Ariel's Crossing (4 page)

—Oh well, he said. —Probably isn’t the kind of thing I should be admitting I used to do, anyhow. Not what somebody from Princeton would understand.

—I’m sure it was fun back then.

—Lonely rural kind of fun.

Under heavy starlight, not talking further, straying back to the house along the bank path, their thoughts wandering, they came to the horse gate, and Marcos opened it as he’d opened it a thousand times already in his life, by rote, his thoughts concentrated on the palm of his hand warmed by hers. Gate metal scraped against the earth and the chain clanged. The flume behind them was running high and the moon was just the finest sliver of white where it sat on the saddle ridge near Capulin. The aluminum latch chimed its colloquial hollow note into the cool night. Mary sensed a sudden change in Marcos and asked what was wrong. He was staring into the lower meadow.

Francisca de Peña had drifted into the field where she lay curled like a magpie nest made of long and waning sparks, or some soiled halo unevenly afloat. This light awakened and uncoiled to disclose itself and thus became more a woman than that spherical luster very near to where Marcos and Franny stood. Francisca arose to what complete luminosity and elevation were left her and spoke her own name. She uttered
de Peña,
herself calling out to herselves.

Marcos and Franny stood silent.

She spoke other names—saying, as her mother had so often said,
Esparaván
—and moved slowly closer. Moved slowly because she found that, at least by her impression, she had no other choice than to thread herself ponderous through the Nambé air.
Esparaván? Gavilán?

Marcos asked Franny, —Are you seeing this?

She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer.

Francisca neared them and could almost taste their fear.

—Franny? Do you see this?

Together they stood as Francisca hesitated midfield. She gazed at that whisper of moon, and she admired her familiar mountains and this oddly familiar boy. And as Marcos and his unknown girl saw her fully forming, unfurling like a chrysanthemum of mist, looking much as she had when she was as alive as anyone who ever walked these lands—she who presented herself to them as a kind of soft photographic negative, clearly and with all the dignity of life—Francisca de Peña heard Franny finally say to Marcos, —Yes. Yes, I do.

Part II
Critical Mass
Chimayó, New York, Gallup, Tularosa
to Nambé
1944–1996

HERE SAT A MAN
whose worn leather jacket was the same shade as his drawn, haggard face. Holding a midnight-blue cap in spidery hands, he shifted his frail frame against a ditchside weeping willow whose budding leaves whispered on their swaying fronds. His wide-set eyes were jaundiced yet full of life. His dusty shoes might have been mistaken for stones had they not been attached to his long legs. It was Good Friday, 1993, and throngs of pilgrims gathered at the holy mission in Chimayó, none noticing him or the man by his side when Kip Calder gazed hard at his childhood friend and said, “I am Ariel’s father, aren’t I.”

Should have been as simple to answer as it was fair to ask. Yet Brice McCarthy hesitated, sensing his life was somehow falling out of its precarious balance. “I answered that question over twenty-five years ago, Kip. The answer is the same now as it was then. I wish you’d believed me. You might have spared yourself a lot of useless pain. Assuming you have suffered because of it.”

“Assuming I have suffered …”

“You were wrong not to believe me.”

“It’s true,” he said, which again disarmed his friend. “But does she know about me? is what I’m asking. Does she know who her father was—is, I mean.”

She did not. She had grown up in the dark, kept there as much by Kip as Brice and her mother, Jessica Rankin, the woman both men had loved. Wasn’t it time to tell Ariel of her tangled heritage?

After securing Brice’s pledge, Kip pulled a bound ledgerbook from a leather satchel that lay beside him on the grass. “Something I’d like for Ariel to have, if you might see fit to give it to her,” and handed it to him, along with a tattered envelope. Brice placed them on his lap as the sun lowered itself slowly behind the tawny notch and hills that rimmed this valley, one hard ray illuminating his friend’s drawn face. He asked, as delicately as he could, about his failing health.

