by Daniel Hecht
"I think if people look for supernatural explanations of their problems, they ignore the social and political stuff that really matters," Tommy went on. "Especially a disadvantaged socioeconomic group like the Dine."
A couple of points to Cree Black, Lynn decided. She'd finally provoked him into saying more than three words in a row, into showing that he had a brain. Even if his answer was probably quoted verbatim from Mr. Clah, his opinionated social studies teacher.
"That's a very mature perspective!" Cree sounded genuinely impressed. "From that, I can guess that art and horses aren't your only interests. Also that you're far too smart for the headshrinkers at the hospital. No wonder they didn't do anything for you!"
Tommy closed up again and shrugged off the praise.
But the psychologist was not going to be deflected. "Tell you what. I'll make a deal with you. I'll trade you. You let go of your fear and distrust of me because I'm a white stranger, and I'll let go of my condescension of you because you're only fifteen and have never been off the rez."
Tommy hunched his shoulders, a little shocked, resenting her.
"Look, Tommy, I could beat around the bush forever, and you'd know I was just trying to figure out what makes you tick. It's better if we just get there straightaway and treat each other as equals. We've got to get you feeling better. That's all I'm here for."
Her tone had been hard and the whole thing was confrontational. But it was honest, Lynn thought, impressed again. The woman was frank that she was here to work with him, not pretending this was just some social call out on the desert.
Tommy still didn't answer, but Cree didn't let up. She bored at him with her eyes.
"So is it a deal? The trade?"
"I guess," Tommy mumbled at last. Beneath the table, his feet continued writhing.
"I'm out," Joseph announced suddenly. He looked relieved to break the tension as he slapped down three queens, flipped an ace onto the discard pile, and mimed raking in a pot of money. "Read 'em and weep, ladies and gents. Another hand, or should we call it quits?"
The way he said it was so… sorrowful, somehow, and with the glow of firelight on his face he looked so resigned and handsome that Lynn almost reached out a hand to console him.
"Joseph is the rummy king," Julieta told Cree. "He murders us every time." She threw back her shoulders, stretching her elbows wide and arching her perfect breasts forward as she pulled her hair away from her face with both hands.
Lynn noticed the way Joseph's eyes lingered briefly on her body, a steady soft heat like coals. The sight made her stomach hurt.
— And too self preoccupied to show him the respect he deserves, to honor their past together by reciprocating his feelings, Lynn finished, hating her. The way any woman with anything like a human heart in her body would.
She begged off the next hand, claiming she had work to do. The others played another round in the dayroom while she went back to the office and began filling out a pharmaceutical requisition form. She heard their voices faintly through the half-closed door. Were they more talkative now that she was gone, more cheerful? The nicotine craving had intensified and was screaming in her veins now. Outside, the wind had picked up a little, whispering around the building.
Her face seemed to burn, scalded by her own acid thoughts and searing feelings. After a while she realized she couldn't concentrate on her paperwork. She fled to the bathroom, where the ventilator fan made a welcome white noise, a camouflage as well as a safe haven from the faint sounds from the dayroom. She locked the door and stood facing the brightly lit, merciless mirror above the sink.
Envious, she said to the face in the mirror. Jealous. All sick inside. Nasty. Hateful, spiteful creature. You're full of everything little and nasty. You're ugly and you have a crazy speck in your eye. You're festering with jealousy and resentment and you're all twisted up and repressed. Hateful, hateful, bad, bad.
She wanted to smack the cheeks of the awful, fleck-eyed face, slap at all the nasties there, so obvious.
