Land of Echoes

by Daniel Hecht

  "Then what is this goddamned thing? Why does it want to hurt Tommy?" Julieta's voice cracked, and she glanced back at the door as if afraid the boy would overhear.

  Cree felt her breath flutter shallowly at the base of her throat as Julieta's fear leaped into her. "It may not 'want' anything. Ghosts are usually caught up in compulsions—they're seldom conscious of the existence of the current world, let alone the ways their actions affect the living."

  Julieta looked dubious as she finished separating the hay, setting out two flakes for each horse. When she'd made three piles, she gathered up an armful and headed for the door. Cree took the rest and followed her past the munching animals to set out the hay near a water tank at the middle of the enclosure. As Julieta bent to fluff the packed flakes, she frowned up at the approaching figures of Dr. Tsosie and Tommy.

  "I should tell you that even though he's the one who recommended we go to Dr. Ambrose, Joseph is having a hard time with this."

  " 'This' meaning me."

  "It's not personal. Joseph is Navajo. He was born on the rez and has lived here all his life except when he went to college. He's an excellent doctor, went to Johns Hopkins. He chose to come back to a job as an underpaid rural GP because he felt his skills were needed here. He wanted to help his people."

  A man on a mission, Cree was thinking. Not unlike Julieta. So the three of us have something in common.

  The black gelding had finished his grain and was coming toward them for the hay. A hundred yards away, Dr. Tsosie raised an arm to block the sunset light, watching them as he and the boy walked.

  Julieta rubbed the glossy neck as the horse bent to pull at the hay with his soft lips. "It's a cultural issue. Joseph often has to deal with problems created by the old ways of treating sickness. He isn't opposed to a patient having a Way sung, or taking traditional herbs, as long as people also come to him early on. But too often he gets patients who've spent months doing ceremonials and other cures and have come to Joseph too late—after their cancer has spread too far, or they're dying of pneumonia or bubonic plague. Or they've got pregnancy complications that could have been avoided if they'd been caught early. The Navajo curing Ways usually blame sickness on ghosts or witches, or the victim's failure to observe some ritual or taboo. Joseph would rather his patients blamed poor nutrition or inadequate sanitation or alcoholism or neglect." She toed a mound of hay closer to the horse's tugging lips. "My point is, he's learned to be skeptical. And he's pretty hard-nosed about it."

  "I can understand that," Cree acknowledged. "Are you telling me this so my feelings won't be hurt, or so I'll be nicer to him when he challenges me?"

  Julieta leaned her head back, her face hardening. "You're very observant. But I sure hope you have something more to offer than hypersensitive psychoanalysis. Because I'm not the one on the couch here, and you're going to need something better, trust me." Immediately, she looked surprised at her own words. She looked as if she were about to apologize but apparently changed her mind. "Here come Breeze and Madie," she said instead. "I'm going to get their curry brush."

  Cree waited with the horses as Julieta disappeared into the barn and Tommy and the doctor ducked through the fence at the far end. Tommy didn't look like a monster. In fact, he looked like a typical kid from Cree's neighborhood in Seattle: slim, bronze skinned, a round face that made him look younger than his fifteen years, big T-shirt embossed with images of the Wu-Tang Clan rap group, baggy jeans draped over basketball shoes. When he got closer, she saw that his buzz-cut hair had some kind of design shaved into the bristle.

  "Hey," Julieta called from the feed room door. "Hey, Tommy. Hey, Joseph. We're just feeding the critters. Tommy, there's someone I'd like to introduce you to."

  The forced lightness of her tone broke Cree's heart. Julieta had shaken the loose hay from her beautiful hair and dusted it from her shirt, and she wore a smile that would have done Miss New Mexico proud.

  Doubleness, Cree was thinking. She stood with Dr. Tsosie, watching Julieta and Tommy curry the horses, trying to put a name to the feeling of this place, this moment, these strangers she found herself among. It was like swimming in deep water with your eyes just at the surface, she decided, one moment getting a view of the sky and sun and boats and people, then submerging only a fraction of an inch and seeing the blue depths and the vague shapes moving in them. Two planes of existence, hidden from one other yet moving restlessly against each other and separated by only the thinnest membrane.

