Land of Echoes cb-2

by Daniel Hecht

  " 'If? Oh, they'll find him," Dr. Corcoran snapped. "He'll be with one or another of his sheepherding relatives. The state will know where they are because all they have to do is go where the welfare checks are delivered. And they'll bring him back. But you'll never see him again, you can trust me on that."

  35

  The mine access road cut straight south from Highway 264 through low, rolling hills. Running parallel to the wide gravel road, the company's rail spur was occupied by a seemingly endless train of open-topped cars heaped with coal. Cree had picked up Joyce at the Navajo Nation Inn, and they were using the time to bring each other up to date.

  Cree felt burnt, little more than a husk of ash, consumed by the flame of anger and anxiety she'd felt at the hospital. On her way out of the building, she'd used a pay phone to call Julieta with the news about Tommy, then spent the drive from Gallup to Window Rock trying to think. With a whirlwind of competing worries, it wasn't easy.

  "I've been mostly striking out," Joyce told her. "The museum is gorgeous, but the materials there didn't tell me jack about what might have happened at the mesa. There's lots of good stuff on Navajo spirituality and healing traditions, and the museum proper gives a basic history of the People. But your little mesa doesn't show up."

  "Crap."

  "Sorry. There's tons of historical drama in the region, though. The Navajos and Apaches began migrating in about eight hundred years ago. Of course, they found the Pueblos' ancestors already living here. For a few centuries there was the usual raiding and feuding among Apaches, Utes, Navajos, Hopis, the whole gang, and then the Spanish came and subjugated the bejeezus out of whoever they could lay hands on. Then the area was ceded to the United States and the Yankees began to come in, and it all went downhill from there. The Indians resisted, natch, some more than others, some making alliances with the whites. One of the worst problems was the trade in Indian slaves, run by the Mexicans and white Americans. At one point, one fourth of all Navajos were slaves. The U.S. government wouldn't do anything about it, so the Dine fought back hard. It all came to a head around 1863, when Kit Carson was sent out to kill or round up every last Navajo. When he couldn't just shoot them, he starved them out-burned their crops, destroyed their flocks. Most of the Navajos were brought to Fort Wingate and then were marched three hundred miles to some hellhole on the eastern side of the state called Bosce Redondo. The Navajos call it the Long Walk, it's one of the defining historical moments for the tribe. It was brutal, a lot of them died en route. And Bosce Redondo was basically a concentration camp-forced labor, starvation, disease, humiliation, the whole Nazi shtick. Eventually it begat some appropriate outrage, several federal commissions looked into the situation and found it abhorrent. So the government felt a twinge of remorse, created the rez, and marched the survivors back in 1868."

  Cree didn't answer. She just clung to the steering wheel, mourning the endless and unnecessary cruelty that human beings could inflict on each other. The arid desert landscape was a melancholy stage upon which untold sorrows had been enacted. Like everywhere else. All these years of self-deluding idealism, thinking she could do something about it by alleviating one small, lingering hurt at a time. Insane. Trying to bail the ocean with an eyedropper.

  Joyce noticed her sudden dive. "I did pull up some newspaper stuff on livestock mutilations, though," she went on brightly, as if that would cheer Cree up. "Most recent local incident was a couple of years ago, that must be what Donny was talking about. Some Navajo teenagers tracked their horses onto McCarty property, over on the far west end of their Hunters Point land? Supposedly found the horses all… well, sliced up. In weird ways. Give you something to chat about with Donny M, anyway. An icebreaker."

  Cree nodded. Joyce was trying to be amusing.

  Joyce bit her lower lip and then said quietly, "I'm sorry, Cree. I don't have anything sweet and nice to tell you." She turned her face to the window and somberly regarded the passing desert. "How'd we get into this business, anyway? You know?"

  "What business? The human being business?"

  "I know you're worried about the boy. But we'll find him. Joseph or Julieta will have some idea how."

  "Yeah." But that hope didn't cheer her. I still have no idea who or what is in him, she thought despondently. I don't know if I can do my work when I'm trying to stay ahead of an entity that's taking more control every day, not to mention child welfare investigators and eager beavers like Schaeffer looking for an unusual specimen to experiment on.

