People Of Darkness

Sena replaced the pencil between his teeth and sat back in the chair. The pencil pointed directly at Chee’s nose. Sena’s eyes asked Chee if he had received the warning.

“Sounds sensible,” Chee said.

“Yeah,” Sena said. “It’s sensible.” He pushed back the swivel chair and pushed himself out of it. “Been a long day,” he said. “Get a little dustin’ of snow and the goddamn Texans coming through on 1-40 ain’t never seen it before and we got ’em slid off the road all the way from Gallup to Albuquerque.” Sena moved around the desk, agile for such a bulky man, showing Chee out.

“I think you was smart deciding not to take that job,” he said. “We’ll just solve that little burglary for Mrs. Vines ourself. Just show her how to do it. She say anything about Dillon Charley? Anything at all?”

Again it seemed to Chee that the question was deliberately casual.

“Just what I told you,” Chee said.

“You know, they got old Dillon Charley buried up there. Right by the house. That always seemed awful fu

Chee said nothing. Sena’s hand gripped his arm.

“She say anything about why they did that?”

“No,” Chee said “All she said was something about the old man joking about it when the doctor told him he was dying.”

“About that burglary. You think she was telling all she knew?”

“People usually don’t,” Chee said.

Sena eyed him thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “That’s always been my experience.” He released Chee’s elbow. “You be careful, now,” he said.

4

JIMMY CHEE SAT with his boot heels propped on the edge of his wastebasket and his fingers locked behind his head and his eyes on Officer Trixie Dodge. Officer Dodge was, as she had already told him, trying to get some work done.

“Come on, Trixie,” Chee said. “Think about it. What could be in the box? Why is old lady Vines so hot to get it back? Why is old Gordo Sena so uptight about it?”

Officer Dodge was sorting through legal papers in her in box, transferring them into a cardboard folder. The papers were to be delivered this morning to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Gallup. Officer Dodge was ru

“And you never heard of anything called the People of Darkness?”

“Nope,” Trixie said. “I’ve heard of moles. I’ve heard of the peyote church. In fact, I’ve got a cousin who’s into that.” Officer Dodge put the last of the papers into the folder and headed for the door. “And I’ve heard of people with moles, but I never heard of people who call themselves moles.”

“Maybe it had something to do with an amulet, or a fetish – something like that,” Chee said.

“Of a mole?” Officer Dodge’s voice was incredulous. “What kind of a Navajo would use a mole for an amulet?” Officer Dodge left for Gallup without waiting for an answer.

What kind of a Navajo would use a mole for an amulet? It was a fair enough question. Chee sat, feet on wastebasket, hands locked behind head, thinking about it. It wouldn’t be a traditional, old-fashioned Navajo, probably, except under unusual circumstances. More likely one of those Eastern Navajos whose clans had mixed more Pueblo Indian ritualism and Christianity into their culture. The Navajo used representations of the predator Holy People for his amulets. The mole was a predator in the Navajo mythology, but he was much less powerful and much less popular than his more glamorous cousins – the bear, the badger, the eagle, the mountain lion, and so forth. In Chee’s own medicine pouch, suspended from a thong inside his trousers, was the figure of a badger. It was about the size of Chee’s thumb and carved from soapstone, a gift from his father. In the mythology of the Slow Talking Dinee, Hosteen Badger was a formidable figure. Hosteen Mole played a trivial role. Why use the mole? He was the predator of the nadir, downward, one of the six sacred directions. He was the symbol of the dark underground, with access to those strange dark subsurface worlds through which the Dinee rose in their evolution toward human status. But compared to the bear, the eagle, or even the horned frog, he had little power and no prominence in ceremonials. Why pick the mole? The only explanation Chee could think of was the obvious one. The oil well drilled toward the nadir, into the mole’s domain.

Chee unlocked his hands and put his feet squarely on the floor beneath his desk. He should get some reports finished. But halfway through the first one he found himself thinking of the nervous Rosemary Vines offering three thousand dollars for a box of keepsakes and the intense, probing questions of Gordo Sena. An arrogant woman presumed he could be bought, and an autocratic man presumed he could be bluffed. What was it that made this little burglary so important to them?

Chee picked up the Albuquerque telephone book. He found the number and placed a call to the Bernalillo County Medical Center. Two transfers later, he was talking to a nurse in the Cancer Research and Treatment Center.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The patient can’t have any visitors.”

“We’re investigating a crime,” Chee said. “Mr. Charley is the only one who can provide some information we need. It would be two or three quick questions.”

“Mr. Charley is not conscious,” she said. “He’s under sedation. He’s in very critical condition.”

“It would only take a few seconds. I could come and wait for him to regain consciousness,” Chee said.

“I’m afraid that won’t happen,” the nurse said. “He’s dying.”

Chee thought about that. It made the question he was going to ask sound absurd.

“Can the hospital confirm that Emerson, Charley didn’t leave the hospital last Tuesday?”

“We can confirm that Mr. Charley hasn’t left his room for a month. He’s being fed intravenously. He’s too weak to move.” The tone was disapproving.

“Well, then,” Chee said, “I’ll need the name of his next of kin.”

He got it from the records office, and jotted it on his note pad. Tomas Charley, Rural Route 2, Grants. No telephone. A son, grandson of Dillon Charley. What would Tomas know of something that had happened about the time he was born? Probably not much. Perhaps nothing.

Then who would know?

One question, at least, Chee could find an answer for. What had caused the trouble between Sheriff Sena and Henry Becenti? He would locate Becenti and ask him. And then Chee would decide whether he would collect Mrs. Vines’ three thousand dollars.

5

“SOME OF IT’S EASY to remember,” Henry Becenti said. “Hard not to. Six people killed. But hell. It was way back in ’47 or ’48. That’s a long time ago.”

“I can just remember hearing somebody talking about it,” Chee said. “But it was long before my time”

“It was a little independent outfit,” Becenti recalled. “Trying to do some drilling back in there northeast of Mount Taylor, and they had an explosion that wiped out the whole crew. That’s how old Gordo and I got in trouble with each other.”

“Just an accident?”

“Yeah,” Becenti said. “You know anything about oil drilling? Well, this one was a dry hole. No oil. So they was going to shoot it. Perforate the casing.” Becenti glanced at Chee to see if he understood. “They lower a tube of nitroglycerin down the well to the level where it looks best and they shoot it off. Idea is to shatter the rocks down there and get the oil ru

A look of distaste crossed Becenti’s face. He shook his head, shaking off the vividness of the memory. They were sitting on a shelf of stone that jutted from the slope above Henry Becenti’s place. They were there because Chee’s arrival had coincided with a visit from Becenti’s mother-in-law to Becenti’s wife. Changing Woman had taught the original Navajo clans that while the groom should join his bride’s family, the mother-in-law and son-in-law should scrupulously avoid all contact. In forty years, Old Woman Nez and Henry Becenti had never broken that taboo. Becenti had built his house at his in-laws’ place, but away from the hogan of his bride’s parents. When Old Woman Nez came to call, Becenti arranged to be elsewhere. This high ridge, which looked across the great valley of Ambrosia Lakes, was a favored retreat.