Land of Echoes cb-2

by Daniel Hecht

  Land of Echoes

  ( Cree Black - 2 )

  Daniel Hecht

  Daniel Hecht

  Land of Echoes

  1

  Sam Yazzie, the boys' dorm night supervisor, was in his room reading when he heard an odd sound from the far end of the building. He put down his book and tipped his head to listen.

  For a few seconds, there was nothing but the noise of wind in the eaves. Then he heard it again: a forced vocalization of distress. He tried to tell himself it sounded like one of the kids having a stomach problem, heaving up cafeteria food in the bathroom, but he knew better. It was the same sort of noise Tommy Keeday had made that awful night just a week ago.

  He laid the book aside, went into the hall, and stopped again to listen. The building was long and narrow, divided by a corridor that stretched its whole length. On the right was the room that served as his office and residence, along with the utility room, two bathrooms, and two six-boy dorms; on the left, the day supervisor's office and four dorm rooms. Sam's impression was that the sounds had come from the far end.

  As usual, the corridor lights were off, but night-lights glowed at regular intervals, and the open bathroom doors spilled enough light to illuminate the hall. He walked down to the first door and went into the tiled, fluorescent-lit room. Nobody: no feet visible under the four stall doors, nobody in the showers, nobody tossing it up at the sinks. The ceiling fluorescents blinked irritatingly, and he made a mental note to ask the maintenance staff to replace the tubes.

  When he paused in the hall to listen again, everything was quiet, and his tension eased a little. Maybe it was something outside, not a kid after all. Maybe the wind, which was high tonight, bearing in from the north and bringing a chill. More likely a coyote or fox. The two dorms stood apart from the classroom and administration buildings, and the whole school was just a dot in an endless expanse of rolling sagebrush desert. It was big country, sparsely populated, with plenty of wildlife. A couple of times a year, coyotes raided the cafeteria trash bins and made a ruckus. Maybe-

  The sound came again, a muffled scream and some garbled words, definitely human. It choked off and left only the midnight silence. A chill crept over Sam's skin as he began to stride down the hall.

  It had to be Tommy again. The first time, he'd recovered within half an hour or so, and Julieta and Dr. Tsosie had written it off: bad dream, exhaustion, stress. After the second episode, they'd sent him to the Indian Hospital in Gallup, a four-day diagnostic workup that ended with the doctors pronouncing him perfectly healthy.

  Now he'd been back for only two days. If this was Tommy getting sick again, it didn't look good for the poor kid. And it would break Julieta's heart to know her prize new student had some chronic or recurring condition.

  Whatever it was. There was something strange about the way Julieta and Joe Tsosie were handling this.

  Approaching the north end of the building, Sam stopped at the door to the room Tommy shared with five of his fellow sophomores. Even in the dim light, he could see six beds and six motionless lumps wrapped in blankets, including Tommy, who looked dead asleep with mouth wide open, one arm up above his head on the pillow. None of them moved, and the only sounds they made were the faint wheezes and sighs of their breathing.

  Then the stifled cry came again, and the lump that was Tommy moved. It seemed to swell and swarm with bumps that must be knees or elbows but that didn't look right. Sam didn't move. Part of his mind noticed that the lights were fluttering in the second bathroom, too. Tommy's blankets humped and shook, and it occurred to Sam that maybe there were two people in the bed, maybe there was some British boys' school-style hanky-panky going on. But then the mound deflated and he could see it was only Tommy, tangled alone in his blanket, lying on his back. One side of the boy's face was drawn up as if a string was pulling a corner of his mouth toward his ear, and as Sam stood, still unable to move, Tommy's body twisted and convulsed. The whole bed shook with the force of it.

  Sam's paralysis broke and he stepped quickly toward the bed. But before he could reach it, Tommy's body went slack.

  He stopped again, confused. Tommy now lay fast asleep or unconscious, motionless but for the shallow pumping of his chest. For the first time, Sam noticed that the other boys weren't asleep-how could they be, with the awful noises Tommy made? — but were lying immobile in some kind of semi-conscious paralysis. David Blanco, in the bed next to Tommy's, lay with his eyes slightly open, just glistening pale slits. In the deeper shadow at the far end of the room, Jim Wauneka was sitting up, rigid, motionless. Sam almost called to him but then realized his eyes weren't really open, either-just unseeing slits, like someone anesthetized or dead.

  Tommy's chest and stomach and legs began rising and falling, rippling in a series of convulsions. At first, the movements were gentle and rhythmic as ripples undulating in a pond, but they quickly grew faster and more vehement until it looked as if the scrawny body would wrench itself apart. The sheer violence of the movement seemed to knock Sam another step backward. He felt torn between wanting to run and duty to his charges, between terror and a hideous fascination.

