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.
“If it was an accident, what was bothering Sena?” Chee asked.
“Sena’s older brother was one of them,” Becenti said. “He was one of the drillers. I think he was what they call the ‘tool pusher.’ And Sena got sort of crazy about it.”
Becenti shook a cigaret out of his pack, offered it to Chee, and then selected one for himself and struck a kitchen match to it. He sat smoking, looking at Mount Taylor, thirty miles to the east. The sun had dropped behind the horizon, but the top of the mountain, rising a mile above the valley floor, still caught the direct light. Tsoodzil, the Navajos called it, the Turquoise Mountain. It was one of the four sacred peaks which First Man had built to guard Dinetah. He had built it on a blue blanket of earth carried up from the underworld, and decorated it with turquoise and blue flint. And then he had pinned it to the earth with a magic knife, and assigned Turquoise Girl to live there and Big Snake to guard her until the Fourth World ended. Now it appeared the magic knife had slipped. The sacred mountain seemed to float in the sky, cut off from the solid earth by the ground haze.
Beautiful, Chee thought. And on the other side of the mountain was the home of B. J. Vines, who had a wife who decided the theft of a keepsake box was very, very important and probably involved witchcraft, or something akin to it. The smoke from Becenti’s cigaret reached Chee’s nostrils.
“The first couple of days we thought we had twelve people killed,” Becenti said. “Wasn’t no way of telling. Lot of people around there now, but then there wasn’t nobody for miles. The only ones we could find that heard the explosion were a long ways off. They hadn’t gone to see about it. Sometimes the crew stayed out on the rig for several days, so nobody got to wondering about it until the weekend. Somebody got nervous. Gordo was a deputy then. He went out to see about it.”
Becenti inhaled a lungful of cigaret and exhaled slowly. The smoke made shapes in the motionless air. Seen in profile, his face was ageless. But his eyes had spent more than forty years looking at drunks, at knife fighters, at victims, at what happened when pickup trucks hit culverts at eighty. They were old eyes.
“The blast was on a Friday, I think it was. Gordo got out there Monday. The birds had been there, and the coyotes. Hauling bits and pieces off.” He glanced at Chee, making sure he understood the implications. “Anyway, like I said, his brother worked out there. Gordo couldn’t find him. Or couldn’t find enough to know whether it was his brother or not. And then one of the men that we thought was killed showed up in Grants. It turned out there was a crew of six roustabouts working out there and we had ’em all down as dead and they was all alive.”
Becenti’s old eyes looked away from the mountain and made contact with Chee’s. “They’d been warned not to go to work,” he said.
“It was an accident,” Chee said slowly. “Who knew it was going to happen?”
“Their foreman was a peyote chief. He’d had services the night before and he had a vision,” Becenti said. “God talked to him and God told him something bad was going to happen out at the well.”
“And he warned his crew?”
“That’s right,” Becenti said. “And when Sena found out about it he just about went crazy. Sena didn’t believe in visions. He figured there was some funny business and somebody had killed his brother.”
“Hard to blame him,” Chee said.
“Anyway, Sena had three of the crew locked up at Grants and was looking for the peyote chief. I was, too – for illegal use of a narcotic on the reservation. One of our people found him first and we had him in custody when a deputy sheriff got there to arrest him.” Becenti’s wrinkled face folded itself into a grin. “Big damned argument over who was gonna get him. Whether it was reservation land or county jurisdiction where he lived, and where the oil well was. Looked like we was going to have another Indian war there for a while. But the well wasn’t on Navajo land, so I let Sena have him.”
Becenti inhaled a puff of cigaret smoke, breathed it out, and looked at the mountain. Its slopes were rosy now with the sunset. Chee said nothing. In Navajo fashion, when Becenti knew what he wanted to say next he would say it. There was no reason to hurry.
“Nothing ever came of it,” Becenti said. “Not as far as Sena was concerned. The peyote preacher stuck to his story, and there wasn’t any reason in the world to believe anyone would have blown up those men on purpose, and so finally Sena turned him loose. But something came of it for us. The Council wanted the peyote church stopped. So we was trying to arrest anyone with peyote. But word got around about the preacher saving those lives, and the congregation kept growing.”
“And you kept arresting them?”
“Trying to,” Becenti said. “They kept moving the services around. First one place and then another. Sort of went underground.” Becenti laughed again. “Got real secret. The leaders took to wearing mole amulets and they called themselves the People of Darkness.” Becenti used the same Navajo word that Mrs. Vines had remembered.
“The peyote chief was a Navajo named Dillon Charley?”
“That’s right,” Becenti said. “He was the peyote chief. He was the one who had the vision.”
“Did B. J. Vines have anything to do with that oil well?”
“No,” Becenti said. “He didn’t come into this country until after all that happened.” Becenti slammed his fist into his palm. “By God, though,” he said. “Vines and Charley got connected later on. Charley worked for him. After that explosion Sena hated Charley and pretty soon Sena was hating Vines, too.” He glanced at Chee. “How much you know about Vines?”
“Just what I’ve heard,” Chee said. “Came in here a poor boy at the very beginning of the uranium discoveries. Made the big uranium find on Section 17 and sold his leases to Anaconda for ten million dollars and a percentage royalty on the ore, and now he gets a little richer every time they drive an ore truck out of the Red Deuce Mine. Got more money than the U.S. government, big-game hunter, flies an airplane, so forth.”
“That’s about it,” Becenti said. “Except early on he and Sena had their troubles. Sena was sheriff by then, and Vines ran some Anglo against him and spent a lot of money and be damned if he didn’t beat Sena. And Sena came back two years later and beat the Anglo. Sena’s been sheriff of Valencia ever since, and he never did forgive Vines.”
“How did Charley get involved with Vines?” Chee asked.
“Politics. He started working with Vines against Sena – getting out the Navajo vote, and the Lagunas and Acomas. On Vines’ payroll, probably. Later on he worked out there at Vines’ ranch. Died years ago.”
“What happened to the People of Darkness?”
“Haven’t heard of them for years,” Becenti said. “But the church is still operating. You remember the courts ruled that peyote was a sacrament and they had a right to dope themselves up with it. Charley’s son – I think his name was Emerson – he was the preacher after Dillon died. And Emerson’s boy, he’s a peyote chief since Emerson’s sick.”