At the same time, she felt like going out to the dayroom and telling the psychologist, Don't let her fool you! She claims to work so damn hard for the kids and for the school, and yet every other time you look for her she's out riding her horse at the foot of the mesa, ever so gay and devil-may-care, big hair blowing free on the wind. You'll fall for it just as I did when I first met her, but soon you'll come to look back on that feeling with disgust. She pretends she loves Navajos all to pieces, yet she won't acknowledge Joseph's love and give hers in return, even with everything that happened all those years ago. Because at bottom she's a spoiled rich white princess who thinks she's too good even for such a fine man. She treats him like he's a servant, has him come here for pro bono care with her students after his long workdays, even has him help shovel the horse manure like some stable hand! She acts so upright and forthcoming, and everyone believes her, but trust me, she's got dirty secrets in her past and it makesfor very strange relationships with some of the kids. Especially Tommy. And that's not right.
That thought brought her back a little. She looked at the blotched, scalded-looking face in the mirror and recoiled. She turned on the tap and began to splash cold water against her burning cheeks. She loosened the elastic at the back of her head, straightened her braid, tucked in loose strands of hair. She fumbled in her pockets for her cigarettes, lit up, and stood gratefully taking the fix and blowing smoke up into the exhaust fan. When she was done, she flushed the butt down the toilet.
The face in the mirror looked much better. This wasn't a personal issue, it was an issue of professional responsibility. That was the only way to see it. The well-being of the children was her only real concern, and if she observed misbehavior on the school administration's part, she had a duty to respond. This thing with Tommy was only one example.
The problem was that so far there was nothing overt, nothing provable that she could put before someone with the authority to do anything. And Julieta was so good at charming people into seeing things her way, it probably wouldn't matter anyway.
But. Fortunately, there were a few people who saw Julieta for what she was. There were others who would be very glad to know about the situation with Tommy, who would probably know what to make of it, what to do about it, even if there was nothing that could be done through formal channels.
She waited another couple of minutes to make sure the smoke was fully exhausted, checked the mirror one last time, then turned toward the door.
That's what it's about, she told herself. The children. Professional responsibility.
10
Cree burst gasping out of a chaotic dream into the darkness of the ward room. Something was screaming in her mind.
It took her a moment to remember where she was. She had chosen a bed against the wall farthest from the inner door, near the window that looked out toward the mesa. A pair of night-lights plugged into wall sockets shed enough light to see the other five beds, green-white rectangles in the gloom. The windows were black, the silence so absolute it hissed in her ears.
In the dream, the night-dark rocks of Lost Goats Mesa had twisted and swarmed and metamorphosed into faces, grotesque brows and cheeks and gaping mouths of beings crying from the depths of the earth. There were crowds of them pushing at the cliffs, and there were air creatures, too, sharp electric things in the sky, flying with cruel stabbing motions. The landscape was alive: things pressing against its inner surfaces, straining against each other, contending with each other.
Dream, she told herself. Just a dream. Get a grip. She sat up and took deep, steady breaths to dispel the feeling.
But it didn't go away. Abruptly, she knew with certainty there was something happening nearby, telegraphing itself directly to her central nervous system.
The part of her mind that didn't recoil in fear registered that the night-lights were throbbing gently, erratically. The flicker phenomenon, she and Edgar called it: the tendency for light sources to become unsteady when paranormal phenom
ena manifested.
A noise came from the window. A muffled stamp or thump, then a.. what? A breath, a deep exhalation. The horses? She listened and heard nothing.
She got quietly out of bed. In her stockinged feet, wearing the sweat pants and T-shirt she'd used as pajamas, she crept to the door of the room. She looked into the hallway and entry area and listened. The dim corridor, lit by several softly pulsing night-lights, stretched away to the bend that led to the dayroom, the nurse's bedroom, and the ward room where Tommy slept.
Ringing silence, charged with a sense of invisible motion.
She walked stealthily down the hall, through the entry, and into the hall on the other side, thinking to check on Lynn Pierce. The silver-haired nurse with the astonishing fleck in her eye had played hostess to the four of them after they'd come in from the horses, starting a fire in the dayroom hearth, making hot chocolate in the kitchen. They had played cards until Tommy's bedtime. It was like no other card game Cree had ever played: five people trying to chat and act relaxed when all felt a rising dread of anticipation. With the night pressed around the building, she had been acutely aware of how isolated they were, not just physically but socially. For the five of them there was no other recourse, no aid or comfort from the larger world of humankind. They were on an island.
