Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

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 gargantuan 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.

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.