Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (35 page)

Joseph didn't ask what kind of wolf. Looking up at the black-topped, austere outcrop and the invisible country beyond, he
felt a little quake inside. The day wasn't hot enough to make an inversion layer, but the air seemed to quiver over the land
in that direction.

"He was very old, eighty, ninety, who knows. He probably would have died by himself but later I learned he had a daughter
who checked in on him sometimes. Even she was old, even she was afraid of him. Nobody else would come near him. I had heard
stories about a Wolf somewhere around here, but I didn't know it was the same guy until I saw him."

Obviously, Joseph realized, Uncle Joe hadn't stopped at this spot by chance. "What did he do?" he asked.

"He was bad. He took other people's animals. Sometimes he'd steal sheep to eat them, but sometimes he'd kill someone's horse
or sheep just to do bad for them. Anything anybody did that he didn't like, he'd become their enemy. He dug up dead people
from their graves, made poisons of their flesh, and some people said he ate it, too. People said he made their children sick,
made them die. Made women have deformed babies."

"How would anyone know it was him who made the kids sick?"

"So this time I went up there, I'm going up the track and about, oh, two miles up I come to a hogan and back behind it a couple
of pole sheds and a stock pen up near one of these little buttes, right up against the cliff. It's a real beat-up place—trash,
rags caught in the bushes, tools on the ground, roof no good. I call hello and no one answers, but I know someone's there,
I can smell smoke. The hogan's door is open, and after I stand there for a few minutes, I go closer to it and look inside.
First thing I see is that the north wall is broken down. It's a dead person's hogan. But it looks like somebody lives in there
anyway, inside it's a mess of dishes, blankets, food bones, the fire on the floor's smoldering a little."

The cigarette was trembling between Uncle Joe's fingers. He gave Joseph a round-eyed look, and Joseph nodded. Only an extremely
antisocial, possibly even sociopathic, person would live in a death hogan. You didn't have to believe the superstitions to
be frightened of someone who would commit such a grave offense against social norms.

Uncle Joe fell silent, staring at the sandstone outcrop. From here, its profile resembled a huge dead iguana, angling up from
the rocky desert floor.

The old man was shaking his head regretfully. "I should have known better. Because on the way in, before I got to the hogan,
I'd seen a couple of dead animals. Dead coyote. Dead crow. Dead rabbit. That's how a Skinwalker moves around. This one was
too old to get around in his human body, but he could still use theirs. The Skinwalker projects his chindi into the animal,
gets all the animal's powers—see in the dark, walk with no sound, smell people out, fly. When he's done using it, he goes
back to his own body and the animal body dies. That's what those animals were. What he'd cast off."

The silence pressed around them again. Joseph felt unaccountably exposed out here, under the naked sky, the truck sitting
in the middle of the track in the certain knowledge no one would come by.

"Maybe we should get going, Uncle Joe. What is it, another ten miles or so, right?"

"But at the time I just thought, okay, whoever lives up here was shooting pests or something. Then up at the hogan, I'm thinking,
I don't know, maybe somebody died here just yesterday, the family's got another hogan, maybe back beyond the sheds and the
little cliff, out of view. I'm still hoping I can borrow a horse. So I head back to the sheds, I'm thinking maybe somebody's
working over there and doesn't hear me yet. And when I get over there, I see there's a sort of a cave in the ledge, the opening's
about ten feet wide, half hidden behind a shed and a dead pinon tree. I looked into that cave."

Even resting on his knee, Uncle Joe's cigarette hand was shaking so hard the ash scattered. He paused for so long that Joseph
thought he wouldn't go on, and he realized suddenly what a huge effort it required for Uncle Joe to tell this.

At last the rasping voice continued, quavering yet determined: "I ducked my head to look inside. Wasn't really a cave, more
of an undercut—maybe only ten feet deep. The back wall sloped up to meet the ceiling, real rough, just broken rock. It took
my eyes a second to adapt to the darkness under there, but the first thing I see is clumps of dark shapes up where the wall
meets the ceiling. Took me a second to see it's bats, maybe fifty, a hundred of them. Then I see that part of the rock wall
isn't a rock wall, it's a naked dead man, hanging upside down like the bats. He's as dried up as a mummy, just skin over bones,
he's the same color as the rocks, he's streaked with guano same as the wall. He's got his ankles hooked into a loop of rope
pegged in up near the ceiling, hands folded across his chest."

