April 21, 2008
Although it was desert country, the land outside Mescalero was suitable for agriculture due to its proximity to water sources, such as the Rio Ruidoso. Many of the farms were owned by locals who had lived in the area long before the European migration westward, even before the arrival of the Spanish. However, when cultures collided, not only did blood spill, but they also mixed.
Finding the property took longer than he anticipated. Still, after a few twists and turns plus a couple of dead ends, he finally headed down a gravel road in the direction of Dosela’s residence. One more turn up a long dirt driveway, and he was parking in front of an old farmhouse.
Stepping out of the Land Cruiser, Kestrel took a moment to take in the scenery. Nearby, a large elm stood, with a tire swing hanging from one of its branches; the rope and rubber were faded and worn. In the distance, the ridges were dry and brownish, dotted with pi?on and mescal stands. Ponderosa amber filled the air—a pleasant and strangely familiar scent of vanilla and butterscotch.
“Victor!” shouted a woman from inside the house. The screen door swung open, and out stepped a small, brown-skinned, gray-haired woman onto the porch. “Did you get a new truck?”
“Mrs. Dosela?” he asked, approaching the house. The 68-year-old woman squinted.
“Oh, I’m sorry, my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I thought you were my cousin’s son for a second. You must be the man my granddaughter spoke to.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You came all this way just to talk to me; must be pretty important.”
“It is.”
“So what is it, what’s this all about?”
“Well, ma’am, I need to talk to you about your brother.”
***
“You know, it’s been more than twenty years, and not a day has gone by that I don’t think of him. I keep hoping one afternoon I’ll hear his footsteps on the porch, and that door will open, and he’ll waltz on in, bigger than life, with that damn steamer trunk of his, and instead you show up…with this.” She glanced down at the gruesome photos, closed the file, and pushed it toward him. “I remember seeing this on the news—the Caretaker Killer. Every night for about a week, I’d see Jesse’s face on the television. Considering what a big story it was, I thought for sure a detective would come knocking, asking questions, and now, finally someone has. Why did it take so damn long?”
“To be frank, when it comes to the police and the legal system, we’re the last in line. That’s why the Southwest Indigenous Justice Network was formed—and why I was hired.”
“You think my brother murdered those girls?”
“I don’t know, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“If he did, it’s not entirely his fault.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I know this sounds like an excuse, but Jesse never got a fair break—see, our father was a drunk. All day he drank the suds, and at night, when he could afford it, took to the hard stuff, and then he got mean. I never knew exactly why, but he had it out for Jesse and used to beat him senseless.” She paused for a moment, racked with guilt. “When it happened, my mother tried to stop him, but she couldn’t. Instead she’d drag me outside, and we’d hide in the cowshed, and listen to his screams.” She started crying.
“Do you want to take a minute? Maybe I can make some tea?”
“No, it’s okay,” she said, wiping her tears, “the beatings began with the booze, and the booze finished it.”
“How so?”
“As was my daddy’s habit whenever his disability check came in, he’d go on a bender in town, and when the last dime had been spent, he’d make his way back home, all twelve miles like a stubborn inebriated mule. Except this time, for some fated reason, he lost his bearings and staggered out plumb into the desert.” She paused, her face growing cold and emotionless. “They found what was left of him a month later. I was seventeen when that happened, and I don’t remember shedding a tear for the bastard.”
“How old was Jesse when your father died?”
“Twelve. Not even in high school.”
“What was Jesse like in school? How were his grades?” She laughed.
“Jesse? When he showed up, he did okay. He wasn’t stupid—in fact, he was smarter than most—but he got into a lot of trouble, a lot of fights, a lot of problems with authority.”
“It starts in the home.”
“Yes. Before retirement, I was an educator for thirty-five years; my husband—God rest his soul—was too. The reason we became teachers was the things we saw growing up: native kids falling through the cracks because of a system that cared nothing about boys like my brother. Today Jesse would be categorized as someone with behavioral problems, someone with special needs—and there would be attention placed upon him, resources allocated—but back then, he was just a dirty Injun, one of the many with alcoholic fathers and mothers. In those days, too many on the rez—uncles, aunties—drank themselves to death. It was a broken community filled with despair and disease. The traditions that kept us grounded and proud were gone. It’s a wonder Jesse even got out, considering what he experienced.”
“Your mother, she didn’t drink?”
“No, thank God, no. It’s how I managed to stay on the straight and narrow.”
“Forgive me, but I have to ask…aside from the physical abuse, were there other kinds of abuse?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, molestation—was Jesse sexually abused by your father?”
