Sharon’s hand went to her mouth. Rosheen simply sipped her water. She had obviously heard this story before.
Arthur tapped the photo on his leg and held it back out for Rosheen Notah to retrieve. She did and returned it to its place on the wall above the sofa.
“Nineteen US soldiers were killed that day,” Arthur said. “Along with some Iraqi National Guard, a few civilians, and some contractor employees, around sixty or so altogether.” Arthur paused, reflecting. Reliving. “I remember the blood all over the concrete floor, making it slippery for those of us who were trying to get the injured away from the melting chairs and tables. Some had parts of them stuck to their skin, so we just stretchered everything, chair and all.”
Sharon grimaced. Arthur saw tears trickling from her eyes and running down her face. Rosheen still sat there, motionless, unaffected, sipping her water.
“Forgive me,” Arthur said. “It’s just that it’s all still fresh in my mind … even though it was almost twenty years ago.”
Sharon composed herself and tapped into her reporter’s alter ego. “Surely you have an idea of where John might go,” she prodded. “You’ve been with him how long?”
“Five years.” Her eyes told Sharon she was lost in thought, flipping through the pages of her scrapbook memory. “He had this one place where he would go and practice. Sometimes a couple of his friends would meet him there.”
“Practice what?” Sharon said, unscrewing the cap from her bottle and taking small sips.
“His shooting,” Rosheen said. “He would go there every now and then and practice shooting. Like that night with the scope. I just figured it was one of those macho guy things, or he needed somewhere to think and get away from me for a while.”
“Who would go out there with him?” Arthur said.
“Like I said, a few of his friends. I never met them. That is to say, he never brought them by here, so …”
“Guys from his old unit?” Sharon asked.
Rosheen opened her bottle and took a mouthful of water. Swallowed. “I don’t know. Maybe? I don’t know. Like I said, I never met them. All I know is that John needed to go off somewhere and play with his guns. I don’t like guns and didn’t allow him to have them in the house, so he kept them hidden somewhere. Some he kept in his truck—his rifle and a handgun—the rest in a storage locker he rented somewhere.” She hung her head slightly. “I guess he played me for a fool.”
Rosheen Notah pulled her feet to the edge of the coffee table, keeping her knees together. She kept the water bottle in her hands on her lap. Her move gave Arthur a chance to study the soles of her boots. The usual scuffs, leftover dirt, and some minute bits of gravel could be seen in the leather sole, but not much else that told him anything.
Arthur let his eyes move to her face. It was smooth, except for the lip ring hooked into the left corner of her mouth. And, based on the photographs arranged along with the others on the wall, she definitely showed some of the features from her mother’s side. Also arranged among the family portraits were a few small photos of her and John Sykes taken in places that looked hard to get to except by hiking. One even seemed to be taken where John practiced at his makeshift shooting range. Arthur saw a folding table set up with all the paraphernalia needed for range shooting. There was one where he and Rosheen were smiling and standing next to each other, arms wrapped around each other and sporting broad smiles against the passenger side of an old Dodge Power Wagon. The truck was yellow with a black hood and black strips along the rocker panels. A single yellow roll bar stood behind the standard cab. Next to it was another photograph showing the bed of the truck, tailgate down with John’s rifles, ammo, and handguns laid out on the carpeted tailgate of the bedrug.
Arthur nodded, looked at Sharon. “Did he leave any of his things here? Is there anything of yours that you noticed was missing?”
“No, nothing’s missing,” she said. “And the only things he left were some clothes and his books.”
Arthur’s eyes passed from his wife’s back to Notah. “You think I could take a look around?”
Notah finished her bottle of water, crushed it, and screwed the cap back on. “Sure. It’s not like he’s gonna be coming back for any of it.”
Sharon could feel the weight of that thought blanketing Rosheen Notah’s face. Disappointment in men seemed to be rite of passage for a lot of women on the rez. If they didn’t beat you or cheat on you, they up and left with no reason given or implied and never returned. Or they simply had no job and no prospects and just used you until they became someone else’s problem. But at least she hadn’t been a side chick.
Sharon said, “May I use your bathroom?”
Rosheen Notah set her crushed water bottle on the coffee table and stood. “Sure.” She pointed past Arthur toward a short hallway to the right of the kitchen. “Master bedroom is through that door. Have a field day.”
Arthur watched as Rosheen led Sharon down the other hallway toward the front of the trailer and the front bedroom. He stepped up to the sofa to get a closer look at the photo of the truck with the tailgate down. A small grin curled his mouth when he noticed the yellow bumper sticker clinging to the rear window behind the driver’s seat that said “US Marine—We don’t suffer from insanity. We enjoy it daily.” Arthur’s grin quickly faded as he turned and made his way past the kitchen. He noticed a louvered door on his left, which he figured housed the furnace and water heater, and the side rear-entry door of the trailer on his right before entering the master bedroom.
