Ariel's Crossing (16 page)

Agnes didn’t dignify his humor with any response. She struck the side of the horse trailer with her open palm, shouting, —Go on, now, get.

None of the three of them moved. The jackbottom stood facing the Montoyas, favoring its right foreleg to elicit sympathy.

—Maybe we ought to take him back home, Delfino said.

—He
is
home.

The ass looked at her, glaucous and unhearing and stubborn with all the stubbornness that inhabits the innermost heart of every beast, whether sentient or idiot, and with the basic recalcitrance it had regained precisely because she and this man had succored it. The ass looked her in the eye and defied her. Surely she was not going to abandon it here in the middle of nowhere? The beast, in all its fear and audacity, even showed its benefactors those squarish rows of agate teeth once more, combining a sneer with a primordial grin. Agnes waved her arms and beseeched, —Go on,
go.
Yet the jack merely ventured forward a bit, limpingly—both surly and pleading—confused maybe by how alien a human voice sounded in the void of the desert. Unfamiliar, small. Agnes quietly said, —Damn.

Had his wife decided she couldn’t go through with her plan to reintroduce the derelict jackbottom to its habitat, Delfino wouldn’t have argued. But she surprised him that day, just as she surprised him other days. She turned her back on the jacky, climbed into the driver’s side of the pickup, started the engine. Delfino got aboard, saying nothing, and they drove away in a mayhem of dust. Sunlight made her face glow as might an angel’s, he remembered thinking as he looked across at his wife, then in the rearview mirror at the lone powder-cloaked figure of the doubly lost bray standing along the dirt track flanked by ocotillos.

That was back in ’seventy-seven. They’d received right around that time a note from some man in the Ford administration—or was it Carter’s?—who said he passed their letter and their problem along to another department. Maybe the State Department or Defense, who could recall? Not that it mattered much anyway, since that was the last they heard of it. Delfino, who now sat alone in their bungalow, remembered that odd morning and his reluctant friendship with the lost jackbottom and the glowing face of his aging wife.

As Agnes had followed through with her conception of the right and proper response to finding some abstracted savage mule in the acequia, and as Agnes had so resolutely left it there on the valley floor to fend for itself, so Delfino resolved to try one last time, with pencil and paper, yes, but also with his hands and his feet, to bring to pass what he’d told his wife he someday wanted to do, told her more than once, told her often, told her ad nauseam. One or two things to do, then in he would go. After that, it wouldn’t matter.

This was a story Delfino Montoya would soon tell his brother and sister-in-law’s salvage, that fellow Sarah kept mentioning whenever they spoke on the phone. Fellow with the peculiar name, Kip. It would thereafter become one of Calder’s favorite stories because he felt a deep empathy for that jackbottom and wondered whether their fates might not one day be the same.

During Kip’s year up at the convalescent center he met a man named Clifford who was afflicted with mild dementia. Kip had befriended Clifford as much as anyone could befriend such a man. He enjoyed listening to Clifford’s stories about his hometown of Gallup, which he memorably said wasn’t a kindly place for folks whose minds were like shafts of grain, because the wind galed hard through town. Wind in the form of cars. Threw and blew. Tornado alley of a different stamp. The united flakes of America coasting west and east on their way to this shining sea or that.

Ever since Kip had returned to Rancho Pajarito, he’d been wondering whether or not he ought to ask Franny Johnson if she happened to know this Clifford. Not that he was of her generation—not hardly—but Gallup was the kind of town where people knew one another, despite old Route 66 running through its dusty heart. Or maybe it was precisely
because
Route 66 ran through it that the town hung together. Somebody had to know somebody.

Kip first met Clifford down on one knee in a corridor, very absorbed with trying over and again to pick up a black scuff mark off the green linoleum floor.

“What’re you doing there?” Kip asked, neutral, hands in his pockets.

“Can you help me get this thing up, sir?”

Clifford hadn’t looked at his interlocutor, but continued with his repeated gesture of plucking at the smudge.

Kip kneeled down beside the man. “Let me give it a try.”

“Thanks,” Clifford said, dramatically moving away to give Kip room enough to address the task.

Startled by Clifford’s quickness, Kip looked levelly at him and saw that he was staring at the scuff mark in a state of combined horror and fascination. Reaching down with his thumb and forefinger, Kip then made a display of trying to lift the black mark from the floor.

