People of Darkness jlajc-4

by Tony Hillerman

  When did he die, then? Chee repeated. And where did they put the body?

  Long time ago, Mrs. Musket said. She stood looking at Chee and through Chee. The seconds ticked away. They lived out behind Bisti in the badlands. I wasn’t with them. But my sister’s husband was a witch, and somebody turned the witching around against him. He got corpse sickness and he died.

  You weren’t there, but you heard about it? Is that right? From your sister? Chee asked.

  From my sister, Mrs. Musket agreed.

  He died of a sickness?

  Corpse sickness, Mrs. Musket said.

  Where?

  In my sister’s hogan.

  And they buried him there?

  They got a white man who worked there at Bisti to come and put the body out in the rocks. They told me that he put it in a little blowhole in the side of a cliff and covered it over with rocks.

  It’s all starting up again, Rudolph Charley said suddenly. More witching.

  Chee looked at him. Charley’s eyes were focused somewhere a long way off.

  The first time it killed my grandfather, and all the people who the Lord Peyote let see through the doorway. The witching killed all six of them. And now it has started up again. First it killed my grandfather. Now it has killed my father, and it killed my brother. Tonight we are asking the Lord Peyote to let us see what will happen next His voice trailed off.

  Mary began a word and bit it off. The four of them stood there, silently, waiting for the road chief to continue. Beyond Charley, Chee could see the room. The packed earthen floor had been cleared of furnishings. The peyote altar had been built across the back of ita low crescent shape of hard-packed sand. The peyote moon, they called it. At its center, where the sand was perhaps six inches high, a cup-sized bed of cedar twigs had been built. In this nest the gnarled, hairy shape of a peyote button rested. On the sand beside it was a small silver box, lid open. Behind the peyote moon two zigzag lines were inscribed in the earth, representing the footprints of Christ. The Native American Church as it came to the Checkerboard was more or less Christian. Christ taught the white man only through the Bible, because the white man had crucified him. But the Navajo, who had not harmed Christ, God instructed directly through visions. And Lord Peyote was the instrument, the key to the door which led to reality.

  Rudolph Charley still stood motionless, caught in some odd drug-induced expansion of time.

  Did he let you see? Chee asked.

  I saw the mole, Rudolph Charley said. The amulet that was my father’s and my grandfather’s.

  Nothing else? Chee asked.

  The door opened and two men ducked throughboth young. They glanced at Chee and at Mary. One added sticks to the pion fire which had burned to a bed of coals in the hogan fire pit. The other went to the back wall and squatted by the pot drum, watching and waiting. Rudolph Charley’s mood changed.

  Nothing you would understand, he said. We have to start again now. We have to finish the service.

  The man you want to talk to is dead, Mrs. Musket said.

  All right, Chee said. Then tell me where to find the blowhole where they put his body. Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Finally colton wolf was ready. He’d had both a cb radio and a radiotelephone installed in the cab of the pickup. He had driven up an arroyo east of the Sandia Mountains and refreshed his marksmanship with both his rifle and his .22 caliber pistol. The rifle was an expensive .30 caliber Ruger equipped with a scope. He’d fired off half the shells from a 100-round carton, adjusting the open sights for ranges up to 250 yards and the scope up to 800. Then he’d established with a telephone call to the hospital that Western Union couldn’t deliver a telegram to Jim Chee because Jim Chee had checked out. That confirmed what Colton had expected. Next he called the city desk at the Albuquerque Journal, identified himself as a professor at the university, and got permission to do some research in the newspaper’s library. An hour of reading through clippings of crime reports provided him with the names of fbi agents and sheriff’s officers who worked on or around the Navajo reservation. He jotted the names and pertinent information into his notebook and then asked if there was a file on B. J. Vines. There was. The oldest clipping reported a transfer of uranium leases from Vines to a consortium of mining companies headed by Kennecott Copper and Kerrmac Nuclear Fuels. Another, a wire service story originating in New York, reported that Vines had won the Weatherby Trophy, the world championship of big-game hunting. The only substantial story was a feature, with photographs, of the construction of Vines’ home on the slope of Mount Taylor. The residence was described as probably the most expensive ever built in New Mexico. The man whose name Colton had found in the box he’d been hired to recover was obviously rich enough to pay the cost of recovering it. There was a good chance, then, that Vines was the client. Not a certainty, because someone else seemed to have wanted the box. But Vines seemed most likely. Colton added to his notes a description of the house and its location. If all else failed, that might be useful.

