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  Bob cut his eyes to me, said nothing. The tour group drifted past us, the park ranger patiently herding them into the blazing sun. An old lady tripped slightly, which caused her to look our way, eyes opening wide as full moons when she saw Bob’s pistol. She clutched a man’s sleeve, but he shook off her fingers with an irritated husband’s frown. Without missing a beat in his lecture, the ranger slipped backward through the group, gently guiding the lady away from us.

  “Nathan did say you were, uh…injured. Just happened?”

  “Souvenirs from one of Charley’s AK-47s. Known Nathan long?”

  “A year.”

  “Know him well?”

  “I love him dearly,” I said. “But I still don’t know him well.”

  “Guess I’m not surprised he doesn’t talk about me. Vietnam and all.”

  “Nathan has a lot of secrets.”

  “Mmm.” Bob settled against his walker.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “Up in the monument. Astro something or other.”

  “It’s part of what he’s going through. Learning the old ways.”

  “Struggle with that myself.”

  “Nathan is fascinated by archaeoastronomy. There’s a hole up there, a window in that thick wall. Every summer solstice, the sun aligns perfect with the edges of that window.”

  “Time to plant. Helluva wonderful place here,” he said. Casa Grande. The Hohokam. Seven centuries old.”

  “I know you two go back to Vietnam. Did you know Nathan on the rez?”

  “Yup, but a really long time ago. Here he comes.”

  I popped the cap of a two-liter bottle of spring water, sipping to keep myself busy as Nathan hugged Bob, helped him get settled on the bench. Bob took his time folding the walker, laid it behind the bench as he twisted awkwardly to smile at me.

  “Did you get a copy of the note?” Nathan said.

  “I did.” He slid a folded fax sheet from an inside jacket pocket.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “Leon Begay left a suicide note.” Nathan took the fax sheet, kept it folded, running fingers along the creases. “Old crazy Leon.”

  “Old crazy sergeant.”

  “Damn,” Nathan said. “Didn’t we have some fine times together?”

  “All three of us. Damn good times.”

  Bob shifted on the bench, his weight moving the oak slats and they rippled against my bare thighs. I drank some more water, feeling the two men bond tightly and slip away from me. Neither of them seemed in any hurry to read the fax sheet.

  “All three of us go back to Nam,” Bob said. “Leon was crew chief for Nathan’s chopper. I was a waist gunner. After Nam, Leon and I worked for U.S. Customs. We both quit, moved to the rez, where I joined the Tribal Police.”

  He started to tell me more, the words never came to his lips. Nathan held up the folded fax sheet, still creased tightly.

  “I don’t buy it,” Nathan said. “Not the murder, not the suicide.”

  “Me neither.”

  “What do you two know that I don’t?” I said.

  “Pima County sheriff closed out this morning, murder-suicide all the way. They’d been holding back a suicide note. Leon’d been drinking earlier that night at the Grubstake bar down in Arivaca, then the old Longhorn bar in Amado. Drove home when that place closed, put in a call to the Green Valley sheriff’s station, said he’d just shotgunned his girlfriend and had the barrel in his mouth. Hung up the phone. Sheriff volunteer gets there after the gunshot, both people dead. I figure, somebody forced him to make that call.”

  “I figure that, too,” Nathan said. “But why’d he actually do it?”

  His fingers worked at the fax sheet, starting to unfold it. Both men were oblivious to my sitting beside them. I stood up with my water bottle, Nathan staring at me with tears in his eyes. I sat beside him, laid my head against his shoulder.

  Bob gently pried Nathan’s hands off of the fax sheet and unfolded it. can’t do this any more sorry about the girl, wrong place wrong

  The writing ended without finishing the thought.

  “His blood alcohol was point two four,” Bob said. “There’s more. Sheriff lives down there, knows the drug scene up from Nogales, on the Arivaca road, all the marijuana and tar heroin coming through these days. Sheriff told me there were unconfirmed rumors that Leon was dirty.”

