People of Darkness jlajc-4

by Tony Hillerman

  We heard this man was your brother, Chee said. We need some information from him.

  But he’s dead, Fannie Kinlicheenie said. He’s been dead for She paused, trying to put a date on it. Why, he was dead when I got married, and that was 1953.

  Chee glanced at Mary. I didn’t know that, he said.

  Fannie Kinlicheenie was frowning at him.

  Why did you want to talk to him?

  He used to be a member of the peyote church. The one over by Grants. We wanted to ask him about that.

  Those sons-a-bitches, Fannie Kinlicheenie said in English. What you want to know about them?

  About something that happened way back. Your brother and some of them were working on an oil well. The peyote chief warned them not to go one day, and the well blew up while they were away.

  I know about that, Fannie said. I was a girl then and I was in that peyote church, too. I was the water carrier. You know about that?

  Yes, Chee said. He didn’t know everything about the Native American Church, but he knew the water carrier, usually a woman, played a minor role in the ritual.

  Those sons-a-bitches, she repeated. There was She paused, glanced at Mary, and back at Chee. They had been speaking in English, the language shared by all three. Now Fannie Kinlicheenie shifted languages. There was witches in that church, she said in Navajo. One talked cautiously of witches. One discussed them with strangers reluctantly. One talked of them not at all in front of those who were not members of the People. Mary was not Dinetahnot of the People.

  How do you know they were witches? Chee asked. He stuck to English. Sometimes people get blamed for being skinwalkers when they’re not.

  Fannie Kinlicheenie answered in Navajo. They gave my brother corpse sickness, she said.

  Maybe he ran into a witch somewhere else.

  It was them, she said. There were other things. There was that oil well that blew up that year. They pretended the Lord Peyote told them it was going to happen. They told everybody that the Lord sent a vision to tell them not to go to work that day. But the witches blew up that oil well. That’s how they knew it was going to happen.

  How do you know that? Chee asked. He had forgotten to speak English. In fact, he had forgotten Mary, who sat there listening and looking puzzled.

  I just know it, Fannie Kinlicheenie said.

  Chee considered this. An irrelevant thought intruded. In a white man’s home there would not be this complete silence. There would be the ticking of a clock, the sounds refrigerators make, the noise of a TV coming from somewhere. Here there was no sound at all. No traffic noise. No sirens. Outside it was sunset now; even the breeze was still.

  My aunt, Chee said, using a young man’s title of respect for an older woman, I have come a long way to talk with you here because what you know may be very important. I think that something very bad happened at that oil well and that people may still die because of it. If Navajo Wolves did it, then I think we are still dealing with the same bunch of witches. Can you tell me how you knew Navajo Wolves blew up that oil well? Did somebody tell you?

  Nobody told me. Just my own head.

  How was that?

  Fannie Kinlicheenie thought about how to answer.

  My brother got sick. He had pains in his middle here. Fannie indicated her stomach. Where the spirit is. And pains in his legs. We got a hand trembler to come in and find out what was wrong. The hand trembler said a witch had done it to him. He found a little bump on the back of Woody’s head where the witch had put the corpse powder in. Then another one of them got sick, and they got the hand trembler for him. And he’d been witched, too. And the hand trembler said to have an Enemy Way for both of them. Fannie Kinlicheenie paused, organizing what she wanted to say.

  What’s going on? Mary asked.

  Chee held up his hand. Just a minute, he said. And then to the Kinlicheenie woman: Another one got sick, you said. You mean another member of the church?

  It was Roscoe Sam, Fannie said. One of the bunch that worked at the oil well with Woody. One of them that called themselves the People of Darkness.

  Ah, Chee said. He was speaking in English again, conscious of Mary’s curiosity. And the hand trembler said to have an Enemy Way? To do that right, you have to know who the witch is. Who

  That’s right, Fannie Kinlicheenie said. They did the Enemy Way for both of them, and it was done right. Both of them got better for a while, but then they had to take Woody off to the hospital at Gallup and he died.

  They don’t much believe in Navajo Wolves at the hospital, Chee said. What did they think he died of?

  They said it was cancer, Fannie said. Leukemia got in his blood.

