by Daniel Hecht
"So what happened? Why'd it go so wrong?"
"Come on, Dr. Black, don't pretend Julieta hasn't told you the story. With my father and me featured as the men in black hats."
"I'm happy to hear a different perspective."
"He was who he was. He did things the way he thought you were supposed to if you were a rich, powerful, virile but aging man. Oh, there were affairs and the usual stuff. But he'd have stuck with her. On his own terms, to be sure, but I think he was honestly surprised that she had different expectations. When she said she was going to divorce him, he reacted the way he'd learned to act when somebody hurt him, which was to hurt back harder. He got mad and he got even, both. After a while, there was nothing but that for either of them."
Cree nodded. Donny's tone was still angry, but he'd lapsed into a mood of recollection verging on nostalgia. It was something she had seen before when even the most alienated survivor visited the place of a loved one's death.
"It wouldn't have gotten so bad if she hadn't insisted on keeping the house and land here. She could have gone for the place in Albuquerque, but no, she had to set herself up right next to the company's land. Which guaranteed he'd have lots of opportunities to make sure her life wasn't too happy. What the hell'd she expect? He was gonna send her a welcome wagon?"
He paced and scuffed, and the way he looked touched Cree: a slim, balding, harried guy with a worried frown permanently etched into his forehead. Clearly he admired his father a great deal, as much as he resented him. Just as clearly, he still dealt with his dead father every day.
"So he was a man who could hold a grudge," she prompted, "who would never forget a hurt or an insult. What else?"
"Why don't you just out with it? What did Julieta send you to find out?"
Cree stared at him, trying to gauge where that was coming from. "Why are you so afraid of her?"
Donny spluttered in outrage for a moment. "Fuck this. I don't have to do this. I've gone along with this bullshit long enough, let's get down to business. Let's get down to—"
"I'm not judging you or your father. Honestly. You're telling me Garrett was a . . . a mixed bag, just like every other human being. So are you. So am I. I'm not buying into Julieta's anger."
He ignored her and started back toward the truck, but Cree grabbed his elbow. The touch startled him and he looked down at her hand, the reaction of a man unaccustomed to physical contact. He shook his arm free, but he did stop walking.
"We are getting down to business, Donny. For me, anyway—what you're telling me is very helpful. Please keep going!"
He looked at his watch and let his shoulders slump in acquiescence. "Three more minutes' worth of this crap here. Then the dragline."
"If I'd met your father at . . . I don't know . . . at a cocktail party, say, what would my impression be? Who would I be talking to?"
"A man with a big appetite for life. A man who liked shiny things—a nice car, an impressive piece of equipment, a beautiful woman. He was impulsive, and sometimes that got him into trouble. But his instincts were usually on target, they worked for people and business. He liked taking on challenges, proving he could master things, people, situations. If you met him at a cocktail party, he'd try to impress you. Charm you, win you over." Donny smiled his bitter, private smile and looked Cree up and down. "You personally? He'd want to get you into bed. And he'd probably succeed. Because he'd make you feel you were at the center of the universe. He'd tell you things about yourself that either were insightful and true or that you would suddenly believe were true, and in either case you'd feel deeply flattered and understood."
"That's a very perceptive observation."
"And he'd get what he wanted from you. Whatever it was. Which was what it was all about."
Cree digested that briefly. "Did he ever talk about death? Things like . . . I don't know . . . how he wanted to die when his time came? Even things like burial preferences or services? Or what he believed would happen after death?"
Donny made a face as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, spat, frowned, then checked his watch again. "We're done here. If you want to see the dragline, we'd better get moving."
It was a signal that he'd overcome his reflective mood, Cree thought. But when they got back to the truck, he hesitated before he went around to the driver's side.
"I don't know what my father believed," he said sourly. "But I do know Garrett McCarty had no intention of dying. Never crossed his mind. Wasn't part of the man's plans in any way."
