Sacred Clowns Read Online Free PDF Page B

that woman off his back. Told me to keep my nose out of everything else and just find the kid.”
    Blizzard devoted his attention for a while to guiding the patrol car into that section of the gravel road in which the washboarding was the least severe. Even so, the jolting rattled his clipboard, and the radio mike, and everything not fastened down. “The thing is,” Blizzard said, “the feds want to talk to the kid, too. So your nose is right in the middle of it. Both nostrils.” This caused Blizzard to chuckle.
    Chee had lost patience with Blizzard about fifty miles ago—maybe even before they’d left the parking lot at Blizzard’s BIA office in Albuquerque. There was no reason for Blizzard to act like this. He knew how the feds worked. The kid’s name was on the FBI list along with everybody known to have talked to Sayesva in the day or so before he was killed. That included just about everybody at Tano Pueblo and a lot of other people. There was no reason for Blizzard to be such a hardass over this, and Chee was tempted to tell him so. But he didn’t. He was in Blizzard’s jurisdiction, but that wasn’t what inhibited him. Blizzard was a Cheyenne. And even with the Yankees cap on, he looked like a Cheyenne. He had that hard, bony face. Profile like a hatchet. Chee had grown up seeing the Cheyennes and the Sioux with their war bonnets and lances, fighting the cavalry in the drive-in movie at Shiprock. Even when the movie had been made south of Gallup and you knew the Cheyennes were actually Navajos making some beer money as extras, they took on the aura of warriors under those war bonnets. When Chee and his friends at boarding school played cowboys and Indians, the Indians were always Cheyenne. It was a hang-up Chee hadn’t quite grown out of. To Jim Chee the man, as to Jim Chee the boy, the Cheyenne was the Indians’ Indian.
    “I’m not going to cause anybody any trouble,” Chee said. “Your FBI wants you to find the kid. My boss has ordered me to find Delmar Kanitewa. I’m just supposed to give his big-shot grandma a chance to talk to him about running away from school. So, like I said, if I can find him, I’ll tell you first, and then I’ll tell my boss. You tell the FBI in Albuquerque, and my boss tells the tribal councilwoman. Then I get to go back to doing something useful. Everybody’s happy.”
    Harold Blizzard didn’t look happy. He said “Uh-huh,” filling the sound with skepticism, and turned the car onto the road into Tano Pueblo. He didn’t hear a word I said, Chee thought. What a jerk. But Chee was wrong about the first part. Blizzard had been listening.
    “Trouble with all that is this boy is about name number sixty on the list the feds gave me,” Blizzard said, “and the list looks to me like they copied the son-of-a-bitch out of the Tano Pueblo census report. I think it’s everybody who’s been around Sayesva for the last month or so, plus his kinfolks. And I think everybody out here is kinfolks. And having a Navajo cop underfoot, and having to squire you around, is trouble. It’s both a pain in the butt and a time waster. You find the kid, and tell me, and I tell the feds, and by then they forgot what they wanted to ask him. So don’t try to tell me you’re going to make me happy.”
    Mrs. Kanitewa didn’t look happy either. She was standing in the door of a fairly new frame-and-stucco house—one of twenty or thirty such houses built on the fringes of the pueblo to meet the specifications of Indian Service housing. She was holding a box of frozen green beans and a butcher-paper package which Chee guessed would be ground beef to be thawed for supper. Through the doorway behind her, Chee could see a great pile of shucked corn filling a corner of the room. Mrs. Kanitewa gave them the smile made mandatory by traditions of hospitality. She didn’t look like she meant it.
    “Well, come on in then,” she said. “Delmar’s not home yet, but if you want me to tell you about it