Free Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 04] by jpg] People Of Darkness (v1) [html

more, and jobs if you learn what the white man puts his value in."
    Jimmy Chee had said that he had already decided. He wanted to walk in beauty as a Navajo.
    "You can't decide until you understand the white man. They have much that we don't have. To be a Navajo is to have no money," Hosteen Nakai had said. "When you are older we will talk again. If you still wish it, I will begin teaching you something. But you must study the white man's way."
    Chee had studied. After Shiprock High School, he had enrolled at the University of New Mexico. He'd studied anthropology, sociology, and American literature in class. Every waking moment he studied the way white men behaved. All four subjects fascinated him. When he came home during semester breaks to his mother's place in the Chuska Mountains, Hosteen Nakai taught him the wisdom of the Dinee. Finally his uncle began teaching him the ritual songs that brought the People back from their sicknesses to walk in beauty. And Chee's memory always served him well.
    On the road that leads from Grants into the back side of Ambrosia Lakes uranium fields, Chee returned the recorder to its case and concentrated on finding the home of Tomas Charley. He found it some thirty feet west of the narrow asphalt pavement. It was a two-room adobe to which someone had connected a wooden frame lean-to with a roof of red composition shingles. A 1962 Chevrolet Impala squatted on cinderblock supports in the front yard, all four of its wheels missing. Chee pulled his patrol car to a stop beside it and sat waiting. If someone was home, willing to receive a visitor, he would appear at the door. If he didn't after a polite interval of waiting, Chee would knock.
    The front door opened and Chee could see someone looking at him through the screen. A child. Chee waited. No one else appeared. Chee climbed out of the carryall.
    "
Ya-tah
," he said. "Hello."
    "Hello," the child said. It was a boy, about ten or twelve.
    "I'm looking for Tomas Charley," Chee said.
    "He went to get my mother," the boy said.
    "Where's that?"
    "They won't be there," the boy said. "She's a weaver. My uncle was taking her to the rug auction."
    "At Crownpoint?" Chee asked. *
    "Yeah," the boy said. "She's going to sell a bunch of rugs."
    Chee laughed. "I'm not very lucky today," he said. "That's where I came from and now I'll have to drive right back."
    "You going to see my uncle there?"
    "If I can find him," Chee said. "What's he driving?"
    "A 1975 Ford pickup," the boy said. "An F-150. Blue. If you see him, tell him maybe somebody wants to buy our old Chevy. Tell him a man came by right after he left, looking for him," the boy said.
    "Sure," Chee said. "Anything else?"
    "Maybe the man will see him there at the rug auction," the boy said. "He's a blond guy, wearing a yellow jacket. He was going to look for him there."
    "Okay," Chee said. He looked at the car with more interest now. The exposed brake drums were brown with rust and the upholstery in the back seat hung down in dusty festoons. Tomas Charley's nephew was overly optimistic. No one was going to drive all the way to Crownpoint to arrange to buy that junker.

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Chapter Twelve
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    I t was after sundown when Chee drove past the Tribal Police office. It was dark. On the other side of the village, perhaps two hundred assorted vehicles were parked at the Crownpoint elementary school, suggesting a good turnout for the November rug auction. Chee found a blue Ford 150 pickup. Parked next to it was a green-and-white Plymouth, like the one Charley's nephew had said the would-be car buyer was driving. Chee checked it quickly. It was new, with less than three thousand miles on the odometer. A folder on the dashboard suggested it had been rented from the Albuquerque airport office of Hertz.
    Inside the school, the air was rich with a mélange of aromas. Chee identified the smells of cooking fry bread, floor wax, blackboard chalk, stewing mutton and red chili, of raw wool, of horses, and of