Land of Echoes

42

Finally getting Joseph's map right, she found the Keedays' driveway and drove the dirt track to its end. The grandparents' trailer and hogan were at the far end of a scattering of structures in a canyonlike area between the parched, sun-scoured buttes. The young man waiting for her came to the truck window and introduced himself as Eric, Tommy's brother, although Cree inferred that he was what most Americans would call a cousin. He was a slender Navajo in his late teens wearing jeans, jogging shoes, and a red sweatshirt with a UNM logo. His grandparents were gone, he said, making preparations for the healing ceremony that would be held in a few days. His mother and uncle and brother were taking care of Tommy; they'd had a hard night of it, everybody was very worried.

Eric looked worried, too, Cree thought. No-scared to death.

Cree parked and got out into a silence that stunned her. No wind down here, no long views. The derelict hogans and sheds enhanced the abandoned feeling of what was by far the remotest human habitation she had ever seen.

Eric noticed her reaction and managed a nervous grin. "Compared to this," he warned her, "sheep camp is really out there."

He led her to a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. She got on behind him, snugged the straps of her backpack, and put her hands around his flat belly. In another moment they were away, bouncing across the rugged ground. Ahead, the dry soil showed wheel tracks snaking out into dozens of routes through the rock formations.

"So I take it you go to UNM?" Cree called into Eric's ear. It seemed odd to have your legs and arms wrapped around someone about whom you knew nothing.

He half turned his head to answer. "No. Just started at Dine College. Majoring in education."

"Have you seen Tommy since… he came back?"

"No. My mother won't let me too near him. That's okay with me."

In a few minutes, Eric had steered them up a rise to a larger plateau topped by gently rolling swells and more vegetation. He accelerated, and the engine noise precluded more talk for a while. The smell of the ATV's exhaust sucked up in the back draft, an oily tang.

When they slowed to navigate through a rockier stretch, Cree thought of another question: "Are you guys close, you and Tommy? You know him pretty well?"

Eric tossed his head. "Ever since he was a baby, yeah. But my folks moved us up to Burnham back when I was a kid, and I'm older, so we went to different schools. He's a real good artist, idn't it?"

Ever since he was a baby: didn't mean anything either way. Of course, Eric might not know. Cree gave up on it. She closed her eyes and just held on, feeling the jolt and sway of the ATV. Trying to charge up her batteries. She almost drowsed despite the jarring motion and the relentless wail of the engine.

The one thing she hadn't taken time to consider was just how she expected to survive. What would keep her intact, herself, when she surrendered to an entity this powerful, charismatic, invasive? What talisman could she hold for protection? It had to be simple and true. Love, of course, love's the only thing strong enough. Love endures, love perseveres. I know who I am because I love and am loved. Dee and the twins. Mom. Ed, Joyce. Loving Mike and being loved by him. And Pop, of course, my dear poppa. Paul? Not at that point yet. But love, that's what'll bring you back. Bring you home every time.

Cree caught her head starting to loll and forced her eyes open just in time to be startled by an explosion of movement off to the right. Two ravens had leapt heavily off a small rodent carcass, spreading their wings and flapping resentfully away.

She'd barely caught her breath when Eric pointed up ahead. A low tarpaper roof hunched just behind a rise a half mile away.

"Almost there," he told her.

Eric stopped the ATV a hundred yards from the hogan, wishing her a hushed "Good luck." Cree walked the rest of the way, carrying her backpack and a bag of food Eric had brought in the ATV's basket. She was very conscious of the silence here: There was only the crunch of her boots on dry soil, the silvery hiss of her own bloodstream. No sound of voices or human activity.

But she could feel it in the hogan. Saturating the silence was the shrill psi buzz she recognized now: the dissonance in Tommy, the radiation of the psychic war inside him. A prickle went up her throat and neck and into her scalp.

Where is everybody? she wondered.

The hogan was low and crude, topped by a rusted stovepipe that canted from a tattered tar-paper roof. Behind it stood some open pole sheds and fenced pens. Beyond, the barren ground stretched away. To the east, boulders and even a few low trees topped the higher swells and bounded the lonely horizon.

She was thirty feet from the door when it opened suddenly and her heart took a slug of adrenaline like a kick in the chest. But it was just a normal-looking human woman. She came out, shut the door quickly behind her, and set its outside hasp.

"Yaateeh'", Cree managed breathlessly.

"Yaateeh', Dr. Black," the woman said quietly. "I'm Ellen, Tommy's aunt."

They shook hands and Cree handed over the bag of supplies. Ellen was a broad, plump, capable-looking woman in her midfifties, with a square, plain face obviously more accustomed to smiles than to the harrowed look of exhaustion and fear there now. She wore jeans and a brown canvas jacket over a couple of checked shirts. Her hair lay on her shoulder in a dark braid, lightly streaked with gray. Cree liked her instantly.

" I… I'm sorry if I looked startled for a second there," Cree stammered. "I was wondering where everybody was."

"My oldest son is over there," Ellen told her, pointing to some sheds. "He got hurt trying to hold Tommy this morning. I think his nose might be broken, but he won't go to have it checked out. My brother Raymond is inside."

"How is Tommy?"

A muffled thump and low voices came from inside the hogan, and Ellen answered with her eyes.

This close to her, Cree could see that her clothes were crusted with spatters of food, and patches of dirt were ground into the fabric at knees, elbows, shoulders. The backs of her hands were scratched, and her lower lip was swollen and split with a line of dried blood. Ellen flinched as another series of thumps came from inside.

"Do you know who the chindi is?" Ellen whispered. "What it wants?"

