Ariel's Crossing (17 page)

“Everything that had any chance of surviving seemed to pass right through Gallup. Movie stars, trains and cars, truck drivers. Only the dogs stuck around. And the pawnbrokers, forever and a day the pawnbrokers. Gallup’s heaven for pawns and for the broke. It’s not a place to live, it’s a place to leave. And that’s what I did.”

While he couldn’t follow many of her movie references, Kip heard things he understood.

“You know the joke about Gallup being well named?”

Yeah, gallop. He knew that one.

One of her father’s chronic taunts had been, —If you don’t like living under this roof, you can hit any road you want so long as it doesn’t bring you back. Do you hear me?

She did, and after years of cycling through the same pattern of mutiny, terror, anger, guilt, meekness, stoicism, and then back to mutiny, she’d eventually called his bluff. The golden lights of sprawling Albuquerque, as she crested the ridge that night after finally making her move, leaving behind family and the waitressing job at El Rancho and every bad memory she had of home, had seemed miraculous at the time. “Like my future was lying there in front of me, this glittering gold magic carpet, with Sandia backlit by a big fat full moon. It was some kind of fine vision.”

Mary smirked. She told Kip she’d ended up in Santa Fe because it offered her a brilliant opportunity to wait tables for better pay than in Albuquerque, which in turn paid better than Gallup. Her plan had been to save some money, take the bus down to the airport, and persevere west. But none of it happened. The hopeless dream was fading, as well it might or even should.

“Not so hopeless. You have a hell of a flair for invention. Aren’t you more or less writing, directing, and acting a role every waking minute?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

One confession deserved another, so Kip told Mary a few things about himself. That he considered himself no better than a living, unmoored Gallup. That he’d messed up more often than not. That somewhere out there another daughter had been left by an unworthy father to find her own way—nothing he was pleased about. Indeed, it was the greatest shame on his head, had shadowed him for a quarter century.

“Is that why you were such a globe-trotter, because you were running away from her?”

Kip shook his head. “Pitiful, isn’t it. Running from somebody who not only wasn’t chasing me but didn’t even know I existed.”

“I’m sure she’d love you if she met you.”

“She never will, though.”

“So long as you’re both still alive, there’s always hope.”

He turned the focus back to Mary, saying, “Look. You’re brave enough to share your problems with me. Why not trust Marcos to the same end? Promise me you’ll at least think about it.”

At breakfast the next morning he sat with the Montoyas. Spoons in cups, the spring of the toaster, the creaking of a cane chair as one or another shifted weight. Their familiar voices riffing over the purr of the refrigerator compressor in the kitchen. Kip thought of these as fundamentally the music of family. A place at the table was set for Franny, who often spent the night with Marcos when she didn’t have to work a late shift in Santa Fe or attend rehearsal. Kip sometimes wondered if he would be so tolerant about his child shacking up like this, not merely right before his eyes but coolly, calmly. Marcos and Franny sometimes came to breakfast dressed for their different days but bouqueted by the love they’d shared an hour before. This morning, however, she entered alone.

“What’s Marcos up to?” he asked her, not knowing why, other than that he wanted maybe to underscore the last point he made after trading revelations the day before.

“Up to what he’s usually up to, right?” she asked Carl, who nodded. Of course he was, thought Kip. Marcos was an unfailingly consistent man, not unlike his folks. Reliable, tried, true. Traits both he and Mary, in different ways, emulated yet resisted. When Carl rose from the table, Kip knew he would, too. Would walk with him through the kitchen, out the door, and into their workday. Marcos would already be out dragging the arena with a round harrow pulled by a small tractor to prep it for the morning’s free-lungeing and sweating the horses. Kip wouldn’t need to ask which of those horses to let out first, or which paddock to put them in. Wouldn’t need Marcos’s help washing down any of their boarders. He had become integrated into Rancho Pajarito, despite his habit of behaving otherwise. That knowledge—brought on by the clink of a spoon in a cup, the most paltry sign of household commonplace—would follow him throughout his day and into the late afternoon down at the fieldhouse.

What Kip did before he left with Carl, though, was ask Franny, seemingly out of nowhere, if she’d ever met a guy named Clifford.

“Why do you ask?” her breath coming short.

“No reason.”

“There’re a lot of Cliffords in the world.”

“This guy’s last name is Carpenter.”

Franny blanched as she said, somewhat sternly, “Don’t know him, Kip.”

“Well, you’d like him if you did. Has some cobwebs in the attic if you know what I mean, but then we all do. Me especially.”