  When he'd first joined them, Dr. Tsosie presented a piece of rock to Julieta, and for a moment they bent their heads together to look at it. They argued briefly, and then Julieta broke away, laughing and shaking her head.

  "It is!" he insisted. "I've brought you a valuable historical relic!"

  "It's gravel," she countered. "And you know it. But thank you so much for thinking of me."

  Joseph turned to Tommy. "What's your vote? Anasazi arrowhead or random chip of useless rock?"

  Tommy just made a go away gesture with his hand, grinning shyly.

  Joseph mimed dismay and betrayal, then smiled and tossed the rock over his shoulder. He joined Cree to watch as the others cared for the horses.

  " So—are you an equestrian fan, too?" Cree asked him.

  "Me? I've always hated them," Tsosie said. "They've got the brains and temperament of chickens. For pets, I like dogs and cats. As for vehicles, I prefer the ones with steering wheels and brakes."

  "Don't go saying bad things about my kids," Julieta called. "Joseph's just down on them because he's a lousy rider and whenever he takes them out they sense his inexperience. So they never do what he tells them. They're sweeties and he knows it."

  Tommy said nothing, just rubbed the big muscles in the gelding's shoulders.

  The interplay among the three of them was deeply double and deeply touching. Julieta and Joseph were obviously good friends of long standing, and though both were very tense they were making an effort to create a simulacrum of a family for this boy. Tommy, at least the part of him above the waves, was reluctantly appreciative, willing to play along with it as much for their sake as his own. It was so compassionate and respectful, so fragile and artificial. A lance pierced Cree's heart.

  On the individual level, each of the players was double, too. Beneath Julieta's roles as officious administrator and chipper surrogate mom was some other act, some part of her life hidden yet running parallel to the actions and emotions she expressed outwardly. The doctor, too.

  And of course Tommy was double most of all. When he'd first been introduced to her, he'd shaken her hand, said a quiet hello, asked if she were another doctor, and gone with Julieta to tend the animals. Quite reasonably, he was a little dubious about meeting yet another stranger wanting to probe and scrutinize him. A pretty regular kid. But there was a parallel Tommy, a hidden unease and pressure below the surface. There was the Tommy you could see, the one who stuck his head above the waves, and there was the rest of him moving in a different and darker medium.

  Julieta went back to the barn and returned with another handful of grain. She put it into one of the pans and held it out to the horses, rattling it temptingly. "Come on, kids," she called. "Let's take our evening constitutional. C'mon, Breeze. Spence! Shake a leg!"

  The horses sashayed toward her. As Julieta coaxed them into a walk around the fence line, the sun drifted below the shoulder of a rise to the west. Only a dwindling strip of orange lingered at the top of the mesa, and a mercury vapor light came on at the corner of the house, gilding the near wall of the barn with a silver tinge. Julieta strode in front of the ambling horses, Tommy among them with an arm thrown over one or another. As they headed along the far fence, he slipped onto the back of one of the mares and lay comfortably along her spine. The horse ignored him. After a few paces, he slid off the mare and up onto the gelding, where he sat with one leg down the horse's belly and the other crossed over its shoulder, hands relaxed on his thighs.

  Cree was struck by the pleasure o
n Julieta's face, how lovely and rare. Despite his tension, Dr. Tsosie made a soft noise of satisfaction as he watched them.

  And Tommy: Tommy looked almost happy. Maybe Mason Ambrose was wrong about this whole thing, Cree thought. Maybe the hospital doctors were right and the nagging buzz she felt was just Tommy Keeday, a relatively typical teenager with some normal-world issues that made him act out in an unusual way.

  As if he'd read Cree's thoughts, Dr. Tsosie turned to her. The sunlight was almost gone now, and his face was lit with silver from the searing light on the house as he regarded her thoughtfully.

  "Just wait," he told her.

  9

  YOU'D NEVER know there was anything wrong with him, Lynn Pierce thought, watching Tommy. Good luck, Dr. Lucretia Black.

