except help time pass, avoid freezing, and think.
“I am born a Slow Talking People,” Chee said. “I’m also a member of the Red Forehead Clan because my father was one. And I’m connected with the Mud Clan, because my uncle – the one teaching me to be a singer – he’s married into the Muds. All of those clans have the same tradition. To become a witch, to cross over from Navajo to Navajo Wolf, you have to break at least one of the most serious taboos. You have to commit incest, or you have to kill a close relative. But there’s another story, very old, pretty much lost, which explains how First Man became a witch. Because he was first, he didn’t have relatives to destroy. So he figured out a magic way to violate the strongest taboo of all. He destroyed himself and recreated himself, and that’s the way he got the powers of evil.”
“I never heard about that,” Mary said. “I thought for a minute you were changing the subject. But you’re not, are you?”
“I’m not,” Chee said. “Lebeck decided to be a witch. He destroyed himself. And he came back.”
Mary was frowning at him. “Lebeck? The geologist at the oil well?”
“Yes; the geologist,” Chee said. “Think about what we know. We know the oil well was drilled through uranium, because the Red Deuce is now mining that deposit where the oil well stood. Lebeck was what they call the ‘well logger’ – the one who inspects samples of the rock they’re drilling through and maps the deposits. Very shallow, maybe down just fifty feet or so, the bit goes through pitchblende, a thick layer of the very richest uranium ore. So Lebeck suddenly knows something that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. How can he cash it in? He can cash it in only if, this oil lease is allowed to expire. Then he can file his own mineral lease claim. So he falsifies the log.”
Mary was leaning forward, intent. “Hey,” she said. “You looked at the log. Did he? Why didn’t you tell me? How could you tell?”
Chee made a wry face. “I couldn’t tell,” he said. “I checked out that log and a couple of other ones from other wells drilled in Valencia County, and they all looked about alike. The oil companies were all looking for a shallow oil sand, just down about two thousand feet. I was looking for God knows what down at the bottom of the well, down at the end where they were deciding to shoot the tubing with the nitro. I didn’t know what I was looking for, and I didn’t see anything.”
“But you should have seen something,” Mary said slowly. “You should have seen they’d drilled through the uranium ore.”
“Exactly!” Chee said. “I’ve heard that Red Deuce deposit is a couple of hundred feet deep. It should have been noted on the log.” Chee felt an overpowering urge to smoke. He hadn’t had a possibility of lighting a cigaret since the blond man’s arrival at the butte. He fished out a Pall Mall, offered it to Mary. She shook her head. He lit it.
“Those things will kill you,” Mary said.
“Actually, I think now he must have falsified the log twice. Once when they drilled through the ore and again at the end. I think they found the oil sand they were looking for, and Lebeck put it down as something else and had them drill right through it. Or maybe he had the log show they were drilling into a geological formation which should be below the oil sand – which would mean the sand didn’t exist at this particular place. Anyway, he wanted them to shut down the well and let the lease lapse, so he could get a lease on it himself. If they struck oil, the lease would be renewed by the oil company and he would never get the uranium. So when the company decided to shoot the well, Lebeck must have known there was a good chance that would start the oil flowing. He couldn’t risk that.” Chee inhaled a lungful of smoke and let it trickle from between his lips. It made blue swirls in the slowly moving air, drifting upward while the white flakes drifted down. Far above at the butte top, the north wind, the evil wind, began hooting again. Chee puffed out the last of the smoke, destroying the pattern with his breath. “And so Lebeck decided to blow everything, and everyone, sky high. Lebeck decided to become a witch.”
He glanced at Mary.
“To die, or seem to die, and to come back as B. J. Vines,” she said.
“Yes,” Chee said.
“But when the nitro truck arrived, something went wrong. Dillon Charley’s crew didn’t show up for work.”
“How did Dillon Charley know?”