Sarah asked her, once Kip left, “What was that about?”

“I haven’t the vaguest.”

“You’ve been helping him down at the fieldhouse. He seem okay to you?”

“Right as right.”

“He’s a complicated character, but we love him.”

Franny sat unstirring, thinking how funny it was that people referred to themselves as characters, as if the world really were a stage.

“That Clifford Carpenter he was asking you about has been up at the convalescent center quite a long time, poor dog. Disconnected from everything and everyone. War vet. Just as sweet as can be. One of those people who make you remember that there but for the grace of God go you.”

“Do you think it’d be so bad. Being totally out of it, I mean? Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be blissful.”

“Who ever said bliss was the be-all?”

“He and Kip were friends?”

“Kip was always gentle with him, very kind—brotherly almost. Not that Clifford even knew who he was from day to day.”

Franny rose from the table. “Got to get to work myself.”

“I ought to take Kip up to visit Clifford sometime. You’d be welcome to join us.”

“Maybe sometime. If you think it’d be a good thing.”

How much smaller could the world get? What she wouldn’t give to visit him, but she couldn’t. One thing was sure—Franny was beginning more and more to ruin Mary’s life.

Good Friday or bad, which would it be? Ariel drove east up out of Pojoaque through Nambé pueblo, toward Chimayó. Thank god it’s Friday. Name of a bar? She hadn’t had a drop since a week ago tonight. The gin debauch at the farm. Was she taking care of herself or of this other she hosted? Forget about that, keep moving forward.

She drove past corrals where chestnut horses and paints stood. A big cat lay dreaming in the purple shade of the overlook mission, El Sagrado Corazón. A goat wearing Moses’ beard and Lucifer’s horns crossed the road and a midnight-blue magpie strutted along its shoulder. Sometimes a brilliant field of green grass came into view but most of the scape was variant browns—tawnies, powders, hazels, beiges, tans. She saw no people anywhere as the road left all dwellings behind.

The turnoff to Chimayó. Before her, behind, and also to either side was a sweeping magnificent emptiness. Brittle thumbs of terra firma reaching upward. A formation that resembled a flock of nuns. Sandy flats stretched between blackgreen globes of piñon and juniper billeted along arroyos and over the jagged flats in all directions. Masses of clouds heaped themselves with mythic luxuriance on the mountains, which they mimicked with such perfect, dwarfing authority as to make Ariel, their witness, disbelieve her ability to distinguish the one from the other.

And speaking of witnesses, she thought, he’s seen all this. Seen it, breathed it. She rolled down the windows and her hair swarmed her head. All those days and nights since she’d left the farmhouse began to feel right suddenly, even righteous. Home for her could surely be here as much as back there. It was reshaping itself into a larger idea than she’d conceived before this moment. She wanted to find him. Said aloud, “I’m here.” As she drove up the final ridge along the western slope of Chimayó valley, then began her descent toward the village, Ariel sensed, spiritedly if wrongly, that she was about to realize this fresh, expectant hope.

The plaza of El Potrero was quiet, empty. El Santuario de Chimayó, humble in the morning sunlight, stood before her looking for all the world like a thing built by creatures from one of her childhood fairybooks, so phantasmagoric were its adobe towers and rounded mud walls. She’d not guessed wrong. This was precisely where she should be right now.

The sudden calm, the peacefulness of the place, brought the gravity of what she faced into focus. Thus assured, Ariel climbed out of her dusty car, with ledger and photograph like bell and candle in hand, and entered the santuario, passing under its modest zaguán and through the walled cemetery courtyard that fronted it. The darkness within the church was cool, dank, and smelled of many thousands of scented candles. Without quite knowing what she was doing, or what it might mean, Ariel tucked a dollar in the painted wooden box just inside the nave, took a votive candle and lit it using the matchbook that was also set there on the little table. Alone, she walked up the central aisle margined by wooden pews as if drawn, like an acolyte, toward the reredos with its painted images of Christ, Mary, the saints. She marveled at the radiant, untutored architecture in gilts and greens, reds and blacks, behind the altar rail. Pigeons cooed, echoing in the rafters, a familiar sound made mysterious by this holy room so far from the city that accompanied their song back east. Halfway down the aisle, she glanced up over her left shoulder and caught sight of where they lived, in a crawl space that gave onto a mullioned window whose glass was broken.

She stood breathing the heavy, drowningly rich scent of burned wax. This was, she thought, ancient air. Her knees buckled beneath the weight of some fine ecstasy.

