Land of Echoes

49

Julieta rode the Keedays' horse as hard as the animal could stand. It was a tall, bony paint gelding, already getting shaggy for winter, out of shape from too much time in the grandparents' corral. She pushed him until he wheezed. The air was a harsh, crisp cold. A hundred feet ahead in the predawn light, Joseph sat behind Tommy's cousin on the ATV. The taillights, so bright when they'd started out, were already dimming as the landscape drew light from the sky.

She hadn't heard from Cree again, but as she'd lain there in Joseph's bed the worry had intruded on the oasis of serenity they'd made together and increasingly she'd sensed it was urgent to get to Tommy. They had left Window Rock at two in the morning and driven the empty roads and wandering wheel tracks for over two hours. They'd awakened Tommy's grandparents and cousin, saddled this horse, and set out.

Once they'd climbed out of the strange canyonlike maze and reached the higher plateau, the going was easier. The horse could sustain a lope for a couple of minutes on end. The ATV bobbed and swerved as the eastern sky turned a bland gray-blue above the dark land.

At last Eric stopped the ATV and let Joseph off, pointing ahead toward a low, dark hogan. Julieta cantered past them, pulled up at the open door, leapt off. The gelding huffed as she dropped the reins and looked through the doorway. A single dull rectangle of window light. Nobody inside.

"Mrs. McCarty?"

She whirled at the voice. A middle-aged Navajo woman stood thirty feet away, looking haggard, blowing puffs of steam into the freezing air. Tommy's aunt, Ellen.

"They're over here. He only got a little way last time. It's good you came. He's starting again. Cree says if he does it again, he'll die."

Julieta's heart clenched at the words. She followed Ellen into an area of rocks and sagebrush, and then spotted the other people: two men, standing some distance apart from two blanket-wrapped forms on the ground. Cree and Tommy.

She hurried to them. Tommy lay twisted among blankets and sheepskins on the bare ground, motionless but not quite asleep. His eyes were open to staring slits in a face that was almost skeletal and greenish in the predawn light. Julieta was seized with worry for him, and with it came that sense of knowing, of resonance, of recognition that she swore she'd forbid herself but that came anyway. She knew him. It had to be her child's ghost in Tommy.

"Hey," Cree said amiably. "Good timing."

Julieta was horrified by Cree's appearance. Sitting at Tommy's side, she looked battered and drained. Even with the heavy blanket around her, Julieta could see the hard cant of her head, the tilt of her shoulders. Some of the grotesque half twist of the ghost had come into her.

"Are you all right?" she stammered.

"Fine," Cree panted. "Listen. Not much time. This is going to be hard, Julieta. Hardest thing you ever did. I can't tell you how. Tommy's just about gone. I've only lived through the dying twice. And it's just about done me in. But Tommy's done it dozens of times. And there's the breathing thing. He can't survive another time. You have to let the ghost go. One shot at it. Has to be just right."

Joseph finally joined them. He came to Julieta's side and put his arm around her waist and she put both her hands over his, pressing him against her.

"Hey, Dr. Tsosie," Cree rasped.

"Dr. Black." Joseph bobbed his head. He kept himself outwardly calm, but Julieta knew that his physician's eyes saw the crisis here for what it was.

"Is… is it-?" Julieta began.

Tommy moaned and stirred. Behind his slitted eyelids, his eyes were moving wildly. Julieta felt a reprise of that numbing indecision that meant the ghost was awakening.

"You have to go with it," Cree croaked faintly. "With the ghost. It's reliving a memory. Like a recurring dream? There's a place where you can intercept. When he knocks at the door. Don't do it sooner, worlds won't mesh. Don't do it later or it'll be too late."

Julieta wasn't sure whether Cree was speaking allegorically. Knocks at the door-to the real world? To consciousness? To your heart? Cree's vocabulary mixed poetry and psychology and philosophy, you couldn't always tell.

"What would you like me to do?" Joseph asked.

