Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

The mine access road cut straight south from Highway 264 through low, rolling hills. Running parallel to the wide gravel road, the company's rail spur was occupied by a seemingly endless train of open-topped cars heaped with coal. Cree had picked up Joyce at the Navajo Nation Inn, and they were using the time to bring each other up to date.

Cree felt burnt, little more than a husk of ash, consumed by the flame of anger and anxiety she'd felt at the hospital. On her way out of the building, she'd used a pay phone to call Julieta with the news about Tommy, then spent the drive from Gallup to Window Rock trying to think. With a whirlwind of competing worries, it wasn't easy.

"I've been mostly striking out," Joyce told her. "The museum is gorgeous, but the materials there didn't tell me jack about what might have happened at the mesa. There's lots of good stuff on Navajo spirituality and healing traditions, and the museum proper gives a basic history of the People. But your little mesa doesn't show up."

"Crap."

"Sorry. There's tons of historical drama in the region, though. The Navajos and Apaches began migrating in about eight hundred years ago. Of course, they found the Pueblos' ancestors already living here. For a few centuries there was the usual raiding and feuding among Apaches, Utes, Navajos, Hopis, the whole gang, and then the Spanish came and subjugated the bejeezus out of whoever they could lay hands on. Then the area was ceded to the United States and the Yankees began to come in, and it all went downhill from there. The Indians resisted, natch, some more than others, some making alliances with the whites. One of the worst problems was the trade in Indian slaves, run by the Mexicans and white Americans. At one point, one fourth of all Navajos were slaves. The U.S. government wouldn't do anything about it, so the Dine fought back hard. It all came to a head around 1863, when Kit Carson was sent out to kill or round up every last Navajo. When he couldn't just shoot them, he starved them out-burned their crops, destroyed their flocks. Most of the Navajos were brought to Fort Wingate and then were marched three hundred miles to some hellhole on the eastern side of the state called Bosce Redondo. The Navajos call it the Long Walk, it's one of the defining historical moments for the tribe. It was brutal, a lot of them died en route. And Bosce Redondo was basically a concentration camp-forced labor, starvation, disease, humiliation, the whole Nazi shtick. Eventually it begat some appropriate outrage, several federal commissions looked into the situation and found it abhorrent. So the government felt a twinge of remorse, created the rez, and marched the survivors back in 1868."

Cree didn't answer. She just clung to the steering wheel, mourning the endless and unnecessary cruelty that human beings could inflict on each other. The arid desert landscape was a melancholy stage upon which untold sorrows had been enacted. Like everywhere else. All these years of self-deluding idealism, thinking she could do something about it by alleviating one small, lingering hurt at a time. Insane. Trying to bail the ocean with an eyedropper.

Joyce noticed her sudden dive. "I did pull up some newspaper stuff on livestock mutilations, though," she went on brightly, as if that would cheer Cree up. "Most recent local incident was a couple of years ago, that must be what Donny was talking about. Some Navajo teenagers tracked their horses onto McCarty property, over on the far west end of their Hunters Point land? Supposedly found the horses all… well, sliced up. In weird ways. Give you something to chat about with Donny M, anyway. An icebreaker."

Cree nodded. Joyce was trying to be amusing.

Joyce bit her lower lip and then said quietly, "I'm sorry, Cree. I don't have anything sweet and nice to tell you." She turned her face to the window and somberly regarded the passing desert. "How'd we get into this business, anyway? You know?"

"What business? The human being business?"

"I know you're worried about the boy. But we'll find him. Joseph or Julieta will have some idea how."

"Yeah." But that hope didn't cheer her. I still have no idea who or what is in him, she thought despondently. I don't know if I can do my work when I'm trying to stay ahead of an entity that's taking more control every day, not to mention child welfare investigators and eager beavers like Schaeffer looking for an unusual specimen to experiment on.

They were driving between heaps of crushed mineral material. Up ahead, Cree saw the rearing dragline boom she and Julieta had seen from the other side. A mile or so to the east, several giant yellow machines were trundling along, dumping spoil and putting up a drifting cloud of dust.

Joyce followed her gaze and her brow wrinkled. "We should talk about how to handle Donny, Cree. What we're going to tell him, what we're trying to accomplish here. What's your plan?"

"Plan?" Cree snorted. "I'm going to lie through my teeth-what else?"

Two minutes later, they approached a guardhouse with striped barrier gates lowered across the road. Just this side of it, Donny McCarty sat on the hood of a massive black SUV. With him was a large man with a boyish, pug-nosed face and the build of a weight lifter. As they pulled over, the two men left the truck and approached them.

Cree turned off the car, got out, and introduced Joyce as her associate; Donny introduced the big man as Nick Stephanovic, his "aide-de-camp."

"That's 'gofer' in English," Nick said amiably. Closer to him, Cree felt a glow of menace behind the bearish good humor and for an instant wondered irrationally whether they had anything to worry about from Donny or his sidekick today.

"And what's your role in your firm, Ms. Wu?" Donny asked Joyce.

"Business manager," Joyce said. "And historical investigator, medic, um, devil's advocate, and all-round utility drone. That's English for gofer, too."

Donny nodded with a sour expression that made it clear he wasn't planning to share anyone's attempts at conviviality.

"We're very grateful for your meeting us," Cree said. "Not too many CEOs would make time to show a stranger around. Especially such a, well, strange stranger."

Nick chuckled and explained cheerfully, "McCarty Energy has a longstanding policy of public accessibility and accountability."

Donny didn't share his assistant's mood. He struck Cree as preoccupied and suspicious, a man just going through the motions. "I have only an hour to spare for this, so I'd like to get started. What's our agenda? Forgive me if I'm unfamiliar with the concerns of a parapsychologist."

"Well, we had talked about the mutilations-"

"We can take you to the area where we found 'em, but I can't promise you'll see anything of interest. I can't even guarantee we'll find the exact spot again. Even the bones are probably long gone. Coyotes drag 'em around."

Nick Stephanovic nodded.

"I have to be frank, Mr. McCarty," Cree began uneasily. "Since we last met, I've heard some interesting supernatural gossip. This will sound strange, but a couple of staffers at the school mentioned a rumor of a ghost here at the mine. I guess they had worked here, or had relatives who had worked here, and-"

"Oh, yeah? And who would that be? I have something of a photographic memory for some things, including my employees' names."

"You know, I can't remember. Sorry, the Navajo names are so unfamiliar to me-"

"Probably a Begay or a Nez," Nick put in helpfully. "Every other Navajo is a Begay."

"I think that was it," Cree said. "Yes."

The two men exchanged glances, and Cree got the feeling she was fooling no one.

"So we've got a ghost here at the mine-" Donny prompted.

"I told you this would sound odd… but they say your father died here three years ago, and someone said it was his ghost. I hoped I might visit the site of his death. I wanted to see if I could… make contact with him. As long as I was here anyway." She hesitated, trying to gauge his reaction. "Of course, if this is difficult for you, I completely understand. I don't mean to sound insensitive to your loss-"