The first thing Arthur noticed was that Rosheen Notah was like Sharon, a fanatic when it came to a made bed. It was as precise as it could be and showed the skill of clean lines and sharp corners. He didn’t have any change or he would have bounced a quarter on it. He moved into the room and went straight to the walk-in closet, rummaging through the pockets of John’s remaining clothing that hung on wooden hangers. Rosheen’s clothes hung on multicolored plastic hangers of varying thicknesses. It looked like John hadn’t taken very many clothes, probably only a handful in a duffle along with whatever else a man on the run would need.
It was a given, Arthur supposed, that John would have weapons and ammunition along with some clothes and a decent amount of cash, since credit cards would be a perfect way to track his movements and would now be out of the question. If he could only find out where the hell Sykes was going, this whole thing could almost be over, and he could tell Margaret he had found the man who had taken the lives of her sons. He was sure that right now Jake Bilagody and the FBI had no clue where to look for John, but at least the FBI could ping his cell phone once they got involved. Unless he had already tossed it out and replaced it with a burner phone. At the very least, they could have every cop in the basin looking for his yellow pickup. After all, how many bumblebee-colored 1980 Dodge Power Wagons could there be in the basin?
Arthur searched every shoe, every boot, and every box that took up space in the closet before moving to the tall, narrow lingerie chest between the two windows that faced the bed and gave the room light. It was a cheap one, obviously purchased at one of those big-box stores and made out of assembled particleboard and laminated cardboard. He felt a bit awkward letting his fingers rifle freely through another woman’s underwear. He relaxed when Sharon entered the room and caught him in the act.
“You never told me you had a fetish for ladies’ panties,” she said with an impish grin.
Arthur turned, eyebrow raised. “Only yours. Why don’t you look through this stuff while I hit the dresser?”
“Sure thing, Sherlock.” She stepped up to take his place. “What am I looking for?”
“Anything that shouldn’t be in there.”
The wide dresser was stationed to the left of the bathroom door in the center of the back wall. From the doorway, he could see the double sinks of the contractor-grade vanity, the mirror above it reflecting the opposite wall,
and the five baseball-sized frosted glass bulbs above that. To the right of the double sink was the toilet, to the left a shower-tub combination partially hidden by the brown shower curtain sporting a row of stampeding stallions splashing though the water of a shallow river.
He turned his attention to the dresser as Rosheen Notah entered the bedroom and sat on the end of the bed, wrinkling the pristine sheets. “I don’t know what you two think you’re going to find,” she said. “But you’re probably not going to find it in my lingerie chest.”
Sharon turned and smiled but kept working her way down, one small panty-filled drawer at a time.
Arthur had finished rummaging through the two top drawers of the dresser and pulled open the second set before responding. “You never know what you might find until you find it. Whatever it may be.”
Sharon was squatting now, being careful not to mess up the arrangement of the contents of the bottom drawer. Finding nothing of any interest, she stood and watched her husband search the two bottom drawers of the dresser. Sharon walked over to the bed and stood next to Rosheen Notah while Arthur closed the drawers and crossed over to a bookcase to the right of the walk-in closet door.
“I remember when Arthur and I first met,” Sharon said with a smile. “It was at Chaco.” Rosheen looked up at her briefly and smiled back. “Where did you and John meet?”
Rosheen put her arms behind her like a bipod and supported herself on the mattress. Her hair dusted the top of the bed. “He pulled in where I work, for gas and to use the bathroom. We only have one, and it’s a small one. He went to open the door and there was this old Navajo woman, an elder, in there.” Rosheen giggled. “He looked so embarrassed. The door doesn’t lock very well, so it just kind of happened.”
“Oh my,” Sharon agreed. “That must have been a sight.”
Arthur began pulling out each of the books from the shelves, starting with the tattered Tony Hillerman novel on the top shelf. He then proceeded to work through each book quickly, moving left to right through the shelf.
“It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud,” Rosheen remarked. “Then, to pass the time while waiting for the old woman to come out, he wandered around the store checking out the ice-cream cooler and looking into the back room and the loading area. He even stood and admired our little post office boxes mounted on the wall by the bathroom.”
Arthur moved on to the second shelf, grabbing each book as he had on the previous shelf, and fanning through their pages with his thumb before returning the book and grabbing another.
“What did the old woman do when she came out?” Sharon asked.
Rosheen giggled again. “She looked around to see if he was still in the store, then made sure she walked a wide distance around him.” Her head cocked playfully to the left. “I bet it was the first time a man had seen her with her pants down since 1968!”
As the two women laughed, Arthur moved on to the next shelf and pulled out a Craig Johnson novel and fanned through it. Then another. And another. And another.
“Life was good for a while,” Rosheen added. “John used to be fun. Sure, he had an ex-wife and a kid, but who doesn’t have baggage after a certain age, you know? I mean, face it, the male gene pool—especially on the rez—gets pretty shallow after a while, so you have to take what you can get sometimes, right?” Her eyebrows arched, and she half smiled. “I’ve had my share of rez men smelling like alcohol, weed, and lies. But John was something different, you know?”
Sharon noticed a tear build up in the corner of Notah’s eye and watched her hand absently wipe it away. Arthur turned to look then went back to his work.
