Tony Hillerman’s procedurals featuring the Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee represent all the strengths of the American regional mystery novel. Not only does Hillerman open a vista of the southwestern landscape, with which he is intimately acquainted, but his work offers an understanding of Native American culture.
Hillerman was born in the dust-bowl village of Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, where he enjoyed a supportive family life and attended a boarding school for Potawatomie Indian girls. By growing up with Potawatomie and Seminole friends and neighbors, he learned, he says, that “racial difference exists only in the bigot’s imagination but that cultural differences are fascinating.”
Hillerman’s youthful hopes of becoming a chemical engineer were already dimmed by bad grades in math and chemistry courses when he was drafted to fight in World War II. In the infantry, he twice attained the rank of private first class and won the Silver Star and the Bronze Star with cluster. He also suffered a wound that left him with only one good eye and a need for a job outside a chemistry lab.
While he was home from Europe on a convalescent furlough, two crucial incidents occurred. A reporter who had read his letters to his family told him that he should be a writer. And while driving a truck to the Navajo Reservation, he witnessed a curing ceremony that later became the center of The Blessing Way, his first novel introducing Leaphorn.
Before he wrote that novel, Hillerman studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma, persuaded Marie Unzner to marry him, and spent seventeen years as a journalist and another five years as a journalism professor at the University of New Mexico. After writing his second novel, which features a political reporter as its sleuth, Hillerman returned to Leaphorn, sending him to the nearby Zuni Reservation to help find a Navajo boy suspected of murder. This book, The Dance Hall of the Dead, won the “best novel” Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America.
The series of novels that followed feature either Leaphorn or Jim Chee, a younger, more traditional Navajo police officer. In the most recent five books, the two work in uneasy tandem, solving crimes through their knowledge of the culture of their people. Hillerman’s books have won awards from the Navajos, the Center for the American Indian, the American Anthropological Association, and the Department of the Interior. His colleagues in the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master.
With its background of witchcraft and atmosphere of an impending desert storm, “Chee’s Witch” demonstrates how Hillerman makes tribal culture and the desert landscape germane to his plots. In his tale, the unraveling of a contemporary crime is impossible without an intimate knowledge of timeless ritual.
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Chee’s Witch
1986
Snow is so important to the Eskimos they have nine nouns to describe its variations. Corporal Jimmy Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police had heard that as an anthropology student at the University of New Mexico. He remembered it now because he was thinking of all the words you need in Navajo to account for the many forms of witchcraft. The word Old Woman Tso had used was “anti’l,” which is the ultimate sort, the absolute worst. And so, in fact, was the deed which seemed to have been done. Murder, apparently. Mutilation, certainly, if Old Woman Tso had her facts right. And then, if one believed all the mythology of witchery told among the fifty clans who comprised The People, there must also be cannibalism, incest, even necrophilia.
On the radio in Chee’s pickup truck, the voice of the young Navajo reading a Gallup used-car commercial was replaced by Willie Nelson singing of trouble and a worried mind. The ballad fit Chee’s mood. He was tired. He was thirsty. He was sticky with sweat. He was worried. His pickup jolted along the ruts in a windless heat, leaving a white fog of dust to mark its winding passage across the Rainbow Plateau. The truck was gray with it. So was Jimmy Chee. Since sunrise he had covered maybe two hundred miles of half-graded gravel and unmarked wagon tracks of the Arizona-Utah-New Mexico border country. Routine at first—a check into a witch story at the Tsossie hogan north of Teec Nos Pos to stop trouble before it started. Routine and logical. A bitter winter, a sand storm spring, a summer of rainless, desiccating heat. Hopes dying, things going wrong, anger growing, and then the witch gossip. The logical. A bitter winter, a sand storm spring, a summer awry. The trouble at the summer hogan of the Tsossies was a sick child and a water well that had turned alkaline—nothing unexpected. But you didn’t expect such a specific witch. The skinwalker, the Tsossies agreed, was the City Navajo, the man who had come to live in one of the government houses at Kayenta. Why the City Navajo? Because everybody knew he was a witch. Where had they heard that, the first time? The People who came to the trading post at Mexican Water said it. And so Chee had driven westward over Tohache Wash, past Red Mesa and Rabbit Ears to Mexican Water. He had spent hours on the shady porch giving those who came to buy, and to fill their water barrels, and to visit, a chance to know who he was until finally they might risk talking about witchcraft to a stranger. They were Mud Clan, and Many Goats People, and Standing Rock Clan—foreign to Chee’s own Slow Talking People—but finally some of them talked a little.