"No."

Ellen looked at her curiously. "Do you know how to heal him?"

"Not exactly, no."

The look of puzzlement increased. "Do you know why he asks for you?"

More noises came from inside the hogan: sounds of exertion, a clatter. Cree felt the prickle come up her throat again. "I'm not sure. Sorry."

Ellen's eyes searched Cree's face as if she might be missing some hidden message, or looking for clues Cree was joking. Cree could imagine what she saw: some bilagaana from the big city, way off her familiar turf, frowsy from lack of sleep, with a scabbed, bruised forehead and scraped-up hands. Not much to inspire confidence.

But a surprising thing happened. Ellen's searching expression gave way to one her face wore much more naturally: a grin, fleeting but radiant.

"Well, you sure tell it like it is, idn't it? Something to be said for that, I guess." Ellen chuckled, sobered quickly, and turned back toward the hogan door.

Cree followed her, marveling at the incredible resilience of this woman's good nature. After what she must have been through in the last thirty-six hours! In the shadow of psychic siege that surrounded this place, it was a bright spark of hopefulness.

It took a moment for Cree's eyes to adapt to the relative darkness inside. The first thing she saw was the single window, a dust-hazed rectangle that cast a Vermeer light on the interior of the eight-sided room. Then she saw Tommy, on hands and knees on the dirt floor. He was struggling through an obstacle course of an overturned table and chairs and a scattering of tin cups and plastic plates.

A middle-aged Navajo man stood motionless on one side of the room, wearing the look of befuddled alertness of someone trying to cross a highway in heavy traffic. It was Ellen's brother, Raymond, a big man dressed in combat pants and a T-shirt that revealed banded workingman's muscles in his arms. His black hair was coiled in a simple bun that lay at the base of his neck.

Tommy's skin was pale and waxy. The face that twisted to look up at Cree was emaciated yet puffy, a sick look exacerbated by the dirt smeared across it. His shirt hung in rags from his shoulders. Scratches bled on his arms. When Cree came in, he looked up with uneven eyes and she saw it react to her presence. A hump writhed through his torso, torquing him, and abruptly he heaved himself up onto two legs like a wounded bear.

For an instant as he rose, Cree had a visual impression of a shape that trailed behind, a phantom being that overlapped Tommy's physical body only incompletely. One whole, vague arm sprang from near the center of his back, the lower part of a leg from his inner thigh. She understood it instantly: It isn't oriented right in him.

Tommy swayed on his feet and she lost the image. She stood ten feet away, watching him, not sure how to greet him, trying to find the starting place.

Distantly, she heard Ellen call out, "Ray! Raymond!"

The big man stirred and after a pause glanced over as if startled to see her. "Yeah."

Their voices surprised Cree, too. She realized that she'd been standing there for a time, just inside the half-open door. Hanging in mesmerized indecision as time stretched. And yet now everything was happening too fast. Tommy was walking toward the door. Before he got as far as Cree, Ray had moved in from the side of the room and half blocked him. Tommy twitched violently in alarm but not at Ray. He was looking at Cree as he asked, "What are you doing here?" Ellen answered quickly, "It's Dr. Black!" but Cree wasn't sure it was Tommy who had spoken. His brows had dropped and he gazed from beneath them with that baleful, predatory look. This close, she felt the particular lights of the intertwined beings in him. Narrative, she reminded herself vaguely, find its narrative. Within the confusion she sensed a strong spark of impulsiveness and behind it a relentless confidence and bottomless determination. Driven. Yet there was fear and remorse and anger and impatience, too. She wanted to surprise the entity but now she couldn't remember the word the girl had used for brother, and without thinking she called out "Garrett?" Everything was a maelstrom of confusing impressions, and it took her a little while to figure out why: She was down on the dirt floor with Tommy on top of her, pounding at her. His waxy face tossed from side to side above her, screaming. Ellen and Ray seemed to move with lazy, floating motions as they bent to reach for him. Cree fought off his hands. It lasted only a moment and then his efforts became random and he rolled off her and began convulsing on the floor. She twisted away from his humping body and got to her hands and knees, feeling a huge pain throughout her, as if her bones had all exploded and her organs ruptured and her heart split. But that was his pain. And still that sense of powerful determination burned, the force of will, the imperious and resistless will, backed by a tangle of feelings from sorrow to tenderness to self-hatred to yearning. As it went on, it veered into a nightmare place of hatred and killing urge. It engulfed her. She vaguely remembered her decision to surrender, but now every instinct of self-preservation screamed in protest against the invasion. Reflexively, she pushed away the foreign being and groped for a life rope, a single certainty, that would pull her free. She found it in the image of Hy and Zoe, wrapping her thoughts around them and clinging to the love between them.

It gave her the strength to get up and lurch a few steps away. Tommy was lying on his back now, Ellen and Ray holding his shoulders with all their weight but unable to restrain his arm from pushing up and snapping back. Slow push, snap! back. The chest rolled with its uneven sideways panting and from a long distance Cree heard herself saying, "Watch his breathing! We have to watch his breathing!" Ellen's lip was split again and a line of fresh blood divided her square chin.

Something moved in Cree's peripheral vision and for an instant she didn't recognize it as it hurtled toward her face. Reflexively she shied from it before she saw it was her own hand and arm. It came up and joined her left hand to sweep the hair out of her face and tuck it back behind her ears.

Afterward she held the hand in front of her and wriggled its fingers. They did as they were told. She made a peace sign and a thumbs-up and a fist. It really was her hand and arm, she was in charge. But that half second of unfamiliarity terrified her more than anything she had ever seen or imagined.