She laughed. "No. I don't mean that. I guess I mean different from the empty West."

  Henry Highhawk's place was about seven blocks from the Metro station-a narrow, two-story brick house halfway down a block of such narrow houses. Tied to the pillar just beside the mailbox was something which looked like a paho. Chee inspected it while Janet rang the bell. It was indeed a Navajo prayer stick, with the proper feathers attached. If Highhawk had made it, he knew what he was doing. And then Highhawk was at the door, inviting them in. He was taller than Chee remembered him from the firelight at Agnes Tsosie's place. Taller and leaner and more substantial, more secure in his home territory than he had been surrounded by a strange culture below the Tsosies' butte. The limp, which had touched Chee with a sense of pity at the Tsosie Yeibichai, seemed natural here. The jeans Highhawk wore had been cut to accommodate the hinged metal frame that reinforced his short leg. The brace, the high lift under the small left boot, the limp, all of them seemed in harmony with this lanky man in this crowded little house. He had converted his Kiowa-Comanche braids into a tight Navajo bun. But nothing would convert his long, bony, melancholy face into something that would pass for one of the Dineh. He would always look like a sorrowful white boy.

  Highhawk was in his kitchen pouring coffee before he recognized Chee. He looked at Chee intently as he handed him his cup.

  "Hey," he said, laughing. "You're the Navajo cop who arrested me."

  Chee nodded. Highhawk wanted to shake hands again-a "no hard feelings" gesture. "Policeman, I mean," Highhawk amended, his face flushed with embarrassment. "It was very efficient. And I appreciated you getting that guy to drive that rent-a-car back to Gallup for me. That saved me a whole bunch of money. Probably at least a hundred bucks."

  "Saved me some work, too," Chee said. "I would have had to do something about it the next morning." Chee was embarrassed, too. He wasn't accustomed to this switch in relationships. And Highhawk's behavior puzzled him a little. It was too deferential, too-Chee struggled for the word. He was reminded of a day at his uncle's sheep camp. Three old dogs, all shaggy veterans. And the young dog his uncle had won somewhere gambling. His uncle lifting the young dog out of the back of the pickup. The old dogs, tense and interested, conscious that their territory was being invaded. The young dog walking obliquely toward them, head down, tail down, legs bent, sending all the canine signals of inferiority and subjection, deferring to their authority.

  "I'm Bitter Water Dinee," Highhawk said. He looked shy as he said it, tangling long, slender fingers. "At least my grandmother was, and so I guess I can claim it."

  Chee nodded. "I am one of the Slow Talking Dineh," he said. He didn't mention that his father's clan was also Bitter Water, which made it Chee's own "born for" clan. That made him and Highhawk related on their less important paternal side. But then, after two generations under normal reservation circumstances, that secondary paternal link would have submerged by marriages into other clans. Chee considered it, and felt absolutely no kinship link with this strange, lanky man. Whatever his dreams and pretensions, Highhawk was still a belagaana.

  They sat in the front room then, Chee and Janet occupying a sofa and Highhawk perched on a wooden chair. Someone, Chee guessed it had been Highhawk, had enlarged the room by removing the partition which once had separated it from a small dining alcove. But most of this space was occupied by two long tables, and the tables were occupied by tools, by what apparently had been a section of tree root, by a roll of leather, a box of feathers, slabs of wood, paint jars, brushes, carving knives-the paraphernalia of Highhawk's profession.

  "You had something to tell me," Highhawk said to Janet. He glanced at Chee.

  "Your preliminary hearing has been set," Janet said. "We finally got them to put it on the calendar. It's going to be two weeks from tomorrow and we have to get some things decided before then."

  Highhawk grinned at her. It lit his long, thin face and made him look even more boyish. "You could have told me that on the telephone," he said. "I'll bet there was more than that." He glanced at Chee again.

  Chee got up and looked for a place to go. "I'll give you some privacy," he said.

  "You could take a look at my kachina collection," Highhawk said. "Back in the office." He pointed down the hallway. "First door on the right."