"What the hell—"

' 'And just when I realize what I'm looking at, the fingers of his hands start to spread! Then his eyes open, he looks straight
at me and bends at the waist so he sits partway up, sticking out from the wall. He spreads his arms wide, he's still being
a
bat.
All this took maybe three seconds total elapsed time since I first looked in there. My heart stopped dead. I had actual, medical
cardiac arrest. And then I went running down that track. I ran all the way back to where we are now and maybe two miles back
toward White Rock."

Joseph felt sick. From Uncle Joe's trembling voice, the quiver of his jaw, it was clear that the old man was telling it factually.
Some senile old hermit, gone crazy, maybe nearing death, morbid with Alzheimer's, lost in sick fantasies, violating taboos.
No one to supervise him, bring him back home to his humanity.

"I wish I'd never looked into that cave," Uncle Joe said, voice hollow with regret. "I wish I'd never seen that. It was bad
enough when I thought he was a dead man, a mummy like over in Canyon del Muerte. But what I felt when those fingers began
to spread . . . I don't like to think fear can be that strong."

"Whatever happened to him?"

Uncle Joe swiveled his face toward Joseph's, looking very old, wrinkles swarming his eyes and brow like some fantastic design
of ornamental scars.

"Not long after, they killed him. People from around here got together. Six men went up, six good men. Old
Hastiin
Keeday, the grandfather we're going to see, he was one of them. Killed the Wolf, then burned him and the hogan and everything
up there. Nothing left, I hear. No trace."

A horrible thought occurred to Joseph. "Because you told them—"

"No. It had been building up for a long time, people were scared, something had to be done. I never told anyone what I'd seen,
ever. Not even my wife. I never wanted to say it out loud. You are the very first person, Joseph."

That was true, too, Joseph knew, and he felt oddly honored to know his uncle had made such an effort for him. From Uncle Joe's
discomfort, he knew this was not just another argument for the old man's late-gained traditionalist worldview. It was an act
of deep humility and courage. And, touchingly, affection.

"Why did you tell me, Uncle?"

"Yeah, I'm trying to figure that out. Now I'm so shook up I lost what I was going to say." Uncle Joe looked down at his cigarette,
which had burned to the knuckles of his shaking hand and had to be searing him. He flicked it down, ground it out, and stared
at his own footprint for a moment.

"After that, I changed. The family put on a Sing for me, and that helped. Mainly, what changed me was I had to think about
what it meant to be a man like him, how he got that way. Once, he was probably like anyone else. Then he changed, maybe bit
by bit, or maybe all at once, who knows, maybe what's happening to Tommy Keeday happened to him and that's what he became.
I don't know. Before that, I was a little fast and loose—in the army, in school. I could talk people into anything, I didn't
mind taking their money in ways that weren't so good. And women—that kind of thing. But for years after that, every time
I was alone, I saw that . . . thing . . . sitting up off the rocks. It came together in my mind with some bad stuff I'd seen
in Korea, too, made me realize that whatever was wrong with that Wolf came from something that's inside every man. Even me.
And I decided I didn't want to become anything like that. I couldn't change what I'd seen, but what I would
be
—that much I could control, I could decide."

Uncle Joe had begun drifting back toward the truck, Joseph tagging just behind. "So I guess I thought you should probably
think about that. Before we talk to the Keedays. When you're dealing with this boy's problem and the business with Julieta.
Today we're coming clean about Julieta's baby, I'll help you however I can. But a thing like this, what you're going to be
dealing with, it's going to be very hard. But what you do with it—that you should think about. How you let it change you.
How you might choose."

Back in the cab, Uncle Joe didn't start up the truck right away. He sat, slumped with weariness, gazing at the dead-iguana
ledge, as if lost in memory. It occurred to Joseph that he hadn't seen his uncle take a drink today, and that he couldn't
recall any other time he'd seen him without a bottle close by. He had to be feeling the hard hand of his addiction on him
by now. It reinforced his sense that the old man was doing something very heroic for him today.