  They were driving between heaps of crushed mineral material. Up ahead, Cree saw the rearing dragline boom she and Julieta had seen from the other side. A mile or so to the east, several giant yellow machines were trundling along, dumping spoil and putting up a drifting cloud of dust.

  Joyce followed her gaze and her brow wrinkled. "We should talk about how to handle Donny, Cree. What we're going to tell him, what we're trying to accomplish here. What's your plan?"

  "Plan?" Cree snorted. "I'm going to lie through my teeth-what else?"

  Two minutes later, they approached a guardhouse with striped barrier gates lowered across the road. Just this side of it, Donny McCarty sat on the hood of a massive black SUV. With him was a large man with a boyish, pug-nosed face and the build of a weight lifter. As they pulled over, the two men left the truck and approached them.

  Cree turned off the car, got out, and introduced Joyce as her associate; Donny introduced the big man as Nick Stephanovic, his "aide-de-camp."

  "That's 'gofer' in English," Nick said amiably. Closer to him, Cree felt a glow of menace behind the bearish good humor and for an instant wondered irrationally whether they had anything to worry about from Donny or his sidekick today.

  "And what's your role in your firm, Ms. Wu?" Donny asked Joyce.

  "Business manager," Joyce said. "And historical investigator, medic, um, devil's advocate, and all-round utility drone. That's English for gofer, too."

  Donny nodded with a sour expression that made it clear he wasn't planning to share anyone's attempts at conviviality.

  "We're very grateful for your meeting us," Cree said. "Not too many CEOs would make time to show a stranger around. Especially such a, well, strange stranger."

  Nick chuckled and explained cheerfully, "McCarty Energy has a longstanding policy of public accessibility and accountability."

  Donny didn't share his assistant's mood. He struck Cree as preoccupied and suspicious, a man just going through the motions. "I have only an hour to spare for this, so I'd like to get started. What's our agenda? Forgive me if I'm unfamiliar with the concerns of a parapsychologist."

  "Well, we had talked about the mutilations-"

  "We can take you to the area where we found 'em, but I can't promise you'll see anything of interest. I can't even guarantee we'll find the exact spot again. Even the bones are probably long gone. Coyotes drag 'em around."

  Nick Stephanovic nodded.

  "I have to be frank, Mr. McCarty," Cree began uneasily. "Since we last met, I've heard some interesting supernatural gossip. This will sound strange, but a couple of staffers at the school mentioned a rumor of a ghost here at the mine. I guess they had worked here, or had relatives who had worked here, and-"

  "Oh, yeah? And who would that be? I have something of a photographic memory for some things, including my employees' names."

  "You know, I can't remember. Sorry, the Navajo names are so unfamiliar to me-"

  "Probably a Begay or a Nez," Nick put in helpfully. "Every other Navajo is a Begay."

  "I think that was it," Cree said. "Yes."

  The two men exchanged glances, and Cree got the feeling she was fooling no one.

  "So we've got a ghost here at the mine-" Donny prompted.

  "I told you this would sound odd… but they say your father died here three years ago, and someone said it was his ghost. I hoped I might visit the site of his death. I wanted to see if I could… make contact with him. As long as I was here anyway." She hesitated, trying to gauge
his reaction. "Of course, if this is difficult for you, I completely understand. I don't mean to sound insensitive to your loss-"

  "My father," Donny said drily, "was not the type to inspire much sentimentality among his survivors."

  He said it with such deliberate understatement, such a hard light in his eyes, that Cree couldn't come up with a reply. Even Nick Stephanovic uneasily hitched a shoulder.

  "You know," Joyce put in brightly, as if it had just occurred to her, "I was thinking that, given the limits on our time, maybe we should split up. Why don't I go look at the mutilation site, Cree, and you and Mr. McCarty go where… wherever you need to? If Mr. Stephanovic would be kind enough to take me." She turned a sweet smile on the big man.

  Donny caught Nick's eyes, thought about it, and shrugged. "Why not," he said.

