Trinity Fields (15 page)

—You motherfuckers, and I meant it with all my heart, knowing full well how Kip's reputation as a scandalous runaway grew and that in our conservative community, with its Western taciturnity, anyone associated with him flirted with catastrophe himself. But how I would have preferred disaster to my role as rejected conspirator and failed renegade.

The sky has colored pallid blue straight above, like some wax paper sea. The morning star has withdrawn behind the curtain of light to wait for its chance to shine again tomorrow. Across the valley, Cerro Gordo, the most perfect rounded little mountain, its reddish breast covered uniformly with piñon, offers a sort of confidence. A spotted flicker with his knife beak and red moustaches perches on the coyote fence, studies me, then flies.

Morning. Here I am. I have been offered the loan of an old retired Cadillac. —It won't get you there fast, but it'll get you there, Alyse had said. Grand and silver, it should have a set of steer horns attached to the front of the hood. Its bumper sticker reads,
NUCLEAR WEAPONS MAY THEY RUST IN PEACE
, which won't go over very well on the Hill. Oh well, I think, I may not go over very well on the Hill, either. Keys in hand, I lock the door behind me and head out.

It is Thursday, the traditional day of preparation and prayer before the penitentes take to the road to walk to the church in the desert, bearing their crosses. I have decided to drive up to Los Alamos to visit my mother, and also Bonnie Jean, her husband and two boys. It's been a long time since we saw one another, not to mention that I've only laid eyes on my youngest nephew, Charlie, but once, when he was just a little boy. I haven't phoned ahead to let them know I am here, in part because I figure it will be nice to surprise them and in part because this way I can back out at the last moment without hurting anyone's feelings. A half-truth and a full truth. My hapless nephews, whose birthdays I don't even know—bad uncle and bad brother—it would be the
right thing
to do, call on them, toss them a ball for half an hour if they like, I don't know, do whatever uncles are supposed to do.

The car handles like a big boat. The highway is a smooth canal of hard black water beneath it. Fins forward and fins aft, the thing is long and commodious. The steering wheel's enormous and the dash baroque. What better way to travel, I think, than in a relic that dates back to the days of one's youth.

Out the windows is a cloudless day except for the everpresent clouds along the tops of the mountains at the edges of Pojoaque Valley, clouds the colors of moonstone and rose quartz and chalcedony, with a gray-black twill pattern here and there where a morning rain is falling, far away. I turn on the radio to find a country-western station and settle in with the honeylike music of the pedal steel guitar and the homey nasal voice of a singer singing about the things country singers always sing about—how their lover left them high and dry, or how they're cheating on the one who's home with a wedding band on her finger. Banal, but I love the stuff if, for nothing else, its luscious predictability.

Up out of the wide bowl of land that holds swarming Santa Fe, past Rosario, the soldiers' cemetery, past the opera house, and into the desert now.

If something frightens you, my mother used to tell me when I woke up in the middle of the night from bad dreams, if something frightens you, Brice, stand up tall and walk straight toward it, you hear me. Walk right at it and threaten to embrace it—embrace it if you must. But no matter what you do when you reach it, that thing that frightens you, at least let it know that it is possible for you to embrace it. That way you not only know that it exists, but you understand why you weren't wrong to be afraid of it in the first place. It is not wrong to be afraid. Some of the things we fear most are phantoms and not worthy of our fear, but there are other things that merit our fear. The only way to know them and to let them know you is to embrace them.

I haven't always lived by this, but when I have, I know I've been a stronger man, a more courageous man. To know the meaning of one's fear is not necessarily to fear no more—but at least to measure its value.

I wonder how Kip learned how to use his fears to such great effect so early in his life. If it frightened him, he habitually reached out and grasped it. Chimayó and Bandelier would not turn out to be the last unknowns he attended. Bandelier did prompt his parents to take steps to rein Kip in. Especially his mother, who none of us knew well, and who in some way must have been his model, Emma Inez, distant Mrs. Calder who didn't take her husband's surname and was something of a recluse, an enigma—she came into the picture for a time after his second runaway.