At last Uncle Joe turned the key and the truck's big engine made a startling roar in the silence.

"Tell you one thing, though," Uncle Joe said finally. He shook his head, as if astonished and grateful for at least one certainty
in life. "That Willys was one good little jeep. That was the only time it ever died on me. Only time it ever let me down,
and I worked that bastard like a mule."

38

THE KEEDAY homesite was about four miles off the road they'd come in on, a driveway consisting of parallel wheel tracks meandering
between rotting buttes and over rolling swells of bare hardpan. Uncle Joe skillfully navigated the truck over the rough ground,
sometimes at no more than a walking pace. As with most rural Navajos, the various units of the Keedays' extended family had
lived for generations within shouting distance of each other, so the place was about what Joseph expected: a scattering of
hogans, shacks, sheds, sheep pens spread over a half mile or so. But the deaths of Tommy's parents and relocations of other
kin had left the grandparents and Tommy alone on the old place, and all but the grandparents' current residence were unused
and falling apart.

The old Keedays' home consisted of a small, aluminum-clad trailer fronted by a tin-roofed, open lean-to. Close by stood a
log hogan in good repair. Between buildings, a little chipboard shed housed a gasoline-powered electrical generator that radiated
wires to the trailer, hogan, and main sheep shed. Other pole sheds served as summer kitchen, work spaces, barns. A four-wheeled
ATV and a battered white Ford pickup were parked next to a pair of rust-stained 250-gallon fuel tanks. The extensive board-
and wire-fenced sheep pens were empty now but for two gaunt horses and maybe a dozen sheep. With the grandparents getting
too old to manage a lot of animals, the family would have moved the main flock to some other relative's place.

They arrived and sat in the truck with the windows rolled down, listening to the silence that lay on the land like a heavy
physical thing, wrapping and muffling the whole uneven circle of the horizon. At last the trailer door opened to reveal Tommy's
grandmother, a tiny, wizened woman wearing a wide dark-brown dress and red wool sweater. They got out of the truck and made
greetings, and after another couple of minutes the old man came out. From what Joseph could see of his face beneath his cowboy
hat and black horn-rims, his deeply seamed features seemed carved of aged, smoke-darkened wood. His new-looking blue jeans
and crisp checked shirt cinched with a bolo tie suggested he'd dressed up when he'd heard visitors arrive.

When Joseph had first met them at the hospital, their stiff walks, weathered faces, cautious eyes, knobbed hard-worked hands,
and the faint sweet stink of lanolin and sheep manure had made them seem rustic and anachronistic, especially set against
the sterile tiles of the hospital corridors. In this landscape, though, they seemed stronger, aged but hardy, at home among
the brown rocks and dry earth.

But they were also very frightened. However Tommy's condition had developed in the last two days, Joseph knew, what they had
seen had been harrowing.

The grandfather was older than Uncle Joe, and Uncle Joe treated him with deference as they made courtesies, mentioned family
members who knew family members, remembered veterinary visits from years past, talked about the health of the flock and the
price of wool. Watching them, Joseph wondered if even they knew their grandson was adopted. He tried to picture
Hastiin
Keeday as a member of a lynch mob that had murdered an old recluse forty years ago. To his surprise, he found he couldn't
muster any judgment against him. Whatever this grave, frail man had done, he'd acted with conscience.

Another sign of eroding certainties,
Joseph thought with alarm.
Values, beliefs, all up for grabs.

The grandparents explained that they'd been wary when they'd heard the truck coming because a Child Protective Services agent
had already been there looking for Tommy. When they'd told him that the boy wasn't there, the agent had waved legal papers
and warned them that he planned to stop by the houses of Tommy's various aunts and uncles, too.

They were scared of trouble with the authorities, they said, but after what they had seen last night, they were vastly more
afraid of the ghost that moved in Tommy and what it meant for their family. Even their hard­bitten dignity couldn't hide that
hunted, fearful look.

"What happened?" Joseph asked.

