Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

He called ahead on his cell phone, got Uncle Joe's answering machine, left a message saying only that he was coming to see him, no explanation of why. Uncle Joe and Margaret lived off the rez not far from Crownpoint, about seventy miles from Window Rock. The drive gave him time to try to put his priorities in order.

The Keedays wouldn't have just brought Tommy back to the grandparents' place-too obvious. Which meant he'd need to persuade Uncle Joe to help him locate the boy and to encourage the family to let them see him. To do that, he'd need to overcome his uncle's resistance to talking about the past, his placing the baby. To do that, he'd have to persuade Uncle Joe that it was truly urgent, that there was a compelling reason to reveal the boy's whereabouts. The most compelling reason he could think of was that Julieta was coming apart at the seams, that she needed something drastic to break the chain, set her free from the past. And if Tommy was her son, he could argue that maybe there comes a time when a young man needs to know who his real parents were. That certainly seemed a big part of Tommy's predicament.

But Uncle Joe would demand more than that. He'd given Joseph a charge: to think about what needed fixing, to diagnose the problem so that he could prescribe himself a cure. Joseph could truthfully claim he'd thought about it, long and hard. The hard part was deciding on the cure.

Then he'd have to explain why it was important for Cree Black to be able to see the boy, and that would open up a supernatural, religious, philosophical can of worms. The old man would ask him why he'd trust some white parapsychologist, why he'd buy into weird quasi-medical, quasi-occult beliefs but had such a distrust of traditional Navajo ways of seeing and coping with the same things.

To which Joseph didn't have an answer. It wasn't so much that he'd come to agree with Cree Black's worldview, but that his habitual beliefs had become full of cracks and gaps. He could no longer decide what was science and what was superstition, fact or supposition, personal view or unbiased observation. He couldn't argue with Uncle Joe anymore because he didn't know what to believe.

He cut up 666 and then east on 9, settling into the forty-mile empty stretch between Nakaibito and Crownpoint. He was awed by the vast open sweep of the Chuska Valley, but still the region had always depressed him: its poverty and aridity, its air of desperation. The litter caught in the fences. People living in isolated, shabby hogans and trailers or new, generic, sterile complexes of government housing, without history or beauty or anything particularly Navajo about them. The scenery was bleak, especially after the recent years of drought. In thirty minutes of driving, he encountered only two other vehicles on the road. And this was positively urban compared to where the Keedays lived, somewhere way up above the dirt road between Naschitti and White Rock.

Uncle Joe and Margaret were comparatively well-off and lived in an eighties-era ranch-style house within view of Highway 371, south of Crownpoint. At the end of the quarter-mile driveway, Joseph was relieved to see the new double-cab truck parked near the house, which meant his uncle was at home or nearby. He turned his own truck around in the space between house and corral, turned it off, and sat, giving Uncle Joe time to adapt to his unannounced arrival.

When no one appeared, he got out and went to the door of the house. He knocked and waited again.

"Nobody home," Uncle Joe called from behind him. The old man had come around the corner of the stock shed, accompanied by two mutt puppies that bounced and bit at each other in high good spirits.

"Yaateeh, Uncle," Joseph said uneasily.

"I got your message on the machine. You're just in time." Uncle Joe frowned as if Joseph were late for an appointment. "I could use a hand in here. My ram is too tough for me." Without further explanation, he disappeared back into the shed. The little dogs watched Joseph, heads canted expectantly.

Joseph crossed the yard, opened the corral gate, and waded through the frisking puppies around to the other side of the shed. Uncle Joe stood in the open end of the three-sided enclosure, smoking a cigarette and blocking the escape of a burly gray ram that chewed some feed and watched him suspiciously. The rest of Uncle Joe's little flock, six ewes and a handful of this spring's lambs, stood nearby, unconcerned.

When Joseph came in, Uncle Joe tucked his cigarette into the corner of his lips, bent quickly, and grabbed the ram. He expertly tipped the barrel-shaped body onto its side and with his head beckoned Joseph to hold the animal down. Helping, the little dogs darted in to nip out tufts of wool until Uncle Joe kicked at them and they backed away. When Joseph had put a knee on the panting chest and gotten a firm grip on two legs, Uncle Joe took a bolt cutter and clipped back the curled toes on one of the double hoofs. The ram's struggles subsided to a perfunctory kicking as Uncle Joe began paring the glistening flat-cut ends with a jackknife.

"You look like hell," Uncle Joe chided. One eye winced as cigarette smoke trickled up his seamed cheek. "Young man your age shouldn't look so bad."

"Young? I'm forty-six. How old do you have to be before you can use it as an excuse? I get tired like anyone else."

"Good-looking young man. Got the pretty nurses at the hospital all giving you moon eyes, is what I hear. Could have your pick." Uncle Joe scrutinized the neat double points he'd sculpted, then let go and went on to the next foot.

Joseph grinned sadly as he changed his grip. "Who'd you hear that from?"

Uncle Joe just grunted as he levered the bolt cutter. He took up his knife again, gouged muck from between the hooves, wiped the blade on his overalls, and carved away another crescent. Neither man said anything more for a time as they worked, Joseph shifting his grip, Uncle Joe's leathery hands deftly sculpting.

When Uncle Joe had finished the last hoof, they both stood up. The ram rolled quickly onto his feet and trotted out to join the ewes, looking officious to conceal his injured dignity. Uncle Joe wiped his hands on a rag and then used it to slap dust off his overalls. He looked at Joseph critically. It was a sharp look, and long enough for a light plane to drone overhead, drop toward the little airstrip on the other side of Crownpoint, and disappear.

Joseph looked back at him. He still hadn't said anything about why he was here today, and there was a lot to explain. But he didn't have the faintest idea of where to start.

Uncle Joe tossed down his cigarette, ground it out carefully, and walked around Joseph toward the corral gate. He held it open for Joseph, then latched it behind them.

Joseph was surprised when his uncle didn't head for the house door but straight for the big burgundy truck.

"We should take my chitty," Uncle Joe called over his shoulder. "Those roads back in there by Keedays', they'll take the oil pan off yours. Anyway, it'll give me a chance to show off the options."

"They'll have scheduled a Hand-Trembler for the boy," Uncle Joe told him. They were still on the paved road, halfway to Tsaya on 371. Uncle Joe had spent the first ten minutes demonstrating the widgets and gadgets that came with his new truck. Joseph had dutifully tested his own seat adjustments, the interior climate control, and the illuminated vanity mirror in the visor.

"The Hand-Trembler will probably make his diagnosis pretty soon, but it'll take some days for the Singer to get ready, people to be invited, sheep to be butchered, all that. In the meantime, the family will be hiding him from the child services people. I know the Keeday place, it's pretty spread out, they couldn't ever live too close together and now a lot of them have relocated. They've got an old summer sheep camp way up on the plateau, and I guess if they're serious about keeping him out of the state's hands they'll have brought him up there."