  The boy was playing with the little marshmallows that floated on the top of his cup. He dipped his teaspoon and boated the white clots back and forth across the surface of steaming chocolate, then selected one and ate it. Some of it was an act; with the new psychologist there, he was working hard to play normal. Julieta sat at one end of the table, positively dripping martyred noblesse oblige, making quick insincere smiles whenever Tommy or Joseph looked her way and losing them just as fast when either male focused on anything else. The psychologist, who introduced herself as Cree, had alert hazel eyes and a neutral expression as she watched Tommy. Lynn wondered if she was perceptive enough to see just how bogus Queen Julieta was, how many secrets lurked below the surface here.

  The five of them had settled in the infirmary's dayroom to drink hot chocolate and play cards, an exercise transparently thought up by Julieta to allow the psychologist to observe Tommy at close range. The wide, beam-ceilinged chamber was furnished with more institutional furniture than it no doubt had been when the queen was in her heyday here, but more than any other room in the building it retained reminders that this had once been a rich person's home: creamy stucco walls, huge fireplace with a step-shouldered mantel, brilliantly varnished old-board floors, built-in bookshelves, fancy light switches—something of a Santa Fe ambience. Right now the windows were hard black rectangles of night, and outside the temperature had dropped, but Lynn had lit a fire in the grate. It crackled behind its screen and made the place feel snug and pleasant despite Julieta's preening and that god-awful sense of latent menace in Tommy.

  Joseph was shuffling the cards, not saying anything. He looked tired.

  "So," Cree Black said, "your grandparents must be very proud of you. I haven't seen your work, but everyone tells me you're a talented artist."

  Tommy looked embarrassed by the prompt and busied himself with stirring his chocolate. "I guess."

  "Very talented," Julieta affirmed proudly, as if she were personally responsible for his abilities. "So much so that he won a complete private scholarship, just for visual artists, to come here. Tomorrow, you'll have to show Cree your work, Tommy."

  Tommy looked into his cup and blew across the top.

  "How did you start?" Cree asked. "Are there artists in your family?"

  "Yeah. My dad was a potter and sculptor. In summer, he'd sell stuff to the tourists in Window Rock. He kind of got me going." Tommy didn't look up as he answered. Under the edge of the table, his right knee started to bob, and the taut, unconscious motion, so at odds with the false calm of his face and the controlled movements of his hands, frightened Lynn. Was that a sign of it? Kids bobbed their knees, but with Tommy you couldn't be sure. Was it an ordinary nervous knee, or the . . . the seizure, starting to kindle again?

  "Okay," Joseph said at last. "Julieta, your turn to start."

  They were playing rummy. Everyone took up the cards Joseph had dealt and looked them over. Cree's eyes moved to Tommy, who was scrupulously intent on his fan of cards, to Julieta to Joseph.

  Julieta drew a card, slipped it into her hand, discarded.

  "I was watching you with the horses," Cree went on. "Another talent, looks like. You must have spent a lot of time with them when you were growing up."

  "Yeah. My dad liked them. He taught me to ride when I was a baby." The subject seemed to embarrass Tommy, and silence followed hard on his words.

  "Well, my dad was no artist. He was a plumber," Cree said, as if she hadn't noticed the conversational stall. She took her card and considered it.

  "He was from Brooklyn. I loved him to pieces, but I sure wasn't going to follow in his footsteps and set toilet bowls for a living. You're lucky you got the artistic influence. But Pop did have one thing in common with your father—he liked horses, too." She chuckled as if at some fond memory, discarded, and went on, "Probably in a different way, though. He liked to bet on the races. You have to understand, my father was the kind of Brooklyn guy you see in the movies who talks like this: 'So dis guy sez to me, he sez, "I got a sure t'ing for ya, put yaself a sawbuck on a win for Sugar Baby inna eight'."' Even I could hardly understand him half the time!"

  Tommy flicked his gaze at her, a glimmer of appreciation there.

  "You're up, Lynn," Joseph said, startling her.

  She had a bad hand, of course, all low numbers and nothing to match. Like life, she thought savagely. She picked up and discarded.

  "He died," Tommy said. "Killed himself." This time he raised his eyes to look challengingly at Cree. The words froze Julieta and Joseph.

  "Who did?" the psychologist asked blandly.

