Land of Echoes cb-2

by Daniel Hecht

  She'd never been a determined skeptic like Joseph; she'd been raised listening to Grandma Sandoval's tales of family ghosts, which as a child she'd believed as fact and as an adult had accepted as licensed but not utterly implausible. And you couldn't live out here without hearing rumors of mysterious and inexplicable events, wondering about the livestock mutilations, or sensing other presences in the rocks and shadows-it was one of the things she loved about this country. And yet, though she'd always been fairly open-minded about supernatural things, she would have described herself as a rationalist. Even two days ago, when she and Joseph had gone to meet Cree Black on Sandia Peak, she would have claimed a fairly secure belief in science and conventional medicine and the whole trend of rational, empirical Western thought since Aristotle.

  But the events of the last few hours had busted all that up pretty good.

  It was almost funny. Really, all she'd been doing for the last three weeks was continuing to live her mental habits, operating from her old paradigms. She was like that cartoon coyote, hurtling off a cliff and running in midair before he realizes he's suspended over a mile-deep canyon. As if the momentum of belief or habit or ignorance could defy the law of gravity!

  "I don't believe in anything!" she called to Spence. His hide hitched at the sound of her voice, and he quickened his stride. She laughed bitterly at the realization and yelled to the empty land, "I don't know what to believe! I have no idea what's real!" She wanted to laugh and cry and scream. She wanted to hit something, strike something and punish the world for its fickleness. For its unfairness in visiting this catastrophe on her. On Tommy Keeday, of all people.

  The thought of Tommy brought her thoughts back a little. This wasn't about Julieta McCarty, she reminded herself, this was about Tommy. A beautiful child, a talented artist, a boy with a lot of potential that would surely be destroyed if they couldn't cure him. A boy who knew nothing about the psychodrama he'd walked into at Oak Springs School, the role he played in the principal's secret fantasies and neuroses. Who was not to blame and who must never know of any of it.

  Spence was laboring now, still willing but getting tired. She spoke to him softly and brought him down to a trot. The big horse huffed and snorted, glad for a chance to get his wind back. Already they were three miles beyond school property and well onto McCarty Energy's Hunters Point coalfield. The land immediately around her looked the same, but a mile to the west a series of low, flat-topped ridges appeared, the spoil mounds from mining operations of thirty years ago. Even now, the desert vegetation had not returned to those dry slopes. She hated the sight of them-why had she come this way? She nudged Spence a little more toward the northeast.

  She marshaled her thoughts. The gallop had tired her as well as Spence, burnt off the worst of the crazy energy. Principal, she reminded herself. Administrator. Head honcha. It's executive decision time: Where do we go from here?

  Was there really any point in allowing Cree Black to work with Tommy? She'd been all but useless last night.

  On the other hand, Julieta couldn't really blame her, given that she'd just about gotten her skull fractured as she'd rushed to help him. And no, actually, she hadn't been useless. Quite the opposite. If her psychic radar or whatever it was hadn't prompted her to go out to the corral, Tommy might have died, suffocating as his lungs labored to rebreathe each other's air. So they already owed her a great deal.

  And Julieta had to admit there was something about Cree, some inner determination that she'd noticed at their very first meeting. She was a woman of about her own age and height, with medium-length brown hair full of chestnut-red highlights. A pageant coach would have appraised her as pretty, but not glamorous enough to be competitive. What made her looks compelling was the keen alertness and candor in her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth. You got the feeling she was a person who cared. She was also someone who told it like it was, had no stake in misrepresenting anything. Whatever Cree Black's personal history, she had obviously faced some tough things, maybe something like the crisis of belief Julieta felt in herself now. Somehow she'd seen it through, had come to some faith or truth despite the maelstrom of uncertainties.

  Which was kind of reassuring.

  And right now, Cree Black's explanations seemed as apt as anything Julieta had heard from the doctors they'd consulted.

  But there were other issues to consider. The symptoms were more extreme and lasted longer every time. The breathing problem demonstrated clearly that Tommy's physical survival, not just his mental well-being, was at risk, and that the school was not well prepared to assure his safety. From the standpoint of the school, the issue was clear: If Tommy died or got badly injured at Oak Springs, especially if any education or health authority heard she'd dealt with it as a supernatural issue, she could face criminal charges. Last night, citing both Tommy's needs and the school's, Joseph had been explicit that he couldn't let this go on: One more crisis and he'd insist on Tommy's being hospitalized again.

  And he was right. Clearly, the safest and easiest route would be to remand him to the care of some public authority, or to his grandparents, and wash her hands of the problem. And try to forget him and the world of fantasies she'd constructed around him.

  She felt her lips curl in a hard smile. Fat fucking chance.

  The scary part of Joseph's dictum was that the next hospital visit would change Tommy's life. From there, the road took a crucial fork. Certainly, in long-term care, some anonymous clinic or institution, his acute needs would be better met. But no doctor was likely to believe-or risk a career by admitting-that some unknown entity was occupying his body and mind. And therefore he wouldn't get the real help he needed. The Indian Health Services would soon find they didn't have the resources for him, and they'd send him on to the state. A bunch of well-meaning, overworked doctors would drug him and talk at him, and if it didn't go away, they'd wedge him deeper and deeper into the system, until he was warehoused in some institution and forgotten. Or they might go for more drastic treatments; she'd read recently that electroshock therapy and lobotomy were coming back into fashion.

