Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (12 page)

Looking down into his face as she held the twisting shoulders, Cree saw a difference in his eyes. One pupil was a great, dilated
black hole, the other much smaller. As she looked down his right eye fixed her, held steady despite the tossing of his head.
And with what looked like great effort, the eye winced itself shut. It opened again, still staring straight at her, and did
it once more.

Maybe it was purely accidental, some fluke of his chaotic movements, but she couldn't escape the feeling it had been a
wink.
Had to be. Was it lascivious, taunting, pleading, threatening? She couldn't guess. But she could swear it had been a kind
of communication—a signal from something living inside Tommy's skull.

12

JULIETA TIGHTENED her legs around the big barrel of Spence's body as she urged him into a full gallop. The ground jolted and
rolled away, and the cold rush of early-morning air gave her the feeling of being airborne. The black gelding was a powerful
horse, smart with his feet, and now she goaded him to his utmost. His rhythmic lunging and the pumping bellows of his breathing
soothed the painful nerve deep inside her. A welcome narcotic.

"Take me away, Spence," she called to him. "Fly me away."

The sun hadn't yet broken the top of the mesa and the world was raw and fresh as she bucketed west from the rear corral gate.
A wide track of disturbed ground showed that horses had been this way not long ago—Shurley's bunch, no doubt. The gray stallion
and his mares must have visited Spence and the girls last night. From the deep bite of hoofs and wide scatter of soil, she
could tell they'd left in a hurry.

Tommy's breathing had returned to normal by the time Joseph had arrived and inspected him. There'd been nothing for him to
see but a very sleepy fifteen-year-old, understandably surly at being poked and prodded in the middle of the night. Once he
was certain Tommy was stable, Joseph had checked Cree Black, looking for signs of concussion. Finally, he had come to Julieta
to lightly touch the scrapes on her cheek, his eyes making it clear he was ministering not to the physical injury but to the
deeper hurt she'd suffered from the assault. Julieta had left the infirmary at around four, leaving Joseph to spend what remained
of the night in the bed next to Tommy's, and had gone back to her quarters.

Where of course sleep had been impossible. She was as tense as a bowstring, charged with hysterical energy and fear and need.
When Joseph had walked her out to the infirmary's porch and the night had wrapped around them, she'd experienced an almost
overwhelming urge to grab him, envelop his mouth with hers, tell him to take her back to her room and make love to her until
the world got real again and there was warmth and safety somewhere and some things were certain and it was okay.

But of course she didn't. She went alone to the dark of her room, where the nightmare of Tommy kept at her. After an hour
or so she gave up and sought the only little remedy she could think of. She dressed again, went out to the corral. The wind
had died and the night was full of a waiting feeling, the stillness before dawn. Spence had been skittish at first, but she'd
tempted him with an apple and spent a long time gently stroking him, and eventually he'd calmed down enough to accept the
saddle. The sky had paled to slate gray by the time she swung herself onto him. She didn't look back once as the school dwindled
and disappeared from view.

A mile out, the track of Shurley's horses veered to the southwest, but she reined Spence to the right, heading north along
a little ridge in the undulating plain. She let him open up, find his own speed. He responded as if he needed this, too, this
wild flight away from what had happened.

The image of Tommy came back to her: the impossible breathing, the independent movement of his anguished eyes, the horrible
strength of his convulsions. Trying to restrain him, she'd felt an eerie fibrillation in his chest and shoulders as if individual strands
of muscle were separately alive, steel wires trying to animate him against the resistance of the rest of his flesh. Then,
later, awakening to the awful predatory fixity of his gaze and his sudden lunging, clawing attack. Beyond scaring her, it
had felt like . . . what? A betrayal. Love rebuffed. The whole thing had been so wrenching she'd feared her mind, her whole
world, would deform with the twisted force of it.

She'd never been a determined skeptic like Joseph; she'd been raised listening to Grandma Sandoval's tales of family ghosts,
which as a child she'd believed as fact and as an adult had accepted as licensed but not utterly implausible. And you couldn't
live out here without hearing rumors of mysterious and inexplicable events, wondering about the livestock mutilations, or
sensing other presences in the rocks and shadows—it was one of the things she loved about this country. And yet, though she'd
always been fairly open-minded about supernatural things, she would have described herself as a rationalist. Even two days
ago, when she and Joseph had gone to meet Cree Black on Sandia Peak, she would have claimed a fairly secure belief in science
and conventional medicine and the whole trend of rational, empirical Western thought since Aristotle.

