Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (20 page)

22

CREE AWOKE with a shriek, sitting up convulsively and knocking her clock and notebook off the bedside table. The faces in
the rocks! They had been writhing and moaning in her dreams, opening wide, devouring mouths and rolling blind eyes. Anger
and fear, awful struggle, transformation. For several minutes she sat breathing hard, trying to master her fright. It seemed
she could still feel them out there, only a few hundred yards away, invisible but radiating their torment into the night.
A wind had picked up outside, making whispers around the infirmary building, a white noise against which her ears strained.

She lay down again, snugged the blankets close, but found she was too wired to sleep. The images wouldn't leave her. They
cried their outrage like a curse or a pledge or a warning. Dreaming the same thing two nights in a row: For any psychologist,
it would suggest significant subconscious turmoil. For an empathic parapsychologist, it meant much more. Some echo of human
experience lingered out there. Some presence.

She'd have to go to the mesa, and soon.

She sat up against the headboard, very aware of the new stiffness of her thighs and the itching ache in her forehead. Listening
to the night, she tried to calm her jumpy nerves and thought about Julieta's heartbreaking confessions and her terrifying
desperation. A woman so needing comforting yet so unwilling to accept it.

The thought brought her back to the question of Julieta and Joseph. Joseph would comfort her if she'd let him. Did she not
see his affection for her, or did she not reciprocate? Had they tried as lovers at some point and decided against it for some
reason?

No, she knew intuitively. The longing between them had not been expressed, wasn't the species of desire that former lovers
showed. The real answer was simpler: Peter. Though Julieta denied it, she lived with long-gone Peter Yellowhorse always inside
her, a phantom of memory. Julieta was "possessed," too, by a young lover from the distant past, transformed with the passage
of years from a flesh-and-blood, humanly flawed reality to an unapproachable ideal of passion and potential that no living
man could match. Leaving her incapable of finding it with anyone else. Not with the occasional lovers over the years, not
even with a handsome, sexy, intelligent, attentive, and patient man like Joseph Tsosie.

Her restlessness grew as her thoughts of Julieta echoed with uneasy resonances in her own life. Her forehead itched, the jacket
bunched around her armpits, one leg was falling asleep. She stood up and paced through the ward room in the dim green light,
swinging her arms. One forty-three in the morning. She desperately needed sleep, she'd be a wreck tomorrow, but it was impossible
while somewhere in Gallup a boy lay with some being inside him, deforming him, damaging him. She needed to get to work. There
was no guarantee she'd ever have access to Tommy again, but if she did, she should be better prepared for the encounter. Sleep
obviously wasn't going to come tonight, she might as well get on with what she'd planned to do.

Seize the day,
she thought. The thought made her chuckle blackly.
Or, rather, the night.
The ghost hunter's credo.

She put on her jacket, zipped it, and snapped the collar snug around her throat. She found the master key that Julieta had
given her earlier, then realized she should probably have a flashlight better than the tiny LED on her key ring. She slipped
quietly down the hall and into the nurse's office, where she pulled the rechargeable from the wall and tested it briefly.
Not great, but it would do. She left the building by the front door and hurried toward the boys' dorm.

The night was black, an opaque darkness clotted by the haze that had crept in toward sunset, and the sharp light of the security
lamps scattered through the campus only served to blind her. The wind blew strongly from the northwest, stirring the dry leaves
of the cottonwood trees and drawing a faint, plaintive song from the old bronze bell in its little tower. Not far beyond the
mercury-gilt gym building, she knew, the mesa hunkered in the dark. In her mind, its rock faces were alive: She could still
feel them there, twisting and swarming, thrusting hopelessly at their mineral barrier.

The lock on the dorm's north door gave her trouble, but she wiggled and jammed the key and at last it turned. She stepped
inside and eased the door shut.

A long corridor stretched the length of the building, lit by ankle-high night-lights every fifteen feet. Doorways lined both
sides. With the handful of weekenders gone on their field trip, Julieta had let the new residence staffer take a couple of
nights off. The building was empty and almost completely dark, just as Cree wanted it.

Julieta had told her that Tommy's room was the second from the north end, on the right. Cree hesitated at the doorway, peering
into a darkness lit only by the red eyes of emergency lighting system batteries high on the wall. A long, narrow room the
size of a small classroom, six beds and dressers against the west wall, six desks against the inner wall. The scent of pubescent
boys—sweat, deodorant, the rubbery perfume of athletic shoes. On the walls, posters, photos, artwork, awards, stolen highway
signs, miscellany.

