Coyote's Regret

by Rich Curtin

  Rivera’s spirits soared. “That would be great. I’ve got a room in Bluff. I like this little town—right here on the San Juan River. Lots of red rock cliffs. Some good restaurants. I might stay here for the duration.”

  “Sounds like a nice place for me to visit. If I can get some time off, I’ll come up there and keep you warm.”

  13

  RIVERA BUTTONED HIS jacket, turned up the collar, put on his Stetson, and stepped out of his motel room into the frigid morning air. Just as the TV weatherman had forecast, the temperature in Bluff had dropped below freezing during the night. Each exhale of his breath produced a plume of frosty condensation. Fortunately, the weatherman had also forecast a high temperature today of sixty degrees. Rivera hurried to his vehicle, hopped in, and started the engine. He waited for the heater to produce some warm air and the defroster to melt away the ice crystals which had formed on the windshield. Meanwhile, he called Sheriff Zilic on his cell phone.

  “Mornin’, Manny. What’ve you got for me?”

  “Good morning, Sheriff. Not much, I’m afraid.” Rivera briefed Zilic on his interviews with the two ranchers and his meeting with Herman. “Problem is, no one in the area saw anything unusual. Both ranchers promised to talk to their employees and contractors to see if anyone saw anything out of the ordinary.”

  “So, no idea why the Masons were killed?” There was disappointment in Zilic’s voice.

  “No. I’m going down to the reservation today to see if I can locate a Navajo sheepherder who takes his flock to that area each day. Maybe he saw something.”

  “What about the drug running theory? The airstrip?”

  “No one I’ve talked to has seen any aircraft flying in or out of there recently. I met last night with the DEA agent who helped break that big drug-running case a couple of years ago. He talked about how technically sophisticated drug running has become but had no knowledge of any recent activity.”

  “I’ve met that guy. Just between you and me, I’ve never had a good feeling about him.”

  “You think he was somehow involved in the drug running?”

  “I’m not saying that. Just an uncomfortable feeling I have about him.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Rivera had gotten no such feeling about White. He knew Zilic well enough to understand that the sheriff had a ‘thing’ for federal agents, ever since dozens of well-armed feds in SWAT gear swarmed unannounced into Blanding and arrested some of its finest citizens for illegally possessing Native American artifacts. Pot hunting had been a cottage industry in San Juan County for a century. The raid was intended to set an example for others who thumbed their noses at regulations prohibiting pot hunting on federal land. Nathan White had seemed like a decent fellow to Rivera. Nevertheless, he would keep in mind Zilic’s reservations about the man.

  “Anything else, Manny?”

  “No. I’ll call you if something breaks.”

  “You know, Manny, it’s possible Nick might be right. Maybe it was a murder-suicide.”

  “I’m not ready to conclude that. Both the daughter and a friend from Taos say the Masons were a happy couple. No health problems, no money problems.”

  “Whatever you think. It’s your case. Speaking of Nick, he won’t be joining you today. I’ve had to reassign him to traffic duty at a sinkhole site on U.S.491. You can probably have him back tomorrow.”

  “Okay, Sheriff.” Rivera found himself relieved and hoped it didn’t show in his tone of voice.

  “How’s he done so far?”

  “Fine. He seems eager to learn.”

  “Good. Well, keep me posted on the Mason case. I’m getting a lot of questions from people in high places.”

  “Okay, Sheriff.” Rivera clicked off and sat back, thinking about how little he had accomplished in two days. He tried to comfort himself with the idea that he’d been down this road before. Just keep digging and gathering facts, and hopefully a picture of what had happened will emerge. Hopefully.

  He drove to the Twin Rocks Cafe for breakfast, now wondering how to find the Navajo sheepherder he wanted to interview. Then he remembered Sammy Begay, his neighbor across the street in Moab. Sammy was a Navajo and grew up on the reservation.

  Rivera parked near the dual red rock spires called the Navajo Twins which loomed over the cafe, grabbed his cell phone, and dialed Begay’s number.

  “Sammy, it’s Manny.”