But the events of the last few hours had busted all that up pretty good.

It was almost funny. Really, all she'd been doing for the last three weeks was continuing to live her mental habits, operating
from her old paradigms. She was like that cartoon coyote, hurtling off a cliff and running in midair before he realizes he's
suspended over a mile-deep canyon. As if the momentum of belief or habit or ignorance could defy the law of gravity!

"I don't believe in anything!" she called to Spence. His hide hitched at the sound of her voice, and he quickened his stride.
She laughed bitterly at the realization and yelled to the empty land, "I don't know what to believe! I have no idea what's
real!
" She wanted to laugh and cry and scream. She wanted to hit something, strike something and punish the world for its fickleness.
For its unfairness in visiting this catastrophe on her. On Tommy Keeday, of all people.

The thought of Tommy brought her thoughts back a little. This wasn't about Julieta McCarty, she reminded herself, this was
about Tommy. A beautiful child, a talented artist, a boy with a lot of potential that would surely be destroyed if they couldn't
cure him. A boy who knew nothing about the psychodrama he'd walked into at Oak Springs School, the role he played in the principal's
secret fantasies and neuroses. Who was not to blame and who must never know of any of it.

Spence was laboring now, still willing but getting tired. She spoke to him softly and brought him down to a trot. The big
horse huffed and snorted, glad for a chance to get his wind back. Already they were three miles beyond school property and
well onto McCarty Energy's Hunters Point coalfield. The land immediately around her looked the same, but a mile to the west
a series of low, flat-topped ridges appeared, the spoil mounds from mining operations of thirty years ago. Even now, the desert
vegetation had not returned to those dry slopes. She hated the sight of them—why had she come this way? She nudged Spence
a little more toward the northeast.

She marshaled her thoughts. The gallop had tired her as well as Spence, burnt off the worst of the crazy energy.
Principal,
she reminded herself.
Administrator. Head honcha. It's executive decision time: Where do we go from here?

Was there really any point in allowing Cree Black to work with Tommy? She'd been all but useless last night.

On the other hand, Julieta couldn't really blame her, given that she'd just about gotten her skull fractured as she'd rushed
to help him. And no, actually, she hadn't been useless. Quite the opposite. If her psychic radar or whatever it was hadn't
prompted her to go out to the corral, Tommy might have died, suffocating as his lungs labored to rebreathe each other's air.
So they already owed her a great deal.

And Julieta had to admit there was something about Cree, some inner determination that she'd noticed at their very first meeting.
She was a woman of about her own age and height, with medium-length brown hair full of chestnut-red highlights. A pageant coach would have appraised
her as pretty, but not glamorous enough to be competitive. What made her looks compelling was the keen alertness and candor
in her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth. You got the feeling she was a person who
cared.
She was also someone who told it like it was, had no stake in misrepresenting anything. Whatever Cree Black's personal history,
she had obviously faced some tough things, maybe something like the crisis of belief Julieta felt in herself now. Somehow
she'd seen it through, had come to some faith or truth despite the maelstrom of uncertainties.

Which was kind of reassuring.

And right now, Cree Black's explanations seemed as apt as anything Julieta had heard from the doctors they'd consulted.

But there were other issues to consider. The symptoms were more extreme and lasted longer every time. The breathing problem
demonstrated clearly that Tommy's physical survival, not just his mental well-being, was at risk, and that the school was
not well prepared to assure his safety. From the standpoint of the school, the issue was clear: If Tommy died or got badly
injured at Oak Springs, especially if any education or health authority heard she'd dealt with it as a supernatural issue,
she could face criminal charges. Last night, citing both Tommy's needs and the school's, Joseph had been explicit that he
couldn't let this go on: One more crisis and he'd insist on Tommy's being hospitalized again.

And he was right. Clearly, the safest and easiest route would be to remand him to the care of some public authority, or to
his grandparents, and wash her hands of the problem. And try to forget him and the world of fantasies she'd constructed around
him.