“What do you think?” Clifford asked.

“Not sure.”

After several further attempts, Kip glanced once more at Clifford, who was now staring saucer-eyed and with smiling panic at him. “Too heavy for you, too, huh?” said Clifford, and Kip rose slowly to his feet, even as did Clifford, and replied, “Too heavy for both of us.”

Clifford walked away with perfect outward ease, giving the impression that all was right with the world, and all ends had been met, loose or otherwise. Kip admired that, envied that, though he did feel the need to remove his shoe and erase the scuff mark with a back-and-forth of his sock. He would think of this incident any number of times before he later entered some realm of true dementia himself. He would remember Clifford with respect, yes, but he would also recall the compassionate Kip Calder of that particular moment—a Kip he was proud of. He who was proud of so little.

That small incident came to mind this morning, some days after Carl Montoya had given his approval for the fieldhouse project, because Franny had the day off from the restaurant and had come down to see if she could help him. As she walked across the lea toward the grove of nineteenth-century cottonwoods whose branches extended over the casita like maternal wardens in gestures of embrace, she thought of that night when she and Marcos had seen something inexplicable down here. Hadn’t crossed her mind in the longest time. Everything seemed simpler back then, freer, more promising. Even a ghost wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

“Kip?”

“In here.”

His fieldhouse was low to the ground and cast, as did he, scant shade. Its adobe was discolored and had partly fallen off in chunks around the corner bases of the walls. Unlike the adobe of the main house in the upper park, this place had not been repaired for years.

Tin gutters had let some rainwater off the flat roof, but not enough, and so the round vigas that supported it sagged. Many of the old latillas that had originally been laid in a herringbone pattern from viga to viga had rotted into wood dust and fallen in. Kip and Franny stood side by side looking up at the sky through the ceiling, like a pair of celebrants gazing into sacred sunlight from the depths of a kiva.

“Kind of a mess,” she said.

“I’ve seen worse,” he replied, and they went on with their appraisal of where to begin in earnest. The windows were square and meager, a traditional design of pintle casement meant to hoard heat in winter and ward off the merciless sun of long summers. Earthen floors in what had once been a kitchen, bedroom, and sitting room, fitted with a corner bell-shaped fogón blackened by piñon smoke, were in pretty good repair, except where holes in the roof had let the weather trespass. Other than a rusted spring mattress, a rickety table, and a few other broken chattels, the fieldhouse was empty. A wooden horse, grayer than time itself and probably used for lasso practice, was the biggest prize. Kip and Franny set it up by the front door, a guardian god.

No one had lived within these thick mudded walls for a century, or longer than that, really—since before the days of statehood. The last inhabitant had been some Hispanic gentlewoman, one Francisca de something or other, whose name showed up in the deed, but about whom little was known. And yes, the place was rumored—beyond Marcos’s sightings, which he’d still discussed with none but Franny—to be haunted. A couple of boys from the other side of Rio Nambé had told a patrolman they’d seen the ghost of a woman in Carlos Montoya’s pasture. That was a decade ago. Poker-faced, the patrolman had taken notes with the eraser end of his pencil and never reported the claim.

Now, using trowels like archaeologists, Kip and Franny began to remove deteriorated adobe from the south side of the house, their backs to the sun, the grainy chipping music of their work such an ancient percussive sound, the air dry around them as they labored together. Franny noticed Kip seemed resurrected incrementally, not unlike the adobe he’d become obsessed with fixing, and though she still felt shy around him, she said as much.

He hummed a sort of thank you, audible over the several soft noises of the wind in the higher branches, the nearby shushing river, and their own scrapers. Then he surprised her by asking when she planned on telling Marcos her real name.

“I sort of hoped we could forget about that.”

Kip just kept working at the lower section of a wall where water had capillaried up to rot it away into nothing more than semi-hardened mud.

“It didn’t seem like you wanted to hear,” she added.

“Sure I do. Why don’t you tell me what you were going to tell me?”

She fell quiet while Kip waited, not glancing over at her but hearing her breath pass in and out.

Franny Johnson had very much remained Franny Johnson, while Mary had begun to protest less often her own chosen hiddenness. But lately matters had gotten more tangled, not less, in her head, thanks to her unwonted growing affection for Marcos, for all the Montoyas. Pulling her past and present into harmony, coming to some kind of truer truth, had thus become matters of some urgency.

