Land of Echoes

  Joseph felt the skin of his face, not so much hot as exposed, naked. "I don't know, Uncle."

  "Sure you do. So do I." The rheumy eyes in their whorls of wrinkles stayed steady on Joseph's. He was talking about his overeducated nephew's ambivalence and shame, and the shame of being ashamed, and the conflict between reason and magic, belief in modern science and respect for tradition, the whole difficult knot for which Joseph knew no solution.

  Frustrated, Joseph scuffed the ground, trying to think of a way to explain it in terms Uncle Joe would comprehend. "I don't understand why if somebody comes to you with a sick cow you'd prescribe surgery or an antibiotic and never think twice about it. But for a man you'd prescribe a Sing."

  "Wouldn't treat a cow the way I'd treat a horse, either. Different anatomy, different body chemistry, different diseases— need different kinds of treatment, right? Same way, a man's a different thing. A man has special parts that need a special kind of cure." Uncle Joe tapped his head and his heart meaningfully, then laughed at his own lecturing tone. "Besides, I'm a DVM, not an MD. State catches me treating humans, they'd lock me away for sure."

  Uncle Joe chuckled at the thought, then the wrinkles swarmed into a frown again. He waved away the argument as a digression and returned to his thread of thought. "So, in your whole life, you came to me one time, fifteen years ago. I helped you. Didn't I earn your respect then?"

  "Yes. Very much so. I am indebted to you."

  "Okay. So I'm going to call this visit the second time in your whole life. I'm going to tell you what I think you should hear, but maybe not what you want to hear. Because I have to cram a lifetime of being a good uncle into two times. About this boy, I won't warn you again about ghosts or witches, you've heard it all before from old fogeys like me and you don't believe it, what's the use? But I have two secrets for you. From an old man who some people think knows something."

  "Okay . . ."

  Joe Billie looked a little unsteady on the bumper as he beckoned Joseph toward him with a gesture from his cigarette. There was a glint in his eye, mischief or command. Closer, Joseph could smell both the stale funk of metabolized booze and the sharp tang of fresh whiskey that surrounded him.

  "I'm full of shit," Uncle Joe rasped quietly. "I'm completely full up of shit. And Navajos are full of shit. Every one of them, all the things they do and believe, full up to here with it. Disorganized, can't run their own public services. Politicians in Window Rock corrupt and full of themselves. Old people with their crazy superstitions, kids all spoiled, watching too much TV, doing drugs. Idn't it? This I believe, just like you. But now for the big secret, Joseph: Everybody is full of shit! Anglos, Mexicans, French, Jews, Chinese, these Arabs—they're equally full of it! The way they live. What they think. Their old beliefs. The way they treat each other. No more and no less than the Dinê."

  The old man leaned back against the tailgate and drew on his cigarette with a hard glint of satisfaction in his eyes, as if having delivered this drunken pearl he'd accomplished a great deal.

  Despite his reflex to dismiss it as the sorry rambling of an aged alcoholic, Joseph felt a surprising shiver, as if hidden in the cynical logic of the message, buried in the human mountain of shit, were the seeds of liberation.

  "Okay, and I have one more for you. You're worried about something else than the health of this boy. And you should be. You can't just treat the symptom, can you? Won't help. It's about the kid, but it's about you and Julieta McCarty, and you're scared of it."

  Joseph reeled back a step, as if his uncle's words were punches. Uncle Joe turned his attention to his cigarette, tapping it with great care against his chrome trailer hitch. It was a respectful gesture, Joseph saw, the uncle prodding his troubled nephew yet giving him the privacy to react without being observed.

  "He wasn't your baby?" Uncle Joe asked softly. "Sometimes I wondered."

  "No!" Joseph was appalled at his bluntness, no doubt yet another indication of alcohol's erosion of his character. "Definitely not!" he said through his teeth. "This would have all come down differently, you can bet your life on it."

  "So why should you care so much? This Tommy, one more sick kid, plenty of those. Why's this one your problem?"

  "I made some mistakes, Uncle," Joseph whispered, surprised at himself.

