People Of Darkness Part 2

Chee said nothing. Sena's hand gripped his arm.

"She say anything about why they did that?"

"No," Chee said. "All she said was something about the old man joking about it when the doctor told him he was dying."

"About that burglary. You think she was telling all she knew?"

"People usually don't," Chee said.

Sena eyed him thoughtfully. "Yes," he said. "That's always been my experience." He released Chee's elbow. "You be careful, now," he said.

4.

Jimmy Chee sat with his boot heels propped on the edge of his wastebasket and his fingers locked behind his head and his eyes on Officer Trixie Dodge. Officer Dodge was, as she had already told him, trying to get some work done.

"Come on, Trixie," Chee said. "Think about it. What could be in the box? Why is old lady Vines so hot to get it back? Why is old Gordo Sena so uptight about it?"

Officer Dodge was sorting through legal papers in her in box, transferring them into a cardboard folder. The papers were to be delivered this morning to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Gallup. Officer Dodge was running late. "How the h.e.l.l would I know?" Trixie said.

"And you never heard of anything called the People of Darkness?"

"Nope," Trixie said. "I've heard of moles. I've heard of the peyote church. In fact, I've got a cousin who's into that." Officer Dodge put the last of the papers into the folder and headed for the door. "And I've heard of people with moles, but I never heard of people who call themselves moles."

"Maybe it had something to do with an amulet, or a fetish-something like that," Chee said.

"Of a mole?" Officer Dodge's voice was incredulous. "What kind of a Navajo would use a mole for an amulet?" Officer Dodge left for Gallup without waiting for an answer.

What kind of a Navajo would use a mole for an amulet? It was a fair enough question. Chee sat, feet on wastebasket, hands locked behind head, thinking about it. It wouldn't be a traditional, old-fas.h.i.+oned Navajo, probably, except under unusual circ.u.mstances. More likely one of those Eastern Navajos whose clans had mixed more Pueblo Indian ritualism and Christianity into their culture. The Navajo used representations of the predator Holy People for his amulets. The mole was a predator in the Navajo mythology, but he was much less powerful and much less popular than his more glamorous cousins-the bear, the badger, the eagle, the mountain lion, and so forth. In Chee's own medicine pouch, suspended from a thong inside his trousers, was the figure of a badger. It was about the size of Chee's thumb and carved from soap-stone, a gift from his father. In the mythology of the Slow Talking Dinee, Hosteen Badger was a formidable figure. Hosteen Mole played a trivial role. Why use the mole? He was the predator of the nadir, downward, one of the six sacred directions. He was the symbol of the dark underground, with access to those strange dark subsurface worlds through which the Dinee rose in their evolution toward human status. But compared to the bear, the eagle, or even the horned frog, he had little power and no prominence in ceremonials. Why pick the mole? The only explanation Chee could think of was the obvious one. The oil well drilled toward the nadir, into the mole's domain.

Chee unlocked his hands and put his feet squarely on the floor beneath his desk. He should get some reports finished. But halfway through the first one he found himself thinking of the nervous Rosemary Vines offering three thousand dollars for a box of keepsakes and the intense, probing questions of Gordo Sena. An arrogant woman presumed he could be bought, and an autocratic man presumed he could be bluffed. What was it that made this little burglary so important to them?

Chee picked up the Albuquerque telephone book. He found the number and placed a call to the Bernalillo County Medical Center. Two transfers later, he was talking to a nurse in the Cancer Research and Treatment Center.

"I'm sorry," she said. "The patient can't have any visitors."

"We're investigating a crime," Chee said. "Mr. Charley is the only one who can provide some information we need. It would be two or three quick questions."

"Mr. Charley is not conscious," she said. "He's under sedation. He's in very critical condition."

"It would only take a few seconds. I could come and wait for him to regain consciousness," Chee said.

"I'm afraid that won't happen," the nurse said. "He's dying."

Chee thought about that. It made the question he was going to ask sound absurd.

"Can the hospital confirm that Emerson Charley didn't leave the hospital last Tuesday?"

"We can confirm that Mr. Charley hasn't left his room for a month. He's being fed intravenously. He's too weak to move." The tone was disapproving.

