People Of Darkness Part 5

Tomas Charley was leaning against the wall alone. He seemed to be watching someone in the crowd. Mary Landon said something else, but Chee didn't hear it. He was studying Charley. He was a small man-not over five and a half feet-and skinny. His face was bony, with small, deep-set eyes and a narrow forehead under the brim of his tipped-back hat. There was an alertness about him, a tension. The eyes s.h.i.+fted to Chee now, quickly past him, and back again. Becenti had said he was half crazy, a fanatic. The small black eyes had the look of those who see visions. Getting Tomas Charley to talk, Chee thought, would take a lot of care and a lot of luck.

As it developed, it was no trouble at all. They talked a bit about the rug auction, and about the drought. Chee leaned against the wall beside the man, guiding the conversation. The auctioneer was on the stage now, a florid white man explaining the rules in a West Texas voice. Chee talked of Sheriff Gordo Sena, of jurisdiction problems between Navajo police and white sheriffs. The first rug was auctioned for $65. Bidding on the second one stuck at $110. The auctioneer put it aside and joked with the crowd about its stinginess. He moved the offer up to $155, and sold it.

Chee talked of Mrs. Vines' job offer, of what she'd said of the burglary, of his decision not to get involved in it, and of Vines' withdrawing the offer. Tomas Charley said less and less.

"It's no business of mine," Chee said. "I don't care about the burglar." He grinned at Charley. "I know who went in Vines' house and got that box. You know who went in. And Gordo Sena never is going to know. What I'd like to know is what was in that box."

Charley said nothing. Chee waited. On the fifth rug, bidding was spirited. The auctioneer sold it for $240.

"I've got a curious mind," Chee said. "Lots of things funny about Vines. Lots of things funny about Gordo Sena. Mrs. Vines, too."

Tomas Charley glanced at him, then glanced away. He stood with his arms crossed in front of him. The fingers of his left hand, Chee noticed, tapped nervously against his right wrist.

"Why did Vines bury your grandfather there at his house?" Chee asked. "I wonder about that. And why did somebody try to kill your father? And why did Mrs. Vines want me to find Vines' old box? And then not want me to find it? And why did Gordo Sena warn me to mind my own business?"

Chee asked the last question directly to Charley. The drumming fingers stopped. Charley pursed his lips.

"I don't give a d.a.m.n if you got into Vines' house and took something," Chee said. "None of my business. But what was in that box?"

"Rocks," Tomas Charley said. "Chunks of black rocks."

It occurred to Chee that he hadn't really thought about what the box might hold. But he hadn't expected this. He considered it. "No papers?" he asked. "Nothing with anything written on it?"

"Mostly rocks," Charley said.

"Nothing else?"

"Some medals," Charley said. "Stuff from the war. Stuff like that." He shrugged.

"Tell me everything that was in it."

Charley looked surprised. "Well," he said. "There's a little card glued inside the lid. Got Vines' name and address on it. Then there was three medals. One was the Purple Heart and the other two were like stars. One out of some kind of brown metal and the other one looked about the same, but it had a little silver star in the middle of it. And there was a set of wings like paratroopers wear, and a shoulder patch with an eagle head on it and silver bars like lieutenants wear in the army." Charley thought. "Photographs. A picture of a girl, and a picture of a man and woman standing by an old car, and then a whole bunch of black rocks." Charley stopped. The catalog was complete.

"Nothing else?" Chee asked. "What did you expect to find?"

Charley shrugged.

"Luck?" Chee asked.

Charley's face tightened. "Vines was a witch," he said. He didn't use the Navajo word, which meant witch, or skinwalker, or Navajo Wolf. He used a Keresan expression-the word the people of Laguna and Acoma used to mean sorcerer.

"I heard that, too," Chee said. "You think you'd find his medicine bundle?"

Charley glanced at Chee, then looked away. Time ticked past. The auctioneer began the rhythmic litany of another transaction.

"He was killing my father," Charley said. "I wanted to turn the witching around. I wanted to find something for that."

Chee didn't say any of the obvious things. He didn't say, "Your father is dying of cancer." He didn't say, "It's not witchcraft; it's something wrong with the way the cells grow." He said nothing at all. Tomas Charley was sure his father had been doomed by a witch. When that happened, the Navajo way was a ceremonial-usually the Enemy Way or the Prost.i.tution Way. Each invoked a traditional formula which reversed the witchcraft and turned it against the witch. And each required something that the witch had used. But Tomas Charley was half Laguna. He saw Vines as the Lagunas saw sorcerers. Perhaps they had a different formula. The auctioneer completed his transaction, selling a small diamond-patterned rug to a woman using bidding card 72. Chee and Tomas Charley leaned against the wall, watching, their shoulders touching.

