Cree thought about it, feeling headachy and overwhelmed. She agreed with Joseph, but she was also sure that no conventional methods would remove the invader from Tommy. If she and Edgar couldn't have access to him, he might never be freed of the thing. The whole situation put even more pressure on her investigation.
"Thank you for being candid with me, Joseph," she said at last.
He nodded, and they didn't say any more as he drove into Fort Defiance and pulled up in a new-looking hospital complex. There were trees here, Cree saw, and beyond the hospital grounds residential streets with actual green lawns and paved sidewalks. Joseph shut off the truck, and before Cree could gather her bag he'd come around to open her door. She let him help her down.
"We'll get you to the ER. I'll leave you there, but I'll check in later to make sure you're okay. Ask for Dr. Bannock, he should be on today. If you're released, you can rest up here until I can drive you back tonight. Or Julieta can come up and get you." He looked at her for her response, steady brown eyes, and she nodded.
Joseph had slept for at most three hours, and he was about to begin a long day of caring for others. Yet he looked fit for it, weary but capable and in command of himself.
Abruptly she knew why Lynn Pierce and Julieta took such comfort from him. She felt an almost overpowering desire to tell him how much she appreciated his help, his innate courtesy and restraint, his calm, his concern for Julieta and Tommy. But she didn't know him well enough to tell him. It would only embarrass him and possibly offend him.
Instead, she raised one hand and lightly took his arm. If he sensed any intent besides an unsteady woman's need for assistance, he didn't show it. They went up the sidewalk like that, and Cree saw their reflections in the hospital's big glass doors: one beat-up-looking Anglo parapsychologist looking very much out of her depth, shyly holding the arm of a tired but trim Navajo doctor who wore a bemused expression as he thought ahead to his day's rounds.
14
Cree made it back to Oak Springs at one o'clock, getting a ride with a grocery supplier who was bringing a load of mutton and eggs to the school's kitchen. Expecting the delivery, Julieta had called the company and arranged for her to be picked up, apparently a fairly common ridesharing procedure. The Navajo man who drove the refrigerated box truck was plump and talkative and a big baseball fan who probed Cree for everything she knew about the Seattle Mariners. She was surprised at how much she did know and began to suspect she'd inherited Pop's baseball gene after all. They parted as good friends at the cafeteria building's service entrance.
Cree cut over to the central drive, the pain in her head a fading memory. X-rays had shown no skull fracture, and Dr. Bannock had concluded that it was safe to take painkillers. It felt good to move, to be outside. The air was dry and comfortably warm, just right. In the bright daylight, the school had a different aspect: isolated, but very much full of the fizz of bright energy Cree associated with young people. Like batteries, these buildings had been daily charged with their chatter, earnest effort, laughter, flirtation, passing hurts and worries, frustration, homesickness, and discovery. A rainbow mix.
Just east of the athletic field, the mesa presented a palisade of cliffs and fallen rock rubble. In the bright sun, it looked merely melancholy and anonymous, not threatening. None of the formations resembled faces in the slightest; the nightmare she'd had last night receded, and the pall of menace dissipated. In fact, the endless rolling desert all around seemed to invite her, to encourage big physical gestures, and she wished she could go running. A long one, out and out until she was alone in the circle of horizon.
Maybe tomorrow, she decided, when her bruised braincase had regrouped.
Where to start? She needed to call Edgar and Joyce, get Joyce going on some research before she came, suggest some ideas about diagnostic technology to Ed. And she should call Paul, too, just to check in. But most important, she needed to spend time with Tommy, feel him out when her head wasn't killing her. She should see his living space, too, look at his drawings or notebooks, his school essays, the things he'd brought from home, whatever he surrounded himself with. Somehow begin to answer the question, Who is Tommy Keeday?
She came around the corner of the gym building to see Tommy and several others taking turns batting a softball on the baseball diamond. Lynn Pierce sat on a bench to the left of home plate, watching. Cree assessed the state of her skull and decided that opportunity took precedence over discomfort.
Play stopped when she ambled over to the batter's cage, the weekend staffers and Tommy looking at her in perplexity. "Yaateeh!" she called. The truck driver had coached her on how to pronounce the Navajo hello, and it seemed to melt the ice. "Can I join you? Looks like you need a catcher."
In the role of pitcher now, Tommy looked dubious, but he said some few words of introduction in Navajo that made the others smile and relax. Cree took it as a welcome. She dropped her purse on the bench, rummaged in the equipment bag there, and came up with a glove that would do. Lynn caught her eye with a bronze-flecked glance.
The rules were like pickup goofing anywhere, she quickly determined, just like the neighborhood "games" she sometimes joined with Zoe and Hy and friends. Not enough people to have a real game, so you took turns batting and enduring the insults of the others until general consensus determined you'd embarrassed yourself enough and it was someone else's turn. Scattered rather randomly on the bare-dirt diamond, the fielders tossed each hit around before bouncing the ball back to the pitcher.
Besides Tommy, the other players were three men and one woman, and a pair of young teenagers, a boy and a girl. From behind the fence, Lynn explained that they were all staff; the teenagers were children of one of the men, visiting for the weekend.
"What did Tommy say when I came?" Cree asked quietly.
"He introduced you as a friend of mine and Julieta's. Very politely, I might add."
The batter who had just come up was a short, muscular man in his early thirties, dressed in the school's kitchen uniform of blue slacks and smock. He was wearing Nike running shoes, but he took up the aluminum bat and tapped the edges of his soles meaningfully, as if clearing his cleats. The fielders laughed, pretended to be fearful, and began yammering about long-ball hitters. That quickly evolved into suggestive puns about long balls and long bats until the teenage girl, scandalized, laughed and shushed them.
"It's better to have a catcher," the batter said over his shoulder. "Otherwise the batter chases it every time, you fall asleep out there, waiting. What happened to your head?"
Cree touched the butterfly bandage above her right eyebrow, grimaced, and told him, "A stupid accident with Ms. McCarty's horses."
He relayed the news to the others in Navajo, and they nodded commiseratingly.
Standing behind the plate, she savored the feel of the group. They had folded around her quickly, perfectly content to have this stranger among them as long as she was willing to play. Aside from the thump inside her head, it was very pleasant: the sun warm on her cheek, the air clean and sweet-spicy, the sky a vast dome of blue that set off the rust hues of the mesa.
Even Tommy looked okay. She watched him as he caught the ball and briefly inspected it. He appeared to have a problem with a muscle cramp in his left calf, and he looked less than pleased to have her butting in, but otherwise, outwardly, he seemed like a pretty normal kid, playing some Softball.
Tight-lipped, Tommy pitched, the batter swung and missed; Cree nailed it in her glove and flipped it back to Tommy as the fielders jeered the batter. As if to set them straight, he knocked the next pitch over their heads. It landed with a puff of dust well out in the desert, where the lonesome-looking outfielders had to chase it.