  "It's not all that confidential," Janet said. "But I can imagine what the bar association would say about me talking about a plea bargain with a client right in front of the arresting officer."

  The office was small and as cluttered as the living area. The desk was a massive old roll top, half buried under shoeboxes filled with scraps of cloth, bone fragments, wood, odds and ends of metal. A battered cardboard box held an unpainted wooden figure carved out of what seemed to be cottonwood root. It stared up at Chee through slanted eye sockets, looking somehow pale and venomous. Some sort of fetish or figurine, obviously. Something Highhawk must be replicating for a museum display. Or could it be the Tano War God? Another box was beside it. Chee pulled back the flaps and looked inside it. He looked into the face of Talking God.

  The mask of the Yeibichai was made as the traditions of the Navajos ruled it must be made-of deerskin surmounted by a bristling crown of eight eagle feathers. The face was painted white. Its mouth protruded an inch or more, a narrow tube of rolled leather. Its eyes were black dots surmounted by painted brows. The lower rim of the mask was a ruff of fox fur. Chee stared at it, surprised. Such masks are guarded, handed down in the family only to a son willing to learn the poetry and ritual of the Night Chant, and to carry the role his father kept as a Yeibichai dancer.

  Keepers of such masks gave the spirits that lived within them feedings of corn pollen. Chee examined this mask. He found no sign of the smearing pollen would have left on the leather. It was probably a replica Highhawk had made. Even so, when he closed the cardboard flaps on the box, he did so reverently.

  Three shelves beside the only window were lined with the wooden figures of the kachina spirits. Mostly Hopi, it seemed to Chee, but he noticed Zuni Mudheads and the great beaked Shalako, the messenger bird from the Zuni heavens, and the striped figures of Rio Grande Pueblo clown fraternities. Most of them looked old and authentic. That also meant expensive.

  Behind him in the front room, Chee heard Janet's voice rise in argument, and Highhawk's laugh. He presumed Janet was telling her client during this ironic gesture at confidentiality what she had already told Chee on the walk from the subway. The prosecutor with jurisdiction over crime in Connecticut had more important things on his mind than disturbed graves, especially when they involved a minority political gesture. He would welcome some sort of plea-bargain compromise. Highhawk and attorney would be welcome to come in and discuss it. More than welcome.

  "I don't think this nut of mine will go for it," Janet had told Chee. "Henry wants to do a Joan of Arc with all the TV cameras in sharp focus. He's got the speech already written. 'If this is justice for me, to go to jail for digging up your ancestors, where then is the justice for the whites who dug up the bones of my ancestors?' He won't agree, not today anyway, but I'll make the pitch. You come along and it will give you a chance to talk to him and see what you think."

  And, sure enough, from the combative tone Chee could hear in Highhawk's voice, Janet's client wasn't going for it. But what the devil was Chee supposed to learn here? What was he supposed to think? That Highhawk was taller than he remembered? And had changed his hairstyle? That wasn't what Janet expected. She expected him to smell out some sort of plot involving her law firm, and a fellow following her, and a big corporation developing land in New Mexico. He looked around the cluttered office. Fat chance.

  But it was interesting. Flaky as he seemed, Highhawk was an artist. Chee noticed a half-finished Mudhead figure on the table and picked it up. The traditional masks, as Chee had seen them
at Zuni Shalako ceremonials, were round, clay-colored, and deformed with bumps. They represented the idiots born after a daughter of the Sun committed incest with her brother. Despite the limiting conventions of little round eyes and little round mouth, Highhawk had carved into the small face of this figurine a kind of foolish glee. Chee put it down carefully and reinspected the kachinas on the shelf. Had Highhawk made them, too? Chee checked. Some of them, probably. Some looked too old and weathered for recent manufacture. But perhaps Highhawk's profession made him skilled in aging, too.

