Land of Echoes

41

Three hours later, Cree finally admitted that she was lost. Following her AAA Indian Country map and the hand-drawn map Joseph had faxed, she had taken 666 north from Ya-Ta-Hey toward Naschitti. For the first hour, the highway stretched straight into the distance, dividing the world into two completely different halves: on the left, the foothills and massive shoulders of the Chuska Mountains, blue and remote; on the right, the Chuska Valley, a bone-dry plain so vast it gave her vertigo. The dirt here was yellow-brown, parched, bare, and so smooth she could see for what had to be thirty or forty miles. With such long views, she thought at first, finding the Keedays' place would be easy.

But after turning onto the county road and driving sixteen miles on rough gravel, she found the land changing. The vast open spaces gave way to a mysterious country of low, decaying rock formations. The flat-topped, sharp-shouldered little buttes and mesas looked like ancient, abandoned castles. At times she felt as if she were driving the empty streets of some lost city being devoured by the desert. And that was before she'd turned off into the labyrinth of lesser tracks and trails that led into the heart of the necropolis.

For the next hour, she'd tried to find the Keedays' driveway. For the last hour, she'd just been trying to find her way back to the county road and start over.

It wasn't Joseph's fault. The map he'd drawn was clear, the landscape features neatly labeled in the most precise handwriting she'd ever seen a physician use. But it was a maze in here-wheel tracks branching and forking again, weaving between buttes and rock formations. Innumerable flat-topped rotting-away buttes all looking the same. No long views to orient by. The fire of urgency that had rocketed her out of the hotel had burned itself out in the frustrating search for the right road, the right rocks, the right direction. Hopelessness began to steal over her.

It was only one o'clock, the sun still searing down, but Cree decided that this was the spookiest country she'd ever been in. It was so dry, so parched, so devoid of plant or animal life that it seemed impossible anyone could live out here. In three hours, even on the so-called county road, she had not encountered a single vehicle or human being. The little buttes were not the lovely, red-hued, sensuous forms of Window Rock, but low, gnarled, close-set islands of mustard yellow shot with streaks of gray and capped by ugly black tops. They stuck up from the desert floor like the stumps of rotting teeth. As she grew tired, the shapes began to frighten her, taking on the look of monsters, gargoyles, corpses, aliens.

You're exhausted, she cautioned herself. Getting morbid.

She stopped the truck and looked at her maps with no sense of where she was. Her back and shoulders aching from the hours of tense, tricky driving, she stared at the forking canyons ahead without any idea of which to choose. She took a long swallow from her water bottle and noticed that it was nearly empty.

After ten more minutes of frustration, she gave up on the wheel tracks and decided to look for a way to higher ground, a vantage from which she could get her bearings. It took a while, but at last she found a promising-looking slope and was able to wrestle the truck over gnarled rock and loose gravel to a small promontory thirty feet above the desert floor.

The longer views gave her only a moment of relief. She could see the open plain from here, but she was separated from it by miles of the broken maze, the dead city. The ridge of the Chuskas loomed against the western horizon, but again it was blocked by miles of geological wreckage. There was no human-made thing as far as the eye could see.

She shut off the truck, too tired to go on. And into the gap charges Cree Black to save the day: Joyce was right to remind her of her hubris. Quite the rescue operation this was turning out to be.

She took her water bottle and got stiffly out of the truck. The sun was so bright that even through her sunglasses the light seemed to ricochet painfully inside her skull. Surprisingly, though, it wasn't so bad-it scoured her out, bleached her clean. The sun and that cool, perfect breeze, dry and silent. From up here, the ancient rocks all around seemed a little less menacing. She put down the water bottle and began swinging her arms and rolling her shoulders, trying to shake out the tension. Deep breaths of the good air.

Since leaving the motel, she had been dutifully trying to follow Ed's advice: to put her thoughts in order and inventory the usable information at her disposal. But it wasn't much. She had Julieta's theory about Garrett McCarty, which might make sense if Tommy was indeed her child. It was based entirely on Julieta's powerful sense of recognition of Tommy as her son. That odd and often irrational certainty was something she'd learned to trust in herself and others, and from the beginning of this case she'd considered knowing about their biological relationship, and the inevitable dynamic it would create, an important asset.

But given Julieta's state of mind, the validity of that recognition was in doubt.