“The Lord Peyote told him in a vision,” Chee said. “Or perhaps Lebeck warned him – which I doubt. Or perhaps Dillon Charley saw things that made him nervous. I think Charley was a very perceptive man. Mrs. Vines told me that her husband and Dillon Charley were friends – had a sort of rapport. Perhaps that was already true when Vines was Lebeck.” Chee shrugged. “Who knows? Lord Peyote, or nervousness about nitroglycerin, or what? Anyway, he didn’t show up that day, and he warned his crew away. I think Lebeck wanted them all there. No one else around here knew him. No one else would recognize him as Vines. But he didn’t have any choice. The nitro truck came. He had to act then or never.”
“How did he do it?” Mary asked.
“I have to guess. Obviously he left the rig. I’d say he probably got far enough away to be safe, and he had a rifle and fired a shot into the nitro bottle at the proper moment.”
Mary Landon shivered again and hugged herself. “And then he just walked away, so he’d be counted among the dead. Didn’t he have a family? A mother and father? People who loved him?”
“I don’t know anything about Lebeck,” Chee said.
“And then to come back here. Wouldn’t he be afraid someone would recognize him?”
“Probably nobody knew him, or had even seen him much. Just the well crew. It was an isolated place. Hardly a road then, and the crew would have lived out at the well, where nobody saw them. And then he stayed away two years. Maybe a little more. Long enough for the mineral lease to expire. Long enough to grow a heavy beard. Who knows-maybe he did something else to change his looks. I said we didn’t know anything about Lebeck, but we do know a little. You get into the paratroops by volunteering. And once he was in, he won two top decorations for courage. So I guess he wasn’t afraid of taking chances. Or of killing, either. He must have done a lot of it.” Chee paused, thinking about it. “I guess he knew he’d have some more to do.”
“The People of Darkness,” Mary said.
“Yeah. He couldn’t count on Dillon Charley forgetting him.”
“You think Dillon Charley saw Vines and recognized him as Lebeck?”
“Maybe. But I’ll bet Lebeck didn’t wait for that to happen. I’ll bet he went looking for him. Maybe he told Charley the Lord Peyote had given him a vision, too. Or maybe he just offered him a job, money, so forth. He’d know Charley wouldn’t tell the sheriff anything – not with the way Gordo was harassing him and his church. And besides, Charley wasn’t going to live very long.”
“Lebeck knew Dillon Charley had cancer?”
“Lebeck knew Charley was going to have cancer,” Chee corrected. “That black rock, it must be pitchblende. When the oil well bit drilled through it, Lebeck recognized pitchblende, and that’s the hottest kind of natural uranium deposit. He didn’t put it on the log, but he saved a piece of the core to test and make sure. And then he kept it because he saved mementos, and this one was going to change his life. Maybe he already knew it was going to be useful to him.”
“You’re losing me,” Mary said. “How do you know it’s pitchblende? I never heard of it. How do you know so much about it?”
“Out here everybody is prospecting half the time,” Chee said. “You learn about minerals, and mostly you learn about uranium-bearing minerals. I should have thought of it before. I think if we get a mineralogist to check those rock samples and those mole amulets, we’re going to find they’re radioactive. Vines gave Charley the mole knowing he would carry it in his medicine pouch – hanging from his waist under his clothing right against the groin.”
“Dillon Charley, and Tsossie, and Begay, and Sam, and all of them,” Mary said. She shivered again.
“He didn’t overlook much,” Chee said. “I think Dillon Charley must have been the first to die, and Vines got the body and buried it, just in case an autopsy would show something. But Navajos don’t have much interest in bodies, and the authorities don’t have much interest in dead Navajos, and people got scattered out, so after Dillon Charley it wasn’t worth the trouble, I guess. It looked like he could quit worrying. Everybody on that work crew who had ever seen him as Lebeck was dead, or soon would be. Nothing to worry about for years.”
“Not until Emerson Charley gets cancer,” Mary Landon said.
“I think that’s right,” Chee said. “Old Dillon was a pretty important religious leader, and people like that sometimes try to pass it along to their children. I guess he gave Emerson his medicine bundle, hoping he’d become