Still alone in the hushed room, she came to. Finding herself on the hard floor, she realized she’d fainted or gone into some sort of fugue, or dream, or she didn’t know quite what, though the duration of it must have been brief, since everything around her seemed the same as it had been before. Kip’s ledger lay splayed beside her and looked like a fallen bird. Feeling dizzy but also, as on the road, alert beyond alertness, she gathered up the book and the guttering, smoking, but still burning candle and pulled herself onto a rugged wooden pew to collect herself.

Time passed. She climbed again to her feet and walked the rest of the short distance to the altar.

Unbelieving, she knelt at the altar rail and attempted, for a quick instant, a prayer. Mindful as ever she didn’t know how to pray, she asked simply,
Help me.
To her left was a low portal that led to another chamber. She ducked as she made her way through this passage into the sacristy. She’d never seen anything like it.

Hung with crutches and baby shoes, with rosaries and homemade placards of gratitude, with framed photographs of the sick who’d been healed, the sinful who’d been saved, the young who once were crippled or mute or deaf or blinded but now could walk, speak, hear, behold, this narrow, long room was a documentary shrine to belief. Gaudy, it was nevertheless blessed; brazen, it was subtly enchanted.

On her right was a small anteroom in whose center was a hole carved in the earthen floor, which made her think of Gaia, of Mother Earth’s navel. Entering this claustrophobic alcove, she knelt, remembering what Brice had told her about the posito and its curative dirt. Astounding to think they’d both been here, Kip and Brice, back when they were boys, her two fathers. She gathered up a handful of sacred soil from the shallow hole that centered the chamber, lifted her palm to her nose, and inhaled deeply. She put her tongue on the consecrated loam. It tasted, well, spiritual.

Ridiculous, she thought, and then just as quickly responded, Ariel, don’t ridicule what you haven’t understood. She walked the length of the sacristy to lunge, like a swimmer reentering the world of air after diving into a deep pond, from the darkness of the church into the irreverent light of the plaza.

She passed the trickling acequia that coursed out in front of the santuario, and entered the church gift shop where she showed a woman behind the cash register her photograph of Kip and Brice. Had she heard of a man named Kip Calder? Nothing. Then over to the Potrero Trading Post whose front was decorated with ristras and a defunct Sinclair gas pump beside the screen door.

Ariel suspected that the man behind the counter had never seen the face in the photo he held before his eyes, though his hesitation suggested otherwise. Raymond Bal was his name, and what she didn’t know about this dark-eyed thin serious man was that his tardiness had to do with his being a thoughtful person who—having lived his whole life in Chimayó and having been asked similar questions over the years by other pilgrims come here in search of the miraculous—wanted merely to give her an honest answer.

When he said, unexpectedly, “I did, maybe,” she nearly dropped the ledger.

“Where? When?”

His Anglo wife had written a book about the history of Chimayó. Indeed, other friends and relatives of Raymond Bal had written books about the place, its penitentes, its curing dirt that made this the Lourdes of New Mexico, the center of annual treks on foot across miles in drenching rain or under heavy sun on Good Fridays.

But Raymond knew he couldn’t answer this weary young woman’s questions with any accuracy. “I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

“But you said—”

“Where’s he from?”

“Los Alamos.”

“A lot of people from the Hill come through here. What’s his name?”

“William Calder. His nickname was—is, Kip.”

“Don’t know that name, Calder. What about the other one?”

“McCarthy.”

“I really couldn’t say if I’ve seen him, either of them, I’m just sorry. I don’t know how to help you.”

The more Raymond thought about it, the less sure he felt about giving her any hope. The fact was, though he didn’t remember it, he had seen Brice three years earlier, back in ’ninety-three, when the man dropped in here to find Jessica and Ariel herself presents. Brice had bought them each Peruvian burial dolls. Odd gifts, he had thought. Nonindigenous and morbid, perhaps, but pretty with their serene cloth faces, legs and arms made of sticks, and clothing of woven, handpainted fabrics. Raymond had told Brice they brought good fortune, and so he had taken them home after meeting with Kip and presented them to Jess and Ariel along with bags of sacred soil, tierra bendita. Both wife and daughter were delighted. Ariel’s was a late birthday present, as she turned twenty-four that year, three years past the deadline that Jessica and Brice had set for themselves to share the secret about Kip with their mutual daughter, having agreed that her twenty-first would be the right time. For his part, Kip had been inside the Potrero Trading Post, too, that Easter. Bought a Popsicle. At the time Raymond thought how sick the poor fellow looked and how he hoped the healing posito dirt would help him, though he doubted it could.