Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

Julieta rode the Keedays' horse as hard as the animal could stand. It was a tall, bony paint gelding, already getting shaggy for winter, out of shape from too much time in the grandparents' corral. She pushed him until he wheezed. The air was a harsh, crisp cold. A hundred feet ahead in the predawn light, Joseph sat behind Tommy's cousin on the ATV. The taillights, so bright when they'd started out, were already dimming as the landscape drew light from the sky.

She hadn't heard from Cree again, but as she'd lain there in Joseph's bed the worry had intruded on the oasis of serenity they'd made together and increasingly she'd sensed it was urgent to get to Tommy. They had left Window Rock at two in the morning and driven the empty roads and wandering wheel tracks for over two hours. They'd awakened Tommy's grandparents and cousin, saddled this horse, and set out.

Once they'd climbed out of the strange canyonlike maze and reached the higher plateau, the going was easier. The horse could sustain a lope for a couple of minutes on end. The ATV bobbed and swerved as the eastern sky turned a bland gray-blue above the dark land.

At last Eric stopped the ATV and let Joseph off, pointing ahead toward a low, dark hogan. Julieta cantered past them, pulled up at the open door, leapt off. The gelding huffed as she dropped the reins and looked through the doorway. A single dull rectangle of window light. Nobody inside.

"Mrs. McCarty?"

She whirled at the voice. A middle-aged Navajo woman stood thirty feet away, looking haggard, blowing puffs of steam into the freezing air. Tommy's aunt, Ellen.

"They're over here. He only got a little way last time. It's good you came. He's starting again. Cree says if he does it again, he'll die."

Julieta's heart clenched at the words. She followed Ellen into an area of rocks and sagebrush, and then spotted the other people: two men, standing some distance apart from two blanket-wrapped forms on the ground. Cree and Tommy.

She hurried to them. Tommy lay twisted among blankets and sheepskins on the bare ground, motionless but not quite asleep. His eyes were open to staring slits in a face that was almost skeletal and greenish in the predawn light. Julieta was seized with worry for him, and with it came that sense of knowing, of resonance, of recognition that she swore she'd forbid herself but that came anyway. She knew him. It had to be her child's ghost in Tommy.

"Hey," Cree said amiably. "Good timing."

Julieta was horrified by Cree's appearance. Sitting at Tommy's side, she looked battered and drained. Even with the heavy blanket around her, Julieta could see the hard cant of her head, the tilt of her shoulders. Some of the grotesque half twist of the ghost had come into her.

"Are you all right?" she stammered.

"Fine," Cree panted. "Listen. Not much time. This is going to be hard, Julieta. Hardest thing you ever did. I can't tell you how. Tommy's just about gone. I've only lived through the dying twice. And it's just about done me in. But Tommy's done it dozens of times. And there's the breathing thing. He can't survive another time. You have to let the ghost go. One shot at it. Has to be just right."

Joseph finally joined them. He came to Julieta's side and put his arm around her waist and she put both her hands over his, pressing him against her.

"Hey, Dr. Tsosie," Cree rasped.

"Dr. Black." Joseph bobbed his head. He kept himself outwardly calm, but Julieta knew that his physician's eyes saw the crisis here for what it was.

"Is… is it-?" Julieta began.

Tommy moaned and stirred. Behind his slitted eyelids, his eyes were moving wildly. Julieta felt a reprise of that numbing indecision that meant the ghost was awakening.

"You have to go with it," Cree croaked faintly. "With the ghost. It's reliving a memory. Like a recurring dream? There's a place where you can intercept. When he knocks at the door. Don't do it sooner, worlds won't mesh. Don't do it later or it'll be too late."

Julieta wasn't sure whether Cree was speaking allegorically. Knocks at the door-to the real world? To consciousness? To your heart? Cree's vocabulary mixed poetry and psychology and philosophy, you couldn't always tell.

"What would you like me to do?" Joseph asked.

Cree looked up at him. She started to speak, then seemed to catch something in his face that needed further inspection. After a few more seconds, she almost seemed to smile. "Just keep back a little. With the others."

Joseph nodded, stepped back to join Tommy's family. Tommy's legs began moving in weak, rhythmic thrusts. He was walking while lying down.

Cree had closed her eyes. "Listen, Julieta. At first you won't know what's going on. It'll seem like random thoughts. Like you're making it up. Like a daydream. Just let it happen."

Julieta felt the ghost burgeoning. With its hypnotic aura came that irrational sense of knowing again. Panicking, she asked Cree, "What are you going to do?"

"I'll just go with him. Help you find the… story. But I'm totally screwed up, Julieta. I'm Tommy, I'm you, I'm me, I'm Peter. I can't-"

"Peter?"

"Tommy's his son." Cree's neck twisted and it seemed to hurt her. "Your best," she choked out. "The person you'd rather be. Got to stack it up right. Like you said."

Julieta wanted to grab her shoulders and shake answers out of her. But Cree's eyes were rolling behind her closed lids. Tommy was moving in his awful parody of walking. Not knowing what else to do, Julieta knelt next to him. She put her hand on his side, felt the trembling effort of his muscles. She shut her eyes.

At first she thought there was nothing she could find. Images popped into her head, but she didn't trust them: fantasy, memory, random subconscious collage, wishful thinking? The effort made her almost sleepy. But some things persisted. She still felt the sense of familiarity, and she let that guide her.

The side of a hill and a horizon. She recognized the land with a shock. Over near Peter's place, the hills along Black Creek. He was walking toward her house. It was chilly out, and the dry hills told her it was autumn. It would have been that fall, when everything fell apart. Yes, it was. He had just come from San Diego. His thoughts embarrassed her. Joseph would hear them. Peter was tired and sore and yet he sparkled and spangled with bright feelings. That energy: She knew that energy, the presence that was Peter. Oh, God, it was gorgeous, it was a magnet. Everything was right there, the memory of his hair on the wind as they rode, the corded lean muscle in his thighs against hers. His bronze smooth skin and the brash confidence and innocence in his eyes. Peter was a spark, a wild joyous song. He carried desire like a tightly wound spring in his belly and loins and it commanded her and she commanded it and it gave her great pleasure to know it belonged to her.

Except that it didn't. There was a girl in San Diego. He was coming back but he'd left her and then he must have left the other woman, too, and all he was really doing was following the path of least resistance. He felt and did everything with such certainty, but it was so shallow. So transient.

Julieta wanted to lash out at him. Scream at him. Blithely striding across the rolling swells toward the mesa, so certain he'd be forgiven! But Cree had said wait. Said do your best. No, be your best. But what was best?

There was her house, windows glowing in the twilight. Peter was hurrying. He was racing across the ground like a wind-lashed wildfire, heat and light and hunger. Irresistible. The land, the house just the way it was back then, it was all real again.

Peter knocked at the door.

Julieta was dimly aware that Cree had moaned and that Tommy was standing in front of her.

She answered the door with no idea how to respond. She was so hurt inside. She was so angry at him. Yet she felt him so strongly. He was there, he was alive, he had come back, he was afire with longing and contrition. He was a force that bent her.