was no accident that in the vocabularies of any number of the Southwest Nations the word for “enemy” and the word for “Apache” were one and the same.
In an effort to fit in and to know something about his surroundings, Dan had bought himself a worn paperback copy of an English/Papago dictionary. The faded red-covered volume was seriously outdated because the Tohono O’odham had stopped referring to themselves as Papagos several decades earlier.
It was in perusing the dictionary and trying to teach himself some of the necessary place names that Dan had learned that as far as the Tohono O’odham were concerned, the all-encompassing Apache/enemy word was ohb .
Once the reservation gossip mill managed to spread the information that the new Shadow Wolf, the one with the dog— gogs— was ohb, Dan got the message. Bozo, the gogs, was okay. As for the human with him? Not so much.
They arrived in Sells in the broiling late-afternoon heat. Dan parked his green-and-white Ford Expedition in the shade of a mesquite tree at the far end of the parking lot in the town’s only shopping center.
Dan had no qualms about rolling down the windows and leaving Bozo alone inside the vehicle while he went into the grocery store. Bozo had an unerring understanding of who constituted a threat and who did not. Little kids who came by the Expedition to say hello to Bozo or give him a pat on the nose ran the very real risk of being kissed on the ear or slobbered on. If a bad guy happened to venture too close to the vehicle, however, he might well lose a hand or a finger.
Inside the store, Dan gathered a few items including two ham sandwiches—one for him and one for Bozo—a couple of bags of chips, two Cokes, and several bottles of water. Those would give him enough calories and help keep him alert through the long nighttime hours—hopefully long empty hours—before his shift ended at six the next morning.
Even though the line at Rosemary Sixkiller’s register was longer than the other ones, Dan went through hers anyway. Of all the clerks in the store, she was the only one who was consistently nice to him.
“There’s a dance at Vamori tonight,” she told him as she rang up his items. She gave the ham sandwiches a disapproving shake of the head as she put them in the bag. “You know you could go to the feast house there instead of eating these. They’re probably old.”
Dan had checked the sell-by date on the package, and Rosemary was correct. The sandwiches were right at the end of their sell-by date. He also knew she was teasing him about the dance. That was one of the reasons he always stopped at her register. To Dan Pardee’s ear, “Sixkiller” didn’t sound like a Tohono O’odham name. He suspected that Rosemary, like Dan, wasn’t one hundred percent T.O., or maybe even any percent. He appreciated the fact that she didn’t seem scared of him and that she joked around with him a little, even though they both knew why he wouldn’t be showing his Apache face at a Tohono O’odham feast house anytime soon.
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m working.”
Which was more or less the truth. Other Shadow Wolves did stop by feast houses now and then. Chatting with the locals gave the officers a chance to learn about what was going on in any given neighborhood—what people might have seen that was out of the ordinary, including the presence of any unfamiliar vehicles coming or going. Because the Tohono O’odham’s ancestral lands had been cut in two by the U.S./Mexican border, those strange vehicles often belonged to smugglers of various stripes and were, as a consequence, of interest to Homeland Security. Dan knew better than to try using the feast-house chitchat routine. He was the ultimate outsider here. What he found out about activities in his sector he had to find out the hard way—by personal observation.
Leaving the store with his small bag of groceries, Dan found two little girls standing outside the Expedition
In an effort to fit in and to know something about his surroundings, Dan had bought himself a worn paperback copy of an English/Papago dictionary. The faded red-covered volume was seriously outdated because the Tohono O’odham had stopped referring to themselves as Papagos several decades earlier.
It was in perusing the dictionary and trying to teach himself some of the necessary place names that Dan had learned that as far as the Tohono O’odham were concerned, the all-encompassing Apache/enemy word was ohb .
Once the reservation gossip mill managed to spread the information that the new Shadow Wolf, the one with the dog— gogs— was ohb, Dan got the message. Bozo, the gogs, was okay. As for the human with him? Not so much.
They arrived in Sells in the broiling late-afternoon heat. Dan parked his green-and-white Ford Expedition in the shade of a mesquite tree at the far end of the parking lot in the town’s only shopping center.
Dan had no qualms about rolling down the windows and leaving Bozo alone inside the vehicle while he went into the grocery store. Bozo had an unerring understanding of who constituted a threat and who did not. Little kids who came by the Expedition to say hello to Bozo or give him a pat on the nose ran the very real risk of being kissed on the ear or slobbered on. If a bad guy happened to venture too close to the vehicle, however, he might well lose a hand or a finger.
Inside the store, Dan gathered a few items including two ham sandwiches—one for him and one for Bozo—a couple of bags of chips, two Cokes, and several bottles of water. Those would give him enough calories and help keep him alert through the long nighttime hours—hopefully long empty hours—before his shift ended at six the next morning.
Even though the line at Rosemary Sixkiller’s register was longer than the other ones, Dan went through hers anyway. Of all the clerks in the store, she was the only one who was consistently nice to him.
“There’s a dance at Vamori tonight,” she told him as she rang up his items. She gave the ham sandwiches a disapproving shake of the head as she put them in the bag. “You know you could go to the feast house there instead of eating these. They’re probably old.”
Dan had checked the sell-by date on the package, and Rosemary was correct. The sandwiches were right at the end of their sell-by date. He also knew she was teasing him about the dance. That was one of the reasons he always stopped at her register. To Dan Pardee’s ear, “Sixkiller” didn’t sound like a Tohono O’odham name. He suspected that Rosemary, like Dan, wasn’t one hundred percent T.O., or maybe even any percent. He appreciated the fact that she didn’t seem scared of him and that she joked around with him a little, even though they both knew why he wouldn’t be showing his Apache face at a Tohono O’odham feast house anytime soon.
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m working.”
Which was more or less the truth. Other Shadow Wolves did stop by feast houses now and then. Chatting with the locals gave the officers a chance to learn about what was going on in any given neighborhood—what people might have seen that was out of the ordinary, including the presence of any unfamiliar vehicles coming or going. Because the Tohono O’odham’s ancestral lands had been cut in two by the U.S./Mexican border, those strange vehicles often belonged to smugglers of various stripes and were, as a consequence, of interest to Homeland Security. Dan knew better than to try using the feast-house chitchat routine. He was the ultimate outsider here. What he found out about activities in his sector he had to find out the hard way—by personal observation.
Leaving the store with his small bag of groceries, Dan found two little girls standing outside the Expedition
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