Okay, so maybe Julieta's thing with Tommy was purely an accident of circumstance, a red herring, made real by Cree's intense empathy with Julieta and reinforced by her own longing to have a child.

She bent at the waist, letting her arms hang loose. Her hair hung down and flipped in the breeze, the blood rushed to her temples. She rolled her neck and felt her vertebrae crackle. After a few moments, she felt somewhat refreshed and stood to take another swig of water and gaze out over the endless badlands.

What else? She had the ghost girl at the ravine and the many ways the mesa seemed to figure in. Maybe the entity was the ghost of the boy named Shinaai, long anchored at the ravine, that had chanced upon a suitable host environment in Tommy. Why Tommy? Maybe it was, as the Navajos often claimed, an ancestor spirit-maybe Tommy was a lineal descendant of Shinaai or one of the others killed there. Maybe Tommy's deep yearning to know his ancestors, to overcome his sense of disconnection, had psychically primed him and made him more vulnerable to some rapacious life urge enduring at the ravine. There it was again, the role of biological relationship and recognition, inarguable: We inherit our forebears' hopes, debts, and errors.

Which naturally brought up Tommy's most immediate forebears-maybe-Tom and Bernice Keeday. Whether or not they were his biological parents, they'd've had a deep emotional connection. Now that she knew more about the circumstances of their deaths, she was in a better position to compare her experience of the ghost's narrative with their perimortem moments. As for their personalities, their characters, she'd have to ask Tommy and his relatives up at the camp. If she ever found the place.

She tried to feel more hopeful, but objectively her inventory had only served to show her, yet again, how little she knew. Really, she had just about zip that would help identify the ghost and its issues.

The scary thing about her situation was the way it would affect her process. Ordinarily, she relied on external information to augment the often vague impressions she received during empathic contact. Knowing specifics like the ghost's identity and circumstances of death helped pin down what motivated it, what remained unresolved, and which living people might figure in its perseverance and therefore in its alleviation. The absence of information now meant that she'd have to rely more on her ability to share the ghost's experience. She had always tried to set limits on the depth of her communion, sharing a ghost's world dream only with greatest caution. The reason was simple: Without preserving a clear sense of her own, separate identity, she could lose herself in the process. With this entity, a ghost who was an invader, a soul conqueror with a survival impulse that was functionally predatory, it had seemed imperative to keep some distance.

But increasingly it looked as if she'd have to rely on communion to learn what she had to. She'd have to merge with the entity. Surrender to it. She couldn't bear the thought, but neither could she bear the thought of what was happening to Tommy. Maybe she'd absorbed the impulse from Julieta, a mother's protective urge, but here was one other bitter certainty: She would do anything to get the thing out of him.

Desperation came over her again and she began scanning the horizon to the south, looking for some clue as to which way to go. She was squinting against the glare when Edgar's cell phone began vibrating against her thigh.

She dug it out of her pocket and pulled up the antenna with her teeth.

"Cree?" It was Joyce.

"So far, anyway, yeah. I think." She held the phone away from her head, conscious of its emanations.

"Hey, don't joke around. How's reception? I've been trying and trying. You getting me now?"

"Spotty, but yeah, I read you. The country is rough here, breaks up the signal. I'm on a high place now."

"You up at the sheep camp?"

Cree looked around at the wilderness of bare rock and silvery sky and decided not to give Joyce anything to worry about. "I, um, I'm getting there, yeah."

"Well, Ed and I are in St. Michael's. At St. Michael's-the priory or church or mission or whatever they call it? We've got something for you on the mesa. The ravine."

"Good timing! I could use something to go on here."

"Well… this… help." Joyce's words came across interspersed with silence and static.

Cree turned to face south, tugged windblown hair from the corner of her lips and tucked it behind her ear. "Say again?"

"Maybe this will help. The Franciscan brothers who started this place back in the 1800s kept good records. They were working on a Navajo-language dictionary, and they also wrote down observations of Navajo traditions, oral histories, and events in the region? So this guy who lives here, teaches at St. Mike's school, he's a friar or whatever, I don't know my Catholic stuff… Father Bryant-Brother Bryant? — he's working on a book, a collection of Navajo personal histories from back then. He half remembered the story when we told him about the lost goats. We went and looked it up in his files."