War, Kip said, was the cause. He’d been poisoned by yellow rain—poor man’s atom bomb, they called it—that the Communists had dropped over the mountains of Laos. Not unlike the black rain that drizzled on Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bomb their own fathers helped create. “It comes in other colors: blue rain, red rain, white rain, black rain, too, a colorful rainbow of venom… . You begin to bleed, from your nose and mouth and ears. You cry blood. And I’m one of the lucky ones because I didn’t get that big a dose of it.” Kip described how after the fall of Saigon he stayed behind illegally to help Hmong refugees flee the Pathet Lao by escaping into northern Thailand. Far up in the highlands, he was visiting a thatched encampment filled with poor farmers and their children when the attack came. Aerial poisoning by choppers. He’d been a peripheral victim and wounded ever since.

Brice said, “I always thought it would be Los Alamos that got us. You remember where we used to play when we were kids? I wonder about some of those canyons, what they buried down there before they knew more about radiation.”

“I’m probably sick from that war, too. Who knows. Maybe I’m just worn out and it has nothing to do with rain of any color, just the marathoner coming to his wire a little earlier than others. Strange race where you lose by coming in first.”

As the afternoon drew down, these two men who’d been estranged for half their lives told each other about what they had done, where they’d been, what they believed. They talked about Hill people, as Los Alamos natives called themselves, and others they’d known from college days in New York. With every passing story, the natural rhythms of friendship reemerged, the way a wilted flower pulled from the garden and tossed onto the compost heap will sometimes take root and rebloom.

Brice nodded toward the ledger, though he had already guessed what Kip was passing along to Ariel. His father’s Los Alamos notebook. Kip claimed not to have read the thing, saying he couldn’t decipher the physics and theoretical stuff—Ariel might not either. But interspersed with the math and science were personal diaries and some ink drawings that would give her the chance to know her third grandfather a little.

“Your father was a good man.”

“Both our fathers were.”

“Hard for kids to know things like that at the time.”

“Hard for us, anyway.”

In the envelope was a key to the storage locker where Kip had stowed his parents’ possessions after the accident that took their lives. He’d kept up with the bills, he said, but had no idea what was in there anymore. “Anything she wants is hers.”

Such were Kip’s feeble, freighting gifts that day, offered in the shade of twelve leafing cottonwoods and that willow behind El Santuario de Chimayó. Then the dying wanderer and the family man, who shared so much and terribly little, parted company. Kip, who had refused Brice’s offer of help, walked away from the day sicker in spirit than he had expected. Brice felt oddly elated. Years of guilty feelings were about to be lifted off his shoulders by finally confessing to his—their—daughter. He bore his promise to tell Ariel the truth about her paternity like some charmed silver milagro such as those the pilgrims wear for good luck. So he mused as he caught his flight back east.

While Brice would soon enough honor his commitment, others of Kip’s hopes would not be fulfilled. Most prominent among these was that he succumb swiftly to his lymphoma, as his illness had been diagnosed by a Taos doctor. That whatever blossomed so badly inside him might cause his unholy soul to rise into an awaiting purgatory, where it might lodge with the souls of all the men he killed in Vietnam and of those who had participated in the preparation of his own long death by inhalation of trichothecene mycotoxin in Laos. Though he didn’t die promptly in the aftermath of his reunion with Brice, he did make a covenant with himself not to seek medical help. Not to go back home to the Hill where he might still know a few people in the frayed contrail of his warred-out life. Vietnam and Laos, Hiroshima and Nagasaki—enough was enough. But this wish he himself would also inadvertently dash.

Midnight after Easter. Kip found himself alone, still in the village of Chimayó, having spent Saturday and through the night into Sunday with straggling believers, some high on the spirit of the Lord, others on wine or weed, whatever was passed around. He had wandered through Resurrection Day listening to mariachi hymns and prayers at the Stations of the Cross, as the crowd in this place of miracles dwindled.

Time had come for him to leave. But Kip had nowhere to go. The week before, he’d given away his few possessions and quit the single-occupancy motel where he’d been living in Rancho de Taos. He’d told Brice he lived in Chimayó, an innocent ruse to keep him, his wife, Jessica, and Ariel, too, in the dark regarding his true whereabouts. His longing to see his daughter was perfectly matched by the strong desire not to. Vanity, was it? Pride? Simple fear, maybe. The misgivings and conflicted wishes ran deeper within him than he had the power to fathom.

He owned what was on his back and even that seemed a heavy burden. Absurd, he thought, to realize he’d made no plan beyond this encounter. Had he believed he would simply atomize once his desire had been met? He found a bottle of water one of the walkers had left behind and drank it. He slept in the park behind the church, using his leather satchel as a pillow.