A witch was at work on the Rainbow Plateau. Adeline Etcitty’s mare had foaled a two-headed colt. Hosteen Musket had seen the witch. He’d seen a man walk into a grove of cottonwoods, but when he got there an owl flew away. Rudolph Bisti’s boys lost three rams while driving their flocks up into the Chuska high pastures, and when they found the bodies, the huge tracks of a werewolf were all around them. The daughter of Rosemary Nashibitti had seen a big dog bothering her horses and had shot at it with her .22 and the dog had turned into a man wearing a wolfskin and had fled, half running, half flying. The old man they called Afraid of His Horses had heard the sound of the witch on the roof of his winter hogan, and saw the dirt falling through the smoke hole as the skinwalker tried to throw in his corpse powder. The next morning the old man had followed the tracks of the Navajo Wolf for a mile, hoping to kill him. But the tracks had faded away. There was nothing very unusual in the stories, except their number and the recurring hints that the City Navajo was the witch. But then came what Chee hadn’t expected. The witch had killed a man.
The police dispatcher at Window Rock had been interrupting Willie Nelson with an occasional blurted message. Now she spoke directly to Chee. He acknowledged. She asked his location.
“About fifteen miles south of Dennehotso,” Chee said. “Homeward bound for Tuba City. Dirty, thirsty, hungry, and tired.”
“I have a message.”
“Tuba City,” Chee repeated, “which I hope to reach in about two hours, just in time to avoid running up a lot of overtime for which I never get paid.”
“The message is FBI Agent Wells needs to contact you. Can you make a meeting at Kayenta Holiday Inn at eight p.m.?”
“What’s it about?” Chee asked. The dispatcher’s name was Virgie Endecheenie, and she had a very pretty voice and the first time Chee had met her at the Window Rock headquarters of the Navajo Tribal Police he had been instantly smitten. Unfortunately, Virgie was a born-into Salt Cedar Clan, which was the clan of Chee’s father, which put an instant end to that. Even thinking about it would violate the complex incest taboo of the Navajos.
“Nothing on what it’s about,” Virgie said, her voice strictly business. “It just says confirm meeting time and place with Chee or obtain alternate time.”
“Any first name on Wells?” Chee asked. The only FBI Wells he knew was Jake Wells. He hoped it wouldn’t be Jake.
“Negative on the first name,” Virgie said.
“All right,” Chee said. “I’ll be there.”
The road tilted downward now into the vast barrens of erosion which the Navajos call Beautiful Valley. Far to the west, the edge of the sun dipped behind a cloud—one of the line of thunderheads forming in the evening heat over the San Francisco Peaks and the Cococino Rim. The Hopis had been holding their Niman Kachina dances, calling the clouds to come and bless them.
Chee reached Kayenta just a little late. It was early twilight and the clouds had risen black against the sunset. The breeze brought the faint smells that rising humidity carries across desert country—the perfume of sage, creosote brush, and dust. The desk clerk said that Wells was in room 284 and the first name was Jake. Chee no longer cared. Jake Wells was abrasive but he was also smart. He had the best record in the special FBI Academy class Chee had attended, a quick, tough intelligence. Chee could tolerate the man’s personality for a while to learn what Wells could make of his witchcraft puzzle.
“It’s unlocked,” Wells said. “Come on in.” He was propped against the padded headboard of the bed, shirt off, shoes on, glass in hand. He glanced at Chee and then back at the television set. He was as tall as Chee remembered, and the eyes were just as blue. He waved the glass at Chee without looking away from the set. “Mix yourself one,” he said, nodding toward a bottle beside the sink in the dressing alcove.
“How you doing, Jake?” Chee asked.
Now the blue eyes reexamined Chee. The question in them abruptly went away. “Yeah,” Wells said. “You were the one at the Academy.” He eased himself on his left elbow and extended a hand. “Jake Wells,” he said.
Chee shook the hand. “Chee,” he said.
Wells shifted his weight again and handed Chee his glass. “Pour me a little more while you’re at it,” he said, “and turn down the sound.”
Chee turned down the sound.
“About thirty percent booze,” Wells demonstrated the proportion with his hands. “This is your district then. You’re in charge around Kayenta? Window Rock said I should talk to you. They said you were out chasing around in the desert today. What are you working on?”
“Nothing much,” Chee said. He ran a glass of water, drinking it thirstily. His face in the mirror was dirty—the lines around mouth and eyes whitish with dust. The sticker on the glass reminded guests that the laws of the Navajo Tribal Council prohibited possession of alcoholic beverages on the reservation. He refilled his own glass with water and mixed Wells’s drink. “As a matter of fact, I’m working on a witchcraft case.”
