Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 Read Free

left.
    She found him in his room, pulling things off his desk and stuffing them into cardboard boxes. With his barrel-chested build,
     brush-cut dark hair, and the downturned lips common among older Navajo men, he came across as stern and martial. The look
     was misleading; Sam was a sweet person, and it had always pleased Julieta to see that dour mouth smile so surprisingly and
     rewardingly.
    She stopped at the doorway. He glanced at her, then opened one of the desk drawers and spent several minutes sorting through
     it in silence.
    At last Sam shook his head, the crescent of his lips tightening. "My grandfather, I mentioned it to him last time, he says
     not to talk about it. He says if you talk about it, it will come after you. You shouldn't give it a name. He can tell twenty
     stories about what happens to you. Says he knew a guy up in Lukachukai, couple of months ago, saw something strange way out
     on Carson Mesa and talked about it to everybody. Next day he got killed in a freak accident. Drove his pickup into the side
     of an empty stock trailer. Wasn't drunk. The way they found him, he was kind of. . . up under the hood of his truck. It wasn't
     right. Nobody could figure out what happened."
    "People get killed in accidents every day. It isn't supernatural."
    "The other boys, Julieta! Like, I don't know . . . zombies." Just remembering it put a tremor in his shoulders, and again he shook his head,
     unwilling to describe the event in any more detail. "You have to see it. Then you'll understand." He gestured with his thumb
     toward the students' rooms, looking at her with sympathy in his eyes, then went back to packing his things.
    "Did your grandfather say what he thought it was?"
    Sam took several books from their shelf and then paused. She knew he was wrestling with his reluctance to tell her anything
     at all, the universal fear that bad things could be contagious and that holding evil in your thoughts brought it upon you.
    "You know how the old people talk," he whispered. "It's a chindi. Maybe this place was built on bones, maybe Navajo, maybe
     Anasazi, and the ancestors don't like the school being here, disrespecting their graves. Or maybe we're doing something else
     wrong, maybe somebody died in the dorm building, we shouldn't be using it, and the ghost is coming back. More likely there's
     some witches live near here, want to hurt us or hurt the kids. He said it would come from the north, evil comes from the north?
     And we had a north wind last night." These explanations seemed to bother him, and he threw down the books in frustration.
     "Look, Julieta, forget I'm Dinê. Last night, I wasn't looking at it from some ethnic perspective, okay? Maybe I smoked too
     much dope at UA, or maybe some UFO landed near here, there's aliens doing experiments or something to people's minds. I don't
     care what. I don't want to deal with it."
    Again he looked at her with regret and sympathy, and she realized with a pang how much she'd depended on Sam for the last
     five years.
    Still she stood in the doorway, unwilling to move yet unable to ask him one last favor.
    He couldn't meet her eyes, but his voice was gruffly compassionate when he spoke again: "I know, Julieta. I won't tell anyone
     what I saw. This place'd be empty by sunset."
    When Julieta put her head into Lynn Pierce's examining room, the nurse looked up with a start, and the pencil she'd been writing
     with snapped in her fingers.
    "Any word from Joseph?" Julieta asked.
    "He'll get here around eleven."
    "How's Tommy?" The blinds over the window to the ward room were half slatted; all she could see was a mound of twisted bedclothes.
    Lynn's eyes darted to the window, and she bit her lips. She gestured at the patient voice monitor on her desk. Through the
     soft hiss pouring from the speaker, Julieta could make out gentle snoring.
    "Sleeping now. But it was worse this time. It lasted longer."
    "His spine again? The right arm?"
    A tiny nod.
    "Why didn't you call