  Does Joseph Sam still live around here?

  He died too, Fannie Kinlicheenie said. I heard it was the same thing. Leukemia.

  I’d say that the Enemy Way didn’t work too well, Chee said.

  I think they waited too long. But part of it worked. It turned the evil around and pointed it at the Navajo Wolf. Fannie Kinlicheenie’s smile was full of malice. He died, too.

  Do you know who it was? Chee knew he’d have to wait for an answer and that he might not get one. The Dinee didn’t like to talk of the dead, or of witches. Speaking the name of a dead witch was doubly dangerous.

  Fannie Kinlicheenie licked her lips.

  It was the peyote chief, she said.

  And thus she avoided pronouncing the name of Dillon Charley. Chapter Twenty-Four

  They jolted down the dirt track toward the graded road that would take them to the asphalt pavement and back to Crownpoint. The sun was down now. High overhead a strip of feathery cirrus clouds glowed salmon pink in the afterglow. But all around them the landscape was dark. Mary had been saying almost nothing.

  Are you going to tell me what all that was about? She asked it without looking at him.

  Chee glanced at her profile. The part where she started talking Navajo?

  And you started talking Navajo. Yes. That part.

  She said some people in the Native American Church were witches, and they gave Woody Begay and Roscoe Sam corpse poisoning, and they both died. And before they died, they held an Enemy Way for them, and that turned the witching around against the witch. And the witch was Dillon Charley, and that’s what killed Dillon.

  Mary was looking at him now. What do you think of all that?

  And she said the witches made the oil well blow up, Chee added. And that Joseph Sam is dead, too.

  Did she say why they wanted to do that?

  No, Chee said.

  Did she know? Did you ask her?

  No, Chee said. You have to understand about our witches. They wouldn’t need a motive in the normal sense. Do you know about Navajo Wolves?

  I thought I did, Mary said. Aren’t they like the white man’s witches, and witches in general, and our Laguna-Acoma witches? She laughed. Hyphenated witches, she said. Only with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs would you get hyphenated witches.

  The way it works with Navajos, witchcraft is the reversal of the Navajo Way. The way the Holy People taught us, the goal of life was yo ‘zho’. No word for it in English. Sort of a combination of beauty/harmony, being in tune, going with the flow, feeling peaceful, all wrapped up in a single concept. Witchcraft is the reverse of this concept, basically. There’s a mythology built up around it, of course. You get to be a witch by violating the basic tabooskilling a relative, incest, so forth. And you get certain powers. You can turn yourself into a dog or a wolf. You can fly. And you have power to make people sick. That’s the opposite of the good power the Holy People gave usto cure people by getting them back into yo’zho’. Back into beauty. So, to make a long story short, a witch wouldn’t have a motive for blowing up an oil well. It’s a bad thing to do, blowing people up. That’s all the motive a skinwalker needs.

  And she said Dillon Charley was a witch?

  That’s what she said. The families had an Enemy Way and turned the witching spell around, and Dillon Charley died.
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br />   That proves he was the witch?

  Well, sort of, Chee said. They’d have to already have him spotted as the witch. Then someone has to get something that belonged to a witchhair, pair of socks, a hat, something personal. That represents the scalp in the Enemy Way ceremonial. On the last day of the ceremonial, the scalp is shot with an arrow. If everything has been properly done, and they have the right witch, this causes the witch to get sick and die from his own spell.

  And the patient gets well?

  That’s the way it works. But it didn’t work for our friend Woody. And it didn’t work for Roscoe Sam.

  The patrol car jolted into a shallow wash and out again. The cloud overhead had changed from pink to a deep glowing red. Two more dead, Mary Landon said. Or three.

  You predicted Woody, Chee said.

  There were six of them to begin with, she said. Six People of Darkness. Six men who didn’t go to work at the oil well. Now Roscoe Sam is dead, and Joseph Sam and Begay, and Dillon Charley.

  Leaves Windy Tsossie and Rudolph Becenti, Chee said. And so far nobody knows where to find them.