They darted glances at each other, reluctant to speak of it. But
Hastiin
Keeday made a grim face and ground it out: "Our son and our daughter went to the hospital and brought him back here. The Hand-Trembler,
Edison Begaye, we had already asked him to be here. We held the divination last night. Tommy seemed better on the way home,
and we hoped maybe he was going to be all right. But later, we saw the ghost awaken in him." The old man shut his eyes momentarily
as if trying to banish the image. He gestured at a deeply bowed pinon branch among a bundle of kindling: "He bent his back
like that, and he spoke in a stranger's voice. For a long time he bent back and forth on the ground, like a grub from the
soil. He tore his shirt off and we could see the chindi moving in the muscles in his back. He bit himself. We couldn't stop
him. Not even
Hastiin
Begaye, not our son Raymond. We couldn't move our legs or arms to help him."

"What did
Hastiin
Begaye say?" Uncle Joe asked.

The old woman answered: "The chindi of an ancestor has come into him. It's very angry because it was wronged when it was alive."
The grandmother bit off the words and then sealed her mouth tight in its radiating wrinkles, growing stern, cutting off any
further discussion of the details because the chindi might hear and figure out ways to sabotage the healing rituals. Joseph
knew that the old people would need Ways sung, too, having been contaminated by their proximity to Tommy.

With Uncle Joe's tactful probing, they told him that the younger family members had brought the boy up to the summer sheep
camp, where they were caring for him in shifts. A young grandson named Eric served as runner between sites, taking up supplies
on his ATV. They had already arranged the curing Way with a renowned Singer from Red Rock, and preparations were under way
for the ceremony early next week.

Joseph said almost nothing until it was time to bring up his errand. He began his request with a preamble, which the old people
waited out, nodding respectfully. But in fact, they needed no persuasion. They answered by praising Uncle Joe's judgment,
saying they trusted Joseph and appreciated Julieta. As for the
bilagâana
psychologist, to Joseph's astonishment, they said Tommy had asked them to bring her to him. In one of the few moments when
he could speak clearly.

Uncle Joe asked them to remind him how to get to the summer camp, which entailed a lot of gesturing and drawing maps in the
sand. It was almost six miles north. The grandfather promised he would tell his daughter and son to expect visitors from Tommy's
school tomorrow.

It was almost five o'clock by the time they left. Saying good-bye to the two old people moved Joseph deeply: seeing them standing
there, in the last inhabited part of a once-thriving family compound, surrounded by the ruins of hogans whose occupants had
died or moved and the remains of defunct sheep operations. A snapshot of two lives approaching their end. Of a bygone era.
The old man took his wife's hand and held it against his chest, and they stood motionless, watching the truck pull out as
if reluctant to see their visitors go.

The truck bumped and tilted slowly back down the driveway.

Though what the Keedays said about Tommy was deeply troubling, Joseph concluded that the meeting had been very successful.
Despite their fear, the old people were facing this family problem with courage. They'd insisted on the old healing ways yet
were open-minded about Cree Black. Clearly, Uncle Joe was held in great respect by these people, and he'd done a terrific
job, handling everything with perfect tact.

And yet from the pressure he felt in his chest, Joseph knew there was still a lot of unfinished business. The tightening knot
in his throat was like a lock, holding back the secrets.

Uncle Joe gripped the wheel hard and said nothing. He seemed burdened, too—sad, preoccupied. Again he had refused Joseph's
offer to drive, yet now he seemed shaky. The sweat on his temples gave it away: Whatever else he might be worried about, he
was entering alcohol withdrawal.

"You know Margaret's Catholic," Uncle Joe said, out of the blue. "I don't take much stock in it myself, but, boy, does that
woman feel better after she goes to confession."

The invitation touched Joseph, but though he ached to tell, he stalled with an uneasy joke: "Why is it I have such a hard
time picturing you as a priest, Uncle?"

"Maybe the same reason I have a hard time seeing you as any kind of sinner. Any more than my wife."

"I still haven't told Julieta that I didn't place her baby. That I didn't know where he was or who he was."

Uncle Joe winced with discomfort as his body shook slightly. "So after today, you'll tell her. Blame me if you want, tell
her I always refused to tell you. I don't care, got nothing to lose."

"There's something else I never told her. Never told anybody."

Uncle Joe put the truck into low gear to bring it over a particularly uneven shelf of rock.

"I need to tell her. But I'm afraid to for a lot of reasons. One of them is that she's fragile, she has a very strong front,
but when she breaks, it's . . . painful."

