Land of Echoes cb-2

by Daniel Hecht

  Neither said anything as Ellen heated some water on the fire and used it to wash the scratches on her face. They weren't severe. When Cree checked her watch, she found it was almost two a.m.

  Ellen finished up her face and sat back on her haunches. "Better?"

  "Much better. Thank you, Ellen." Cree reached out a hand to touch her brown cheek, cherishing her. She kept her right hand in the pocket of her jacket. She had placed it there carefully with her left to keep it from hanging loose from her shoulder. It wasn't responding. It wasn't there. It wasn't actually her arm at all. Her real arm, she was sure, was unaccountably wrapped around behind her, tucked hard along her spine as if she'd slipped her hand deep into the waistband of her jeans and couldn't bring it out. The feeling was so gnarled and knotted it made her nauseous. Some part of the entity's body ghost had entered her. Or she had empathized with it so much she'd inherited its condition. Whatever the mechanics were. It didn't matter, and she didn't want Ellen to worry. They needed to hold out here until morning and hope that Julieta would come and the ghost would reveal itself to her and they could somehow let it go. No, she decided. Looking at Tommy after they'd laid him among his blankets, she'd seen how the weeks of warring had sapped him. There'd been unceasing doubt and anxiety, and the exertion of the fighting and convulsing. He had nearly suffocated several times. Worst of all, his body had relived someone's act of death innumerable times. There was little left of him, not even physically; even animated by the ghost's preposterous power, his fighting had been feeble. They couldn't wait for Julieta. As soon as daylight allowed, they'd have to get him back to the hospital, where at least his body could be kept alive. Whatever they might do to him there, this wasn't working. This couldn't go on.

  They sat for a few minutes, warming themselves on the snapping juniper-twig fire Ellen had rekindled. Cree felt crushing disappointment at her inability to enter the ghost's world. To heal Tommy. She had promised Julieta and Tommy, and she had failed them.

  Still, as Pop always said, It ain't over till it's over, and it's never over. Until morning came, she had to keep trying.

  "Ellen," she said hoarsely. "The ghost, or maybe it's Tommy, says things sometimes. Have you heard it?"

  "Yeah. Before you came, a couple of times."

  "Did you hear it say 'away' or 'awake'?"

  "Yeah. Only I thought it was a Navajo word, `awee,'" Ellen ended the sound with a glottal stop that could almost have served as a k.

  "That's it exactly! What does it mean?"

  " 'Baby.'"

  "Does that mean anything to you under the circumstances?"

  Ellen shook her head. She poked at the fire with a stick as Cree tried to imagine what the word might imply, or who had spoken it. Could it have been Tommy, somehow knowing his possessor was Julieta's child, her baby? Or the chindi itself, understanding its plight and struggling to express the tidal pull toward its mother? It didn't make sense. But if either was true, seeing the ghost with Julieta could well reveal everything. If she got here in time.

  But she couldn't let her thoughts be prejudiced by Julieta's longing. There were other possibilities to consider. One of Tommy's parents could have called out for their child at the moment of death. But the death was not at all what Cree would have expected if the entity was one of the parents. The person inhabiting Tommy had been hurt in the stomach and chest, not the head. He- she was sure it was male-hadn't died quickly at all, but had fought off the injury and pain for quite some time. The ghosts at the ravine were probably her strongest candidates; the father had just seen his children killed. He might very well have been calling out to one of his "babies" in his last moment.

  She turned to Ellen, who was staring sleepily into the fire. "Are you up for talking anymore?"

  "Sure."

  "Can I ask what clan your people are?"

  "I'm Black Sheep on my mother's side. Towering House on my father's side."

  "Are there any Waters Run Together in your ancestry?"

  "You're trying to figure which ancestor's in him? Sorry, I don't know. You go back a couple generations, you've got dozens of clans mixed in. Nowadays, people don't know their clans so much."

  The impossibility of untangling Tommy's ancestry depressed Cree, but she gave it one more try: "So, Tommy… would he be Black Sheep as well?"

  "Usually, he'd be 'born to' his mother's clan. We'd say he's 'born for' his father's clan."

