POLLS PROJECT DEWEY LANDSLIDE
“Ha!” Mary Landon said. “Wrong disaster.” She was sitting beside and a little behind him, saying nothing much. She brought to his sensitive nostrils the scent of clothing dried in sunlight, and of soap.
Chee pushed the lever to the right again and glanced up. A librarian moved down the aisle to his left, pushing a cart loaded with bound periodicals. A slender white girl with a fur-collared coat was hunting something in the microfilm files. Beyond her, movement caught Chee’s eye. An elbow, covered with blue nylon, jutted out from behind one of the square white pillars. It retracted, jutted out again, retracted, jutted. Doing what? Someone scratching himself?
Chee wanted suddenly to took over his shoulder, to make sure that Hunt was still in the carrel, alert and ready. He resisted the urge. Theoretically, Hunt was tagging along as a guard. But while it hadn’t exactly been spoken, it was understood that purpose number one was to get the blond man. Protecting Chee was a by-product. It sounded cold-blooded but it made sense. One protected Chee and Mary Landon by catching the blond man. There was no other way to do it. The law wanted very, very badly to catch the blond man. On the other hand, the world was full of tribal policemen.
Under his eyes, the record of June 1948 raced past and became July. The reels overhead hummed, paused, hummed again, paused again. On this pause the banner read:
WELL EXPLOSION KILLS CREW
“Here it is,” Chee said.
The subhead added:
TWELVE FEARED DEAD
IN BLAST ON RIG FLOOR
“Scoot over a little,” Mary said. She leaned over the projected page, pressed against him, reminding him again of sunshine and soap.
All members of an oil well drilling crew were apparently killed instantly northwest of Grants several days ago in what authorities believe to have been the premature explosion of a nitroglycerin charge.
Valencia County Sheriff Gilberto Garcia said the toll may be as high as twelve men, including ten working on the drilling crew on the east slope of Mount Taylor and two employees of the oil field supply company, who had brought in the nitro charge.
Garcia said the death toll is uncertain because the force of the blast “blew everything apart and scattered bits and pieces of people for half a mile.”
It looks like they had the nitro on the floor of the well when it went off,” Garcia said. “It didn’t leave much.” He said the explosion probably took place Friday, which was the day the crew from Petrolab, Inc., delivered the explosive to the site. The accident was not discovered until Monday, when a deputy sheriff went to the site to investigate why men working there had not been heard from.
Garcia said the well is about 25 miles north and west of Grants near the border of the Checkerboard district of the Navajo reservation. “We haven’t found anyone who heard the explosion,” the sheriff said. “No one lives for miles around out there.”
The sheriff said coyotes, other predators, and scavenger birds had complicated the problem of identifications. “We think we have one identification positive now, and we expect we have enough to pin down a couple of others, but we’re not too optimistic about the rest.”
He said payroll records named the drilling crew as Nelson Kirby, about 40, of Sherman, Texas, the crew chief; Albert Novitski, age and address unknown; Carl Lebeck, age unknown, a geologist who was logging the well; Robert Sena, 24, of Grants, and six as yet unidentified Navajos working on the well as a roustabout crew.
Also feared killed were R. J. Mackensen, about 60, and Theo Roff, about 20, both employees of Petrolab, a Farmington company which supplied the explosive.
Chee scanned the remaining paragraphs.
“Pretty much what Sena told you?” Mary asked. “The names ring any bells?”
“Just Robert Sena,” Chee said. “He was Gordo’s big brother.”
Mary was reading over his shoulder. “Carl Lebeck,” she said. “My cousin used to date a boy named Carl Lebeck. Or maybe it was Le Bow. Something like that.”
“Let’s see what they said when they found the Navajos were alive,” Chee said.
It was on the front page of the Wednesday edition, a brief item reporting that the crew of six Navajo laborers, originally believed killed in the explosion, hadn’t gone to work that day. The story included their names, which Chee copied off in his notebook. It didn’t mention why they had missed work. Chee found that in the following day’s paper. Again the headline stretched black across the top of the page:
ARREST MADE IN WELL BLAST
SHERIFF REPORTS NAVAJOS
GIVEN ADVANCE TIP
One of the Navajo workers who escaped last week’s fatal explosion at a Valencia County oil drilling site was being questioned today about reports that he had advance knowledge the explosion would occur.
Sheriff Gilberto Garcia identified the man as Dillon Charley. He said Charley has admitted warning five other Navajo coworkers at the well not to go to work last Friday “because something bad was going to happen.”
”He claims he got the warning from God in some sort of religious vision,” Garcia said. He said that Charley is the “peyote chief” in the Native American cult and that the five other Navajos on the work crew were also members of the religious organization.
Members of the cult chew seed buttons from the peyote cactus as part of their rites. A narcotic in the peyote reportedly affects the nervous system, causing hallucinations in some users. Possession of the substance is illegal, and the Navajo Tribal Council has passed specific legislation banning its use or possession on the reservation.
The sheriff also revealed that Charley had been injured in what Garcia called “an attempt to resist arrest.” He said Deputy Sheriff Lawrence Sena had been placed under suspension “until we can determine if undue force was used.” Deputy Sena’s brother, Robert Sena, was one of the men blown to bits when a nitroglycerin change went off prematurely at the well last Friday.
“Notice that?” Chee asked. He poked his finger at the proper paragraph. “Gordo roughed up Dillon Charley. He must have really roughed him up to get suspended for it. Beating up a Navajo wasn’t considered such a big deal in those days.” He leaned back, away from the microfilm projector hood, and looked at Mary. Her expression was quizzical.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you’re strange,” she said. “I think you’re weird. You have this creepy murderer trying to shoot you, and you’re down here all excited, reading about something that happened thirty years ago.”
“You, too,” Chee said. “How about you?”
“I’m not excited,” she said.
“I mean he’s trying to shoot you, too.”
“I don’t believe that,” Mary said. “You’re the one who got a good look at him. You’re the one he came after.” She looked away from him, leaning again into the microfilm reader. A nice profile, Chee thought. Nice. She was looking down, reading the projected type. Her eyes were very blue and the lashes curved away from them in a long, graceful sweep. Her hair fell across her cheek. Soft hair. Soft cheek.
“Another thing,” Mary said without glancing up. “What’s all this concern about a cop beating up a Navajo? From what I heard at Laguna, the worst cops for beating up Navajos were Navajo cops.”
“We’d rather beat up Anglos,” Chee said, “but we don’t have jurisdiction over you folks.” He watched her profile as he said it, looking for the reaction that would tell him something about her. Her jibe about Navajo police was partly serious-probably mostly serious. Navajo police, like most police, had a reputation of being toughest on their own people. Her eyes were still on the projected page. “You haven’t really told me what happened up in the hospital. How you got away. And you haven’t told me your secret name.”