Land of Echoes

18

"'Mutes'?" Cree asked. "I had no idea livestock mutilations were so common they'd earned a vernacular term."

Julieta's jaw had been clenched for the first ten minutes or so, but her rage had gradually given way to exhausted despondency. Now she shrugged. "There's more of it up in the northern part of the state, southern Colorado. We get a little wave of them, every few years. Makes the papers." She looked numbed and dispirited, back slumped, a negligent hand on the reins.

"People take it seriously?"

Another listless shrug. "Some do. He could be right about scavengers. I've never thought about it much. But I found a mutilated calf once. The face had been… well." She frowned over at Cree. "I thought you'd be an expert at that kind of thing."

"No. I'm a psychologist, Julieta. I may have a unique theory of psychology, but it all pertains to the human mind. They didn't teach us a thing about extraterrestrial intelligences at Harvard or Duke."

Julieta bobbed her head, unable to share the joke.

"Think Donny will agree to meet me?" Cree asked.

"Depends. I'd give it even odds. He will if he thinks he might get some useful information out of you-dirt about me or the school. Or if he thinks he can use you to get some publicity that makes McCarty look nice. He'll do anything-last month, they did a local TV special about handicapped grade-school kids taking a field trip to the mine. So very heartwarming. He calls it 'image management.'"

They rode on in silence for a time. It was only three o'clock, but the day had dimmed as a thin film of clouds formed high in the atmosphere and diffused the sun's glow. Though the light was still bright, it had begun to take on a milky quality that muted the landscape, softened the shadows, blurred the distances. The celebratory crispness was gone from the land, leaving it forlorn.

"We got interrupted," Cree ventured. "You were telling me some really important things. I'd love to hear the rest."

Julieta turned quickly, and even behind the mask of the sunglasses her face looked stricken. She whipped her head to the front again and looked as if she were about to flee once more, to gallop away from her own past.

"Julieta!" Cree barked. "You can do this, damn it! You're an administrator and you know how to do hard things! Tell me!"

Julieta caught herself as she raised the reins. She slumped again, took off her sunglasses, and looked at Cree with glittering eyes.

"You're being me again," she said. "The boss me." She grunted with bitter amusement.

"Whatever it takes," Cree told her curtly.

Peter Yellowhorse was about her age, twenty-four, twenty-five. He was from Teec Nos Pos, up near Shiprock, but he'd moved south a year earlier to take a job doing grounds work for the tribal facilities in Window Rock. Always late, he'd gotten fired pretty quickly, but then he'd been lucky enough to get work with the little company that took care of the McCartys' estate. He lived in a wreck of a house just over the rez line, about eight miles away. He was dirt-poor, by white standards, anyway, lucky to have a job. He owned exactly three things of any value whatsoever: his horse, a beat-up Chevy truck, and a belt with a fancy silver and turquoise buckle that had been made by some uncle who was a well-known silversmith. He loved to ride and occasionally did bronc riding at local rodeos, but mainly what he wanted was to get into radio, become a DJ. He did janitorial work three nights a week at a Gallup station in exchange for the studio time and training that would earn him his FCC license.

Easy to be DJ on a Navajo station, he joked. All those long moments of respectful silence, yeah?

At first she found excuses to chat with him during the day about repairs or landscaping she wanted done. Then she started talking to him about her horses; she asked him to help train them and, eventually, to ride with her. Peter was the restless type, she could see why he didn't hold a job. But he was very smart, with a relentless sense of humor and a gift for turns of phrase that always surprised her. He was innately courteous and, compared to Garrett's social set, surprisingly proper, traditional. She liked that. Also unlike them, he was honest, never tried to hide what he was, couldn't have if he'd tried. And oh God, he was handsome-whipcord thin, smooth bronze skin, a fast smile and quick flashing eyes. He wore his hair long because there'd been an American Indian Movement protest nearby a while ago, and though he'd considered them just a bunch of troublemaking Sioux coming down from the Midwest to get their pictures in the papers, he'd liked their rebellious look and style.

One day she was bold enough to ask him to do some work, just him, during off hours. After a while, when he came, all they did was talk or ride together. The desire she felt was as bright and hot as lightning, except it didn't flicker, didn't come and go. It was a remorseless current that flowed continuously, almost painfully. Yet despite its power, they were just friends for almost a year. Julieta was still waiting for Garrett.

Peter felt it, too, but even with his reckless attitude, he would never have broached it. He was too decent, too respectful. And he was no doubt more aware than she was of the risks that would come with having an affair with the wife of Garrett McCarty. A poor Navajo kid getting on the bad side of an old rich white coal exec wasn't likely to do too well in any arena of life.