  Colton’s last stop was at the municipal library, where he checked through the file of telephone books and noted the numbers he might need. And then he drove westward from Albuquerque, climbing out of the Rio Grande valley, crossing the Rio Puerco breaks, and rolling at a steady fifty-five miles an hour across the empty mesa-butte landscape of west central New Mexico. As he drove, he tested his radio reception on the federal and law-enforcement channels. Reception was excellent. The technique and terminology of the radio dispatchers was no different from what he’d heard in other states. Then he tested the telephone connection by calling the U.S. Weather Service for the forecast. For the west central plateau of New Mexico, the forecast was for increasing afternoon cloudiness, periodic gusty winds, and colder temperatures through the afternoon, with a 60 percent chance of snow before midnight. The green interstate information sign told Colton that the Grants interchange was ahead. To his right, Mount Taylor rose against an unnaturally blue sky, its highest slopes white with snowbanks. He let the camper roll to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, picked up the phone, checked his notebook for the names he wanted, and placed a call to the Navajo Tribal Police subagency office at Crownpoint.

  The voice that answered was a woman’s.

  This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Colton said, Albuquerque. Agent Martin. Is Captain Largo there?

  He works out of Tuba City, the voice said. That number

  I know that, Colton said, but Largo told me he might stop in there today. How about Jim Chee, then?

  Chee’s not here, either, the voice said. He’s taking some time off.

  How’s he feeling? Hope those ribs are healing up.

  Okay, I guess.

  I was calling about Chee, Colton said. We got some things we want him to look at. About that shooting. How can I get hold of him?

  Just a minute, the voice said. There was a pause.

  Colton waited. This was the crucial moment. He would allow the delay to stretch four minutes. More than that would risk a successful trace. He couldn’t chance the police learning that this was a radiotelephone call. The second hand on his watch dial swept into the second minute.

  We’ll have to get him on the radio. It was a man’s voice now. What’s the message?

  Tell him Martin has some information for him, and I need to show him some pictures. Tell him I’m coming out to the reservation and have him call me on my car telephone. He provided a wrong number that sounded reasonable. Is he near a telephone?

  I doubt it, the voice said.

  Look, Colton said. This is urgent. See if you can find him, and if he’s a long ways from a telephone, can I get you to call me back and let me know how long it will be?

  Sure, the voice said.

  Okay. Thanks, Colton said. He hung up, switched on the radio receiver, and pulled the truck back onto Interstate 25. He hadn’t gone a mile before he monitored the first call from the Crownpoint dispatcher trying to reach Jimmy Chee.

  Colton drove steadi
ly westward, past Grants, past the uranium-processing mills of Ambrosia Lakes, into the rougher country which climbed toward the Continental Divide. Crownpoint was trying to reach Chee at ten-minute intervals. At the Thoreau interchange, Colton pulled off the highway and parked. It was here he had decided to wait. He had never thought there was a serious chance that Chee would run far after the fiasco in the hospital. There was no need to run. Where better to hide an Indian than on an Indian reservation?

