Ariel's Crossing (20 page)

Their lives came into scale here. She liked telling hikers who asked her when she was on duty, —Yes, there are over five thousand petroglyphs here, thought to have been inscribed by the Jornada branch of the Mogollon culture around nine hundred to fourteen hundred a.d, and if you climb high enough you’ll see the white dunes that have been there for two hundred and fifty million years. A quarter billion years, just imagine, she’d say with equal wonderment each time. For Agnes—who loved these numbers, as they made her feel small, innocent, somehow safe—this was a place where you learned to know yourself and those around you.

One thing she didn’t know, however, was that Delfino, in a rare moment of acting behind his wife’s back, had ordered several vintage rifles from that catalog she’d long since forgotten about. Rifles and quite a few rounds of ammunition. Moreover, he took great care to hide them from Agnes. She died without ever discovering them.

Now they looked both pathetic and arrogant on the oilcloth where Delfino laid them out the evening before he left for Nambé. He was reminded of the excitement he had felt on Christmas Eves, when his mother, Kayley, made her kids set out their nightshirts and turn back their beds all neat and nice before they were allowed to join the adults in the casa greatroom, where a fire crackled in the hearth that was taller than either young Delf or Carlos, raggedy punks with bowl haircuts. Christmas nog, chocolate fudge squares, snow on the ocotillos that made them look like anorexic Jack Frosts. A profound feeling of order settled over those bygone Navidad nights, and Delfino, impressed by the chimera of such a memory, now felt that youthful sense of promise again, however disparate might be the image of his bed and nightclothes and presents under the tree—the lovely lost past—with these shotguns, rifles, rounds, and five-gallon plastic water canisters beside them. He had paint and boards for the signs he would make, and lengths of barbed wire rolled and stored in a canvas satchel. Dried food was packed in saddle bags. Bedroll, binoculars, of course the nightscope. To hell with sunscreen, he thought with a laugh—he couldn’t get any more burned than he already was. While the authorities and news media would no doubt declare him criminal, berserk, an extremist—if they bothered with him at all—he was in truth none of those. Rather, a ticked-off romantic. Dreamy maverick. Or else just a guy who got it into his head he wanted to go home. Even if he were able to think through all the probable
tragic consequences,
as they would phrase it on the radio, he could never talk himself out of it now. Deeper forces were at work.

The wall clock read four. Meticulously, upon finishing setting out his desert gear in the garage, he shaved and showered, then packed a couple of clean shirts and climbed into the truck. He’d always loved the heavens on clear nights such as this, loved how unquestionably the Milky Way traversed the sky and earned its name. Driving, terribly awake, toward Carrizozo, he listened to the wind pummel the hood and windscreen of the pickup.

First he would have to visit what was left of his family. Carl, Sarah, Marcos. He didn’t want to be remembered as anything other than a gentleman by those who loved him. He would meet Marcos’s friend Franny and wish her every advantage in the world. He was curious about this man whom Sarah had mentioned so often, the veteran who fixed up the fieldhouse. And he wanted to visit the place of his birth and childhood, if only to make some kind of peace with it and pay respect at gravesides.

He felt very light of heart, standing under the first pinks and sundry blues and the fluorescence of the gas station as he filled the tank, and when he got back into the cab and made toward Bingham and San Antonio, past the malpais with its whiskery cacti flickering in the dawn rising behind him, he felt voluptuously at peace, more so than in any recent year.

He’d be there by late afternoon, poking along, taking in the familiar geography as he went. Somewhere down the road he’d phone his brother, and if he couldn’t reach him at the stables he would call Sarah at the convalescent center, to say he hoped they wouldn’t mind that on the spur of the moment he decided to take them up on their standing invitation. Then, after visiting his first home, he’d return to his true home once and for all.

In Zuni, dreamers are said to accompany their dreams outside their dreaming bodies. Some Zuni believe that the dreamer’s breath leaves the body to accompany the dream, like a sigh chaperoning another sigh, as together dream and breath move away from the sleeper to experience the fantastic narrative world beyond. Others believe that the mind, not the breath, goes forth from the sleeping person to become the dream’s wandering mate. Both are valid—
sa tse ’makwi allu’a,
the dreamer’s mind leaving its flesh to range the darkness of night, and
an pinanne allu’a,
wherein this dangerous privilege is performed by the dreamer’s spiritual “air.” Either way, Zuni traditions about death and dying, about concepts regarding the loss of rational mind, are inevitably nourished whenever the sleeping person begins to dream.

