People of Darkness jlajc-4

by Tony Hillerman

  One of the Navajo workers who escaped last week’s fatal explosion at a Valencia County oil drilling site was being questioned today about reports that he had advance knowledge the explosion would occur.

  Sheriff Gilberto Garcia identified the man as Dillon Charley. He said Charley has admitted warning five other Navajo co-workers at the well not to go to work last Friday because something bad was going to happen.

  He claims he got the warning from God in some sort of religious vision, Garcia said. He said that Charley is the peyote chief in the Native American cult and that the five other Navajos on the work crew were also members of the religious organization.

  Members of the cult chew seed buttons from the peyote cactus as part of their rites, A narcotic in the peyote reportedly affects the nervous system, causing hallucinations in some users. Possession of the substance is illegal, and the Navajo Tribal Council has passed specific legislation banning its use or possession on the reservation.

  The sheriff also revealed that Charley had been injured in what Garcia called an attempt to resist arrest. He said Deputy Sheriff Lawrence Sena had been placed under suspension until we can determine if undue force was used. Deputy Sena’s brother, Robert Sena, was one of the men blown to bits when a nitroglycerin charge went off prematurely at the well last Friday.

  Notice that? Chee asked. He poked his finger at the proper paragraph. Gordo roughed up Dillon Charley. He must have really roughed him up to get suspended for it. Beating up a Navajo wasn’t considered such a big deal in those days. He leaned back, away from the microfilm projector hood, and looked at Mary. Her expression was quizzical.

  What do you think? he asked.

  I think you’re strange, she said. I think you’re weird. You have this creepy murderer trying to shoot you, and you’re down here all excited, reading about something that happened thirty years ago.

  You, too, Chee said. How about you?

  I’m not excited, she said.

  I mean he’s trying to shoot you, too.

  I don’t believe that, Mary said. You’re the one who got a good look at him. You’re the one he came after. She looked away from him, leaning again into the microfilm reader. A nice profile, Chee thought. Nice. She was looking down, reading the projected type. Her eyes were very blue and the lashes curved away from them in a long, graceful sweep. Her hair fell across her cheek. Soft hair. Soft cheek.

  Another thing, Mary said without glancing up. What’s all this concern about a cop beating up a Navajo? From what I heard at Laguna, the worst cops for beating up Navajos were Navajo cops.

  We’d rather beat up Anglos, Chee said, but we don’t have jurisdiction over you folks. He watched her profile as he said it, looking for the reaction that would tell him something about her. Her jibe about Navajo police was partly seriousprobably mostly serious. Navajo police, like most police, had a reputation of being toughest on their own people. Her eyes were still on the projected page. You haven’t really told me what happened up in the hospital. How you got away. And you haven’t told me your secret name.

  The elbow had reappeared from behind the pillar. Motionless now. Its owner must be leaning on the pillar. Reading, perhaps.

  I hid, Chee said. Like a rabbit.

  She looked at him. Why like a rabbit? You think you should have come on like Monster Slayer? She grabbed his wrist and raised his hand. Me mighty redskin. Me take on gun with bare hands. Me big hero. Me dead, but me hero. She dropped his hand. If you didn’t have time to do a little ghost dance to make your hospital gown bulletproof, I think the smart thing to do was get under the bed.

  The way it worked, I guess I was hiding behind another guy. My roommate. He gave her a quick sketch of what had happened, from the furtive trip downstairs to find out how the body had been stolen from the morgue. He told it quickly, without interpretation and without speculation. Just the facts, he thought. Just the facts. And while he told them, he watched her face.

  She pursed her lips into a soundless whistle and shuddered. I’d have been terrified. She looked at him a moment, her lower lip caught between her teeth. How did you think to climb up into the ceiling?

  That’s not the point, Chee said. The point is I got away because I left the blond man somebody to shoot. He came into the room to shoot himself an Indian. Nobody home but a Mexican. So the Chicano gets shot instead of me.

  She was frowning at him again. So?

  So? What do you mean, so?