  Yá’ át’ ééh, Manny.”

  Sammy always used the standard Navajo greeting with Rivera. “Sammy, I need some advice.”

  “Sure, Bro, how can I help you?”

  “I need to find a Navajo sheepherder on the Rez. I don’t have his name but he lives somewhere in the Hatch Trading Post area. What’s the best way to find him?”

  Rivera heard gentle laughter. “Man, that’s like me asking you how I can find a chupacabra.”

  “C’mon, Sammy. There must be a way.”

  “Without a name, it’s going to be almost impossible. There are lots of sheepherders on the Rez. I would have told you to ask at Hatch, but that trading post has been shut down for years. Your best bet now is to visit the chapter house that serves that part of the Rez—that would be the Aneth Chapter House—and ask for help there. Not knowing the man’s name is going to make the search real tough, though.”

  “Okay, thanks, Sammy. I’ll start at the chapter house.”

  Breakfast was Rivera’s favorite meal, something he looked forward to each morning as soon as he rolled out of bed and his feet hit the floor. He ordered his usual fare—sausage, eggs, hash browns, and whole wheat toast—from the pretty brunette waitress and sipped coffee while he waited for the food to arrive. He thought about the day ahead and pondered the task awaiting him. After talking with Begay, finding the sheepherder seemed like a daunting task and would likely consume most of the day. Rivera had driven through the Navajo reservation many times before, usually on his way to somewhere else. He’d stopped there only once to visit Canyon De Chelly, a gorgeous canyon with a rich Native American history.

  He Googled ‘Navajo Reservation’ on his cell phone and learned some interesting facts. The Big Rez, as it was commonly called, was approximately the size of West Virginia. It was larger than ten of the individual U.S. states. All this land was home to only 350,000 Navajos, making it one of the most sparsely populated areas in the United States. Fortunately for Rivera, only a small portion of the reservation jutted north of the San Juan River and that was the part he was concerned with. Instead of having to deal with 27,000 square miles of land, he only had to contend with a few hundred.

  One website he checked informed him that once you get off the pavement, the reservation roads go quickly from gravel to graded dirt to rutted dirt to sandy two-tracks winding through the sagebrush. Be prepared, it said, for a road system of repeating forks fanning out into unknown terrain. And forget about road signs—there are none. In other words, Rivera concluded, he needed to get excellent directions at the chapter house before he started out, or he’d be searching forever.

  Rivera drove on the pavement of Highway 162 to the town of Aneth and located the Aneth Chapter House. He parked and entered the building. Behind the counter was a pretty Navajo girl who looked to be in her mid-twenties. Rivera approached her, introduced himself, and asked how he might find a Navajo sheepherder on the north margin of the reservation who runs his sheep up near Route 347. She said there were many sheepherders in the Aneth Chapter of the Navajo Nation and added that she’d never heard of Route 347. She smiled and waited.

  Rivera extracted his copy of the AAA Indian Country map, spread it out on the counter, and pointed to the area around the old Hatch Trading Post.

  “Somewhere in this area,” he said, circling his finger around McCracken Mesa.

  “I can think of two or three dozen sheep camps up that way.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the counter, and smiled a flirty smile. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “The sheepherder is an old man
, maybe seventy years old or more.”

  She grinned, displaying a beautiful smile with perfect teeth. “Most Navajo sheepherders are old men or young boys. That doesn’t help much.”

  Finding the right sheepherder was going to be more difficult than Rivera thought. He noticed an elderly woman with wrinkled brown skin sitting in a chair close to the counter. She was leaning toward them, eavesdropping, and making no pretense about it. She seemed to be enjoying the conversation. Her grin revealed a couple of missing front teeth.

  Rivera pulled his notepad from his shirt pocket and flipped through the pages to his notes from his interview with Herman. “He wears a black hat,” he said and looked up with a hopeful expression.

  The girl’s eyebrows rose. She looked over at the old woman and they both burst into laughter.

  “Almost all Navajo men wear black hats, silly policeman.”

  He smiled. “I guess I’m not doing this very well.”