Mary knew that night was the most fearsome time in Zuni. She knew this not because Zuni pueblo stretched like a dream of unruined land south of Gallup, but because the thing she remembered best about her uncle Clifford was his obsessive love of Zuni culture, Zuni spiritual beliefs, anything from the four-cornered world of Zuni. Like any novice who manages to teach himself about another culture, he reveled in it and talked about it to anyone who would listen. After the war tore part of his mind away, what he understood about Zuni and retained in his fragmented memory—that Kachina Village was where the dead lived, witches among them carrying on the matriarchy, for instance—he shared excitedly with his brother Russell’s kids, before he was shipped off to the ward.

—Listen up, you might learn something, he said with winning enthusiasm. He hinted that by telling them about Zuni, he was guiding them into a secret society. That each bit of lore he offered was, as the Zuni themselves would say, precious
mi’le,
and would serve them well in their lives in unexpected ways.

His nephews, naturally, laughed behind his back, but Mary sensed that there was maybe something true and valuable in all this Zuni stuff their nutty uncle was telling them, something not to be forgotten or taken for granted. She was reminded of this when she awakened from a dream about a witch in the form of a dripping doll who was pursuing her into a field of sharp-leaved cornstalks, until finally she could run no more. When she looked down, she saw that her legs had grown into a single limb rooted in the soil, and realized that the witch who was chasing her was none other than Mary herself. Or else a nameless girl who looked like Mary. She woke in terror, remembering the two theories of how a person dreamed.

Had her breath or her mind left her body when she had this nightmare? She might have insisted both had wandered into that field of razory corn with her dreaming self. However freaky, her nightmare came as no surprise. Chasing herself into a cornfield where she took root—wasn’t this the most thinly veiled dream she ever had?

Rising in the dark, she made her way across the room to the kitchenette where, still half asleep, she lit the gas burner for tea. The circle of flame put her in mind of a wreath shimmering on the stovetop, the wreath in turn becoming a fiery martyr’s crown. But who was the martyr if not Marcos? Not a good thing. Not what she wanted.

Water from the faucet half filled the saucepan; Franny owned no kettle. After placing the pan on the burner, she glanced down at her body, her breasts, the tuft of hair where her thighs met, her naked feet, and wondered why anybody would bother to make love with such flesh. But he did, sweetly, just as she adored his strong body. He’d been over earlier this evening, after dinner in town. They had undressed each other and, kissing, collapsed onto the braided rug. Marcos skinned his knees in the precious tumult, and afterward rolled off onto his side, both of them laughing until tears came to their eyes.

That was when he said, “Franny, let’s do it, move in with me at Nambé.”

“You’re such a wonderful man, Marcos,” was her answer.

She sat facing him in the shadowy room and combed his hair with her fingers.

“Franny?”

Running her hand down his stubbly cheek, over his shoulder, as he lay there propped on one elbow, she said, “I do love you. But I’m not sure about moving in together.”

Plain words plainly said though not plainly explained. Marcos put on his clothes and went home. Afterward, the trucks that passed along Saint Francis sounded to her not like the flow of a beautiful river but rather like what they were—filthy eighteen-wheelers, moving metal junkyards driven by undreaming men on stimulants who transported goods from one place to another. Nothing like a nightmare to wake you up to reality.

Franny drank her tea as she got dressed. She didn’t know where she was headed, but knew she wasn’t going back to sleep. Something essential in her waking dreams had cracked. Albuquerque had not led to any movie studio or screen. Santa Fe, by the same token, was drawing her on to Nambé, farther than ever from the dream in those photographs on the walls of El Rancho. She was being pulled into a lasting relationship, a mooning girl destined to become some ranch wife instead of a celebrated actress. Go figure. She now walked vaguely toward the plaza, trying her best to think, alone under a blithe ceiling of stars, a charlatan in love with Marcos Montoya despite her own wary distancing. The weight of her falsehoods, lies lying on more lies, freighted each step she took. She’d arrived at this crossroads because at so many earlier crossroads she’d made choices. Good ones, bad ones. Did the word
coincidence
rightfully belong in the language?

