Looking back now, Cree saw Earl differently: to outward appearances, an ordinary middle-aged man in jeans and T-shirt; in fact, a person who lived in the knowledge he was poised on the brink of infinite mystery.
Another reminder that in coming here she was entering a different world, where nothing was quite what it seemed.
Julieta's expression of contentment remained as she backed the truck out of the driveway. Such a lovely woman, Cree thought. Such a lovely smile, all the more beautiful for its rarity. She covertly watched Julieta during the quarter-mile drive back to the highway. By the time they'd turned onto the asphalt again, the lines of worry had returned.
They drove on in silence. Still the land had not changed: As far as the eye could see were low hills of bone-dry brown earth, low-growing brush, scattered scrubby pinon trees. The only indication of human presence was an occasional trailer or prefab house at the end of a dirt driveway, a defunct pickup truck, maybe a corral occupied by a gaunt, drowsing horse.
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.