  He sat with his knees propped against the dash and put together a sandwich of the materials he had brought from the trailer. As always, he ate slowly. The mountain was miles to the east now, but it still dominated the landscape, cold and ominous. When this was over, when he had caught Jim Chee and killed him, and killed the woman; when his tracks were erased and he was once again secure, then he would find a better way to trace his mother. Perhaps a hypnotist could help him remember something he had forgotten. Something useful. There was that old woman in one of his earliest memories. She had put him on her lap and her breath had smelled of tobacco. He had always guessed she might be a grandmother. If he could remember that—or even the place where they had lived when he was very small—it might be helpful. He could remember so little of that. Only a sense of days of cold fog, days of rain, days in an upstairs apartment with his meals left in a refrigerator, his mother coming home in the mornings, his mother’s hair damp against his face, his mother’s hands cold against his skin. There were men then, too, but no particular man he could remember.

  He was staring outward at the blank blue sky, but his thoughts were on that room. He could remember the cracks in the gray linoleum. He’d had two marbles then and the marbles would chase one another down the cracks. He could remember playing that game endlessly, day after day, and the grimy windows, but not the name of the town. Surely he had heard it. Surely, even at four or five, it had meant something to him. His mother had not talked to him often. She wouldn’t have been likely to tell a child they were living in Seattle, or Portland, or wherever it was. But he must have heard it. He would find himself a hypnotist and maybe then he could remember something. Colton was aware that things were wrong with his memory. Gaps in it. He ran his thumb down his sweater, feeling the bump under the skin where the rib had healed crookedly. He could remember when he didn’t have the bumpwhen they lived in San Diego. He could remember having it, already healed, in Bakersfield. But he couldn’t remember the beating that produced it. It was the same with the ridge of thick white scar tissue under the hair above his left ear. That also had grown from some blank spot in his childhood. The last time he had tried to remember about that was in Taylorville, but trying had made him sick and he had stopped.

  His radio spoke again, the voice of the Crownpoint dispatcher called for Jim Chee.

  This time, Chee answered. Colton put down his sandwich and picked up his notebook. Crownpoint relayed the message he had left.

  Well, hell, Chee’s voice said. We’re way over here by the old Bisti trading post.

  Colton jotted We’re by Bisti on his pad. He underlined We’re.

  If you’re away from the telephone, he wanted me to call him and let him know where he could meet you. He said he’d be coming to the reservation, the dispatcher said.

  There was a pause. Well, the voice of Chee said. I guess he’s going to have to wait, then. We’re trying to find a hogan northwest of the old trading post. It’s about nine miles back in there, and it’ll take me a while to find it. Tell him I’ll meet him at our office in Crownpoint tonight. Tell him I’ll try to be there by nine, but I might be a little late.

  Ten-four, the dispatcher said. You paying attention to the weather? It’s supposed to snow.

  Right, Chee said. We’ll watch it.

  Colton jotted We on his note pad. He also wrote nine miles back in there. He didn’t make a note of the nine o’clock meeting time at Crownpoint. By nine o’clock Jimmy Chee would be dead. Chapter Thirty

  The bisti trading post had burned years ago, with the thoroughness with which buildings burn when there is no fire department to interfere. The fire had left only the blackened stone foundation and odds and ends of melted glass and twisted metal. Years of casual Navajo scavengers had sorted through the ashes, and years of weather had piled tumbleweeds and dust against the ruins. The great cypresses imported to protect the post from the sun had long since starved for water, like town dogs abandoned in the desert. The row of bare dead trunks now served as an incongruous landmark for a ruin that had otherwise almost returned to nature.

  Chee turned the pickup truck left beyond the dead trees, leaving a road marked Graded Dirt for a track his map did not show. It ran, fairly straight and fairly smooth, across an expanse of creosote brush.

  You sure this is the right way? Mary asked.

  No, Chee said, but I’m sure it’s the right direction.

  And you still think we can find the hogan? After all these years?

  Probably, Chee said. She said nine miles northwest by north of the trading post, at the south side of an isolated butte. And she described the butte. He pointed ahead. That must be it. And out here they’d have had to build the hogan of stone, so it’s still there. It’s just a matter of hunting it. And I’m pretty good at hunting. Chee paused, thinking about that statement. Or I used to think I was.