Julieta was the one who led the way. Something had sprung loose inside her the first time she'd seen him riding Bird so joyously. She'd determined she would taste that freedom. She'd been a physical virgin when she'd married Garrett; as she and Peter began to make love, that first time, she realized that in every way that mattered she still was one. It happened in a worn sandstone gully far around the south end of the mesa, among smooth, sensuous rock curves that invited their bodies to collide and entwine.

"He touched my face. He caressed my face for a long time, like he wanted to know my bones. My expressions, the feelings I'd had? It was slow, but it was… urgent the whole time." Julieta's eyes went wide as if she'd just heard herself, the degree of confidence she'd indulged.

Cree held her breath, unwilling even to mutter encouragement, afraid it would break the flow. Or that Julieta would notice her reaction: The image of Mike had materialized and she could feel the shape of his body against hers. In the vaulted architecture of her heart, some supporting pillar or buttress bent and faltered agonizingly. Blind, she let Breeze find her own way. The sky had taken on the same feeling, turning gradually an opaque, cataracted white; the sun was the color of a blood orange, dimming, and in the odd light the landscape felt artificial-some stark, digital, virtual place. The school was still several miles away.

They were lovers for a year. They were very careful to keep it secret. Julieta confided only in Joseph, whom she trusted absolutely. She introduced Peter to Joseph, they liked each other. She grew stronger. She realized she'd have to divorce Garrett, even if her father lost his job as a result. Now when she took her husband's arm for the occasional function they attended together, she felt dirty not because of his infidelities but because of hers: She was betraying Peter. When Garrett came home, she made excuses to avoid sleeping with him.

At first, she did a good job of planning the divorce. She hired a private detective to take photos of Garrett entering motel rooms with different women. She made copies of his credit card bills showing incriminating purchases, travel, and hotel stays, which she kept in a secret file. When they went to court, she'd have him by the balls.

But just about the time she was ready to file and move out of the house, two things happened to blow the whole thing apart.

She discovered she was pregnant. She knew it was Peter's child because she hadn't slept with Garrett for months and because, yes, she had been less than cautious with Peter. When she told Peter about it, he was shocked and, understandably, perturbed. As she was: Being visibly pregnant or having a baby that was obviously not red-blond Garrett's child would reveal her infidelity and put the impending divorce process at risk.

At the same time, she never once considered having an abortion. She wanted that child. Really, it was no accident that she'd gotten pregnant. She'd let that last, most intimate barrier fall, she'd needed it to. She'd wanted her life to begin at last.

When she told Joseph, he helped her make a plan: keep the pregnancy secret, file for divorce immediately-before she started to show-and move to her own place.

But before she got that far, Peter left her.

The first time he didn't show up to visit her, she was upset, but she didn't worry until the next day, when she called his house and got no answer. The following day, she drove past his place and found it abandoned: The truck was gone, Bird wasn't in the corral.

He's young, Joseph told her. You know how he is, Julieta, he's a free spirit. That's one of the things you love about him. He got scared. If not of Garrett, then of being a father, making a commitment. But he's a good guy. He'll think about it for a while and he'll call you. He'll realize pretty quick he can't live without you. Don't worry.

And it was true that Peter was intimidated at the prospect of being a father, a husband, a full-time companion. The ardor and excitement in his eyes had been mixed with doubt ever since she'd told him.

But he didn't come back. Weeks went by and he didn't reappear.

Julieta went through with her plan. One horrible afternoon she told Garrett she was divorcing him, then moved out of the house and set up in a cramped third-floor apartment in Gallup.

For a while she tried to make excuses for Peter: Maybe Garrett had found out about him, had threatened him or had him beat up and scared him away. But then she thought, no, there was no way Garrett could have found out, they had been too careful. The proof was that if he had, he'd be using her infidelity against her in the divorce; he certainly fought her proposed settlement terms tooth and nail, and he followed through on his threat to fire her father, but he never brought Peter into it.

Still, she couldn't bear to believe Peter had left of his own accord. But when she finally mustered the courage to call Peter's mother, up near Shiprock, she said yes, he'd brought Bird to stay at her house and had left the rez. He'd said he was going to California, but she hadn't heard from him. Julieta begged her to have him contact her if he came back or called.

Heartbroken, she lived on in her little apartment. Every day brought a dozen changes of heart toward Peter: hope and fear, strength and devastation, anger and forgiveness. Her confusion wasn't just about men, or even love, it was about life. The sense of betrayal that all the good things you believed should be so untrue.

She started to show, a little. The divorce process dragged on. She received no visitors. She saw Joseph often, always at the hospital or at restaurants. The longer she stayed in her tiny apartment, the more anger she felt toward Peter. But she still wanted to have the baby. It was the child of those beautiful moments, when the world opened up and it seemed there was love in it after all. And maybe Peter would come back. Maybe he just needed more time.

"In retrospect, I wish I didn't do it the way I did. But you have to understand how angry I was. How terrified I was of what Garrett would do if he found out."