  "He drunk himself and my mother to death. Got into a car crash because he was so loaded he couldn't see cows on the road."

  The psychologist didn't blink. "I'm sorry, Tommy," she said, with sincere but not excessive sympathy. "You must miss him terribly. I know I miss my pop every day."

  Tommy looked to his cards again and shrugged his shoulders, doesn't matter or not really. He seemed puzzled and maybe put out by her response—clearly he'd been fishing for something more dramatic. He picked up a card, laid out three twos, discarded a six of spades. Meanwhile, Julieta was making heartbroken moon eyes and trying to hide the expression from Tommy. Joseph gave her a supportive, steadying gaze. It made Lynn sick. The craving for nicotine was beginning to gnaw at her in a way that couldn't be ignored, and she tried to remember which one she was on—number four? Or five? Whichever, she needed a cigarette.

  "Alcoholism is one of our leading health problems," Joseph told Cree.

  "It's the root cause of most crimes and accidents here. Native Americans carry a genetic predisposition for it, a difference in the way carbohydrates are metabolized. That's one reason liquor's illegal on the rez."

  Cree nodded as she took her turn, keeping whatever it was she picked up, discarding but not laying out any cards. They went around again in silence, as if nobody was sure what to say.

  The psychologist broke the quiet. "This is such a gorgeous room. I love the fireplace!"

  "This was the main store of the trading post, and then it was my living room," Julieta said, deliberating theatrically over her hand. "I told you this was my house before we converted it, didn't I?"

  "Yes. You must miss having it all to yourself."

  Julieta shook her head. "Nope. Never once. Haven't had time to miss it since we got the school going. Anyway, I get so many rewards from my job, especially when I work with the kids and their parents. And I gave myself one indulgence, teaching one of the drawing classes. Beyond that, I don't feel any need for the luxury. Really, I wouldn't know what to do with this much space all to myself now."

  How touching, Lynn thought. How very admirable of you.

  It would be bad enough to have to listen to this crap, but it broke her heart to watch Joseph falling for it. He was a brilliant man in every other respect, but when it came to Julieta he seemed to have no brains at all. He took her posing at face value. Like just now, that decisive little shake of her head: the way her lustrous big black hair swung so alluringly, half covered one eye, got swept casually aside—she learned that one in beauty queen school for sure. Over the last three years, Lynn had seen her too many times around other men to believe it was u
nconscious. Board members, prospective donors, maintenance contractors, whoever—they all went knock-kneed around her. And she didn't hesitate to exploit the effect to get what she wanted.

  The tragic part was that in Joseph's case the feelings so obviously went much deeper. Of course they did: He was too sincere and decent for his affection to be anything but genuine, even if it was deluded. The deceptions those two pulled were obviously not his choice! The thing that really made Lynn sick was that Julieta was too self-preoccupied or stupid or whatever to treat him with the respect he deserved, and to—"Lynn?"

  She startled at Joseph's voice and looked up from the fan of cards she'd been staring sightlessly at. She realized it was the second time he'd said her name.

  "Your turn," he said, smiling. He chuckled and explained to the psychologist, "We're all a little tired, I think."

  "Sorry!" Lynn forced a laugh as she picked up another useless card, the seven of hearts, and threw it down again.

  Tommy's turn. He picked up her seven from the discard pile.

  "How about you, Tommy? How do you feel?" Cree asked. "Tired?"

  "Not so much. Pretty boring to sit around."

  "Think you'll be up for spending time with me tomorrow?"

  He made a frown. "They already talked to me. The headshrinkers at the hospital."

  "You must be sick of it, huh?"

  He smiled weakly, unsure how to answer, courtesy at odds with candor.

  "It's okay. You won't insult me if you say yes—"

  He shrugged, looking at his cards. "They didn't know anything." Cree nodded.

  Sitting at Tommy's side, Lynn noticed that his leg had stopped bobbing. But down on the floor, his feet writhed in his socks. She tried not to make her reaction obvious as she darted her eyes down. It almost didn't look like human feet—the bumps that came and went as the bones flexed, the arching and tensing and twisting! And still the rest of him, everything above the tabletop, kept an artificial calm.