“He never laid a hand on me; my mother saw to that. But Jesse? I honestly don’t know. But it’s possible—it might explain the rage he had toward him. Let’s just say I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“I appreciate your candor, Mrs. Dosela. These are difficult questions, but they help me build a psychological profile.” He made a few notes before peering at the gray-haired woman again. “You say Jesse had trouble in school, care to elaborate?”
“In his early years, the usual stuff: skipping class, getting into fights, failing grades. One year he was held back.”
“What year?”
“Can’t remember exactly, fifth grade?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“And his high school years?”
“Worse. His first year of high school, he was expelled for drinking.”
“Like father, like son.”
“Yup, threw up in the math room. For that, he was suspended for two weeks; shortly after that, he was expelled for assaulting a teacher. And then, during that same period, someone burned the school down.”
“Someone?”
“Not Jesse, but they blamed him anyway, and he was charged as a juvenile. I remember, like it was yesterday, the tribal police coming, putting cuffs on him, and taking him away.”
“Hmm, I checked your brother’s criminal record. His record is clean.”
“Yes. The court gave him a choice. Either serve time in a juvenile prison or enlist in the Army when he turns eighteen and be released on probation. He chose the latter.” She sat up, and a smile began to crack. “When Jesse joined the army, my first thought was, with his hatred of authority, how in the heck would he survive? My mother and I kept expecting to hear word from an MP that he had gone AWOL, or worse, but instead, he showed up on that doorstep, about a year later, and we didn’t even recognize him. His long hair gone, his posture ramrod straight, the manners of a gentleman, and a kind of pride and purpose that I could have never imagined in my wildest dreams. His transformation was something of a wonder, and he said it came from being part of the best of the best, the elite.”
“The Green Berets.”
“No, Army Rangers—he joined the Special Forces a few years later.”
“Right, that makes sense. Do you remember what year Jesse enlisted?” he asked. Irene paused for a moment to think back.
“Early ‘60s, the same year that song ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ was so popular. I remember listening to it in the car, after dropping Jesse off at the recruiting station, at Fort Bliss.” He made a few notes.
“What can you tell me about his years in the service?”
“Well, when he joined, we thought of the Army as more of a character-building exercise, you know, discipline and structure, the two things missing in most native boys’ lives. We saw it as a positive experience. Then the Vietnam War rolled around, and it was a whole other ballgame. It scared my mom and me to death. But Jesse he was gung-ho to go. In fact, Jesse did his first tour in ’65, and then if that wasn’t bad enough, he volunteered for another.”
“Huh… back to back? Or was there a period when he was Stateside in between?”
“I don’t remember him coming home during that time. All I know is he finished his second tour—the same year as the Tet Offensive, the same year Cronkite said the war was lost. Mom and I were just glad to see him come home in one piece.”
Irene frowned. “I remember picking him up from the airport in El Paso, and instead of a duffel bag like your typical GI, he had a steamer trunk. Christ, what a pain in the rear it was to load that into our station wagon. He said with all his travels, he’d become quite the collector: silk kimonos from Japan, cameras and watches from Hong Kong, souvenirs from all over Southeast Asia.”
The sixty-eight-year-old woman sighed. “Jesse was something else; he was like a hero to me, you know, and to the people around here.”
“Yeah, I can understand why, two tours in Vietnam. Special Forces. Damn. So, when he came home, how long did he stick around?”
“Not long, Jesse never stayed more than two or three days. Just long enough to touch base, and make my mom feel alright. He didn’t see any of his old friends or high school buddies, just didn’t have anything in common with them anymore.”
“What about women, did he have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, I think he was seeing someone for a time, a girl in Alamogordo.”
“You remember her name?”
“No. I never met her. When it came to his love life, he was pretty tight-lipped. Didn’t talk about stuff like that.”
“What did he talk about?”
“Politics, mostly—the spread of communism.” She laughed. “It was kind of a touchy subject between us, because I was a communist back then. Well, you know, it was the height of flower power and all that anti-war, anti-Vietnam crap, and Jesse? Well, he was practically a Goldwater Republican.”
“If you’re a Green Beret, that makes sense. Do you remember what year he joined the Special Forces?”
“Yeah, about a year later, my mom and I flew to Fort Bragg to attend the ceremony at the Kennedy School, you know, when those men of steel are given their green berets. Funny, I remember a couple shedding tears that day as they had that silly beanie placed on their noggins. Not Jesse, though—an Apache warrior doesn’t cry,” she winked, “only when his mom and dog die.”
“His time in the Special Forces—what can you tell me about it?”
“Honestly, I can’t tell you much. It was all hush-hush.” She looked up at the ceiling. “But he might,” she added. He followed her gaze upward.