  This wasn't right, he knew. This wasn't natural. Nothing he'd encountered in the army or as an orderly in the crisis ward in Phoenix had prepared him for this. Abruptly he became aware of the great dark sagebrush plains all around the building, the infinite night sky above hundreds of thousands of square miles of bare red-brown earth, stark rocks, lonely mesas, and shadowed canyons. He remembered the feeling from his childhood, from the times he'd be herding his family's sheep in the evening as the stars pricked through one by one and the sun bleached only the very western edge of night and he could feel in the lonely empty hollow of his gut just how big and incomprehensible the world was. He'd almost forgotten. Now he realized with a sense of calamity that the world he'd disciplined himself to accept, that he'd spent his adult life buying into and working to master, wasn't real after all: The world of white America and science and school, jobs and sports and TVs, didn't have an explanation for this. This was something come out of the world's hidden places, from the old world of the Bible or his grandfather's stories or the dark legends of witches and ghosts that had been whispered from person to person long before human beings knew how to write them down.

  Tommy made a quiet, awful sound, as if a full-bellied scream had been throttled by a throat too constricted to allow it to pass. Sam bolted forward, but just as he caught the arching shoulders, the awful tension went out of the boy. One moment Tommy's right arm had started to push forward and then Sam felt something like a shock through his hands and arms, a vortex of sensation that buzzed quickly through his stomach, and the boy's arm snapped back and lay limp on his chest. All Sam held in his arms was a slack, sleeping fifteen-year-old.

  Sam felt only an instant of relief as he lowered Tommy back to the pillow. His movements felt as if they were resisted by a powerful force, some warped gravity or a form of magnetism that influenced flesh and bone. The light bleeding in from the corridor was really going crazy now. It strobed as if a string of flashbulbs was going off in the bathroom as Tommy began to shudder and twitch and another wave of convulsions took him.

  Julieta McCarty stared across her desk and tried to assimilate what Sam had just told her. He insisted that there was no other way to look at it. It wasn't a prank or even an ordinary seizure. Some kind of disturbance or force radiated from the Keeday boy: The other boys had lain or sat unmoving throughout his battle with Tommy, despite the awful noises he'd made and the thrashing and wrestling. Sam had felt it himself. Now Tommy was in the infirmary, Sam said, doing that thing again like last time, and the nurse had called Dr. Tsosie.

  As an afterthought, Sam informed her that he was quitti
ng, effective immediately.

  He didn't have to explain why. Sam was forty years old, a reliable staffer who had served in the army, where he'd been trained as a paramedic, and he'd earned a bachelor's degree in social work from the University of Arizona; though he'd been born on the reservation he'd lived a good part of his life elsewhere. But like most Navajos of his generation, he hung uncertainly between the old beliefs and the view of the world he'd absorbed from white America. In Julieta's experience, even the most culturally assimilated Navajo believed that some truth lay beneath the traditional fears of Skinwalkers, Navajo Wolves, spirits of the dead, and the consequences of violating old taboos.

  "Sam. You know I'll never be able to replace you." Julieta tried to keep the pleading out of her voice.

  "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 both she and the students admired. 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 for an exhaustive diagnostic workup at 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, comprehensive 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 symptoms had returned 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 Sam'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. Set 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 she could raise the money to build another unit.

  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 a red-brown, gray-green mosaic only rarely varied by the dark green of a pinon tree; to the west, the land rose and broke into the hills bordering Black Creek. Beyond the school buildings to the east, the view was cut short by a little mesa, its cliffs making a meandering wall that eventually curved out of sight. Far to the north, the horizon was capped by the rugged line of the Chuska Mountains' southernmost slopes. Above, the vault of clean blue sky, streaked today with thin, high clouds.

  Not another human thing in sight. Beautiful.

  And that's it, Julieta thought desperately. My life. The one good thing I've ever done. The only thing I've ever done right.

  She looked at the place and loved it painfully, and it seemed the sun stung her eyes and brought tears. Starting this school had been a way not only 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.

  Sam Yazzie's leaving would have ramifications far beyond the need to shuffle staff and advertise for a replacement. If Sam 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 an empty life. She got up quickly and almost ran to the boys' dorm, hoping to catch Sam before he left.

  She found him in his room, pulling things off his desk and stuffing them into cardboard boxes. With his barrel-chested build, brush-cut dark hair, and the downturned lips common among older Navajo men, he came across as stern and martial. The look was misleading; Sam was a sweet person, and it had always pleased Julieta to see that dour mouth smile 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 Sam 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… up 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 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?"

  Sam took several books 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? And 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 at 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 don't want to deal with it."

  Again he looked at her with regret and sympathy, and she realized with a pang how much she'd depended on Sam for the last five years.