Ariel's Crossing (23 page)

—Breaths, breathing.

—Closer.

—Come on, Grampa. Footsteps was the right answer.

—The correct answer was wedding rings. Here’s another. What single word has the most letters in it?

She knew this, knew the answer was post office, but said, —The alphabet.

Naturally, calmly, swiftly, he said, —That’s correct, by god.

It was two words, but so is post office. —Hey, Grampa, what can fill a room but doesn’t take up any room?

—Light.

—Nope. Light takes up room.

—Darkness.

—Naw, come on. Darkness takes up room.

—Air?

—No. Air takes up room, too. You’re not trying very hard.

—I give up.

—Silence! she shouted.

—One could make the case that silence is spatial, you know.

These games endured through their brief years as granddaughter and grandpa, on the telephone, in letters, in person. She rose to every occasion and he marveled at her mind, telling his son once, —Do whatever you can to nurture this girl’s imagination and nothing to hurt it. She’s special.

Brice concurred, saying he was doing his best.

—Why is Grampa’s eye so milky, like there’s a cloud in it? she asked Jessica after the McCarthys made one of their rare visits to New York, some seven months before he died. No conundrum; Ariel’s forehead was furrowed, her arms were crossed, her black shoes were locked side by side. At times such as this, she looked mature well beyond her baker’s dozen years. Her mother explained that this was something that happened to certain people when they got older.

—It’s called a cataract.

When Ariel looked the word up in the dictionary, she found that it came from a much older term for
waterfall,
for
abrupt,
for
floodgate,
and for
striking down.
She remembered those backgrounding words when her conundrumming pal was gone. As she wept in her bedroom, she thought how abrupt death can be in striking us down, how those who are left behind are flooded in tears. A heart attack seemed so unfair, she believed, to come to a man who had such a good heart.

During that last visit to the city, he asked her the queerest question. She recalled it because it was his final riddle.

—Here’s one for you, he said with a wink. They were sitting side by side on a bench in Washington Square, feeding the squirrels. —When a man gets hit by a train, is it the engine or the caboose that kills him?

Her grandmother, flanking Ariel opposite, overheard this. —Don’t be morbid.

—It’s not morbid, Granna. Don’t sweat it.

—You heard her, he gently laughed. —Don’t sweat it.

—Ariel, we should be getting back to the apartment so your grandfather can rest.

—I’m not tired. Ariel, which is it?

But he did look tired, drawn, even emaciated.

—Let me think, she said, staring into his ivoried eyes.

They left the park soon after, and though she had several more days in which to do so, she never concocted an answer. Then he died and with him went the secret to his last conundrum.

It occurred to Ariel now, as she finished her glass of milk, that she never figured out whether it was a true riddle or instead an instance of his losing hold on lucidity, a prophetic, enigmatic protest against the rushing onset of his impending death. Either way, she knew the answer, suddenly. Too easy, too obvious, and that’s why she hadn’t put it together. Neither the engine nor the caboose killed the man. The man killed himself by walking out onto the tracks in the first place. How she wished she could give him her response. It might have earned her one of his cherished smiles.

Here at the table she had to ask herself, how had she wound up walking these metaphoric tracks, aware the train must eventually bear down on her, if only to keep another’s schedule? And how would her finding Kip Calder, an iota of whose body had combined with Jessica’s to make her own, offer an answer to any conundrum, posed or not?

Because of Kip’s early abandonment, her first moments on earth—even before she was born—had been fraught with puzzlements. Her maternal grandparents, now long deceased, had come east from Ohio for the big event, though they hadn’t been happy about the situation surrounding it. They’d had good reason to be unnerved, if only because their daughter hadn’t bothered to marry Ariel’s father. Brice McCarthy and Jessica Rankin were admittedly unconventional and, as Ariel would also come to learn, were indeed still virgins—with each other, that is—odd as it might seem, given they’d come of age in the era of free love. But however unconsummated, their love had never been in question.

—William is what we’ve settled on, Brice told Jessica’s dad, answering his question about what the child was going to be named if it turned out to be a boy.

Innocently or fake innocently, Jim Rankin asked, —Is that your father’s name, then, or this other fellow’s?

—It’s her father’s, sort of—

—I’m her father and my name isn’t William.

