minutes of driving, he encountered only two other vehicles on the road. And this was positively urban compared to where the Keedays lived, somewhere way up above the dirt road between Naschitti and White Rock.
Uncle Joe and Margaret were comparatively well-off and lived in an eighties-era ranch-style house within view of Highway 371, south of Crownpoint. At the end of the quarter-mile driveway, Joseph was relieved to see the new double-cab truck parked near the house, which meant his uncle was at home or nearby. He turned his own truck around in the space between house and corral, turned it off, and sat, giving Uncle Joe time to adapt to his unannounced arrival.
When no one appeared, he got out and went to the door of the house. He knocked and waited again.
'Nobody home,' Uncle Joe called from behind him. The old man had come around the corner of the stock shed, accompanied by two mutt puppies that bounced and bit at each other in high good spirits.
'Yaateeh, Uncle,' Joseph said uneasily.
'I got your message on the machine. You're just in time.' Uncle Joe frowned as if Joseph were late for an appointment. 'I could use a hand in here. My ram is too tough for me.' Without further explanation, he disappeared back into the shed. The little dogs watched Joseph, heads canted expectantly.
Joseph crossed the yard, opened the corral gate, and waded through the frisking puppies around to the other side of the shed. Uncle Joe stood in the open end of the three-sided enclosure, smoking a cigarette and blocking the escape of a burly gray ram that chewed some feed and watched him suspiciously. The rest of Uncle Joe's little flock, six ewes and a handful of this spring's lambs, stood nearby, unconcerned.
When Joseph came in, Uncle Joe tucked his cigarette into the corner of his lips, bent quickly, and grabbed the ram. He expertly tipped the barrel-shaped body onto its side and with his head beckoned Joseph to hold the animal down. Helping, the little dogs darted in to nip out tufts of wool until Uncle Joe kicked at them and they backed away. When Joseph had put a knee on the panting chest and gotten a firm grip on two legs, Uncle Joe took a bolt cutter and clipped back the curled toes on one of the double hoofs. The ram's struggles subsided to a perfunctory kicking as Uncle Joe began paring the glistening flat-cut ends with a jackknife.
'You look like hell,' Uncle Joe chided. One eye winced as cigarette smoke trickled up his seamed cheek. 'Young man your age shouldn't look so bad.'
'Young? I'm forty-six. How old do you have to be before you can use it as an excuse? I get tired like anyone else.'
'Good-looking young man. Got the pretty nurses at the hospital all giving you moon eyes, is what I hear. Could have your pick.' Uncle Joe scrutinized the neat double points he'd sculpted, then let go and went on to the next foot.
Joseph grinned sadly as he changed his grip. 'Who'd you hear that from?'
Uncle Joe just grunted as he levered the bolt cutter. He took up his knife again, gouged muck from between the hooves, wiped the blade on his overalls, and carved away another crescent. Neither man said anything more for a time as they worked, Joseph shifting his grip, Uncle Joe's leathery hands deftly sculpting.
When Uncle Joe had finished the last hoof, they both stood up. The ram rolled quickly onto his feet and trotted out to join the ewes, looking officious to conceal his injured dignity. Uncle Joe wiped his hands on a rag and then used it to slap dust off his overalls. He looked at Joseph critically. It was a sharp look, and long enough for a light plane to drone overhead, drop toward the little airstrip on the other side of Crownpoint, and disappear.
Joseph looked back at him. He still hadn't said anything about why he was here today, and there was a lot to explain. But he didn't have the faintest idea of where to start.
Uncle Joe tossed down his cigarette, ground it out carefully, and walked around Joseph toward the corral gate. He held it open for Joseph, then latched it behind them.
Joseph was surprised when his uncle didn't head for the house door but straight for the big burgundy truck.
'We should take my chitty,' Uncle Joe called over his shoulder. 'Those roads back in there by Keedays', they'll take the oil pan off yours. Anyway, it'll give me a chance to show off the options.'
