He shook his head and grimaced at the prospect.
'Water?'
'Yeah. Please.' His voice cracked, dry and reedy.
Cree took a plastic canteen from the windowsill, held it to his parched lips. He steadied it with his left hand; his right arm hung loose from the shoulder. He was able to drink a fair amount.
'How's the thing?' she asked. She gestured at the limp hand and arm. He frowned at it and seemed about to say something. Then he glanced over at Ellen and Ray, their frightened eyes round in the dark hogan, and clamped his mouth shut.
Cree thought about that for a moment. 'Listen, why don't I take the next shift with Tommy, you folks rest up. We'll be all right. We'll call you if we need you, okay?'
They got the message. Ellen gave Tommy a weak smile as she shut the door.
'You must be glad to be up here, huh?'
'Yeah.'
'Me, too. It's so quiet. Did you spend much time here when you were a kid?'
He nodded weakly and pointed up at several pieces of yellowing paper tacked to the walls. The drawings were clearly his, a younger hand's rendering of family members, sheep, trucks.
As if exploiting his momentary inattention, the right arm rolled slowly so that the hand lay palm up, and the fingers spread slightly, a sleeping infant's gesture. Tommy's eyes darted at it and quickly away again.
Shit, Cree thought. She hoped it wasn't awakening. She needed some time with Tommy. ' Can you tell me what you're feeling?' she whispered.
'Like my head is in two places at once,' he mumbled. 'Like my eyes are crossed or something, I can't see right.'
'Do you know what's the matter with you?'
'Hastiin Begaye said there's a chindi in me. Said it's the ghost of an ancestor.'
'If it is, do you know who the ancestor might be?'
His shook his head, defeated. As if taking its turn, the ghost rolled the head to the right.
'Could it be your father or mother?'
'Don't think so.'
'Why not?'
He shrugged, baffled. 'Just doesn't… feel like them.'
'Tommy, ghosts always want something. Do you have any idea what this one wants?'
'Hastiin Begaye said it died in an evil way. An unjust way. It wants the injustice to be made right.'
'Is that what you think it wants?'
'All I know is, it wants to… come back.'
Cree nodded. That much was obvious. 'Anything else?'
He started to shake his head again, but hesitated. 'It tells, like
… a story.'
Narrative! Cree thought. 'What story?'
The hand moved again, that lethargic roll and lazy spreading of fingers. It looked as if it could spring suddenly to vigorous life. Tommy's jaw started vibrating up and down, as if he were chilled to the bone, teeth chattering. But he was able to answer: 'Walking. Got to walk a long way in a big hurry. It's cold. Then something bad happens. Like a fight.'
'Walking where?'
Before he could answer, a shadow eclipsed the window light. They both startled. Cree looked up to see Raymond through the dusty glass, averting his face, lugging a heavy plastic water carrier. In another second he was gone.
Tommy had lost the train of thought.
'What does it feel, Tommy? Do you think it's just angry or is there another feeling there?'
That idea troubled him. 'Doesn't always seem angry.'
'So what else? Hate? Love? Fear?'
One of his eyes stayed fixed uncertainly on her face while the other spun away as if tracking the flight of an invisible butterfly. He made a deep, guttural noise, uh-uh-uh-uh, then muttered something incomprehensible.
Cree waited, but when he didn't say any more, she pressed on: 'Do you think I could talk to the chindi? If I did, if you heard me talking to you like you're someone else, you don't ever have to worry. I'm not forgetting about you, okay? I'm always on your side. You know that. Can I talk to it?'
He didn't answer. Now she wasn't sure it was Tommy in the eyes. She felt him slipping away and the strange body beast arising with its numbing charisma, its colossal confusions.
'Tommy,' she said quickly, 'when it's you I'm talking to, you tell me. Okay? Say, 'I'm Tommy.' Can you do that? So I know who you are.'
Tommy's eyes took on a sad and distant look, too old for fifteen, and he didn't answer her directly. But he seemed to steady. 'I did what you asked,' he said.
'What was that?'
'You said I should draw what it felt like.'
'Right! Can you show me?'
His left hand gestured weakly at a notebook on the floor against the north wall.
Cree retrieved it, opened it. The renderings were almost too ghastly to look at: painfully labored pencil sketches of what looked like conjoined twins. Too many limbs, multiple deformed heads, bulbous shapes like cancerous growths. She tried to hide her shock.
'It's not so good. I had to do it left-handed.' He shut his eyes, exhausted. 'You want to know who's Tommy, that's who.'
The claim frightened her, even though she wasn't sure just what he meant. There were so many questions. 'If I asked you to draw what you want to be, what would that look like?'
He looked stricken. Then his face stiffened, a mask intended to keep her out. 'I don't know,' he mumbled. It was a terrible admission.
He observed her reaction in her face. 'I'm Tommy,' he managed. Wanting to please her. He looked so worn, ravaged. 'Tired now. Got to sleep.' He shut his eyes and she thought he was gone until his croaking voice startled her: 'Sorry.'
She stayed kneeling there for a time, just probing the shifting tides of presence inside him: irregular waves lapping a beach, higher and lower, uneven eddies and flows. When she was sure he was asleep and breathing reliably, she crossed to the other side of the hogan, laid a sheepskin on the floor, and sat on it. At intervals, Tommy's right hand and arm startled her, turning suddenly, flexing, making what looked like abortive movements, and each time her fear spiked at the thought of it coming alive. But so far it hadn't. She tried to relax and get some control of herself. Her body desperately wanted sleep, but she had a lot to consider.
Narrative: So far, she hadn't really glimpsed a story unfolding in the ghost's impulse-no reliving of the period just before death, no crucial memory from earlier times, not even a random visual image of the world the ghost thought it was in. There was its cycle of physical actions, which matched Tommy's description of walking, then maybe fighting. Afterward, there was the repeating sequence of convulsing and the arm pushing up. But she'd learned nothing that would help her identify the entity or determine what motivated it.
But she had gotten a tantalizing general sense of its character. This ghost conveyed a sense of vigorous physicality. It also had a burning will, or drive. Determination. Oddly, though, running through all that vigor and drive was desperation, as if the vitality were deliberately mustered to overcome resistance. Fatigue, maybe. Or the cold Tommy mentioned. Or sickness.
Or age. Garrett? This ghost's nature was reasonably consistent with a man accustomed to making things happen his way, getting what he wanted. Garrett had been fit for his years but was having to work harder and harder to keep signs of aging from view. Climbing the dragline boom was clearly the act of a man desperate to defy the encroaching limitations of age.
She wished Tommy had been able to tell more about the ghost's affective complex. Not just angry. But there was anger there at times, rising to murderous rage. And remorse, too, she'd felt it. Of course there was. Most people left life with some measure of regret for things done or left undone; regret and the desire to atone was the