As before, Kip seemed her ideal confessor, because like her he was someone assembled from fragments, a patchwork person. Franny empathized with this trait. She trusted him and what he might say to her more than she trusted her own meandering thoughts. She was awed by what appeared to be Kip’s real freedom from the small fears that dictated other people’s lives. On all this, Franny and Mary agreed—a curious interior colloquy that didn’t feel strange, since she wasn’t some split personality. More that the person she was accustomed to being differed from her earlier single self.

Look. Kip was here. The time had presented itself for her to try again to speak. “Can I ask you to keep it—”

“A secret?”

“Secret
seems kind of a strong word. I meant, just keep it to yourself for a while. Do you mind?”

“If you don’t, I don’t.”

“I suppose I
should
mind, is what you’re saying. But I’ve got to talk to somebody or I’m going to burst.”

Kip suggested, “One question first.”

“Yes?”

“Wouldn’t it be better if Marcos heard whatever it is you’ve got to say?”

“What if he doesn’t understand?”

“Shouldn’t understanding be
his
problem? Yours is simply to offer him the truth.”

“I can’t right now. I wish I could.”

Kip thought, What would a good father advise? “Say whatever you want to say. Nothing leaves this place. Fair enough?”

“Thanks,” Mary whispered, suddenly grave and compressed into the small sovereign world they inhabited together under these trees and beside this house. She told Kip she was a runaway, and why she had run. She told him her father had raged at his kids from as far back as she could remember, about anything and everything. Told him how the man’s outbursts had come in clusters, like storm cells moving over the family landscape. How, after upbraidings and tongue lashings and shoving and screaming, periods of calm would settle in, not unlike a hangover following a binge. The physical stuff was what had finally pushed her over the edge, she said. Her father had constructed a spanking paddle from a thin flat plank of oak in which he’d drilled half-inch holes that made for a sharper, more succinct blow. The backs of her legs would sometimes bear his appliance’s marks—a polka-dot patterning of welts—and as often as not she’d be grounded, so no one could see the bruises. Badges of honor, she came to think of them. Like those of Saint Catherine on her beautiful wheel of fire, or Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc at the stake. Even early Bogart hoodlums never treated anyone like her father did her. Cagney had at least been a gangster. And Mary? She was Cool Hand Luke unwilling to play the Audrey Hepburn part in
Wait Until Dark,
except she wasn’t blind and intended to escape with her eyes wide open.

Kip stopped working and listened intently to Mary. Before she finished, she began to cry. It had been years since he tenderly embraced anyone, but he held this Mary Franny Johnson against himself and felt the warmth of her tears on his shoulder, through the thin cotton of his shirt and the even thinner fabric of his skin. She was asking him what she should do. Tell Marcos and risk the possibility that he and his family would never want to have anything to do with her again? Go back to Gallup and face her parents, who might tell her to leave or, worse, to stay? Head back to Albuquerque and catch that plane to Los Angeles the way she had originally planned, back before everything got derailed because she had no money and no connections? Or just remain in this present abeyance, this limbo, living a daily lie that more and more was overtaking her, like a shadow rushing ahead of the very body that cast it in the first place?

“Back up,” Kip said. “What was that about Los Angeles?”

She told him of her aspirations.
Sea of Grass.
Hepburn, Tracy.
The Desert Song. Sundown
with Gene Tierney. Susan Hayward, Louise Brooks, even Mae West. Burt Lancaster in
Hallelujah Trail
and Robert Taylor when he filmed
Ambush.
They’d come to Gallup to shoot their films at Acoma or in Zuni pueblo. Ronald Reagan and Larraine Day in
The Bad Man.
William Holden when they did
Streets of Laredo.
And at night, in the nondescript house on Jefferson, up on the heights above Gallup and its famous route, where the song told you to
get your kicks,
there Mary would listen instead to freight trains that ran day and night through the center of town, and hear the wind gusting as it carried along hopeful chirruping birds past the fenced yard up toward the pink mesa, which embraced them in its large silence, as did the sky, clouds within silent clouds, and always more silent sky beyond. And she would dream herself into those films, which were far more real than any life she was living.