'They'll have scheduled a Hand-Trembler for the boy,' Uncle Joe told him. They were still on the paved road, halfway to Tsaya on 371. Uncle Joe had spent the first ten minutes demonstrating the widgets and gadgets that came with his new truck. Joseph had dutifully tested his own seat adjustments, the interior climate control, and the illuminated vanity mirror in the visor.
'The Hand-Trembler will probably make his diagnosis pretty soon, but it'll take some days for the Singer to get ready, people to be invited, sheep to be butchered, all that. In the meantime, the family will be hiding him from the child services people. I know the Keeday place, it's pretty spread out, they couldn't ever live too close together and now a lot of them have relocated. They've got an old summer sheep camp way up on the plateau, and I guess if they're serious about keeping him out of the state's hands they'll have brought him up there.'
'I have Hastiin Keeday's cell phone number. Don't you think we should call them before we get there?'
Uncle Joe shook his head. 'No. No reception from here. Anyway, it's better to do this the old-fashioned way. Face-to-face. That way we all trust each other.'
'Think they'll let us see him?'
'You and me? Sure. But not today. Their house is, oh, fifteen miles off the county road, the camp is maybe five miles beyond that. Gotta take a horse or go on foot unless you've got an ATV. Take too long to get up there today.'
'I meant Julieta and me. And the psychologist she brought in.'
'Huh. The psychologist, I doubt.'
'They will if they meet her. That's one of the things I need your help with. Help me get them to meet her. To let her see Tommy.'
'What's so special about this psychologist? They just went to a lot of trouble to take him away from a bunch of bilagaana shrinks.'
Joseph hesitated at the brink and then told him Tommy's symptoms in detail. That Cree Black believed Tommy was possessed by a ghost, that to help her patients she looked at the whole history of emotional debts and unresolved feelings and motives around her patients, among the living and dead alike. He didn't have to explain to Uncle Joe that that's about what the Keedays would be thinking, too, and what general beliefs lay behind the traditional curing Ways.
Uncle Joe's frown had deepened as Joseph described Tommy's condition. His quick sideways glance showed a canny glint, meaning he saw Joseph's request for what it was: an admission that he had lost his bearings, his certainties.
The old man couldn't resist a prod: 'Why are you helping her? I thought you didn't believe in that kind of stuff.'
'I thought about what you said. About being full of shit. And you're right. Everybody's full of shit, Navajo or whatever, all the superstition and belief, the habits-none of it's any better. Or any worse. Thanks for screwing up my outlook completely, Uncle. Doesn't leave a guy with much, does it? So now I'm trying to take it as it comes. Best I can do.'
Joseph saw Uncle Joe's lips move in a wry smile and felt it mirrored on his own lips. He remembered the bittersweet epiphany he'd felt when he'd been lying awake wrestling with his uncle's drunken riddle. With it, of course, came acceptance and absolution: for being Navajo, for his years of rejection of things Navajo. The problem isn't being Navajo, it's being human. We're all equally full of shit and we're therefore all equally okay. The realization had broken a chain that had bound and chafed for decades.
No sense in letting Uncle Joe get too smug, though. He decided to turn it around on the old man. 'So why are you helping me?'
Uncle Joe snorted. 'I took one look at you and I knew, here's a guy who needs all the help he can get.'
'You know what I mean. Why'd you change your mind about our old agreement?'
A shrug. 'I see my nephew all screwed up, wrapped around his own axle. He can't untie his knot until Julieta unties hers, she can't untie hers until she knows about her baby. And I'm seventy-four and a worn-out drunk, who the hell am I to make judgments. Besides, I don't need this hanging over me anymore. The pressure.'
'I'm sorry, Uncle. Thank you.'
Uncle Joe tugged a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket, stuck a Marlboro between his lips. He drove with it unlit for a mile or so before saying sadly, 'We'll see if you thank me when we're done with this.'
Forty minutes later, they were west of White Rock on one of the innumerable side roads that branched off of
