“The general knows.” Oppy looked at Joe with a clear gaze of resignation and contempt. It was an inner look, a meditation. He put his hand out the open window and dropped the microphone onto the dirt outside. “You can’t help me, Joe.”

“You’re in charge of the most important lab in the war and you’re scared of a captain? They can’t do anything without you. You’re the goddamn bomb.”

“It’s … a temporary situation.”

The cattle guard was clearing. Augustino’s jeep waited far up the road.

Joe got out. “Then I’ll help Augustino.”

Oppy slid behind the wheel and asked, “Help him?”

“He wants to know who those clowns are. It takes an Indian to stop an Indian, right?”

“Joe—” Oppy started to protest. He began again. “Joe, twenty more days. After Trinity, no one can touch us.”

On his way back, Joe made a wide circuit of Santiago. Fuchs’ car was gone, probably halfway to the Hill by now. The Indian Service riders, Billy and Al, were drinking beers in the back of a tribal police car in an alley. All around the plaza, Indians ate fried bread on their roofs. Under the plaza cottonwood in an island of shade, tourists ate sandwiches. Waxed papers floated over the ground on waves of dust.

15

Around the shaft of sunlight that came down the ladder leading up to the kiva roof, three clowns repaired their black and white stripes from Mason jars of body paint. Two clowns without caps rested on the built-in benches of the walls. The last stood in the shadow of the corner to drink a Coke and piss into a pail. All turned to the side door as Joe came in.

He hadn’t been in a kiva for almost twenty years. Outside, the kiva of the clowns was a plain adobe house. Inside, though, the walls were painted in shapes barely visible in the dark. Snakes. Swallows. Stepped mountains and red and white clouds. The zigzag lightning slats of a dismantled altar stood between Spanish chests of prayer sticks and dance wands. In the middle of the floor was the traditional hole that led to the center of the earth. The clowns themselves seemed half-figures: white blocks, bars of black. Even so, Joe saw that one of the clowns without caps, a clown with loose gray hair, a heavy belly and spindly legs, was Ben Reyes.

“Psoot-bah!” Ben said; it was an order for a dog to scram. “Get out!”

“There are two Indian Service cowboys out there,” Joe told the other clown without a cap. “I think they came to arrest you.”

“You pointed him out,” Ben said.

“Fuchs pointed you out,” Joe told the other clown.

The clown’s long brown hair fell to his shoulders. Despite the dark of the kiva he still wore sunglasses from the morning dance. He tilted his head and smiled at Joe as if sharing a joke.