Two, three hours before sunrise he began walking in the natural direction his feet carried him, along the crumbly macadam shoulder of the road to Pojoaque. Wanting to avoid anyone else who might be traveling this way, he traipsed along like some fugitive unworthy of pursuit, a hundred paces out in the desert. Putting one foot in front of the other, he paralleled the road, more or less, out of sight and half out of his mind, pushing blindly along toward the finger mesa where he and Brice had been born.

He walked across pueblolands. He crossed wide seco arroyos and breaches in the earth. He climbed with difficulty small hills, grabbing at juniper or outcroppings of stone to hoist himself up over ridges. Lights of distant villages glowed like hallowed clouds, as if their dreaming residents were spinning out auras high over their beds. His head ached and leaden legs pained him. His guts swelled against his ribs and his straining lungs were like two antique bellows whose leather had dried to dust, and now merely whistled and wheezed. His heavy heartbeat made a shushing in his ears that reminded him of an Indonesian sea coruscating over a beach. For a while he crawled. Lay on his side, breathing. Crawled some more. Tried to breathe.

He must have slept if only because he sort of woke up, finding himself curled like some shoveled snake under the wooden porch of a faded turquoise trailer house, the Nambé Smoke Shop, then set out again, more slowly, stumblingly than before, not seeing those few who saw him but left him alone, assuming he was stoned or mad or both. The day passed—rising, nooning, setting—with a weird density and quickness that proposed it never happened. Wind kicked up through that afternoon, chasing the last winter leaves from their branches, driving tumbleweeds across the scape, sequining Kip with elm pennies, catkins, and twigs that caught in his hair and clothes. He’d lost his satchel somewhere along the way.

Next morning, a wan milky sun lifted over the Sangres. Kip might have reached the intersection where the highway connected with the road to Los Alamos had he not instead fallen asleep in somebody’s horse stalls in Nambé. Blood, dried to an evocative blotch at the corner of his mouth, caused the woman who found him lying there in hay and dung to cry out.

The few women in the world who might have cared about Kip would have screamed with her had they seen him so annihilated. Instead, two thousand miles away, a serene Ariel Rankin set out for her morning walk from the East Village through Union Square to work. In Chelsea, her mother, Jessica, sat beside a window, thinking about her husband’s momentous call from New Mexico, pondering the best way to admit to Ariel what they’d kept hidden for so many years. And many more thousands of miles away, Kip’s Vietnamese wife, who had been east of Haiphong just long enough to help get citizenship for her boys, was asleep in Hanoi.

Marcos’s mother, Sarah, who came upon this sick vagrant, was neither serene nor meditative nor dreaming, much as she wished she were. She leaned close to his face, presuming he was dead, but saw the pulse in his neck and heard his breathing. He opened his eyes, and again she screamed. Apologizing in a language that seemed like English but was more a dialect of delirium, Kip tried to crawl onto his hands and knees. “What’s the matter?” she asked, but he looked at her as if to say he had no idea. They worked together to get him to his provisional feet. Despite his continued efforts to avoid remedy—Kip mouthed apology after apology for trespassing, then collapsed again under himself, knees buckling—he had wandered into a place of refuge. Sarah sturdied him along the barn road to the ranch house, his arm over her shoulder and hers around his back, his slim ribs reminding her of the tines of a pitchfork.

Spent, starving, sore as hell, Kip was possessed of sufficient presence of mind—or a professional spook’s habit—to give, when asked in the kitchen where Sarah led him, a name that was both false and yet his own. “William,” he said, offering his given name, eyes darting about as he thanked her son for the fresh change of clothes. He demurred at Sarah Montoya’s proposal that when he was feeling a bit better, she and Marcos might drive him up to the Hill so that a doctor could look him over at the convalescent center where she worked. He was much obliged to her, he said, and to her husband, Carl Montoya, who sat there straight and tall as winter yucca. He thanked them for offering to put him up—“In a bed, not the barn,” said Carl—but would probably pass on the opportunity of visiting the clinic overlooking Acid Canyon, one of the very ravines he and Brice roved back in the fifties, rowdy boys with bottle rockets and homemade wire squirrel traps and a talent for hiding in the caves of North Mesa beyond.