  “No, you’ll have to do a lot better than that,” the girl said. “Maybe if you took me to lunch, I’d remember something.”

  Rivera studied his notes. “They raise Churro sheep.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know one breed of sheep from the next.

  Now the old woman stopped laughing. “That’d be the Nez outfit,” she said. “They’re the only ones up there who have the Churros.” She twitched her lips in Navajo fashion to indicate the direction of the Nez place.

  “Could you tell me how to find the Nez place?”

  By now, two more Navajo women, also elderly, had joined the group. It was all dirt roads, they told him, each trying to inject a clarifying tidbit of information into the conversation. They gave him circuitous directions which involved finding the L-shaped maroon house which the Navajo Housing Authority rented to the Honani family, driving three miles north past the place with the whiteface cows, turning left after passing a large, round, black rock covered with lichens, crossing five arroyos before turning right, heading toward the Abajo Mountains for a mile, turning left at the post with a boot on it, and driving up an arroyo after passing a large juniper tree. “A quarter mile more and you’ll see the Nez place up against a low, tan-colored cliff.”

  Rivera jotted all that into his notepad. “Thank you, ladies.” He tipped his hat and turned to leave.

  “What about my lunch?” The young girl was still leaning on the counter and grinning.

  Rivera decided there was one sure way to put an end to the girl’s overt flirtations. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the velvet-covered box. He flipped open the box and displayed the ring. Before he could explain that he had a girlfriend and was going to marry her, the young girl spoke up.

  “I accept,” she said and laughed a delightful laugh. The older women howled with laughter and told Rivera she was a good girl who was looking for a nice husband. They told him she would make a fine wife and they wished the couple the best of luck.

  Rivera felt himself blushing. He smiled and shook his head. “You ladies ...” His words were drowned out by their laughter. Rather than try to finish the sentence, he touched the brim of his hat and exited the building.

  Rivera hopped into his vehicle and headed north under a dark blue sky, following the directions the ladies had given him. The roads were rough—barely roads by the white man’s standards. In several places, they had been washed out by last summer’s rains and had not yet been repaired. A well-worn detour around each washout was the Navajos’ answer to the problem. Rivera found himself wondering if these roads were ever graded or maintained.

  The endless landscape of rolling hills, bluffs, and outcroppings was stark and beautiful, despite being sere and overgrazed. He had strong doubts about ever finding the Nez place, but gained confidence with each landmark he encountered. He saw the L-shaped maroon house, the Herefords, the black rock, the arroyos and the Abajos in the distance, and the post with the boot on it.

  He was somewhat unsure of how to approach the residents of a sheep camp, not being acquainted with the Navajo culture. He wondered what he would do if no one in the Nez outfit spoke English. Then he rejected that notion—surely at least the younger people there spoke English. Soon he pulled onto the hard-packed earth of the Nez place. He sat in his vehicle, his eyes scanning the camp, feeling like an intruder. The main dwelling was a gray double-wide trailer fifty feet in front of him. Down the slope to his left were three more dwellings, all single-wide trailers. There, five children were playing some kind of game with a red ball. A grandmotherly-looking woman wrapped in a shawl sat watching them. Beyond the children was a windmill, slowly turning in a gentle breeze.

  Old tires lay on top of the trailer roofs—there, he assumed, to help keep the roofs from blowing off in a high wind. All of the trailers were weathered and looked like they’d been in place for decades. Straight ahead were a traditional stone hogan, a brush arbor, and a weaving shed. A loom had been set up in the shed and a woman, sitting on a stool with her back to Rivera, was working at it, weaving a gray, brown, and black rug with imbedded red shaman figures. A young man with shoulder-length hair and a red headband sat on a wooden crate watching her work. The woman turned from the loom and glanced back at Rivera but made no move in his direction.

  A hundred feet beyond the weaving shed, built up against the wall of an ochre sandstone bluff, was a series of large sheep pens constructed of juniper logs. Inside the pens were dozens of Churro sheep. An elderly Navajo man in a black hat was tending to them. Rivera noticed some of the rams had the multiple contorted horns he’d seen on the internet. It seemed to him that horns sticking out in every direction would make life difficult for the ram but decided the rams knew more about that than he did.

