Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (21 page)

24

JOSEPH TSOSIE bumped his head on the door frame as he bumbled thick headed and banana fingered into his pickup. Morning at
last, the prospect of some sleep. End of a long shift.

Julieta had called at around ten p.m. to tell him Tommy's symptoms had peaked again and that he'd been taken by ambulance
to Ketteridge Hospital. She was afraid that she'd lost him now. He'd tried to console her but had to cut it short: He'd had
patients waiting. Saturday night was drinking time on the rez. Those who needed it drove into Gallup or Farmington, pawned
some family jewelry, put down a bellyful of booze, and got into accidents on the long drive back home. Or they opened up the
bottle they'd provided themselves with earlier and got into fights or accidents or other mischief that left them in the emergency
ward at some dark hour, where Joseph, or whoever was on shift, dutifully sutured their torn flesh or set their shattered bones
or prepped them for internal surgery. Even now, eight o'clock Sunday morning, an old man was tottering around the parking
lot of the Tribal Social Services building, blown like a tumbleweed on the random winds of ethyl-crazed impulse.

Joseph chided himself for his dark mood and reminded himself of his priorities:
Hot shower. Bed.

The sun had just come up and was starting to burn its way through a high, thin ice haze. Along Route 12, where the red disk
broke above the Manuelito Plateau, the bluffs wore pleated skirts of blue-black shadow. There were no other cars on the road,
and the scattered houses were blank windowed and still. He turned on the radio, listened to the yammer of a commercial station,
couldn't stand it, switched to a Sunday-morning Evangelical harangue and couldn't stand that either. He turned it off again
and was grateful for the silence.

Tired as he always was, he relished these Sunday morning drives, especially in the autumn when dawn came late and he was there
to see the rising sun. On a morning like this, it was easy to imagine this landscape as its first explorers had seen it, thousands
of years ago: imponderably vast, humblingly ancient and full of mysteries. They'd have probed it cautiously, appraising the
land's capacity to sustain life, alert for signs of water and game and enemies and portents, wary of the spirits who had first
claim here. And that wasn't exclusively an Anasazi or Navajo perspective, you couldn't ascribe it to some local gene. Every
people throughout the world had populated its pinewoods or deserts or ice fields, its rain forests or mountains or seacoasts
with invisible beings that commanded that exalted form of fear called reverence. As a kid at St. Bonaventure's boarding school,
he'd often asked his teachers why the Old Testament used the word "fear" to describe what you were supposed to feel about
God, and he'd never gotten a satisfactory answer. Later, one kindly priest had explained the way perspectives had evolved
in the New Testament, Christ's emphasis upon love between the Almighty and his creations. At the time, he'd found reassurance
in that view.

But now, with what was happening to Tommy Keeday, he couldn't help thinking maybe the older texts had it right after all.

He wondered how the parapsychologist saw this stuff. She seemed to have sorted out her metaphysics in some way, forged a personal
reconciliation between very divergent worldviews. He envied that equilibrium. For all his doubts about her, he also had to
admit that she'd dealt very well with Tommy: sympathetic and responsive, yet never indulging in any of the politically correct
walking on eggshells that you so often saw among whites pursuing altruistic motives among Navajos. Not even when Tommy had
deliberately tried to prevail upon the liberal guilt reflexes he'd learned to expect from social service and medical types.
Cree Black obviously had a talent for getting people to show themselves. Already she had induced Julieta to reveal the long-buried
saga of Peter Yellowhorse, the divorce, the baby. It made Joseph's cheeks burn to think of anyone else knowing about the mistakes
they'd made together sixteen years ago. Still, the parapsychologist's getting Julieta to talk about her past was a testament
to her skills.

Not that it mattered, at this point: With Tommy gone from the school, Cree Black's talents or lack thereof might be irrelevant.

Driving on automatic pilot, he realized that he'd passed his turn into Window Rock. Not really an accident, he knew immediately.
Thinking about Julieta's pleading last night made him realize that he had pressing business that took precedence over the
need for sleep. He needed to find Uncle Joe Billie, ask him some questions. Given that it was a weekend, he knew where to
find his mother's brother. Whether the old man would tell him anything, whether he was sober enough to understand the issues
or felt like playing games today, was another matter.

