Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

Not that it mattered, at this point: With Tommy gone from the school, Cree Black's talents or lack thereof might be irrelevant.

Driving on automatic pilot, he realized that he'd passed his turn into Window Rock. Not really an accident, he knew immediately. Thinking about Julieta's pleading last night made him realize that he had pressing business that took precedence over the need for sleep. He needed to find Uncle Joe Billie, ask him some questions. Given that it was a weekend, he knew where to find his mother's brother. Whether the old man would tell him anything, whether he was sober enough to understand the issues or felt like playing games today, was another matter.

He stopped at the Mustang station to gas up the truck and get a cup of coffee to go. Then he headed east on Route 264, the sun searing straight into his eyes as he left the Navajo Nation, entered the United States, and hit the highway for the drive to Gallup.

He shut off the engine in the rutted dirt lot across the highway from the flea market. Nine-thirty, it was too early for the big crowds, and the parking area was less than half full of pickups and station wagons. The hay sellers were doing a brisk business, though, tossing down bales from towering stacks on flatbed semitrailers to family pickups that nosed up against their flanks like foals to a mare.

Joseph crossed the highway to the dirt access road that ran around the market proper. Some of the smaller vendors were still arriving, moving their tables and racks and paraphernalia on dollies or garden carts. Whole families carried things: little girls carrying nested hand-woven baskets, boys wrestling toppling piles of cowboy hats or burlap sacks of potatoes, fathers and mothers struggling with racks of toys or Chinese-made tools or their own handicrafts. Already the air was filled with the smell of fry bread and roasting mutton, reminding Joseph that he hadn't eaten any breakfast.

Uncle Joe often set up in the first row of stalls, among some of the other herb sellers. But as Joseph scanned the row, he didn't see his uncle's weathered face. He stopped at one of the booths to ask a young woman if she'd seen Hastiin Joe Billie, and she said she thought maybe he'd come late and was around one of the side lanes. Joseph thanked her and left her table. The Gallup Flea Market covered many acres and included hundreds of vendors who sold everything from used engine blocks to watermelon juice, potatoes to livestock-castrating tools, snow cones to hand-woven blankets, plastic action-figure toys to saddles to computer components. When he was younger, it had included more local crafts, but now many of the vendors were small-time entrepreneurs who'd gotten a line on off-brand tools or cooking utensils, T-shirts, Chinese-made electronics, Mexican tourist goods, music CDs and cassettes. Still, there were plenty of family-run stands full of pottery and jewelry, piles of root vegetables, bags of herbs, goat-fat soap, wool and sheepskins and leather. From their rough hands and the reserve in their eyes, you could tell some of these people had come in from remote areas where crowds like this were unknown and the nickels and dimes they'd make here were big-time cash. This was how he imagined some bazaar in Cairo or Istanbul might look: tarp-covered stalls, piles of vegetables, stacks of boxes, food concessions with grills roasting meat or boiling vats of corn stew. There were some whites here, as well as Mexicans, Pueblos, Apaches, even a few Japanese guys and Pakistanis, but most of the vendors and clientele were Navajos. He looked at their faces and felt their collective anarchic energy with a familiar mix of pride and sorrow.

He found another herb vendor whose face he thought he recognized. "Yaateeh. Do you know where Joe Billie is today?" he asked.

"Maybe around back," the man answered.

Which meant it could take him a long time to find Uncle Joe. If strung end to end, the meandering rows of stalls would stretch a couple of miles. The thought made him feel weary and he decided he'd better still the complaining of his stomach before going any farther. He stopped at a likely-looking concession, an Airstream trailer fronted by a tarp-covered sitting area with four picnic tables. The roast mutton wasn't ready yet, so he ordered a bowl of stew, a couple of fry breads, and a cup of coffee, and when he got the food took it to a table where he could look out on the lane as he ate. Several booths down, one of the music sellers turned on a boom box, playing a CD of some local country-and-western band, amateurish but full of vigor. Joseph ripped a piece from the huge disk of bread, salted it, and wolfed it down. Time to catch his breath and fortify himself.

Anyway, before he talked to Uncle Joe, he needed another few minutes to gather his thoughts.

Besides pleading with him to tell her whether Tommy really was her long-lost baby, Julieta had begged him to help keep the parapsychologist working with the boy, to intercede with the grandparents or the doctors to keep her on as a consulting psychologist.

Which required he make a decision about Cree Black. As Tommy's primary physician, someone the grandparents trusted, a doctor in good standing at Ketteridge, he could play Roman emperor, give Cree a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Thumbs-down: He could recommend against her having access to the boy, and there would be little she could do about it. Thumbs-up, and they'd probably assent to her seeing him.

Two days ago, it would have been an easier decision: good-bye Dr. Black. But the parapsychologist's methods were not at all what he'd expected. Every time they spoke, she articulated her perspective so clearly and compellingly. And yet it was like nothing he'd ever heard of.

Well, not quite, he realized. Surprisingly, some aspects of her approach resembled the traditional Navajo healing process. Her belief in spirits capable of occupying a human being, that was part of it, and the way real reverence merged with superstition in her personal cosmology. It was also her emphasis on the patient's social environment. By probing the interpersonal relationships around the sufferer, Cree Black made the group part of the process-not unlike the complex Ways the old healers performed, where the whole community came to give the ritual and gave the patient their support. It was one component of the traditions he'd accepted as both defensible and, for some afflictions anyway, effective.

And she had an impressive resume, too. During a break yesterday morning, he had looked her up on the Internet and found a surprising number of references: advanced degrees, significant publications, lecturing, a prestigious postdoctoral research prize.

Joseph chuckled cynically, surprised at himself. He couldn't decide which factor influenced him most, but on balance, he decided, he was impressed with her and wouldn't mind seeing what she could accomplish with Tommy. At the very least, arranging for Cree Black to keep working with him would soothe Julieta, maybe discourage her from raising legal challenges to the grandparents' custody, or waging a private, hopeless war against the health-care system. Or otherwise staking claims on the boy that she couldn't defend and that would rip Tommy's world, and hers, apart.

But Cree Black's approach also created potential problems. The first was simply that her methods might not hold any promise for Tommy. The woman could be chasing vapors. Despite the baffling strangeness of his symptoms, Joseph still had to believe Tommy was suffering from a neurological or psychological problem that would ultimately need a clinical remedy. Cree Black could do worse than nothing; she could delay or misdirect the treatment that Tommy really needed. In that sense, the very penuasiveness that made her such a skilled interviewer and confidante could make her dangerous. Already, Julieta had bought completely into the idea that Tommy was indeed "possessed," and that the culprit was the nasty ghost of a too-familiar enemy, Garrett McCarty.