  The gray head bobbed, Uncle Joe's yellow eyes still concerned with the cigarette.

  "I did some . . . wrong things. I lied to her. And some other things. I don't want her to find out! And I need to fix it somehow."

  "Fix the boy? Or fix her? Fix you? Fix you and her?" Now the old man caught his eye, merciless. "You're a doctor. Got to be specific in your diagnosis if you want the right medicine. So, what needs fixing?"

  All of it, Joseph thought. All of us. Everything.

  Uncle Joe gave him a long moment, and when it was clear no answer was forthcoming he stood up creakily, tossed down his cigarette, and ground it out beneath his pointed toe.

  "This damn enlarged prostate," he mourned. "Size of a watermelon by now. Have to piss every ten minutes." He made his way unsteadily to the side of the truck, where he turned away and unzipped. Over his shoulder, he called back, "I'll think about old Keedays with a boy, up in that area, see if I even know who you're talking about. Meantime, you think about what I told you, you come back to me when you know what needs fixing. Then maybe I can help you."

  The old man's words had the tone of finality. As if to emphasize it, he took Joseph's arm and, walking with the exaggerated care of the aged or just the very inebriated, led him back into the bustle of the market.

  25

  CREE FELT A surge of relief when Joyce stepped out of her rental car. Some of it, she realized, was that, appearing magically in the dazzle of lights under the portico of the Navajo Nation Inn, her Long Island-born Chinese-Jewish colleague hadn't after all worn some kind of bogus Western outfit. Joyce was reasonably attired in a quilted nylon jacket over a sweater and trim black jeans, and she had already changed into hiking boots. Her jet-black hair was gathered into a simple fall on one down-plumped shoulder, and though she smiled broadly she radiated also a look Cree treasured: Joyce's getting-down-to-business look. A pro, with a pro's crisp readiness and alertness. Cree kissed her fervently.

  Ed pulled his van behind Joyce's car, opened the door, and stepped blinking into the lights. He looked tired, but in his rumpled, khaki-clad, thoughtful way, just as much the pro as Joyce: the consulting physicist and engineer on a field research assignment. The two of them had flown from Seattle, rented the vehicles, and for the last three hours had caravanned in the dark from Albuquerque. Cree went to Ed and kissed him, too, a hard, long one despite his initial show of reserve. When his arms went around her, they felt greatly comforting, and Cree let go of him only with reluctance.

  "Am I glad to see you guys!" she told them. "Welcome to the Navajo Nation. Long drive, huh? Have a good flight?"

  Ignoring the questions, Joyce looked her up and down. "What do you think, Ed? Bandaged brow notwithstanding, she looks okay, doesn't she? Accent, I'd say is, oh, slight to moderate. Posture and body language are more pronounced, though, don't you think?"

  Ed squinted appraisingly at Cree, chewing on his lip. "Not too bad, so far."

  They were assessing her unconscious adoption of client characteristics. She could sympathize with how they felt—wondering, every time they caught up with her on a case, who she would be—but couldn't help bristling at the implicit condescension. Frustrated, she threw back her shoulders and swept her hair away from her face before she realized she was using Julieta's gesture again.

  She caught herself in midsweep. Joyce shook her head in exasperation, and they all laughed.

  She helped them unload their luggage, then accompanied them as they registered and went to their rooms. Cree and Joyce chatted as Ed parked the van and ferried in the six bulky equipment cases he'd brought. It was going on eleven by the time he was done and they all met in his room. Joyce and Ed cracked beers from a six-pack
Joyce had innocently bought on their way through Gallup, not knowing it was contraband here on the rez, while Cree went to the minibar for a can of soda water to toast their safe arrival.

  "You up for a short conference?" she asked. "It's pretty late. If you're too tired, we—"

  "It's an hour earlier out there," Ed reminded her. "Anyway, I napped on the plane."

  "I'm a little bleary, but I want to get going on the job," Joyce said. Her gaze turned suspicious. "You, you're looking positively hyper, Cree. And why aren't you having a beer?"

  Cree explained that after getting almost no sleep for two nights running, she'd napped for much of the day. With Tommy gone, there'd been little to do at the school anyway. At least during daylight hours.

