Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (7 page)

They drove on in silence. Still the land had not changed: As far as the eye could see were low hills of bone-dry brown earth,
low-growing brush, scattered scrubby piñon trees. The only indication of human presence was an occasional trailer or prefab
house at the end of a dirt driveway, a defunct pickup truck, maybe a corral occupied by a gaunt, drowsing horse.

Closer to Window Rock, they passed an area where the ridges visible from the road struck Cree as too uniform to be natural
mesas; it wasn't until she saw the sign for the P & M Coal Company that she realized they must be recovered strip-mine tailing
mounds. Sure enough, beyond the farther hills she saw a gargantuan derrick rotating slowly against the sky. Near the highway,
several preposterously outsized yellow dump trucks and front loaders moved around piles of dirt, putting up clouds of dust.

Julieta's frown deepened as they passed the operation. She squinted into the lowering sun, gripped the wheel, and drove as
if eager to get past.

"So you married Garrett McCarty—" Cree prompted.

"The long and short of it is, we were married for five years," Julieta said curtly. "It was not so good. The details are irrelevant.
Divorced in eighty-seven. I did all right in the settlement—ended up with our residence here, the land around it, and some
money. Somewhere in there I decided I needed to do something with my life. Went to UNM and got a master's in education administration.
Spent every cent of the divorce money to build Oak Springs School."

"How do you get along with your ex now?"

"Garrett? He died three years ago. He was sixty-six. Now his son from his first marriage owns McCarty Energy. Donny McCarty—
my former stepson, can you believe it?—is four years older than I am. We have a mutual-loathing arrangement. He resented
me from the start, and his feelings didn't sweeten when I walked away with some of his father's holdings. The bad part is that the court partitioned off my land from a much larger chunk Garrett owned, so the company is our neighbor. Donny likes to make our lives miserable with right-of-way problems or whatever he can dream up."

The question seemed to drive Julieta back inside herself, and they were quiet again as they approached Window Rock. Julieta's
anxiety was rising as they got closer to the school and what awaited them there. It occurred to Cree that for all she'd learned
about Julieta's past, she'd hardly gotten to know the woman at all. She realized she was rather dazzled by her beauty, her
vividness, and that for all the immediate empathy she'd felt, her dazzlement distanced her. Except for that glimpse of a grin at Earl Craig's house, she knew next to nothing about Julieta's emotional life.

"I can't help wondering . . . " Cree began. "You had what sounds like a crappy marriage. Why did you keep McCarty's name?"

Julieta made a face of distaste. "Sheer pragmatism. The name carries clout around here. To make the school happen, I needed
all the weight I could sling. Having the name, even as an ex-wife, helps me get access and ask for favors in the right places.
Make contacts in the legislature, raise money from other rich mining families."

"So you've never remarried? Never had children?"

"I've had relationships. None of them ever quite made it to the marrying stage," Julieta said distantly. Abruptly she seemed
to catch herself, and she turned to Cree with an angry face. "But I don't see what my past has to do with Tommy Keeday and
his
terrible
problem. Why aren't we talking about that? Joseph and I came to Dr. Ambrose as a last resort when nobody else was giving us
satisfactory answers. We wouldn't buy into this at all if we hadn't seen what we'd seen and spent the last few weeks trying
every other imaginable solution. I could really use some reassurance that there's substance to his conclusions or your methods. This isn't about
me.
It's about Tommy. And, frankly, if you're going to work with him, it's about
you.
"

Cree couldn't help feeling personally rebuffed. But she made a mental note of Julieta's sudden defensiveness and decided to
press on with a less intrusive line of inquiry.

"I wish I could offer more reassurance, but I can't. I've never dealt with a situation like this. But what you've told me
so far is very helpful. It's especially useful to me to know about the school and the history of the immediate area, because often a . . . an unknown entity is anchored in
a place and connected to past events there. But as I said, every environment is deeply layered with human experience—it can
be hard for me to pin down whether a given entity is from a year ago or a thousand years ago or anywhere in between. So the
more I know, the better. Can you tell me anything about the school or the land it's on?"

Julieta nodded and continued in a subdued tone that suggested she regretted her outburst.

The school buildings were new, she said, built five years ago. All but her own house—that was something of a historic building,
a former trading post built around 1890 on what was then a trail from Oak Springs to Black Hat. The McCartys bought the land
in 1922 and began using the building as their site office. Over the years, mining operations drifted several miles to the
north, following the coal, and in 1950 Garrett McCarty's father converted it to a residence. Garrett renovated and modernized
it once again before Julieta married him, and that's where she had lived, mostly, for the five years of their marriage. The
old road ended at the house now; the mine's access and rail spur now came down from Route 264, about twenty miles to the north.
Both Julieta's twelve hundred acres and the mine's much larger holding, over forty square miles, were situated in New Mexico,
just over the Arizona border from the Big Rez.

