MEET A CRUSTY OLD SOUL FROM THE BISTI BUSINESS

Have you ever met a crusty old soul you don’t like, but can’t say you dislike him (or her), either? Meet Sam Dunkard, the manager of a Giant Service Station in Farmington, New Mexico. When you run across someone like him, you wonder if he hates his fellow man or if he’s just so dedicated to minding his own business it gets in the way of being helpful.

In the following scene from Chapter 15 of THE BISTI BUSINESS, our PI, BJ Vinson, and Aggie Alfano are following up on a lead in their search for Aggie’s younger brother, Lando.

*****

Sam Dunkard, the old crab who managed the Giant Service Station on Main a few blocks from the Trail’s End, rightly assumed he didn’t need to talk to us because he’d already told everything he knew to the “effing” Sheriff’s Office. To make matters worse from his standpoint, Plainer had been by to ask his own questions. The attendant, somewhere in his mid-fifties, got as much out of his five-four frame as possible by standing ramrod straight in scuffed high-heeled cowboy boots. Thumbs hooked in old-fashioned yellow suspenders gave him an air of defiance. It took some patience on my part and some pleading by Aggie to get him to give us the time of day.

“I dunno why I gotta go to the trouble of doing this three times. Twice oughta be one too many.” But he was weakening.

“Because this man’s brother is missing and may be in trouble. The sheriff is looking for him, but Mr. Alfano would appreciate anything we can learn on our own.”

“Told them two law dogs the only reason I recall the guy is because of that flashy car. A fella could spot it coming a mile off even if it was dirty as hell.”

“Dirty?”

“You know, dusty; kinda like the kid driving it. His eyeballs matched his car; you know, orange. Looked like he’d been driving all night. Figured he drove ten…twelve hours straight from somewhere or the other.”

“But he looked okay? I mean, he wasn’t hurt or anything?” Aggie fished around in his pocket. “I’ve got a picture of him. Could you confirm he was the driver?”

“Don’t need it,” Dunkard said. “Looked a whole lot like you. Like a clone that didn’t grow up as big as you.” Finally, the man glanced at the picture. “Yep, that’s him.”

“And this was when?” I asked.

“Fifteenth,” he said after thinking it over. “My brother-in-law spells me at noon on Wednesdays, so I recollect what day it was.”

“What time?”

“Early morning. Maybe eight…nine.”

“And he was alone?”

“Yep. All by himself.” Sam Dunkard studied us a moment. “Nervous as hell, he was. Kept looking over his shoulder. Made me think it mighta had something to do with the fella asking about him a little later.”

“Asking about my brother?” Aggie said.

“Asking about the car. He wanted to know if I’d seen an orange Porsche.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Said, sure. Not more’n an hour ago. Man claimed he was supposed to meet his friend but got held up by a detour on the way down from Colorado. I never heard of no detour. Course, coulda been up the road apiece, I suppose.”

“What did this man look like? Blond, around the same age as the driver?” I fed him a vague description of Norville.

“Naw. Older. Hard-looking customer. Don’t recall him too much, but think he was sandy-haired, but thinning. Probably somewhere around forty. Stocky.”

“What was he driving?” I asked.

“Don’t remember. Something bland. Brown Ford or something.”

“Any nicks, dings, dents, decals—anything that stood out?”

“Naw. It was just a plain manila envelope”

“I don’t suppose you noticed his license plate,” I said.

“Sure did. It was a New Mexico plate. And he claimed he drove down from Colorado way.” Sam Dunkard frowned. “Could of, I guess, if he was on a trip.”

“How can you be so sure about the license plate?” Aggie asked. “You aren’t even sure what kind of car it was.”

“License plates is my hobby; son. Cars, ain’t. Be surprised how many of these United States I can count every day.”

“Do you remember the plate number?” I asked.

“Hell no. That ain’t part of the game.”

“Did you tell Detective Joe about this man?”

“Sure did. Told Lonzo all of it.” He gave a sour look. “Maybe I held out on that other fella, that BLM man. Too smooth by half.”

By the time we got back into our rental, Aggie looked ten years older than when we had met a few days back. He was silent, and I left him alone.

