Land of Echoes

by Daniel Hecht

  Later, closer to the void, she wondered where Joyce was. Where Tommy Keeday was. Where Cree Black was.

  6

  JULIETA DROVE like a bat out of hell. But everyone drove fast out here, Cree noticed. The distances were long, the horizons endlessly unfolding in low swells of bare, rocky earth, largely unchanging. If you didn't put the pedal down, you might think you weren't moving at all.

  They'd left the university at one o'clock, after Cree's obligatory participation in a morning panel session and a speakers' luncheon with the UNM psych faculty. The way Julieta drove the Oak Springs School pickup, they covered the distance from Albuquerque to Gallup in under two hours. In Gallup, they stopped at a restaurant supply wholesaler to load the bed of the truck with paper towels and cafeteria napkins, six big bales wrapped in plastic that now nattered and flapped in the wind. They cut north on Route 666 and turned west on Route 264 toward Window Rock for the last hour of the drive.

  After spending a week on the Hopi reservation, four years ago, Cree knew that the Big Rez of the Navajo was a separate world in more ways than one. The formal treaty borders enclosed an area as big as New England, but even that was little more than an island on the Colorado Plateau, isolated from more populated regions by a million square miles of deserts and mountains that stretched from central Mexico up the backbone of the continent. It was big enough to resist not only physical but also social change, and the Native American reservation lands were the home of cultures in many ways thousands of years as well as thousands of miles removed from the rest of the country.

  Dr. Tsosie had driven ahead in his own truck earlier, and Cree had looked forward to her three hours alone with Julieta as a chance to talk.

  Cree gave her a general idea of how PRA conducted an investigation: Ed and his high tech, Joyce and her historical and forensic detective work, Cree's own brand of psychological analysis and empathic communion. She did her best to make it sound routine, avoiding the scary stuff.

  "Each line of inquiry supports the others. Often, when I'm . . . making contact, my impressions are ambiguous. Most locations are layered with lingering human experiences from different periods, so it can be hard for me to pin down what's relevant and what isn't. And it can take me a while to progress from feeling vague moods and auras and sensations to actually seeing a ghost or living its thoughts and feelings. My goal is to know what motivates the entity, figure out why it's there, what remains unresolved for it. But sometimes my intuitive experience of its world is not enough. That's where Ed and Joyce's work, and my own interviewing, comes into play. Having some hard information helps me identify the ghost. Once I know who it is, how it died, and so on, it's easier for me to determine why it's here—what motivates it and which living person figures in its compulsions. There's almost invariably a connection of some kind between the ghost and the witnesses or other people in the vicinity of a haunting. Once we know what that link is, we have a better chance of setting the ghost free."

  To her surprise, Julieta didn't voice skepticism about these far-fetched points. But none of it seemed to soothe her, either. A strange reserve and tension remained between them, and the closer they got to Oak Springs School, the more she seemed to close off.

  Still, when Cree prompted her with questions, Julieta was generally forthcoming.

  She'd been born and raised in Santa Fe, an only child. Her mother was of Mexican descent, mostly, while her father's ancestors were black Irish; both families had been in the area for a long time. Her father had owned a heavy-equipment supply company that involved big money but always seemed to be overextended and in trouble. They were proud and respected but still very much striving, proving themselves, and therefore very—overly, Julieta admitted—conscious of symbols of wealth and status.

  "I only mention that as an explanation for the stupid things I did when I was younger," Julieta said.

  "More stupid than the things everybody does when they're young?"

  "Probably."

