Land of Echoes

"Julieta, what can we do about Donny? If anything could ruin the school, this could. And he knows it. He wants to use it to bargain with you."

  "For what? I don't have anything to bargain with. Not a thing. I'll call him. I'll do whatever he wants."

  They walked on, shoulder to shoulder. They were already a good distance from the school, two women alone in the red-brown landscape of desert, the silvery blue sky. Julieta wasn't dressed for the outdoors. A little wind scurried along the plain, blowing their hair around and entwining Julieta's longer, darker curls with Cree's.

  "I learned a lot about Garrett, anyway," Cree said, wanting to give her something, anything. "If I can get near Tommy again, I'll be better able to recognize him. If it is him, I mean."

  Julieta nodded dubiously. "We need to talk about that," she said.

  "About—?"

  "Recognition. You had asked me how I recognized Tommy as my son."

  Cree felt a sudden premonitory trepidation. "Right. Yes."

  "It's a couple of different things. First, his records show him as a home birth, from the general area where I know my child went, the eastern rez."

  "How about his birth date?"

  "Well, the papers claim he was born about five months after I gave birth. But the discrepancy doesn't mean anything—the family might have taken their time reporting and filing, or fudging the date might have helped them claim the child was their own in some way. Allowed time for a supposed pregnancy to have occurred, I don't know."

  "But it sure doesn't prove he is your son."

  "No. It just puts him in the ballpark. The way I knew him, Cree, it was intuitive. You of all people can understand that, can't you? I need you to understand it. I felt it the moment I met him for the admissions interview. I just . . .felt it." Julieta pulled away a little and turned so she could look Cree in the eye. The look was pleading.

  "What about his appearance? He doesn't seem to resemble you. Does he look like Peter Yellowhorse?"

  Julieta's mouth made the saddest of smiles. "I keep telling myself he does, but the truth is, I can't remember. And I never had a photo of Peter, or I'd show it to you. I have memory, that's all. And it changes, it's astonishingly malleable. The best I can do is, he got a part in Dances with Wolves—playing a Sioux, of course. This was a few years later. Seeing him again upset me so much I had to leave the theater. But we could rent the video, if you want to get a look at him."

  "That might be good—"

  "But it has nothing to do with Tommy's appearance. It's just . . . here. She spread one hand against her chest and one on her stomach, inhaling and exhaling deeply, once. "It's something I feel here." Inside.

  Cree nodded, knowing exactly what she meant. It was rationally indefensible, but it was the kind of instinctive knowing she trusted completely. She depended on it herself for every investigation. She'd never known it to be without some basis in reality.

  They joined arms again and walked on. Their isolation on the bare earth of the undulating plain, under the endless sky, felt very private.

  "I don't think of Peter," Julieta said. "This isn't about him, I don't hold anything against him anymore. He was right—we wouldn't have worked out. And I don't live in the past, I really don't, I've had other lovers since then. I live in the here and now and I've got far too much to do to mope around. It's just that when I try to figure out how . . . I got to this place, my life feels all . . . out of kilter. Like all the right pieces are there, but they're stacked wrong? The foundation is out of whack? And when I trace it back to where it went wrong, it's that period. Garrett, Peter. The baby. And I don't know how to stack it up right after that."

  "But what's so out of kilter? You're beautiful, you're still young, you've got the school . . . ?"

  Julieta just scuffed along, pondering the ground in front of them.

  A little while later, Julieta brought them around to face back toward the campus, and they stopped to gaze at it. The sun made the angles of the buildings sharp and their planes brilliant. It all looked bright and little and far away, a thing receding.

  "There's just one other thing you should probably know," Julieta said sadly. Her affect was one of utter surrender, yet she spoke with great decision.

  Again Cree felt a lurch, as if the ground beneath her feet had shifted. She tried to mask her burgeoning alarm as she searched Julieta's eyes and saw how deep this vulnerability and pain went. The liquid spark in the dark blue eyes was utterly naked.

  "Tommy . . . he isn't the only one. He isn't the first."

  "What?" Cree panted.

  "There was a boy the second year. I wanted him to be my child. So badly. But he wasn't. There was even a girl last year, I thought maybe Joseph had misled me about my baby's gender to put me off the track. So you see, it's very complex. I'm kind of crazy. Joseph knows. He's very kind to me. But it's not fair of me to impose it on you, or the kids, anymore. I thought you should know."

