People of Darkness jlajc-4

by Tony Hillerman

  What? Mary asked.

  Chee looked at her. Boy, he said. Am I stupid. He slammed his fist against the steering wheel. Two sets of keepsakes, he was thinking. One on the walls. One hidden in the safe. What was the difference between them? The difference was in time.

  Mary was staring at him. Come on, she said. Cut it out. Let me in on it.

  I’m still getting it sorted out, Chee said. But what it boils down to is why a man who’s very much into keeping mementos and showing them off would hide the best of them in his wall safe.

  Like those medals, Mary said.

  Like those and his high school football team picture, and a couple of athletic awards.

  And black rocks, Mary said.

  Let’s get to those later. Stick to the easy stuff now.

  Easy if you’ve thought of the answer, Mary said. Quit showing off, damn it. What have you thought of?

  The only difference I can see is the ones in the safe were all from Vines’ early life. Boyhood and young man in the military. The stuff on the wall is after he struck it rich.

  Mary had her lower lip caught between her teeth. Her expression said she was looking for significance in this. Before the oil well explosion and after the explosion. Is that it? And how about the rocks?

  We better get moving, Chee said. It’s going to get dark. He put the pickup in gear.

  In other words, you don’t know about the rocks.

  Somehow they had to be important. A memento of something important, Chee said. And from his early life.

  I’ll buy that, Mary said. Moments ticked away as the pickup jolted over the rocky surface. Hey, Mary said. I know what. The rocks are from when he found the uranium deposit. They’re his first ore samples. Don’t you think?

  That would fit, Chee said. Sure. Why didn’t you think of that earlier?

  You didn’t ask me, Mary said. All you had to do was ask.

  Okay, then. Explain why he keeps those medals in the safe.

  Maybe he’s keeping them for somebody else, Mary said.

  The wind rocked the pickup again, buffeting it with a barrage of driven sand. Chee down-shifted to pull the truck up a steep incline.

  Mary, he said, you’re a genius. He switched on the transmitter and raised the dispatcher at Crownpoint. His instructions were specific. Call Martin at the fbi. Tell him to have the Veterans Administration make a high-priority emergency check on the military record of Benjamin J. Vines. Was he a first lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division? Had he won the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart? What kind of discharge? Any criminal record in the service?

  The dispatcher read the instructions back. Anything else?

  Tell Martin I’ll explain it to him when I see him tonight. Tell him I’ll be late. And wait a minute. Chee fished out his notebook. Give him these names, too. He read off the names of those killed in the oil well explosion. At the name of Carl Lebeck, he paused. Lebeck the geologist. Lebeck the welllogger. For a geologist, black rocks might be a memento. Put the name of Lebeck first, Chee said. Tell Martin that if Vines didn’t win those decorations, to have the VA go down that list of names and see if Lebeck or any of the others won them.

  Got it, the dispatcher said. You still at Bisti?

  Northwest of the burned-out trading post, Chee said. We’ll be out here until after dark, the way it looks.

  Better watch the weather, the dispatcher said. It’s snowing some over on the west side. Inch on the ground at Ganado. Not supposed to amount to much, but you know how that is.

  We’ll watch it, Chee said. He flicked the radio switch and put the pickup back into gear.

  What are you thinking? Mary asked.

  Chee frowned at the windshield. Mostly, I’m just taking a shot in the dark.

  But just mostly, Mary said. Have you figured a way that Vines and the oil well connect?

  They must, Chee said. They have to connect. If not Vines, then Gordo Sena. One or the other has to connect.

  Mary laughed. Sure, she said. Now all you have to do is figure out how.

  I think I have, Chee said. At least part of it.

  The track angled to the right and up the slope of dark-blue shale marbled with reddish impurities. Above it, the top of the butte loomed, now no more than a thousand yards away. Chee shifted down. Mary was watching him impatiently.

  I’m waiting, she said.

