People Of Darkness

But Fa

“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 Fa

Mary gri

“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 tines.”

“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 class. 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?” Fa

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 shirt. 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 shift 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 weaning more layers of clothing. Fa

“We heard this man was your brother,” Chee said. “We need some information from him.”

“But he’s dead,” Fa

Chee glanced at Mary. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

Fa

“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-bitches,” Fa

“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,” Fa

“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 note in the ritual.

“Those sons-a-bitches,” 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 Fa

“How do you know they were witches?” Chee asked. He stuck to English. “Sometimes people get blamed for being skinwalkers when they’re not.”

Fa

“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.