  Julieta explained: When she was fifteen, she began trying out for modeling jobs. She had always been told she was gorgeous, and ever since she was thirteen, seeing herself mirrored in the eyes of men, she could almost believe it. From modeling, it was a short step to beauty contests. Her parents were as suckered as she was by the incentives the pageants offered: prizes, scholarships, a chance to meet the rich and famous, a line in your resume that would help nail lucrative modeling work. At first it was easy. She won some of the local pageants, did modeling for more prestigious agencies, and then felt confident enough to compete for the title of Miss New Mexico in 1982. She spent all the money she'd saved on the tailored evening gown and bathing suit and the deportment coaching everybody said she'd need. Preparing for the contest took almost a year, during which every hour outside of school was occupied with exercising, fitting clothes, going to the orthodontist, practicing her smile and posture, pursuing the community service that would perk up her citizenship score. When at last the competition began, it was a whirlwind that completely carried her away. She entered the last stages utterly self-brainwashed into believing that this was her destiny, the absolute best and only course for her life. That winning really, really mattered. That win it she certainly would.

  She made it only to third runner-up.

  She tried to smile for the cameras while her heart crash-landed and the tears exploded behind her eyes. The spotlight lingered on her briefly, impatiently, and for the last time, before it moved on to the more beautiful, talented young women.

  "Barely twenty years old," Julieta said. "I felt like the ugly duckling. The instant my name was announced, I had this epiphany that I'd completely wasted five years of my life, posing with a fake smile and sticking my chest out. By that time I had no friends. I'd never had time for friends, and anyway the kids at high school and UNM all thought I was hopelessly stuck-up. And I realized suddenly just how completely I'd learned to quantify every aspect of myself I didn't even know what I really liked to do or was good at! My only reason for doing anything had always been, 'Gee, I'd better take up ballet or . . . or chess so I'm more competitive in the talent judging.'"

  Maybe that painful epiphany would have driven her to redirect her life, but the pageant of 1982 had yet one more damaging and lasting effect. At some point, she'd been introduced to Garrett McCarty, one of several corporate bigwigs who'd helped sponsor the proceedings. He was CEO and sole owner of McCarty Energy, a big thing in western New Mexico, coal and uranium mining. And Garrett, forty-nine-year-old millionaire, famously eligible twice-divorced bachelor, took an interest in one of the good-looking pieces of prime stock at the pageant: a dark-haired, blue-eyed Hispanic-Irish girl from suburban Santa Fe.

  "Long and short of it, he bowled me over. I was bruised and demoralized after the contest, but when he contacted me I was handed an instant remedy. He courted me for six months and it was heady—power, money, important people, nice clothes, expensive cars, good food. I thought, 'Hell, maybe I won the damned thing after all!' When he proposed to me, my father and mother were ecstatic. Garrett had gotten chummy with Dad, talked about buying tons of equipment from his firm. Marrying him would mean a guaranteed living for me, grandkids for them, and best of all a way to meet the real people, to hobnob with the movers and shakers. Which would prove we were taking our rightful place in the world. And all I had to do was look nice, keep the smile in place!" Julieta made a face as if she wanted to spit. "I hate talking about it. It's a tawdry, pathetic soap opera."

  "But did you love him? Were you attracted to him? Apart from his money, I mean."

  "I don't know. I couldn't tell him apart from his money—hell, I couldn't tell him apart from his Corvette! He was very handsome, didn't look his age at all. I think I told myself I was in love with him. But it's a long time ago now. The girl who married Garrett McCarty was a different person. I could just as easily recite the facts of the life of Helen Keller or . . .Mary, Queen of Scots, and it would feel neither more nor less 'me'!" Julieta looked over at
Cree as if checking her response. "I know I should be able to toss off a wry grin and chuckle at it, but I can't."

  "Would it help if I told you about my own youthful follies? I've got plenty—we could probably manage a yuck or two about 'em. My mother says if you haven't got regrets you haven't lived right."

  Julieta brought her attention back to driving. "I've got regrets," she said. Ones you can laugh about later, Cree had meant to add. She bit her tongue.

  They drove without talking for a while, a vertical crease deepening between Julieta's eyebrows. Ten minutes out of Gallup, she announced that she had another stop to make.

  "I don't mean to take up your time with these errands," she apologized. "With drive times the way they are out here, the rule of thumb is to get several things done on any long trip. This one'll only take a minute."

