People Of Darkness Part 10

It had been generally frustrating, except for Roscoe Sam who had got sick at Tuba City and died in the BIA hospital there, and was remembered as being dead. Joseph Sam was another matter. A distant cousin on the paternal side of the family thought, rather vaguely, that he, too, was dead. Another even more distant paternal-side cousin said he'd moved his wife's sheep and his own belongings over to the Canoncito Reservation and probably still lived there. Dead or alive, no one had seen Joseph Sam for years. It was the same for the rest of them. An in-law remembered that Rudolph Becenti had moved to Los Angeles but had heard he'd come back again. Windy Tsossie was recalled dimly and unfavorably by a few of his contemporaries around Ambrosia Lakes as one of the Tsossie "outfit" which had lived at Coyote Canyon but had moved away a long time ago. Except for Roscoe Sam, definitely and specifically dead and buried, the day had produced nothing concrete. As for Woody Begay, there was only an old woman's memory that his sister lived north of the Borrego Pa.s.s chapter house, and his sister's name was Fannie Kinlicheenie.

The vagueness of it had puzzled Chee. It was almost as if these People of Darkness existed only in shadowy rumors and not as flesh and blood. Even the site of the oil well explosion eluded them. The hunt for Roscoe Sam had taken them near the place where Chee's notes said it had been. They found only the immense dusty hole that was the Red Deuce-a dozen gigantic power shovels eating the earth in a pit that was already two hundred yards deep and a half mile across. The oil well site, too, seemed part of a memory of something that never was.

But Fannie Kinlicheenie was definitely flesh and blood. She had looked out the doorway of her house at them when they drove up. Chee parked his patrol car a polite thirty yards from the residence, thereby respecting a modest people's tradition of privacy. When Fannie Kinlicheenie was ready to receive guests she would let them know. Meanwhile they would wait. Chee offered a cigaret to Mary, and she took it.

"I shouldn't smoke these things," she said, as he lit it for her.

"Neither should I," Chee said.

"This guy's going to be dead, too," Mary said. "Either that or moved way off somewhere."

Chee had a feeling she was right. Otherwise, someone would have remembered him.

"You're too pessimistic," Chee said.

"No. I'm a realist. There's four of them left. After thirty years, you'd have a mortality rate of about twenty-five percent. I think Woody Begay's the one."

Chee considered this logic. He exhaled a cloud of cigaret smoke.

"You started with six," he said. "We got Dillon Charley dead, and Roscoe Sam dead. That's already a thirty-three percent mortality."

Mary didn't comment for a moment.

Then she said, "If you think like that you should avoid poker games. What happened in the past doesn't affect the mathematics. It doesn't affect the probabilities. Forget the other two. Now we have the names of four men who were alive thirty years ago. Chances are one of the four is dead now and three of them are alive."

"Okay," Chee said. "I'll buy that. Now tell me how you figure the dead one will be Woody Begay."

"That's intuition," Mary said. "Women have intuition."

Chee reached for the key in the ignition. "Any use sticking around, you think? Wasting Fannie's time."

Mary grinned at him. "As long as we've come this far, maybe we might as well confirm the hunch."

"I'd like to," Chee said. "Sure you won't be insulted?"

"Naw," she said. "I was wrong once."

"But not recently," Chee said.

"I think I was four." She paused. "No, as a matter of fact, make that twice I was wrong. The second time was being dumb enough to go along on this Great Jimmy Chee Manhunt. Boy, am I tired. How far did we drive today?"

"I don't know," Chee said. "Maybe two hundred and fifty miles. It just seems longer because a lot of it was dirt roads."

"It seems like a thousand," Mary said. "This thing rides like a truck. I think you have too much air in the tires."

"We put in the specified amount," Chee said. "It's intended to jar us around enough so we don't doze off while driving."

"Come to think of it, there was another time I was wrong." She glanced at him and looked quickly away. "That was at the auction, when I got the impression you were interested in me."

"I am," Chee said.

"I mean romantically. You're interested in me because I'm an Anglo. Questions all day long. I feel like I'm being interviewed by a sociologist."

"Anthropologist," Chee said. "And that's the same reason you came along with me. 'What's this Navajo Indian really like?' You just won't admit it."

Mary laughed. "I admit it," she said. "Now I know what you're really like. You're weird."

"But who knows," Chee said. "Maybe something great will grow out of it. We had a Shakespeare teacher at UNM who said that Romeo was doing a paper on the Capulets for his social studies cla.s.s. He just wanted to pick Juliet's mind."

"I think he was the Capulet," Mary said. "She was a Montague."

"'What's in a name?'" Chee recited. "'A rose by any other name...'"

"So what's your secret name?" Mary asked.

"Rose," Chee said. "Something like that."

The Kinlicheenie house was of wood-frame construction, insulated with black tar paper. It sat on an expanse of sandstone elevated enough to offer a fine view of a rolling, eroded landscape-gray-silver sage and black creosote brush.

On the horizon Mount Taylor dominated, as it dominated everything in the Checkerboard. Its top was white, but its slopes were blue and serene. Behind the house was a circular stone hogan, its doorway facing properly eastward. And behind that stood a small Montgomery Ward steel storage shed and the humped roof of the dugout where the family took its sweat baths. "Ever notice how Navajos always build their houses where they have a view?" Chee asked.

"I've noticed that Navajos build their houses as far as they can possibly get from other Navajos," Mary said. "Any significance to that?"

"We don't like Indians," Chee said.

Mrs. Kinlicheenie was at the door now. Her hair was neatly tied in a bun, and she was wearing a heavy silver squash-blossom necklace and a wide silver-and-turquoise bracelet. Mrs. Kinlicheenie was ready to receive guests.

23.

"My brother?" Fannie Kinlicheenie's expression was puzzled. "You want to find him?"

They were in the front room of the house. The chair in which Jim Chee sat was covered with a stiff green plastic. He felt the chill of it through his uniform s.h.i.+rt. The house was the "summer hogan" of the Kinlicheenies. There was no heating stove in it. In a while, when the high country frost arrived full force, the family would s.h.i.+ft its belongings into the old earth-and-stone "winter hogan" and abandon this poorly insulated structure to the cold. Until then, the problem of the chilly margin between the seasons was solved by wearing more layers of clothing. Fannie Kinlicheenie looked about eight layers deep. Chee wished he had worn his jacket in from the patrol car.

"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-b.i.t.c.hes," 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-b.i.t.c.hes," 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 Dinetah-not 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 t.i.tle 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?"

"n.o.body 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 b.u.mp 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 p.r.o.nouncing the name of Dillon Charley.

24.

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?"