  So what, she said. You on some guilt trip? You think you should have stayed behind? Bared your chest and said, ‘Here I am. Don’t shoot this other guy.’ Come on. Her voice was scornful. He shot the nurse, didn’t he? The only difference would have been he’d have shot both of you.

  Maybe, Chee said.

  You really are weird, Mary Landon said. Either that, or you want me to think you are.

  Well, Chee said. No use talking about it now. Let’s see what else we can find.

  They found very little. There was a lengthy story about the Native American Church, the ceremony, and what the members said about Dillon Charley’s vision of warning. There was a short item in which the sheriff reported that one of the victims had been definitely identified from dental work as an employee of Petrolab. But the story seemed quickly to die away for lack of new information.

  If Sena, or any of the other victims, was identified, it wasn’t mentioned in the Beacon. Nor was there any follow-up story on the arrest of Dillon Charley. His release, whenever it happened, went without notice in the paper.

  They worked through the microfilm slowly now, page by page, looking for the remainders of a story that was no longer banner headline news. Halfway through the September editions, after an hour of finding nothing, Mary had an idea.

  Hey, she said. Newspapers do anniversary stories. You know. They start, ‘A year ago today’ and then they rehash it all. Why don’t we skip ahead a year?

  Chee stood and stretched. He pushed the lever to the left. The reels hummed with the rewinding. The young woman had left the microfilm area. The elbow was missing from the pillar. Protruding now into Chee’s line of vision was the tip of a nose and a shock of hair. The hair was blond. Very blond. Chee felt his stomach muscles tighten. He released the lever and moved his right hand into his coat pocket. The hand found the pistol grip. The thumb found the hammer.

  What? Mary said. She was staring at him.

  The man emerged from behind the pillar. He glanced at Mary. He was very blond, but he wasn’t the blond man. Far too young. No resemblance at all. He moved to the microfilm file and began rummaging.

  Nothing, Chee said. I’m just jumpy.

  They found the anniversary story. It reported little new.

  By the time the copying desk had made Xeroxes of the microfilmed stories for them, it was five o’clock.

  Now what? Mary asked. It occurs to me that Sergeant Chee of the Mounties has just wasted one afternoon, plus the afternoon of one Crownpoint schoolteacher, and isn’t going to have the slightest idea of what to do next. This is a dead end. Right?

  No, Chee said. They were climbing the stairway that spiraled upward through the four levels of the working end of the university library. An artist had used the stairwell walls to depict in paint and plaster the history of man’s efforts to record his communication with his fellows. Here, below the ground floor, they climbed past pictographs and petroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was far overhead, and the symbolic language of computers even higher. Maybe it doesn’t lead anywhere, but I’d like to talk to some of those men who got warned away from that explosion. I’d like to find out what Dillon Charley told them.

  They emerged on the ground-floor level. Through the glass south wall of the library, the Humanities Building loomed above the sycamores of the central mall, a monolithic sculpture against a dark-blue autumn sky. Usually Chee liked the building. Today it reminded him of tombstones.

  Why? Mary said. What can they possibly tell you that has anything to do with this?

  Maybe
nothing, Chee said. But the killings grew out of the keepsake box, and stealing the keepsake box seems to have something to do somehow with Dillon Charley’s peyote religion, and everything seems to lead back to what happened at the oil well.

  Or maybe you’re just curious, Mary said. Anyway, you won’t be able to find them. It’s been thirty years.

  It won’t be so hard, Chee said. They’ll probably all be kinfolks of Dillon Charley. He hired them, so they’ll be kinfolks. Cousins, or uncles, or in-laws at least. The Navajos not only invented nepotism. We perfected it.

  But thirty years, Mary said. They’ll be dead. Or half of them will be. .

  One or two, probably, Chee said. We know Dillon Charley is. But the odds are about four of them are still around. They were outside now, walking across the bricked mall south of the library with the brittle sycamore leaves underfoot and the heatless light of the setting sun throwing their shadows a hundred yards ahead and turning the craggy east face of the Sandia Mountains the color of diluted blood. Chee thought of that, and of Hunt walking fifty feet behind them, and of the target they would make for someone standing at any of the walkways or balconies that overlooked the mall.

  And what can they remember about thirty years ago? Probably not much.

