Land of Echoes

50

It was a strange procession that made its way out of Julieta's corral: three women on horseback, two men walking behind. They didn't hurry. The horses were content to amble, occasionally turning their heads aside to nip mouthfuls of sage. Joyce was having a blast, sitting high astride Breeze with her jet-black hair rippling, eyes sparking; she'd borrowed a cowboy hat from Julieta. Forty feet back, Joseph and Edgar were talking, but Cree couldn't hear what they were saying over the dull clump of hooves. The rhythm of Madie's strides and the movements of her muscular shoulders felt good to Cree, and she wished she wasn't too tired for anything more than a walk.

"Ellen called to invite us to the ceremony. She wanted to make sure you knew you were invited," Julieta said. "It starts on Tuesday. Can you stay till then?"

"I wouldn't miss it," Cree told her. Right now, every bone in her body ached with exhaustion. But a few days of rest would patch her together.

It was Friday afternoon. Behind them, the school was a buzz of activity as the kids milled between buildings. The five yellow buses had parked in front of the dorms and soon most of the students would head home for the weekend. The night had been cold, but the sun had brought warmth and now the air was a mild, cool caress, perfect for riding. To the east, the mesa rose with walls of red-brown.

It looked obscure, Cree thought. Completely anonymous.

"Can I, you know, make him go faster?" Joyce asked.

"Breeze is a mare," Julieta told her. "A female horse. Just tap your heels and make a cluck or kissing noise. First comes a trot, and you have to post-that's support yourself on your legs. Then a canter, what we call a lope, then a gallop."

"What do I do then?"

"You hang on for dear life."

Joyce was already off. Her hair streamed behind her as she cantered off ahead. Her cowboy hat fell back and hung by its cord at her back. Cree smiled, realizing how much she would miss this wide-open land, the dry cleanliness of it.

"I talked to Tommy this morning," Julieta said. "He's doing fine. He's eating. Says his aunt is feeding him big meals, making him drink Gatorade. He's drawing again and wants to come back to school."

The family had taken Tommy to Ellen's house in Burnham until the ceremony. Just the thought of Ellen made Cree smile. "She'll fix him up in no time."

Julieta grinned and then got serious. "Cree. Did Peter… did he know he was a ghost?"

"Ordinarily, I'd say no. But I'm never really sure about ghosts' self-awareness. They're usually very confused by the discrepancy between the world they were alive in and our current world. Especially when you intervene in their world dream, they experience a conflict of realities that's fundamentally irreconcilable. Most of Peter's actions were a perseveration, practically just a tape loop replaying his final hours. But whenever his hand moved on its own, I couldn't help feel that it had become the instrument of a conscious being. I have no idea how that would work, Julieta. None. But when I was talking to Ellen about it, she pointed out the parallels with something I should have thought of, the Navajo tradition of hand-trembling. Do you know much about that?" Julieta shook her head.

"If I've got the traditional explanation right, the Hand-Trembler diagnoses the sick person with the assistance of some helping spirits-not human ones, the four Gila monsters, kind of half gods. They animate the diagnostician's hand and reveal what's wrong with the sick person. At least there's some precedent for the idea of such a selective possession, that… isolation of consciousness in one limb. But I don't know how it might work. I just don't know." Cree blew through her lips in frustration. Every case seemed to generate more possibilities and uncertainties than answers. And yet that gave her joy, too: world without end. Infinite mystery. "But I was going to say-at the very end, I did get the sense Peter realized what he was, what was going on. That it was time to let go. That he wanted to do as you asked."

"I think so, too," Julieta said softly. "I'd like to believe that. That he'd be so… graceful." She frowned, and Cree knew what she would say next. It was a moment she'd dreaded.

After helping get Tommy to Burnham, they had returned to the school and had talked for a long time. Cree had given Julieta a rough idea of what had happened after Garrett met Peter at the door. The burial in the ravine explained Nick's midnight visit: After Lynn had told Nick and Donny of Cree's interest in the ravine, they had gotten worried that maybe she'd uncovered some evidence. Nick had come back to see if anyone had been digging in the area.

It was a horrible story, and Julieta had taken it hard. But thinking back, she said, there'd been little clues-a word dropped by Garrett or Donny now and again, a smug and cruel look. Even Lynn Pierce seemed to know something about it. Just Wednesday, the nurse had made veiled allusions to Julieta's past, to others knowing her secrets.

What concerned Cree now was Peter's call to Joseph. Julieta would be justified in blaming Joseph for deflecting him toward Garrett's murderous rage. And that would ruin everything.

As if she'd read Cree's mind, Julieta turned to look back at the walking men. "Joseph. He'll blame himself."

"Yeah. But, more important, will you?"

Julieta shook her head. "There were so many bad choices that ended up there. All the big ones were mine. Trying to be a beauty queen. Marrying Garrett. Not divorcing him the moment I knew what was going on. Getting pregnant. If I'd had my head on my shoulders one goddamned time-"

"Hey, Julieta. You want my advice?"

Cree's tough tone startled her, and she looked over wide-eyed.

"My advice is, screw the self-blame. If Garrett had been a halfway decent person, none of it would have happened. Neither of you can take responsibility for what an impulsive, philandering, arrogant, violent man did!"

Julieta stared straight ahead. Cree could only hope she'd get there eventually.

Off to the west, Joyce was bucketing along and whooping for joy. Who'd have guessed? Cree asked herself.

"Did Peter know Tommy was his son?" Julieta asked.