  The land sloped downward now, into an immensity of erosion. What once had been a sandstone plain had been carved into a grotesquerie of shapestables, heads, layer cakes, twisted spires, exposed ribs, serrations, and weird forms that suggested things to which Chee’s imagination could not attach names. Wind and water had cut through the overlay into the blackness of coal deposits, into crimson clay, into the streaky blue of shale. Every color showed except green. This was the Bisti badlands. It stretched away for fifty miles under a sky in which clouds had been steadily building.

  I have a hunch he’s not dead, Mary said. I sort of sensed she was hiding something.

  She was nervous, Chee said. Maybe she was lying and maybe there was another reason. But if the bones are there, we’ll find them. And if they’re not, we’ll find Tsossie.

  As he said it, his confidence surprised him. But he was confident. Finding Tsossie, skeletal or breathing, involved things purely Navajoa pattern of thinking and behavior with which Chee was in intimate harmony. He felt no such harmony with the thinking of the whites who must be involved in this affair. For all enterprises, such harmony was essential. Especially for the hunter. And this was from the very start a hunt.

  One of the prayers from the Stalking Way ran through his mind, and the voice of his uncle chanting:

  I am the Black God as I sing this,

  Black God I am. I come and I stand

  beneath the East, beneath the Turquoise Mountain.

  The crystal doe walks toward me,

  as I call it, as I pray to it,

  toward me it comes walking, understanding me

  it walks this day into my right hand.

  Pleasant, it comes to join me,

  in its death it obeys the voice of my singing.

  In its beauty I obey the crystal doe.

  Perfect understanding, Chee thought. Harmony between deer and man. Harmony between Jim Chee and Tsossie, or the bones of Tsossie, and the thinking of those who had placed Tsossie’s corpse among the rocks. But Jim Chee didn’t understand the thinking of whites. Neither Changing Woman nor Talking God had given him a song to produce that understanding. What would his uncle say to that? Chee knew exactly what the old man would say. He could almost hear him, because he had heard him so often:

  Boy, when you understand the big, you understand the little. First understand the big.

  And that would mean, in this case, that if Chee learned to understand all men (the big), he could understand white men (the little). His uncle would add that if a Navajo could find harmony with a deer, he could find equal harmony with a white man. Chee grimaced at the windshield. And then his uncle, who never failed to belabor a point, would add
some wisdom about deer and men. He would say that the deer is much like the Navajo in fundamental ways. It loves its offspring and its mate, food, water, and its rest. And it hates cold, hunger, pain, and death. But the deer is also different. Its life is short. It builds no hogans. The Navajo is more like a white man than like a deer.

  That’s about what his uncle would say, Chee thought sourly. But his uncle had no dealings with the whites when he could avoid them. And how would his uncle explain the thinking of a white man who filled his home with mementos of his achievements but kept his greatest honors hidden away in a keepsake box? The medals Tomas Charley had described were a Bronze Star and a Silver Star, whichas the military encyclopedia in the university library had informed himare awarded for deeds of courage in combat; and the Purple Heart, awarded to those wounded in action. You would expect to find them framed in places of prominence on Vines’ wall, along with his other trophies. Why did he hide them away with a package of old boyhood photographs and a double handful of rock fragments? A Navajo might either advertise his exploits or modestly conceal them. Why would anyone hide some and advertise others?

  The sky was darker now and the wind blew from the northwest. It gusted around the pickup, kicking up a flurry of sand and tumbleweeds.

  That has to be our butte, Chee said. He pointed through the right side of the windshield. It’s the only one within nine miles of the trading post. And it’s in the right direction.

  The track emerged on a great sheet of barren granite and skirted an island of overlaid sandstone. The island was capped by a slab of white limestone, which left a wide overhang where the softer rock had worn away. It suggested to Chee a table where giants dined. Suddenly, just beyond this landmark, he took his foot from the gas pedal and let the truck roll to a stop.