"I've had six hours to think about it. I talked to my wife. It scares her for me to be here anymore." He knew what his leaving meant and was clearly feeling bad about his decision, but he left her office with a resolute stride.
Only eight-fifteen in the morning, and she was already confronted with two pieces of very bad news. It was bad enough that she'd just lost a linchpin of her residential staff, a man whom both she and the students admired - a loss that didn't bode well for the school. But equally disturbing - no, worse, a sick, strangling fear that clotted in her chest was that Tommy Keeday had been back only two days and already his troubles had resumed. Why Tommy, of all of them? The first time his bizarre symptoms had cropped up, they had passed quickly, and she and Dr. Tsosie had decided to let it go as some flu symptom, maybe, or a touch of food poisoning. But the second time, the attack had lingered and intensified, and Dr. Tsosie had referred Tommy to the Indian Hospital. The problem was that the symptoms had passed before they'd even completed the hour-long drive to Gallup, and after four days of testing that had included CT scans, electroencephalograms, comprehen- sive blood work, and a battery of psychological tests, the doctors had given Tommy a clean bill of health. He'd shown no cranial abnormalities, no detectable seizure activity, no sign of any illegal drugs in his system. In fact, he'd shown no symptoms of physical illness at all.
"Probably just dehydration," one smug intern had told her. "Sometimes its effects can mimic seizure activity. It's only temporary. Make sure he drinks lots of Gatorade."
Remembering his condescension infuriated Julieta - as if a lifelong resident of the area and principal of a boarding school wouldn't know the effects of the hot, dry climate of western New Mexico on teenagers! - and she mastered her anger with the hard pragmatism her position required of her. She had to think clearly, couldn't let her emotions get in the way.
That Tommy's troubles had resumed meant that he was a child seriously at risk. But how? The hospital couldn't find anything wrong with him. And what was she to make of Alvin's claim that the . . disturbance . . . had affected the other boys?
Two lights on her phone had begun blinking demandingly, and abruptly she realized she couldn't be bothered with whatever it was, she needed to get away from distractions and think this through. She left her desk, stopped briefly to tell the secretary that she was going for a walk, and hurried out of the administration building.
Outside, it was a perfect mid-September day. The strong north winds that had battered the school last night had died out. The sun was halfway up the eastern sky, its heat already a smart slap on her face even though a layer of cool air still hovered above the ground. Arms crossed, chin on her chest, she scuffed across the rear access road to the partial shade of a trellis she'd had set up as a place for staff to take lunch. A sunning lizard darted away as she sat on the picnic table.
It was a good vantage from which to look at the school. With everyone in class now, the complex was quiet: a little cluster of one-story buildings, a gravel-surfaced parking lot, a row of five stubby yellow school buses, a white water tower. The admin, classroom, and dorm buildings were new, built of concrete and surfaced to resemble adobe in gray and pink tones. A large hogan, eight-sided and built of logs, occupied a central spot between dorms and classroom buildings. Farther back amid some cottonwood trees stood the little adobe bell tower and her own sandstone-block house, which now served as the infirmary until they could raise the money to build another unit.
Like everything human here, the school stood alone and diminished by the vastness of its surroundings. To the north and south stretched sagebrush desert, rolling swells of bare soil and rocks in gray-green and red-brown mosaic only rarely varied by the dark green of a pinon tree; to the west, the land rose into humps and hills near Black Creek. Beyond the school buildings to the east, the view was cut short by a mesa that bounded the campus. Its cliffs and slopes made a meandering wall that eventually curved out of sight. Far to the north, the horizon was capped with the rugged line of the southernmost end of the Chuska Mountains. Above, the vault of clean blue sky, streaked today with thin, high clouds.
Not another human thing in sight. Beautiful.
And that's it, she thought desperately. My life. The one good thing I've ever done. The only thing I've ever done right.
Julieta looked at the place and loved it painfully, and it seemed the sun stung her eyes and brought tears. Starting this school had not only been a way to give something to the people of the region, it had been a personal crusade — redemption for a life of stupid mistakes, wasted years, squandered self. It was a line she'd drawn in the sand, the demarcation between past and future. Whatever neurotic hopes or submerged longings might have shaped her motivations, it had turned into a good thing.