" 'Know' isn't the right word. I doubt Peter knew he occupied anyone's body. Peter's ghost replayed its memory for fifteen years, there in the ravine, until one day it came across a really compatible environment, a vehicle for the expression of its compulsion. Obviously, there's some kind of natural resonance between kin. Maybe someday we'll figure out how it works. But right now, I don't know."

"But… why out at the ravine? Why not back at the house?"

Cree hadn't told her the details, but there was no dodging it now. "He wasn't quite dead when Nick buried him. The rocks Nick knocked down were what finally killed Peter."

Appalled, Julieta sagged. When she straightened again, her lips were pressed tight, white with rage.

This was another close passage for Julieta. If she became obsessed with retribution, no matter how richly deserved, her liberation would not be complete. "I know exactly what you're feeling. But Joyce and Ed and I were talking about that last night. We all agree there's not going to be any evidence of who killed Peter. Not fifteen years later. His bones will show he was murdered, but there won't be any way to pin it on Garrett or Nick."

Cree looked over at Julieta and could see that it wasn't going down easy. She wondered if Julieta could get past this, relinquish her rage over even so great an injustice. There was so much at stake. Julieta was just beginning life as a free person. Cree was certain she and Joseph had already become lovers, but Julieta would have to leave a lot behind if the two of them were to be happy. She could still be deflected back so easily.

But you could give someone only so much advice.

They were not far from the ravine now, and Julieta's small, private duty to the dead. They stopped their horses and waited for the men to catch up.

Joyce was trotting back, cheeks bright with high desert air, stoned absolutely gonzo on so much light and space. "My behind is going to be sore for a week and I won't regret a minute of it!" she sang. Then she remembered their errand and sobered quickly.

Julieta and Joseph walked toward the mesa, hand in hand, getting smaller against the cliffs and then disappearing as they went between the walls of the ravine. Cree tethered the horses to a clump of sagebrush and she and Joyce and Edgar sat on the ground. The detailed debriefing would wait until they were back in Seattle, but they took out their canteens and talked about Tommy, about the psychological state and environment that had primed him for the possession. They talked about the independent hand, and what it suggested about the mechanics of possession. They tried to guess at the hypnotic or paralytic effect that surrounded him when the ghost was resurgent; Ed theorized that maybe the antagonism between two different brain frequencies created an electromagnetic field strong enough to affect others. For a while they talked about the role of blood relationship in hauntings, ancestor spirits, the principle of blood to blood and like to like.

Joyce shook her head. "Here I've always bitched about how my mother is trying to live vicariously through me. But she's got nothing on this Peter guy!

They all laughed at that.

"But what about these ghosts?" Joyce asked, tipping her head toward the ravine. "Here Ed and I did all that work, found out about old Yil' Dezbah and her family, and then we find out they had nothing to do with it. But why did Tommy draw the faces in the cliffs?"

"A period of acute sensitivity, triggered by his sudden invasion by Peter?" Cree proposed. "Or maybe Tommy's something of a natural sensitive and subconsciously picked up on their presence. Or maybe just his… hunger to know his parents, his forebears, had a role-primed him, made him more vulnerable." She shrugged. "Personally, I think that's one of the factors that made him receptive to Peter's revenant."

"Which, of course, we'll never know," Edgar muttered.

Joyce sifted soil through her fingers. "So… you want to do some work on the ghosts here?"

Cree looked at the mesa, the lonely cleft in the rocks, and shook her head. "I can't, Joyce. I'm too beat. I'm so used up. Julieta says she'll talk to the medicine man about them. Maybe he knows some ceremony that'll lay them to rest. But not me. I'm shot."

They nodded understandingly. But Ed still looked a little downcast: Again, he'd missed the chance to probe the ghost with his instruments. Measuring the electrical activity in Tommy's brain while possessed would have constituted a tremendous advance in parapsychology, mapping the neurological mechanism of possession and quite possibly providing information that would be instructive in other psychiatric maladies. But he'd never had the chance to use the FMEEG. And his inspection of the school's electrical system in pursuit of clues about the flicker phenomenon had produced nothing. Ed sat on the dirt, absentmindedly picking tufts of sage leaf, crushing them between his fingers, sniffing the pungent herb, tossing the crumbs away.

Cree smiled, hoping she could cheer him up. She had saved something for him.

"Ed. I have to tell you about a phenomenon I noticed up at the sheep camp. No electricity up there, right? Just Coleman lanterns, firelight, starlight. So guess what?"

"What?" He looked at her suspiciously from beneath one raised eyebrow.

"We had flicker! When Tommy was in full swing, the light appeared to strobe, quite noticeably-natural light, Ed! Kerosene lamps! Meaning it's an optical or neurological phenomenon. Not necessarily electrical!"

"No kidding!" Ed visibly perked up, his eyes changing as the implications hooked him.

"Nope."

"Which would argue for direct neural stimulus. Jeez, that is good!" He edged over and put his arm around Cree's shoulder. He squeezed her hard, looking at Joyce. "She's a sweetie, isn't she? Making me feel better." He screwed off the top of his water bottle and raised it in a toast: "To DNS! The future of parapsychology."

They laughed, toasted, then quickly got serious as Julieta and Joseph emerged from the ravine. The two little figures slowly made their way back.

Joyce tipped her head back to observe them thoughtfully. "Think they'll make it?"

Cree looked at them. "I think they already have. I think these two've paid their dues in advance, the good stuff starts now. Like they say: Love will find a way."

"Sometimes it just takes a while," Ed added, getting distant again.