People Of Darkness

“It’s cold.”

Chee could see what had happened. The shot had hit the blond man as he reached the door. One of Vines’ hunting rifles, probably. Something big. The slug had torn through him from the back, splashing the door with blood. It had broken the blond man as a stick is broken.

“Is there someplace warm?” the blond man asked.

“Maybe the fireplace,” Chee said. He put his pistol in its holster, walked through the blood, and squatted beside the blond man. He put an arm under his legs and an arm behind his shoulders and lifted him – carefully because the blood was slippery under his socks, carefully because the man was dying.

In the big room, a log fire had burned itself down to flickering coals in the fireplace. Chee knelt in front of it and put the blond man on the skin of the polar bear. The man’s back was broken somewhere between the shoulder blades. The blond man’s head rolled toward the fire. His voice was small.

“There’s this detective agency,” he said. “Webster. In Encino. He’s going to find my mother. She’ll know about the cemetery. She’ll come and get me.”

“All right,” Chee said. “Don’t worry.”

“I thought I killed him,” Rosemary Vines said. She was standing in the doorway, holding a long-barreled rifle. It was pointed roughly in Chee’s direction.

“You did,” Chee said. “It takes a few minutes.”

Mrs. Vines’ face was bloodless. The lipstick she wore made a grotesque contrast against chalky skin.

“Did you know who your husband was?” Chee asked.

Rosemary Vines stared past him, her eyes on the blond man. She’s in shock, Chee thought. She didn’t even hear me.

“I knew he’d had another life somewhere,” she said slowly. “I suspected that even before we were married. He loved to talk about himself, but not back before a certain time. Earlier than that – when he was a boy, when he was in college, any of that time before he’d come out here and found his mine – any time before that it was all very vague. So he had to be hiding something. And finally he admitted he had his secrets. But he’d never tell me what. I told him it had to be criminal or he wouldn’t be ashamed of it. But he’d just laugh.”

On the pelt of the dead polar bear, the blond man was now quite motionless. Rosemary Vines still stared at his body, the rifle still ready.

“I knew it was in his safe. In his box. It had to be. That’s the way BJ. was. Everything he did, he had to keep the evidence. Heads. Pelts. Photographs. He was compulsive about it. Like he had to have proof it had happened. He wouldn’t take twenty-five years of his life and just throw it away. If I could get the box before he got back, there’d be things in there to tell me who B.J. had been when he was young. And there’d be something to tell me what it was he was so ashamed of.”

The thought brought something like animation to her face – a look of triumph anticipated. It was a sort of smile. “Ashamed of, or afraid of,” Mrs. Vines said, still smiling.

Jim Chee looked away from her, away-from the body, and the white fur stained with red. Through the great soaring expanse of glass that lit the room he could see only sky and snow. Blue and white purity. Such beauty should have aroused in Jim Chee an exultation. Now he felt nothing. Only numb fatigue and a kind of sickness.

But he knew the cause, and the cure. Changing Woman had taught them about it when she formed the first clans of the Dinee from her own skin. The strange ways of strange people hurt the spirit, turned the Navajo away from beauty. Returning to beauty required a cure. He would go tomorrow to Hosteen Nakai and ask him to arrange an Enemy Way, to gather family, the interlinked relatives of the Slow Talking Dinee and the Red Forehead Dinee – the brothers and sisters of his blood, his friends, his supporters. Then there would be another eight days for the songs and the poetry and the sand paintings to recreate the past and restore the spirit.

He would persuade Hosteen Nakai that Mary, too, should undergo the blessing even though she was not born Dinee. The arrangements would take weeks – picking the site, spreading the word, getting the proper singer, arranging the food. But when it was over, he would go again with beauty all around him.

About the Author

TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.