  In the center of the camp were four old pickup trucks, one without tires, its bulk resting on cinder blocks. Rivera could see a power line running into the camp but no telephone line.

  The woman at the loom now stood up and walked toward Rivera, followed by the young man. She was perhaps fifty years old and wore jeans and a loose flannel shirt. Her black hair fell in braids to her waist. Rivera got out of his pickup.

  “Yá’ át’ ééh,” she said.

  Rivera recognized the Navajo greeting he’d learned from Sammy Begay and said hello. He introduced himself and the woman identified herself as Dibé Nez. She introduced the young man as her son, Raymond Nez, who glanced at Rivera for a brief moment, nodded, and remained silent with a relaxed expression on his face. He wore faded jeans and a yellow long-sleeved shirt. The woman then named the sixteen remaining Navajos who lived in the camp. She articulated their names and described the role each of them played in the Nez family sheepherding operation. It was obvious from her tone of voice and the expression on her face that she was proud of them and they were happy here. It was also obvious she was the matriarch of the family.

  With the preliminaries out of the way, Rivera got down to business. “I would like to speak with the man who takes his sheep north of here a few miles where the grazing is better,” he said. As soon as he uttered those words, he knew he’d made a mistake. She would think he’d come to arrest the sheepherder for illegally grazing his sheep on another’s grazing lease. But it was too late.

  She studied Rivera’s uniform. “Do you speak Navajo?”

  “No ma’am. English and Spanish. No Navajo.”

  “My father’s name is Atsa Nez. He is very traditional. He speaks only Navajo. He never learned the other languages.”

  Rivera jotted the name into his notebook. “I’m investigating a double homicide. Two people were killed near the place where he waters his Churros. I’d like to find out if he saw or heard anything unusual while he was up there Tuesday morning. Anything that would help me in my investigation. Do you think you could ask him that for me?”

  “He does not like to talk with policemen.”

  “Please ask him anyway. Tell him it’s important. Tell him an evil person has been killing people up there and I need to make sure no one else gets killed.”
>
  She studied Rivera for a brief moment, then nodded. “I will ask him.” She walked across the hard-packed earth to the sheep pens while Raymond remained silently with Rivera. Rivera watched as she said something in Navajo to the old man who then shot a glance in Rivera’s direction. The old man looked back at the woman and shook his head. He spoke to her for several minutes. Rivera was hopeful but, if he read the body language right, it didn’t look like he was cooperating.

  The woman returned to Rivera. “He said that two years ago a bilagáana policeman told him that a white man owned the grazing lease north of the reservation boundary. He said the white man complained that my father was seen many times grazing his sheep on that land.” Rivera knew she was talking about Emmett Mitchell’s conversation with Nez in connection with Bill Converse’s complaint. “He said my father was breaking the law whenever he took his sheep across the boundary. The grass down here is poor from drought and overgrazing so the sheep must be taken north so they won’t die. If the sheep die, so do we. My father…”

  Rivera raised his hand. “I’m not concerned with the grazing. Only the murders…”

  Dibé drew back her head. The surprised expression on the weaver’s face told Rivera he’d been rude to interrupt her. He wished he had more experience with Navajo cultural norms and rules for polite conversation. “Excuse me,” he said, and waited for her to finish.

  “My father said the Navajos have been grazing their sheep up there for centuries, long before the white men came and stole that land for themselves. The white men make much money from the oil and gas they take from the ground. My father don’t see how his flock of Churros eating a little grass and drinking some water from that spring will hurt the wealthy white men. It is for this reason that he will not speak with you or any other policeman. He said you can put him in jail if you want to, but that will not make him change his mind.”

  Rivera felt a familiar frustration rising within him. He wondered if he was ever going to catch a break in this case. “Ma’am, I’m not here about the grazing. As far as I’m concerned, he can graze his sheep anywhere he wants to.”