Closer to Window Rock, they passed an area where the ridges visible from the road struck Cree as too uniform to be natural mesas; it wasn't until she saw the sign for the P amp; M Coal Company that she realized they must be recovered strip-mine tailing mounds. Sure enough, beyond the farther hills she saw a gargantuan derrick rotating slowly against the sky. Near the highway, several preposterously outsized yellow dump trucks and front loaders moved around piles of dirt, putting up clouds of dust.
Julieta's frown deepened as they passed the operation. She squinted into the lowering sun, gripped the wheel, and drove as if eager to get past.
'So you married Garrett McCarty-' Cree prompted.
'The long and short of it is, we were married for five years,' Julieta said curtly. 'It was not so good. The details are irrelevant. Divorced in eighty-seven. I did all right in the settlement-ended up with our residence here, the land around it, and some money. Somewhere in there I decided I needed to do something with my life. Went to UNM and got a master's in education administration. Spent every cent of the divorce money to build Oak Springs School.'
'How do you get along with your ex now?'
'Garrett? He died three years ago. He was sixty-six. Now his son from his first marriage owns McCarty Energy. Donny McCarty- my former stepson, can you believe it? — is four years older than I am. We have a mutual- loathing arrangement. He resented me from the start, and his feelings didn't sweeten when I walked away with some of his father's holdings. The bad part is that the court partitioned off my land from a much larger chunk Garrett owned, so the company is our neighbor. Donny likes to make our lives miserable with right-of-way problems or whatever he can dream up.'
The question seemed to drive Julieta back inside herself, and they were quiet again as they approached Window Rock. Julieta's anxiety was rising as they got closer to the school and what awaited them there. It occurred to Cree that for all she'd learned about Julieta's past, she'd hardly gotten to know the woman at all. She realized she was rather dazzled by her beauty, her vividness, and that for all the immediate empathy she'd felt, her dazzlement distanced her. Except for that glimpse of a grin at Earl Craig's house, she knew next to nothing about Julieta's emotional life.
'I can't help wondering… ' Cree began. 'You had what sounds like a crappy marriage. Why did you keep McCarty's name?'
Julieta made a face of distaste. 'Sheer pragmatism. The name carries clout around here. To make the school happen, I needed all the weight I could sling. Having the name, even as an ex-wife, helps me get access and ask for favors in the right places. Make contacts in the legislature, raise money from other rich mining families.'
'So you've never remarried? Never had children?'
'I've had relationships. None of them ever quite made it to the marrying stage,' Julieta said distantly. Abruptly she seemed to catch herself, and she turned to Cree with an angry face. 'But I don't see what my past has to do with Tommy Keeday and his terrible problem. Why aren't we talking about that? Joseph and I came to Dr. Ambrose as a last resort when nobody else was giving us satisfactory answers. We wouldn't buy into this at all if we hadn't seen what we'd seen and spent the last few weeks trying every other imaginable solution. I could really use some reassurance that there's substance to his conclusions or your methods. This isn't about me. It's about Tommy. And, frankly, if you're going to work with him, it's about you.'
Cree couldn't help feeling personally rebuffed. But she made a mental note of Julieta's sudden defensiveness and decided to press on with a less intrusive line of inquiry.
'I wish I could offer more reassurance, but I can't. I've never dealt with a situation like this. But what you've told me so far is very helpful. It's especially useful to me to know about the school and the history of the immediate area, because often a… an unknown entity is anchored in a place and connected to past events there. But as I said, every environment is deeply layered with human experience-it can be hard for me to pin down whether a given entity is from a year ago or a thousand years ago or anywhere in between. So the more I know, the better. Can you tell me anything about the school or the land it's on?'
Julieta nodded and continued in a subdued tone that suggested she regretted her outburst.
The school buildings were new, she said, built five years ago. All but her own house-that was something of a historic building, a former trading post built around 1890 on what was then a trail from Oak Springs to Black Hat. The McCartys bought the land in 1922 and began using the building as their site office. Over the years, mining operations drifted several miles to the north, following the coal, and in 1950 Garrett McCarty's father converted it to a residence. Garrett renovated and modernized it once again before Julieta married him, and that's where she had lived, mostly, for the five years of their marriage. The old road ended at the house now; the mine's access and rail spur now came down from Route 264, about twenty miles to the north. Both Julieta's twelve hundred acres and the mine's much larger holding, over forty square miles, were situated in New Mexico, just over the Arizona border from the Big Rez.
As for the history of the school land, she said, there wasn't any. It was just a little patch of ground in a desert that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The region was first populated by the early Pueblo ancestors, popularly called by the Navajo term, Anasazi, who had first started arriving around two thousand years ago, followed a thousand years later by the Navajos and Apaches. The first European explorers were the Spanish, who came in 1540, looking for gold and converts to Catholicism, but a few hundred years of Indian resistance and the Mexican revolution destroyed their dreams of empire. When Mexico ceded the region to the United States in 1848, Yankees began pouring in the region, suppressing the Indians in wars and pogroms. The government created the Navajo reservation in 1868 during a flash of contrition for atrocities perpetrated upon the Dine.
Julieta didn't think Spanish explorers had ever made it to the Black Creek area, but the American entrepreneurs certainly had. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, they'd set up trading, lumbering, mining, and cattle ranching operations, along with the military posts needed to protect them and the railroads needed to move goods. Her Irish ancestors, like Garrett McCarty's, had arrived in a wave of migration in the 1870s.
But as far as she knew, the area of the school itself didn't figure in any of this. A few Navajos had no doubt lived there once, but if so they'd left no traces. Possibly some Anasazis had lived there a thousand years ago, but she had ridden her horses over every inch of the land nearby and had never seen any ruins or petroglyphs. Her house might have had some colorful early history in its years as a trading post, but if so she'd never heard a word of it.
The whole place was so obscure that the little mesa just east of the school didn't even warrant a name on the maps. She'd once heard an old Navajo ranch hand call it Lost Goats Mesa, but that generation had died off and now it was nameless again- none of her staff or faculty had ever mentioned any history of the place.
Cree got the picture. The land was big and enduring; people were small and transient, and the details of their little lives got lost in the sweep of things.
Another few minutes of silence. Julieta put on a pair of sunglasses to help ward the sun that now drilled straight into their eyes, and the reflective plastic seemed to make her very remote.
Soon a big mesa rose and cut off the northwestern horizon, presenting a line of sandstone bluffs that broke into freestanding pillars and buttes at the edges, carved by time into marvelous shapes. They struck Cree as gorgeous, and despite her growing trepidation she felt a shiver of excitement when she saw the sign at the edge of Window Rock: WELCOME TO THE NAVAJO NATION. The highway led into a typical strip of shopping centers, fast- food restaurants, and gas stations, but it felt to her like a gateway to something far larger and older. Behind every plastic sign and faux-adobe facade loomed the ancient rock faces, stark yet sensuous, patient yet playful. The lowering sun filled the red stone with light, softening and smoothing it; she wanted to reach out and stroke the wind-sculpted forms.
'So lovely!' Cree exclaimed.
Julieta glanced over as if startled to find someone in the truck with her. She followed Cree's gaze. 'Yes,' she admitted. 'I guess it is, isn't it. I kind of forget.'
7
Horses. They turned onto the school's access road through a little band of horses that milled across the gravel and onto the verge, engaged in some minor scuffle and unconcerned by the approaching pickup. Other than