  "So what was his mother's clan?"

  "Bernice? I don't know. She wasn't Dine-she was Jicarilla Apache. She had a lousy family, we never had anything to do with them. She and Tommy's dad met when they both worked at the lumberyard in Farmington."

  An alarm went off in Cree's head, a connection being made. Abruptly her heart was pounding and she couldn't seem to catch her breath.

  Ellen was looking at her strangely. "You know already, don't you?"

  "Know what?"

  "About Bernice and my brother. When you first came, asking about whether Tommy looks like his dad, whether he was adopted, all that."

  "Tell me about Bernice," Cree said shakily.

  "Oh, like I said, she was a wild one. She was already pregnant when she got together with my brother-that's what you figured out, right? My parents never accepted her, called her al'jil'nii-that means, oh… like 'loose woman.' But I always figured she was a good match for my brother, he was no saint, either, believe me. And Bernice, she turned out to be the steady one. I was always proud to call her my sister."

  "Had she always lived around here?"

  "She was born on the Jicarilla rez, that's about maybe seventy-five miles from here. But she'd lived in Farmington and then ran away to California. San Diego. Met some handsome Navajo guy who got her knocked up and then left her high and dry to go back to his true love. She never heard from him again. She came back when she knew she was pregnant. Her family was no good to her, they threw her out. But it worked out okay. When she met my brother, she wasn't showing yet. They fell in love, he didn't seem to mind about her having some other guy's baby, he said he figured he was old enough he should have had some kids by now anyway. And she settled down. They were pretty happy for some years. I always figured, you know, love will find a way." Ellen's face had grown warm with remembrance, but suddenly her lips pursed and turned down. "Unless you do something stupid," she finished sadly. "Like my brother getting drunk that time and getting them both killed."

  Love will find a way, Cree was thinking. In Peter Yellowhorse's case, love was still trying to find its way. But he'd done something stupid, and then gotten himself killed.

  She wondered how Julieta would handle it when she found out just which ancestor of Tommy's had entered him.

  48

  The endless night still hadn't given way to dawn when Tommy started moving again.

  They had left the hogan's door open. The predawn stillness stole over the land with an eerie serenity as gray light filtered into the darkness. Lying on the floor, Cree could feel chill currents move through the door and roam the room despite the faint heat of the woodstove.

  Just as she rolled over to look at Tommy, the eyes in his gaunt face popped open and shocked her. When he labored to sit up, she did the same, struggling to make her arms and legs obey. Her body fit her badly, like someone else's clothes.

  Cree heard muffled movements just outside the door, Ellen and Ray keeping watch. She had asked them to stay nearby, or follow from a distance if Tommy still had the strength to walk. Now, watching him as the darkness paled, she doubted he'd even be able to stand. She wondered how soon they'd be able to take him down off the plateau, back to the grandparents' place, and begin the long drive to the nearest hospital. For a moment, she wondered distantly where Julieta was and whether she'd arrive in time. She wasn't sure that whenever she might arrive there'd be enough of Cree or Tommy left to help find the way through this.

  Then she gave up on the problem as the ghost's world engulfed her and she surrendered herself to it.

  Peter's heart
surged with joy when he got out of the last car. Just south of Hunters Point, from here his old house was only a mile ahead. He knew the land to the east well. Walking it would take a couple of hours longer than when he used to ride Bird, but going overland cut ten miles off the distance, and he knew he'd likely have to walk anyway on the seldom-used back roads to Julieta's place.

  The bus ride from San Diego to Flagstaff had taken forever, and from there he'd still had two hundred miles to hitchhike. He'd walked back to the highway and had felt lucky when a van pulled over right away. And full of Indians, too. But they weren't Navajos-some Midwest tribe he'd never heard of. They had punched him up a little and taken his last thirty-two dollars, a kind of half-serious mugging, more threat than hurt. The worst part was when they shoved him down the interstate embankment, because the knees of his good jeans burst as he somersaulted down the slope. Looking like some just-dumped rodeo loser, it didn't help get rides. He felt as bad as he looked.

  I'm coming to you with nothing, Julieta. But I am coming to you. Back like an echo.