He stopped at the Mustang station to gas up the truck and get a cup of coffee to go. Then he headed east on Route 264, the
sun searing straight into his eyes as he left the Navajo Nation, entered the United States, and hit the highway for the drive
to Gallup.

He shut off the engine in the rutted dirt lot across the highway from the flea market. Nine-thirty, it was too early for the
big crowds, and the parking area was less than half full of pickups and station wagons. The hay sellers were doing a brisk
business, though, tossing down bales from towering stacks on flatbed semitrailers to family pickups that nosed up against
their flanks like foals to a mare.

Joseph crossed the highway to the dirt access road that ran around the market proper. Some of the smaller vendors were still
arriving, moving their tables and racks and paraphernalia on dollies or garden carts. Whole families carried things: little
girls carrying nested hand-woven baskets, boys wrestling toppling piles of cowboy hats or burlap sacks of potatoes, fathers
and mothers struggling with racks of toys or Chinese-made tools or their own handicrafts. Already the air was filled with
the smell of fry bread and roasting mutton, reminding Joseph that he hadn't eaten any breakfast.

Uncle Joe often set up in the first row of stalls, among some of the other herb sellers. But as Joseph scanned the row, he
didn't see his uncle's weathered face. He stopped at one of the booths to ask a young woman if she'd seen
Hastiin
Joe Billie, and she said she thought maybe he'd come late and was around one of the side lanes. Joseph thanked her and left
her table. The Gallup Flea Market covered many acres and included hundreds of vendors who sold everything from used engine
blocks to watermelon juice, potatoes to livestock-castrating tools, snow cones to hand-woven blankets, plastic action-figure
toys to saddles to computer components. When he was younger, it had included more local crafts, but now many of the vendors
were small-time entrepreneurs who'd gotten a line on off-brand tools or cooking utensils, T-shirts, Chinese-made electronics,
Mexican tourist goods, music CDs and cassettes. Still, there were plenty of family-run stands full of pottery and jewelry,
piles of root vegetables, bags of herbs, goat-fat soap, wool and sheepskins and leather. From their rough hands and the reserve
in their eyes, you could tell some of these people had come in from remote areas where crowds like this were unknown and the
nickels and dimes they'd make here were big-time cash. This was how he imagined some bazaar in Cairo or Istanbul might look:
tarp-covered stalls, piles of vegetables, stacks of boxes, food concessions with grills roasting meat or boiling vats of corn
stew. There were some whites here, as well as Mexicans, Pueblos, Apaches, even a few Japanese guys and Pakistanis, but most
of the vendors and clientele were Navajos. He looked at their faces and felt their collective anarchic energy with a familiar
mix of pride and sorrow.

He found another herb vendor whose face he thought he recognized. "
Yaàtèeh.
Do you know where Joe Billie is today?" he asked.

"Maybe around back," the man answered.

Which meant it could take him a long time to find Uncle Joe. If strung end to end, the meandering rows of stalls would stretch
a couple of miles. The thought made him feel weary and he decided he'd better still the complaining of his stomach before
going any farther. He stopped at a likely-looking concession, an Airstream trailer fronted by a tarp-covered sitting area
with four picnic tables. The roast mutton wasn't ready yet, so he ordered a bowl of stew, a couple of fry breads, and a cup
of coffee, and when he got the food took it to a table where he could look out on the lane as he ate. Several booths down,
one of the music sellers turned on a boom box, playing a CD of some local country-and-western band, amateurish but full of
vigor. Joseph ripped a piece from the huge disk of bread, salted it, and wolfed it down. Time to catch his breath and fortify
himself.

Anyway, before he talked to Uncle Joe, he needed another few minutes to gather his thoughts.

Besides pleading with him to tell her whether Tommy really was her long-lost baby, Julieta had begged him to help keep the
parapsychologist working with the boy, to intercede with the grandparents or the doctors to keep her on as a consulting psychologist.