  She turned onto a side road that ran through a spread-out scattering of tiny houses and mobile homes. No trees relieved the bare-dirt desert; the land stretched in every direction without any notable features. The laundry on the clotheslines, the satellite dishes on the parched yards, the pairs and trios of playing kids and their tagalong dogs: on one level, not so different from any neighborhood. But set in this arid moonscape, blasted by the westering sun, the little human outpost struck Cree as marvelously foreign.

  Julieta drove slowly along the hard-packed dirt street. "One of my maintenance staff had to have a hip replacement. Earl Craig. It's his second. He's been out for three weeks and he's had some complications. He'll need to miss another month or more, so I had to hire someone to cover. I know he's secretly worried about whether he'll be able to keep his job—employment is hard to come by out here. So whenever I pass by, I try to stop in to kind of reassure him."

  She pulled the truck into a short driveway to a tiny shoe box house. A thickset, midfifties Navajo man sat in a wheelchair not far from the front door, face tipped to the late-afternoon sun. When he heard the truck, he rotated his chair and a small dog jumped off his lap and began yapping. Julieta shut off the engine, rummaged behind the seat, and came out with a rumpled grocery bag full of something heavy.

  "You should probably just wait here," Julieta told Cree. "I'll only be a minute."

  Earl's face relaxed into a smile as Julieta got out. The little dog sped toward Julieta and without pausing hurtled itself through the air at her. She clearly wasn't ready for the greeting, but she managed to stoop and catch the dog with one hand. She winced into a vigorous face licking, then slid the animal down onto one hip and awkwardly carried it back to its master.

  Cree couldn't hear what they were saying, but Earl laughed and appeared to be apologizing for his pet. When Julieta set the bag at his feet, he bent to pull out several paperback books and exclaimed gratefully. Then they talked seriously for a moment, Earl shifting in his chair to point to parts of his hip and thigh, Julieta still holding the wriggling dog and nodding.

  It was only two or three minutes until she handed back the dog, touched Earl's shoulder in farewell, and returned to the truck. Earl waved good-bye with his free hand and then bent to dig more books out of the bag.

  When Julieta climbed back into the truck, she explained quietly to Cree, "Mysteries, thrillers, that's all he'll read. I get them by the pound from a used paperback place in Albuquerque. Last time I slipped in Memoirs of a Geisha, but that didn't go over too well." Remembering that mischief made her grin. "Arthritis. He had a healing Way sung, too. The Hand Trembler—that's the medicine man who diagnoses illness—blamed it on Earl's walking on the grave of an ancestor. Earl sincerely and completely believes that, but it didn't stop him from getting high-tech molybdenum joints put in. And if you asked him whether it was the Way or the surgery that fixed him, he'd credit both. That's pretty typical."

  Looking back now, Cree saw Earl differently: to outward appearances, an ordinary middle-aged man in jeans and T-shirt; in fact, a person who lived in the knowledge he was poised on the brink of infinite mystery.

  Another reminder that in coming here she was entering a different world, where nothing was quite what it seemed.

  Julieta's expression of contentment remained as she backed the truck out of the driveway. Such a lovely woman, Cree thought. Such a lovely smile, all the more beautiful for its rarity. She covertly watched Julieta during the quarter-mile drive back to the highway. By the time they'd turned onto the asphalt again, the lines of worry had returned.

  They drove on in silence. Still the land had not changed: As far as the eye could see were low hills of bone-dry brown earth, low-growing brush, scattered scrubby piñon trees. The only indication of human presence was an occasional trailer or prefab house at the end of a dirt driveway, a defunct pickup truck, maybe a corral occupied by a gaunt, drowsing horse.

  Closer to Window Rock, they passed an area where the ridges visible from the road struck Cree as too uniform to be natural mesas; it wasn't until she saw the sign for the P & M Coal Company that she realized they must be recovered strip-mine tailing mounds. Sure enough, beyond the farther hills she saw a gargantuan derrick rotating slowly against the sky. Near the highway, several preposterously outsized yellow dump trucks and front loaders moved around piles of dirt, putting up clouds of dust.