  There was poetic justice in his humiliation. Starting again with nothing, from nothing-that felt right, too. All new. Leave the baggage behind. Plus, maybe she'd feel some sympathy for him, it might help ease them over what would probably be a rocky first few minutes.

  Return of the prodigal Indian, he'd say to her. The stuff of which legends are made, yeah? Standing before her looking like hell, knees torn. Make her laugh.

  This was not how he'd imagined it. When he'd first decided to come back, he'd conjured a vision of a tender and heroic homecoming: appearing at her door in crisp new clothes, full of tales of the coast, of dramas in the casting lots, of close brushes with fame and disaster. She'd be angry at first, but she'd see how much he wanted her, she'd be swayed by his passion. She'd forgive him, against her will. She'd be pretty pregnant by now, maybe only three months away, and she'd see how he had changed by how tender he'd be with her. He'd tell her he knew how wrong he'd been, that he'd left Bernice, that he was back for keeps.

  The thought of Julieta stirred him and fired his resolve. He remembered her body against his, and it seemed the power of that memory would allow him to overcome anything.

  He was close now, maybe eight miles overland. If he hurried he'd get there before dark. He'd ridden Bird this way a dozen times, winding between the hills near the road, then breaking through into the open country beyond. When the land smoothed into the endless miles of rolling swells, he'd let Bird find her own pace and it was always a gallop, that horse loved to run. He'd ride her like the wind in a straight line, shortest distance between two points, the heart line, straight east. He'd fly like an arrow. First he'd see the mesa standing clear of the surrounding land, and that would steer him to the house.

  He felt bone tired, bruised and sore, and the closer he got the more nervous he became. She had a lot to be angry about.

  But he'd explain. She'd understand. His love would overcome her resistance. She'd see it in him.

  Everybody had warned him it was not so easy off the rez, but he'd always dismissed that as the song of losers who didn't have the spark or good looks or willpower to succeed in a world without BIA housing and government handouts. But in fact it had been tough. He couldn't get a grip on L.A. at all. Down in San Diego there were more jobs, but coming into Southern California with bronze skin, you came into a labor pool overflowing with Mexicans, and nobody gave a damn whether you were a noble Native American or some newly arrived wetback. And as for having ambitions in broadcasting-hey, who didn't? Plus there was the unrelenting pace of things, and the crowded, controlled feel of the city. Hard rules. No slack. In aggregate, white people were crazy, drank too much coffee. It made them efficient but graceless. He had always looked at the typical Navajo way of doing things with affectionate superiority, but in San Diego he found he missed being around the People, the spacious gracious slow funky chaos of rez life. He missed hearing his own language spoken. On the rez, he'd grown tired of living where everybody was some kind of cousin, too claustrophobic, no privacy, the clan thing with every woman you met. But in white America, it went too far the other way, nobody knew anybody. Being an outsider in San Diego, you went around lonely and empty and unrecognized. Even whites who lived there didn't know each other. He missed Bird and their wild gallops over open land where there was no one to tell him what to do and his spirit took wing.

  And most of all, he missed Julieta. Even when he met Bernice and they had a thing for a while, he'd think of Julieta and feel a rat gnawing in his stomach, the sense of missing her and fearing that he'd made a disastrous mistake.

  But I'm back. Take two. I'll do it right this time.

  Now the walk was taking forever. Early November, after six months on the Coast he wasn't used to the cold. But whenever he bottomed out, he'd picture an image of her: the breathtaking curve of her hip as she shrugged out of her jeans the first time they'd made love. Oh, man. Or the light in her eyes when he'd be at work with the other guys around and couldn't talk to her and she'd look a blue fire of love at him that set him ablaze from thirty feet away. Plenty enough to keep him going.

  I'll do it right this time, he promised. Babies, they're not so bad. People have been having babies, raising families, for years. Decades, even. I'll try it, Julieta.

  Walk, walk, walk. It took three hours to reach the last rise, about a mile from the house. He was aching and tired, but the instant he saw the place, the kinks and pains fell away. The last light of sunset painted its walls, the windows glowed with welcoming yellow. He laughed out loud for joy. He'd made it! There was warmth of every kind inside. There was starting new. Birth and rebirth.