  "I have a few things to attend to tonight," she finished. "That's why I don't want to get soused like you guys."

  Ed exchanged a quick glance with Joyce, then frowned at his beer and took another swallow. "So the boy's no longer at the school. Will we have access to him?"

  "I hope so. Julieta has talked to his grandparents, they sound somewhat flexible. It'll probably be a few days before he's released from the hospital. If indeed he is released."

  "And if he isn't?" Ed persisted. He gestured at the row of equipment cases. "I brought the FMEEG gear and the rest of it. I'd like to be able to use it."

  "We might be able to swing access to him anyway. I'm hoping Dr. Tsosie asks me in as a consulting psychologist. In any case, there's work to be done while we're waiting."

  Joyce sipped her beer and looked around the room, which was done in lovely Southwestern pastels stenciled with Navajo designs. "What're you up to tonight, Cree?"

  They would disapprove, Cree knew. "I'll get there," she stalled. "Let me brief you on developments."

  They nodded. Ed kicked off his shoes and settled himself on the bed, leaning against the headboard as he swigged beer and flexed his long, narrow feet. Joyce dug a pen and a legal pad out of her bag and sank into the armchair. She took out her hair band and combed the ebony strands free with her fingers.

  Cree sat in the desk chair and filled them in, starting with a description of Tommy's symptoms and his explanations of how it felt to him. For context, she elaborated with Joseph's depiction of the boy and the hospital's initial conclusion that his crises were the result of purely psychological, not physical, problems.

  "What do you think of that hypothesis?" Ed asked. "What do you sense when you're near him?"

  "Oh, they've got a perfectly good psychological theory. Completely right and completely wrong. What do I sense? You know, I've been so off balance—I got clopped on the head before I saw him while . . . when it was fully on him, before I spent any time one-on-one with him. When we were playing softball yesterday, it was in remission and I honestly couldn't tell. But when he's in crisis, you see it so clearly—two beings in the same body, out of sync with each other, experiencing different worlds. Probably not even really aware of each other except that everything's out of whack." She shook her head, realizing how little this gave them to go on. "There are a couple of empirical signs. There's the flicker phenomenon, for one thing, very pronounced when the manifestation is in full swing. And there's this odd . . . I don't know what to call it . . . this charisma. When I found him out by the corral Friday night, the horses were paralyzed. Frozen. The night dorm guy said he felt it, and the other boys were mesmerized. I felt it too, this sort of stunned indecision that you can't shake off. There might be something useful for us in it, I don't know."

  "Together with the flicker phenomenon, it could suggest a powerful field of some kind," Ed said doubtfully. "Something we might measure." Joyce nodded and jotted a note to herself.

  "There's another thing," Cree continued. "He's an artist, very accomplished, right? Ever since I've been at the school, I've had these dreams of faces, living faces, emerging from the rocks. So last night, after he'd been taken away, I go to look at his drawings? And I find he's drawn two landscapes where rocks are morphing into faces. The school nurse told me the setting is a particular gully in the mesa, not far from the school."

  They nodded soberly, and she felt a sudden wave of affection for these two. She didn't have to explain why she attached importance to the fact that she'd dreamed what Tommy had drawn. They'd know it wasn't coincidental, that both dreams and drawings had their source in some echo of human experience in the vicinity of those ancient rocks.

  "So today I went back to his room and checked the dates. He drew the faces on September ninth. After that, his drawings began changing—every one of them shows this . . . I don't know, this double vision. It's hard to explain, but you see it right away when you look at his work."

  "So," Ed said after a moment, "what're you thinking? He acquired a formerly place-anchored entity that day? September ninth?"

  "It's worth looking into."

  "And that's where you're going tonight," Joyce said, eyes narrowing. "Out to the rocks he drew."

  Cree nodded and tried to keep looking nonchalant. Ed and Joyce exchanged another quick glance, but to her relief they didn't confront her on it.

  "So what're we dealing with?" Ed asked. "A strict perseverator? Or something more intentional?"