She felt her lips curl in a hard smile.
Fat fucking chance.

The scary part of Joseph's dictum was that the next hospital visit would change Tommy's life. From there, the road took a
crucial fork. Certainly, in long-term care, some anonymous clinic or institution, his acute needs would be better met. But
no doctor was likely to believe—or risk a career by admitting—that some unknown entity was occupying his body and mind.
And therefore he wouldn't get the real help he needed. The Indian Health Services would soon find they didn't have the resources
for him, and they'd send him on to the state. A bunch of well-meaning, overworked doctors would drug him and talk at him,
and if it didn't go away, they'd wedge him deeper and deeper into the system, until he was warehoused in some institution
and forgotten. Or they might go for more drastic treatments; she'd read recently that electroshock therapy and lobotomy were
coming back into fashion.

She shuddered and shook off the thought.

The other most likely option would be to send him home. That was the choice his grandparents had endorsed—the Navajo way,
removing him from whatever bad influences had triggered his problem, wrapping him close against the bosom of family, performing
some archaic healing Way for him. But, again, he would probably not get cured. And even with in-home support from the state
or tribe, he'd be far away from appropriate medical help, from educational resources, from—

From Julieta McCarty.

A shiver of panic rattled her. The scariest aspect of those options was that they took him away. She couldn't even tell how
much that thought was biasing what should be objective analysis of Tommy's needs.

The third possibility was that she could again persuade his grandparents to keep him here. She'd met them twice, and they
seemed to trust her judgment. Here at the school, he'd have decent, if not optimum, medical care; he'd have social contacts
and educational options and all those lovely "normalizing" things. Plus there was the possibility, one she found increasingly
credible, that Cree Black could do something for him. The problem there would be Joseph. And the liability issues, of course.

What was the right thing? What did he really need? You couldn't decide that without deciding whether he was suffering from
a neurological dysfunction, a psychological problem—or, as Dr. Ambrose and Cree Black insisted and his impossible symptoms
seemed to prove, the literal invasion of his central nervous system by some foreign entity.

"It comes down to what we believe, doesn't it?" she asked Spence. Then she corrected herself: "What
I
believe." This time he
whickered in agreement, and she stroked his shoulder, whispering gratefully, "You're my man, Spence. My debonair gent."

Sometimes you had to make decisions entirely on your own. It was hard, it was scary, it was lonely, but it was what you did
if you had any guts. You did what you believed was right and necessary. No, she resolved, letting go of Tommy was out of the
question. She'd fight to keep him at the school. She'd play whatever hand she had, legal or financial or personal, to retain
a say in what happened to him.

"Screw
safe!
" she shouted. "Huh, Spence? Screw
easy!
"

He picked up his trot as if he agreed. She felt a little better. An angry inner fire warmed her against the chill. When had
she ever done anything easy?

The full disk of the sun had nudged above the horizon by the time she came within sight of McCarty Energy's current operations.
She reined Spence to a stop and then sat there, looking north to a ruined ridge and the gigantic rearing boom of a dragline
just visible a couple of miles away. Again she wondered why she'd come this way. She hated the sight of it. She'd been there
often enough to fight with Garrett and Donny to visualize what lay beyond the screen of hills.

There was a wasteland of dug-up soil and rock heaped in man-made mountains, meandering dirt roads and ramps for the big machines,
and gaping trenches blasted and scraped into the ground. There was the crusher and the huge mounds of coal waiting to be loaded
onto trains. There were the walking draglines, whole movable buildings that supported the colossal girdered booms and buckets,
one of which was the same dragline Garrett had led her through when he was in his phase of impressing her with the many large,
expensive things he owned. With the boom from which sixty-six-year-old Garrett had fallen and died while showing off for his
latest tramp girlfriend.

There were yellow dump trucks and front loaders the size of houses. There was the office and repair complex and a parking
lot full of pickup trucks. And sometimes there was Donny's Lincoln Navigator or Porsche in the lot, and Donny, along with
a gaggle of rapacious bean counters, going over the operation's records and being an officious pain in the ass and thinking
up clever ways to make more money. And as a sideline, kind of a hobby, thinking up ways to make Julieta's life miserable.