Just starting its sixth year of operation, Oak Springs was the first privately run boarding school for gifted and talented Navajo kids, and it was now weekday home to sixty-seven high school boys and girls drawn from western New Mexico and eastern Arizona, most of them from the Rez. Every Friday the buses returned all but ten to their homes in remote trailers and hogans and shacks scattered over an area of fifteen thousand square miles, and every Monday brought them back for another five days of instruction and, she hoped, inspiration. She'd spent all of the money she'd gotten in her divorce settlement, had campaigned hard for the rest from charitable foundations and state agencies, and she'd done it, she'd built it and certified it and staffed it and got it up and going. Every step of the way had been hard, and every step had been wonderful and worth it.
Except that now it was about to fall down around her.
Alvin Yazzie's leaving would have ramifications far beyond the need to shuffle staff and advertise for a replacement. If Alvin felt he had to get out, it wouldn't be long before other Navajo staff and faculty - virtually every employee at the school - started abandoning ship. And if Tommy Keeday's problem couldn't be solved, it was a much larger issue than the fate of one very bright, troubled boy. If word of his problem got out into the community, people would stop sending their kids. A vital opportunity would be lost to those who needed it most.
And Julieta McCarty would be left without a reason for living.
Again the jolt of intolerable fear hit her: the prospect of any empty life. She got up quickly and almost ran to the boys' dorm, hoping to catch Alvin before he left.
She found him in his room, distractedly pulling things off his desk and bookshelves and stuffing them into cardboard boxes. He was a barrel-chested man, slightly shorter than she was, with dark hair cut military fashion. He had a likable face, with the narrow nose and habitually down-turned lips common on older Navajo men, the mouth that smiled so surprisingly and rewardingly.
She stopped at the doorway. He glanced at her, then opened one of the desk drawers and spent several minutes sorting through it in silence.
At last Alvin shook his head, the crescent of his lips tightening. "My grandfather, I mentioned it to him last time, he says not to talk about it. He says if you talk about it, it will come after you. You shouldn't give it a name. He can tell twenty stories about what happens to you. Says he knew a guy up in Lukachukai, couple of months ago, saw something strange way out on Carson Mesa and talked about it to everybody. Next day he got killed in a freak accident. Drove his pickup into the side of an empty stock trailer. Wasn't drunk. The way they found him, he was kind of. . . u p under the hood of his truck. It wasn't right. Nobody could figure out what happened."
"People get killed in accidents every day. It isn't supernatural."
"The other boys, Julieta! Like, I don't know . . . zombies." Just remembering it put a tremor in his shoulders, and again he shook his head, unwilling to describe the event in any more detail. "You have to see it. Then you'll understand." He gestured with his thumb down toward the students' rooms, looking at her with sympathy in his eyes, then went back to packing his things.
"Did your grandfather say what he thought it was?"
Alvin took several b
ooks from their shelf and then paused. She knew he was wrestling with his reluctance to tell her anything at all, the universal fear that bad things could be contagious and that holding evil in your thoughts brought it upon you.
"You know how the old people talk," he whispered. "It's a chindi.Maybe this place was built on bones, maybe Navajo, maybe Anasazi, and the ancestors don't like the school being here, disrespecting their graves. Or maybe we're doing something else wrong, maybe somebody died in the dorm building, we shouldn't be using it, and the ghost is coming back. More likely there's some witches live near here, want to hurt us or hurt the kids. He said it would come from the north, evil comes from the north. We had a north wind last night." These explanations seemed to bother him, and he threw down the books in frustration. "Look, Julieta —forget I'm Dine. Last night, I wasn't looking at it from some ethnic perspective, okay? Maybe I smoked too much dope a UA, or maybe some UFO landed near here, there's aliens doing experiments or something to people's minds. I don't care what. I never saw anything like it. I don't want to deal with it. I'm sorry."
Again he looked at her with regret and sympathy, and she realized with a pang how much she'd depended on Alvin for the last five years.
