Land of Echoes

37

Joseph begged off his rotation at the hospital, telling the shift supervisor he had emergency family obligations that might require several days.

He called ahead on his cell phone, got Uncle Joe's answering machine, left a message saying only that he was coming to see him, no explanation of why. Uncle Joe and Margaret lived off the rez not far from Crownpoint, about seventy miles from Window Rock. The drive gave him time to try to put his priorities in order.

The Keedays wouldn't have just brought Tommy back to the grandparents' place-too obvious. Which meant he'd need to persuade Uncle Joe to help him locate the boy and to encourage the family to let them see him. To do that, he'd need to overcome his uncle's resistance to talking about the past, his placing the baby. To do that, he'd have to persuade Uncle Joe that it was truly urgent, that there was a compelling reason to reveal the boy's whereabouts. The most compelling reason he could think of was that Julieta was coming apart at the seams, that she needed something drastic to break the chain, set her free from the past. And if Tommy was her son, he could argue that maybe there comes a time when a young man needs to know who his real parents were. That certainly seemed a big part of Tommy's predicament.

But Uncle Joe would demand more than that. He'd given Joseph a charge: to think about what needed fixing, to diagnose the problem so that he could prescribe himself a cure. Joseph could truthfully claim he'd thought about it, long and hard. The hard part was deciding on the cure.

Then he'd have to explain why it was important for Cree Black to be able to see the boy, and that would open up a supernatural, religious, philosophical can of worms. The old man would ask him why he'd trust some white parapsychologist, why he'd buy into weird quasi-medical, quasi-occult beliefs but had such a distrust of traditional Navajo ways of seeing and coping with the same things.

To which Joseph didn't have an answer. It wasn't so much that he'd come to agree with Cree Black's worldview, but that his habitual beliefs had become full of cracks and gaps. He could no longer decide what was science and what was superstition, fact or supposition, personal view or unbiased observation. He couldn't argue with Uncle Joe anymore because he didn't know what to believe.

He cut up 666 and then east on 9, settling into the forty-mile empty stretch between Nakaibito and Crownpoint. He was awed by the vast open sweep of the Chuska Valley, but still the region had always depressed him: its poverty and aridity, its air of desperation. The litter caught in the fences. People living in isolated, shabby hogans and trailers or new, generic, sterile complexes of government housing, without history or beauty or anything particularly Navajo about them. The scenery was bleak, especially after the recent years of drought. In thirty minutes of driving, he encountered only two other vehicles on the road. And this was positively urban compared to where the Keedays lived, somewhere way up above the dirt road between Naschitti and White Rock.

Uncle Joe and Margaret were comparatively well-off and lived in an eighties-era ranch-style house within view of Highway 371, south of Crownpoint. At the end of the quarter-mile driveway, Joseph was relieved to see the new double-cab truck parked near the house, which meant his uncle was at home or nearby. He turned his own truck around in the space between house and corral, turned it off, and sat, giving Uncle Joe time to adapt to his unannounced arrival.

When no one appeared, he got out and went to the door of the house. He knocked and waited again.

"Nobody home," Uncle Joe called from behind him. The old man had come around the corner of the stock shed, accompanied by two mutt puppies that bounced and bit at each other in high good spirits.

"Yaateeh, Uncle," Joseph said uneasily.

"I got your message on the machine. You're just in time." Uncle Joe frowned as if Joseph were late for an appointment. "I could use a hand in here. My ram is too tough for me." Without further explanation, he disappeared back into the shed. The little dogs watched Joseph, heads canted expectantly.

Joseph crossed the yard, opened the corral gate, and waded through the frisking puppies around to the other side of the shed. Uncle Joe stood in the open end of the three-sided enclosure, smoking a cigarette and blocking the escape of a burly gray ram that chewed some feed and watched him suspiciously. The rest of Uncle Joe's little flock, six ewes and a handful of this spring's lambs, stood nearby, unconcerned.