  37

  JOSEPH BEGGED off his rotation at the hospital, telling the shift supervisor he had emergency family obligations that might require several days.

  He called ahead on his cell phone, got Uncle Joe's answering machine, left a message saying only that he was coming to see him, no explanation of why. Uncle Joe and Margaret lived off the rez not far from Crownpoint, about seventy miles from Window Rock. The drive gave him time to try to put his priorities in order.

  The Keedays wouldn't have just brought Tommy back to the grandparents' place—too obvious. Which meant he'd need to persuade Uncle Joe to help him locate the boy and to encourage the family to let them see him. To do that, he'd need to overcome his uncle's resistance to talking about the past, his placing the baby. To do that, he'd have to persuade Uncle Joe that it was truly urgent, that there was a compelling reason to reveal the boy's whereabouts. The most compelling reason he could think of was that Julieta was coming apart at the seams, that she needed something drastic to break the chain, set her free from the past. And if Tommy was her son, he could argue that maybe there comes a time when a young man needs to know who his real parents were. That certainly seemed a big part of Tommy's predicament.

  But Uncle Joe would demand more than that. He'd given Joseph a charge: to think about what needed fixing, to diagnose the problem so that he could prescribe himself a cure. Joseph could truthfully claim he'd thought about it, long and hard. The hard part was deciding on the cure.

  Then he'd have to explain why it was important for Cree Black to be able to see the boy, and that would open up a supernatural, religious, philosophical can of worms. The old man would ask him why he'd trust some white parapsychologist, why he'd buy into weird quasi-medical, quasi-occult beliefs but had such a distrust of traditional Navajo ways of seeing and coping with the same things.

  To which Joseph didn't have an answer. It wasn't so much that he'd come to agree with Cree Black's worldview, but that his habitual beliefs had become full of cracks and gaps. He could no longer decide what was science and what was superstition, fact or supposition, personal view or unbiased observation. He couldn't argue with Uncle Joe anymore because he didn't know what to believe.

  He cut up 666 and then east on 9, settling into the forty-mile empty stretch between Nakaibito and Crownpoint. He was awed by the vast open sweep of the Chuska Valley, but still the region had always depressed him: its poverty and aridity, its air of desperation. The litter caught in the fences. People living in isolated, shabby hogans and trailers or new, generic, sterile complexes of government housing, without history or beauty or anything particularly Navajo about them. The scenery was bleak, especially after the recent years of drought. In thirty minutes of driving, he encountered only two other vehicles on the road. And this was positively urban compared to where the Keedays lived, somewhere way up above the dirt road between Naschitti and White Rock.

  Uncle Joe and Margaret were comparatively well-off and lived in an eighties-era ranch-style house within view of Highway 371, south of Crownpoint. At the end of the quarter-mile drivew
ay, Joseph was relieved to see the new double-cab truck parked near the house, which meant his uncle was at home or nearby. He turned his own truck around in the space between house and corral, turned it off, and sat, giving Uncle Joe time to adapt to his unannounced arrival.

  When no one appeared, he got out and went to the door of the house. He knocked and waited again.

  "Nobody home," Uncle Joe called from behind him. The old man had come around the corner of the stock shed, accompanied by two mutt puppies that bounced and bit at each other in high good spirits.

  "Yaàtèeh, Uncle," Joseph said uneasily.

  "I got your message on the machine. You're just in time." Uncle Joe frowned as if Joseph were late for an appointment. "I could use a hand in here. My ram is too tough for me." Without further explanation, he disappeared back into the shed. The little dogs watched Joseph, heads canted expectantly.

  Joseph crossed the yard, opened the corral gate, and waded through the frisking puppies around to the other side of the shed. Uncle Joe stood in the open end of the three-sided enclosure, smoking a cigarette and blocking the escape of a burly gray ram that chewed some feed and watched him suspiciously. The rest of Uncle Joe's little flock, six ewes and a handful of this spring's lambs, stood nearby, unconcerned.