"Well, then," Chee said, "I'll need the name of his next of kin."

He got it from the records office, and jotted it on his note pad. Tomas Charley, Rural Route 2, Grants. No telephone. A son, grandson of Dillon Charley. What would Tomas know of something that had happened about the time he was born? Probably not much. Perhaps nothing.

Then who would know?

One question, at least, Chee could find an answer for. What had caused the trouble between Sheriff Sena and Henry Becenti? He would locate Becenti and ask him. And then Chee would decide whether he would collect Mrs. Vines' three thousand dollars.

5.

"Some of it's easy to remember," Henry Becenti said. "Hard not to. Six people killed. But h.e.l.l. It was way back in '47 or '48. That's a long time ago."

"I can just remember hearing somebody talking about it," Chee said. "But it was long before my time."

"It was a little independent outfit," Becenti recalled. "Trying to do some drilling back in there northeast of Mount Taylor, and they had an explosion that wiped out the whole crew. That's how old Gordo and I got in trouble with each other."

"Just an accident?"

"Yeah," Becenti said. "You know anything about oil drilling? Well, this one was a dry hole. No oil. So they was going to shoot it. Perforate the casing." Becenti glanced at Chee to see if he understood. "They lower a tube of nitroglycerin down the well to the level where it looks best and they shoot it off. Idea is to shatter the rocks down there and get the oil running into the hole. Anyway, this time the nitro went off on the floor of the rig. Wiped everybody out. Little pieces of 'em scattered all over."

A look of distaste crossed Becenti's face. He shook his head, shaking off the vividness of the memory. They were sitting on a shelf of stone that jutted from the slope above Henry Becenti's place. They were there because Chee's arrival had coincided with a visit from Becenti's mother-in-law to Becenti's wife. Changing Woman had taught the original Navajo clans that while the groom should join his bride's family, the mother-in-law and son-in-law should scrupulously avoid all contact. In forty years, Old Woman Nez and Henry Becenti had never broken that taboo. Becenti had built his house at his in-laws' place, but away from the hogan of his bride's parents. When Old Woman Nez came to call, Becenti arranged to be elsewhere. This high ridge, which looked across the great valley of Ambrosia Lakes, was a favored retreat.

"If it was an accident, what was bothering Sena?" Chee asked.

"Sena's older brother was one of them," Becenti said. "He was one of the drillers. I think he was what they call the 'tool pusher.' And Sena got sort of crazy about it."

Becenti shook a cigaret out of his pack, offered it to Chee, and then selected one for himself and struck a kitchen match to it. He sat smoking, looking at Mount Taylor, thirty miles to the east. The sun had dropped behind the horizon, but the top of the mountain, rising a mile above the valley floor, still caught the direct light. Tsoodzil, the Navajos called it, the Turquoise Mountain. It was one of the four sacred peaks which First Man had built to guard Dinetah. He had built it on a blue blanket of earth carried up from the underworld, and decorated it with turquoise and blue flint. And then he had pinned it to the earth with a magic knife, and a.s.signed Turquoise Girl to live there and Big Snake to guard her until the Fourth World ended. Now it appeared the magic knife had slipped. The sacred mountain seemed to float in the sky, cut off from the solid earth by the ground haze.

Beautiful, Chee thought. And on the other side of the mountain was the home of B. J. Vines, who had a wife who decided the theft of a keepsake box was very, very important and probably involved witchcraft, or something akin to it. The smoke from Becenti's cigaret reached Chee's nostrils.

"The first couple of days we thought we had twelve people killed," Becenti said. "Wasn't no way of telling. Lot of people around there now, but then there wasn't n.o.body for miles. The only ones we could find that heard the explosion were a long ways off. They hadn't gone to see about it. Sometimes the crew stayed out on the rig for several days, so n.o.body got to wondering about it until the weekend. Somebody got nervous. Gordo was a deputy then. He went out to see about it."

Becenti inhaled a lungful of cigaret and exhaled slowly. The smoke made shapes in the motionless air. Seen in profile, his face was ageless. But his eyes had spent more than forty years looking at drunks, at knife fighters, at victims, at what happened when pickup trucks. .h.i.t culverts at eighty. They were old eyes.