Sharon said, “What happened?”
“He changed.”
Sharon sat next to her on the bed and spoke to her like a friend, a sister even. Arthur had seen her do it before. Not simply because she had learned to have empathy from her years as a reporter, but because that emotion was indelibly carved into her being. “How did he change?”
Rosheen sat on her hands now, her tattooed arms tucked in close to her sides. “There were nights he would have nightmares and night sweats, you know, and he would wake up screaming.” She paused to sniffle and control her welling emotions. “Then there were nights I would see him sitting outside by the firepit, and all he would do is stare into the flames … like he was lost inside them, you know?” She looked at Sharon. “Like he was seeing some kind of vision in them.”
Arthur had been listening as she spoke and could relate to the girl’s story. In his first days stateside, right after his time in the Marines had ended, he too had often found himself lost, reliving a part of his past he could never outrun. He removed a copy of American Indian Trickster Tales and opened its yellowish cover. Instantly, a small scrap of paper tumbled to the floor by his feet. His eyes dropped to it, and he squatted down, pinching it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He stood and placed the book back into its slot on the shelf and opened the piece of paper.
He stared silently at the scribbling on the paper until he felt the presence of both Sharon and Rosheen Notah lurking behind him. Flanking him, they looked down at the two strings of numbers on the small unfolded paper in Arthur’s hands and said nothing.
One string was a set of nine digits, the other a string of eight.
“Are those phone numbers?” Rosheen said. “If that fucker was cheating on me, I—”
“Phone numbers have seven or ten digits,” Sharon remarked. “These could be a combination or something?”
“I don’t think so,” Arthur said. “Most combinations work from zero to ninety-nine. This is something I haven’t seen in a long time.”
“What are they then?” Rosheen asked.
He looked at her, then at his wife. “I’m willing to bet they’re coordinates.”
Sharon said, “Coordinates for what?”
“Not what,” Arthur answered. “Where.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The angled blue metal roof and white adobe walls of the Angel Peak chapter house sat on an area of land encircled by a tall chain-link fence that the local residents referred to as the compound. It occupied an area where two BIA graded roads met before sloping downhill slightly and disappearing off into the desert toward the east and Highway 550. To the right of the main building sat the youth and senior citizen centers, both of which were often used as the community hub for potluck suppers, free lunches, and celebrations, along with a flurry of voting activities during election days.
Jake Bilagody rested himself against the left wall of the open hall used for chapter meetings and, as was the case today, a listening session to talk about NMX and its drilling and fracking practices on Dinétah, the Navajo homeland. The late afternoon sun funneling through the square-paned windows that ran around the hall cast its golden light on the rows of plastic folding chairs set up for the expected masses. Jake watched the chairs fill with residents who had come to listen to what the oil and gas company officials had to say, even though most of them had already made up their minds and had come ready for a fight. Jake could see it in their eyes, their demeanor. He had learned early in his career how to read people and what he saw in many of his fellow Diné were building tensions concerning the land, the water, and their health—not necessarily in that order.
A small group of environmental activists filed their way in, along with some stragglers from the parking lot, and found a spot against the opposite wall and waited, poster-board signs and chanting lungs at the ready. Jake was pleased to see that some of the younger people—younger than he was at least—had given up their seats to their elders so they could sit comfortably during the meeting. Soon four members of the Navajo Nation Council walked in and took their respective seats behind their folded-paper nameplates resting on the two six-foot-long plastic folding tables at the front of the large hall.
Behind them rose the dais, which stood less tha
n two feet off the floor and was hidden behind a faux stone partition with pictures of the current Navajo Nation president and other officials decorating the wall behind it on both sides of the large white dry-erase board. To their left, the star-spangled banner hung proudly along with the Navajo Nation and the New Mexico flags. The speaker opened up the session by reminding everyone of the rules that would apply to the afternoon’s discussion. When he was confident the crowd had understood, he introduced the official from NMX and asked him to join them.
Jake studied the apprehensive and agitated crowd as a tall, gray-haired man in a crisp white shirt and impeccably tailored gray suit entered the room through a set of double doors across from him and next to the environmental activists. He could see the crowd’s contempt for the man before he had even said a word. The NMX official nodded his head in a friendly gesture and smiled the same placating yet condescending smile the colonials had probably used on Native peoples since Columbus had become the first immigrant to set foot on Native land. Jake grinned inwardly as he watched him step behind the folding tables and take a seat with the council.
As the NMX representative began his speech, Jake’s eyes wandered around the room, counting every head and scanning every face. He expected Elias Dayton wouldn’t be too far away from his NMX benefactor. It only took him a little more than a few minutes to spot Dayton since the hall had become a packed house and people were filling space anywhere they could. Tucked away to the left of the folding tables, nestled comfortably between two of his security enforcers, like a hotdog in a bun, stood Elias Dayton. His smug face showed nothing but what Jake could only assume was contempt for being in this poverty-stricken place with all these heathen people that couldn’t matter less to him.
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