Cree stepped inside, still avoiding using the flashlight, wanting to remain as long as possible in the hyperalert state darkness
always induced. Her antennae were buzzing with a nervous electricity that made her jumpy but also seemed to extend the reach
of her subtler senses. In the dim red glow, the room had a secret, enclosed feel, like the interior of a photo darkroom. The
wind probed at the windows with soft, persistent fingers.

There was no question which bed was Tommy's. No athletic posters here: The wall above was covered with drawings. Reluctantly,
she brought out the flashlight and turned it on. When her eyes recovered from the glare, she panned the circle of light from
one drawing to the other, increasingly impressed.

There was a portrait of some rap star with a credibly aloof gangsta face, and a savage scene of a group of white policemen
shooting an AfricanAmerican man—the Diallo shooting? There were two interior still lifes: a stove with pots and pans and
utensils hung on the wall above it, a stark windowsill with a lonely-looking book open on it. Cree's eyes devoured each one
in turn.

Most compelling were the portraits. One was of a very old man with a face deeply cut by seams of worry and determination,
rendered with meticulous care that captured the subject's weary dignity and strength. Tommy's grandfather? Cree was no interpretive
expert, but this level of attention to detail had to derive from considerable affection for the subject. Another was a series
of studies of a Navajo man and woman, side by side, drawn repeatedly on the big page. His parents? Again the level of detail
was astonishing. Looking more closely, Cree found that each of the six sketches characterized the subjects differently: In
one, their faces looked bland and ordinary; in the next, unmistakably shifty or sleazy; the others portrayed them as rather
heroic, cruel, pathetic, kindly. The third portrait featured the same couple, drawn twice—astonishingly, one rendered them
as decidedly "Indian," with feathers in their hair and traditional robes, while the other as completely Caucasian, with pale
skin and tidy, suburban, casual clothes. When she peeled loose the tape that held it to the wall, she found the date scrawled
on the back: July 2002. She lifted corners of the other drawings and found that all were from the spring or summer, just before
he'd come to Oak Springs School.

A noise from the hall made her heart leap. She straightened quickly and shut off the flashlight, listening, hands tingling
with alarm. The wind buffeted the windows, and as she listened she heard the sound again: a repetitive click and chunk. Relieved,
she realized it was just the outer door at the end of the hall, rocking against its latch—she must not have shut it fully
behind her.

She turned on the flashlight again and moved to the bedside dresser. Its top was cluttered: a bunch of pencils bound together
with a rubber band, a couple of kneaded erasers, a half-consumed package of chewing gum, a pile of photocopied handouts from
a math class; coins, CD cases, a calculator. A framed photo showed a man and woman who were clearly the subjects of the portrait
studies. As the camera had caught them, they were a thirty-something Navajo couple with the slightly stilted smiles you often
saw in studio shots. She scrutinized their faces for the qualities Tommy had emphasized in his studies. On the back, someone
had written
Thomas and Bernice Keeday, 1996.
Tommy's adoptive parents.

Comparing the photo to the portraits, Cree had to acknowledge that Tommy was a hugely talented kid. Also, as Joseph said,
a kid with deep ambivalence about the people he'd known as his parents. Or maybe simply a kid trying to figure out who they
were, experimenting with different conceptions of them. The thought made her heart ache.

She put the photo down and went through the drawers, feeling like a burglar, apologizing to Tommy in her mind. But she found
nothing revealing: just baggy jeans, shirts, underpants, sweatshirts. She knelt to look under the bed, where a pair of well-worn
cleated athletic shoes kept company with a shabby suitcase and a shoe box full of cassettes and CDs. Tommy's preference in
music reinforced her sense of his identification with angry, urban black rebellion. She thought about Tommy's cultural uncertainties
and wondered what he'd feel if he knew that eleven-year-old Seattle white girls like Zoe also ate up the gangsta style. What
banner of rebellion would remain for him to carry?

The suitcase was empty and told her nothing.

The outside hall door clicked again, loud enough to startle Cree. She panned the light at the door of the room and into the
hall, and decided she'd better shut the damned thing, not waste heat. But as she was heading to the hall, her eyes went to
the inner wall, and what she saw drew her immediately to Tommy's desk. On the desktop lay a couple of large, spiral-bound
artist's sketchbooks. More drawings had been taped to the wall behind it.