  It was then he noticed the sketches. They were stacked on the top level of the roll-top desk, done on separate sheets of heavy artist's paper. The top one showed a boy, a turkey with its feathers flecked with jewels, a log, smoke rising from it as it was burned to hollow it into a boat. The setting was a riverbank, a cliff rising behind it. Chee recognized the scene. It was from the legend of Holy Boy, the legend reenacted in the Yeibichai ceremony. It showed the spirit child, still human, preparing for his journey down the San Juan River with his pet turkey. The artist seemed to have captured the very moment when the illness which was to paralyze him had struck the child. Somehow the few lines which suggested his naked body also suggested that he was falling, in the throes of anguish. And above him, faintly in the very air itself, there was the blue half-round face of the spirit called Water Sprinkler.

  The sound of Highhawk's laugh came from the adjoining room, and Janet Pete's earnest voice. Chee sorted through the other sketches. Holy Boy floating in his hollow log, prone and paralyzed, with the turkey running on the bank beside him-neck and wings outstretched in a kind of frozen panic; Holy Boy, partially cured but now blind, carrying the crippled Holy Girl on his shoulders; the two children, hand in hand, surrounded by the towering figures of Talking God, Growling God, Black God, Monster Slayer, and the other yei-all looking down on the children with the relentless, pitiless neutrality of the Navajo gods toward mortal men. There was something in this scene-something in all these sketches now that he was aware of it-that was troubling. A sort of surreal, off-center dislocation from reality. Chee stared at the sketches, trying to understand. He shook his head, baffled.

  Aside from this element, he was much impressed both by Highhawk's talent and by the man's knowledge of Navajo metaphysics. The poetry of the Yeibichai ceremonial usually used didn't include the role of the girl child. Highhawk had obviously done his homework.

  The doorbell rang, startling Chee. He put down the sketch and went to the office door. Highhawk was talking to someone at the front door, ushering him into the living room.

  It was a man, slender, dark, dressed in the standard uniform of Washington males.

  "As you can see, Rudolfo, my lawyer is always on the job," Highhawk was saying. The man turned and bowed to Janet Pete, smiling.

  It was Rudolfo Gomez, Mr. Bad Hands.

  "I've come at a bad time," Bad Hands said. "I didn't notice Miss Pete's car outside. I didn't realize you were having a conference."

  Jim Chee stepped out of the office. Bad Hands recognized him instantly, and with a sort of controlled shock that seemed to Chee to include not just surprise but a kind of dismay.

  "And this is Jim Chee," Highhawk said. "You gentlemen have met before. Remember? On the reservation. Mr. Chee is the officer who arrested me. Jim Chee, this is Rudolfo Gomez, an old friend."

  "Ah, yes," Bad Hands said. "Of course. This is an unexpected pleasure."

  "And Mr. Gomez is the man who put up my bail," Highhawk said to Chee. "An old friend."

  Bad Hands was wearing his gloves. He made no offer to shake hands. Neither did Chee. It was not, after all, a Navajo custom.

  "Sit down," Highhawk said. "We were talking about my preliminary hearing."

  "I've come at a bad time," Bad Hands said. "I'll call you tomorrow."

  "No. No," Janet Pete said. "We're finished. We were just leaving." She gave Chee the look.

  "Right," Chee said. "We have to go."

  A cold wind out of the northwest had blown away the drizzle. They walked down the steps from Highhawk's porch and passed a blue Datsun parked at the sidewalk. It wasn't the car Bad Hands had been driving at the Agnes Tsosie place, but that had been three thousand miles away. That one was probably rented. "What'd you think?" Janet Pete asked.

  "I don't know," Chee said. "He's an interesting man."

  "Gomez or Highhawk?"

  "Both of them," Chee said. "I wonder what happened to Gomez's hands. I wonder why Highhawk calls him an old friend. But I meant Highhawk. He's interesting."

  "Yeah," Janet said. "And suicidal. He's flat determined to go to jail." They walked a little. "Stupid son of a bitch," she added. "I could get him off with some community service time and a suspended sentence."