  Who knows? Chee said. He thought. Probably nothing with any real accuracy. But there was no other lead to follow. And if nothing else, hunting survivors of the People of Darkness would take him out on the reservation. He would take Mary with him. On the reservation, the blond man would never know where to look for them. Chapter Twenty-Two

  A day later, Chee had taken a fruitless shot in the dark and added a few details to his list of names of Dillon Charley’s People of Darkness.

  The shot in the dark had taken him to the university’s Geology Department library. With some help from a cooperative graduate student, he had found a copy of the geologist’s log of the oil well. It looks fairly typical of that area, the student told him. There’s been some shallow production from the Galisteo formation. He checked through it quickly. Looks like they found the formation but not the oil.

  You see anything unusual about it? Chee asked. The log was totally incomprehensible to him. He stared at the sheet of symbols and notations, feeling foolish.

  I’m no authority on Valencia County petroleum geology, the young man said. But it looks like what I’d expect. What are you looking for?

  That’s the trouble, Chee said. I don’t know.

  His luck in hunting Charley’s roustabout crew had been only a little better. He and Mary had driven to the reservation and spent the remaining hours of daylight jolting over the washboard back roads and wagon trails of the Checkerboard, hunting information to go with the names extracted from the Grants Beacon. By nightfall the list had looked like this:

  Roscoe Sam, Ojo Encino or Standing Rock. Mud Clan. Dead. Confirmed.

  Joseph Sam, Ojo Encino or maybe Pueblo Pintado area. Mud Clan and married into Salt Clan. One report he died in the 1950s. Others say no.

  Windy Tsossie. Mud Clan. Married into Standing Rock Clan. Used to live around Heart Butte? May be dead?

  Rudolph Becenti. Mud Clan. Coyote Canyon? Married?

  Woody Begay. Mud Clan. Sister lives at Borrego Pass?

  It had been generally frustrating, except for Roscoe Sam who had got sick at Tuba City and died in the bia hospital there, and was remembered as being dead. Joseph Sam was another matter. A distant cousin on the paternal side of the family thought, rather vaguely, that he, too, was dead. Another even more distant paternal-side cousin said he’d moved his wife’s sheep and his own belongings over to the Caoncito Reservation and probably still lived there. Dead or alive, no one had seen Joseph Sam for years. It was the same for the rest of them. An in-law remembered that Rudolph Becenti had moved to Los Angeles but had heard he’d come back again. Windy Tsossie was recalled dimly and unfavorably by a few of his contemporaries around Ambrosia Lakes as one of the Tsossie outfit which had lived at Coyote Canyon but had moved away a long time ago. Except for Roscoe Sam, definitely and specifically dead and buried, the day had produced nothing concrete. As for Woody Begay, there was only an old woman’s memory that his sister lived north of the Borrego Pass chapter house, and his sister’s name was Fannie Kinlicheenie.

  The vagueness of it had puzzled Chee. It was almost as if these People of Darkness existed only in shadowy rumors and not as flesh and blood. Even the site of the oil well explosion eluded them. The hunt for Roscoe Sam had taken them near the place where Chee’s notes said it had been. They found only the immense dusty hole that was the Red Deucea dozen gigantic power shovels eating the earth in a pit that was already two hundred yards deep and a half mile across. The oil well site, too, seemed part of a memory of something that never was.

  But Fannie Kinlicheenie was definitely flesh and blood. She had looked out the doorway of her house at them when they drove up. Chee parked his patrol car a polite thirty yards from the residence, thereby respecting a modest people’s tradition of privacy. When Fannie Kinlicheenie was ready to receive guests she would let them know. Meanwhile they would wait. Chee offered a cigaret to Mary, and she took it.

  I shouldn’t smoke these things, she said, as he lit it for her.

  Neither should I, Chee said.

  This guy’s going to be dead, too, Mary said. Either that or moved way off somewhere.

  Chee had a feeling she was right. Otherwise, someone would have remembered him.

  You’re too pessimistic, Chee said.

  No. I’m a realist. There’s four of them left. After thirty years, you’d have a mortality rate of about twenty-five percent. I think Woody Begay’s the one.