The flashlight was dimming, but it cast enough light to tell that these had been drawn since he'd arrived at Oak Springs.
In one, Cree recognized the central campus road, looking north with the hogan just to the left, a delivery truck off to the
right, Julieta's once and future house distant in the center. Tommy had compressed the buildings at the bottom of the page,
a horizontal band of detail beneath a huge, featureless sky. The radical vertical asymmetry struck Cree as a strong compositional
experiment, suggesting that Tommy was growing rapidly as an artist. Another drawing showed a group of fellow students seated
in the mottled shade of a trellis. Tommy had done a beautiful job of capturing the boys and girls in their various postures,
then had heightened the intensity of the scene by exaggerating the shadows. The hard chiaroscuro was fascinating but a little
jarring, cutting the space into two very different dimensions.

The third one really grabbed Cree's eye: a self-portrait. The face was well rendered, instantly recognizable as Tommy's despite
the powerful artifice he'd chosen to portray himself with. The face was divided by a line down the middle. He'd rendered the
left half in the conventional manner with black lines on the white page, the right half in the negative, white lines on black.

It screamed from all of the newer drawings: two dimensions, two layers, two visions. Two Tommys. Pulse racing, she ignored
the pestering wind noise and the puffs of chill creeping along the floor from the hall. She moved aside a tin box full of
charcoal and pencils to open one of the sketchbooks.

Holding the feeble flashlight close, she opened the book and saw that these drawings continued the theme of division or doubleness.
The first few looked like the mesa near the school: the steep sandstone cliffs, the tumbled boulders and dry gullies. In one,
he'd included fellow members of his drawing class, sitting on rocks with sketch pads propped against knees. Again, he'd used
shadow and composition to divide every scene into different dimensions.

It was a drawing several pages farther that stopped her cold.

Another pencil sketch of weatherworn cliffs, the angle of the shadows suggesting midday. In this one, Tommy had subtly morphed
the features of the rocks into human faces. A halfdozen huge faces, deftly rendered in the shadows and highlights of rock
shapes and fissures. Agonized stone faces pressed against their interface with the air. Pushing, swarming, silently clamoring.

Just like the ones in her dreams.

Cree felt suddenly weak, and her stomach tightened in a deep, sick clench. She flipped the page and found another drawing
similar to the first: faces emerging from patterns of light and shadow. On closer inspection, she saw again the deliberate
variation of character: One seemed noble, one brutish, others cruel, cowering, pathetic, wise. The only affect that ran through
all of them was suffering.

Cree dropped the book, feeling utterly out of her depth. Her head ached with each pounding heartbeat. Everything was going
around, dizzying, her thoughts hyperanimated and chaotic. And she'd been so engrossed that she'd ignored something crucial:
The noise in the hall wasn't right. There was a shifting sound now, the quiet sound of cloth moving against cloth.

She switched off the flashlight and inched toward the door, afraid to look into the hall, afraid to stay where she was. Afraid
to breathe. She forced herself to the doorway, made herself push her face around the edge of the frame.

23

"LYNN! Good Jesus, you startled me!" Cree felt a flood of relief at the sight of the nurse, standing twenty feet away in the
dim green light with arm outstretched, hand against the wall. She looked like a person who had been startled while listening
or waiting for something. Cree wondered how long she'd been there.

"As you did me. Oh, my!" Lynn blew out a breath and fluttered a hand against her chest. Then she came toward Cree, trailing
her fingers against the corridor wall. "I thought you might be here, but I got a little worried when I found the door open.
And no lights on."

Cree backed into the dorm room. "I couldn't sleep. So I figured I'd come and look at Tommy's drawings and things. Before the
other kids got back."

Lynn Pierce came through the door and switched on the overhead lights. The tubes flickered and hummed and then came on garishly
bright. She took in the room before locking her disconcerting eyes on Cree's. "In the dark?" she asked expressionlessly.

"I borrowed your flashlight."

"I know. I heard you go into the office." A clever expression fled quickly across her face and was banished. "So you still
hope to be working with him?"

"It'll probably come down to getting his grandparents' permission. If there's any chance I can, I figured I should make use
of the time. Get to know him better."

Lynn looked at the open notebook on Tommy's desk, the bureau drawer Cree had neglected to close. "Finding anything interesting?"

"I think so."

" Like—?"

Cree went to the desk, flipped the notebook pages to one of the drawings of faces. "This, for example. Do you know if it's
from life—a real place? Or is it a made-up place?"

Lynn Pierce came to her shoulder to consider the drawing. "It looks like the walls of the mesa. Oh, sure—it's that spot about,
oh, maybe a mile north of here. It's the deepest gully on this side, the rock formations are pretty distinctive. Picturesque,
I guess you'd say. The art teachers often take classes there before the cold weather sets in. What—the faces?"

"Do they mean anything to you?"

Lynn shrugged and shook her silver head once. "A teenage boy with an active imagination."