  They took Donny's Lincoln Navigator through a maze of wide gravel roads that wound between heaps of soil and rock and past lumbering earthmovers, ending up at the office complex Cree had seen that first day with Julieta. At the main parking lot, Joyce and Nick bailed out and got into one of the rugged company Jeeps. Joyce brought her shoulder pack containing some basic equipment Ed had suggested would be typical for a mutilation site, given the supposed UFO connection: a Geiger counter, latex gloves, a soil scoop and a dozen plastic sample containers, a digital camera-enough for the charade they were putting on, anyway. Cree waved good-bye to her from the window of Donny's Lincoln, feeling a little trepidation at letting her go with the bearish hulk. Then, thinking about it, she decided that Nick Stephanovic might be one tough bastard, but if it came to any rough-and-tumble, she'd put her money on Joyce every time.

  Donny drove east along the valley, passing deep trenches with striated cliffs, then up a winding ramp to the higher land on the north side. At one point he stopped and rolled down Cree's window.

  "You can get some idea of the scope of operations from here. Quite a sight, isn't it?"

  It was. From their position Cree could see a huge expanse of land, scattered with mountains of earth in pastel reds and grays, cut with meandering ramps and roads. A deep gash, half a mile long and several hundred yards wide, was obviously one of the working pits. Visible through the dust haze at its far end, a dragline swung a bucket the size of a house and let go an avalanche. The boom alone, Donny told her, was the length of a football field, the dirty-orange motor house at its base was six stories tall, its vertical mast another eight above that. Other machines came and went like ponderous prehistoric animals, filling the air with the rumble of engines and the stink of dust and diesel.

  Cree startled as a broad ridge of ground about a mile away suddenly rose in a hump, as if the land were alive and flexing muscle. In another instant, a line of geysers blew soil and rock skyward in a rolling wave of explosions that swept across an area a quarter mile square. The sound of thunder hit the truck before the last of it had blown. In another moment, the area was hidden in a pall of downward-sifting dust and rubble.

  "We call it 'shooting,'" Donny explained. "The shooters-the explosives guys-drill holes down to the first coal seam, fill 'em with TNT. Setting the charges off in sequence that way helps chase the shock wave. Cracks up the overburden so the big Cats can scrape it off, expose the coal." He watched with satisfaction as the dust cloud thinned and drifted away.

  "It's very… impressive. Must be dangerous."

  "That's coal mining," he agreed with some macho pride. But then he said coldly, as if she'd accused him, "McCarty Energy has one of the best safety records in the industry."

  Donny rolled up her window and continued driving. In another moment, he steered the Jeep into a descending ramp that led into a long, flat-bottomed trench hacked into the rock.

  "Not that I'm buying into any of this," he said, "but how the hell are you supposed to go to the site of an alleged haunting when the site isn't there anymore? I mean, the general area is just up ahead. But the ground he fell on has been stripped away, the pit floor is about thirty feet below that level now. The spoil's been taken away to fill in other mined-out pits. The coal has long since been sent to power plants in Colorado. The dragline he fell off of has moved to a new pit a mile and a half west. So where's the site? Where's your ghost?"

  "I don't know," Cree admitted. If there was a ghost here, she was thinking, it would sure put Ed's geomagnetic theory to a stern test. But then it occurred to her that maybe the unusual circumstances here-the literal disappearance of the material place of Garrett's death-could have been the trigger that set his perseverating energies wandering.

  "But," she went on, "there's plenty of historical precedent for haunted mines-shaft mines, anyway-that offer some of the same theoretical problems. And quite often when a house that's haunted is torn down, the empty lot or a new building that's put up will inherit the entity."

  Donny blew out a skeptical breath and turned his attention to driving. Again she puzzled at her sense that he was indulging her, just playing along, waiting her out.

  "Really, I only need a few minutes here, and then we can move on to the dragline. In the meantime, you can help me by telling me about your father. What kind of person he was. How he talked, how-"

  "And how's all that supposed to help you?"

  "There are many schools of parapsychological research. My approach is more psychological and intuitive than most. Knowing more about his personality will help me recognize him if I encounter him. The idea that ghosts always appear as visible phantoms is completely false. I usually don't really 'see' a ghost so much as 'become' a ghost, so that inner… feeling or quality of character is often the only way I can identify a revenant."