  That’s too many dead, Mary Landon said. They wouldn’t be all that old. Probably late middle age if they were alive now. But they died a long, long time ago. When they were pretty young. Just a few years after the oil well. That’s too many to be dead. She looked at him thoughtfully. You think somebody poisoned them all? Something like that? Maybe revenge?

  As far as we know, Begay died of leukemia, Chee said. Same thing with Roscoe Sam. Dillon Charley died in the hospital. Vines says he told him he had some sort of cancer. Anyway, in a hospital they’d have detected poison if it was that.

  With an autopsy? Mary asked.

  Chee drove a little while. I think you’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking, he said. You’re thinking about Emerson Charley.

  Yes, Mary said. I’m thinking about how Emerson Charley didn’t have an autopsy.

  Because somebody stole his body out of the cold room at bcmc, Chee said.

  Which seems a funny thing to steal.

  Right, Chee said.

  Unless you don’t want an autopsy performed.

  Right, Chee said.

  Which is also what you’d get if you blow the guy into little pieces by bombing his truck. No autopsy. Right?

  Yeah, Chee said.

  Yeah, Mary said. Yeah, or maybe baloney. Why would anyone want to poison Emerson Charley? Or Dillon Charley? Or Woody Begay, or any of those guys?

  No reason, Chee said. But you know what? Let’s go to Albuquerque and see what we can find out at the hospital.

  I don’t know, Mary Landon said. When I go places with you, it’s no picnic. She hesitated. Do you think he’ll be there? She didn’t have to say the blond man. Chee knew what she meant.

  I’ve thought about that, Chee said. If I was him, I wouldn’t go near that hospital. And if I was looking for you and me, that would be the last place I’d look. Chapter Twenty-Five

  The doctor’s name was Edith Vassa. The midmorning sun slanted through the window behind her desk and flashed through her short reddish hair. She was a young woman with that pink complexion which made Jimmy Chee wonder why the white men called Indians redskins. Dr. Vassa was the physician who had treated Emerson Charley at the University of New Mexico Cancer Research and Treatment Center. Thus she had been stuck with the job of trying to find out what had happened to the Charley corpse. It had been a frustrating, embarrassing dead end. Edith Vassa was sick of it. Her expression showed it.

  I can tell you everything I know in a very few words. Emerson Charley’s vital signs ceased at approximately 5:13 p.m. The physician on duty made the usual examination and certified death. The body was tagged for autopsy and moved to the morgue cold room. The next morning, the morgue attendant noticed he had only one body instead of two. He guessed the body had gone to the morphology laboratory without being properly checked out. Dr. Vassa made an impatient gesture with her hands. To skip the unnecessary details, it was finally learned that the body had disappeared.

  You presume it was stolen?

  I presume his relatives collected him, Dr. Vassa said. The Albuquerque police thought we might have just misplaced it somewhere. She laughed, but she didn’t think it was funny.

  All we actually know is that one of the morgue carts was found the next morning in the hallway near the loading dock. Presumably it was used to move the body. And we found that the bag of personal effects that belonged to a second body in the morgue was also missing. It seems safe to presume that someone got into the morgue, picked up the wrong bag of personal effects, put the bag on the cart with the body, rolled it down the hallway to the loading dock, and loaded everything into a car or something.

  It was being held for an autopsy?

  It was supposed to be held for an autopsy.

  Why the autopsy?

  It’s the routine. We’re studying cancer. How it affects cells. How treatment affects tumors. Effect of treatment on blood platelets. On bone marrow. Metastasis. So forth.

  Metastasis?

  Spreading. How cancer spreads from one part of the body to another.

  You didn’t suspect foul play? Chee asked.

  Dr. Vassa smiled, very faintly. You don’t get leukemia through foul play. It’s not like a poison. And it’s not like an infectious disease, which you could cause by inserting a bacteria. It’s caused by Dr. Vassa hesitated.

  Jimmy Chee waited, curious. How would this woman describe the origins of leukemia to a Navajo?

  We don’t know exactly what causes it. Perhaps some sort of virus. Perhaps some malfunction in the bone marrow, where blood cells are produced.

  Fair enough, Chee thought. He couldn’t have done better himself.

  And it’s rare, especially among adults?

