Ariel's Crossing (22 page)

For his part, Marcos had a question for his friend here on the bench mottled by sun moving past its zenith. “You mind me asking how you lost it?”

“Lost what?” jolted from his darkening reverie.

Marcos nodded toward where Kip’s hands worked at the wood laid across his lap.

“What, my virginity?” Kip quipped, hoping to lighten his sinking mood.

“That’d be an interesting story, but I mean your left hand. I always wanted to ask why you’re missing part of that finger.”

“The rest of it’s in Laos somewhere.”

“The war?”

“I lost a lot more important things than my finger there, but that’s another story.”

“Your war stories are interesting.”

“Hand me that, would you?”

“I like hearing them, I’m not sure why.”

“Because, thank god, you’ve never been and don’t face having to go.”

Marcos handed him a wire brush that lay on the ground. “War.”

Kip ignored the word, tried to. Crazy, wasn’t it, that such a complicated enterprise of mass destruction was summed up in a small burst of air across the lips.
War.

“I would think the most important thing not to lose in a war is your life. At least you came home with that.”

“Nobody comes home from a war with anything other than his country’s victory or its surrender. Everything else in a war is lost, no matter which side you fought on, and don’t let any fool tell you otherwise. All my fingers are gone. They just look like they’re here.”

Marcos said, “Well, they say you can’t be a good carpenter and have all ten fingers.”

“You don’t mean to offend me so I won’t take it that way. I wasn’t a good soldier. I didn’t belong in Vietnam so I connived my way to Laos, but I didn’t belong in Laos, either. In retrospect I’m proud I wasn’t that good a soldier. I tried to be, just wasn’t. I still have the middle finger left, and that’s the one I raise to salute our fine Indo-chinese war and all valiant, important, and necessary wars waged from now until kingdom come. Maybe we ought to call it a day with these shutters. I’m sure Carl needs some help.”

“Yeah, got a couple more horses to work. Guess I’ll get to it,” Marcos said, wanting to apologize for having touched a nerve but understanding that he could not.

When Marcos stood up, covered with fine sky-blue paint from his scraping and sanding, Kip was reminded of Krishna, the blue Hindu boy god. His earlier fondness returned immediately, not that it had ever left. Shouldn’t have been so short with him, but what’s family for if not to work out your hardest ideas on?

The season of largesse, of things and stuff, continued that evening when Delfino, who’d arrived before sundown, brought out a present for his brother’s family, as he always did when he visited them. In years past, Delfino’s
visit gifts,
as they were called, had been magnificently ordinary (a cropper’s spade) or funny (a whirligig of a gunslinger bowing to a barmaid) or just plain odd (a glassed display case of rattlesnake tails mounted with pins). This evening’s present was a nineteenth-century photograph of some people formally gathered around a mule, taken just a few miles, Delfino believed, from Dripping Spring.

Sarah held it up to the light and thanked him, saying, “Why, that’s just beautiful.”

“Wonder how old it is?” Carl said.

“If anybody ought to know it’d be you, Methuselah.”

“Very funny.”

Fraternal banter.

“Look,” said Marcos. “Somebody wrote 1890 on the back.”

“Well, then, not quite as old as Carl,” said Delfino.

“Go ahead, ruin your presentation of the visit gift, see if I care.” They chided each other with relaxed, toothy smiles.

“What you think they’re doing?”

“Mule beauty contest,” said Carl.

“Carl,” said Sarah.

“Damn handsome mule,” said Marcos.

“Always thought you were a sheep fancier,” said Carl.

“Carl,” said Sarah.

The mule did, however, have a fuzzy white muzzle and the soulful eyes of a sage, standing there untethered. Sarah held the print closer and asked, “Are those some kind of headsets the children are putting up to their ears?”

Delfino smiled. “You’re getting warmer.’’

The glass-plate photo showed thin boys in light-gray shirts, probably the only shirts they owned at the time, some with broad suspenders. All wore baggy pantaloons and boots that resembled leather puddles in the dust. On the beast’s back was a black contraption, squarish and somewhat sinister-looking. Seven boys held to their ears the ends of thick wires that were connected to the saddled box, while another loitered under the sun without a hat, leaning on what appeared to be a crutch, waiting his turn to listen. The majordomo and his wife stood solemn at either edge of the frame, he frowning under his bowler, she with hands on the sturdiest of hips. Not a living tree in sight, only scrabble wilderness rock. Behind them was a log structure that might have been a ranch house or the office of a mining company.

