Unintended target

Across the brushy reservation range land near the bottom of a mesa two Navajo men sat in a blue 1978 Ford F-250. Intermittently one or the other would raise their hand and a container it held to their mouth, pull long and hard, and finishing, throw an empty beer can out the window. This had been going on for some time. Besides the wind blowing through juniper trees and the sound of the Navajo men talking loud, you could hear the tribal AM radio station blaring old forgotten country tunes from Waylon Jennings or Johnny Cash. Between them was a rifle, butt-stock firmly planted between the four wheel drive shifter and the seat, barrel pointing to the roof of the cab, and a caliber .223 Remington hollow point bullet, with 69 grains of propellant, chambered.

Four days ago on Tuesday the men’s mother smoldered with anger that another coyote jumped the corral and killed a sheep that was nearly ready to drop a lamb. In unflattering Navajo she cussed the devil for the fifth attack in a month. Brushing aside traditional teachings, which was to find a medicine-man to determine the meaning of these attacks, she told her boys to hunt the coyote and kill it dead, adding that her boys might as well do something useful for once.

Smarting with their mother’s insult, one of the boys, Jack, got up from the dinner table and walked to the closet and dug out the old semi-automatic rifle while the other, Sam, went to fetch the bullets from his dresser drawer. They both walked outside to the truck and drove to the earthen dam. Noon passed into afternoon, and finally at early evening the boys gave up and headed for home. No coyote.

Day in and day out this was the routine. Load up, park at the dam, look through old BIA binoculars, sleep some, get hungry, and drive back home. And at every one of the evenings they would hear their mother cuss the coyote at the dinner table and scold them because they weren’t looking hard enough, “Probably just sleeping up there, too,” she finished.

But today was different out there on the range land near the mesa. Dark clouds were forming in the north and a cold breeze blew through the juniper trees. In Navajo Jack said he didn’t feel any good. Sam looked at him through eyes connected to a body that consumed nearly seven cans of beer. Focusing a minute, and refocusing the next, he asked if Jack was afraid of the messenger, coyote. It was said in Navajo that the coyote brought bad omen.

“No, I ain’t afraid of nothing!” Jack said in a too loud voice.

Sam looked at his younger brother and wondered if in fact Jack was too loud for his liking. He’s always like that, too damn loud and always looking for something to be mad about, Sam thought. Before he fully comprehended what he was doing, Sam was pointing his finger at Jack and said even louder in slurred English, “You’re a chicken.”

Looking at Sam, Jack smiled and thought about the time Sam couldn’t get up the nerve to ask Ruthie out to the country western dance at the boarding school gym and said so.

“And let me tell you, Ruthie sure kisses good,” Jack said. Sam’s quick glance and outrage told Jack he hit the target good.

“You go to hell!” Sam said in Navajo, which literally was translated as, “You go the land of the evil spirits!” Sam regretted ever telling Jack he liked Ruthie.

From behind a large sage bush near where the blue truck was parked, the coyote cocked its head a little sideways and turned an ear toward the sound of the men arguing. It turned its nose upward smelling the wind and looked again. Calculating the danger, the coyote started out for the sheep corral taking a circuitous route behind the truck nearly a hundred yards distance. From years of dodging vehicles and the people in them, the coyote knew that it was better to go behind them than in front.

Jack and Sam’s argument turned to who was the one more afraid to go the outhouse at night, alone, when they were kids.

“You couldn’t even go to the outhouse without waking me up to walk you over there! You were a chicken then and you’re a chicken now!” Jack taunted.

Just about the time Sam was going to bring up Jack’s childhood bedwetting, Sam looked into the rearview window and saw the coyote trotting along, head turned and looking at him right in the eye. Sam blinked and looked again, focusing better, and sure enough he saw the coyote. Jack noticed and turned and looked too. They were in shocked disbelief for a good second.

When the second was over and in the mad scramble for the rifle a shot went off in the truck. The blast was deafening and the muzzle flash from the gun momentarily blinded both men. In the quiet that followed, Jack saw what was left of the top of Sam’s head and started to shout his bother’s name, frantically trying to stop the bleeding. It was no use. Sam was dead as a door nail.

Down at the house, their mother heard the rifle go off and thought, finally, I hope those no good boys have killed that damned coyote. She opened the curtain and dried her hands on her apron and looked toward the mesa with her old binoculars and could see one of her boys running wildly around the truck and do something on the other side, what it was she couldn’t tell. And she saw the coyote standing there on the hill side looking at the truck and she thought it odd, why aren’t they shooting at that devil!