People Of Darkness

sensed the barb. And the answer was different.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I did tell his nephew I’d pass on the message about the car. But I also wanted to see him about police business.”

“And you couldn’t tell me that.” It was more a statement than a question, and the proper answer, of course, was “No, I couldn’t.” But Chee sensed the hostility again (or perhaps it could now better be described as a mixture of caution and suspicion), and he was not in the mood to give the proper answer.

“I could tell you, but only if you don’t mind complicated accounts of things that don’t amount to much,” Chee said. “Do you want to hear about it?”

She did. Chee told her about Vines, and Mrs. Vines, and the stolen keepsake box, and Sheriff Gordo Sena, and about the People of Dankness and the disappearing body, and finally about where Tomas Charley had left the box.

“And when you look at it all with a detached view,” Chee said, “you see a Navajo cop simply exercising his curiosity. A crime of no particular importance. A total lack of jurisdiction.”

“But it is curious,” she said. “What do you think happened to Mr. Charley’s father? And what are you going to do next?”

“I don’t know about the body. Probably lost by the bureaucracy somehow and nobody cared enough to find it. As for me, next I’ll go out in the malpais when I have some time and get the box and take a look at those rocks, and then I’ll get the box back to Vines. He says he doesn’t want his box back. But he must want those medals.”

“What will you tell Vines?”

“I won’t. I’ll call the sheriff’s office at Grants and tell them I got an anonymous tip on where the box had been left, and went out and found it, and for them to tell the Vineses to come and get it if they want it back.”

Mary Landon raised her eyebrows and sipped her coffee.

“Okay,” Chee said. “It’s a lie. But how else does Vines get his box back without Charley getting in jail?”

“I can’t think of a way,” she said. “Something else puzzles me. How did Charley know he could trust you?”

Chee shrugged. “Because I look trustworthy?” he asked.

She laughed. “As a matter of fact, you don’t,” she said. “Could I go along when you go hunting the box?”

“Sure,” Chee said. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

The apartments the Crownpoint school district provided for its teachers were a quarter mile beyond the school. The school was dark now, and the parking lot empty except for a single pickup truck. The pickup was a blue Ford 150. Charley’s. Chee slowed his carryall, staring at it.

“Not here,” Mary Landon said. “It’s those apartments up ahead.”

“I know,” Chee said. “I’ll get you home in just a minute.”

He pulled into the parking lot, beside the pickup. “This is Charley’s truck,” he said. “Why would he leave it?”

The truck was locked. Frost was turning the windshield opaque. Chee walked around it, shone his flashlight into the cab, looking for anything that would answer that question. He didn’t find it.

13

“MALPAIS, TRANSLATED LITERALLY from the Spanish, means “bad country.” In New Mexico, it signifies specifically those great expanses of lava flow which make black patches on the map of the state. The malpais of the Checkerboard country lies just below Mount Taylor, having been produced by the same volcanic fault that, a millennium earlier, had thrust the mountain fifteen thousand feet into the sky. Now the mountain has worn down to a less spectacular eleven thousand feet and relatively modern eruptions from cracks at its base have sent successive floods of melted basalt flowing southward for forty miles to fill the long valley between Cebolleta Mesa and the Zuni Mountains. Some of this malpais was ancient, long since softened by algae, moss, rain, wind, and durable desert grasses. Elsewhere it was only a few thousand years old, still raw, black, and relatively lifeless. The track Chee was following zigzagged its way across a smoother, more ancient flow. Nonetheless, it was rough going.

“I’ve never been out here before,” Mary Landon said. “Not out in it. It’s like someone was boiling a whole oceanful of black ink, and all of a sudden it froze solid.”

“Even the rodents out here tend to be black,” Chee said. “Protective coloration, I guess.”

“It doesn’t look like there’d be anything alive.”

“Lots of reptiles,” Chee said. “All kinds of snakes and lizards. And quite a few mammals. Rabbits, mice, kangaroo rats, so forth.”

“What do they drink?’ Mary asked.

“Some of them don’t. They get their water from the plants they eat. But rain and snow melt and collect in potholes,” Chee said. “And now and then there’s a spring. That’s where we’re going. Charley has a spring out here. He collects herbs, datura, stuff like that. For his ceremonials. That’s where he left the box.”

“How do you find it?”

“Either by the powers of deduction,” Chee said, “or by asking Charley. I asked Charley and he told me to follow this track until I came to the place where the new lava flow crosses the old.” Chee pointed ahead. “Like right there. And then I’d see a place where the track forks. See? Right there ahead. And the spring was maybe a hundred yards down the right fork of the track. He said there was a bunch of tamarisk sticking up out of the lava flow to mark it. See? Over there.”

“So why aren’t you taking the right turn?” Mary asked.

“I want to show you that new lava up close,” Chee said. “We’ll park there and we can walk over.”

The new lava was at least a thousand years old. It looked as if it had hardened yesterday. It was as black as coal, raw and rough, still marked with the froth of its white-hot bubbling as it boiled across the landscape. They climbed from the ancient lava onto the final wave of the new and stood looking across ten miles of tumbled, ragged blackness at the blue shape of Cebolleta Mesa.

“I’m impressed,” Mary said finally. “It’s like looking backward a hundred million years.”

“Do you know any of our legends?” Chee asked.

“I know a few,” Mary said. “A Laguna girl I know told me one about the Laguna migrations. And the Corn Maidens.”

“Those are Pueblo,” Chee said. “If you were Navajo you’d know that you are looking at the blood of the Horned Monster.”

“Oh. Black blood.” Mary grinned at Chee. “You Navajos have black-hearted monsters.”

“Yes, indeed. A historic spot. Right around here is where the Hero Twins started making Dinetah safe for the Dinee to live in. The Horned Monster was the first one they bagged. Bonn of Water distracted him, and Monster Slayer shot him with an arrow.”

“He certainly bled a lot,” Mary said.

“And then they cleaned the rest of them out,” Chee said. He helped her down from the lava crest. “The Winged Monster, and the Water Monster. We even had one they called One Who Kicks People Over the Cliff.”

“How’d they do him in?”

“His hair grew out of the cliff, keeping him from falling,” Chee said. “Monster Slayer gave him a haircut.”

The ancient lava flow made fairly easy walking. Eons of time had rubbed away its roughness and turned its blackness gray. It was coated with lichens, and grass grew wherever dust had accumulated in its cracks. Chee talked of Navajo mythology. Mary Landon listened. He was carrying a grocery sack which contained a thermos of coffee, two apples, and two king-sized Lottaburgers picked up in Grants. Chee hadn’t been on a picnic since school days. He was happy. To their right, the morning sun reflected off the snow on the high slopes of Mount Taylor, making it glitter against the dark-blue sky.

“We call it Turquoise Mountain,” Chee said. “First Man built it out of earth he brought up from the Third World, and he pinned it to the world with a magic knife to keep it from flying away. He put Turquoise Girl on top of it, to keep the Navajos safe from monsters, and he assigned Big Snake to live on the mountain for eternity, to keep