Still she stood in the doorway, unwilling to move yet unable ask him one last favor.
He couldn't meet her eyes, but his voice was gruffly compassionate when he spoke again: "I know, Julieta. I won't tell anyone what I saw. This place'd be empty by sunset."
When Julieta put her head into Lynn Pierce's office, the nurse looked up with a start, and the pencil she'd been writing with snapped in her fingers. Their eyes met in guarded commiseration.
"Any word from Joseph?" Julieta asked.
"He'll get here around eleven."
"How's Tommy?" The blinds over the window to the ward room were half-slatted; all she could see was a mound of twisted bedclothes.
Lynn's eyes darted to the window, and she bit her lips. She gestured at the patient voice monitor on her desk. Through the soft hiss pouring from the speaker, Julieta could make out gentle snoring.
"Sleeping now. But it was worse this time. It lasted longer."
"His spine again? The right arm?"
A tiny nod.
"Why didn't you call me, Lynn? I would have - "
"Joseph told me I should let you rest. Unless it was a crisis. Yazzie and I were able to keep him from hurting himself. By the time I could get free to call you, he'd stabilized."
"Is there any point in my going in with him?" All Julieta could think of was to hold him.
"No. Wait until Joseph gets here."
The thought of Joseph's earnest face and skilled, strong hands soothed Julieta a little. It helped that he knew how much this meant to her. That there was someone who knew it all. Surely he'd have some solution, he'd think of the next step. There had to be one. "Have you talked to his teachers?"
"I didn't go into details, just told them he wouldn't be in class. That he wasn't feeling well."
"Who else has seen him? Is anybody talking about it yet?"
Lynn would know this was the school administrator turning to damage control, the need to contain superstitious gossip. The nurse was one of the few non-Navajo staff at the school, a solidly built woman in her mid-fifties with silver hair pulled back into a thick braid that hung down to her waist. She had dazzling blue eyes made more startling by an iridescent bronze fleck in her left pupil that was distracting when she looked at you and sometimes made her expression hard to read. She had come to the Rez as a Vista volunteer in the 1970s and had married a Navajo man from the Nakaibito area. Childless, her husband now dead, she seemed to have taken the stream of student patients here as her family. Julieta admired her devotion to them, something they shared, but though they'd known each other for three years, Lynn had preserved a distance that precluded real closeness. Still, Julieta took comfort in the fact that the nurse shared her distress now.
"Nobody's called me for details," Lynn said, "so if Alvin doesn't talk, it'll probably be all right for a few days. Alvin says the other boys told him they don't remember anything, but I wouldn't count on that - I don't know what kind of gossip they might be spreading. The teachers will inquire if he doesn't show up in class soon, and his grandparents will need to be informed . . . " Lynn finished with a gesture: And soon everyone will know.
Julieta stepped fully into the office, shut the door, and leaned against it."Lynn," she whispered. "What is this? Be honest with me. Have you ever encountered anything like this?"
Lynn toyed with the snapped pencil, her fingers drawn again and again to the jagged break. "The brain is a wilderness, the strangest things can happen. All I can guess is that this is a profound neurological aberration. But I can't square that with what Alvin says - the way it affected the other boys."
They thought about it for a moment, listening to the deceptively serene noise of breathing coming through the monitor.
"What're we going to do?" Julieta whispered at last. "Where do we go from here?"
Lynn shook her head, and she looked at Julieta with her lopsided, startling gaze, her eyes now moist, nested in wrinkles of worry, and very guarded. "I have no idea."
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Daniel Hecht was a professional guitarist for twenty years. In 1989, he retired from musical performance to take up writing, and he received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1992. He is the author of two previous novels, Skull Session, a USA Today bestseller, and The Babel Effect.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book is set in Bembo. This type was first used in 1495 by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius for Cardinal Bembo's De Aetna, and was cut for Manutius by Francesco Griffo. It was one of the types used by Claude Garamond (1480-1561) as a model for his Romain de L'Universite, and so it was the forerunner of what became standard European type for the following two centuries. Its modern form follows the original types and was designed for Monotype in 1929.
Daniel Hecht, City of Masks
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