  “Don’t believe it,” Nathan said. “Not having that young prostitute around, either, she was no girlfriend, we know from Antoinette Claw. She says Leon buried his wife Michaela not many years ago, he loved her still. Wouldn’t have been fooling around with somebody young and frisky.”

  “So where do we go from here?” I said. Both of them so deep in their own thoughts they started at the sound of my voice. As one, we stood up. Bob unfolding his walker and leaning gratefully on it.

  “I’m going back to your house,” he said to Nathan.

  “How you feeling?” Nathan said.

  “Never better. We’ll talk later. When this fax came in, thought you’d better hear about it from me.”

  “I’ll find out if there’s anything on Leon’s computers,” I said. “But there may be nothing to help us.”

  Bob maneuvered onto the curved walkway, trying to get inside the headquarters building ahead of the approaching tour group. “Another thing the sheriff didn’t tell you is why only a volunteer was available that night Leon died.

  “Sheriff got an emergency call twenty minutes earlier. Three youngsters, pumped on crystal meth, one of them with his dad’s .30-30 lever-action Winchester, tried to hold up the gas station at the Safeway on Duval Mine Road. Another driver pulls into the station, sees the kids and the rifle, pulls out his Desert Eagle, and, hell, one kid gets shot right off, the cashier gets shot, kid with the Winchester blown apart, another kid runs off into the bush, and sheriff calls in all his regular people.”

  “Might be nothing,” Nathan said. “Things fall that way, sometimes. I just, I mean, I just figure I owe Leon. To look at it one more time.”

  “It?” I said.

  “The suicide. Leon handled guns all his life, but putting a barrel to his own head? I don’t see that ever happening.”

  “People commit suicide everywhere,” I said. “Anywhere.”

  “Suicides are never good,” Bob said. “People get edgy when somebody swallows his gun. Hard to shake off trouble like that. A few weeks after I got shot up in Nam, pain nearly intolerable, I didn’t want pain pills or marijuana or booze or even smoking an opium pipe, I imagined myself in a wheelchair for life, that’s when I was on the edge of thinking suicide. I’d never go there, but I saw into it. Up on the rez, suicide is an answer for some. I’ve seen my share.”

  “You always hear these stories about suicide,” Nathan said. “Like a mythology committing suicide, hara-kiri, that sort of thing. Like, there’s a certain kind of weak person who worships suicide as the way out. Some people plan it out for months, even keep a suicide diary. You can go on the Internet, find all kinds of ways to kill yourself painlessly. Those websites say, I dunno, to me, anybody can get to the edge of suicide and then it’s just a matter of do you want to step back or jump off.”

  “So what’s the sense in this business?” I said.

  “Looked like suicide,” Bob said. “Sheriff leaned to suicide, coroner was in too much demand, what with the gas station shootout, so he signed off quick on suicide.”

  The tour group returned, flowed past us quickly, the old lady who’d seen Bob’s gun ducking her head at him, eyes crinkled in smile lines.

  “Before we leave,” I said. “I need to know something else.”

  The tour group entered the main building, leaving us alone in the shade of two overlapping palo verde trees. Beyond the trees, a huge anvil-shaped cloud, a perfect thunderhead formed many miles to the south, winds picking up down there, other clouds racing by in ragged formation, long strings of moving clouds, huge bubbles and triangles in long geometric rows, like a fleet of Federati
on battle cruisers.

  They both turned to me. Distracted, I’d momentarily forgotten where I was.

  “What do you want to know?” Nathan said.

  “Tell me about skinwalkers.”

  25

  “These are my best thoughts on what you ask,” Bob said. “These thoughts came to me when I moved back to Dinetah, back to the reservation. I may not believe in the reality of skinwalkers, chindi ghosts and how we Dineh view life and death, good and evil. Everything is in balance, I had to relearn that from the beginning.