"That he'd hurt you? Physically, I mean?"

The muscles on Julieta jaws rippled. "Remember Donny's remark about the quality of my horses? It goes back to the day I told Garrett I was divorcing him. He didn't love me, but he liked sex with me and he owned me-plus he knew the divorce would cost him some money and property. And by God one thing Garrett did was, he fought for what he owned! The day I handed him the papers he argued and threatened me and his eyes literally turned this horrible bloody color. He… he did something very terrible."

"What?"

"I had gone to my bedroom and locked the door, I was that afraid of him. So Garrett went out to the barn. He shot my horses. All four. I listened to the shots and screams. One after the other."

Sickened, Cree couldn't imagine a response.

It took her a while, but after a few minutes Julieta managed to grind out the rest of the story: "I was scared to death. What he'd do if he found out about the baby. About Peter and me. Especially that I'd slept with a Navajo, was carrying a Navajo child. That would be a blow to his ego he'd never forgive."

The searing fear and horror of that day fired her determination to get away from Garrett, cemented her sense that he really owed her. He had betrayed her, turned her into a paid courtesan, not a wife; he'd made her practically a prisoner for four years, he'd ruined her father, he'd murdered her horses. Even now, he ruled her life through fear and intimidation. Turning over a new leaf meant not accepting that crap from him, or anyone, ever again. Despite Joseph's tactful recommendation that she divorce quietly and amicably, even if it meant a less lucrative settlement, she continued to press ahead with the very hard terms her attorney said she would certainly get. All she had to do was keep her pregnancy secret and get the divorce over with quickly.

But the final court date ended up being set for late winter. Showing up in court eight months pregnant was out of the question. She had to change plans.

Again, Joseph helped her think it through. The solution they came up with was to have the baby in secret. Postpone the court date until spring, a month or so after she'd given birth. In the meantime, live a covert life in Gallup, withdraw from public contact, do all her business by phone, let her lawyer handle everything. It was only a few more months, and over the last five years she'd gotten good at waiting, at living alone. At having a secret life, a secret self.

By the time she was six months pregnant, she was in bad shape. She'd been cooped up forever and ever. She'd received every heartbreak imaginable. She felt burdened and heavy and tired all the time. The hope that Peter would return had worn thin. She was so lonely she wanted to die; she probably would have if Joseph hadn't been there.

Then one day she found a letter from Peter in her mailbox. It had been mailed from California to the old address and had been forwarded by the post office. At the sight of his scrawl on the envelope, familiar from the occasional love letters he'd written, the hope and fear exploded in her. She practically fell down in the stairwell as she ripped it open and read it.

He was in California. He'd tried to start up in LA but had drifted down to San Diego. Things were going pretty well. He'd found a job maintaining vending machines at the naval base. He had gotten some regular air-time at a community radio station; he had also registered with a film agency up in Hollywood and was excited at the prospect of maybe some work as an extra, there were a couple of films coming up that needed Indian types. He loved her, he would never forget a single moment with her. But he couldn't be with her. He was a poor backcountry Navajo, she was a rich Santa Fe white girl. They should have known better than to try, with the deck stacked so badly against them. He was seeing somebody else now, a Jicarilla Apache woman who was escaping reservation life just as he was. Julieta should move on with her life. He was very, very sorry.

A few days later, while she was still reeling from that, she saw a car slide past the building, its driver looking up at the windows. She realized she'd seen the same car on several occasions. And this time, she recognized the driver's face: one of Garrett's assistants, a thug named Nick Stephanovic. Garrett was having her watched!

Suddenly the whole absurdity of her plan struck her. A naive twenty-five-year-old idiot and a thirty-year-old idealistic Navajo doctor were no strategists for the kind of war she was fighting or the kind of enemy she had. She'd never keep her secrets. Even if the divorce went through without a hitch, Garrett could keep watching. If she suddenly appeared with a baby in her arms, a Navajo baby, he'd know everything. She didn't dare ask her lawyer, but she suspected that proof of her infidelity would be cause to retroactively overturn a settlement. Far more frightening, the extent of her deception would conjure in Garrett the rage she'd glimpsed when he'd killed her horses. At that point it would've had nothing to do with love anymore, or even ownership: He'd get back at her because his pride demanded it. She'd seen his vengeful side in business dealings- cross him, and he never forgot. She'd never be safe. Her nightmare would go on and on with no reprieve, ever.

The whole thing had been a mistake, she saw, error upon error, stupidity upon stupidity. If she really wanted to start a new life, she realized, she had to let go not just of Garrett and of Peter, but of the baby, too.

Yes, she'd have to give up the baby.

It wasn't just her anger at Peter or her fear of Garrett that resolved her. She saw with frightening clarity that she was in no shape to be anybody's mother. She was too confused, impulsive, damaged; she had too much angry pride and had made too many mistakes because of it. The baby should have stable, sane, capable parents-two of them. The baby should be removed as far as possible from the wrath of Garrett McCarty and the emptiness left by an abandoning father and the mess of Julieta's life.