*****

You wouldn’t think an orange Porsche would be so hard to find, would you? But it deals BJ a great deal of trouble as he chases it clear across this great State of New Mexico.

Keep up the reading. I might be old-fashioned, but I think that still the best way to get information … and some pleasure.

Be happy to hear from any of you who’d like to make contact.

New Posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Return to the Bisti-De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area

 After wandering around lost the last few weeks (including posting a poem, for crying out loud), I thought we’d return to one of the BJ Vinson books today.

What follows is the closing scene in Chapter 12 of THE BISTI BUSINESS. BJ and Aggie Alfano (one of the missing men’s older brother) have been drawn to the remote, usually deserted Bisti-De-Na-Zin Wilderness when they learn a Navajo teenager has found a cell phone owned by one of the missing duo. They have just ransomed the telephone when they are joined by Sgt. Dix Lee of the Farmington Police Department and Special Agent Larry Plainer of the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that is responsible for administration of the wilderness area.

*****

By John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA
(Natural Sculptures) 

I nodded in the direction of the retreating teens. “Where did they come from? They’re not headed for the parking lot—unless there’s another one I don’t know about.”

“No,” Dix answered. “There are two or three private Navajo holdings inside the Wilderness. They probably belong to one of those. They’re within walking distance.”

“And that’s why they stumbled on Dana’s phone?” I took another slug of water as she spoke and offered her some. She declined with a shake of her head. I wiped a sheen of sweat from my face with a sodden handkerchief.

“Probably.” She turned to the man with her. Blond and blue-eyed and handsome in a chiseled features way, he was J. Edgar Hoover’s ideal FBI agent—except that he was a Bureau of Land Management man. “BJ, this is Larry Plainer, a Special Agent for the BLM. As I told you, they administer the Bisti Wilderness.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said and introduced him to Aggie.

I knew t the BLM had its own law enforcement arm, but didn’t know exactly how they worked. Some rangers regularly carried firearms and handled criminal cases such as vandalism, theft, and the like. A special agent was new to me. Perhaps they handled the “heavier” crimes. Gainer’s fair features labeled him an inside man, not a working ranger. Despite the heat, he wore navy dress pants and a pale blue, long-sleeved shirt, although he had foregone a coat and tie. A black baseball cap with BLM stenciled on it was all that protected him from the sun. It made me wonder how he’d walked the same route I had without staining his clothing with sweat.

I brought Dix and Plainer up to date on the situation while Aggie wandered off somewhere on his own. A few minutes later, a shout attracted my attention.

“BJ, over here!” Aggie yelled.

I hurried over to a hoodoo, one of those sculpted toadstool formations that threatened to collapse momentarily. Aggie slowly walked the rocky ground around the base, as if searching for something.

“What is it?”

“You smell anything?” he asked.

And then I caught a whiff of it—the faint, cloying, unmistakable stink of death.

*****

It feels good to be back on safe, familiar ground. I hope this and other posts featuring the wilderness area will prompt you to visit the Bisti Badlands country. If you’re into eerie, otherworldly landscapes, this is the place for it.

By the way, the spectacular image is a Creative Common photo taken by John Fowler of Placitas, a village north of Albuquerque -- a very interesting place on its own.

As always, thanks for reading.

New Posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

It’s Off to Farmington…

Seal of the City
of Farmington

In Chapter 8 of THE BISTI BUSINESS, BJ and Aggie Alfano approach Farmington by air in Alfano’s dual engine Mitsubishi Marquise. Aggie is the older brother of the young man BJ has been hired to locate. A couple of tenuous leads in Taos have sent them to the Four Corners area of New Mexico on their quest. The following is a passage (told from BJ’s viewpoint) from Pages 49 and 50 of the book:

###

A massive fluffy plume boiled up out of a gigantic smokestack and rode the prevailing air currents beneath our wings like one of the malevolent spirits of native folklore, spreading mischief far to the southwest. Plans for a new electric power-generating plant, to be fed by area coal mines, were slowly making their way through the bureaucracy to one day add dollars to the economy and carcinogens to the environment.

“Those emissions look nasty.” Aggie reflected my own thoughts. “You know much about Farmington?”

I chuckled. “I’m a history buff, so I know a little about a lot of places, and not a lot about any of them.”