Well, Kip was coincidence. Accepting Marcos’s invitation to visit Rancho Pajarito, in a moment of unguarded enthusiasm, didn’t mean she’d signed on to meet Kip Calder who seemed to see through her as if she were a pane of glass. Kip, who not only appeared to understand her mess but was caught in his own. And it was just that, a fucking mess, she freely conceded, seated on a bench in the plaza, shivering some. Just as hypochondriacs do get sick sometimes, and paranoiacs do have enemies, some coincidences are simply in the cards. How absurd was it, for instance, that her drama class had staged a closed reading of
The Tempest,
with her in the role of Miranda, only a few weeks before Kip told her he had a daughter named Ariel? Not very. Not at the end of the day. What was crazy was that the young guy who’d played Ariel was a truly gifted actor who would never go to Hollywood in a thousand years for a million bucks. She admired him but found his unjaded purity, in a backwater night-class acting school in Santa Fe, a bit sublime. Sublime as in loony.

Several people passed her. A couple, probably a little drunk, spiraled by, their laughing voices punctuating the echoing quiet along the Governors’ Palace arcade. None noticed this lone figure across the street facing them, hands nestled under opposite arms. They had, however, broken across the meander of her thoughts and—again, chance provoking fate—brought her to a decision. As if in a more benign dream, Mary walked back home. For one who had risen after a nightmare, dressed, and fled, she hadn’t gone very far. But in another sense she had traveled light-years. During what remained of the night she slept more peacefully than she had in months.

Come morning, she phoned in sick to work. Small white lie. Then she drove out to Pajarito and found Marcos. The chronological ordering of truths might not have come out quite as Mary would have wished, but her doppelgänger was doing the best she could, given the knot she’d tied them both up in.

“I didn’t give you a straightforward answer to your question last night,” she began.

“No, you didn’t.”

“If you’re still willing to consider me living with you, I’d like to accept.”

“You would?”

“Yes,” and they embraced—
an pinanne allu’a
—sending forth her breath with this waking dream.

It would remain for Mary to persuade him to leave Nambé and move west to a place where they might both tackle the world from a greater vantage, and for Franny to be exposed and then retire to some kindly Kachina Village where witches would not torment her.

Accompanied by the younger of her sons, Bonnie Jean met Ariel at the emergency room. Aunt and niece had never been much closer than were Bonnie Jean and her somewhat estranged brother, Brice, but they kissed each other on the cheek in the hospital foyer. Bonnie stood in her daisy-print housedress, looking dazed and hapless. Her wispy browngray hair was bobby-pinned arbitrarily to her head, her drawn face was bleached by worry, and her bloodshot eyes conveyed that she, usually stalwart to a fault, had been weeping. She blinked as if, roused from a long nap, she discovered herself in a place where she had never been before. “Do they know what happened?”

“A mild stroke is what they’re saying,” answered Ariel, herself ashen. “They’ve got her stabilized, said they’ll know more over the next few hours. She’s going to be all right. She’s tough.”

“Too tough for her own good.”

“Well, she does things her way, if that’s what you mean.”

Bonnie Jean said to no one in particular, “I warned her. This was inevitable, smoking that pipe of hers like some merchant marine and drinking like a sailor. Eventually catches up with you.”

Sam adjusted his oversize stovepipe jeans on his narrow waist and nodded mute greetings to this cousin, who was more than a decade his senior. His basketball jersey was either half tucked in or purposely left half untucked, she couldn’t tell which.

Mountaintop hip-hop, thought Ariel. “I sure hope my showing up unexpected didn’t cause this to happen.”

“Of course not.”

“She was pretty wound up this morning.”

“How so?”

“We’d finished breakfast, and she was talking about, about the number thirteen—”

“Her latest fixation.”

“—and Christ and your father.”

“Her other two.”

“She was really lucid, but all over the place—”

“Was she drinking?”