“What do you think they were listening to?”

“John Philip Sousa was around back then—maybe it was ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’”

“Probably a jingle for Coke.”

“Marcos.”

“The real thing.”

“I doubt those kids had the faintest idea what they were hearing. Look at their faces.”

Kip studied the sepia wasteland scene of adults and children listening to a scratchy black disk—Chincester, Bell, and Tainter wax-board going around at seventy-eight or thereabouts—and spoke for the first time. “Must have been the absolute strangest thing that ever happened to any of them.”

“Depends on how long they lived after eighteen ninety,” said Sarah.

Kip agreed, “Model T, the Wright brothers. It did all happen pretty fast.”

“Not to mention discovering the atom.”

“Men on the moon in less than a hundred years,” said Marcos, and Franny added, “Don’t forget about the Internet.”

“Christ save us,” said Delfino, suddenly realizing his gift didn’t mean quite what he had intended.

“Christ-dot-com, you mean.”

Sure, the image alluded to Dripping Spring, the old ranch and old dream, and as such it was a memento of his strong fondness for the place. But now he recognized it also marked the nanosecond when technology had first come to the desert, and with that the irreversible wave of scientific systems under which he himself had faded, as much a memento from yesteryear as those folks gathered around a mule with a gramophone strapped to its sagging back.

For dinner they ate cayenne chicken and grilled squash from the kitchen garden. The small dining room was redolent with food and wine.

“What brings you to Nambé?” Carl asked his brother.

“Felt like it.”

“Come on. Nothing gets you here unless something’s up.”

“I felt like seeing you. No crime in that.”

“Nothing doing, Hoss.”

“This is their old game,” Sarah told Franny and Kip. “Carl still doesn’t get why his brother left Nambé for downstate back when they were Marcos’s age.”

“Younger than Marcos,” said Carl.

“Wanted to breathe some fresh air is why.”

“Nambé air is a hell of a lot fresher than Tularosa basin.”

“Not to my nose.”

“This,” Sarah continued, “is where I stop listening.”

“I always told you you ought to get your nose examined.”

“And you ought to have yours looked at by a vet.”

“I don’t need a vet to tell me horse shit smells better than cow shit.”

“See what I mean?” said Sarah.

Turning to Kip, who was seated across the table in his best linen shirt, the visitor changed the subject, not to mention the spirit of the conversation. “My sister-in-law here tells me you come from Los Alamos.”

“Born and raised, but I haven’t lived there since I was a kid.”

“Not my favorite place on earth, forgive me, Sarah.”

“If you’re referring to the Project, it’s not my favorite place, either,” Kip said, seeing in Delfino’s half smiling eyes the look of one of those overwhelmed boys hearing music from a gramophone for the first time. He believed he saw fear there, apprehension about some unexplored future. He knew the demeanor. A blasphemy of calm. Had seen this sanguine look before on the faces of soldiers who knew they were about to lose their lives on the field of battle.

Kip glanced around the table to see if anyone else picked up on it. None had, and none—aside from Sarah, who’d surely seen it in the eyes of her patients on the Hill—would or could. Some things you can learn only from experience. Kip, who’d flown, then run, then walked, then literally crawled away from his inescapable war, now saw it sitting at the pleasant August evening table in the form of Delfino Montoya and wondered what lay behind it. He could feel one of his old episodes coming on, a slippage, gnawing like flame at his edges, but he didn’t want to be backdrafted into some drastic scenario. Delfino was saying something directly to him, yet he couldn’t hear. Then, as if Kip managed to grasp the delicate, broken quadrant of his mind and lift it clear of that growing flame, he forced himself back into the present.

The man across the table was saying, “Lots of great people come from not so great places—you all right?” to which Kip answered, “Of course, thanks,” which in turn led Delfino to begin considering what had already traversed his thoughts over these past months, and even during the long morning stretch of his drive.