  Okay, Chee said. First we agree there has to be a reason. White man or Navajo, you do things for a reason. With a Navajo, something this badblowing up people wholesalewould have to be witch business. Irrational. Evil for the sake of evil. No other motive would make sense. For the white man, I think it would be greed. He glanced at her. All right so far?

  Mary looked puzzled. I guess so, she said.

  If we’re dealing with witchcraft, what’s happened since doesn’t connect. Maybe a Navajo would want to kill the Charleys if he knew they were witches who’d done him harm. That’s happened. But he would do it in the heat of rage, not years later. So let’s set that aside.

  Mary shrugged.

  So we’re dealing with a white man’s crime, Chee continued. The motive’s greed. Who gains by blowing up an oil well? You have to remember where that well was. We couldn’t find the remains because the Red Deuce has swallowed up the site. So the oil company drilling the well had a mineral rights lease on that piece of land. If the well produces oil, the lease is extended as long as production lasts. That’s the standard oil lease form. So let’s say somebody knows there’s a uranium deposit under the well. Who’d benefit?

  You mean the Senas? Because it was on their ranch?

  Maybe the Senas, Chee said. When it finally did happen, uranium made Gordo Sena rich. But something doesn’t fit with thinking Gordo did it.

  You mean like killing his own brother? Mary asked. Maybe Robert Sena planned it himself and then something went wrong and he killed himself, too.

  I didn’t mean that, Chee said. I meant the Sena ranch is like most ranches out here. It’s a little bit of privately owned land connected to a big spread of federal Bureau of Land Management land. Most of what you own is a permit to graze your cattle on blm land. That’s where the well was drilling. On federal land. The Senas had the grazing lease, but it was about a quarter of a mile from the boundary of their own land. So they wouldn’t benefit directly from either an oil strike or a uranium find. Sena got rich because the uranium deposit spread over onto his family property.

  So you rule out Sena, Mary said, Who then?

  I don’t quite rule out the Senas, Chee said. There’s a piece missing somewhere. I can’t think it through.

  The pickup tilted abruptly downward into a narrow wash. Chee shifted into his lowest gear, braked to a stop, and inspected the arroyo. The problem would be pulling the truck up the other side. The arroyo carried very little water even after downpours, and a tall growth of mesquite and rabbit brush on both sides of the track had limited erosion. But still, years of cutting away had made the opposite bank steep enough so that getting traction to the pickup out of it looked chancy.

  Looks like the end of the line, Mary said. But aren’t we close enough to walk?

  We’ll try the pickup, Chee said. If we don’t make it, there’s plenty of room down there to turn it around.

  The vehicle produced a great shower of flying gravel, lost traction briefly, and skidded sideways. But it made the brief, steep climb. Ahead now, no more than four hundred yards away, they could see three gnarled cottonwoods. In a desert climate they signaled either a spring or a very shallow water sand that could be tapped by a well. And that in turn explained why this track led across the badlands and why the Tsossies had picked the site for their hogan. Chee and Mary could see the hogan now about twenty feet beyond the trees. It was a hexagon of stacked sandstone slabs, roofed with poles which radiated outward from a central smoke hole. The earth that once insulated the roof against cold and heat had long since washed away.

  Chee pulled the pickup to a stop against an outcr
op of cliff. He clipped on his holster and hung his binocular case around his neck. Be prepared, he said, and stepped out into the wind.

  The doorway of the hogan was closed with planks nailed across the lintel logs. The only opening now was on the north sidea hole knocked through the stone wall to provide an exit for the ghost and to warn strangers that this was a death hogan. Chee stood looking into the hole. The evening light that filtered through the latticework of roof showed nothing but odds and ends of junk too worthless to carry away even by an impoverished family. Dirt had blown in and tumbleweeds had bounced through the ghost hole, but the danger posed by the chindi had made the place secure from scavengers.

  If Tsossie didn’t die here, someone did, Chee said. Let’s find the place the old lady said they put him.

  Mary was staring at the hogan. I’ve heard about this, she said, about Navajos not using buildings after somebody dies in them. It seems awfully wasteful.

  Unless maybe they died of something contagious, Chee said. When the custom started, I guess that was the purpose.

