Sacred Clowns by Tony Hillerman Read Free Book Online Page B

transmit themselves through the clear, dry air without need for verbalizing.
    “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “That’s the plan.”
    “That’s what I heard,” Streib said.
    Leaphorn looked at his watch, a $13.99 Casio digital. He pushed the proper buttons and adjusted the seconds.
    “I checked it when they gave the time on the radio,” he said. “It’s a little slow. Or maybe the radio is a little fast. Probably it was exactly right. Makes you wonder why anyone would pay a hundred bucks for a watch. Or one of those five-thousand-dollar jobs.”
    Streib ignored this signal to change the subject.
    “That’s a hell of a long ways to go,” Streib said. “All the way to China. If you got something going with the lady, why not just stay here? Nobody would care. You’re a widower. I think she’s single. That’s what I heard.”
    “I always wanted to go to China.”
    “Yeah,” Streib said. “Really. I’ll bet you did.”
    The skepticism provoked Leaphorn. “I used to talk about it with Emma,” he said, irritated with himself for explaining this to Streib. “But she didn’t like to travel. She went to New York with me once. And once to Washington. But it was really just to keep me company. It made her nervous, being away from the reservation. Even when we just went to Albuquerque. Or Phoenix. She’d be anxious to get home.”
    “I heard the lady was doing a research project in China. Quite a coincidence.” The tone remained skeptical. “Good thing she wasn’t doing research on Antarctica or you’d be telling me of your lifelong fascination with penguins.”
    “Back when I was a grad student at Arizona State I got interested,” Leaphorn said. “We had an anthro professor who was into linguistics. The evolution of languages, that sort of thing. He’d ask me how my grandfather said things, and my relatives. And he’d show me the charts he’d accumulated about the Athabascan languages up and down the Pacific Coast, Canada, Alaska, and across the straits among some of the Siberian tribes. It got me interested.”
    Leaphorn looked up, made a deprecatory gesture. “You know,” he said. “Where’s my homeland? Where’d the Dineh come from? Where are my roots?”
    “You Navajos came up from the underworld,” Streib said. “Up from the fourth world into the fifth world. Through a hollow reed, wasn’t it?”
    “Flooded out, just like you bilagaani,” Leaphorn said. “You guys made yourself an ark out of gopher wood. Hauled out the animals. We had to climb through a hole in the ceiling and the animals had to climb out, too.”
    “I guess my ancestors—the German ones— came out of Alsace. That part that switches back to France depending on who won the last war. But I never much wanted to go see it.”
    Streib uncapped his thermos, poured coffee into a cup marked austin sam for tribal council, new lands chapter, and handed it to Leaphorn. He poured coffee into the thermos cap for himself “Maybe if I had a good-looking woman as a traveling companion I’d find Alsace more interesting.”
    Leaphorn let it pass. Sipped coffee.
    Streib grinned at him. “Admit it,” he said. “Knock off the bullshit about tracking down your roots. I’ve met the prof a couple of times. At cultural doings there at the university. She’s a nice-looking woman.”
    Leaphorn finished his coffee slowly.
    “Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed,” Streib said.
    “See if you can pour me some more coffee,” Leaphorn said, passing the cup. “Without talking.”
    “I’m not knocking it,” Streib said. “I think it’s a good idea. Why not? You’ve been alone now for too damn long. It’s making you cranky. The old testosterone must still be working. Young man like you. You better find yourself a permanent lady or you’ll be hanging around the squaw dances and getting yourself into trouble.”
    Leaphorn thought: A year and eight months and eleven days since the nurse had awakened him in the chair in Emma’s room. She