It snowed a lot that December, was cold to the marrow. Gossip about what the Calders were going to do with Kip came and went. There was persistent talk of his being sent to a reform school out east—which would have been quite an irony, given that the original settlement in Los Alamos back during the First World War was a ranch school for boys who had problems of health or adjusting to society in one way or another—but that never came about. I didn't ask about him because I found myself not wanting to be asked about how I felt about it, what I thought they ought to do with Kip. I didn't think there was much of anything
to do
with him. He was going to do as he pleased. Kip was spirited, is how I saw it. He was no criminal. He was wildly alive. If he wanted to run, run he would. If he wanted to run, he had his reasons. Having used my running legs once, I remembered well the sensation of freedom seized.

Christmas came, went. Our sixteenth birthdays came and went. New Year's came and when it went I had had enough.

The night I finally resolved to break the rules and go see him was particularly snowy. A wind rode down the mountain canyons and drove the snow across the mesa in billowing sheets, we'd been inside most all day, school was closed and the blizzard kept us off the pond. As evening fell, the white world tinted to neon blue. The tracks my father had made that morning, headed back to the lab after working late the night before, were long since filled in by drifting snow. I finished drying dishes from the dinner the three of us had shared in his absence and excused myself, saying I was tired.

—But it's not even nine, Bonnie Jean said. —You can't be going to bed already.

I said, —Night, all.

Bonnie Jean rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. I thought, Bonnie Jean, if you blow this, I'm going to make you pay, one way or another.

—Goodnight, Brice, my mother said.

—Brice's weird, said Bonnie, who then uncrossed her arms and looked at Mother.

—Quiet now, Mother told her.

On the way out of the kitchen I made the devil's horns at her. Mother didn't see. Bonnie Jean made horns back and I smirked and shook my head. Unredeemable, she replicated my moves. Sometimes I found it hard to believe we were born from the same womb. No doubt, Bonnie now and then had the same thought.

In my bedroom I moved about as quietly and quickly as I could. I set about molding under the bedspread a sleeping figure, a sham Brice, of sweaters and the old Beacon blankets mother stored in the closet. Maybe I had seen this trick done in the movies, who knows, but if someone peeked in without turning on the lights, it really might have looked as if I was curled up in bed. I assumed no one would, however; my parents' trust I had regained and Bonnie Jean—for the host of other egregious faults I may have attributed to her—was honorable with regard to the sanctity of our separate rooms, and could be depended on to stay away.

Out the casement window, in the manner of the visit nights, and into the storm. As I shoved along, I breathed in the frosty air, and began to worry how I might go about seeing him without the Calders catching me, and also what I might say to Kip if we were able to talk. Gusts caught up the powder and sent it spiraling and gnarling like spectral twisters along the deserted street. Pine boughs clad in white bowed to the blue-white ground. No one was out tonight. My toes began to smart and bursts of quivering ran through me.

When our family moved from the Sundt house on the old road that was next door to the Calders', I remember how upset Kip and I were. We couldn't have been more than three or four. I wonder if I've ever forgiven Bonnie Jean, since it was her birth that made it so the house was too small for us.

The old road wasn't far, and soon enough I stood behind a row of cars, each with snow hats, and watched the house, its tangerine windows. Smoke poured from the central chimney, the rich, black coal smoke from the furnace. Jogged in place a little to keep the blood moving in my feet, flexed my fingers as fast as I could but already the icy snow was clinging to my deerskin mittens. Made more brazen by the glacial wind, I gave up my cover, pitched my way, heaved through the deepening snow to the side of the house, and looked in the nearest window.

There he was. Emma Inez was with him. He was talking to her. I couldn't hear, of course, but tried to read if not his lips his countenance. He was different, both his face and carriage were hard to interpret. I hadn't seen Kip this close-up for half a year, since mid-late summer—that is, I hadn't been able really to
look
at him—and was astonished to witness how much he had aged.

