People Of Darkness

Died June 4, 1949

A Faithful Woman

Faithful to B. J. Vines? It seemed an odd thing to put on a tombstone, but then everything about the white man’s burial customs seemed odd to Chee. The Navajos lacked this sentimentality about corpses. Death robbed the body of its value. Even its identity was lost with the departing chindi. What the ghost left behind was something to be disposed of with a minimum risk of contamination to the living. The names of the dead were left unspoken, certainly not carved in stone.

Chee glanced again at the Charley tombstone. The name tugged at memory. There were no Charleys in Chee’s clan – the Slow Talking Dinee – and none among the other clans that occupied the Rough Rock country of his family. But here on the east margin of the reservation – among the Salt Dinee, and the Many Goats Dinee, and the Mud Clan, and the Standing Rock Clan – the name seemed fairly common. And somebody named Charley had done something recently which he should be able to remember.

“Does it seem an unusual place for a graveyard?”

The voice came from behind him. A woman, perhaps in her mid fifties, with a thin, handsome, unsmiling face. She was wearing a coat of some expensive fur over jeans. A navy knit cap covered her ears. “It’s one of B.J.’s little eccentricities, burying people by the garage. Are you Sergeant Chee?”

“Jim Chee,” Chee said. The woman was looking at him, frowning critically, making no offer to shake his hand.

“You’re younger than I expected,” she said. “They told me you were an authority on your religion. Could that be right?”

“I’m learning to be a yataalii,” Chee said. He used the Navajo word because no English word really expressed it. The anthropologists called them shamans, and most people around the reservation called them singers, or medicine men, and none of these expressions really fit the role he would play for his people if he ever finished learning to play it. “Are you Mrs. Vines?” he asked.

“Of course,” the woman said. “Rosemary Vines.” She glanced at the tombstone. “The second Mrs. Vines. But let’s get out of this sleet.”

The house had puzzled Chee. Its front wall was a sweeping, virtually windowless curve, suggesting a natural formation of stone. But inside the massive entry doors and through the entry foyer the puzzle solved itself. The front was actually the back. The ceiling rose in a soaring curve toward a great wall of glass. Beyond the wall, the mountain slope fell away. Now the view was obscured by clouds and gusts of sleet, but on the usual day Chee knew the glass overlooked immense space – across the Laguna and Acoma Indian reservations to the south and east, southward across the forty-mile sea of cooled lava called the malpais toward the Zuni Mountains, and eastward across the Canoncito Reservation to the great blue hump of the Sandia Mountains behind Albuquerque. The room was almost as spectacular as the view. A fireplace dominated the native-stone interior wall to Chee’s left, with the pelt of a polar bear on the carpet by the hearth. On the wall to his right, a hundred glassy eyes stared from trophy heads. Chee stared back: water buffalo, impala, wildebeest, ibex, oryx, elk, mule deer, and a dozen species he couldn’t name.

“It takes some getting used to,” Mrs. Vines said. “But at least he keeps all the fierce-looking ones in his trophy room. These are the ones that couldn’t bite back.”

“I had heard he was a famous hunter,” Chee said. “Didn’t he win the Weatherby Trophy?”

“Twice,” Rosemary Vines said. “In 1962 and 1971. Those were bad years for anything with fang, fur, or feathers.” She draped the mink over the back of a sofa. Under it she wore a man’s plaid shirt. She was a trim woman, one who took care of her body. But there was a tension about her. It showed in her face, in the way she held herself, in the taut muscles along her narrow jaw. Her hands twisted together at her belt line.

“I’ll have a drink,” Mrs. Vines said. “Join me?”

“No, thank you,” Chee said.

“Coffee?”

“If it’s no trouble.”

Mrs. Vines spoke into the grillwork beside the fireplace. “Maria.” The grille buzzed in response.

“Bring a Scotch and some coffee.”

She turned back to Chee. “You’re an experienced investigator. That’s right, isn’t it?” she asked. “And you’re stationed at Crownpoint and you know everything about the Navajo religion.”

“I was transferred to Crownpoint this year,” Chee said, “and I know something about the customs of my people.” This was not the time to tell this arrogant white woman that the Navajos had no religion in the white man’s meaning of the term (in fact, had no word in their language for religion). First he would find out what she wanted with him.

“Sit down,” Rosemary Vines said. She gestured toward a huge blue sofa and seated herself in a chair of stainless-steel tubing and polished leather.

“Do you also understand witchcraft?” She perched at the edge of the chair, smiling, tense, her hands twisting now in her lap. “That business about Navajo Wolves, or skinwalkers, or whatever you call them. Do you know all about that?”

“Something,” Chee said.

“I’ll want to hire you, then,” Rosemary Vines said. “You have some accrued annual leave coming…” An elderly woman – a Pueblo Indian, but Chee wasn’t sure which Pueblo – came in with a tray. Mrs. Vines took her glass – from its color, more Scotch than water – and Chee accepted his coffee. The Indian woman examined him from the corner of her eye with shy curiosity. “You have thirty days leave time,” Mrs. Vines continued. “That should be more than enough.”

For what? Chee thought. But he didn’t say it. His mother had taught him one learns through the ear and not the tongue.

“We had a burglary here,” Mrs. Vines said. “Someone broke in, they got into B.J.’s quarters and stole a box of his keepsakes. I want to hire you to get it back. B.J.’s at a hospital in Houston. I want it back before he gets home. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars now and twenty-five hundred dollars when you return the box. If you don’t get it back, you don’t get the twenty-five hundred dollars. That’s fair enough.”

“You can have the sheriff do it for you for free,” Chee said. “What does the sheriff say about it?”

“Gordo Sena,” Mrs. Vines said. “B.J. has no use for Sena. Nor do I. B.J. wouldn’t want him involved in any way. Besides, what good would it do? They’d send out some ignorant deputy. He’d ask a lot of questions and look around and then he’d go away and that would be the end of it.” She sipped Scotch. “There’s absolutely nothing for the police to go on.”

“I’m police,” Chee said.

“It will be simple enough for you,” Mrs. Vines said. “The People of Darkness stole the box. You find them and get it back.”

Chee felt swallowed by the sofa, engulfed in velvety royal-blue comfort. He considered what Mrs. Vines had said, seeking some sense in it. Her eyes were studying him. One of her hands held the glass. The ice moved in the trembling liquid. The other hand fidgeted on the denim of her jean leg. Sleet rattled and scratched at the plate- glass window. Beyond the glass, night was coming.

“The People of Darkness,” Chee said.

“Yes,” said Rosemary Vines. “It must have been them. Did I tell you nothing was taken except the box? Look around you.” She gestured at the room. “They didn’t take the silver, or the paintings, or anything else. Just the box. They came to get it. And they took it.”

The silver service was on the sideboard – a great urn and a dozen goblets on a massive tray. Worth a lot, Chee thought. And behind it, on the wall, a perfect little Navajo yei rug which on the reservation would bring two thousand dollars from the greediest of traders.

Chee resisted an impulse to ask Mrs. Vines what she meant by “People of Darkness.” He’d never heard of them. But it would be smarter to simply let her talk.

She talked, perched on the edge of the chair, sipping occasionally. She said that when she had come to this place-the house then still under construction – the foreman of the B. J. Vines ranch had been a Navajo named Dillon Charley – the man now buried next to Vines’ first wife by the garage. Vines and Charley had been friends, Rosemary Vines said. “The old man had organized himself some sort of church,” Mrs. Vines said “B.J. was