  Donny grunted and abruptly pulled the Lincoln to a stop. "Well, good luck. Because this is it." He shut the engine down and glared at Cree, a challenge. He seemed to be struggling with a ticlike gulping movement, as if he had something stuck in his throat.

  She got out. The ground here was a scraped plane of solid rock littered with mineral debris. The cliff rose in a broken, jagged wall a hundred feet high, striped with dark striations. She stood, walked a slow circle, and stood again with eyes shut. From here, the rumble of the rest of the mine was distant; she could just hear a crow calling from somewhere to the east.

  She sensed nothing. It was as close to a complete psychic vacuum as she'd ever experienced.

  Donny surprised her by speaking right at her shoulder. "He was being an idiot. He was vain about how fit he was for his age, how he knew his company from the ground up, and he was showing off to his new girlfriend. They'd had a bit to drink. So Dad climbs out on the boom to show her what a girder monkey he is, and he slips. Only fell about forty feet, but it was enough."

  "Did he break his neck, or-"

  "Hell, no. Landed upright, just like a cat. But the fall ruptured his spleen. Our on-site paramedics were afraid to move him. It took a while for the ambulance to get here. He was dead by the time it arrived. I was up at the Bloomfield mine when I got the call. What a goddamned mess."

  "Were you and he close?"

  Donny looked at her with his veiled eyes. Through the impatience and weariness, Cree saw a passing flicker of discomfort. "What's it matter?"

  "I want to know what kind of person he was," she reminded him. "What kind of relationship he had."

  "He had his life, I had mine. He'd divorced my mother by the time I was ten, and she mostly raised me. Dad and I didn't always see eye to eye. It wasn't easy working for him."

  "How about Julieta? How did he feel about her?"

  Donny walked away and stooped to pick up a rusted piece of iron, some small mechanical part from one of the behemoths that had worked the site. He inspected it momentarily, then tossed it from him. "You really want to know? When he first met her, he was wild about her. The man was over the moon. Told me she was young, not even my age, and then laughed and warned me to keep my hands off, this one he wanted all to himself. This one was a keeper. He brought her flowers, courted her on bended knee, the whole thing."

  "So what
happened? Why'd it go so wrong?"

  "Come on, Dr. Black, don't pretend Julieta hasn't told you the story. With my father and me featured as the men in black hats."

  "I'm happy to hear a different perspective."

  "He was who he was. He did things the way he thought you were supposed to if you were a rich, powerful, virile but aging man. Oh, there were affairs and the usual stuff. But he'd have stuck with her. On his own terms, to be sure, but I think he was honestly surprised that she had different expectations. When she said she was going to divorce him, he reacted the way he'd learned to act when somebody hurt him, which was to hurt back harder. He got mad and he got even, both. After a while, there was nothing but that for either of them."

  Cree nodded. Donny's tone was still angry, but he'd lapsed into a mood of recollection verging on nostalgia. It was something she had seen before when even the most alienated survivor visited the place of a loved one's death.

  "It wouldn't have gotten so bad if she hadn't insisted on keeping the house and land here. She could have gone for the place in Albuquerque, but no, she had to set herself up right next to the company's land. Which guaranteed he'd have lots of opportunities to make sure her life wasn't too happy. What the hell'd she expect? He was gonna send her a welcome wagon?"

  He paced and scuffed, and the way he looked touched Cree: a slim, balding, harried guy with a worried frown permanently etched into his forehead. Clearly he admired his father a great deal, as much as he resented him. Just as clearly, he still dealt with his dead father every day.

  "So he was a man who could hold a grudge," she prompted, "who would never forget a hurt or an insult. What else?"

  "Why don't you just out with it? What did Julieta send you to find out?"

  Cree stared at him, trying to gauge where that was coming from. "Why are you so afraid of her?"

  Donny spluttered in outrage for a moment. "Fuck this. I don't have to do this. I've gone along with this bullshit long enough, let's get down to business. Let's get down to-"