  When Joseph came in, Uncle Joe tucked his cigarette into the corner of his lips, bent quickly, and grabbed the ram. He expertly tipped the barrel-shaped body onto its side and with his head beckoned Joseph to hold the animal down. Helping, the little dogs darted in to nip out tufts of wool until Uncle Joe kicked at them and they backed away. When Joseph had put a knee on the panting chest and gotten a firm grip on two legs, Uncle Joe took a bolt cutter and clipped back the curled toes on one of the double hoofs. The ram's struggles subsided to a perfunctory kicking as Uncle Joe began paring the glistening flat-cut ends with a jackknife.

  "You look like hell," Uncle Joe chided. One eye winced as cigarette smoke trickled up his seamed cheek. "Young man your age shouldn't look so bad."

  "Young? I'm forty-six. How old do you have to be before you can use it as an excuse? I get tired like anyone else."

  "Good-looking young man. Got the pretty nurses at the hospital all giving you moon eyes, is what I hear. Could have your pick." Uncle Joe scrutinized the neat double points he'd sculpted, then let go and went on to the next foot.

  Joseph grinned sadly as he changed his grip. "Who'd you hear that from?"

  Uncle Joe just grunted as he levered the bolt cutter. He took up his knife again, gouged muck from between the hooves, wiped the blade on his overalls, and carved away another crescent. Neither man said anything more for a time as they worked, Joseph shifting his grip, Uncle Joe's leathery hands deftly sculpting.

  When Uncle Joe had finished the last hoof, they both stood up. The ram rolled quickly onto his feet and trotted out to join the ewes, looking officious to conceal his injured dignity. Uncle Joe wiped his hands on a rag and then used it to slap dust off his overalls. He looked at Joseph critically. It was a sharp look, and long enough for a light plane to drone overhead, drop toward the little airstrip on the other side of Crownpoint, and disappear.

  Joseph looked back at him. He still hadn't said anything about why he was here today, and there was a lot to explain. But he didn't have the faintest idea of where to start.

  Uncle Joe tossed down his cigarette, ground it out carefully, and walked around Joseph toward the corral gate. He held it open for Joseph, then latched it behind them.

  Joseph was surprised when his uncle didn't head for the house door but straight for the big burgundy truck.

  "We should take my chitty," Uncle Joe called over his shoulder. "Those roads back in there by Keedays', they'll take the oil pan off yours. Anyway, it'll give me a chance to show off the options."

  "They'll have scheduled a Hand-Trembler for the boy," Uncle Joe told him. They were still on the paved road, halfway to Tsaya on 371. Uncle Joe had spent the first ten minutes demonstrating the widgets and gadgets that came with his new truck. Joseph had dutifully tested his own seat adjustments, the interior climate control, and the illuminated vanity mirror in the visor.

  "The Hand-Trembler will probably make his diagnosis pretty soon, but it'll take some days for the Singer to get ready, people to be invited, sheep to be butchered, all that. In the meantime, the family will be hiding him from the child services people. I know the Keeday place, it's pretty spread out, they couldn't ever live too close together and now a lot of them have relocated. They've got an old summer sheep camp way up on the plateau, and I guess if they're serious about keeping him out of the state's hands they'll have brought him up there."

  "I have Hastiin Keeday's cell phone number. Don't you think we should call them before we get there?"

  Uncle Joe shook his head. "No. No reception from here. Anyway, it's better to do this the old-fashioned way. Face-to-face. That way we all trust each other."

  "Think they'll let us see him?"

  "You and me? Sure. But not today. Their house is, oh, fifteen miles off the county road, the camp is maybe five miles beyond that. Gotta take a horse or go on foot unless you've got an ATV. Take too long to get up there today."

  "I meant Julieta and me. And the psychologist she brought in."

  "Huh. The psychologist, I doubt."

  "They will if they meet her. That's one of the things I need your help with. Help me get them to meet her. To let her see Tommy."

  "What's so special about this psychologist? They just went to a lot of trouble to take him away from a bunch of bilagâana shrinks."

  Joseph hesitated at the brink and then told him Tommy's symptoms in detail. That Cree Black believed Tommy was possessed by a ghost, that to help her patients she looked at the whole history of emotional debts and unresolved feelings and motives around her patients, among the living and dead alike. He didn't have to explain to Uncle Joe that that's about what the Keedays would be thinking, too, and what general beliefs lay behind the traditional curing Ways.