  Chee considered this logic. He exhaled a cloud of cigaret smoke.

  You started with six, he said. We got Dillon Charley dead, and Roscoe Sam dead. That’s already a thirty-three percent mortality.

  Mary didn’t comment for a moment.

  Then she said, If you think like that you should avoid poker games. What happened in the past doesn’t affect the mathematics. It doesn’t affect the probabilities. Forget the other two. Now we have the names of four men who were alive thirty years ago. Chances are one of the four is dead now and three of them are alive.

  Okay, Chee said. I’ll buy that. Now tell me how you figure the dead one will be Woody Begay.

  That’s intuition, Mary said. Women have intuition.

  Chee reached for the key in the ignition. Any use sticking around, you think? Wasting Fannie’s time.

  Mary grinned at him. As long as we’ve come this far, maybe we might as well confirm the hunch.

  I’d like to, Chee said. Sure you won’t be insulted?

  Naw, she said. I was wrong once.

  But not recently, Chee said.

  I think I was four. She paused. No, as a matter of fact, make that twice I was wrong. The second time was being dumb enough to go along on this Great Jimmy Chee Manhunt. Boy, am I tired. How far did we drive today?

  I don’t know, Chee said. Maybe two hundred and fifty miles. It just seems longer because a lot of it was dirt roads.

  It seems like a thousand, Mary said. This thing rides like a truck. I think you have too much air in the tires.

  We put in the specified amount, Chee said. It’s intended to jar us around enough so we don’t doze off while driving.

  Come to think of it, there was another time I was wrong. She glanced at him and looked quickly away. That was at the auction, when I got the impression you were interested in me.

  I am, Chee said.

  I mean romantically. You’re interested in me because I’m an Anglo. Questions all day long. I feel like I’m being interviewed by a sociologist.

  Anthropologist, Chee said. And that’s the same reason you came along with me. ‘What’s this Navajo Indian really like?’ You just won’t admit it.

  Mary laughed. I admit it, she said. Now I know what you’re really like. You’re weird.

  But who knows, Chee said. Maybe something
great will grow out of it. We had a Shakespeare teacher at unm who said that Romeo was doing a paper on the Capulets for his social studies class. He just wanted to pick Juliet’s mind.

  I think he was the Capulet, Mary said. She was a Montague.

  ‘What’s in a name?’ Chee recited. ‘A rose by any other name’

  So what’s your secret name? Mary asked.

  Rose, Chee said. Something like that.

  The Kinlicheenie house was of wood-frame construction, insulated with black tar paper. It sat on an expanse of sandstone elevated enough to offer a fine view of a rolling, eroded landscapegray-silver sage and black creosote brush.

  On the horizon Mount Taylor dominated, as it dominated everything in the Checkerboard. Its top was white, but its slopes were blue and serene. Behind the house was a circular stone hogan, its doorway facing properly eastward. And behind that stood a small Montgomery Ward steel storage shed and the humped roof of the dugout where the family took its sweat baths. Ever notice how Navajos always build their houses where they have a view? Chee asked.

  I’ve noticed that Navajos build their houses as far as they can possibly get from other Navajos, Mary said. Any significance to that?

  We don’t like Indians, Chee said.

  Mrs. Kinlicheenie was at the door now. Her hair was neatly tied in a bun, and she was wearing a heavy silver squash-blossom necklace and a wide silver-and-turquoise bracelet. Mrs. Kinlicheenie was ready to receive guests. Chapter Twenty-Three

  My brother? Fannie Kinlicheenie’s expression was puzzled. You want to find him?

  They were in the front room of the house. The chair in which Jim Chee sat was covered with a stiff green plastic. He felt the chill of it through his uniform shirt. The house was the summer hogan of the Kinlicheenies. There was no heating stove in it. In a while, when the high country frost arrived full force, the family would shift its belongings into the old earth-and-stone winter hogan and abandon this poorly insulated structure to the cold. Until then, the problem of the chilly margin between the seasons was solved by wearing more layers of clothing. Fannie Kinlicheenie looked about eight layers deep. Chee wished he had worn his jacket in from the patrol car.