“What was the hospital’s explanation?”
“They didn’t know what happened. Just the body was gone. One man told me that some of the kinfolks must have got a funeral home to get it. He said the body was put where they put the bodies, and the next day it was gone. He said it must have been a funeral home got it.”
“You reported it to the police?”
“Yeah,” Charley said. “They didn’t do nothing.”
They wouldn’t, Chee thought. He imagined Charley showing up at the Albuquerque police building, trying to find somebody to take the report, telling a clerk (would the clerk have been incredulous, or merely bored?) of a missing body taken by a witch. What would the crime have been? At worst, transporting a cadaver without a permit from the medical examiner. And the police would have guessed it was merely a mix-up: the body claimed by another relative, a family feud perhaps. And Tomas Charley wouldn’t have raised hell and pressed for answers. He already knew two answers. One was that nobody would pay much attention to a Navajo trying to raise hell. And the other was that a witch had flown away with the body. Still, Chee felt his anger rising at this indignity.
“Those sons-a-bitches,” he said. “You want me to try to find him for you?”
Charley thought about it.
“Well,” he said. “I’m half Acoma and half Navajo, and I guess I’m Navajo far as bodies go. When the old man died, he died. Body don’t mean nothing but trouble. But my mother, she’s Acoma. She’d like to know he’s buried the right way. She wouldn’t want a witch to have him.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Chee said. “Why do you think Vines got him?”
Charley hesitated. “It’s got to do with our church,” he said. “I got to go way back to explain it.”
Tomas Charley went back to World War II, when his grandfather was working on the Santa Fe Railroad track crew, and had met an Indian from Oklahoma, and had been introduced to the Native American Church and Lord Peyote. His grandfather had founded a church in the Checkerboard country, and one day Lord Peyote had opened the door so his grandfather could see God. He was working then on an oil well, and God told him that something bad would happen the next day and to tell his crew not to go to work. The oil well had blown up just as God had warned and the word had spread among the Navajos and the Laguna-Acomas of this miracle, and the grandfather’s congregation grew. By the next year more than two hundred people were coming to the Peyote Ways. Then one time a white man came. He was a uranium prospector named Benjamin Vines. Vines told everyone at the Peyote Way that the Lord Peyote had given him a dream of where to find uranium ore.
“All this is the way my father told me,” Charley said. “He said Vines came back about a month later and told my grandfather the uranium ore was where the Lord Peyote said it would be. They had another Peyote Way and Vines had another vision. This time Lord Peyote told Vines he had now done two miracles for my grandfather’s church. He had saved the men from the explosion, and he had led Vines to the ore. He said Vines was blessed, and those men he had saved were blessed, and since the blessing had come from under the ground, from an oil well and uranium ore, their totem would be the mole and their name would be the name of the moles – the People of Darkness.”
“And Vines gave your grandfather a mole fetish?”
“A little later,” Charley said. “They didn’t have a Way for a while because the Navajo Police and the BIA cops were arresting everybody and searching people for peyote buttons, and Gordo Sena was after everybody in the church. But then they had a Way at a secret place, and Vines gave these mole fetishes to my grandfather and to the other men who Lord Peyote had saved.” Charley paused. “That was before Vines got to be a witch,” he explained.
“How’d that happen?” Chee asked.
“First my grandfather got sick,” Charley said. “They had a sing for him, but it didn’t help very long. He went into the hospital. In and out a lot. Finally he died and Vines buried him up at his ranch. He was just building that big house then. The church sort of died out then for years. Then my father got it going again. After that, Vines came around. He tried to get my father to give him the medicine bundle, the box for Lord Peyote, the mole totem, all of the sacred things. My father wouldn’t give them up. After that Vines didn’t come to the Peyote Way again.”
That seemed to be the end of the story. Charley slumped against the wall, looking across the crowded auditorium toward the stage. The Texan had just sold a small yellow yei rug to number 18 for forty-five dollars and was describing a black-and-gray diamond design from Two Gray Hills as “worth three hundred dollars in any trading post on the reservation.”
“Then what?” Chee prodded.
Charley didn’t say anything for a moment. “Then we started hearing things.”
“Like what?”
“Hearing Vines was a witch.”
There was another pause. The Navajo half of Charley seemed to be ascendant, Chee thought. Navajos did not like to talk about witches.
“Tell you what,” Chee said. “You don’t want that old box of Vines’ with the rocks in it. You let me know where to look, and we’ll get it back to the owner. If anybody asks how we found it, it was an anonymous telephone call.”
“It’s out in the malpais,” Charley said. “It was locked. I took it to a place out there where I go and pried it open. It was heavy, so I just left it there.” He explained to Chee how to find it. “I got to go now,” he said. “I’ve got to work tomorrow.”
“Did the man see you about buying that old Chevy?”
Charley looked surprised. “No,” he said. “Somebody want to buy that?”
“That’s what your nephew said. He said to tell you a man came looking for you, and he wanted to buy that old car, and he was going to look for you here.”
“Must be crazy,” Charley said. And he walked away.
And I must be crazy, too, Chee thought as he watched Charley move down the aisle toward the table where an association clerk was paying off rug weavers for their sales. Rocks in a keepsake box. B. J. Vines as mystic prophet. B. J. Vines as witch. A body lost out of a hospital morgue. And Chee wasting his time in an affair that made no sense at all.
He wasted more time watching the auction, moving among the spectators idly at first and then looking for Mary Landon. She was interested in him, of that he was sure. He was equally sure that it was nothing very personal. The interest was more generic than individual. Another Navajo male, adequately scrubbed and trimmed, would have been just as interesting to the blue-eyed woman. Fair enough. At the moment, he was particularly interested in whites, and white women. The Navajo women he knew – his mother, her two sisters, who were his “little mothers,” the Navajo girls he’d been involved with – did nothing to explain Rosemary Vines. And he’d never really known the white girls. Their curiosity had put him off. But Mary Landon he would study. Unfortunately, Mary Landon was nowhere to be seen.
He walked into the parking lot, savoring the cold fresh air after the stuffy heat inside. Tomas Charley was standing beside his truck, talking to a white man in a yellow windbreaker. The white man was blond. The buyer of worthless rusty Chevrolets had found his man. Chee stared at him, curious. The white man seemed to feel the eyes on him. He stared back. The same man, Chee realized, had been watching him and Charley in their long conversation against the wall. Mary Landon was still invisible.
He found her, finally, in the cafeteria kitchen helping a half-dozen other women with cleanup operations.
“The message is delivered,” Chee said. “Thanks.”
It was the third time he had spoken to her, and Chee had a theory about third meetings between people. The third time you were no longer strangers.