  "I have no idea. The arm sometimes moves by itself when Tommy's asleep, and it seems so . . . self-aware. It's almost as if it's trying to figure out where it is, what's going on. Very creepy. And when I was wrestling with Tommy, he did this thing with his eye. Like a wink. As if it was aware of me and trying to communicate. But I really don't know."

  They chewed on that. Cree shuddered and wished she could banish the image.

  "What about the idea that the entity is Julieta McCarty's ex?" Joyce asked.

  Cree looked to Ed. "Did Joyce tell you about all this?"

  Ed nodded. "Bad blood between Julieta McCarty and her former husband, now dead. Ex was killed in an accident three years ago, not far from the school."

  "Yes. And there's some complicating context there. Julieta told me yesterday that the boy is her son, fathered by a lover long gone to dreams of glory on the West Coast. She kept the pregnancy secret and hardly even saw the baby. He was adopted by a rural family fifteen years ago."

  "Oh my," Ed said quietly. "Oh my my." He finished his beer, levered his long frame off the bed, and pulled another from its plastic collar. With an expression of resignation and melancholy, he popped the can, settled himself again, and took a long swallow. "Well, that would lend credibility to the ex-as-entity theory, wouldn't it? Suggests there'd be lots of high emotions and unresolved issues. The boy's genetic relationship to Julieta could possibly explain why the ex's ghost would home in on him, maybe as a surrogate for the mother."

  Ed was talking about what they called the "blood is drawn to blood" axiom. Many of their cases over the years had concerned revenants returning to haunt blood kin, a tendency corroborated by statistical surveys of paranormal activity and echoed in supernatural lore throughout the world. Ghosts tended to "home in" on the individuals involved in their deepest compulsions, the powerful emotions felt in life or at the moment of death. Looking for blood relationships, along with emotional connections, was always a wise starting place in the quest to understand witnesses and to identify an unknown entity.

  "Very possibly," Cree agreed. "Which is another piece of business we can be working on. I called Donny McCarty today—he's the ex's son—and managed to swing an appointment to meet with him. It's ostensibly to talk about livestock mutilations, don't ask me to explain how we got there, but I want to get a look at the site of his father's death. Maybe hear more about what kind of person Garrett was, see if I can learn anything that will help determine if he's Tommy's entity."

  "On the McCartys," Joyce put in, "I've got a pile. Prominent name, lots of press—give it to you tomorrow." She scratched her head with her pen, frowning as if something were bothering her. "This'll sound stupid, but—question: Is Tommy Julieta's son? Do we know that for certain? Because it seems to me it would make a big dif
ference here."

  Cree shot her a grin. " God, you're smart. You could get a job as, like, an investigator or something! I'm assuming she knows from his records, maybe his appearance. Or maybe Dr. Tsosie told her—he's the one who arranged the adoption."

  "Is she credible?" Ed asked.

  "I think so. I trust her, I like her a great deal. But you have to understand, she's very beautiful and charismatic, she sort of dazzles you? She's intense and sexy and smart, she's appealingly wounded . . .I guess I'm saying she can overwhelm you. It's hard to make an unbiased appraisal."

  "I can't wait to meet her," Ed said, deadpan but for an intrigued lift of his eyebrows.

  "Hey, me neither," Joyce quipped, looking alarmed. "And I'm about as hetero as it gets."

  They chuckled. But the wan, reflective mood was stealing over them, the late-night lonesomes compounded by pondering the complexity of the human condition. They each retreated into private reflections for a moment.

  Joyce broke the silence: "It sounds as if you have a lot to do while we're waiting for a crack at Tommy. But what about Ed and me? We can't sit here and watch sitcoms all day."

  "There's plenty. Ed, we need you to check out the school's electrical system, rule out system weakness for the flicker phenomenon. Joyce, there's a ton of research to do—a lot of running around western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. We need to learn more about Tommy's adoptive parents' car accident—where, when, exactly what happened. Regardless of his biological parentage, their emotional connection marks them as prime candidates here. Also, when I meet with Donny McCarty, it'd be good if one of you came with me—give me more credibility, maybe help me find an excuse to walk around the mine area."