"The blast was on a Friday, I think it was. Gordo got out there Monday. The birds had been there, and the coyotes. Hauling bits and pieces off." He glanced at Chee, making sure he understood the implications. "Anyway, like I said, his brother worked out there. Gordo couldn't find him. Or couldn't find enough to know whether it was his brother or not. And then one of the men that we thought was killed showed up in Grants. It turned out there was a crew of six roustabouts working out there and we had 'em all down as dead and they was all alive."

Becenti's old eyes looked away from the mountain and made contact with Chee's. "They'd been warned not to go to work," he said.

"It was an accident," Chee said slowly. "Who knew it was going to happen?"

"Their foreman was a peyote chief. He'd had services the night before and he had a vision," Becenti said. "G.o.d talked to him and G.o.d told him something bad was going to happen out at the well."

"And he warned his crew?"

"That's right," Becenti said. "And when Sena found out about it he just about went crazy. Sena didn't believe in visions. He figured there was some funny business and somebody had killed his brother."

"Hard to blame him," Chee said.

"Anyway, Sena had three of the crew locked up at Grants and was looking for the peyote chief. I was, too-for illegal use of a narcotic on the reservation. One of our people found him first and we had him in custody when a deputy sheriff got there to arrest him." Becenti's wrinkled face folded itself into a grin. "Big d.a.m.ned argument over who was gonna get him. Whether it was reservation land or county jurisdiction where he lived, and where the oil well was. Looked like we was going to have another Indian war there for a while. But the well wasn't on Navajo land, so I let Sena have him."

Becenti inhaled a puff of cigaret smoke, breathed it out, and looked at the mountain. Its slopes were rosy now with the sunset. Chee said nothing. In Navajo fas.h.i.+on, when Becenti knew what he wanted to say next he would say it. There was no reason to hurry.

"Nothing ever came of it," Becenti said. "Not as far as Sena was concerned. The peyote preacher stuck to his story, and there wasn't any reason in the world to believe anyone would have blown up those men on purpose, and so finally Sena turned him loose. But something came of it for us. The Council wanted the peyote church stopped. So we was trying to arrest anyone with peyote. But word got around about the preacher saving those lives, and the congregation kept growing."

"And you kept arresting them?"

"Trying to," Becenti said. "They kept moving the services around. First one place and then another. Sort of went underground." Becenti laughed again. "Got real secret. The leaders took to wearing mole amulets and they called themselves the People of Darkness." Becenti used the same Navajo word that Mrs. Vines had remembered.

"The peyote chief was a Navajo named Dillon Charley?"

"That's right," Becenti said. "He was the peyote chief. He was the one who had the vision."

"Did B. J. Vines have anything to do with that oil well?"

"No," Becenti said. "He didn't come into this country until after all that happened." Becenti slammed his fist into his palm. "By G.o.d, though," he said. "Vines and Charley got connected later on. Charley worked for him. After that explosion Sena hated Charley and pretty soon Sena was hating Vines, too." He glanced at Chee. "How much you know about Vines?"

"Just what I've heard," Chee said. "Came in here a poor boy at the very beginning of the uranium discoveries. Made the big uranium find on Section 17 and sold his leases to Anaconda for ten million dollars and a percentage royalty on the ore, and now he gets a little richer every time they drive an ore truck out of the Red Deuce Mine. Got more money than the U.S. government, big-game hunter, flies an airplane, so forth."

"That's about it," Becenti said. "Except early on he and Sena had their troubles. Sena was sheriff by then, and Vines ran some Anglo against him and spent a lot of money and be d.a.m.ned if he didn't beat Sena. And Sena came back two years later and beat the Anglo. Sena's been sheriff of Valencia ever since, and he never did forgive Vines."

"How did Charley get involved with Vines?" Chee asked.

"Politics. He started working with Vines against Sena-getting out the Navajo vote, and the Lagunas and Acomas. On Vines' payroll, probably. Later on he worked out there at Vines' ranch. Died years ago."

"What happened to the People of Darkness?"

"Haven't heard of them for years," Becenti said. "But the church is still operating. You remember the courts ruled that peyote was a sacrament and they had a right to dope themselves up with it. Charley's son-I think his name was Emerson-he was the preacher after Dillon died. And Emerson's boy, he's a peyote chief since Emerson's sick."

