Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (25 page)

"Run, Ed!"

"Cree! Are you all right? What is it?" He was coming toward her, holding his staff, a watchful shepherd attending to an alarm.

There was pain in the air. Pain and piercing loss and every regret. She swore a curse upon it with rage torn from her bowels,
her bones. It was monstrous and evil beyond reckoning, and the voices and rumble and jingle, the exploding fear and heartsickness
and outrage all merged into one thing, a whole world that gathered into the sound of a cymbal clashed and ringing and then
damped and fading and silent.

And there was no one there but Ed, alone beneath the sky on the vast empty desert.

She fell between worlds. She tumbled against him and his arms were around her and his body rocked hers as she tried to catch
her breath. Her pounding heartbeat shook her. He wasn't very real and then he was.

"It's okay, Cree! You're okay! What happened? What's up there?"

It wasn't up
there,
she wanted to tell him, it was out here, she had rushed to warn him. Save him. But that didn't make sense. What she had wanted
so urgently was evaporating from her mind. She grasped at the knowledge of it but it slipped away, mist between her fingers.

All that she could conjure of it was the thing she'd had to tell him, so urgent, but when it came to her lips it had shrunk
to a single word that surprised her and was utterly without meaning: "Goats!" she panted. "The goats!"

27

THE CHIEF of psychiatry at Ketteridge Hospital was a dignified-looking, white-haired man, tall but carrying himself with a
stoop that brought his face level with Cree's. He met Cree in the visitors' lounge on the juvenile floor, shook her hand,
and took a seat in the chair across from her. The little room was empty and quiet but for the burble of an aquarium against
one wall, where three dazed-looking goldfish hovered.

"We think the world of Dr. Tsosie here," Dr. Corcoran told her. "A good man—the best. And Joseph tells me wonderful things
about you."

Cree tried to mask her surprise. "Thank you. And thank you for letting me see Tommy."

He put his palms up,
the least I could do,
and smiled. "It's a very troubling case. If you've established good rapport with him, as Dr. Tsosie says you have, perhaps
you can make some progress. He talks to me only with great reluctance."

"Why, do you suppose?"

"I'm just an old white guy! What the hell do I know?" Dr. Corcoran chuckled indulgently, then made a sterner face. "Poor kid—
little does he know that if he keeps this up he's going to be talking to old white geezers like me for a long, long time."
He shook his head and sighed. "Seriously, his reticence ties in with the whole complex. Here's a boy who's very stressed by
his new school experience and is seeking a way to retreat from that which frightens and overwhelms him. It has opened up his
repressed grief at the death of his parents, the sense of rejection and abandonment. As for why he won't talk to me, it's
because, first of all, he's at the stage where he resents all Anglos for their historic and continuing sins against the Dinê.
But, more important, because he doesn't
want
the problem to go away. He
needs
the problem. If I helped solve it, he'd have no excuse! Part of him is also very ashamed of himself too—of how excessive
all this is. Of how obvious and, frankly,
thin
it is."

Again, Cree tried to compose her face and voice. "But he's been in boarding schools all his life. Why would he suddenly feel
so much stress just now?"

"Ah. Two reasons. First, because he's been at run-of-the-mill schools where it's been easy to stand out, to wow everybody
with his talents and intelligence. But at Oak Springs his peers are equally sharp. I think there's an implicit competition
there, and Tommy is making it plain he doesn't feel up to it. I also understand he attended his first college-counseling session
not long ago." Dr. Corcoran smiled modestly at his own insightfulness. "Suddenly the bigger world impinges. He wants to shine,
to stand out, but now he discovers that as bright and talented as he is, he's just one of many. He's told just how competitive
college admissions are going to be, how he's got to mind his p's and q's from here on in. Keep his 'cume' up, prepare for
the SATs, and so on. The pressure can be especially hard on these rural kids."

"And the other reason?"

"Conditions at home. His grandparents are getting quite old. Tommy may claim he wants
out,
rejects rural life, and so on, but of course he cares for them, and seeing them in decline makes him feel even more insecure.
After Oak Springs, on to college, probably moving far away. He knows his grandparents are approaching some major life passages,
too—they can't hang on out there forever. The family home will never be the same, he'll never experience those old rhythms
of life again. It scares him. He may also feel responsible, that he should be more help to the grandparents. Part of Tommy
wants badly to get out of school, go back to the family hogan, be near his grandparents, care for them and be cared for. Postpone
the big changes pending."

Cree nodded. It was all quite plausible. "Did you do any tests on him last night or today?"