The phone's radio waves were hurting Cree's mastoid bone, but this could be crucial. She kept it close to her ear, staring out at the distant smooth land to the south. High above, alone in the vast sky, a single puffy cloud floated, serene and mysterious as a cryptic smoke signal.

"You there, Cree?"

"I'm here."

"Okay. So, 1863, Kit Carson and his men are exterminating the Navajos. The ones they can't kill or catch outright, they burn their fields and shoot their livestock, figuring the winter without food will finish them off. This is about six months before they're sent off on the Long Walk. Carson's got detachments of soldiers, some led by Dine'e'anai' guides, rounding up Navajos all over the place-"

"What kind of guides?"

"Oh, Dine'e'anai'. Means 'the People Who Are Enemies.' 'The Enemy People'-that's the term you got from your ghost girl, Cree! They were a group of Navajos who allied themselves with the whites. Traitors. Knowing the land, the language, they made it very hard for the other Navajos to escape."

The thought saddened Cree: The division and conflict inside the Navajo soul had been there for a long time. As with every other people.

Joyce insightfully interpreted her silence. "Yeah, it was bad. Everything was falling apart for the Navajos. They… it… time

…"

"Joyce, I lost that last part."

"The Navajos called it the Time of Fearing."

Time of fearing: a good description of this moment, too, Cree thought. Of what Tommy and the Keedays, and Julieta, were going through.

"So, this is the story a Navajo survivor told one of the Franciscans, thirty years later. A detachment of soldiers was down in the area where the school is now, and this one family group that lived near there was trying to escape. They're fleeing to the top of the mesa up that ravine, it's the only way up on the northern end. They're driving their goats and sheep with them. Two goats get loose, run back down the ravine. One of the sons goes after them, you can see why, they know they'll need the meat if they're gonna survive. Up on the top of the mesa, the family sees the soldiers coming, so the boy's sister gets scared and goes to call him back. The father and several uncles come down the ravine after her, but they're too late, the soldiers are there. There's a fight, both kids get killed, and the father and one uncle. The others got rounded up, sent to the concentration camp. Four years later, the surviving family members moved back to their home turf. They didn't resettle near the ravine, too much sorrow there, bad ghosts. After that they called it Lost Goats Mesa, don't ask me to say it in Navajo, sort of a testament to what had happened. Eventually, the first McCartys came, started mining, bought up the land. People moved away. A few generations later, the story was forgotten."

Despondent, Cree couldn't answer immediately. Lost Goats. One little accident, the goats running back. Then tragedy.

"So what can you tell me about them?" she managed at last. "Did they record the family's name?"

"Well, that's complex. It was the children's mother who told the story, thirty years later, right? She was called Yil' Dezbah, and she was of the Waters Run Together clan. Father Bryant says her name means 'Goes to War With,' a pretty common name. I know you'll be wondering if Tommy or Peter Yellowhorse is a descendant of that group, but tracing lineage'll probably be impossible. The clans mix up thoroughly, a lot of names got Anglicized, plus back then it was matrilineal, but for the last couple of generations people mostly use the father's name… Maybe the Keedays'll know the genealogy here."

"The boy-how old was the boy?"

"Older than the girl, that's all I know."

"Was his name Shinaai?"

"What? I lost that."

"What was the boy's name?"

"Doesn't say. I asked Father Bryant about shinaai-he says it just means 'my older brother.' Sorry." Joyce blew out a breath. "Think any of this'll help?"

"Absolutely. Great work, Joyce." It wasn't much, but having any data at all was like a tonic. Cree felt exhilaration rising in her. A moment later, her pulse kicked up still further as something flashed between the buttes to the south. Reflected sunlight. She tore off her sunglasses and squinted and after a moment saw what had caused it: about a mile away, the top half of a red pickup truck was just visible, skimming along above an invisible fold of ground. The county road! She'd been this close for the last half hour and hadn't been able to see it. At last she could find her way out of this godforsaken maze.

"Joyce, I have to tell you, you're the greatest!"

"Sorry, I didn't catch that. Say again?"

The phone was killing Cree, and the urgency of her mission had returned like gangbusters. She hurried around to the door of the truck.

"I said I love you, and please tell Ed I love him, too."

"Hey, Cree-I don't like the tone of final farewell here."

Cree heard it perfectly but opted to dodge: "What? Sorry, I think we're losing reception. Talk to you soon, okay?"

She shut the phone and slid it back into her pocket.