  Uncle Joe's frown had deepened as Joseph described Tommy's condition. His quick sideways glance showed a canny glint, meaning he saw Joseph's request for what it was: an admission that he had lost his bearings, his certainties.

  The old man couldn't resist a prod: "Why are you helping her? I thought you didn't believe in that kind of stuff."

  "I thought about what you said. About being full of shit. And you're right. Everybody's full of shit, Navajo or whatever, all the superstition and belief, the habits—none of it's any better. Or any worse. Thanks for screwing up my outlook completely, Uncle. Doesn't leave a guy with much, does it? So now I'm trying to take it as it comes. Best I can do."

  Joseph saw Uncle Joe's lips move in a wry smile and felt it mirrored on his own lips. He remembered the bittersweet epiphany he'd felt when he'd been lying awake wrestling with his uncle's drunken riddle. With it, of course, came acceptance and absolution: for being Navajo, for his years of rejection of things Navajo. The problem isn't being Navajo, it's being human. We're all equally full of shit and we're therefore all equally okay. The realization had broken a chain that had bound and chafed for decades.

  No sense in letting Uncle Joe get too smug, though. He decided to turn it around on the old man. "So why are you helping me?"

  Uncle Joe snorted. "I took one look at you and I knew, here's a guy who needs all the help he can get."

  "You know what I mean. Why'd you change your mind about our old agreement?"

  A shrug. "I see my nephew all screwed up, wrapped around his own axle. He can't untie his knot until Julieta unties hers, she can't untie hers until she knows about her baby. And I'm seventy-four and a worn-out drunk, who the hell am I to make judgments. Besides, I don't need this hanging over me anymore. The pressure."

  "I'm sorry, Uncle. Thank you."

  Uncle Joe tugged a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket, stuck a Marlboro between his lips. He drove with it unlit for a mile or so before saying sadly, "We'll see if you thank me when we're done
with this."

  Forty minutes later, they were west of White Rock on one of the innumerable side roads that branched off of County 7760. They had left the vast desert plains of the Chuska Valley and had wound north into a maze of low, decaying mesas and crumbling buttes. Eons of wind and water had ground the land into freestanding forms of sandstone topped by a harder mantel of black rock, leaving grim, crumbling pillars, undercut mushrooms, shapes like castles and creatures. It was so dry that in places dunes of blown sand had drifted across the roads. Uncle Joe carefully navigated his truck over the uneven track. He steered with his cigarette between his knuckles, frowning at the occasional faint tire tracks that led away on the right. Many were barely visible in the brown grit, or disappeared as they crossed sandstone shelves higher up. Joseph couldn't imagine how anyone could find the right one.

  "I have to piss again," Uncle Joe said abruptly. He stopped the truck in the middle of the track, shut it down, and got out. He walked down the track a way, selected a rock to water, and unzipped. Joseph got out and joined him.

  It was completely silent here. The only sound was the tick of the truck's engine and the flow of their urine. They were in a hollow in the land where the surrounding buttes and humps cut off any long views. No wind stirred. After a long moment Uncle Joe finished and zipped himself up.

  Joseph was halfway back to the truck before he realized Uncle Joe wasn't with him. He looked back to see the old man still over there, standing with one boot up on the rock, hands on his knee, staring ruminatively toward the northwest.

  When Joseph walked back to him, Uncle Joe dug a wrinkled cigarette pack out of his jacket pocket, withdrew a bent Marlboro. He scowled deeply at it before he lit it.

  "Just up ahead, you see where that outcrop comes near the road?" Uncle Joe blew smoke to indicate where to look. "Back forty years ago, used to be a little track went up just the other side. Nobody goes there now, can't even see where it was, but I went up there one time. This was about ten years after I got back from the war. I was hawking a new sheep-dip formula to my customers out this way, had a good deal going with the manufacturer. I was driving an old Willys, everybody thought I was rich to have a car, most people still got around on horses. Best little chitty I ever had, but it died on me right about this same spot. Couldn't get it going again. Out here, I knew nobody was going to come by for a long time, so I started walking and when I saw that track, I went up it. I thought I'd ask to borrow somebody's horse, or hitch a ride to where there was a phone. But there was a Wolf lived up there."