"No cranial imaging. He's been through all that twice, no need to subject him to it again just yet. But we ran the EEG and
another full blood spectrum. Normal in every respect."

"How about his reflexes? His proprioception? Sensation in his limbs?"

"The business with the right arm and spine? I'll admit it troubled me at first. My colleagues at the Indian Hospital say it
always 'vanished' by the time they got a gander at him."

"Wouldn't that suggest that it's lasting longer? That the symptoms are progressing?"

"Oh, definitely." Dr. Corcoran smiled. "He's getting better at it. Practice makes perfect."

"And what about the self-injury yesterday?"

"The veritable cherry on top!" Dr. Corcoran said with satisfaction. "Kills two birds with one stone, you see. It fulfills
his need to display another extreme and bizarre behavior, to 'prove' to us that something's badly the matter with him. And,
symbolically, it's a reflection of his desire to punish himself—for not measuring up, for not taking care of his grandparents,
and, paradoxically, for making all this fuss." He frowned, shook his head gravely. "None of which is intended to suggest this
isn't very serious. A very serious situation."

Cree looked into his infuriatingly calm, self-possessed eyes. He was, she saw, one of that breed of psychologists who looked
for a tidy, encompassing theory that wrapped the human psyche into a neat diagnostic bundle. The trailing ends, the parts
that didn't fit, were to be ignored or cut to size. It was the outlook of a man accustomed to dealing with human problems
in quantity: to treating an unending flow of short-term patients, managing their acute stages and referring them on, but never
having to dig in for the long haul and the messy, irregular, and highly individual process of healing.

Dr. Corcoran coughed delicately into his fist and asked, "Have you, um, dealt with Native American patients before?"

"Rarely," Cree hedged.

He nodded deeply, wisely. "If I may say so, there are also cultural factors to consider."

"Oh?"

"Yes. As you know, Tommy is Navajo. There are certain beliefs—we might call them superstitions—prevalent among the Dinê.
These ideas inform their way of thinking about illness. It often leads to a . . . how to put this? A
dramatizing
of the problem." He smiled at her and lowered his voice. "A supernatural approach to anything mysterious. Even with the most
educated Navajo, it can be a surprisingly hard paradigm to displace." He raised his eyebrows meaningfully, confidingly:
Just between us white folks.

"I'm speaking of, oh, spirits, witches, curses, ghosts of ancestors—that kind of thing."

Cree managed to avoid taking him by the shoulders and shaking him and instead just nodded thoughtfully. "Actually," she told
him, deadpan, "I do have some experience in that area."

Tommy had been installed in a three-bed room with a single window that looked north to a view of Gallup and the vast land
beyond. The middle bed was empty, but through a gap in the curtain Cree could see that the bed nearest the door was occupied
by a boy of around ten, sleeping now. An older woman sat in a chair nearby, drowsing, a magazine forgotten on her lap.

"Ah, Mr. Keeday," Dr. Corcoran said heartily. "I've brought someone to see you!"

Tommy was sitting on his bed, facing the window. He turned, looking surprised to see Cree, dismayed to see Dr. Corcoran. He
wore a thin terry robe over striped pajamas. His right arm lay inert on the bed, hand and wrist bandaged.

"Yaàtèeh,"
Cree said. And to her surprise she felt it immediately, now—felt it startle and quickly go quiet in him, as if hiding when
it sensed her.

"I'm just dropping Dr. Black off," Dr. Corcoran reassured him. "You two have a good chat, and we'll all touch bases later."
He smiled and left the room.

With her experience at the mesa still urgent in her memory, Cree had to resist the impulse to bombard him with questions.
Instead, she went to stand at the end of his bed, looking out the window. Below the hospital, the land sloped downward to
a residential district that a mile or so away yielded to the two- and three-story buildings of the old downtown. Beyond were
the overpass of Interstate 40 and the freight railyard that cut Gallup in two. Somewhere far out in the emptiness on the other
side would be the lonely sheep ranch where Tommy had grown up.

She didn't say anything. The thing stayed inert, camouflaging itself in his body's normal energies and auras, a dark chameleon.

"My grandparents and my aunt will be back soon," he said at last. "They went away for lunch."

"You must be glad to see them."

"No."

"Why not?"

Tommy thought about it. "I scare them. I don't like to see them scared."

"I can imagine. But I don't think you should worry about them."

"Why not?"

She had to think about how to say it. "Well, because they're
brave,
too, aren't they? I mean, even though they're scared, they want you to come home so they can take care of you. Fear is what
makes us find our courage. If they want you home, it's because they believe courage will win out over fear."