  If she forgave him. The thought shivered him. But of course it would be hard at first. He deserved it. He didn't blame Joe Tsosie for not talking to him, trying to keep him away-he'd screwed up royally. She'd be mad because she was hurt and scared. But he'd make it better.

  He ran the last half mile.

  As he came up to the door, he stood straight and brushed the dust off his clothes. He tugged his hair loose from its ponytail and shook it out over his shoulders, the way she liked it. He tried to catch his breath but couldn't. When he knocked, he was burning. He felt the love light come over him and knew it made him beautiful and strong, irresistible.

  Garrett McCarty opened the door.

  It was so unexpected that the best Peter could do was stammer, "What are you doing here?"

  "What am I doing here? I own this house." Garrett McCarty looked him up and down and his eyes narrowed. "I'd ask what you're doing here, but I think I already know."

  A big shape moved behind McCarty and Peter saw Stephanovic, the big Irish guy who everybody knew worked as a sort of enforcer type at McCarty mines. He came to the door, looked at Peter without expression, then swept his eyes over the driveway as if checking for cars or other visitors.

  Garrett McCarty turned away and made a sharp gesture with one hand. "Nick, invite this kid in, huh? And shut the door, it's cold out there."

  One of Stephanovic's huge paws whipped out and came around the back of Peter's neck and yanked him stumbling into the house. Peter cuffed the hand off and stepped away.

  McCarty stood belligerently, legs braced wide, face red and full of veins. He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a checked shirt opened a couple of buttons to reveal a mat of gray chest hair. "You've got a lot of goddamned balls, don't you. Coming here, knocking on the door. I knew she had a brave in the woodpile. I knew it. Is this some macho rite, you want to lock horns with the old buck?" The thought made McCarty laugh. "Or, what-you're the honorable type, looking for permission to take my pony for a ride? That it?"

  "Don't talk that way about her," Peter snapped.

  McCarty threw himself at Peter. He was heavier, but Peter was younger and quicker and his first punch flattened the old man's nose. McCarty reared away, roared, charged again, and they reeled back against the wall, raging and pounding each other. McCarty's nose sprayed blood.
Peter felt the power of his own anger, hate brewed from all the things Julieta had told him about the man. He hammered the red face with his forearm and knocked the old man reeling. McCarty staggered into the middle of the room and charged again like a wounded bull. They fell against a coatrack and went to the floor, rolling, tangling in it. Things were breaking, falling from the walls. Peter rolled on top of McCarty and punched the raging face.

  Then something hard hit the side of his head, knocking him sprawling on the tiles. Stephanovic aimed another steel-toed kick at him and he barely got his arms up in time to protect his face.

  Peter had just gotten to his hands and knees when the big man kicked him in the center of his chest. The force of it lifted him off the floor. He fell on his side and struggled to get his breath. Couldn't inhale. Couldn't move.

  Still the rage and ardor burned in him. He wouldn't lose. He wouldn't give up. He would find Julieta.

  Stephanovic was standing across the room, giving him a stay cool half smile and watching him as he got to his feet. Then McCarty appeared in the living-room doorway holding a kitchen towel against his nose with one hand and a big silver pistol in the other. Stephanovic's eyes went wide and he moved toward his boss, saying, "Whoa, hey, Garrett-" but the gun exploded, sound and flash and impact all at once. Peter felt his insides blow apart. Then another huge noise and another detonation in his gut.

  Peter curled around the pain. He felt as if he'd leapt off a cliff and plunged deep underwater. The air was thick and resistant, and the sound of the men's voices was a big rounded booming, slow. One rumbled, No Navajo punk… screw my wife… talk to me like that. The other said, Didn't have to do that… mess to deal with.. trouble.

  Another man appeared at the inner door. Peter's eyes focused enough to recognize him: Donny McCarty, the old man's son, a pale clerkish nerd who Julieta had always felt sorry for. He swore at his father and boomed, Never think first… could have used it against her… cost yourself millions! Then both McCartys were giving orders. Stephanovic complained but gave in. Donny was already picking up the broken things.