Unaccountably ill at ease with Lynn so close to her shoulder, Cree left the desk and went to sit on the end of Tommy's bed.
"Did you want to talk to me? Is that why you followed me here?"

Smiling minutely, Lynn turned to face Cree and half sat against the edge of the desk. "Mind if I smoke? Strictly speaking,
it's not allowed, but with the kids gone . . . " She rummaged in her pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes, a lighter,
and a little foil ashtray folded into a half circle. She opened the ashtray and smoothed out its creases before setting it
on the desk. She lit a cigarette and drew on it hungrily. When she exhaled, she carefully blew the smoke away from Cree, toward
the hall door.

"My one vice," she apologized. "Down to five a day. And never in the infirmary, God forbid." Another deep suck that made the
ember spark, and then her gaze wandered cautiously from the floor to meet Cree's. "I was wondering what kind of psychologist
you are."

"I got my Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke."

"But you specialize . . ."

"Didn't Julieta tell you my focus?"

"She's the boss. She tells me only what she thinks I need to hear. I guess I didn't need to hear the details this time."

"It's hard to explain, Lynn. There's really no name for my field of specialty."

"Not 'parapsychologist'? On the Internet, that's the term that seems to come up." Lynn blew another gout of smoke toward the
door and with an air of apology swished at it with one hand. "I did a search on you this evening."

"Does that bother you?"

"I can't decide. The strictly orthodox professional in me disapproves. But Tommy . . . it's baffling. I can't imagine what's
going on with him."

"Any thoughts you want to share?"

She startled Cree with a direct bolt of her blue-bronze gaze, then tapped ash into the foil tray before answering. "Did you
know I was married to a Navajo? Sixteen years. My Vern died fifteen years ago." She hesitated, clearly stumbling over that
obstinate fact without meaning to.

"I'm sorry, Lynn."

"Yeah. Well," the nurse said reflexively.

"I know that 'yeah, well.'" Cree smiled. "I lost my husband, too."

The look Lynn returned had a surprised, grateful quality to it. But it lasted only an instant before she half shook her head,
refusing the sympathy or resisting the impulse to remember. A drag on her cigarette seemed to help her find her train of thought
again. "It took a few years for his family to accept me, a white Midwestern girl, but eventually I got to know them pretty
well. The older people told stories about this kind of thing . . . Once we went to a Way sung for one of his nephews. The
boy had started having what a mainstream doctor would've diagnosed as grand mal seizures. The Hand-Trembler said he had a
ghost in him. That he had offended an ancestor. The family hired a Singer to do the Evil Way."

"Do you believe it? About the ghost?"

"It's completely at odds with my medical training . . ."

" But—" Cree prompted.

Lynn smiled crookedly. "But after the Way, his symptoms were much less extreme."

Cree smiled with her. Despite her unease, she found herself intrigued by this odd, tense, smart, apologetic woman whose aura
glinted with the sharp silver flashes of well-concealed anger.

"I guess I'm credulous enough to be curious what a parapsychologist would do about Tommy," Lynn continued. "I was also very
impressed with the way you handled him when we were playing cards—responsive but not condescendingly sympathetic. I admire
that. Refreshingly unlike our beloved but distinctly overindulgent principal. He respects you now, you could tell by the way
he opened up to you during softball. That'll help." She took a last, long drag on her cigarette, blew out a blue-gray plume,
stabbed out the butt. Obviously a practiced clandestine smoker, she folded the ashtray like a clam around the remains and
returned it to her pocket. "That is, if the doctors at Ketteridge or his grandparents let you work with him."

Despite Lynn's efforts to disperse the smoke, the acrid stink rasped in Cree's lungs. She got up to look again at the drawings
over the bed. In the brighter light, the skill of the rendering was more apparent: The old man looked alive.

"You've worked here for, what, two years?"

"Three."

"So you must know her pretty well. Julieta." The old man seemed to be looking over Cree's shoulder, as if watching Lynn on
the other side of the room.

"In some ways, maybe."

"She's a remarkable person, isn't she?"

A hesitation. "She certainly is."

"I mean, she's dynamic, she's intelligent, she's beautiful enough to turn any woman green, she's passionate—"

"She is all that and much more."

Cree gave it a beat, and then suggested casually, " But—?"

"But nothing. And I'm not that easy, Dr. Black. Please don't be sly with me."

Cree felt caught out. Her head was hurting again, putting her off her stride, and the hovering layer of cigarette smoke was
a distracting irritant.

"Your tone seemed to qualify your praise, that's all. I was wondering why."

"She's great. She's my boss. No qualification."