The thought seemed to please him, but he didn't say anything.

Cree kept looking out the window. "That Dr. Corcoran, he's sure got you all figured out, doesn't he? You must be thrilled."

She glanced sideways at him and caught a flicker of a grin. It felt good to have conjured it in him. He was wary as a cornered
animal now, but through the fear and the typical tangle of adolescent emotions she sensed the person that was so evident in
his drawings: highly observant, burning with a desire to understand the big questions.

"Know what I did last night?" she asked.

"What."

"I went for a long walk. Out to the mesa, to that ravine about a mile north of the school. You know the one? The steepest one."

He frowned. "At night?"

"Well, darkness helps me think about things. Sometimes when you can't see very well, other parts of your mind get more active,
and you can sense things or imagine things more easily. You went out there with your drawing class, right?"

"You were looking at my drawings?" Disapproval:
Spying on me.

"Well, I'd wanted to talk to you Saturday night, but then you . . . they brought you here. So I figured I'd at least look
at your work." She turned to him. "Tommy, I have to say, you absolutely blow me away! Your drawings open my eyes to things
I'd never noticed. Even the most ordinary objects or scenes take on a . . . a
magic,
I guess you'd call it. I'm . . . I'm awed. Really."

The flattery pleased him, but his wandering eyes showed he was wary of condescension. She gave him time, but he didn't say
anything. She thought the rightward bow of his body increased slightly in the interim.

"Tell me about the faces in the rocks," she said quietly. "The ones you drew."

"It just seemed like an interesting compositional idea. It's called 'personification.' 'Anthropomorphism.'"

"There's more to it than that. There had to be. You had an interpretive theme—you gave them all very different personalities,
just like you did with those studies of your parents. Why?"

His expression suggested he resented her probing but that he was also impressed or pleased that she'd noticed. "I was thinking
about Navajos in the old days. All you know is what you read or people tell you, you don't ever know what to believe. Sometimes
I just want to know, that's all. Who they really were. I was trying to see which seemed right." From the way his eyes fled
hers, she sensed he'd inadvertently revealed something very important to him. "And I liked the idea of putting them in stone,
kind of a statement, like they're enduring but also frozen in time. Like stuck in their history."

Same as with your parents,
Cree thought. "Were you thinking of any ancestor in particular?" She held her breath: The answer could be crucial.

But abruptly the boy in the other bed woke with a cry and a long moan that ended in coughing. The old woman gently shushed
him and muttered reassurances in Spanish.

Tommy half turned to look toward the drawn curtain and whispered, "I think he's dying or something. He's been in here a long
time, like six weeks, I heard his parents talking about it."

"Tommy, stay with me on this for a moment. Did anything happen when you were out at the cliffs that day? Did you see anything
different or unusual? You wrote the date on your drawings—September ninth."

"If they think they can keep me that long, no way. I'd rather be dead. I'll get out somehow."

Cree thought back to Dr. Corcoran's casual comment,
He'll be talking to old white geezers like me for a long, long time,
and felt a terrible resolve blossom in her, just what Julieta must feel. "They won't have to. You're going to be better. But
you have to help me now."

Tommy swiveled his head back to look at her, and the way he did it gave her a little shiver. Something robotic about it, too
smooth and controlled.

"How did you know?" he asked. "Did Mrs. McCarty tell you?"

"Know what? Tell me what?"

"That day. When I went up the ravine. I was sick of drawing the same rocks, I thought there'd be something more dramatic up there."

"How far up did you go?" Cree tried to conceal her excitement.

"Not far. It just goes up and divides into two little washes that dwindle away at the top. I shouldn't have spent so much
time in there. I got too hot."

"Oh?"

"Not too bad. I was sitting on some boulders and trying to draw the ravine, but it didn't work out. Too much glare from the
rocks. I just got dizzy."

"So what'd you do?"

Shrug. "Went back down. Drank some water. It went away."

"Your drawings have been changing since then."

"Yeah, Mrs. McCarty and Miss Chee, they're great teachers."

A nurse came in, checked on them briefly, then went to confer in hushed tones with the other boy and the old woman. Cree was
thinking about the ravine, the shadow beings skipping down, and the awful thing that she'd feared would devour Edgar. And
more and more she felt the thing crouching in Tommy: tense, balled up as if hiding or as if gathering itself to spring. But
she didn't feel she could ask him more specific questions without risking programming his responses, giving him ideas. Or
scaring him to death.