"Why was Vines witching your father?" Chee asked. "Do you know that?"

"Vines wasn't always a sorcerer," Charley said. "Once he was a good man, I think, and he helped my grandfather and he helped our church. He gave us our totem. He gave it to my grandfather. The mole. It is powerful, and it helps the Lord Peyote open the door for us. It helps bring us visions. Vines wanted to get it back. So he made my father sick. And then he stole my father's body."

On the stage, the auctioneer and his a.s.sistant held up a saddle blanket. "This un's a dandy," the Texan was saying. He leaned comically against its pretended weight. "Take a stout horse to carry this un. Wove so tight you couldn't get water through it. I'm starting at eighty. Yum at eighty. Eighty. Eighty. Yum at eighty. Eighty-five. Have eighty-five. Yum at eighty-five. Ninety. Yum at ninety."

"Stole your father's body?" Chee asked. He was thinking Emerson Charley had been alive last week. Very sick but alive. How long ago was it? Five days? Six? He glanced at Charley. The thin man was staring straight ahead, every line in his face rigid. He seemed to be remembering something.

"When did Vines steal your father's body?"

"Two, three days ago," Charley said. "Out of the hospital there at Albuquerque. And he got the mole back again."

"But how did he do it? Did he just walk in and walk out with it?"

Charley shrugged. "Vines is a witch," he said. "The hospital, they call me, and they tell me my father died and what to do with the body? When I get there, Vines had already got off with it. That's all I know."

"What was the hospital's explanation?"

"They didn't know what happened. Just the body was gone. One man told me that some of the kinfolks must have got a funeral home to get it. He said the body was put where they put the bodies, and the next day it was gone. He said it must have been a funeral home got it."

"You reported it to the police?"

"Yeah," Charley said. "They didn't do nothing."

They wouldn't, Chee thought. He imagined Charley showing up at the Albuquerque police building, trying to find somebody to take the report, telling a clerk (would the clerk have been incredulous, or merely bored?) of a missing body taken by a witch. What would the crime have been? At worst, transporting a cadaver without a permit from the medical examiner. And the police would have guessed it was merely a mix-up: the body claimed by another relative, a family feud perhaps. And Tomas Charley wouldn't have raised h.e.l.l and pressed for answers. He already knew two answers. One was that n.o.body would pay much attention to a Navajo trying to raise h.e.l.l. And the other was that a witch had flown away with the body. Still, Chee felt his anger rising at this indignity.

"Those sons-a-b.i.t.c.hes," he said. "You want me to try to find him for you?"

Charley thought about it.

"Well," he said. "I'm half Acoma and half Navajo, and I guess I'm Navajo far as bodies go. When the old man died, he died. Body don't mean nothing but trouble. But my mother, she's Acoma. She'd like to know he's buried the right way. She wouldn't want a witch to have him."

"I'll see what I can do," Chee said. "Why do you think Vines got him?"

Charley hesitated. "It's got to do with our church," he said. "I got to go way back to explain it."

Tomas Charley went back to World War II, when his grandfather was working on the Santa Fe Rail-road track crew, and had met an Indian from Oklahoma, and had been introduced to the Native American Church and Lord Peyote. His grandfather had founded a church in the Checkerboard country, and one day Lord Peyote had opened the door so his grandfather could see G.o.d. He was working then on an oil well, and G.o.d told him that something bad would happen the next day and to tell his crew not to go to work. The oil well had blown up just as G.o.d had warned and the word had spread among the Navajos and the Laguna-Acomas of this miracle, and the grandfather's congregation grew. By the next year more than two hundred people were coming to the Peyote Ways. Then one time a white man came. He was a uranium prospector named Benjamin Vines. Vines told everyone at the Peyote Way that the Lord Peyote had given him a dream of where to find uranium ore.

"All this is the way my father told me," Charley said. "He said Vines came back about a month later and told my grandfather the uranium ore was where the Lord Peyote said it would be. They had another Peyote Way and Vines had another vision. This time Lord Peyote told Vines he had now done two miracles for my grandfather's church. He had saved the men from the explosion, and he had led Vines to the ore. He said Vines was blessed, and those men he had saved were blessed, and since the blessing had come from under the ground, from an oil well and uranium ore, their totem would be the mole and their name would be the name of the moles-the People of Darkness."

"And Vines gave your grandfather a mole fetish?"

"A little later," Charley said. "They didn't have a Way for a while because the Navajo Police and the BIA cops were arresting everybody and searching people for peyote b.u.t.tons, and Gordo Sena was after everybody in the church. But then they had a Way at a secret place, and Vines gave these mole fetishes to my grandfather and to the other men who Lord Peyote had saved." Charley paused. "That was before Vines got to be a witch," he explained.