It took five minutes to cover the mile and a half to the pit where the dragline was currently working, Donny driving slowly through his kingdom of raw rock, machines, and dust. He called ahead on his CB to let the dragline crew know they were coming, telling them to shut it down when they arrived for Cree's tour. Afterward, the air of preoccupation claimed him again, and his replies to Cree's questions were mostly monosyllables.
Still, she gleaned some details that would be useful later, if and when she confronted the entity again. Garrett had been right-handed. He spoke Spanish and had picked up enough of the Navajo language to say a few words to his Navajo employees. For amusement, he played golf and poker and went to rodeos, where he bet large sums in a private pool of fellow execs. He knew horses—he'd personally selected the thoroughbreds he'd bought for Julieta—and was a good rider. When Donny was a kid and made his regular weekend visits to Garrett's Albuquerque house, his favorite place had been the solarium cactus garden: Watching his father lovingly tending the spiny knobs and armatures revealed a side of the man he never saw otherwise.
Donny got quiet again after telling her that, and Cree couldn't tell if it was a guarded silence or just a moment of reflection. His throat began making the gulping movement again—a reaction to stress, Cree decided.
"You've described your father as impulsive, charming, yet a man who'd never forgive, never let go of a grudge. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, if he did live on in some form, what would his psychological engine be—what obsessional feelings or motivations might animate his ghost? Would he be so angry about something, or sad or guilty about something—"
"Like what—Julieta? Is that what you're getting at? Julieta thinks she's haunted by my father's ghost? Jesus Christ, this is turning into science fiction here!"
"Believe it or not, I'm trying to turn it into just plain science."
"Because if she does, tell her to get over it. Tell her that the world doesn't revolve around her ass. He had plenty of younger and better afterward, trust me. If Garrett ever had such a huge grudge against her, he'd long since gotten it out of his system."
That couldn't be true, Cree thought, not if the years of conflict that followed were any indication. She bounced some of his ire back at him: "How'd he do that? Shooting her horses?"
He stared at her, surprised she knew about it, and he seemed about to say something nasty. But he just closed his thin mouth and ignored the question.
"So why do you hate her? Why do you want to hurt her?"
He rolled his eyes—a martyred, frustrated expression. "I don't want to hurt her. She's got it all wrong. If I wanted to hurt her, trust me, she'd know it. I'm just trying to run my business without her interference."
"Interference like the in situ uranium suit? Doesn't that make you want to get back at her?"
That got his attention: a flash of pure ire and calculation in the eyes, a radiant chill Cree could feel from four feet away. "That's a matter for the courts to decide. What she doesn't get is, a business this size, I've got two dozen suits, injunctions, regulatory hassles, you name it, pending at any time! She's the one with the 'psychological engine' here. She's the one can't leave well enough alone!"
Donny swerved the truck hard enough to throw Cree against the door, and then they were pulling up near the walking dragline.
They got out and for a moment Cree had to just stand there, looking up at it in awe.
It was one of the biggest man-made objects she had ever seen. A gargantu
an rusty orange cube supported a vertical mast about fifteen stories tall, connected by cables to the main boom, which angled up and out over a deep trench. The whole structure pivoted on a steel disk seven feet thick as it dragged its enormous bucket up the slope on its cables. Each of the bucket's steel chisel teeth was as big as Cree's dining-room table. To her surprise, there was no diesel roar; the loudest sound was the massive groaning of metal under stress.
"Electric," Donny explained. "Eight separate motors. Thing cost my father thirty-two million bucks when he bought it in 1979. It's one of three we keep going twenty-four/seven."
From this angle, she could see the operator's cab, a tiny glass box at the base of the boom, and the platform between the boom's huge hinges. The boom itself was a girder of tube steel, massive as a suspension bridge, with welded rungs on the main tubes providing ladders to the upper reaches. Cree could visualize Garrett, clambering drunkenly up this outsize phallic symbol, turning to observe his lady friend's reaction, losing his footing. His grip would've stayed his fall for an instant, but the jerk was too much. He dropped, just missing the superstructure below him. The jolting collision with the ground, the awful pain inside as his organs ruptured. It would have been an agonizing death.