  They carry the body out the hole? Is that right? Always on the north side?

  Chee didn’t want to talk about it now. The wind gusted again, carrying around a light load of dry, feathery snowflakes. North is the direction of evil, he said.

  Mrs. Musket had told them the blowhole was in the mesa wall, west of the hogan. The butte was formed of layers of geological formations, capped with a gray erosion-resistant granite. Below that was a stratum of red sandstone perhaps thirty feet deep, which covered porous, whitish volcanic tuft that had been riddled with wind pockets and seepage holes. Only two of these near the hogan were large enough for a burial. Chee examined both through the binoculars and saw nothing conclusive. They climbed the talus slope toward the nearest one. Against the perpendicular walls of the butte, sections of the soft perlite had been worn away, undermining the sandstone. A section of it had fallen in a clutter of blocks, each as large as a freight car. Chee scrambled up the sloping side of one of the blocks and looked into the blowhole. Rocks had been piled on its floor. From beneath one of them a ragged fragment of blue cloth protruded. The wind eddied into the hole. The cloth fluttered.

  Come on up, Chee said. I guess we found Windy Tsossie.

  Sometimes the dry cold of a desert winter will protect a corpse from decay and turn it into a desiccated mummy. Since the placement in the cliff and the covering of rocks had protected Tsossie from both animal predators and scavenger birds, this might have happened to him. But Tsossie, apparently, had died in the summer, and thirty years of insects had reduced what he had been to a clean white skeleton.

  With the last rocks removed, Chee squatted in the low opening and looked at what remained. The skeleton was still wearing moccasins, put on the wrong feet to confuse any chindi that might follow the spirit into the darkness of the afterworld. The denim trousers Tsossie had worn had been reduced to scraps of decayed rags, but for some reason the shirt was about half intact. Two buttons still held it across the empty cage of ribs. Chee checked the skeleton’s left hand. A finger was missing. Mrs. Musket had said Tsossie had lost a finger. The wind caught the shirttail and blew it against the ribs, revealing the dull silver of leather-strung conchas. The heavy belt that had once encircled a waistline now encircled only a row of whitened vertebrae. Under the concha buckle Chee saw a leather string, the thong of a medicine pouch. Pouch and belt lay just above the socket where the ball joint of Tsossie’s thigh bone connected to the pelvic socket. The thigh bone was distorted by a heavy, unnatural growth of scar tissue, an ugly lesion which ran from the joint almost halfway down the heavy bone. It looked very much like the illustration Dr. Huff had pointed out to them in his medical text. Bone cancer. The sort of crazy growth that happens in bone tissue with the metastasis of cell malignancy.

  Chee picked up the pouch and pried open the brittle leather.

  It’s snowing again, Mary Landon said. She was sitting on the slab outside the cave entrance inspecting the landscape through the binoculars. And it’s getting dark.

  Just another minute or two, Chee said.

  The leather broke apart under his fingernail. Inside there was a coating of yellow dustwhat once had been sacred pollen. The pollen coated four small fragments of abalone shell, a gallstone taken from some small animal, two feathers, a withered bit of root, and the small stone shape of a mole.

  Chee held the mole delicately and polished away the pollen dust. It looked just like the one he had found in Emerson Charley’s medicine pouch. Almost identical.

  Jimmy. Somebody’s coming.

  It was as if they were the same mole. The same amulet. The feel under his fingers was the same. The same blunt legs, the same sloping, pointed snout.

  The tone of Mary’s voice cut through his concentration more than the meaning of the words. The tone was fear.

  What? he asked. Where?

  There. She pointed over the open hogan roof, past the almost bare cottonwoods, down the track they had followed.

  At first he saw nothing. Then a man wearing a navy-blue stocking cap and a heavy black windbreaker trotted into sight. He carried a rifle in his right hand and ran easily, in a low crouch. Chee could see just enough of his face to confirm what he instinctively knew. It was the blond man. In his crouching, careful trot, he was skirting Chee’s pickup truck.