  She shuddered and shook off the thought.

  The other most likely option would be to send him home. That was the choice his grandparents had endorsed-the Navajo way, removing him from whatever bad influences had triggered his problem, wrapping him close against the bosom of family, performing some archaic healing Way for him. But, again, he would probably not get cured. And even with in-home support from the state or tribe, he'd be far away from appropriate medical help, from educational resources, from-

  From Julieta McCarty.

  A shiver of panic rattled her. The scariest aspect of those options was that they took him away. She couldn't even tell how much that thought was biasing what should be objective analysis of Tommy's needs.

  The third possibility was that she could again persuade his grandparents to keep him here. She'd met them twice, and they seemed to trust her judgment. Here at the school, he'd have decent, if not optimum, medical care; he'd have social contacts and educational options and all those lovely "normalizing" things. Plus there was the possibility, one she found increasingly credible, that Cree Black could do something for him. The problem there would be Joseph. And the liability issues, of course.

  What was the right thing? What did he really need? You couldn't decide that without deciding whether he was suffering from a neurological dysfunction, a psychological problem-or, as Dr. Ambrose and Cree Black insisted and his impossible symptoms seemed to prove, the literal invasion of his central nervous system by some foreign entity.

  "It comes down to what we believe, doesn't it?" she asked Spence. Then she corrected herself: "What I believe." This time he whickered in agreement, and she stroked his shoulder, whispering gratefully, "You're my man, Spence. My debonair gent."

  Sometimes you had to make decisions entirely on your own. It was hard, it was scary, it was lonely, but it was what you did if you had any guts. You did what you believed was rig
ht and necessary. No, she resolved, letting go of Tommy was out of the question. She'd fight to keep him at the school. She'd play whatever hand she had, legal or financial or personal, to retain a say in what happened to him.

  "Screw safe!" she shouted. "Huh, Spence? Screw easy!"

  He picked up his trot as if he agreed. She felt a little better. An angry inner fire warmed her against the chill. When had she ever done anything easy?

  The full disk of the sun had nudged above the horizon by the time she came within sight of McCarty Energy's current operations. She reined Spence to a stop and then sat there, looking north to a ruined ridge and the gigantic rearing boom of a dragline just visible a couple of miles away. Again she wondered why she'd come this way. She hated the sight of it. She'd been there often enough to fight with Garrett and Donny to visualize what lay beyond the screen of hills.

  There was a wasteland of dug-up soil and rock heaped in man-made mountains, meandering dirt roads and ramps for the big machines, and gaping trenches blasted and scraped into the ground. There was the crusher and the huge mounds of coal waiting to be loaded onto trains. There were the walking draglines, whole movable buildings that supported the colossal girdered booms and buckets, one of which was the same dragline Garrett had led her through when he was in his phase of impressing her with the many large, expensive things he owned. With the boom from which sixty-six-year-old Garrett had fallen and died while showing off for his latest tramp girlfriend.

  There were yellow dump trucks and front loaders the size of houses. There was the office and repair complex and a parking lot full of pickup trucks. And sometimes there was Donny's Lincoln Navigator or Porsche in the lot, and Donny, along with a gaggle of rapacious bean counters, going over the operation's records and being an officious pain in the ass and thinking up clever ways to make more money. And as a sideline, kind of a hobby, thinking up ways to make Julieta's life miserable.

  Just like his father.

  "One mistake," she told Spence. "That's all it takes. One. Then your whole life is spent living it down or trying to compensate."

  Spence swiveled one ear as if to hear her better but didn't answer. And of course it wasn't that simple. Which was the one mistake? Being suckered into that first teen modeling job? Sticking to the competitions despite growing misgivings? Going out for lunch that first time with a man old enough to be her father?

  Or maybe the mistake was one of the avalanche of decisions that had come later and that had haunted her, every day, ever since.

  It was hard to think of the creature inside Tommy as anything but a demon, a supernatural monster existing only to cause anguish- some horrible being from Navajo mythology, or a violent spirit of the ancient rocks, a distillation of sheer malevolence from old, angry gods. But maybe Cree Black was right about everything. Maybe she was right to look at Julieta, to put her on the couch along with Tommy. Maybe she was right in her theory that the psychological situations of people in proximity to the haunting created the conditions needed to support a ghost's manifestation. That what had invaded Tommy was a part of a once-human consciousness, taking someone else's flesh in an attempt to fulfill its deepest compulsions.

  If that was true, there was only one person Julieta could imagine having the malice to do what it was doing. One person who'd have the fiendish insight and the motivation to destroy a child, this child, in an effort to strike at Julieta herself.

  That's why she'd come here today, she realized. To remind herself.

  She stood up on the stirrups and beamed hatred at the rearing boom where Garrett McCarty had gotten himself killed, as if she might see his vicious ghost and by sheer force of will send it screaming back to hell.