When Joseph came in, Uncle Joe tucked his cigarette into the corner of his lips, bent quickly, and grabbed the ram. He expertly tipped the barrel-shaped body onto its side and with his head beckoned Joseph to hold the animal down. Helping, the little dogs darted in to nip out tufts of wool until Uncle Joe kicked at them and they backed away. When Joseph had put a knee on the panting chest and gotten a firm grip on two legs, Uncle Joe took a bolt cutter and clipped back the curled toes on one of the double hoofs. The ram's struggles subsided to a perfunctory kicking as Uncle Joe began paring the glistening flat-cut ends with a jackknife.

"You look like hell," Uncle Joe chided. One eye winced as cigarette smoke trickled up his seamed cheek. "Young man your age shouldn't look so bad."

"Young? I'm forty-six. How old do you have to be before you can use it as an excuse? I get tired like anyone else."

"Good-looking young man. Got the pretty nurses at the hospital all giving you moon eyes, is what I hear. Could have your pick." Uncle Joe scrutinized the neat double points he'd sculpted, then let go and went on to the next foot.

Joseph grinned sadly as he changed his grip. "Who'd you hear that from?"

Uncle Joe just grunted as he levered the bolt cutter. He took up his knife again, gouged muck from between the hooves, wiped the blade on his overalls, and carved away another crescent. Neither man said anything more for a time as they worked, Joseph shifting his grip, Uncle Joe's leathery hands deftly sculpting.

When Uncle Joe had finished the last hoof, they both stood up. The ram rolled quickly onto his feet and trotted out to join the ewes, looking officious to conceal his injured dignity. Uncle Joe wiped his hands on a rag and then used it to slap dust off his overalls. He looked at Joseph critically. It was a sharp look, and long enough for a light plane to drone overhead, drop toward the little airstrip on the other side of Crownpoint, and disappear.

Joseph looked back at him. He still hadn't said anything about why he was here today, and there was a lot to explain. But he didn't have the faintest idea of where to start.

Uncle Joe tossed down his cigarette, ground it out carefully, and walked around Joseph toward the corral gate. He held it open for Joseph, then latched it behind them.

Joseph was surprised when his uncle didn't head for the house door but straight for the big burgundy truck.

"We should take my chitty," Uncle Joe called over his shoulder. "Those roads back in there by Keedays', they'll take the oil pan off yours. Anyway, it'll give me a chance to show off the options."

"They'll have scheduled a Hand-Trembler for the boy," Uncle Joe told him. They were still on the paved road, halfway to Tsaya on 371. Uncle Joe had spent the first ten minutes demonstrating the widgets and gadgets that came with his new truck. Joseph had dutifully tested his own seat adjustments, the interior climate control, and the illuminated vanity mirror in the visor.

"The Hand-Trembler will probably make his diagnosis pretty soon, but it'll take some days for the Singer to get ready, people to be invited, sheep to be butchered, all that. In the meantime, the family will be hiding him from the child services people. I know the Keeday place, it's pretty spread out, they couldn't ever live too close together and now a lot of them have relocated. They've got an old summer sheep camp way up on the plateau, and I guess if they're serious about keeping him out of the state's hands they'll have brought him up there."

"I have Hastiin Keeday's cell phone number. Don't you think we should call them before we get there?"

Uncle Joe shook his head. "No. No reception from here. Anyway, it's better to do this the old-fashioned way. Face-to-face. That way we all trust each other."

"Think they'll let us see him?"

"You and me? Sure. But not today. Their house is, oh, fifteen miles off the county road, the camp is maybe five miles beyond that. Gotta take a horse or go on foot unless you've got an ATV. Take too long to get up there today."

"I meant Julieta and me. And the psychologist she brought in."

"Huh. The psychologist, I doubt."

"They will if they meet her. That's one of the things I need your help with. Help me get them to meet her. To let her see Tommy."

"What's so special about this psychologist? They just went to a lot of trouble to take him away from a bunch of bilagaana shrinks."

Joseph hesitated at the brink and then told him Tommy's symptoms in detail. That Cree Black believed Tommy was possessed by a ghost, that to help her patients she looked at the whole history of emotional debts and unresolved feelings and motives around her patients, among the living and dead alike. He didn't have to explain to Uncle Joe that that's about what the Keedays would be thinking, too, and what general beliefs lay behind the traditional curing Ways.