But that was all imagination. She didn't feel an entity here. The only echo of human feeling was a faint swirl of the ever-changing moods of the men who worked here.
They had just started toward the thing when Donny's cell phone rang and he stopped to put it to his ear.
"Hey, Nicko. Yeah, we're there now." He turned his head away from Cree. "Oh, yeah? Okay. Okay. Just hold on. You just get here, let me handle it."
When he flipped the phone shut, his affect had changed utterly. His face hardened into a baleful mask, immobile but for the striating muscles in his jaw.
"Is everything okay?" Cree asked.
Donny flashed her a look of contempt, then gazed past her to the access road they'd come by. A company Jeep was barreling down it, trailing a plume of dust, sliding through the turns. In another moment it had skidded to a stop not far away, and Joyce exploded out of it as if she'd been thrown. She slammed the door and hurried over to Cree, breathing fast, wide eyes signaling alarm.
Nick Stephanovic got out to stand with his legs braced, hands clasped in front like a club bouncer, glaring at them. No trace of the boyish charm remained.
"Wait here," Donny snapped. He went over to Nick, and the two men conferred. Nick lit a cigarette and gestured with it as Donny glanced from Joyce to Cree, nodding. The dragline had gone still and silent.
"What the hell?" Cree whispered. "I didn't think you two would be done for a while."
"I think I screwed up badly, Cree! But I'm not sure how."
"What happened?"
Joyce checked to make sure the men were still out of hearing. "I get into the Jeep, right, and we drive up out of the mine and go east? We're getting along fine, flirting a little, talking about our jobs, he seems like a nice guy. After a few minutes he stops and says okay, this is where the mutilated horses were found. I get out, walk around. No sign of anything, no bones or whatever. So I ask how he even knows we're in the right area, the ground's all the same as far as you can see, not so much as a big cactus or something. So he opens this map of the mine property, right? It's all marked in sections. He shows me where we are—out on the far eastern border, Area Two. So I open the pack, I'm gonna go through the motions. There's nothing to take a sample of, so I figure I'll run the Geiger counter around, then take site photos? And when Nick sees the Geiger counter, everything changes. He asks me what's that for, I tell him it's routine with mutes, looking for trace radioactivity. And by the way, I say—it hasn't totally dawned on me that something's the matter yet, I'm just being conversational, I figure maybe I've got it wrong?—I say I thought the mutes were found at the other end of the property, closer to Highway 12. I point to the map and tell him I thought it was in, like, Area Eighteen on that map. And then the guy goes ballistic! He—"
"They're coming over," Cree interrupted. The men had finished their conference and were striding toward them.
"Okay," Donny said. "This is good. This is very good. We're getting down to brass tacks here, I like that. We could have done this straight off without all the song and dance, Dr. Black. So here's the deal: You two go back like good little gofers and tell Julieta she needs to think twice about making shit for us. Tell her we need a face-to-face. Tell her it's in her best interests."
"What are you talking about?" Cree stammered.
Nick tossed his cigarette and moved laterally around to face them from one side, a man prepared for anything. Joyce dropped her backpack as she turned to track him, not quite taking a martial arts stance but also very much at the ready.
"Be nice, Nicko," she warned him quietly.
"Tell her we know about the boy and the exorcism thing and some other stuff, and that we'll close her down if she gives us any grief. She has my cell number. I'll expect a call today." He turned back toward his truck but paused at Nick's side to jab a thumb over his shoulder at Cree. "See them off the property, huh, Nick? But watch this one. Don't let her play with your mind when you drive them up to their car."
A couple of hard-hatted men had emerged on a catwalk high on the side of the dragline housing, bellying up to the railing, lighting cigarettes, and looking down curiously.