"How'd that happen?" Chee asked.

"First my grandfather got sick," Charley said. "They had a sing for him, but it didn't help very long. He went into the hospital. In and out a lot. Finally he died and Vines buried him up at his ranch. He was just building that big house then. The church sort of died out then for years. Then my father got it going again. After that, Vines came around. He tried to get my father to give him the medicine bundle, the box for Lord Peyote, the mole totem, all of the sacred things. My father wouldn't give them up. After that Vines didn't come to the Peyote Way again."

That seemed to be the end of the story. Charley slumped against the wall, looking across the crowded auditorium toward the stage. The Texan had just sold a small yellow yei yei rug to number 18 for forty-five dollars and was describing a black-and-gray diamond design from Two Gray Hills as "worth three hundred dollars in any trading post on the reservation." rug to number 18 for forty-five dollars and was describing a black-and-gray diamond design from Two Gray Hills as "worth three hundred dollars in any trading post on the reservation."

"Then what?" Chee prodded.

Charley didn't say anything for a moment. "Then we started hearing things."

"Like what?"

"Hearing Vines was a witch."

There was another pause. The Navajo half of Charley seemed to be ascendant, Chee thought. Navajos did not like to talk about witches.

"Tell you what," Chee said. "You don't want that old box of Vines' with the rocks in it. You let me know where to look, and we'll get it back to the owner. If anybody asks how we found it, it was an anonymous telephone call."

"It's out in the malpais," Charley said. "It was locked. I took it to a place out there where I go and pried it open. It was heavy, so I just left it there." He explained to Chee how to find it. "I got to go now," he said. "I've got to work tomorrow."

"Did the man see you about buying that old Chevy?"

Charley looked surprised. "No," he said. "Somebody want to buy that?"

"That's what your nephew said. He said to tell you a man came looking for you, and he wanted to buy that old car, and he was going to look for you here."

"Must be crazy," Charley said. And he walked away.

And I must be crazy, too, Chee thought as he watched Charley move down the aisle toward the table where an a.s.sociation clerk was paying off rug weavers for their sales. Rocks in a keepsake box. B. J. Vines as mystic prophet. B. J. Vines as witch. A body lost out of a hospital morgue. And Chee wasting his time in an affair that made no sense at all.

He wasted more time watching the auction, moving among the spectators idly at first and then looking for Mary Landon. She was interested in him, of that he was sure. He was equally sure that it was nothing very personal. The interest was more generic than individual. Another Navajo male, adequately scrubbed and trimmed, would have been just as interesting to the blue-eyed woman. Fair enough. At the moment, he was particularly interested in whites, and white women. The Navajo women he knew-his mother, her two sisters, who were his "little mothers," the Navajo girls he'd been involved with-did nothing to explain Rosemary Vines. And he'd never really known the white girls. Their curiosity had put him off. But Mary Landon he would study. Unfortunately, Mary Landon was nowhere to be seen.

He walked into the parking lot, savoring the cold fresh air after the stuffy heat inside. Tomas Charley was standing beside his truck, talking to a white man in a yellow windbreaker. The white man was blond. The buyer of worthless rusty Chevrolets had found his man. Chee stared at him, curious. The white man seemed to feel the eyes on him. He stared back. The same man, Chee realized, had been watching him and Charley in their long conversation against the wall. Mary Landon was still invisible.

He found her, finally, in the cafeteria kitchen helping a half-dozen other women with cleanup operations.

"The message is delivered," Chee said. "Thanks."

It was the third time he had spoken to her, and Chee had a theory about third meetings between people. The third time you were no longer strangers.

"It must have been a long message," Mary said. "I think you found something to talk about besides someone wanting to buy a car." The words were skeptical, but after she said them she smiled.

Chee found himself trying to think of something to ask her, of a reason to be in this kitchen talking to her. His mind was blank. "How about having a cup of coffee?" he heard himself saying. "The coffee shop will be open late."

The first time she had looked at him she had been inspecting a Tribal Police sergeant. Now she was looking at a man asking her out for coffee. It was a different sort of inspection. "I have to finish with these pots," she said.

"I'll do it for you," Chee said.

Chee washed dishes each evening in his mobile home-a plate, cup, knife, and fork left over from breakfast, a second plate, a cup, and cutlery from dinner, and the frying pan used to cook both meals. But never since his university days had he washed dishes socially.

"You look like you enjoy that," Mary said. "Maybe you missed your calling."

Chee tried to think of something witty. He couldn't.