Uncle Joe's frown had deepened as Joseph described Tommy's condition. His quick sideways glance showed a canny glint, meaning he saw Joseph's request for what it was: an admission that he had lost his bearings, his certainties.

The old man couldn't resist a prod: "Why are you helping her? I thought you didn't believe in that kind of stuff."

"I thought about what you said. About being full of shit. And you're right. Everybody's full of shit, Navajo or whatever, all the superstition and belief, the habits-none of it's any better. Or any worse. Thanks for screwing up my outlook completely, Uncle. Doesn't leave a guy with much, does it? So now I'm trying to take it as it comes. Best I can do."

Joseph saw Uncle Joe's lips move in a wry smile and felt it mirrored on his own lips. He remembered the bittersweet epiphany he'd felt when he'd been lying awake wrestling with his uncle's drunken riddle. With it, of course, came acceptance and absolution: for being Navajo, for his years of rejection of things Navajo. The problem isn't being Navajo, it's being human. We're all equally full of shit and we're therefore all equally okay. The realization had broken a chain that had bound and chafed for decades.

No sense in letting Uncle Joe get too smug, though. He decided to turn it around on the old man. "So why are you helping me?"

Uncle Joe snorted. "I took one look at you and I knew, here's a guy who needs all the help he can get."

"You know what I mean. Why'd you change your mind about our old agreement?"

A shrug. "I see my nephew all screwed up, wrapped around his own axle. He can't untie his knot until Julieta unties hers, she can't untie hers until she knows about her baby. And I'm seventy-four and a worn-out drunk, who the hell am I to make judgments. Besides, I don't need this hanging over me anymore. The pressure."

"I'm sorry, Uncle. Thank you."

Uncle Joe tugged a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket, stuck a Marlboro between his lips. He drove with it unlit for a mile or so before saying sadly, "We'll see if you thank me when we're done with this."

Forty minutes later, they were west of White Rock on one of the innumerable side roads that branched off of County 7760. They had left the vast desert plains of the Chuska Valley and had wound north into a maze of low, decaying mesas and crumbling buttes. Eons of wind and water had ground the land into freestanding forms of sandstone topped by a harder mantel of black rock, leaving grim, crumbling pillars, undercut mushrooms, shapes like castles and creatures. It was so dry that in places dunes of blown sand had drifted across the roads. Uncle Joe carefully navigated his truck over the uneven track. He steered with his cigarette between his knuckles, frowning at the occasional faint tire tracks that led away on the right. Many were barely visible in the brown grit, or disappeared as they crossed sandstone shelves higher up. Joseph couldn't imagine how anyone could find the right one.

"I have to piss again," Uncle Joe said abruptly. He stopped the truck in the middle of the track, shut it down, and got out. He walked down the track a way, selected a rock to water, and unzipped. Joseph got out and joined him.

It was completely silent here. The only sound was the tick of the truck's engine and the flow of their urine. They were in a hollow in the land where the surrounding buttes and humps cut off any long views. No wind stirred. After a long moment Uncle Joe finished and zipped himself up.

Joseph was halfway back to the truck before he realized Uncle Joe wasn't with him. He looked back to see the old man still over there, standing with one boot up on the rock, hands on his knee, staring ruminatively toward the northwest.

When Joseph walked back to him, Uncle Joe dug a wrinkled cigarette pack out of his jacket pocket, withdrew a bent Marlboro. He scowled deeply at it before he lit it.

"Just up ahead, you see where that outcrop comes near the road?" Uncle Joe blew smoke to indicate where to look. "Back forty years ago, used to be a little track went up just the other side. Nobody goes there now, can't even see where it was, but I went up there one time. This was about ten years after I got back from the war. I was hawking a new sheep-dip formula to my customers out this way, had a good deal going with the manufacturer. I was driving an old Willys, everybody thought I was rich to have a car, most people still got around on horses. Best little chitty I ever had, but it died on me right about this same spot. Couldn't get it going again. Out here, I knew nobody was going to come by for a long time, so I started walking and when I saw that track, I went up it. I thought I'd ask to borrow somebody's horse, or hitch a ride to where there was a phone. But there was a Wolf lived up there."