“Witchcraft?” Wells laughed. “Really?” He took the drink from Chee and examined it. “How does it work? Spells and like that?”
“Not exactly,” Chee said. “It depends. A few years ago a little girl got sick down near Burnt Water. Her dad killed three people with a shotgun. He said they blew corpse powder on his daughter and made her sick.”
Wells was watching him. “The kind of crime where you have the insanity plea.”
“Sometimes,” Chee said. “Whatever you have, witch talk makes you nervous. It happens more when you have a bad year like this. You hear it and you try to find out what’s starting it before things get worse.”
“So you’re not really expecting to find a witch?”
“Usually not,” Chee said.
“Usually?”
“Judge for yourself,” Chee said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve picked up today. You tell me what to make of it. Have time?”
Wells shrugged. “What I really want to talk about is a guy named Simon Begay.” He looked quizzically at Chee. “You heard the name?”
“Yes,” Chee said.
“Well, shit,” Wells said. “You shouldn’t have. What do you know about him?”
“Showed up maybe three months ago. Moved into one of those U.S. Public Health Service houses over by the Kayenta clinic. Stranger. Keeps to himself. From off the reservation somewhere. I figured you federals put him here to keep him out of sight.”
Wells frowned. “How long you known about him?”
“Quite a while,” Chee said. He’d known about Begay within a week after his arrival.
“He’s a witness,” Wells said. “They broke a car-theft operation in Los Angeles. Big deal. National connections. One of those where they have hired hands picking up expensive models and they drive ‘em right on the ship and off-load in South America. This Begay is one of the hired hands. Nobody much. Criminal record going all the way back to juvenile, but all nickel-and-dime stuff. I gather he saw some things that help tie some big boys into the crime, so Justice made a deal with him.”
“And they hide him out here until the trial?”
Something apparently showed in the tone of the question. “If you want to hide an apple, you drop it in with the other apples,” Wells said. “What better place?”
Chee had been looking at Wells’s shoes, which were glossy with polish. Now he examined his own boots, which were not. But he was thinking of Justice Department stupidity. The appearance of any new human in a country as empty as the Navajo Reservation provoked instant interest. If the stranger was a Navajo, there were instant questions. What was his clan? Who was his mother? What was his father’s clan? Who were his relatives? The City Navajo had no answers to any of these crucial questions. He was (as Chee had been repeatedly told) unfriendly. It was quickly guessed that he was a “relocation Navajo,” born to one of those hundreds of Navajo families which the federal government had tried to reestablish forty years ago in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other urban centers. He was a stranger. In a year of witches, he would certainly be suspected. Chee sat looking at his boots, wondering if that was the only basis for the charge that City Navajo was a skinwalker. Or had someone seen something? Had someone seen the murder?
“The thing about apples is they don’t gossip,” Chee said.
“You hear gossip about Begay?” Wells was sitting up now, his feet on the floor.
“Sure,” Chee said. “I hear he’s a witch.”
Wells produced a pro-forma chuckle. “Tell me about it,” he said.
Chee knew exactly how he wanted to tell it. Wells would have to wait awhile before he came to the part about Begay. “The Eskimos have nine nouns for snow,” Chee began. He told Wells about the variety of witchcraft on the reservations and its environs: about frenzy witchcraft, used for sexual conquests, of witchery distortions, of curing ceremonials, of the exotic two-heart witchcraft of the Hope Fog Clan, of the Zuni Sorcery Fraternity, of the Navajo “chindi,” which is more like a ghost than a witch, and finally of the Navajo Wolf, the anti’l witchcraft, the werewolves who pervert every taboo of the Navajo Way and use corpse powder to kill their victims.
Wells rattled the ice in his glass and glanced at his watch.
“To get to the part about your Begay,” Chee said, “about two months ago we started picking up witch gossip. Nothing much, and you expect it during a drought. Lately it got to be more than usual.” He described some of the tales and how uneasiness and dread had spread across the plateau. He described what he had learned today, the Tsossies’ naming City Navajo as the witch, his trip to Mexican Water, of learning there that the witch had killed a man.
“They said it happened in the spring—couple of months ago. They told me the ones who knew about it were the Tso outfit.” The talk of murder, Chee noticed, had revived Wells’s interest. “I went up there,” he continued, “and found the old woman who runs the outfit. Emma Tso. She told me her son-in-law had been out looking for some sheep, and smelled something, and found the body under some chamiso brush in a dry wash. A witch had killed him.”
“How—”
Chee cut off the question. “I asked her how he knew it was a witch killing. She said the hands were stretched out like this.” Chee extended his hands, palms up. “They were flayed. The skin was cut off the palms and fingers.”