Donny's cool slipped when he noticed them. "What the hell are you looking at!" he roared. "Get back to work!"
They were back inside before their spiraling cigarettes hit the ground.
36
CREE WAITED in the outer office as Julieta finished up with a student-parent conference. Across the room, a secretary pecked at a computer, paused, pecked again. From what Cree could hear through the half-open door, a worried mother had come to talk with Julieta about her daughter, who was very homesick and wanted to leave the school.
When they came to the door, Cree saw that the student was a moonfaced girl who barely looked old enough for high school. The mother was a young Navajo woman, pretty and professional looking, now glowing with relief or gratitude: Julieta must have found a way to set things right. Julieta kissed them both as they left and promised them that things would be okay. She looked much older, Cree thought. Worn.
"Such a sweet girl," Julieta said quietly. "A math prodigy. It's all her teachers can do to keep up with her. She's one of our full-timers, and she misses her baby sister. We just had to figure out a way to get her home on weekends. Look what she gave me—she made it herself. I'm so flattered. I just love it." It was a little garnet and turquoise brooch in the shape of a hummingbird, inexpertly made. Julieta pinned it to her blouse, patted it, then took a deep, resigned breath as if preparing herself for something. "I know we've got a lot to talk about. Would you mind going for a walk? I could really use some fresh air."
"Sure."
Julieta found a windbreaker and pulled it on as they left the building. They walked slowly away from the school to the west, their shadows behind them: Three-thirty, the sun was beginning to roll down the far side of the day. On the hilly land to the west, the scrubby trees seemed larger as their shadows darkened the near slopes.
"After you called, I talked to Joseph," Julieta said. "He's going to help us find Tommy. He's really the only one who can. He'll go talk to the grandparents today."
Cree detailed her concern about the doctors' treatment plans, then described her visit to the mine: Nick's attempt to mislead Joyce about the location of the mutilation site, Donny's anger and his threatening message.
Julieta shook her head, weary and unbelieving. "Everything's a mess, isn't it. Everything's coming apart. It's like a train wreck."
"It's looking dicey, yeah," Cree said. "But as my father used to say, 'It ain't over till it's over, and it's never over.'"
A wan smile.
"It would have to be Lynn, wouldn't it? Who told him about Tommy?" Julieta bobbed her head sadly. Cree had expected outrage, but to her surprise J
ulieta just chewed her lip and hunched herself into her windbreaker. "That poor woman. She doesn't have much, does she. She must be so desperate. I should have seen how bad it was with her."
"What does she have against you? She makes these veiled, dark allusions to your relationship with Tommy, your past . . . Could she know the story?"
"I have no idea, Cree. I hardly know her. All I can guess is that she resents my authority here. And I think she . . . she fancies Joseph. Envies my friendship with him."
That struck Cree as right. "So what does Donny think is going on? What's he so afraid of?"
"Donny's paranoid! He thinks I'm out to get him. It must have to do with his in situ uranium project. An unfortunate coincidence— Joyce bringing a Geiger counter and then mentioning Area Eighteen, he thought I sent you to spy on him. Area Eighteen is where they wanted to build the extraction plant. I don't know why he's so hot and bothered, but probably he's doing something illegal. It wouldn't be the first time. McCarty Energy is famous for its lousy record on safety and environmental compliance. Just like Garrett, Donny figures it's cheaper to buy off the inspectors than pay the cost of reclamation. A few years ago, OSHA took them to court for huge safety violations they'd been covering up for years. But I don't know what this one's about."
Clearly, she didn't care much, either. Everything about Julieta, her scuffing walk, the hunched shoulders, the resignation in her voice, radiated an affect Cree had seen only in the briefest of glimpses before. Something was breaking up inside her. She had abandoned hope and resistance. Curiously, Cree thought, she wore the mood beautifully. Surrender, that's what it was. Grace came with it. She put her arm through Julieta's and was pleased to feel her draw Cree's elbow against her side.