they'd been covering up for years. But I don't know what this one's about.'
Clearly, she didn't care much, either. Everything about Julieta, her scuffing walk, the hunched shoulders, the resignation in her voice, radiated an affect Cree had seen only in the briefest of glimpses before. Something was breaking up inside her. She had abandoned hope and resistance. Curiously, Cree thought, she wore the mood beautifully. Surrender, that's what it was. Grace came with it. She put her arm through Julieta's and was pleased to feel her draw Cree's elbow against her side.
'Julieta, what can we do about Donny? If anything could ruin the school, this could. And he knows it. He wants to use it to bargain with you.'
'For what? I don't have anything to bargain with. Not a thing. I'll call him. I'll do whatever he wants.'
They walked on, shoulder to shoulder. They were already a good distance from the school, two women alone in the red-brown landscape of desert, the silvery blue sky. Julieta wasn't dressed for the outdoors. A little wind scurried along the plain, blowing their hair around and entwining Julieta's longer, darker curls with Cree's.
'I learned a lot about Garrett, anyway,' Cree said, wanting to give her something, anything. 'If I can get near Tommy again, I'll be better able to recognize him. If it is him, I mean.'
Julieta nodded dubiously. 'We need to talk about that,' she said.
'About-?'
'Recognition. You had asked me how I recognized Tommy as my son.'
Cree felt a sudden premonitory trepidation. 'Right. Yes.'
'It's a couple of different things. First, his records show him as a home birth, from the general area where I know my child went, the eastern rez.'
'How about his birth date?'
'Well, the papers claim he was born about five months after I gave birth. But the discrepancy doesn't mean anything-the family might have taken their time reporting and filing, or fudging the date might have helped them claim the child was their own in some way. Allowed time for a supposed pregnancy to have occurred, I don't know.'
'But it sure doesn't prove he is your son.'
'No. It just puts him in the ballpark. The way I knew him, Cree, it was intuitive. You of all people can understand that, can't you? I need you to understand it. I felt it the moment I met him for the admissions interview. I just… felt it.' Julieta pulled away a little and turned so she could look Cree in the eye. The look was pleading.
'What about his appearance? He doesn't seem to resemble you. Does he look like Peter Yellowhorse?'
Julieta's mouth made the saddest of smiles. 'I keep telling myself he does, but the truth is, I can't remember. And I never had a photo of Peter, or I'd show it to you. I have memory, that's all. And it changes, it's astonishingly malleable. The best I can do is, he got a part in Dances with Wolves-playing a Sioux, of course. This was a few years later. Seeing him again upset me so much I had to leave the theater. But we could rent the video, if you want to get a look at him.'
'That might be good-'
'But it has nothing to do with Tommy's appearance. It's just… here. She spread one hand against her chest and one on her stomach, inhaling and exhaling deeply, once. 'It's something I feel here.' Inside.
Cree nodded, knowing exactly what she meant. It was rationally indefensible, but it was the kind of instinctive knowing she trusted completely. She depended on it herself for every investigation. She'd never known it to be without some basis in reality.
They joined arms again and walked on. Their isolation on the bare earth of the undulating plain, under the endless sky, felt very private.
'I don't think of Peter,' Julieta said. 'This isn't about him, I don't hold anything against him anymore. He was right-we wouldn't have worked out. And I don't live in the past, I really don't, I've had other lovers since then. I live in the here and now and I've got far too much to do to mope around. It's just that when I try to figure out how… I got to this place, my life feels all… out of kilter. Like all the right pieces are there, but they're stacked wrong? The foundation is out of whack? And when I trace it back to where it went wrong, it's that period. Garrett, Peter. The baby. And I don't know how to stack it up right after that.'
'But what's so out of kilter? You're beautiful, you're still young, you've got the school…?'
Julieta just scuffed along, pondering the ground in front of them.
A little while later, Julieta brought them around to face back toward the campus, and they stopped to gaze at it. The sun made the angles of the buildings sharp and their planes brilliant. It all looked bright and little and far away, a thing receding.
'There's just one other thing you should probably know,' Julieta said sadly. Her affect was one of utter surrender, yet she spoke with great decision.
Again Cree felt a lurch, as if the ground beneath her feet had shifted. She tried to mask her burgeoning alarm as she searched Julieta's eyes and saw how deep this vulnerability and pain went. The liquid spark in the dark blue eyes was utterly naked.
'Tommy… he isn't the only one. He isn't the first.'
'What?' Cree panted.
'There was a boy the second year. I wanted him to be my child. So badly. But he wasn't. There was even a girl last year, I thought maybe Joseph had misled me about my baby's gender to put me off the track. So you see, it's very complex. I'm kind of crazy. Joseph knows. He's very kind to me. But it's not fair of me to impose it on you, or the kids, anymore. I thought you should know.'
37
Joseph begged off his rotation at the hospital, telling the shift supervisor he had emergency family obligations that might require several days.
He called ahead on his cell phone, got Uncle Joe's answering machine, left a message saying only that he was coming to see him, no explanation of why. Uncle Joe and Margaret lived off the rez not far from Crownpoint, about seventy miles from Window Rock. The drive gave him time to try to put his priorities in order.
The Keedays wouldn't have just brought Tommy back to the grandparents' place-too obvious. Which meant he'd need to persuade Uncle Joe to help him locate the boy and to encourage the family to let them see him. To do that, he'd need to overcome his uncle's resistance to talking about the past, his placing the baby. To do that, he'd have to persuade Uncle Joe that it was truly urgent, that there was a compelling reason to reveal the boy's whereabouts. The most compelling reason he could think of was that Julieta was coming apart at the seams, that she needed something drastic to break the chain, set her free from the past. And if Tommy was her son, he could argue that maybe there comes a time when a young man needs to know who his real parents were. That certainly seemed a big part of Tommy's predicament.
But Uncle Joe would demand more than that. He'd given Joseph a charge: to think about what needed fixing, to diagnose the problem so that he could prescribe himself a cure. Joseph could truthfully claim he'd thought about it, long and hard. The hard part was deciding on the cure.
Then he'd have to explain why it was important for Cree Black to be able to see the boy, and that would open up a supernatural, religious, philosophical can of worms. The old man would ask him why he'd trust some white parapsychologist, why he'd buy into weird quasi-medical, quasi-occult beliefs but had such a distrust of traditional Navajo ways of seeing and coping with the same things.
To which Joseph didn't have an answer. It wasn't so much that he'd come to agree with Cree Black's worldview, but that his habitual beliefs had become full of cracks and gaps. He could no longer decide what was science and what was superstition, fact or supposition, personal view or unbiased observation. He couldn't argue with Uncle Joe anymore because he didn't know what to believe.
He cut up 666 and then east on 9, settling into the forty-mile empty stretch between Nakaibito and Crownpoint. He was awed by the vast open sweep of the Chuska Valley, but still the region had always depressed him: its poverty and aridity, its air of desperation. The litter caught in the fences. People living in isolated, shabby hogans and trailers or new, generic, sterile complexes of government housing, without history or beauty or anything particularly Navajo about them. The scenery was bleak, especially after the recent years of drought. In thirty