  "You know anything about this Gomez guy?" Chee asked.

  "Just what I told you and what Highhawk said. Old friends. Gomez posted his bail."

  'They're not old friends," Chee said. "I told you that. I saw them meet at that Yeibichai where I arrested him. Highhawk had never seen the guy before."

  "You sure of that? How do you know?"

  "I know," Chee said.

  Janet put her hand on his arm, slowed. "There he is," she said in a tiny voice. "That car. That's the man who's been following me."

  The car was parked across the street from them. An aging Chevy two-door, its medium color hard to distinguish in the shadows.

  "You sure?" Chee said.

  "See the radio antenna? Bent like that? And the dent in the back fender? It's the same car." Janet was whispering. "I really looked at it. I memorized it."

  What to do? His inclination was to ignore this situation, to simply walk past the car and see what happened. Nothing would happen, except Janet would think he was a nerd. He felt uneasy. On the reservation, he would have simply trotted across the street and confronted the driver. But confront him with what? Here Chee felt inept and incompetent. This entire business seemed like something one saw on television. It was urban. It seemed dangerous but it was probably just silly. What the devil would the Washington Police Department recommend in such a circumstance?

  They were still walking very slowly. "What should we do?" Janet asked.

  "Stay here," Chee said. "I'll go see about it."

  He walked diagonally across the street, watching the dim light reflecting from the driver's-side window. What would he do if the window started down? If he saw a gun barrel? But the window didn't move.

  Beside the car now, Chee could see a man behind the steering wheel, looking at him.

  Chee tapped on the glass. Wondering why he was doing this. Wondering what he would say.

  Nothing happened. Chee waited. The man behind the wheel appeared to be motionless.

  Chee tapped on the window again, rapping the glass with the knuckles of his right hand.

  The window came down, jerkily, squeaking.

  "Yeah?" the man said. He was looking up at Chee. A small face, freckled. The man had short hair. It seemed to be red. "Whaddaya want?"

  Chee wanted very badly to get a better look at the man. He seemed to be small. Unusually small. Chee could see no sign that he was armed, but that would be hard to tell in the darkness of the front seat.

  "The lady I'm with, she thinks you've been following her," Chee said. "Any reason for her to think that?"

  "Following her?" The man leaned forward toward the window, looking past Chee at Janet Pete waiting across the street. "What for?"

  "I'm asking if you've been following her," Chee said.

  "Hell, no," the man said. "What is this anyway? Who the hell are you?"

  "I'm a cop," Chee said, thinking as he said it that it was the first smart thing he'd said in this conversation. And it was more or less true. A good thing to have said as long as this guy didn't ask for identification.

  The man looked up at him. "You sure as hell don't look like a cop to me," he said. "You look like an Indian. Let's see some identification."

  "Let's see your identif
ication," Chee said.

  "Ah, screw this," the man said, disappearing from the window. The glass squeaked as he rolled it up. The engine started. The headlights came on. The car rolled slowly away from the curb and down the street. It made a careful right turn and disappeared. Absolutely no hurry.

  Chee watched it go. Through the back window he noticed that only the top of the driver's head protruded above the back of the seat. A very small driver.

  Chapter Twelve

  ®

  Since boyhood Fleck had been one of those persons who like to worry about one thing at a time. This morning he wanted to worry only about Mama. What the devil was he going to do about her? He was up against the Fat Man's deadline. Get her out of that nursing home. "Get her out now!" the Fat Man had shouted it at him. "Not one more day!" The only place he'd found to put her wanted first month and last month in advance. With all those so-called incidental expenses they always stuck you with for the private room, that added up to more than six thousand dollars. Fleck had most of it. Plus he had ten thousand coming, and overdue. But that didn't help him right now. He'd scared the Fat Man enough to hold him a day or two. But he couldn't count on much more than that. The son of a bitch was the kind who just might call the cops in on him. That wasn't something Fleck wanted to deal with. Not with Mama involved. He had to get the ten thousand.