Which required he make a decision about Cree Black. As Tommy's primary physician, someone the grandparents trusted, a doctor
in good standing at Ketteridge, he could play Roman emperor, give Cree a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Thumbs-down: He could
recommend against her having access to the boy, and there would be little she could do about it. Thumbs-up, and they'd probably
assent to her seeing him.

Two days ago, it would have been an easier decision: good-bye Dr. Black. But the parapsychologist's methods were not at all what he'd expected. Every time they spoke, she articulated her perspective so clearly and compellingly. And yet it was like nothing he'd ever heard of.

Well, not quite, he realized. Surprisingly, some aspects of her approach resembled the traditional Navajo healing process.
Her belief in spirits capable of occupying a human being, that was part of it, and the way real reverence merged with superstition
in her personal cosmology. It was also her emphasis on the patient's social environment. By probing the interpersonal relationships
around the sufferer, Cree Black made the group part of the process—not unlike the complex Ways the old healers performed,
where the whole community came to give the ritual and gave the patient their support. It was one component of the traditions he'd
accepted as both defensible and, for some afflictions anyway, effective.

And she had an impressive resume, too. During a break yesterday morning, he had looked her up on the Internet and found a
surprising number of references: advanced degrees, significant publications, lecturing, a prestigious postdoctoral research
prize.

Joseph chuckled cynically, surprised at himself. He couldn't decide which factor influenced him most, but on balance, he decided,
he was impressed with her and wouldn't mind seeing what she could accomplish with Tommy. At the very least, arranging for
Cree Black to keep working with him would soothe Julieta, maybe discourage her from raising legal challenges to the grandparents'
custody, or waging a private, hopeless war against the health-care system. Or otherwise staking claims on the boy that she
couldn't defend and that would rip Tommy's world, and hers, apart.

But Cree Black's approach also created potential problems. The first was simply that her methods might not hold any promise
for Tommy. The woman could be chasing vapors. Despite the baffling strangeness of his symptoms, Joseph still had to believe
Tommy was suffering from a neurological or psychological problem that would ultimately need a clinical remedy. Cree Black
could do worse than nothing; she could delay or misdirect the treatment that Tommy really needed. In that sense, the very
penuasiveness that made her such a skilled interviewer and confidante could make her dangerous. Already, Julieta had bought
completely into the idea that Tommy was indeed "possessed," and that the culprit was the nasty ghost of a too-familiar enemy,
Garrett McCarty.

The other big problem was that Dr. Black's delving into the past could unearth trouble that was best left alone. It could
plunge Julieta into self-doubt and self-castigation and the dangerous instability that he'd seen too many times over the years.
Worse, Cree might force to the surface secrets that would expose Joseph himself. Things he'd done that he couldn't forgive
himself for, let alone ask Julieta to forgive.

Joseph's appetite faltered at the memories, but he made himself eat, scooping bites of stew with a chunk of bread.

He 'd done his best to help Julieta, but they'd both been so young, so naive. It had rapidly gotten so out of control—the
progression of mistakes and deceptions that culminated in the decision to give up her baby. How stupid he'd been to think
she could get over that! He should have put his foot down:
Julieta, forget about what Garrett has done to you. Forget about fighting for a favorable divorce settlement. Don't accuse and defame him in court, don't try to hold on to any of his property. Don't give him one more reason to hate or resist you, or any more of a grudge to settle. Just get free of him, as fast and easy as possible, even if it means you end up penniless. Keep the baby, let your new life start now.

There are other alternatives,
he should have said.

Like what? What other alternatives had there been? That's what he'd never articulated. That's where he'd really failed her.

But there were three words he'd had no right to say:
You and me.

What could he have offered?
Be with me. I'll claim I'm the father, I'll take care of you and the baby. I'll take the heat from McCarty and protect you from him with my life if I have to.

He had come very close, but it hadn't been possible. At first, she had been deeply in love with Peter Yellowhorse, and for
all either of them knew Peter might have come back to her. She'd also been afraid, and blinded by anger and fear, and deeply
disillusioned; he couldn't have offered himself without seeming to exploit her confusion and desperation. And then she'd been
fighting free of two different but equally devastating relationships with men—the last thing she needed was another male
making demands or claims on her. What she'd needed was a
friend.
And she'd looked to Joseph to be that.