And that was this. Were he to tell his brother what he was going to do next week, Carl would talk him out of it. That’s goddamn lunatic crap, he’d calmly shout. Sarah would agree with Carl, if not in those precise terms, Marcos with Sarah, and Delfino would be left either to capitulate to their collective wisdom or to march forth onto White Sands range not just alone but more than alone, pushing on against the best wishes of what family he had left on earth.

But what about this Kip Calder? He was the victim of Vietnam, not War Two, granted, but of war nevertheless. Maybe, Delfino mused, Kip would be kind enough to hold his last will and testament for him, and the letters he’d written, see to it that Sarah execute his wishes if indeed he didn’t come back out of Dripping Spring in one piece, which he figured reasonably he might not. Maybe this remnant of one war would be chivalrous toward the remnant of another. Kindness of strangers—wasn’t unheard-of. In fact, it seemed the best way for Delfino to proceed. He saw in Kip’s eyes the depths of a man who’d borne burdens in the past and might be equal to a burdensome charity case now. The Montoyas had taken him in when he was down and out. Perhaps he’d indulge an old man a similar favor.

After dinner, as always, the brothers sat on the
portal
and smoked beneath the stars that framed the serrate silhouette of the eastern mountains beyond Nambé pueblo. Kip sat with them. They prattled on wonderfully about people Kip didn’t know and never would. He was reminded of nights he’d passed aboard ships, sitting on an idle deck under luminous constellations and a half moon that itself looked like a sail on some floating skiff. Ships above, ships below. Here the veranda rocked because of the wine Kip sipped and because the slippage was still there, nearby, he could feel it. Yet the moment seemed rich with chance, though he couldn’t say why, just as any sailor’s starry moment of reflection before dawn brought its endless struggles and possible storms. Kip thought of his wife. What he’d told Marcos was true. He would probably never see her again. Hadn’t he eaten cayenne chicken with her once in Hanoi? And her boys—the elder in San Diego now, the younger in Port Arthur,

Texas—prospering immigrant youths who’d always been grateful if perfectly withdrawn. What would he tell them had he one last chance? What would he say to his distant wife? To Jessica? And Ariel?

Kip rose from the creaky rawhide chair and shook hands goodnight. He said, “My pleasure,” to Delfino who asked if he might come to the fieldhouse in the morning and have a look-see at the restoration.

“I thought about fixing it up myself way back when, before I left Rancho Pajarito instead for other terrain,” Delfino continued, then abruptly grew as pensive and mute as this fellow Calder who left the Montoya brothers to walk under the Dippers great and lesser toward the lower pasture, thinking, Sometimes there’s just nothing you can say.

Ariel woke up wired. Wired and disconcerted. Her week on the long road, culminating in that Friday reality-check reckoning in Chimayó, had finally weighed in on her. Having tossed, turned, remembered where she was and why, she pulled back the sheets and tiptoed—though there was no reason to do so, since the house was empty—into Granna’s kitchen. Sitting at the table with a glass of milk, she thought about how much Granna wanted to join her husband. After Ariel said goodnight, the woman’s parting words, garbled by drugs and the stroke, were, “Maybe a gaw nigh in Heaven.”

“It’s always a good night in Heaven, right, Granna?”

“You come too when’s your time, awrigh?”

“I’ll do my best. Meanwhile, get some sleep. Heaven’s not ready for you yet.”

She thought about how much her grandfather McCarthy had liked to sit at this very table with her, drinking warm milk to soothe his ulcer. He loved physics and a good conundrum, those two things maybe more than anything else besides Granna. Work and wife made sense, but his devotion to riddles was a character quirk, no doubt about it.

The old man was a master of
conundra,
as he liked incorrectly to call them, penumbras of cognition. Trick questions he collected. Ariel remembered how much he delighted in posing even simple classic riddles like, —What’s black and white and red all over? in his crumbly dry voice, then awaiting her response.

If his granddaughter guessed, —Newspaper, he would say, —Sunburned zebra.

If she guessed, —Sunburned zebra, he’d say, —Communist Manifesto.

If she tried another tack and guessed, —Ovaltine in a red cup, he’d say, —Not bad. But not right, either.

He loved answering one conundrum with another’s solution.

—The more you take the more you leave behind, what’s that?

Ariel considered the problem for a minute, but it wasn’t a difficult one. She answered, —Footsteps?

—No, he said. Try again.