Cree let it go, pretending to give the next drawing a close inspection. "So, okay, ghosts of ancestors can cause things like
this. What else can? What's the story on Skinwalkers? Are there really such things—evil Navajo magicians, people capable
of changing into animals? Do people still believe any of that?"

"Around white people, Vern always said it was nonsense. Superstition."

"And what did he say when he wasn't around white people? What did the old people say?" Cree half turned and jumped to find
that Lynn had come silently up close to her again, standing just behind her shoulder. She moved a step away.

"Sideways comments," the nurse said quietly. "Warnings with their eyes not to talk about it. Once Vern bought a wolfskin from
a pawnshop in Gallup—kind of a joke, just to show how above it he was, something we'd put in front of our woodstove. But
there'd been some Navajos from our town at the pawnshop, and they recognized him. The next day, that's how fast gossip travels
on the rez, three of Vern's uncles came to our house. A delegation from the family. Said he should burn it. Said people were
talking about him, they'd get the wrong idea. Of course it was crap—a real Navajo Wolf wouldn't buy his skin at a Gallup
pawnshop!"

"Did he burn it?" Claustrophobic, Cree sidled another step away.

"Yes, as a matter of fact." Standing where Cree had just been, the nurse pretended to look over Tommy's drawings. "Why? What
does a modern parapsychologist think of old superstitions?"

"This one thinks there's usually some wisdom there."

"You're thinking there's a . . . spirit inhabiting Tommy, aren't you? That he's possessed. Is that what you are? An exorcist?"

Cree would have preferred not to discuss it with Lynn, not yet. But there was no denying the obvious. "No, I'm not an exorcist.
I don't believe the popular idea of possession, Lynn. I'm skeptical of the idea of purely evil beings. In my experience, paranormal
entities are neither more nor less wicked than living humans. I wouldn't assume this thing has malevolent intentions. It may
be just lost or scared or desperate. Or lonely."

Lynn Pierce cocked her head, puzzled. "Am I being obtuse in some way? Because you saw him attack Julieta. And he stabbed himself
repeatedly tonight." She winced as she rubbed her forearm and went on. "In fact, I have a confession to make. Something I
didn't tell anyone, but I'll tell you." She unbuttoned the cuff of her jacket, tugged back the sleeve, then rolled the sleeve
of her blouse. Cree gasped at the sight of the half circles of scabs and the surrounding penumbra of marbled green bruising.
"From last week. I didn't tell Julieta because she's so . . .
invested
in Tommy. I didn't want her to worry." Lynn held up the arm and rotated it, looking at the wounds with satisfaction, as if
admiring a suntan.

"Do you have any idea why she might be so 'invested' in him? Him particularly?"

Again, Lynn cocked her head. "Why do I keep getting the feeling you're trying to tempt me into indiscretions? Or maybe I'm
just being paranoid. That must be it. But." She raised the wounded arm again and pinned Cree with her gaze. "You didn't answer
me. Still convinced it's harmless?"

The bites were upsetting, and Cree needed a moment to think about what they implied. She moved farther away from Lynn, around
Tommy's bed to one of the windows, where she leaned her pounding forehead gingerly against the pane and cupped her hands around
her eyes to look outside. All she could see was the rectangle of bare earth lit by the ceiling fluorescents, stark as a patch
of moon landscape, with her own humped shadow cut into it. Beyond the light, dead black. The wind whimpered faintly as if
it wanted to get inside. The glass was icy against her skin. The nurse was complex and strange, and seemed to be fencing—
to be asking or offering something. But Cree couldn't think well enough to respond in the right way. All she knew was that
if Lynn came too far into her physical space one more time, she'd confront her on it.

"The entity is not harmless," Cree said at last. "It's hurting Tommy terribly. We just don't know that it's
intentionally
doing so. There's an important difference."

"Good point. Excellent point. Of course." The admiration in Lynn's voice seemed genuine. "You're very smart, Dr. Black. I
can't tell you what a pleasure it is talking with you. Such a refreshing change from . . . well, from my usual diet of conversation."

This time Cree heard her moving, and she spun around quickly.

But Lynn had gone to the door and stood half turned as if about to leave.

"You've been very kind, Cree Black. Thank you. I know I'm strange. Hard to get used to. My Vern used to say I was an acquired
taste." Her downcast eyes darted around the floor as if searching for something; then, as if she'd found it, she brightened
a bit and looked at Cree. "What you said about paranormal entities—you apply the same principle to living humans, too, don't
you? I like that very much. You won't assume someone has malevolent intentions. They may be just lost or scared or desperate.
Or lonely, huh?" She offered a shy, apologetic smile that quickly failed, and with a tired wave left the room.