She had pushed Tommy pretty hard, confronting him as candidly as she dared, and by and large was not unhappy with his response. He'd been defiant, embarrassed, shy, reluctant. But every patient of every age resisted probing, quite justifiably. She got a sense of an intelligent, complex person, decent and very much wanting to please, but confused by typical adolescent identity issues and troubled by ambivalent feelings toward his dead parents.
And though he tried hard to hide it, he was also terrified by the inexplicable things happening to him.
If only she'd gotten as good a sense of the supposed entity. The dissonance she sensed was so subdued that she doubted her own perceptions. Was the entity in him at all times but languishing in some kind of latency between crises? Or was it simply not there now-did it come out of the desert night each time, settling into him for a while and then leaving again? Or was there nothing there but a troubled teenage boy?
When it had gotten late, Joseph had driven off to Fort Defiance for his rotation at the hospital, and Julieta had gone to her room in the faculty housing building. Cree and Lynn had promised they'd wake her "if anything happened." Hoping nothing would.
Cree continued down the hall past the nurse's office, turned right, passed the dayroom, and paused at the door to Lynn Pierce's bedroom. It was pitch-dark inside, but her eyes had adapted enough to see the mounded blankets and the long braid trailing over the side of the bed. Tense as a wound spring, she warily approached the door to the smaller ward room. It struck her that the night-lights in this hall were throbbing faster.
Tommy's bed was empty.
Cree backed out of the doorway, followed the hall as it doglegged, and found the rear exit door. It was slightly ajar, rocking softly. When she opened it, the chill wind hit her, straight from the north, and she quickly realized that sweat pants, T-shirt, and socks weren't good enough for the high desert in late September. But a sense of imminence propelled her, and she didn't want to take the time to go back for shoes and sweater. She stepped out into the night and shut the door softly behind her.
The exterior light was on, glazing the yard between infirmary and barn with a hard bright silver. Beyond, the corral fence stood like a construction of bones against the darkness. At the far end of the enclosure, just at the edge of the circle of light, Julieta's three horses were vague forms against deep black night.
No sign of Tommy. No motion or sound at all but the wind.
The blue-white area light blinded her. Beyond its sphere of chemical illumination, the night wrapped a curtain of black felt around the infirmary, the barn, the corral.
Instinctively, she went toward the horses. They were facing away from her, heads up, legs braced, alert but absolutely motionless. She opened the corral gate and went inside, feeling blind and very exposed as she crossed the bare, silver-gilded ground. Sharp stones stabbed up through her socks. Her breath came out in wraiths of steam that fled away instantly; her shadow preceded her, looking like a deformed thing. Beyond the curtain of darkness, she could feel the cliffs of the mesa, in her imagination still moving like flesh. As she got farther away from the buildings, the light on the side of the infirmary shrank to a distant sharp point.
She forgot the discomfort of her feet as she got closer to the horses. There was something wrong with them.
Their breath steamed and their tails rippled in the icy wind, but they didn't turn as she approached, didn't whicker or snort. Hadn't they heard her? She stopped ten feet away, suddenly afraid of being among such big animals, aware that for all their docility earlier they didn't know her well.
"Hey, Breeze," she whispered. "Madie. Spence." But they didn't move. They just stood with their necks arched erect. Their chins were raised in an attitude of listening, but their ears were pressed flat against their heads.
It took her a moment to realize that they were making a sound after all. It was a dry, fast rustling noise that didn't make sense until she got closer and saw that they were shivering, all three of them, their bulging haunches and shoulders and great neck tendons standing out, hard with tension. The noise she was hearing was the vibrating contraction of the surface muscles of their great bodies, the quick shifting of their hides. A sound like a tree of dry leaves rattling softly in a winter wind, or the palms of two dry hands rubbing rapidly.