Cree looked up at him. She started to speak, then seemed to catch something in his face that needed further inspection. After a few more seconds, she almost seemed to smile. "Just keep back a little. With the others."

Joseph nodded, stepped back to join Tommy's family. Tommy's legs began moving in weak, rhythmic thrusts. He was walking while lying down.

Cree had closed her eyes. "Listen, Julieta. At first you won't know what's going on. It'll seem like random thoughts. Like you're making it up. Like a daydream. Just let it happen."

Julieta felt the ghost burgeoning. With its hypnotic aura came that irrational sense of knowing again. Panicking, she asked Cree, "What are you going to do?"

"I'll just go with him. Help you find the… story. But I'm totally screwed up, Julieta. I'm Tommy, I'm you, I'm me, I'm Peter. I can't-"

"Peter?"

"Tommy's his son." Cree's neck twisted and it seemed to hurt her. "Your best," she choked out. "The person you'd rather be. Got to stack it up right. Like you said."

Julieta wanted to grab her shoulders and shake answers out of her. But Cree's eyes were rolling behind her closed lids. Tommy was moving in his awful parody of walking. Not knowing what else to do, Julieta knelt next to him. She put her hand on his side, felt the trembling effort of his muscles. She shut her eyes.

At first she thought there was nothing she could find. Images popped into her head, but she didn't trust them: fantasy, memory, random subconscious collage, wishful thinking? The effort made her almost sleepy. But some things persisted. She still felt the sense of familiarity, and she let that guide her.

The side of a hill and a horizon. She recognized the land with a shock. Over near Peter's place, the hills along Black Creek. He was walking toward her house. It was chilly out, and the dry hills told her it was autumn. It would have been that fall, when everything fell apart. Yes, it was. He had just come from San Diego. His thoughts embarrassed her. Joseph would hear them. Peter was tired and sore and yet he sparkled and spangled with bright feelings. That energy: She knew that energy, the presence that was Peter. Oh, God, it was gorgeous, it was a magnet. Everything was right there, the memory of his hair on the wind as they rode, the corded lean muscle in his thighs against hers. His bronze smooth skin and the brash confidence and innocence in his eyes. Peter was a spark, a wild joyous song. He carried desire like a tightly wound spring in his belly and loins and it commanded her and she commanded it and it gave her great pleasure to know it belonged to her.

Except that it didn't. There was a girl in San Diego. He was coming back but he'd left her and then he must have left the other woman, too, and all he was really doing was following the path of least resistance. He felt and did everything with such certainty, but it was so shallow. So transient.

Julieta wanted to lash out at him. Scream at him. Blithely striding across the rolling swells toward the mesa, so certain he'd be forgiven! But Cree had said wait. Said do your best. No, be your best. But what was best?

There was her house, windows glowing in the twilight. Peter was hurrying. He was racing across the ground like a wind-lashed wildfire, heat and light and hunger. Irresistible. The land, the house just the way it was back then, it was all real again.

Peter knocked at the door.

Julieta was dimly aware that Cree had moaned and that Tommy was standing in front of her.

She answered the door with no idea how to respond. She was so hurt inside. She was so angry at him. Yet she felt him so strongly. He was there, he was alive, he had come back, he was afire with longing and contrition. He was a force that bent her.

A ghost's dream, she tried to remind herself. A woman's memories.

It didn't help. She was only partly aware that Tommy's body stood before her in the growing light. All she really saw was Peter. The sight of him struck her breathless.

"Birdman," she said softly.

"Julieta!"

He was glorious in his relief and passion. His eyes pleaded with her but he didn't speak again, just stood there, letting his body say everything. His jeans were ripped, his shirt dirty. He was breathing hard. Confused images roiled in his mind: fighting, pain, turmoil. They rumbled and faded away like thunder.

She stepped out to him, cupped his face in her hands. He touched her hands as if to verify they were real, then slid his own hands to her face.

"I came back," he said.

"So I see."

"I was thinking about you the whole time."

"Yes. Me, too," she said. Sadness filled her at the thought.

