Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

Where is everybody? she wondered.

The hogan was low and crude, topped by a rusted stovepipe that canted from a tattered tar-paper roof. Behind it stood some open pole sheds and fenced pens. Beyond, the barren ground stretched away. To the east, boulders and even a few low trees topped the higher swells and bounded the lonely horizon.

She was thirty feet from the door when it opened suddenly and her heart took a slug of adrenaline like a kick in the chest. But it was just a normal-looking human woman. She came out, shut the door quickly behind her, and set its outside hasp.

"Yaateeh'", Cree managed breathlessly.

"Yaateeh', Dr. Black," the woman said quietly. "I'm Ellen, Tommy's aunt."

They shook hands and Cree handed over the bag of supplies. Ellen was a broad, plump, capable-looking woman in her midfifties, with a square, plain face obviously more accustomed to smiles than to the harrowed look of exhaustion and fear there now. She wore jeans and a brown canvas jacket over a couple of checked shirts. Her hair lay on her shoulder in a dark braid, lightly streaked with gray. Cree liked her instantly.

" I… I'm sorry if I looked startled for a second there," Cree stammered. "I was wondering where everybody was."

"My oldest son is over there," Ellen told her, pointing to some sheds. "He got hurt trying to hold Tommy this morning. I think his nose might be broken, but he won't go to have it checked out. My brother Raymond is inside."

"How is Tommy?"

A muffled thump and low voices came from inside the hogan, and Ellen answered with her eyes.

This close to her, Cree could see that her clothes were crusted with spatters of food, and patches of dirt were ground into the fabric at knees, elbows, shoulders. The backs of her hands were scratched, and her lower lip was swollen and split with a line of dried blood. Ellen flinched as another series of thumps came from inside.

"Do you know who the chindi is?" Ellen whispered. "What it wants?"

"No."

Ellen looked at her curiously. "Do you know how to heal him?"

"Not exactly, no."

The look of puzzlement increased. "Do you know why he asks for you?"

More noises came from inside the hogan: sounds of exertion, a clatter. Cree felt the prickle come up her throat again. "I'm not sure. Sorry."

Ellen's eyes searched Cree's face as if she might be missing some hidden message, or looking for clues Cree was joking. Cree could imagine what she saw: some bilagaana from the big city, way off her familiar turf, frowsy from lack of sleep, with a scabbed, bruised forehead and scraped-up hands. Not much to inspire confidence.

But a surprising thing happened. Ellen's searching expression gave way to one her face wore much more naturally: a grin, fleeting but radiant.

"Well, you sure tell it like it is, idn't it? Something to be said for that, I guess." Ellen chuckled, sobered quickly, and turned back toward the hogan door.

Cree followed her, marveling at the incredible resilience of this woman's good nature. After what she must have been through in the last thirty-six hours! In the shadow of psychic siege that surrounded this place, it was a bright spark of hopefulness.

It took a moment for Cree's eyes to adapt to the relative darkness inside. The first thing she saw was the single window, a dust-hazed rectangle that cast a Vermeer light on the interior of the eight-sided room. Then she saw Tommy, on hands and knees on the dirt floor. He was struggling through an obstacle course of an overturned table and chairs and a scattering of tin cups and plastic plates.

A middle-aged Navajo man stood motionless on one side of the room, wearing the look of befuddled alertness of someone trying to cross a highway in heavy traffic. It was Ellen's brother, Raymond, a big man dressed in combat pants and a T-shirt that revealed banded workingman's muscles in his arms. His black hair was coiled in a simple bun that lay at the base of his neck.

Tommy's skin was pale and waxy. The face that twisted to look up at Cree was emaciated yet puffy, a sick look exacerbated by the dirt smeared across it. His shirt hung in rags from his shoulders. Scratches bled on his arms. When Cree came in, he looked up with uneven eyes and she saw it react to her presence. A hump writhed through his torso, torquing him, and abruptly he heaved himself up onto two legs like a wounded bear.

For an instant as he rose, Cree had a visual impression of a shape that trailed behind, a phantom being that overlapped Tommy's physical body only incompletely. One whole, vague arm sprang from near the center of his back, the lower part of a leg from his inner thigh. She understood it instantly: It isn't oriented right in him.

Tommy swayed on his feet and she lost the image. She stood ten feet away, watching him, not sure how to greet him, trying to find the starting place.

Distantly, she heard Ellen call out, "Ray! Raymond!"

The big man stirred and after a pause glanced over as if startled to see her. "Yeah."

Their voices surprised Cree, too. She realized that she'd been standing there for a time, just inside the half-open door. Hanging in mesmerized indecision as time stretched. And yet now everything was happening too fast. Tommy was walking toward the door. Before he got as far as Cree, Ray had moved in from the side of the room and half blocked him. Tommy twitched violently in alarm but not at Ray. He was looking at Cree as he asked, "What are you doing here?" Ellen answered quickly, "It's Dr. Black!" but Cree wasn't sure it was Tommy who had spoken. His brows had dropped and he gazed from beneath them with that baleful, predatory look. This close, she felt the particular lights of the intertwined beings in him. Narrative, she reminded herself vaguely, find its narrative. Within the confusion she sensed a strong spark of impulsiveness and behind it a relentless confidence and bottomless determination. Driven. Yet there was fear and remorse and anger and impatience, too. She wanted to surprise the entity but now she couldn't remember the word the girl had used for brother, and without thinking she called out "Garrett?" Everything was a maelstrom of confusing impressions, and it took her a little while to figure out why: She was down on the dirt floor with Tommy on top of her, pounding at her. His waxy face tossed from side to side above her, screaming. Ellen and Ray seemed to move with lazy, floating motions as they bent to reach for him. Cree fought off his hands. It lasted only a moment and then his efforts became random and he rolled off her and began convulsing on the floor. She twisted away from his humping body and got to her hands and knees, feeling a huge pain throughout her, as if her bones had all exploded and her organs ruptured and her heart split. But that was his pain. And still that sense of powerful determination burned, the force of will, the imperious and resistless will, backed by a tangle of feelings from sorrow to tenderness to self-hatred to yearning. As it went on, it veered into a nightmare place of hatred and killing urge. It engulfed her. She vaguely remembered her decision to surrender, but now every instinct of self-preservation screamed in protest against the invasion. Reflexively, she pushed away the foreign being and groped for a life rope, a single certainty, that would pull her free. She found it in the image of Hy and Zoe, wrapping her thoughts around them and clinging to the love between them.

It gave her the strength to get up and lurch a few steps away. Tommy was lying on his back now, Ellen and Ray holding his shoulders with all their weight but unable to restrain his arm from pushing up and snapping back. Slow push, snap! back. The chest rolled with its uneven sideways panting and from a long distance Cree heard herself saying, "Watch his breathing! We have to watch his breathing!" Ellen's lip was split again and a line of fresh blood divided her square chin.