As for the history of the school land, she said, there wasn't any. It was just a little patch of ground in a desert that stretched
to the horizon in every direction. The region was first populated by the early Pueblo ancestors, popularly called by the Navajo
term, Anasazi, who had first started arriving around two thousand years ago, followed a thousand years later by the Navajos
and Apaches. The first European explorers were the Spanish, who came in 1540, looking for gold and converts to Catholicism,
but a few hundred years of Indian resistance and the Mexican revolution destroyed their dreams of empire. When Mexico ceded
the region to the United States in 1848, Yankees began pouring in the region, suppressing the Indians in wars and pogroms.
The government created the Navajo reservation in 1868 during a flash of contrition for atrocities perpetrated upon the Dinê.

Julieta didn't think Spanish explorers had ever made it to the Black Creek area, but the American entrepreneurs certainly
had. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, they'd set up trading, lumbering, mining, and cattle ranching operations,
along with the military posts needed to protect them and the railroads needed to move goods. Her Irish ancestors, like Garrett
McCarty's, had arrived in a wave of migration in the 1870s.

But as far as she knew, the area of the school itself didn't figure in any of this. A few Navajos had no doubt lived there
once, but if so they'd left no traces. Possibly some Anasazis had lived there a thousand years ago, but she had ridden her
horses over every inch of the land nearby and had never seen any ruins or petroglyphs. Her house might have had some colorful
early history in its years as a trading post, but if so she'd never heard a word of it.

The whole place was so obscure that the little mesa just east of the school didn't even warrant a name on the maps. She'd
once heard an old Navajo ranch hand call it Lost Goats Mesa, but that generation had died off and now it was nameless again—
none of her staff or faculty had ever mentioned any history of the place.

Cree got the picture. The land was big and enduring; people were small and transient, and the details of their little lives
got lost in the sweep of things.

Another few minutes of silence. Julieta put on a pair of sunglasses to help ward the sun that now drilled straight into their
eyes, and the reflective plastic seemed to make her very remote.

Soon a big mesa rose and cut off the northwestern horizon, presenting a line of sandstone bluffs that broke into freestanding
pillars and buttes at the edges, carved by time into marvelous shapes. They struck Cree as gorgeous, and despite her growing
trepidation she felt a shiver of excitement when she saw the sign at the edge of Window Rock: WELCOME TO THE NAVAJO NATION.
The highway led into a typical strip of shopping centers, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations, but it felt to her like
a gateway to something far larger and older. Behind every plastic sign and faux-adobe facade loomed the ancient rock faces,
stark yet sensuous, patient yet playful. The lowering sun filled the red stone with light, softening and smoothing it; she
wanted to reach out and stroke the wind-sculpted forms.

"So lovely!" Cree exclaimed.

Julieta glanced over as if startled to find someone in the truck with her. She followed Cree's gaze. "Yes," she admitted. "I guess it is, isn't it. I kind of forget."

7

HORSES. THEY turned onto the school's access road through a little band of horses that milled across the gravel and onto the
verge, engaged in some minor scuffle and unconcerned by the approaching pickup. Other than to slow down, Julieta ignored them,
but they struck Cree as beautiful, a poem of motion—big, rangy animals with ropy veins in their legs, running free beneath
the open sky. They were all pale dapple grays and caramel-and-white palominos, their mottled hides vivid in the lowering sun,
long shadows behind.

"The Navajos tend to let their stock roam loose," Julieta explained.

"These guys are from Shurley's place, on the rez just the other side of Black Creek—the stallion comes to check out my mares.
I should call him to let him know they've come over this way again."

As the truck came among them, the stallion wheeled, showed a wide eye and yellow teeth to one of his harem, then harried her.
The whole group turned irritable and skittish, ears back, as they trotted away.

The sign at the turnoff had said the school was nine miles away, and they drove it in what was becoming for Cree a loaded
silence. Julieta's tension was palpable, a dark, heavy mass. The sun was directly behind the truck now, painting the stark
landscape with a lush glow, but Cree couldn't savor its beauty anymore. Ahead lay something she'd never encountered, a brooding
thing burgeoning like the line of blue dark that rimmed the eastern horizon. Already, she was unsure whether her sense of
it was her own or something acquired from Julieta. For the thousandth time, she cursed her proclivity—her talent, her disability—
for resonating so strongly with her clients, taking on their states of mind until the borders of identity blurred. If ever
there was a time to remain objective, this was it. And she was off to a lousy start.

The horses veered away from the road and descended out of view into a dip of land to the north. Julieta's knuckles had gone
white on the steering wheel, her pretty hands turned to naked bone, pressure rising until after another five minutes she slowed
and stopped the truck. The plume of dust that had been following them blew past on a light breeze. Once it was gone, she shut
off the motor and rolled down her window.

"You can see pretty much the whole thing from here," Julieta said hollowly, as if it were something lost to her.

