Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"We've had some disturbing activity, yes," Julieta said flatly.

"If I can call you sometime soon," Cree told him, "I'd be very grateful…"

Another man joined the group, and the three of them got into the back of the Jeep, which pulled out and headed toward the south rim ramp Donny had used. Outwardly, Julieta maintained her scornful calm, but Cree felt her tension rising.

Donny turned to watch the truck's dust, then gave a resigned sigh and took out his cell phone again.

"Nick? Forget it. I can handle it… No, more of a bullshit exercise in community relations. Yeah. I'll see 'em off the property myself Send the boys back to work. Yeah." He snapped the phone shut. Ignoring Julieta, he took the bridle of Cree's horse and turned her around, facing away from the valley. "We can't have people coming this close to mine operations, Dr. Black. It's not safe-you could take a fall. Might be weeks before anyone found you, and you'd end up looking like one of those mutes. Now it's time for you to leave."

"Is there any chance we can meet? At your convenience-"

He regarded Cree briefly, and she sensed an analytic mind at work behind the weary gray eyes, some calculation of value or opportunity. "We'll see. Possible. Call my secretary." He appeared to give Breeze a shrewd once-over, stroking her cheek and neck and haunches. Then he spat and thrust the horse's head away from him. He started back to the Jeep. "Your horses, Julieta- not the quality you were once used to, are they?"

Julieta's eyes shot daggers. "Screw you, Donny! How dare you!"

He ignored her but paused at the Jeep's door to look at Cree again. "Another piece of advice-don't associate with the wrong people. Get off on the wrong foot around here, people don't forget. Bad reputations kind of rub off on you."

Julieta wheeled Madie around and led the way back toward the open desert, deliberately holding the horse to a slow walk. Cree rode next to her. Donny McCarty trailed a hundred yards behind for several miles, making a point, before finally pulling the Jeep around and speeding away.

"'Mutes'?" Cree asked. "I had no idea livestock mutilations were so common they'd earned a vernacular term."

Julieta's jaw had been clenched for the first ten minutes or so, but her rage had gradually given way to exhausted despondency. Now she shrugged. "There's more of it up in the northern part of the state, southern Colorado. We get a little wave of them, every few years. Makes the papers." She looked numbed and dispirited, back slumped, a negligent hand on the reins.

"People take it seriously?"

Another listless shrug. "Some do. He could be right about scavengers. I've never thought about it much. But I found a mutilated calf once. The face had been… well." She frowned over at Cree. "I thought you'd be an expert at that kind of thing."

"No. I'm a psychologist, Julieta. I may have a unique theory of psychology, but it all pertains to the human mind. They didn't teach us a thing about extraterrestrial intelligences at Harvard or Duke."

Julieta bobbed her head, unable to share the joke.

"Think Donny will agree to meet me?" Cree asked.

"Depends. I'd give it even odds. He will if he thinks he might get some useful information out of you-dirt about me or the school. Or if he thinks he can use you to get some publicity that makes McCarty look nice. He'll do anything-last month, they did a local TV special about handicapped grade-school kids taking a field trip to the mine. So very heartwarming. He calls it 'image management.'"

They rode on in silence for a time. It was only three o'clock, but the day had dimmed as a thin film of clouds formed high in the atmosphere and diffused the sun's glow. Though the light was still bright, it had begun to take on a milky quality that muted the landscape, softened the shadows, blurred the distances. The celebratory crispness was gone from the land, leaving it forlorn.

"We got interrupted," Cree ventured. "You were telling me some really important things. I'd love to hear the rest."

Julieta turned quickly, and even behind the mask of the sunglasses her face looked stricken. She whipped her head to the front again and looked as if she were about to flee once more, to gallop away from her own past.

"Julieta!" Cree barked. "You can do this, damn it! You're an administrator and you know how to do hard things! Tell me!"

Julieta caught herself as she raised the reins. She slumped again, took off her sunglasses, and looked at Cree with glittering eyes.

"You're being me again," she said. "The boss me." She grunted with bitter amusement.

"Whatever it takes," Cree told her curtly.

Peter Yellowhorse was about her age, twenty-four, twenty-five. He was from Teec Nos Pos, up near Shiprock, but he'd moved south a year earlier to take a job doing grounds work for the tribal facilities in Window Rock. Always late, he'd gotten fired pretty quickly, but then he'd been lucky enough to get work with the little company that took care of the McCartys' estate. He lived in a wreck of a house just over the rez line, about eight miles away. He was dirt-poor, by white standards, anyway, lucky to have a job. He owned exactly three things of any value whatsoever: his horse, a beat-up Chevy truck, and a belt with a fancy silver and turquoise buckle that had been made by some uncle who was a well-known silversmith. He loved to ride and occasionally did bronc riding at local rodeos, but mainly what he wanted was to get into radio, become a DJ. He did janitorial work three nights a week at a Gallup station in exchange for the studio time and training that would earn him his FCC license.

Easy to be DJ on a Navajo station, he joked. All those long moments of respectful silence, yeah?

At first she found excuses to chat with him during the day about repairs or landscaping she wanted done. Then she started talking to him about her horses; she asked him to help train them and, eventually, to ride with her. Peter was the restless type, she could see why he didn't hold a job. But he was very smart, with a relentless sense of humor and a gift for turns of phrase that always surprised her. He was innately courteous and, compared to Garrett's social set, surprisingly proper, traditional. She liked that. Also unlike them, he was honest, never tried to hide what he was, couldn't have if he'd tried. And oh God, he was handsome-whipcord thin, smooth bronze skin, a fast smile and quick flashing eyes. He wore his hair long because there'd been an American Indian Movement protest nearby a while ago, and though he'd considered them just a bunch of troublemaking Sioux coming down from the Midwest to get their pictures in the papers, he'd liked their rebellious look and style.

One day she was bold enough to ask him to do some work, just him, during off hours. After a while, when he came, all they did was talk or ride together. The desire she felt was as bright and hot as lightning, except it didn't flicker, didn't come and go. It was a remorseless current that flowed continuously, almost painfully. Yet despite its power, they were just friends for almost a year. Julieta was still waiting for Garrett.

Peter felt it, too, but even with his reckless attitude, he would never have broached it. He was too decent, too respectful. And he was no doubt more aware than she was of the risks that would come with having an affair with the wife of Garrett McCarty. A poor Navajo kid getting on the bad side of an old rich white coal exec wasn't likely to do too well in any arena of life.

Julieta was the one who led the way. Something had sprung loose inside her the first time she'd seen him riding Bird so joyously. She'd determined she would taste that freedom. She'd been a physical virgin when she'd married Garrett; as she and Peter began to make love, that first time, she realized that in every way that mattered she still was one. It happened in a worn sandstone gully far around the south end of the mesa, among smooth, sensuous rock curves that invited their bodies to collide and entwine.