  “Navajo witches are called skinwalkers. Nobody really wants to talk about them, especially to an outsider, so for months it was difficult to hear anything since we don’t care to discuss the powers of the dark side. I know, it sounds like Star Wars. But it’s real. We’re careful because we don’t know for sure. So in case there’s a retaliation toward us, for what we may say, the elders caution us not to talk about witches or skinwalkers. Of course, everybody does.”

  “If somebody finds out that you’re talking about witches,” I said, “are you also saying, if anybody finds out you are talking, the witches will come? This is the twenty-first century, Bob.”

  “We’re afraid of witches,” he said. “For centuries, we’ve done our best to live in harmony with our surroundings. We don’t kill animals or humans just to kill, just to destroy something. Animals and every other living thing have the same rights to exist as we do. Coyote and other animals show up everywhere in Navajo creation myths about how we find our way from one world to the next.”

  “A coyote ran into me,” I said. “In the dark, I was out running and startled a coyote, I thought for a minute it was, I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Coyote, he’s a trickster. Always making trouble for other living beings. But Coyote isn’t a skinwalker. Coyote’s just having fun, looking to get by with as little trouble as possible so he doesn’t destroy other living beings. Skinwalkers and witches, they want to hurt people and animals. They’re not interested in making jokes, they just go for the kill.

  “You’ve got to remember, the Dineh is the biggest Indian nation. Almost two hundred thousand tribal members. A lot of them leave the rez for the outside world, not many come back like me. And because I’m in the Navajo Tribal Police, I know that even those people who stay on the rez aren’t all good people. Some go to the whiskey towns at the edges of the rez. Gallup, Flagstaff, places where there might be an odd job, or an honest place to pawn old jewelry. But some people are just plain bad. And some people are said to be witches or skinwalkers. They hunt at night, sometimes a story tells about a skinwalker wearing a wolf skin, but for those who are most afraid of skinwalkers, wearing a skin doesn’t matter, the belief is that the witch has powers beyond what is human, including the power of any animal they choose, even if they’re not wearing the skin. These people are witches.”

  “Are they like werewolves?” I said.

  “You know,” Bob said with a laugh. “When I was a kid, some traveling library van would bring an old movie project and screen, show us ancient movies in the dark, some of them so old they were silent movies. Or the sound system wouldn’t work, so even a talkie would be silent. And we saw a werewolf movie, one night when I was about eight years old, holy moly, that scared the shit out of me. People talked about skinwalkers for days and the library people never came back, they were told not to bring evil ever again into our village. An uncle of mine, he told me that the movie projector was a witch bundle, that everybody who heard the motor was cursed by this powerful witch hex.”

  “Do you still believe that?” I said.

  “What I believe isn’t the point,” Bob said. “Other people do believe. Werewolf? Witches can be any animal. They’re…how would you say it, they can change what they look like?”

  “Shape shifters,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. Where’d you get that phrase?”

  “When I’m afraid of something, I try to meet my fear by making myself somewhat aware of what’s terrifying me.”

  “That’s what good policemen do. That’s how I have to talk to people on the rez. Have to be patient, have to listen between words, people don’t outright lie most of the time, they just have their own way of telling stories, what’s most important to them can be totally irrelevant to me. You had enough of this talk?”

  “Does it make you uncomfortable?” I said.

  “Well, I’m not used to such direct talk. On the rez, anybody asking direct questions like you could actually be a witch, a skinwalker, so people are very careful how they answer, to avoid being witched. And it’s not a big thing, you know, people don’t talk about witches all the time. Most talk is about what happens day to day, who’s born to and for which clan, sheep, the weather.”

  “And ghosts?” I said.

  “What Nathan did, that bothers you?”

  “Smashing up a man’s possessions when he dies, I’m not used to that, I’m used to traditional ways of inheritance, of passing goods along to the family.”

  “When somebody dies,” Bob said, “a chindi is expelled into the world with the person’s last dying breath. Chindi can be powerful, you don’t want to go looking for this evil force, you might get sick or have incredible bad luck, your sheep could die, your hogan burn down, something dangerous and terrible.