  Relatively, Dr. Vassa said. I think the current case rate for all sorts of malignancies this year is less than three per thousand. Leukemic diseases are about one percent of that. Say three in a hundred thousand.

  Three per thousand? Mary Landon said. What would you think of a situation in which you had six men, friends, members of the same church, sort of distant relatives, and three of them die of cancer?

  I’d be surprised, Dr. Vassa said.

  How surprised? Mary Landon asked. Three out of six instead of three out of a thousand.

  It would be quite a coincidence, Dr. Vassa said, but things like that can happen. Mathematical probabilities work in odd ways. Was Emerson one of the three?

  He was the son of one of the three, Chee said.

  His father died of cancer?

  That’s what we’re told, Mary said.

  But you don’t know for sure? Dr. Vassa asked. Did they all live in the same area? Work at the same jobs? I think if they really did all die of cancer our epidemiology people would be interested. Dr. Vassa smiled. Especially if it happened to be cancer of the gall bladder. They’re fascinated by that. She reached for the phone. I’ll make you an appointment with Sherman Huff.

  Sherman Huffs office was in the basement. Dr. Huff asked questions and took notes, and picked up the telephone. Three out of six is unusual, he said. So first we try to find out if the tumor registry has them. He spoke into the telephone, identifying himself and reading the names of Dillon Charley, Roscoe Sam, and Woody Begay off his notes. He kept the receiver pinned to his ear with a raised shoulder and turned back to Chee and Mary Landon.

  Just be a minute or two, he said. It’s a matter of checking the names with the computer. The registry tries to keep a file on every cancer case diagnosed in the state, but these were way back when they were first setting it up. And it could be they were out on the reservation, where they weren’t diagnosed.

  In other words, if you don’t have the names registered, it won’t necessarily mean they didn’t have cancer?

  Not from the early 1950s it won’t, Huff said. And not from the Navajo reservation. However, even in those days, they were getting most of them. They had a pretty good
r />   The telephone said something into Huffs ear. Just a second, he said.

  He made a note. Okay, he said. He wrote again. Thanks. Pull the folders for me. I’ll want to look at them. He hung up and glanced at Chee.

  Dillon Charley, leukemia. Roscoe Sam, malignancy affecting liver and other vital organs. Woody Begay, leukemia. Huffs face was thoughtful. That’s a hell of a lot of cancer, he said. And a lot of leukemia for men their ages.

  And Emerson Charley, Mary Landon added. He also died of leukemia.

  That’s what Vassa told me, Huff said. Let’s make sure. Let’s get that folder, too. He dialed the phone again.

  While you have them, give them some more names, Chee said. Give them Rudolph Becenti, Joseph Sam, and Windy Tsossie.

  Those the other three of the six? You hear they had cancer, too?

  All we know is that Joseph Sam probably died back in the 1950s, and we couldn’t find Becenti or Tsossie, Chee said.

  Tumor registry data is confidential, Huff said. I can confirm a cancer death for law enforcement. I’m not sure I can just go on a fishing expedition for you.

  I’m only trying to confirm that their cause of death was cancer. It saves me time. Otherwise, I’d have to go hunting for death certificates in county courthouses.

  Huff talked into the telephone again. He asked for the Emerson Charley file and a check on Tsossie, Becenti, and Joseph Sam. Then he waited, phone to ear. He was a burly man, with a gray mustache merging into a bushy gray beard, sun-weathered skin, and bright blue eyes. Behind him, the wall was covered with posters: Smoke Can Make Your Doctor Rich. Little Orphan Annie’s Parents Smoked. Stamp Out Old Age: Smoke! To Kill a Mockingbird: Blow Smoke on It. In the silence, Chee became conscious of a tapping. Mary’s little finger was drumming against the arm of her chair. The telephone receiver made a sound.

  Go ahead, Huff said. He wrote on his note pad. Okay, he said. I’d like to see them all. He hung up and sat for a moment looking silently at what he had written. Well, he said.

  Another one? Mary asked.

  Rudolph Becenti, Dr. Huff said. Another form of leukemia.

  That’s four out of six, Mary Landon said.