Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"I have Hastiin Keeday's cell phone number. Don't you think we should call them before we get there?"

Uncle Joe shook his head. "No. No reception from here. Anyway, it's better to do this the old-fashioned way. Face-to-face. That way we all trust each other."

"Think they'll let us see him?"

"You and me? Sure. But not today. Their house is, oh, fifteen miles off the county road, the camp is maybe five miles beyond that. Gotta take a horse or go on foot unless you've got an ATV. Take too long to get up there today."

"I meant Julieta and me. And the psychologist she brought in."

"Huh. The psychologist, I doubt."

"They will if they meet her. That's one of the things I need your help with. Help me get them to meet her. To let her see Tommy."

"What's so special about this psychologist? They just went to a lot of trouble to take him away from a bunch of bilagaana shrinks."

Joseph hesitated at the brink and then told him Tommy's symptoms in detail. That Cree Black believed Tommy was possessed by a ghost, that to help her patients she looked at the whole history of emotional debts and unresolved feelings and motives around her patients, among the living and dead alike. He didn't have to explain to Uncle Joe that that's about what the Keedays would be thinking, too, and what general beliefs lay behind the traditional curing Ways.

Uncle Joe's frown had deepened as Joseph described Tommy's condition. His quick sideways glance showed a canny glint, meaning he saw Joseph's request for what it was: an admission that he had lost his bearings, his certainties.

The old man couldn't resist a prod: "Why are you helping her? I thought you didn't believe in that kind of stuff."

"I thought about what you said. About being full of shit. And you're right. Everybody's full of shit, Navajo or whatever, all the superstition and belief, the habits-none of it's any better. Or any worse. Thanks for screwing up my outlook completely, Uncle. Doesn't leave a guy with much, does it? So now I'm trying to take it as it comes. Best I can do."

Joseph saw Uncle Joe's lips move in a wry smile and felt it mirrored on his own lips. He remembered the bittersweet epiphany he'd felt when he'd been lying awake wrestling with his uncle's drunken riddle. With it, of course, came acceptance and absolution: for being Navajo, for his years of rejection of things Navajo. The problem isn't being Navajo, it's being human. We're all equally full of shit and we're therefore all equally okay. The realization had broken a chain that had bound and chafed for decades.

No sense in letting Uncle Joe get too smug, though. He decided to turn it around on the old man. "So why are you helping me?"

Uncle Joe snorted. "I took one look at you and I knew, here's a guy who needs all the help he can get."

"You know what I mean. Why'd you change your mind about our old agreement?"

A shrug. "I see my nephew all screwed up, wrapped around his own axle. He can't untie his knot until Julieta unties hers, she can't untie hers until she knows about her baby. And I'm seventy-four and a worn-out drunk, who the hell am I to make judgments. Besides, I don't need this hanging over me anymore. The pressure."

"I'm sorry, Uncle. Thank you."

Uncle Joe tugged a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket, stuck a Marlboro between his lips. He drove with it unlit for a mile or so before saying sadly, "We'll see if you thank me when we're done with this."

Forty minutes later, they were west of White Rock on one of the innumerable side roads that branched off of County 7760. They had left the vast desert plains of the Chuska Valley and had wound north into a maze of low, decaying mesas and crumbling buttes. Eons of wind and water had ground the land into freestanding forms of sandstone topped by a harder mantel of black rock, leaving grim, crumbling pillars, undercut mushrooms, shapes like castles and creatures. It was so dry that in places dunes of blown sand had drifted across the roads. Uncle Joe carefully navigated his truck over the uneven track. He steered with his cigarette between his knuckles, frowning at the occasional faint tire tracks that led away on the right. Many were barely visible in the brown grit, or disappeared as they crossed sandstone shelves higher up. Joseph couldn't imagine how anyone could find the right one.

"I have to piss again," Uncle Joe said abruptly. He stopped the truck in the middle of the track, shut it down, and got out. He walked down the track a way, selected a rock to water, and unzipped. Joseph got out and joined him.

It was completely silent here. The only sound was the tick of the truck's engine and the flow of their urine. They were in a hollow in the land where the surrounding buttes and humps cut off any long views. No wind stirred. After a long moment Uncle Joe finished and zipped himself up.

Joseph was halfway back to the truck before he realized Uncle Joe wasn't with him. He looked back to see the old man still over there, standing with one boot up on the rock, hands on his knee, staring ruminatively toward the northwest.

When Joseph walked back to him, Uncle Joe dug a wrinkled cigarette pack out of his jacket pocket, withdrew a bent Marlboro. He scowled deeply at it before he lit it.

"Just up ahead, you see where that outcrop comes near the road?" Uncle Joe blew smoke to indicate where to look. "Back forty years ago, used to be a little track went up just the other side. Nobody goes there now, can't even see where it was, but I went up there one time. This was about ten years after I got back from the war. I was hawking a new sheep-dip formula to my customers out this way, had a good deal going with the manufacturer. I was driving an old Willys, everybody thought I was rich to have a car, most people still got around on horses. Best little chitty I ever had, but it died on me right about this same spot. Couldn't get it going again. Out here, I knew nobody was going to come by for a long time, so I started walking and when I saw that track, I went up it. I thought I'd ask to borrow somebody's horse, or hitch a ride to where there was a phone. But there was a Wolf lived up there."

Joseph didn't ask what kind of wolf. Looking up at the black-topped, austere outcrop and the invisible country beyond, he felt a little quake inside. The day wasn't hot enough to make an inversion layer, but the air seemed to quiver over the land in that direction.

"He was very old, eighty, ninety, who knows. He probably would have died by himself but later I learned he had a daughter who checked in on him sometimes. Even she was old, even she was afraid of him. Nobody else would come near him. I had heard stories about a Wolf somewhere around here, but I didn't know it was the same guy until I saw him."

Obviously, Joseph realized, Uncle Joe hadn't stopped at this spot by chance. "What did he do?" he asked.

"He was bad. He took other people's animals. Sometimes he'd steal sheep to eat them, but sometimes he'd kill someone's horse or sheep just to do bad for them. Anything anybody did that he didn't like, he'd become their enemy. He dug up dead people from their graves, made poisons of their flesh, and some people said he ate it, too. People said he made their children sick, made them die. Made women have deformed babies."

"How would anyone know it was him who made the kids sick?"

"So this time I went up there, I'm going up the track and about, oh, two miles up I come to a hogan and back behind it a couple of pole sheds and a stock pen up near one of these little buttes, right up against the cliff. It's a real beat-up place-trash, rags caught in the bushes, tools on the ground, roof no good. I call hello and no one answers, but I know someone's there, I can smell smoke. The hogan's door is open, and after I stand there for a few minutes, I go closer to it and look inside. First thing I see is that the north wall is broken down. It's a dead person's hogan. But it looks like somebody lives in there anyway, inside it's a mess of dishes, blankets, food bones, the fire on the floor's smoldering a little."