He hesitated. "I was afraid you'd be too mad at me. But I love you. You have to know that. I always loved you. The whole time."

"I'm not mad anymore. I know you loved me."

"The baby-?"

Another pang of sadness, almost enough to bring her out of the ghost's fragile dream. "The baby is fine. You have a beautiful son."

That confused him even as it eased him. "I was worried. I was afraid-"

"Shhh," she soothed him. "Don't be afraid."

"And I was worried about you."

You hurt me so bad, Birdman, she thought. So damn bad. But that was long past, and what she said was, "I'm fine. Everything is okay now. It's all worked out as it should have."

That made him feel much better. He was enormously relieved. A knot released inside him as if the very stuff he was made of unkinked, calmed and smoothed. He was suffused with love for her. His hands moved down her cheeks to her shoulders and down her sides to her waist. They stood together on the edge of the porch that way for a long moment, and then he grinned tentatively.

"I had an unfortunate encounter on the interstate. Now I know what it means to be rolled. I didn't want to look like this when you saw me again."

"You're even more handsome than I remembered. Much, much more."

His grin gained confidence. "So… you going to invite me in, or what? Freezing out here. Prodigal Indian comes back, yeah? We should celebrate."

Julieta had dimly wondered what would happen at the moment, but when it came there was no hesitation at all. "No, Peter. Things changed while you were… gone."

"Uh-oh. Like what?"

"I'm in love with someone else. I've been in love with him for a long time. You can't come back to me."

Peter stiffened in hurt and disappointment, and an image of struggle, fighting, rocks falling flashed through his thoughts. Julieta was vaguely aware that Cree had stirred in her blanket. The dawn light was much stronger now. Tommy held her waist in his thin hands and looked into her face with Peter's eyes, now very confused. He was so weak his legs were trembling with the effort of standing. Peter needed consoling.

"Everything is okay now, my love. I'm happy now. Your son is good. You are free. No diapers, no bills-some relief there, huh?"

Still he looked wounded, but his face admitted there was truth in what she said. He would never have stayed, she knew with certainty. He'd have flown away.

"Who?" he asked.

"Joseph."

Peter nodded once, not surprised. He looked away from her for the first time. "You're sure this is how it goes?"

"Very sure."

He was coming undone. It was harder to see Peter in the face of the shaky teenager who stood before her clinging to her sides. Julieta suddenly saw the world as Cree must: All the forces that had converged to bring Peter back were starting to slip away. All the longings that had propelled him had been answered or denied by the only person who could. Again the scary horrible dream tumbled in the back of his mind, fighting and guns and falling rocks, but it was remote and irreconcilable with what was happening. This was so much preferable. Still, he felt dismay.

A thought came that had never occurred to her before, and an overwhelming gratitude blossomed in her. "You did something wonderful for me."

He turned back to her. "Oh, yeah? What was that?"

"You showed me how to fly. From that very first day at the mesa. You didn't know it, but you gave me freedom from Garrett. You broke his hold on me."

"Glad I could be of service, ma'am." He was imitating a cowboy, protecting himself with some swagger. But she could see she'd pleased him.

"Can you help me that way again? Would you?"

"You know I would. How?"

"You… be free. That makes me free. You fly. Then I can fly."

"Where should I fly?"

"Out there," Julieta said, choking.

She couldn't be sure which landscape she indicated with her gesture. Behind Tommy, the sun still had not risen but was so close to the horizon it gilded the rim of the land with golden fire. Where Peter was, on the front porch of the house in Oak Springs, the stars had come out through the darkening blue and the sky looked deeply domed at the zenith. The shape of the mesa and the rolling swells of sagebrush were magical in the near dark, turning faint as the ghost's world lost conviction.

Peter looked out at it as if he'd just seen something astonishing. He turned back to give her a confiding smile and turned away again. Something like a reflection of light skipped out of Tommy as Peter stepped off the porch.

His foot never touched the ground.

Tommy almost fell, but Julieta caught him in time.