  Julieta's frown deepened as they passed the operation. She squinted into the lowering sun, gripped the wheel, and drove as if eager to get past.

  "So you married Garrett McCarty—" Cree prompted.

  "The long and short of it is, we were married for five years," Julieta said curtly. "It was not so good. The details are irrelevant. Divorced in eighty-seven. I did all right in the settlement—ended up with our residence here, the land around it, and some money. Somewhere in there I decided I needed to do something with my life. Went to UNM and got a master's in education administration. Spent every cent of the divorce money to build Oak Springs School."

  "How do you get along with your ex now?"

  "Garrett? He died three years ago. He was sixty-six. Now his son from his first marriage owns McCarty Energy. Donny McCarty— my former stepson, can you believe it?—is four years older than I am. We have a mutual-loathing arrangement. He resented me from the start, and his feelings didn't sweeten when I walked away with some of his father's holdings. The bad part is that the court partitioned off my land from a much larger chunk Garrett owned, so the company is our neighbor. Donny likes to make our lives miserable with right-of-way problems or whatever he can dream up."

  The question seemed to drive Julieta back inside herself, and they were quiet again as they approached Window Rock. Julieta's anxiety was rising as they got closer to the school and what awaited them there. It occurred to Cree that for all she'd learned about Julieta's past, she'd hardly gotten to know the woman at all. She realized she was rather dazzled by her beauty, her vividness, and that for all the immediate empathy she'd felt, her dazzlement distanced her. Except for that glimpse of a grin at Earl Craig's house, she knew next to nothing about Julieta's emotional life.

  "I can't help wondering . . . " Cree began. "You had what sounds like a crappy marriage. Why did you keep McCarty's name?"

  Julieta made a face of distaste. "Sheer pragmatism. The name carries clout around here. To make the school happen, I needed all the weight I could sling. Having the name, even as an ex-wife, helps me get access and ask for favors in the right places. Make contacts in the legislature, raise money from other rich mining families."

  "So you've never remarried? Never had children?"

  "I've had relationships. None of them ever quite made it to the marrying stage," Julieta said distantly. Abruptly she seemed to catch herself, and she turned to Cree with an angry face. "But I don't see what my past has to do with Tommy Keeday and his terrible problem. Why aren't we talking about that? Joseph and I came to Dr. Ambrose as a last resort when nobody else was giving us satisfactory answers. We wouldn't buy into this at all if we hadn't seen what we'd seen and spent the last few weeks trying every other imaginable solution. I could really use some reassurance tha
t there's substance to his conclusions or your methods. This isn't about me. It's about Tommy. And, frankly, if you're going to work with him, it's about you."

  Cree couldn't help feeling personally rebuffed. But she made a mental note of Julieta's sudden defensiveness and decided to press on with a less intrusive line of inquiry.

  "I wish I could offer more reassurance, but I can't. I've never dealt with a situation like this. But what you've told me so far is very helpful. It's especially useful to me to know about the school and the history of the immediate area, because often a . . . an unknown entity is anchored in a place and connected to past events there. But as I said, every environment is deeply layered with human experience—it can be hard for me to pin down whether a given entity is from a year ago or a thousand years ago or anywhere in between. So the more I know, the better. Can you tell me anything about the school or the land it's on?"

  Julieta nodded and continued in a subdued tone that suggested she regretted her outburst.

  The school buildings were new, she said, built five years ago. All but her own house—that was something of a historic building, a former trading post built around 1890 on what was then a trail from Oak Springs to Black Hat. The McCartys bought the land in 1922 and began using the building as their site office. Over the years, mining operations drifted several miles to the north, following the coal, and in 1950 Garrett McCarty's father converted it to a residence. Garrett renovated and modernized it once again before Julieta married him, and that's where she had lived, mostly, for the five years of their marriage. The old road ended at the house now; the mine's access and rail spur now came down from Route 264, about twenty miles to the north. Both Julieta's twelve hundred acres and the mine's much larger holding, over forty square miles, were situated in New Mexico, just over the Arizona border from the Big Rez.