She talked it over with Joseph. Again, he served as her sounding board, didn't suggest or force her decisions in any way. The only time he put his foot down was after she'd told him her decision. He would help her, he said, if she was absolutely sure, if she'd considered every option and felt there was truly only that one. But it has to be forever, he warned her. You have to let go completely. You can't change your mind in a month or a year or five years. You can't rip a family's life apart by coming in later and claiming the child they've raised as their own. You can't do that to a child who loves the people it knows as its parents.

I know, she told him. That's right. I know.

There's another reason, Joseph went on. You can't second-guess yourself, either-can't hold your future hostage to the bad things that have happened. Your heart has to have freedom to grow and move on. If you emotionally cling to this child after it's gone, it'll be like having an open wound that can never heal. If you ever change your mind, you'll only hurt yourself and other innocent people. It's a one-way street, Julieta. It's got to be.

Off-record, at-home births were common on the rez-as a rural GP, Joseph had delivered his share. He said he knew of an infertile couple in a remote area of the eastern rez, good people who dearly wanted a child. When Julieta's time came, Joseph delivered the baby and brought the boy to them.

Julieta saw her son for only those minutes after his birth: Joseph laid him on her chest while he did some repairs on her. She looked at the wrinkled little face, saw those tiny lips working, and at that moment felt a force in her that she never imagined existed. It changed her inside. It was as if her whole body and mind became one big magnet, as if she existed only as that pull toward the baby. Her breasts ached and tingled with the desire to nurture him, but he wasn't ready to suckle. She looked at him for a long time. Marveling at him. But labor had exhausted her, and after a while she closed her eyes and forgot everything but the glow of that warm little weight against her skin, the minute movements. She drowsed. When she awoke the baby was gone. As they'd agreed.

Joseph never told her the details of where the boy went. There was never any question of finding him again. The new parents would report the arrival as a home birth and fill out the papers in their names. With a Navajo father and a black Irish-Hispanic mother, he'd have the right coloring to blend in. He'd grow up as a Navajo, share the good and bad of a Navajo's fate in twentieth-century America.

For once, their plans went off without a hitch. With all the heartbreak and tension, Julieta had gained barely any weight during the pregnancy. She was far too thin, but the bright side was that nobody would suspect she'd recently given birth. The divorce took place in April, and it went as her lawyer predicted. She ended up with the Oak Springs house and twelve hundred acres and three million dollars, plus an uneasy proximity to McCarty Energy's Hunters Point field and the enduring hostility of Garrett and his nasty son.

She never saw her baby again. She never heard from Peter Yellowhorse again. She was twenty-five when she began her new life.

Julieta reined Madie to a stop. A mile away, the school was just visible over a swell in the land, the buildings new and clean but sad-looking in the wan, milky light. Julieta just sat in the saddle and looked at the lonely little cluster. The sun was not far from the horizon, so dulled by the uniform overcast its glow didn't impart any warmth to the buildings or the walls of the mesa.

Cree stopped Breeze beside her. She was astonished at how differently she saw the scene now. It was rooted in all the reasons Julieta had done this monumental thing. The buildings were not just objects of stone and steel but manifestations of feeling and purpose. They were built not just on the bare red desert earth but on a foundation of one person's past pain and error and the profound drive to turn it all around, to remedy wrongs and atone for them, to act for the good rather than react to the bad.

Julieta's accomplishment awed her.

Of course, it was also built on a subconscious desire to find the lost child again. Or to sublimate and channel the mothering urge, frustrated then, in the act of nurturing and guiding many children.

Screw Sigmund, Cree thought, impatient with her Freudian reflexes. That urban, neurotic, fin-de-siecle sensibility stripped things of scope and nobility and poetry. This woman faced herself. She acknowledged her failings and turned every one of them around. She did a marvelously good thing. Turned a disaster into a brilliant achievement.

Of course, there were so many questions left unanswered. One of them was not whether, or why, Julieta would seek her lost baby in every child she encountered: Joseph's advice had been both wise and kind, but of course that wound in her heart would never close.

But why Tommy? Cree wanted to ask. How did she know he was her long-lost child? His records? Some resemblance to Peter Yellowhorse? Maybe Joseph told her. But why would he identify the boy to Julieta after making sure the cord was so completely severed?

But Julieta had pulled into herself, and she deserved a break from the relentless probing and prodding Cree had subjected her to.

Julieta put her hand to her face and seemed startled to find her sunglasses still there. She took them off, folded them away, wiped her cheeks with the balls of both hands.

"Going to get cold tonight," she said. "Sunset's coming. Better get to the chores." She glanced at the chilly horizon and urged Madie toward the school.