Bernie took Mama some coffee. The rug Mama loved, the rug she planned to sell, was on the couch, folded into a rectangle. Mama ran her hand over it as she focused on the TV. “When I feel this one, I think of those sheep we had then. We had a time with some of those dibé yázh, the little lambs.”
“I remember that spring when it was so cold, and the lambs came early.” Even though she had been small herself, Bernie had bottle-fed one of the newcomers. She could hear the rhythmic sound the lamb made as it sucked and see the way its tail wagged as it gulped the milk. It grew to have wool the color of chocolate and became one of her favorites. The brown in the rug’s double diamonds came from its fleece.
As she drove into Shiprock, Bernie noticed the building clouds, potential thunderheads that held the flirtatious promise of rain. Had it rained somewhere on the sprawling Navajo Nation? She hoped so.
She arrived at the police station a little earlier than she had to for her shift, and ran into Bigman finishing his reports.
Bernie greeted him. “A couple of days ago, you said you wanted to ask me a favor?”
“Oh, that’s right. It’s for my wife. She’s interested in weaving. She asked me to see if I could find somebody who might be willing to teach her. She’d like to start soon, while she’s still off from school.”
A couple of years ago Bigman had married a bilagaana who taught at Shiprock’s elementary school. Bernie didn’t know her very well, but she liked the woman.
“Learning to weave takes a while. She won’t be able to pick up a whole lot before she has to go back to work.”
“She wants to keep at it, evenings and on the weekends, depending on how much she has to do for her classes.”
“Does she know anything about weaving?”
“She knows how to get to the auction at Crownpoint.”
Bernie laughed. The auction, held each month at the Crownpoint Elementary School, drew weavers from across the reservation and plenty of buyers, too. “I’ll see who I can come up with.” She wondered if Mama, probably the teacher Bigman and his wife had in mind, would be willing.
Her afternoon’s most interesting assignment involved two males with fake IDs, apparently underage, turned away from Falling Water Casino. They remained loitering in the parking lot, drawing the attention of a security guard who thought they might be working up the gumption to break into vehicles. The boys disappeared before Bernie could find them, vanishing at the first glimpse of her police car. The guard knew one of them because his teenage grandson had played basketball with the boy, and he agreed to have a word with that boy’s mother. The whole thing took longer than Bernie expected.
Next she talked with a man accused by a neighbor of siphoning gasoline. The gas thief explained that he was merely borrowing the gas. He had gone over to ask his neighbor if he could have some, but the neighbor didn’t come to the door, so he helped himself. He meant to explain the situation, but he got busy. Bernie took him to the complainant’s house, where he apologized and promised to buy more gas than he stole as soon as he got his check. Apology accepted, case closed.
The day dragged on. She checked with the soil analysis lab and got good news; results should be available by the end of the day. She’d talk to Cordova when she found out what was in the dirt, tell him about the frequent calls to Las Vegas and Utah she’d seen on Miller’s phone. Maybe she could parlay the new information into an explanation of why Miller warranted federal attention.
The promising clouds vanished, pushed away by a hot, dry wind that unrelentingly blasted the landscape, stirring tiny bits of sand into dust devils. Bernie remembered walking on the dirt road near her house as a girl, the airborne dirt stinging her arms and legs. In high school, waiting for her events in track, she dreaded feeling the windblown sand buffet her skin, and she would shut her eyes and turn her back to the gusts.
She watched the swirling spirals move from the earth into the sky, as much a part of summer as rodeos and roadside flea markets. Diné tradition taught that, like everything in nature, the wind had its purpose—scouring the earth clean. Nonetheless, it made her feel edgy.
She heard the radio call for her.
“Largo wants you to head over to check out a burned car.” Sandra gave her the route number and directions to a house closest to the car. “Somebody who was driving out there called it in.”
“OK.” Bernie knew the area—a good place for mischief, complete with old stories of evil ones.
She soon saw and smelled the smoldering car, or what was left of it. She drove her unit off the road and parked. The cases of burned vehicles she knew about on the reservation had all been tied to revenge, and a few had involved grisly murders. She hadn’t been the responding officer on those calls. Once, as a rookie, she had been on duty at a house fire. The family survived, but she never forgot the stench and sight of the dog that had burned in the blaze chained to the back wall.
As she walked closer, she realized the vehicle looked like the car she’d pulled over, the one with the boxes of dirt in the trunk. Even in its blackened condition, she was almost certain that she recognized it. She remembered Miller at the wheel, sweaty and uneasy, and hoped she would not encounter what was left of him now. Bernie’s aversion to associating with the dead had begun in childhood, learned from the example of her relatives and from the stories she’d heard as a little girl. The spirits of the dead, chindis, roamed restless and out-of-sorts. She tried not to imagine what she might find inside the car, but she had paid too much attention during training to return to na?veté. The thought of the body and the stink of the smoldering car made her queasy.
Reminding herself that she was a Navajo police officer, she stood straighter as she walked to the driver’s door. She forced herself to look through the broken window at the blackened remains of the seats. Empty seats. No burned body. She exhaled and stepped away. She took a few deep breaths, then walked back to the vehicle and found the VIN near the windshield, above the melted dashboard. She went to her unit to radio in the ID number, along with the good news that no one remained inside, then realized this place was a communication dead zone. No radio meant no cell phone service either.
Bernie surveyed the scene around the car: empty beer cans, broken glass, shredded plastic, and the usual accumulation of windblown trash. No obvious clues. When she’d seen enough, she drove to the closest house, a tiny home with a porch added on, covered to provide some shade. Whoever lived here might have seen the car burn.