  Climb in here, Chee whispered. He helped pull Mary into the blowhole. It’s him, Chee said. But I don’t think he’s seen us. He’s looking for us around the truck.

  How could he have found us here? Mary whispered.

  God knows, Chee said. The blond man was kneeling behind a growth of rabbit brush, apparently watching the truck. Chee lifted the binoculars and surveyed the landscape down the track. The man must have driven here and left his vehicle parked somewhere. Chee could see no sign of it. It was probably parked out of sight in the bottom of the arroyo they’d crossed.

  Mary found a place behind the bones and the rocks that had covered them. She sat pressed against the sloping wall, looking first at Chee and then at the skeleton. The blowhole was an elongated circle perhaps six feet along its longest diameter and flattened at the bottom by fallen debris and accumulated dust. The wind had cut into the soft ash no more than four feet. If the man with the rifle learned they were there, the blowhole offered no safety.

  Chee spoke in a very low voice. We stay absolutely still until it gets dark. No motion. No sound. Nothing to attract attention. I want you to ease yourself down as flat as you can get. You’re out of sight from where he is now, but do it slowly and carefully. I’m going to lay flat, too. Then he won’t be able to see anything in here, even if he tries. Not without climbing up on the slab.

  And we can’t see him, either, Mary said in a very faint voice. We won’t know where he is. We won’t be able to do anything to defend ourselves.

  He has the rifle, Chee said. We don’t have any defense against that. Not until it gets dark.

  Chee lay on his stomach, his left hand pressed against the tuft beneath him, his right hand gripping the butt of his revolver. Ready to move. There was the smell of dust and ashes in his nostrils. The wind picked up again and hooted through the blowhole opening. Grains of perlite fell against his cheek. The blowhole had become infinitesimally deeper. There was a sound outside. The blond man? The wind? A brushy branch scratching against stone?

  Chee struggled against an overwhelming urge to run.

  The sound came again. A creaking.

  What was that? Mary asked. The question had a frantic sound. Panic had come to her a little later than it had to him.

  He reached across the bones for her, gripping her leg with his left hand. The wind, he whispered. Mary, listen. The way the owl hunts, he sits in a pion and he hoots. He can’t see the rabbits, and they can’t see him. And that’s the problem for the rabbits. He hoots. And he waits a little to let them think about it, and he hoots again. And the rabbits think. And one of them will think too much. He thinks the owl is getting
closer and closer. He thinks the owl has found him. So he makes a run for it, and the owl has her meal for the night.

  Mary moved his hand from her leg. Okay, wise guy, she whispered. I get your point.

  A flurry of snow blew into the hole, the flakes cold against his face. Noises came again and with them a return of panic. He found himself imagining the blond man’s face appearing suddenly over the rim of the hole behind the silenced .22 pistol. Chee found his muscles rigid with tension. He forced himself to think of other things. In three weeks he would go to Albuquerque and buy his ticket and report to the fbi Academy. Or he would drive out to the place of Hosteen Nakai and tell his uncle that he was ready to work with himthat Hosteen Nakai could count on him this winter when the calls came to conduct his sings. Which one would it be? He couldn’t concentrate on the question. Instead he planned what he would do when darkness came. He would move when there was still a little light. He would find the blond man’s car. If the blond man was in it, he would kill him. If he wasn’t, then Chee would wait. He waited now, hearing the sound of the wind when it gusted and the sound of Mary breathing when it was silent. He had time now to add what Tsossie’s bones and Tsossie’s mole had told him to what he had already surmised. The People of Darkness had been murdered. Tsossie had been an unpleasant man, perhaps even a witch. But he had been reduced to bone for a motive that had nothing to do with the anger his unpleasantness had provoked. The motive was mathematical, not emotional. A simple matter of improving the odds against the future. A white man’s crime.

  Chee felt an impatience to move, to begin the contest. It was much darker, but not quite dark enough. Words from the Stalking Way ran through his memory, his uncle’s husky voice singing them, his uncle’s stubby fingers tapping rhythm on the pot drum.