"Tomas Charley?"

Becenti nodded. "He's a crazy little son of a b.i.t.c.h," Becenti said. "All them Charleys was crazy and this youngest one is the worst. His mother's a Laguna. From what I hear, he's into one of the Laguna kiva societies, and he's the peyote chief in the Native American Church around here, and he does some curing for the People on top of it all."

"How'd that happen?" Chee asked.

"One of the boy's paternal uncles is a yataalii yataalii," Becenti said. "Pretty good old fellow. He taught Tomas the Blessing Way and the kid does it now and then. But most people would rather get someone else."

"Why do you say he's crazy?"

Becenti laughed and shrugged. "Chewed too G.o.dd.a.m.n many peyote b.u.t.tons," he said. "Got his brains curdled. Sees visions. Thinks he's talking to G.o.d. Silly little b.a.s.t.a.r.d." Becenti paused, searching for an ill.u.s.tration. "He come in the office last year and said Jesus had told him there was going to be a terrible drought and we should warn everybody to stock up on food. And then this fall he was in telling us that some witch was making his daddy sick. His daddy, that's Emerson Charley."

"Well, it's been dry as h.e.l.l," Chee said, "and his daddy is dying."

"It's always dry," Becenti said. "And his daddy's got cancer. That's what I heard. I didn't know he was dying." Becenti thought about it. "Anyway, he didn't get witched. I think cancer runs in that family, like craziness. I think that's what the grandfather died of, too."

"Dillon Charley? Yeah. That's what Mrs. Vines said."

Becenti looked uneasy. He was old enough to have the traditions of the People worn deep into the grain, and one of the traditions was not to speak the name of the dead. The ghost might overhear and be summoned to the speaker.

"Did you know Vines had Dillon Charley buried up at his house?" Chee asked.

"I heard that," Becenti said. "White men sure got some weird customs."

Especially their burial customs, Chee thought. He'd spent years among the whites, first at boarding school, then through enough years at the University of New Mexico to win a degree in anthropology, but he still couldn't fathom the att.i.tude of whites toward the corpse.

"You have any idea why Vines would want to bury Dillon Charley?" Chee asked.

Becenti made a wry face. "h.e.l.l, no."

"This Tomas Charley," Chee said. "You said he was crazy. Would he be crazy enough to get into Vines' house and steal a lockbox with keepsakes in it?"

Becenti extracted the cigaret from between his lips and looked at Chee. "Did something like that happen?" he asked. "Why would he want to steal something like that? Vines and his woman are both big hunters. I understand either one of them would just as soon shoot somebody as not."

"I heard that Tomas' grandfather thought Vines kept the luck of the Darkness People in that box," Chee said. "Maybe Tomas heard about that."

Becenti nodded. "Okay, then. I'd say yes. That kid would be about crazy enough to break in to steal himself some luck."

6.

The spike on his desk the next morning held three pink "While You Were Out" slips. One told him to call Captain Leaphorn at the Chinle substation. The other two, one left over from yesterday, and one received just before he'd got to work, told him to call B. J. Vines. He put those aside and called the Chinle station. Leaphorn's business involved identifying a middle-aged Navajo killed in a truck-pedestrian accident. The captain wanted him to send someone to Th.o.r.eau to check with a family there. Chee added it to the afternoon a.s.signment of Officer Dodge. Then he picked up the "Call B. J. Vines" slips, leaned back in his chair and considered them. Both were initialed "T.D." Trixie Dodge was at her desk across the room. He glanced at her. She looked grim this morning. Trixie, he suspected, should have written "Call Mrs. B. J. Vines." Vines wouldn't be back for weeks.

"Hey, Trixie," he said. "You put down 'Call Vines' here. Wasn't the call from Mrs. Vines?"

Trixie didn't look up. "Vines," she said.

"Mr. Vines?" Chee insisted.

"It was a man. He said his name was B. J. Vines. He asked for you and then he asked you to call him at that number." Trixie's voice was patient.

Chee dialed the number. It rang once.

"Yes." The voice was male.