They had stopped on a little rise. About a mile away, the school lay at the base of some low cliffs, a cluster of new-looking
sandstone and steel buildings surfaced in pastel beiges and pinks that complemented the desert palette. The road curved due
north through a parking lot and then through the center of the little campus. Julieta pointed out each building. "Just this
side of the water tower, that's the garage and utility shed. The next building on that side of the road is our main classroom
and cafeteria, and the steel building beyond that is the gym. On this side, the first one's our administration and faculty
housing building, and the two beyond that are the dorms. That little log house in the middle there is our hogan. At the far
end, that little bell tower is left over from the old days—the trading post would ring it to announce that they were open
for business. We think of it as a school bell now, but we only bang on it once a year, at graduation. Past that, where the
road ends, that's my house."

The last was a low, sandstone block building at the north end, well removed from the main cluster. A pair of huge cottonwood
trees bracketed the front porch; a swimming pool made a startling turquoise oval on one side, and behind the house stood a
barn, a few sheds, and a corral surrounded by a wooden rail fence.

"My once and future house," Julieta corrected herself. "Now I keep quarters in the faculty housing unit. Until we can add
a wing to the admin building, we're using my home as the infirmary and nurse's residence. That's where Tommy's been staying."

They spent a moment looking over the scene and listening to the tick of the cooling truck motor. A breeze came lightly through
the open windows, carrying the dry, clean scent of the desert.

There was nothing overtly menacing about the sight, Cree thought, but its isolation was extreme. Not a human being was visible,
and aside from the hard red glare of reflected sun in the west-facing windows, no lights shone. The parking lots were mostly
empty of cars, and the shadows of the buildings stretched long over the bare ground. All the distances seemed very great.

Lonesome,
Cree thought.

"Friday night is always quiet," Julieta explained. "Most of the kids go home for the weekends. A handful stay on campus, but
under the circumstances I figured this would be a good time for a field trip. They're off to Taos to visit artists' studios.
So Tommy's the only student here for the next couple of days, and we've got just a skeleton staff for the weekend. I thought
it would be the best conditions for . . . whatever it is you're going to do."

"Excellent."

Still Julieta made no move to start the truck. She sat looking at the scene with eyes full of desperation. "There's something
we should talk about before we get there," she said at last.

"Sure."

"What you tell me about your . . . theory of ghosts—it makes intuitive sense to me. I've always been pretty agnostic about
such things, but after what we've been through during the last few weeks, I'm willing to . . . reconsider my views. But I
still have serious doubts about bringing you here. You should know that what's happening to Tommy could kill this school in
any number of ways."

"How so?"

"All but three of the faculty and staff are Navajo, and if they start to think there's a supernatural aspect to this, they'll
leave and we'll never find anyone to fill their positions. If the parents hear there's something supernatural going on here,
they'll pull their kids out, word will spread, and we'll never get another student. If the school authorities hear about my
bringing in a . . . ghost buster to cope with a student health problem, they'll yank our accreditation. If any of my board
or my private funders hear about it, I'll lose my financial support. If the state social services people think we haven't
handled Tommy the right way, they'll close us down."

Cree nodded, accepting also the unspoken message behind Julieta's words:
This place means everything to me.

Several miles to the west, the horses came into view again and continued their long arc toward the corral behind Julieta's
house. Avoiding Cree's eyes, Julieta watched them with a desperate intensity.

"Julieta, you do have an awful lot at risk. Have you thought about ways you might dodge the problem? Couldn't you just, I
don't know, find another place for the boy? I don't want to sound callous, but his condition shouldn't jeopardize the whole
school. Couldn't you get him referred to a facility that's better set up for kids with medical or behavioral problems?"

"For now, this
is
where he's been referred! Putting him into long-term care somewhere is one of the options we've discussed. But Tommy hates
the idea, and so do his grandparents—they're his legal guardians, his parents are dead. And so do I. As Dr. Ambrose said,
the doctors have decided it's a behavioral issue—a . . . hoax, a gambit for attention by a troubled boy. Personally, I think
that's a load of manure, but for now that's what we're going on—formally, anyway. I argued that in that case, it's best to
keep him among his peers, have him keep up with school and other normalizing activities."

"What about sending him home? Could he take a leave of absence, or—"

Julieta shook her head decisively. "We discussed that, too. That was his family's preference, and that may be where he ends
up. But his grandparents are getting frail, and they'd never be able to cope with a problem like this. His extended family,
aunts and uncles and so on, is very dispersed. Their outfit's in a remote area where getting supervision and regular treatment
would be difficult. It's also an area without the social and learning resources to stimulate a boy with so much potential."

As always, Julieta had a logical answer, but Cree couldn't escape the feeling that the mere thought of Tommy going elsewhere
had terrified her. So much urgency and vehemence there. Through the administrator's reasoning answer had come one of the most
personal communications Julieta had yet offered, even if its subtext wasn't yet clear.

Julieta was looking intently at her as if to make sure she got the message. "My point is, the buck stops here," she said,
turning hard again.

"You're saying this is Tommy's last resort. That you're taking a big chance on me, and I'd better not let you down."

"Something like that," Julieta said. "Yes."