It appalled and transfixed her. Not right, her mind was screaming, wrong wrong wrong-
She had been standing there in the dim light for several moments, terrified and perplexed, when abruptly she realized there were other shapes in the night. The darkness beyond the fence was suddenly full of faint, uprearing gray-silver shapes where there should have been only empty desert. Nightmare forms just visible against the black. She felt her stomach drop.
She stared into the gloom and suddenly knew the monstrous night beings as horses-six or eight pale horses with heads stiffly erect, ears back, glazed eyes. Motionless. Cree caught one jagged breath as she recognized them: the little band of free-roaming grays and palominos she and Julieta had seen on the way in.
Like Julieta's horses, they stood locked into shivering, stiff stances. After a moment she saw a shadow slide in among them, eclipsing their phantom glow.
It was Tommy Keeday.
What was he doing? Dancing? He ducked under one horse's belly, disappearing and then emerging again to slide his body among the rigid animals. Even in this faint light, Cree could see that he was wearing only pajama pants, no top, no shoes, and that his movements were oddly stylized. He took queer, uneven steps, a crablike sideways shuffle with one arm upraised to stroke a shivering flank and the other pressed down at his side. Several times he seemed to be stepping over invisible objects on the ground, trying to stride over them, checking himself, trying and checking again with rhythmic, repetitive motions. His head remained cocked to the right.
The gray stallion stood closest to the fence, and as Cree's night vision improved she caught the glint of one round eye.
Tommy turned and began his complicated dance toward the corral, facing Cree directly but giving no indication he'd seen her. When he came near the fence, his left arm groped forward, his right leg took a half step and held his weight as his left leg bent sharply at the knee and drew up several times before setting itself tentatively down. By the time he reached the rails and inserted himself through them, his body had contorted in a sideways bend and his limbs weren't cooperating with each other at all. Erratic puffs of steam came from his open mouth and vanished with the wind. She heard the faint, uneven rasp of breath.
Pawing at the air, his left arm reached for something that didn't exist. His right leg stepped through while his left leg stood and then went down on one knee, tangling him on the lowest
rail.
It struck Cree that there were two people coming through the fence.
When he'd managed to get most of his body through, he fell forward onto the ground, directly onto his chest and chin. Only after he'd lain facedown for a moment did his limbs start moving again, the agonized effort of an overturned turtle or beetle, trying to right itself. After he'd flopped onto his back, he lay facing the cloak of sky with one arm pushing up and out and snapping back and one leg scraping the soil in slow, deliberate motions.
Thirty feet away, Cree stood unable to move, sick with horror.
After a moment his arm dropped and he just lay there. Only his bare chest was moving, a lateral ripple, lifting on one side and falling on the other with the sinuous flexibility of a belly dancer. His mouth was stretched wide, a black round hole in his face, but no steam came from it. No breath came from his open throat.
Cree's hypnotic terror shattered as she realized she was watching a boy suffocating. "Tommy!" she shouted. She lunged forward to help him just as the world exploded.
As if their invisible bonds had snapped, the three horses in the corral burst to life, pivoting away from Tommy. The gelding's wheeling shoulder struck Cree and sent her flying backward. She landed on her back, bounced hard, sat up immediately into a storm of flailing knobby legs as the mares hurtled past her, over her, shrieking. Something hard hit her head and knocked her flat, a string of firecrackers went off between her ears. The impact stunned her, but she jerked herself upright again and stared around her through the bloody yellow explosions in her head. Julieta's horses were back near the barn, wheeling and snorting as they raced up and down the far fence line. The phantom horses on the far side of the fence were gone. She heard their fading hoofbeats and their dwindling screams, so like the screams of women.
A yellow beam lit the ground as she struggled to her feet and lurched toward Tommy. Julieta's voice called from the infirmary door. Cree fell before she got to the boy, but she managed to crawl the rest of the way on her hands and knees. Tommy's chest continued its writhing, his mouth gaped for air but none came. When she dared to touch his skin, it was ice-cold.