Joseph didn't ask what kind of wolf. Looking up at the black-topped, austere outcrop and the invisible country beyond, he felt a little quake inside. The day wasn't hot enough to make an inversion layer, but the air seemed to quiver over the land in that direction.

"He was very old, eighty, ninety, who knows. He probably would have died by himself but later I learned he had a daughter who checked in on him sometimes. Even she was old, even she was afraid of him. Nobody else would come near him. I had heard stories about a Wolf somewhere around here, but I didn't know it was the same guy until I saw him."

Obviously, Joseph realized, Uncle Joe hadn't stopped at this spot by chance. "What did he do?" he asked.

"He was bad. He took other people's animals. Sometimes he'd steal sheep to eat them, but sometimes he'd kill someone's horse or sheep just to do bad for them. Anything anybody did that he didn't like, he'd become their enemy. He dug up dead people from their graves, made poisons of their flesh, and some people said he ate it, too. People said he made their children sick, made them die. Made women have deformed babies."

"How would anyone know it was him who made the kids sick?"

"So this time I went up there, I'm going up the track and about, oh, two miles up I come to a hogan and back behind it a couple of pole sheds and a stock pen up near one of these little buttes, right up against the cliff. It's a real beat-up place-trash, rags caught in the bushes, tools on the ground, roof no good. I call hello and no one answers, but I know someone's there, I can smell smoke. The hogan's door is open, and after I stand there for a few minutes, I go closer to it and look inside. First thing I see is that the north wall is broken down. It's a dead person's hogan. But it looks like somebody lives in there anyway, inside it's a mess of dishes, blankets, food bones, the fire on the floor's smoldering a little."

The cigarette was trembling between Uncle Joe's fingers. He gave Joseph a round-eyed look, and Joseph nodded. Only an extremely antisocial, possibly even sociopathic, person would live in a death hogan. You didn't have to believe the superstitions to be frightened of someone who would commit such a grave offense against social norms.

Uncle Joe fell silent, staring at the sandstone outcrop. From here, its profile resembled a huge dead iguana, angling up from the rocky desert floor.

The old man was shaking his head regretfully. "I should have known better. Because on the way in, before I got to the hogan, I'd seen a couple of dead animals. Dead coyote. Dead crow. Dead rabbit. That's how a Skinwalker moves around. This one was too old to get around in his human body, but he could still use theirs. The Skinwalker projects his chindi into the animal, gets all the animal's powers-see in the dark, walk with no sound, smell people out, fly. When he's done using it, he goes back to his own body and the animal body dies. That's what those animals were. What he'd cast off."

The silence pressed around them again. Joseph felt unaccountably exposed out here, under the naked sky, the truck sitting in the middle of the track in the certain knowledge no one would come by.

"Maybe we should get going, Uncle Joe. What is it, another ten miles or so, right?"

"But at the time I just thought, okay, whoever lives up here was shooting pests or something. Then up at the hogan, I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe somebody died here just yesterday, the family's got another hogan, maybe back beyond the sheds and the little cliff, out of view. I'm still hoping I can borrow a horse. So I head back to the sheds, I'm thinking maybe somebody's working over there and doesn't hear me yet. And when I get over there, I see there's a sort of a cave in the ledge, the opening's about ten feet wide, half hidden behind a shed and a dead pinon tree. I looked into that cave."

Even resting on his knee, Uncle Joe's cigarette hand was shaking so hard the ash scattered. He paused for so long that Joseph thought he wouldn't go on, and he realized suddenly what a huge effort it required for Uncle Joe to tell this.

At last the rasping voice continued, quavering yet determined: "I ducked my head to look inside. Wasn't really a cave, more of an undercut-maybe only ten feet deep. The back wall sloped up to meet the ceiling, real rough, just broken rock. It took my eyes a second to adapt to the darkness under there, but the first thing I see is clumps of dark shapes up where the wall meets the ceiling. Took me a second to see it's bats, maybe fifty, a hundred of them. Then I see that part of the rock wall isn't a rock wall, it's a naked dead man, hanging upside down like the bats. He's as dried up as a mummy, just skin over bones, he's the same color as the rocks, he's streaked with guano same as the wall. He's got his ankles hooked into a loop of rope pegged in up near the ceiling, hands folded across his chest."