Farmington, a small city of just under 50,000, which the early aboriginals called Tótah, or the Meeting Place of Waters, perched on the Colorado Plateau at the conjunction of the San Juan, Animas, and La Plata Rivers. Combined, these three rivers accounted for twenty-five percent of all the water in the state. The local economy was carbon-based: natural gas, coal, and oil.

“There’s something that worries me more than that smokestack at the moment,” I said. “Farmington’s been the target of several civil rights investigations, mostly for hate crimes motivated by racial discrimination. The place is virtually surrounded by Native Americans—the Navajo Nation west of Farmington, the Ute Mountain Reservation to the northwest, and the Southern Ute to the northeast—and that’s sparked trouble at times. It’s not much of a leap to conclude that a couple of gays might run into the same type of prejudice.”

###

Looking over Farmington
west toward Shiprock

BJ’s stated concern about hate crimes in the area were based on actual fact. Farmington has earned headlines in the past for hate crimes against Native Americans, particularly Navajos. The city spent years attempting to shake it’s designation as “the Selma, Alabama of the Southwest.” The 1970s were the heyday of “Injun rollin’,” when youths from border towns in the area beat up Navajos (usually sleeping alcoholics) with rocks, pellet guns, bottles, and baseball bats as a rite of passage.

Rodney Barker’s book, The Broken Circle – a True Story of Crime and Magic in Indian Country, recounts the April 1974 “Chokecherry Massacre,” the murder and mutilation of three Navajo men near Farmington. Their bodies were thrown into a nearby canyon. Three Farmington high school boys admitted to the killings but were never tried for the crime of murder. They were sent to reform school as juveniles, instead. Attempts by tribal members to march in protest of this lenient treatment turned into riots when permits for peaceful demonstrations were denied.

Thirty-two years later, fears were raised again by violent, racially charged incidents between whites and Navajos which started with the beating of a forty-seven-year-old Navajo man who was offered a ride by three white teenagers in Farmington, driven to the outskirts of town, and beaten. Six days later, a twenty-one-year-old Navajo was killed by police responding to a domestic dispute in a Wal-Mart parking lot. When the Farmington police declared it a justified shooting, the FBI declined to investigate. They later reconsidered their decision.

Aztec Ruins Near
Aztec, New Mexico

Although BJ’s concerned had some basis in history, the City of Farmington is not totally defined by its racially charged past. The area was settled by the Anasazi in the Seventh Century (visit the nearby Salmon and Aztec Ruins as BJ and Aggie do while following the trail of Lando Alfano and his companion, Dana Norville). In 1868, the Navajo Nation was ceded the western half of San Juan County, New Mexico. A number of settlers moved into the remaining territory from Southern Colorado and established Junction City. In 1901 the town was incorporated and renamed Farmington. At the time it boasted a population of 548. By September 19, 1905, the railroad connected Farmington to Durango, Colorado. The 1920s saw investments in natural gas and oil in the area, although significant production did not occur until the 1950s.

Something I didn’t know: In 1967, an underground nuclear explosion took place 50 miles east of Farmington and about 25 miles south of Dulce, New Mexico in the present day Carson National Forest. This detonation was the pilot project of Operation Plowshare (Project Gasbuggy), an attempt to fracture underground bedrock for greater extraction of natural gas from wells in the area.

Something else I hadn’t known: On March 18, 1950, over half the town’s population reported seeing large saucers in the sky flying at rapid speeds—a mass UFO sighting!

Today, Farmington is an active, vibrant town that has hosted the Connie Mack World Series baseball tournament for players between 16 and 18 years of age for 43 years. The games are played every August at Ricketts Park.

The three local rivers are celebrated by the Farmington Riverfest each year. The festival boasts music, fine arts displays, food, entertainment, river rafting, and a 5K and 10K run and walk.

The city sponsors an annual strongman competition on the last Saturday of July on San Juan Plaza. There is a Four Corners Storytelling Festival and a Renaissance Faire in October, and youngsters from the Four Corners Home for Children dress in traditional clothing and pose for the Live Navajo Nativity Scene on the 23^rd of December.

This piece wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the excellent fishing, both in the rivers and on the lake.

It’s a great place to visit.

Next week: Probably something else from THE BISTI BUSINESS.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.