"She's in for a rough ride, Julieta. Whatever you tell her or don't. Just stand by her, you'll probably fix it up."

"If she lets me. If she'll forgive me. She can get very angry, Uncle. She . . . hurts herself with her own anger. She might
not forgive me."

Uncle Joe concentrated on his driving, the sweat beading on his grizzled temples. Joseph wished he'd get stern, get clever,
anything that would force it out of him in some way. But of course Uncle Joe wouldn't. It was up to Joseph to tell it, to
face it. To let out the pressure that was choking him.

"This was back before the baby was born," he began. "She was six, seven months pregnant, she was living in that apartment
in Gallup, she was hiding from Garrett McCarty. I was her only contact with the world. I was the only one who knew what she
was going through. She'd been hurt by her husband and then Peter Yellowhorse had left her and gone to California. One time
she showed me this letter he'd written, how he'd gotten a job out there, he had another girlfriend, he was going to try out
for the movies. That was the only time she'd heard from him. When she wasn't sad, she was furious. She'd risked everything
for him, and he'd tossed her aside."

Uncle Joe just drove. Up and down and over the rough track, the endless fields of stone and sand jolting past. The constant
roiling and pitching. Joseph gripped the door handle, feeling seasick.

"I knew Peter a little. The three of us got together a few times, clandestine meetings for lunch or at my place, before she
got pregnant. I thought he was kind of. . . footloose, but I could see how they felt about each other. They were, what would
you call it . . . kindred spirits. They had
chemistry
—sparks flew. And something more, deeper, at least for Julieta. Maybe for him, too, but it was hard to tell, a guy like
that. He was very smart, he could talk like a poet and make jokes and he knew he was good-looking. I heard from people that
he had something of a reputation, that women liked him. And he could get away with things without consequences."

"Sounds like me," Uncle Joe put in sadly. "Back whenever."

"But I never told Julieta about that. I thought they should have a chance. I thought maybe he'd change, even he would know
he'd never get that lucky again. Not in this life."

"You wanted her."

Early on, Joseph thought, no—not exactly, not yet. At first, it wasn't something he'd let himself think or admit. "They were
in love," he said simply. "I liked them both. I wasn't ready, either."

There was a period of silence during which Uncle Joe shifted and accelerated into a smoother stretch. He used the respite
from two-handed driving to light a cigarette, the shaking of his hands more pronounced. "Jesus, we've only gone about two
miles. I don't know how those old people do it—driveway that takes fifteen minutes, forty minutes to the county road every
time."

"So it's winter and she's around seven months pregnant, Peter's been gone six months, she's barely hanging on. Afraid of Garrett,
mad as hell at him. Still in love with Peter and so mad she'd throw things when she talked about him. And I'm thinking, How
could he do this, how could he leave her? She was so beautiful, Uncle! And by then I wanted her, I wanted her to love me like
that. But the last thing I could do was . . . put that in her way. She had enough to deal with as it was." A gout of Uncle
Joe's smoke swirled in the cab and Joseph's breath caught on it. He had to cough and clear his throat before going on: "So
one night I was at home, I was tired, I'd just come off rotation at the hospital, my first break in a while. This was just
before Julieta decided to give up the baby. And I got a phone call."

"Uh-oh."

"Yeah, it was Peter Yellowhorse. He was still in California, he said he'd been trying to reach Julieta for days, but she never
answered the phone. He wanted to know if she was all right. He said he was coming back, he was going to catch a bus. Wanted
to know if she was still at the old house, or if she wasn't, could I give him her new phone number? This was when she had
an unlisted number at her apartment, trying to keep Garrett from finding her. And I'm angry at him, too. I tell him, What
the hell do you care? You got her pregnant, left her, broke her heart, you shacked up with some Apache girl! And he tells
me he's left that girl because he realizes he can't live without Julieta, he'll do anything for her. Everything he should
have known six or seven months earlier."

"So what did you do?" Uncle Joe croaked. His voice was so gravelly and sick that Joseph pulled back from the memory to appraise
him with a doctor's eye. He looked alarmingly bad—greenish, clammy, full of tremors.

"When was the last time you had a drink?" Joseph demanded.