  13

  Another pickup truck ride. Every bump in the gravel banged up through the suspension of Dr. Tsosie's Ford and up Cree's spine to be delivered like a hammer blow on the inside of her forehead. She had gone to bed determined not to take the time for a visit to the hospital, but this morning as she'd bent to look for her shoes a sick red-purple haze of pain suddenly filled the room, and she'd changed her mind. She had agreed readily when Dr. Tsosie insisted she accompany him to the hospital in Fort Defiance.

  Joseph's first act upon arising had been to inspect Tommy, and when he'd assured himself that the boy was stable he'd looked Cree over with the same thoroughness. Then he'd taken her to the school cafeteria, where along with a handful of weekend staff they'd grabbed a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. Julieta didn't join them; Joseph said she was probably out riding-it was what she did when she needed to think.

  Now the two of them drove in silence as an ebullient sun bounded up from the mesa, promising a brilliant day as open and guileless as the night had been cloaked and full of dire things. Joseph seemed content to ride next to this stranger without making small talk, and Cree didn't mind. There was a lot to think about.

  The problem was that any impressions she might have received had been muddled by the pain, which had obstructed any empathic resonance with Tommy and whatever had invaded him.

  Inspecting her memory of the movements of his hand and that awful wink, she'd decided that the being now resident in Tommy was not some unknown category of entity-some relief there, maybe-but had once been human. She couldn't say why she thought that, except that she'd felt seen by it, felt its rude self-awareness glimmering there, enough to feel its similarity to her own. The eerie movements of the hand and arm suggested intentionality, some level of awareness of itself and its circumstances. But she'd garnered nothing of its character, identity, origin-or, crucially, its motivations.

  No, the few insights she'd come away with had little to do with the boy.

  One observation had to do with the way Joseph had dealt with Julieta when he'd arrived last night. The moment he was confident Tommy was resting safely and that Cree's injury wasn't serious, he'd gone to Julieta. He took her by the shoulders and with one hand swept the loose hair away from her face so he could study her. She looked like hell, exhausted, eyes puffy from crying, but as she gazed into his face her unguarded expression revealed how relieved and grateful she was to have him there. Joseph had first lightly touched her scraped cheek, and then his hand had turned and he'd delicately brushed the back of his fingers along her jawline before he turned away. It lasted only an instant, but even through her pain Cree could see that though the first touch had been a physician's, the second had been much more.

  These two people knew each other well and cared deeply about each other.

  Another was, irrelevantly, about Lynn Pierce. She was pleasant and certainly competent, but she radiated a sense of tension, a hypervigilance and — sensitivity. Some internal warring was going on, and though it made sense that the nurse would be keyed up with a patient like Tommy in her care, Cree felt intuitively there was more to it. For reasons Cree couldn't guess, a good measure of that odd, sideways hyperalertness seemed directed toward Julieta and Joseph.

  One final insight concerned Julieta-Julieta and Tommy. Unquestionably, Julieta was a dedicated educator, deeply committed to the well-being of her students. But there was also some special connection between the two, much more than the concern called for by professional obligations or general altruism. It was something Cree felt achingly in her own belly whenever she saw them together, heard in Julieta's voice as she tried to comfort him. It awakened her own yearnings, the feeling she felt around Hyacinth and Zoe: the DNA-deep calling to have a child, to love and nurture. Julieta's concern grew out of instincts and longings that deep and irresistible.

  That thought suggested another set of questions. If Julieta wanted children, why didn't she have them? It couldn't be for want of willing males. If Cree knew one thing about men and women, it was that nature abhorred a vacuum, and that a woman so beautiful and vivid would attract the attentions of any man who saw her. Julieta had spoken in passing about other relationships, but there had to be a reason why she'd never remarried in the many years since her divorce from Garrett McCarty.
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  The sudden smooth hum of the truck tires on pavement brought Cree out of her musings. They had made it to Indian Route 12, and now Joseph turned north, leaving behind the dust plume that had trailed them since they'd left the school. He maintained an impassive face as he drove. The hands that gripped the steering wheel were long fingered and neatly manicured, the competent hands of a physician. Cree wished with sudden intensity she could break through to him, enlist him as an ally.

  "Dr. Tsosie-can we talk?"

  "If you like."

  "My process is difficult to accept at first. But it's worked for me and for the benefit of many others. If you and I can cooperate, it'll really help. If we can't, it'll really get in the way."

  "It may become moot. Another night like last night and he can't stay at the school anymore."

  "I understand. But the pattern so far is that there's an interval between crises, right? If I can have even a few days with him, I can make progress. With your help."

  He stayed quiet for a long moment. "A month ago, if somebody like you came here, I'd have advised Julieta to throw him off the grounds."

  "If one of the kids got sick and asked for a Hand-Trembler or a Singer, would you throw him off, too?"

  He looked at her more closely. It wasn't a long and confrontational gaze, but a short, lateral look of appraisal. Tsosie was a handsome man, with deep brown eyes that seemed to take in the sunlight and give it back, warm and clear. The reserve she sensed in him was not one of arrogance or uprightness, not even a product of his skepticism; it struck her as a habit born of a desire to deliberate, to show respect, to assert mutuality.