  “It’s the opposite of when we’re born and the Holy People put breath into you. When you die, this breath comes out, it’s chindi and it’s evil, unless you’re either a newborn baby or somebody really, really old.”

  “And what if I contact a chindi?” I said.

  “Ghost sickness comes into your body.”

  “And how do I cure that?”

  “We have sings. We get a shaman, get a singer to perform ceremonies like the Blessing Way.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “But I guess, maybe I shouldn’t even try?”

  “It’s a matter of what you believe.”

  “Ghosts? Skinwalkers? I don’t know what to believe. And you?”

  “As I told you at the beginning of these thoughts,” Bob said, “I don’t necessarily believe in them myself. But also, as a Dineh, as a Navajo, I can’t choose not to believe.”

  gary cooper

  26

  “Why?” I said. Bob didn’t understand. “They’ve got television up there. On the rez. TV, magazines, the Internet, email…why do they still believe in witches?”

  “Not everybody.”

  “Powakas,” I said.

  “Sure. Hopi witches. Hopis believe in witches. Just a different name.”

  “I don’t understand it.”

  “You’ve read the books, you’ve seen the movies. Navajos, spiritual, a life of balance and harmony.”

  “Hozho,” Nathan said.

  “I’ve been up there,” I said. “I married a Navajo. Don’t tell me about harmony, I never saw harmony, never…no hozho, no life in balance.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything,” Bob said. “It’s there. White people, they suck up the mysticism, they’ve got their Halloweens, their ghosts, their own demons. Jason and Freddy.”

  “The devil,” Nathan said. “Satan. It’s no different for us, he’s just got a different name.”

  “That’s just crap.”

  “Maybe,” Nathan said finally, “maybe…we should drive up there.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” I said. “I want to know what this whole thing is about. You two, you’ve got some agenda, and I’m not on the committee.”

  “You’re right,” Nathan said. “You have a right to know. Our problem is, we don’t know what we know. Leon Begay’s father died of a self-inflicted gunshot.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Up there, with the circumstances, with the…tradition of skinwalkers, many people believed he didn’t commit suicide. That it was a witch, a skinwalker. In the past weeks, almost everybody in that Begay clan family have died. Some of these deaths were so outrageous that people say it’s the work of ski
nwalkers.”

  “And you?” I said. “You don’t really believe that?”

  “We think,” Bob said, “that one of the two surviving members of the Begay clan is somehow responsible for these deaths. The brother. Vincent Basaraba.”

  “Get out,” I said. “That’s too much of a stretch.”

  “He travels back and forth to the rez. He’s supposedly got this huge dog.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “You’ve seen the dog?”

  “Yes. He does have a black mastiff. Must stand over three feet high, weight I could only guess about. Huge, heavy, but really friendly.”

  “That dog has been seen running around at night,” Nathan said. “People talk about animals like that, especially when they’re only seen at night.”

  “But why?” I said. “What does Vincent have to gain?”

  “Vincent?”

  “Well, I’m having dinner at his house tonight, Nathan. He asked me to call him Vincent. You’ve got a lot of people dead, you’ve a man, a rich man, who owns a black dog. Tell me there’s more.”

  “We don’t know,” Bob said.

  “We feel it’s true,” Nathan said. “We just don’t see why.”

  “Alex is checking out his financials,” I said. “Off the top, she says he drives a four hundred thousand dollar car, his house must be worth two million. He’s the front man for a casino, okay, and he’s got a weird security manager working for him, okay. But what else? Money? He’s got money. He’s even got enough money to produce a movie.”

  “A movie?”

  “Man of the West. An old Gary Cooper movie.”

  “What does it cost to make a movie?” Bob asked.

  “Millions. Depends on the salary structure of the actors, I guess I don’t have any real idea.”

  “So during dinner tonight,” Nathan said, “ask him. Where’s the money coming from that will finance this movie?”

  “Do you think that’s a motive? For what?” They both shrugged. “I’m going to this man’s house, but you’re telling me he’s responsible for how many deaths?”