People of Darkness

by Tony Hillerman

  Chee described the hiding place for the box and how it had been pried open. “Nothing else was missing,” he said. “Lots of valuable stuff in the house—right in plain view. Silver. Rugs. Paintings. Worth a lot of money.”

  “I imagine so,” Sena said. “Vines has got more money than Saudi Arabia. What’d she say about religion?”

  Chee told him, outlining briefly Mrs. Vines’ account of her husband’s interest in the church of Dillon Charley, her speculation that something in the box was important to the cult, and that only Charley had known where the box was kept.

  “Dillon Charley’s a long time dead,” Sena said.

  “Mrs. Vines said he had a son. She figured he’d told his son about it years ago, and the son decided to come and get it.”

  Sena sat immobile, studying Chee. “That what she figured?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “The son’s name is Emerson Charley,” Sena said. “That ring a bell?”

  “Faintly,” Chee said. “But I can’t place him.”

  “Remember that killing they had in Albuquerque in August? Somebody put a bomb in a pickup and it killed a couple of fellows in a tow truck trying to haul the pickup away. That was Emerson Charley’s pickup.”

  Chee recalled having read about it. It was a puzzling case. “I remember it,” Chee said. “Understand they think the bomb was intended for one of the big shots at the hospital. Divorce settlement or argument or something, from what I heard.”

  “That’s what the Albuquerque police seem to think,” Sena said. His tone was skeptical.

  “Anyway, Mrs. Vines figures Emerson got the box. She wants me to get it back from him.”

  “Emerson didn’t get the box,” Sena said. He reinserted the pencil and chewed on it. His eyes were on Chee, but his attention was far away. He sighed, shook his head, scratched his left sideburn with a thick forefinger. “Emerson’s in the hospital,” Sena said. “BCMC in Albuquerque. If he’s not dead, that is. Last I heard, he was in bad shape.”

  “I thought he didn’t get hurt,” Chee said.

  “He was already hurt,” Sena said. “He’d gone to the hospital to check into that Cancer Research and Treatment Center the university has there. The son of a bitch is dying of cancer.” He focused on Chee again, and emitted a snort of ironic laughter. “The APD and the FBI between ’em couldn’t figure out why anyone would blow up a Navajo when he’s already dying.”

  “Can you?” Chee asked.

  The pencil waved, up and down, up and down. “No,” said Sena, “I can’t. Not a thing. Did Mrs. Vines say anything to you about some people they used to call the People of Darkness?”

  Sena made the question sound casual.

  “She mentioned it,” Chee said.

  “What did she say?” The sheriff’s voice, despite his efforts, was tense.

  “Not much,” Chee said. He repeated what Rosemary Vines had told him about her husband’s interest in Dillon Charley’s church, about his contributing money, helping members when they were arrested, and giving Charley something “lucky” from the box—perhaps a talisman, Chee guessed. Halfway through it, Sena stifled a yawn. But his eyes weren’t sleepy. “Like she said herself, it was all pretty vague,” Chee concluded.

  Sena yawned again. “Well, I’ll send somebody out tomorrow or so and get all the details. No use wasting your time.” Sena examined the pencil top. “You weren’t figuring on taking that job, were you?”

  “Hadn’t really decided,” Chee said. “Probably not.”

  “That’d be the best,” Sena said. “It was like I was telling you that day you first came in here and introduced yourself—that first week you replaced old Henry Becenti. Like I was telling you then, this jurisdiction business can be a real problem if you ain’t careful with it.”

  “I guess so,” Chee said. As far as he could remember, jurisdiction hadn’t been discussed during that brief meeting. He was sure it hadn’t been.

  “I don’t know if you ever worked out here on the Checkerboard Reservation before,” Sena said. “You’re driving along and one minute you’re on the Navajo reservation and the next minute you’re in Valencia County jurisdiction and usually there’s no way in God’s world to know the difference. It can be a real problem.”

  “I bet,” Chee said. The Navajo Police lived with jurisdiction problems. Even on the Big Reservation, which sprawled larger than all New England across the borders of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, jurisdiction was always a question. The serious felony brought in the FBI. If the suspect was non-Navajo, other questions were raised. Or the crime might lap into the territory of New Mexico State Police, Utah or Arizona Highway Patrol, or involve the Law and Order Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Or even a Hopi constable, or Southern Ute Tribal Police, or an officer of the Jicarilla Apache tribe, or any of a dozen county sheriffs of the three states. But here on the southwestern fringe of the reservation, checkerboarding complicated the problem. In the 1880s, the government deeded every other square mile in a sixty-mile-wide strip to the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad to subsidize extension of its trunk line westward. The A&P had become the Santa Fe generations ago, and the Navajo Nation had gradually bought back part of this looted portion of its Dinetah, its homeland, but in many places this checkerboard pattern of ownership persisted.

  “Tell you the truth, Becenti and I had us some trouble when he first took over the Crownpoint station. The Tribal Council had just passed itself a law outlawing peyote, and they were cracking down on the church. You old enough to remember that?”

  “I knew about it,” Chee said.

  “Old Henry got pretty carried away with that,” Sena said. “He got so interested in rounding up the peyoteheads that he’d forget where the reservation boundary was and he’d get over into my territory. So I had my boys arrest some of his boys and one thing and another, and finally we got together here and worked out a way so we wouldn’t interfere in one another’s business.” Sena’s eyes were intent on Chee’s face, making sure he’d understood the lesson.

  “I’d think enforcing that peyote ban would have been Lieutenant Becenti’s business,” Chee said.

  “Normally,” Sena said, “yes. This time, though, we were looking into another crime and Henry was messing us up.” Sena wiped away the disagreement with a wave of his hand. “The point is we learned how to coordinate. Like I’d call Henry when something Navajo came up and find out where he was on it. And Henry’d call me when he had something that was crossing the Checkerboard lines and ask me if we was touchy about it. And if we was touchy, he’d stay over on the reservation and let it alone.”

  Sena replaced the pencil between his teeth and sat back in the chair. The pencil pointed directly at Chee’s nose. Sena’s eyes asked Chee if he had received the warning.

  “Sounds sensible,” Chee said.

  “Yeah,” Sena said. “It’s sensible.” He pushed back the swivel chair and pushed himself out of it. “Been a long day,” he said. “Get a little dustin’ of snow and the goddamn Texans coming through on I-40 ain’t never seen it before and we got ’em slid off the road all the way from Gallup to Albuquerque.” Sena moved around the desk, agile for such a bulky man, showing Chee out.

  “I think you was smart deciding not to take that job,” he said. “We’ll just solve that little burglary for Mrs. Vines ourself. Just show her how to do it. She say anything about Dillon Charley? Anything at all?”

  Again it seemed to Chee that the question was deliberately casual.

  “Just what I told you,” Chee said.

  “You know, they got old Dillon Charley buried up there. Right by the house. That always seemed awful funny to me.”

  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 al
l 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 hell 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-fashioned Navajo, probably, except under unusual circumstances. 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 hell. 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 assigned 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 nobody 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 nobody 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 hit 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?”