Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

She took her water bottle and got stiffly out of the truck. The sun was so bright that even through her sunglasses the light seemed to ricochet painfully inside her skull. Surprisingly, though, it wasn't so bad-it scoured her out, bleached her clean. The sun and that cool, perfect breeze, dry and silent. From up here, the ancient rocks all around seemed a little less menacing. She put down the water bottle and began swinging her arms and rolling her shoulders, trying to shake out the tension. Deep breaths of the good air.

Since leaving the motel, she had been dutifully trying to follow Ed's advice: to put her thoughts in order and inventory the usable information at her disposal. But it wasn't much. She had Julieta's theory about Garrett McCarty, which might make sense if Tommy was indeed her child. It was based entirely on Julieta's powerful sense of recognition of Tommy as her son. That odd and often irrational certainty was something she'd learned to trust in herself and others, and from the beginning of this case she'd considered knowing about their biological relationship, and the inevitable dynamic it would create, an important asset.

But given Julieta's state of mind, the validity of that recognition was in doubt.

Okay, so maybe Julieta's thing with Tommy was purely an accident of circumstance, a red herring, made real by Cree's intense empathy with Julieta and reinforced by her own longing to have a child.

She bent at the waist, letting her arms hang loose. Her hair hung down and flipped in the breeze, the blood rushed to her temples. She rolled her neck and felt her vertebrae crackle. After a few moments, she felt somewhat refreshed and stood to take another swig of water and gaze out over the endless badlands.

What else? She had the ghost girl at the ravine and the many ways the mesa seemed to figure in. Maybe the entity was the ghost of the boy named Shinaai, long anchored at the ravine, that had chanced upon a suitable host environment in Tommy. Why Tommy? Maybe it was, as the Navajos often claimed, an ancestor spirit-maybe Tommy was a lineal descendant of Shinaai or one of the others killed there. Maybe Tommy's deep yearning to know his ancestors, to overcome his sense of disconnection, had psychically primed him and made him more vulnerable to some rapacious life urge enduring at the ravine. There it was again, the role of biological relationship and recognition, inarguable: We inherit our forebears' hopes, debts, and errors.

Which naturally brought up Tommy's most immediate forebears-maybe-Tom and Bernice Keeday. Whether or not they were his biological parents, they'd've had a deep emotional connection. Now that she knew more about the circumstances of their deaths, she was in a better position to compare her experience of the ghost's narrative with their perimortem moments. As for their personalities, their characters, she'd have to ask Tommy and his relatives up at the camp. If she ever found the place.

She tried to feel more hopeful, but objectively her inventory had only served to show her, yet again, how little she knew. Really, she had just about zip that would help identify the ghost and its issues.

The scary thing about her situation was the way it would affect her process. Ordinarily, she relied on external information to augment the often vague impressions she received during empathic contact. Knowing specifics like the ghost's identity and circumstances of death helped pin down what motivated it, what remained unresolved, and which living people might figure in its perseverance and therefore in its alleviation. The absence of information now meant that she'd have to rely more on her ability to share the ghost's experience. She had always tried to set limits on the depth of her communion, sharing a ghost's world dream only with greatest caution. The reason was simple: Without preserving a clear sense of her own, separate identity, she could lose herself in the process. With this entity, a ghost who was an invader, a soul conqueror with a survival impulse that was functionally predatory, it had seemed imperative to keep some distance.

But increasingly it looked as if she'd have to rely on communion to learn what she had to. She'd have to merge with the entity. Surrender to it. She couldn't bear the thought, but neither could she bear the thought of what was happening to Tommy. Maybe she'd absorbed the impulse from Julieta, a mother's protective urge, but here was one other bitter certainty: She would do anything to get the thing out of him.

Desperation came over her again and she began scanning the horizon to the south, looking for some clue as to which way to go. She was squinting against the glare when Edgar's cell phone began vibrating against her thigh.

She dug it out of her pocket and pulled up the antenna with her teeth.

"Cree?" It was Joyce.

"So far, anyway, yeah. I think." She held the phone away from her head, conscious of its emanations.

"Hey, don't joke around. How's reception? I've been trying and trying. You getting me now?"

"Spotty, but yeah, I read you. The country is rough here, breaks up the signal. I'm on a high place now."

"You up at the sheep camp?"

Cree looked around at the wilderness of bare rock and silvery sky and decided not to give Joyce anything to worry about. "I, um, I'm getting there, yeah."

"Well, Ed and I are in St. Michael's. At St. Michael's-the priory or church or mission or whatever they call it? We've got something for you on the mesa. The ravine."

"Good timing! I could use something to go on here."

"Well… this… help." Joyce's words came across interspersed with silence and static.

Cree turned to face south, tugged windblown hair from the corner of her lips and tucked it behind her ear. "Say again?"

"Maybe this will help. The Franciscan brothers who started this place back in the 1800s kept good records. They were working on a Navajo-language dictionary, and they also wrote down observations of Navajo traditions, oral histories, and events in the region? So this guy who lives here, teaches at St. Mike's school, he's a friar or whatever, I don't know my Catholic stuff… Father Bryant-Brother Bryant? — he's working on a book, a collection of Navajo personal histories from back then. He half remembered the story when we told him about the lost goats. We went and looked it up in his files."

The phone's radio waves were hurting Cree's mastoid bone, but this could be crucial. She kept it close to her ear, staring out at the distant smooth land to the south. High above, alone in the vast sky, a single puffy cloud floated, serene and mysterious as a cryptic smoke signal.

"You there, Cree?"

"I'm here."

"Okay. So, 1863, Kit Carson and his men are exterminating the Navajos. The ones they can't kill or catch outright, they burn their fields and shoot their livestock, figuring the winter without food will finish them off. This is about six months before they're sent off on the Long Walk. Carson's got detachments of soldiers, some led by Dine'e'anai' guides, rounding up Navajos all over the place-"

"What kind of guides?"

"Oh, Dine'e'anai'. Means 'the People Who Are Enemies.' 'The Enemy People'-that's the term you got from your ghost girl, Cree! They were a group of Navajos who allied themselves with the whites. Traitors. Knowing the land, the language, they made it very hard for the other Navajos to escape."

The thought saddened Cree: The division and conflict inside the Navajo soul had been there for a long time. As with every other people.

Joyce insightfully interpreted her silence. "Yeah, it was bad. Everything was falling apart for the Navajos. They… it… time

…"

"Joyce, I lost that last part."

"The Navajos called it the Time of Fearing."

Time of fearing: a good description of this moment, too, Cree thought. Of what Tommy and the Keedays, and Julieta, were going through.