“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.

“It must have been a long message,” Mary said. “I think you found something to talk about besides someone wanting to buy a car.” The words were skeptical, but after she said them she smiled.

Chee found himself trying to think of something to ask her, of a reason to be in this kitchen talking to her. His mind was blank. “How about having a cup of coffee?’ he heard himself saying. “The coffee shop will be open late.”

The first time she had looked at him she had been inspecting a Tribal Police sergeant. Now she was looking at a man asking her out for coffee. It was a different sort of inspection. “I have to finish with these pots,” she said.

“I’ll do it for you,” Chee said.

Chee washed dishes each evening in his mobile home – a plate, cup, knife, and fork left over from breakfast, a second plate, a cup, and cutlery from dinner, and the frying pan used to cook both meals. But never since his university days had he washed dishes socially.

“You look like you enjoy that,” Mary said. “Maybe you missed your calling.”

Chee tried to think of something witty. He couldn’t.

In the booth at the Crownpoint Café, Chee learned a little about Mary Landon, and she learned a little about him. She had come to Laguna the previous year to replace a teacher hurt in an automobile accident. Then she had landed the Crownpoint job. She was from a little place not far from Milwaukee. She had attended the University of Wisconsin. She liked canoeing and hiking, and the outdoors in general. She didn’t like pretentious people. She liked teaching Navajo children, but wasn’t sure what to do about their conditioning against competitiveness. She hoped to learn Navajo, but it was hard to pronounce and so far she could speak only a few phrases. She spoke them, and Chee pretended to understand, and Mary Landon was not fooled by the pretense but appreciated it and rewarded him with a genuinely friendly look. Chee asked her about her parents, and learned her father ran a sporting goods store. He decided not to ask her about her hostility to police. This wasn’t the time for that, and the attitude was common enough.

Mary Landon learned Chee was one of the Slow Talking Dinee, the clan of his mother, and was “born to” the Bitten Water Dinee, the clan of his father. She learned that Chee’s father was dead, that his maternal uncle was a noted yataalii, and she had been around Navajo country long enough to know about the role of these shamans in the ceremonial life of the People. She learned a good deal more about his family, ranging from his two older sisters through a galaxy of cousins, uncles, and aunts, one of whom represented the Greasy Water district on the Tribal Council.