“He?”
“Jesse.”
***
The attic was large and dusty, stuffed with mounted animals, elk antlers, furs, and a bear trap. The floorboards creaked underfoot, and it smelled of mold, musk, and mothballs.
“Grandpa Samuel used to take Jesse hunting. Sometimes they’d be gone a month at a time, out there in the wild. That was the only time Jesse was happy—when he was around his grandpa. Grandpa passed on everything he knew about hunting and trapping, as well as the traditional ways of living off the land.
“He told my daddy that Jesse had the vision. That he had one foot on the land, the other in the spirit world. He said Jesse had it in him to be a great hunter. A great warrior. Even a diyin, if he wished.”
“A diyin?”
“Yes, a medicine man. One who walks between worlds. That’s a streak that runs in our family. I even have a little of it myself. But Jesse had it bad. Grandpa used to say our daddy got the white blood, but Jesse was all Ndeh.” She laughed. “That used to make my daddy furious. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why he beat Jesse. Because there was something special about him. Something he was jealous of. Something he hated.” Irene began moving boxes, looking for something.
“When you say your brother learned the traditional ways, did that include crafting stone knives, axes?”
“You mean like a Tomahawk?”
“Sure.”
“Not that I know of. All I know is, by the time Jesse was knee-high, he knew how to live off the land—like my grandpa, and like all the Ndeh warriors before him. There it is.” She snatched up an old shoebox from the clutter, blew off the dust, and removed the lid. Inside were rows of cassettes.
“When Jesse joined the Special Forces, there’d be months when we wouldn’t hear a peep from him. I laid a guilt trip on him about that, telling him Mom was worried. He said he just didn’t have time to write. So I sent him a recorder and tapes, and told him no excuses! And for a while there it worked; he’d send a cassette home once a month, on a regular basis.”
“Did he talk about what he was doing?”
“Not really. He’d talk about the places he’d seen. The weather. The heat. Snakes! He hated snakes, and he said the jungles were crawling with them. In the beginning, everything was fine. Normal, you know. Upbeat and positive. And then…” Her expression shifted from pride to pain again, her eyes fixed on the past as she clutched the box.
“And then?” Strongblood’s sister snapped out of it.
“Little by little, he began to change—like he was on something. I mean, he just stopped making sense.” A look of guilt flashed across her face. “After a while, I couldn’t listen anymore, and I sure didn’t want Mom to hear him like that. He’d send tapes home, and I’d just box them away and pray that he was all right.” He noticed the dates written on the cassette boxes.
“They’re in chronological order?”
“Yes, from June 1969,” Strongblood’s sister said. She picked up another shoebox—there were four in total—opened it, and revealed more tapes inside, “all the way to November 1984.”
“84, around the time he took on the caretaker job?” he asked.
“Yes, Jesse kept sending me letters for about a year after he left the army, and then they stopped—no letters, phone calls, nothing, like he’d gone naakai for good.”
“Naakai?”
“Yes, it’s our word for walker, or wanderer. Like he wandered into the desert like our father. What I’ve learned about trauma, Mr. Crowe, is that it’s multigenerational. The sins of the father are often passed on to the son, and in many cases, to the grandson. During my time in the school system, much of our toil was focused on trying to disrupt that chain of events through some kind of intervention. When we succeeded, we considered it near miraculous.”
“Your life turned out pretty good, it seems, a nice property, grandchildren.”
“Yes, well, I have my mother to thank for that, and my husband, Earl. He was a good man; I was very fortunate in that regard.” She handed him the shoebox. “You know I tried to file a missing person’s report, but the tribal police said I couldn’t. I’ll never forget what that officer told me; he said, ‘Sometimes people from the rez want to disappear, to never come back, and in America, they had every right to do so—it’s a free country.’ Isn’t that rich, spoken from a man whose people were conquered?”
“Some of our people just don’t get it, Irene—there’s a derogatory word for that, but I’ll refrain from using it.”
“Apple.”
“Glad you said it and not me,” he chortled. His tone reverting to serious again, he asked, “Did Jesse give you a mailing address?”
“No, or a phone number…just the packages and tapes…as the police said, it seems like he didn’t want to be found.”
“Can I take these with me? I’ll make copies and send them back. Shouldn’t take more than a week.”
“I thought one day I’d give them back to Jesse, but he’s never coming back; I know that now.” She looked at the shoebox as if it contained her brother’s ashes. “Are you good at what you do?”
“I am. Very good.”
“Then have them, but under one condition: when you find out what happened to Jesse, I want to know. Whatever it is.”
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