In the booth at the Crownpoint Cafe, Chee learned a little about Mary Landon, and she learned a little about him. She had come to Laguna the previous year to replace a teacher hurt in an automobile accident. Then she had landed the Crownpoint job. She was from a little place not far from Milwaukee. She had attended the University of Wisconsin. She liked canoeing and hiking, and the outdoors in general. She didn't like pretentious people. She liked teaching Navajo children, but wasn't sure what to do about their conditioning against compet.i.tiveness. She hoped to learn Navajo, but it was hard to p.r.o.nounce and so far she could speak only a few phrases. She spoke them, and Chee pretended to understand, and Mary Landon was not fooled by the pretense but appreciated it and rewarded him with a genuinely friendly look. Chee asked her about her parents, and learned her father ran a sporting goods store. He decided not to ask her about her hostility to police. This wasn't the time for that, and the att.i.tude was common enough.

Mary Landon learned Chee was one of the Slow Talking Dinee, the clan of his mother, and was "born to" the Bitter Water Dinee, the clan of his father. She learned that Chee's father was dead, that his maternal uncle was a noted yataalii yataalii, and she had been around Navajo country long enough to know about the role of these shamans in the ceremonial life of the People. She learned a good deal more about his family, ranging from his two older sisters through a galaxy of cousins, uncles, and aunts, one of whom represented the Greasy Water district on the Tribal Council.

"She's my mother's sister, which makes her my 'little mother,'" Chee said. "A real tiger."

"You're not playing the game," Mary Landon said. "I told you about me. You're just telling me about your family."

The statement surprised Chee. One defined himself by his family. How else? And then it occurred to him that white people didn't. They identified themselves by what they had done as individuals. He added sugar to his coffee, thinking about it.

"That's the way we play the game. If I was introducing you to Navajos, I wouldn't say, 'This is Mary Landon, who teaches at Crownpoint,' and so forth. I'd say, 'This woman is a member of...'-your mother's family, and your father's family-and I'd tell about your uncles and aunts, so everyone would know just exactly where you fit in with the people around you."

"'This woman'?" Mary Landon asked. "You wouldn't tell them my name?"

"That would be rude. Now more people have English names, but among traditional Navajos it's very impolite to say someone's name in their presence. Names are just reference words, when the person's not there."

Mary Landon looked incredulous. "I think that's..." She stopped.

"Silly?" Chee asked. "You have to understand the system. Our real names are secret. We call them war names. Somebody very close to you in the family names you when you're little. Something that fits your personality, if possible. Not more than a half-dozen people are ever going to know it. It's used for ceremonial purposes: if a girl is having her kinaalda kinaalda-her p.u.b.erty ceremony-or if you're having a sing done for you. Then, as you grow, people give you nicknames to refer to you. Like 'Cry Baby,' and 'Hard Runner,' or maybe 'Long Hands' or 'Ugly.'" Chee laughed. "I've got an uncle on my father's side everybody calls 'Liar.'"

"How about Jim Chee? Isn't that your real name?"

"Along came the trading posts," Chee said. "Along came the white man. He had to have a name to write down when one of us p.a.w.ned our jewelry to him, or got credit for groceries. The traders started formalizing the nicknames, and before long we had to have names on birth certificates, so you got family names, like mine. I've had nicknames, too. Two or three. And I'm sure you do, too."

"Me?" Mary Landon looked surprised.

"How long you been at Crownpoint? Three months? Sure. The people have a name for you by now."

"Like what?"

"Something that fits. Maybe 'Pretty Teacher.' Or 'Stubborn Girl.'" Chee shrugged. "'Blue Eyes.' 'Blond Woman.' 'Fast Talker.' Do you want me to find out for you?"

"Sure," she said. Then, "No, wait. Maybe just forget it. How about you? What do they call you?"

"Here? I don't know. When I was at Rough Rock they used to call me..." He paused, and then said the word carefully in Navajo. "It means 'One Who Studies to Be a Singer.'"

"Oh," Mary Landon said. "Are you?"

"I was," Chee said. "I guess I still am, in a way. It depends."

"On what?"

"I applied for admission to the FBI. More or less to see how I'd do. Took the tests. Got interviewed by the screening panel at Albuquerque. Last week I got a letter telling me I'd been accepted. I'm supposed to report to the academy in Virginia. December tenth."

She looked at him curiously. "So you're going to be an FBI agent."

"I don't know," Chee said.

"You haven't decided?"

"What's the rush? We work on Navajo time." Even as he said it, the flippancy sounded false. December 10 wasn't Navajo time. It was four weeks away. A specific, ironclad, unbendable deadline.