The change was subtle, sharp. What was it about him? I forgot the cold, stood there fixed in one place as I stared at that face, collecting snowflakes on my clothes and wondering whether I dare envy him still or learn somehow to master my habit of feeling a lesser boy, a dependent.

My feet led me around to the front porch of Kip's house, up to his door, on which I knocked with my knuckles, having pulled my mitten off, and Emma Inez came to the door, opened it, and said, —My god, Brice. Come in.

My cheeks, I was told later, were mottled white and matte blue.

—Brice? Kip said.

I was making a ridiculous chattering sound, all the while wanting only to apologize for intruding and just to ask them both if they wouldn't mind just helping me to warm up and let me sneak back home without telling my parents about what I'd done. She said something about getting my hands and feet into warm water. I watched them both, from inside myself, my shaking hard body, and saw Emma Inez carry a deep wide bowl of warm water to the chair I sat in while Kip removed my boots and peeled off my white socks. It felt like some of my skin was glued to the socks and I remembered the days we all used to challenge each other in the middle of winter to press our tongues to the jungle gym, and how those who rose to the challenge found that the hide of their tongue stuck and was flayed away, left clinging to the bar of steel. But I wasn't frostbitten, and was given some reheated coffee, which warmed me up. I expected Emma Inez to send me home—per the edict that our families had set forth—but instead she left the room, a tacit blessing of sorts. I had always figured it was Kip's father, and my own, rather than our mothers, who decreed that Kip and I should be kept apart for a while, and her mercy led me to believe I'd been right about that. Maybe this was all mere wishful thinking, though. Perhaps she'd gone in another room to telephone my home to tell my folks their son was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be, and that they had better come and pick the boy up. I didn't care one way or the other, or so I told myself.

—So how've you been?

—All right, I said.

Even his voice seemed older. I thought to try to lower the register of my own voice, so as to sound to him as mature as he sounded to me, but the chill that ran through me hampered my idea. —What about you? I asked, and heard the tremulousness and kidlike tenor behind the words.

—You're not supposed to be here.

I shrugged and smiled. He sat in his father's large overstuffed chair, a grown man really, thin and long of frame, and didn't smile back. He was taking me in. Measuring, like always.

—Do your parents know you're here, Brice?

—No, I said.

—So what's up?

—I wanted to see how you're doing, I said.

—I'm all right, I guess. Aren't you worried about getting grounded again?

—I'm still grounded from before.

He liked that. That made him laugh a little. —We're too old for groundings.

—You can say that again.

Then that silence prevailed once more. Had he thought there were other reasons I hadn't come by before now to see him besides being grounded, did he think I'd chosen to stay away from him? That bothered me, but I wouldn't bring it up. I drank from the cup, and noticed that on it were Navajo squashblossom designs. It made me wish for summer. The canyons and cliffs and the mesas. The hot springs in the Jemez above us smelling of sulfur. The games.

—You done running away from home, Kip?

He glanced over toward the open door where Emma Inez had gone and shook his head no while he said, —Yeah, sure am.

That was Kip all over. While shaking my head yes I said, —Well, if you do get it in mind to run off like that again, don't count on me coming along.

—I won't, he said, shaking his yes in return.

That was more like it, I thought.

—Good, I said.

Strange, after all my boldness coming here to talk with him, there wasn't much to say. Maybe he knew what I'd been doing, through the grapevine, not that I'd been doing very much. Maybe it didn't matter to him. The fact was, our fathers seemed to have been right about one matter, wise engineers that they were. Friendships are inevitably synergistic. The energy of two friends equals more than the sum of their individual parts. Whatever Kip and I did separately was less dangerous, less provocative, less inspired than what we did together.

—I'm feeling better now, I said, though he hadn't asked. —Don't think I got frostbit.

—That's good.

What was missing in Kip's eyes? A dullness, as difficult to fathom as to describe, was dusted over them. They almost looked like somebody else's eyes. But then, I told myself, Kip's been through more than I have these months since we last talked—recovery, chastisement, escape, capture—maybe that explains it. And also, what exactly is this “it” I think I see? He didn't seem defeated. Was he the same, and were my eyes looking at him differently?