"What the hell-"

' 'And just when I realize what I'm looking at, the fingers of his hands start to spread! Then his eyes open, he looks straight at me and bends at the waist so he sits partway up, sticking out from the wall. He spreads his arms wide, he's still being a bat. All this took maybe three seconds total elapsed time since I first looked in there. My heart stopped dead. I had actual, medical cardiac arrest. And then I went running down that track. I ran all the way back to where we are now and maybe two miles back toward White Rock."

Joseph felt sick. From Uncle Joe's trembling voice, the quiver of his jaw, it was clear that the old man was telling it factually. Some senile old hermit, gone crazy, maybe nearing death, morbid with Alzheimer's, lost in sick fantasies, violating taboos. No one to supervise him, bring him back home to his humanity.

"I wish I'd never looked into that cave," Uncle Joe said, voice hollow with regret. "I wish I'd never seen that. It was bad enough when I thought he was a dead man, a mummy like over in Canyon del Muerte. But what I felt when those fingers began to spread… I don't like to think fear can be that strong."

"Whatever happened to him?"

Uncle Joe swiveled his face toward Joseph's, looking very old, wrinkles swarming his eyes and brow like some fantastic design of ornamental scars.

"Not long after, they killed him. People from around here got together. Six men went up, six good men. Old Hastiin Keeday, the grandfather we're going to see, he was one of them. Killed the Wolf, then burned him and the hogan and everything up there. Nothing left, I hear. No trace."

A horrible thought occurred to Joseph. "Because you told them-"

"No. It had been building up for a long time, people were scared, something had to be done. I never told anyone what I'd seen, ever. Not even my wife. I never wanted to say it out loud. You are the very first person, Joseph."

That was true, too, Joseph knew, and he felt oddly honored to know his uncle had made such an effort for him. From Uncle Joe's discomfort, he knew this was not just another argument for the old man's late-gained traditionalist worldview. It was an act of deep humility and courage. And, touchingly, affection.

"Why did you tell me, Uncle?"

"Yeah, I'm trying to figure that out. Now I'm so shook up I lost what I was going to say." Uncle Joe looked down at his cigarette, which had burned to the knuckles of his shaking hand and had to be searing him. He flicked it down, ground it out, and stared at his own footprint for a moment.

"After that, I changed. The family put on a Sing for me, and that helped. Mainly, what changed me was I had to think about what it meant to be a man like him, how he got that way. Once, he was probably like anyone else. Then he changed, maybe bit by bit, or maybe all at once, who knows, maybe what's happening to Tommy Keeday happened to him and that's what he became. I don't know. Before that, I was a little fast and loose-in the army, in school. I could talk people into anything, I didn't mind taking their money in ways that weren't so good. And women-that kind of thing. But for years after that, every time I was alone, I saw that… thing… sitting up off the rocks. It came together in my mind with some bad stuff I'd seen in Korea, too, made me realize that whatever was wrong with that Wolf came from something that's inside every man. Even me. And I decided I didn't want to become anything like that. I couldn't change what I'd seen, but what I would be-that much I could control, I could decide."

Uncle Joe had begun drifting back toward the truck, Joseph tagging just behind. "So I guess I thought you should probably think about that. Before we talk to the Keedays. When you're dealing with this boy's problem and the business with Julieta. Today we're coming clean about Julieta's baby, I'll help you however I can. But a thing like this, what you're going to be dealing with, it's going to be very hard. But what you do with it-that you should think about. How you let it change you. How you might choose."

Back in the cab, Uncle Joe didn't start up the truck right away. He sat, slumped with weariness, gazing at the dead-iguana ledge, as if lost in memory. It occurred to Joseph that he hadn't seen his uncle take a drink today, and that he couldn't recall any other time he'd seen him without a bottle close by. He had to be feeling the hard hand of his addiction on him by now. It reinforced his sense that the old man was doing something very heroic for him today.

At last Uncle Joe turned the key and the truck's big engine made a startling roar in the silence.

"Tell you one thing, though," Uncle Joe said finally. He shook his head, as if astonished and grateful for at least one certainty in life. "That Willys was one good little jeep. That was the only time it ever died on me. Only time it ever let me down, and I worked that bastard like a mule."