—I mean the baby’s father.

Awkward beyond all measure.

—But I thought you didn’t know whether it was going to be a boy or a girl.

Very Abbott and Costello, thought Brice, who then shifted the geography beneath the subject, just as he’d do later in life as the lawyer he would become, saying, —Well, it hardly matters, since I know the baby will be a girl and we’ve decided on Ariel for the name.

—What kind of name is Ariel?

—It’s out of Shakespeare, and the Bible.

—William’s a better name.

—For a playwright.

The name game, straight out of
The Naughty Nineties.
At that point Brice must have wondered whether he and Jessica really should have pressed ahead with his pretending to be her husband, Ariel’s father, that whole bit. Which pretense would have been less eccentric, which more tenable? Didn’t matter. This was the way they’d chosen to go, the honest way. Only later would their veracity evolve into a much more powerful mistruth, or dual truth, thus positing the oldest riddle of them all. What in heaven’s name is the truth?

Jessica’s parents received the news of her pregnancy complete with an accurate description of her romance with Kip and a firm recommendation that if peace were to be kept in the family there should be no insults, no sarcasms, no denunciations. If they wanted to be supportive, she’d welcome their support. If they couldn’t in good conscience support what she was doing, she would respect that. Her parents hadn’t the least interest in arguments or anger. Brice’s parents, on the other hand, were never given the details about their granddaughter’s knotty parentage, a decision their son took early on to avoid the inevitable
Bible beltings,
as he termed his mother’s peppery sermons. Over time, the decision to curate a half-truth—Ariel became, after all, legally his daughter—ossified into whole truth. The McCarthys asked, once, why the girl had her mother’s surname rather than her father’s. But as she was born of sixties parents, the countercultural thing to do was just that. Ariel Bankin was her name, for better or for worse.

And what kind of a name was Kip? Sounded like an acronym. Keep Isolation Pure. Kismet Isn’t Practical. Karma Is Pain.

Word games. She’d come an awfully long way to sit at a kitchen table in Los Alamos and think up Sunday morning acronyms, reminisce about games with her grandfather and idiosyncrasies surrounding her birth. What about Granna and Kip? The now. She had to reach her parents this morning. She wanted to phone David again, but had less to say to him than ever, and besides, she couldn’t take his rejection of her again. Having left no messages on her machine, he’d become a complete absence. Except for the pain that more or less replaced him.

Maybe ought to give herself a break, she could almost hear her grandfather’s advice. Her life had been largely floated on words. Airy, eerie, weirdie. On her name she’d heard every pun in the book. Time to forget conundra and homonyms and get some breakfast going, head over to the hospital. Ask around about Kip Calder. Make discreet inquiries about where one might have a procedure done to abort an early-term. Above all, stay off the train tracks.

Both men were up with the magpies. Each saw the sun cut sickles of light into ten thousand dense cloud waves that rose like white vulcan smoke on fenders edged purple as locoweed, datura in the shadows. They met, as if on some kind of businessmen’s schedule, in the kitchen of the hacienda. Kip hand-ground coffee beans while Delfino put up water in the kettle on the big black Wolf stove. One asked the other if he’d slept well. Yes, and you? He did, though the drive doesn’t get any goddamn shorter. Which led them to Tularosa and the Jornada del Muerto, a province of New Mexico Kip knew better than Delfino might have expected.

“My father worked at the lab during the Manhattan Project. He was down there the day they detonated the first A-bomb.”

“Trinity?”

“He saw the whole thing from Compañia Hill.”

“July forty-four. I should know, I was there, too.”

This surprised Kip, who looked carefully at the man in the room with him, a handsome cayuse in his seventies, strong, lean, weathered as any who lived his life under a desert sun, with a prominent browned nose narrow as a ruler, a taut wide mouth, high Hispanic cheekbones, and furrowed cheeks. With black eyes, and tall—easily as tall as Kip himself—Delfino cut quite a figure. The younger of them sensed that while they were of distinct generations, their very different lives had ruined them in ways that had the odd result of breaking down their differences. Embracing them both, time and fate had brought them here, and though Kip knew nothing of Delfino’s plan, he did sense something was at work. This notion blew through him like light. “Nobody told me you’d worked on the Project.”

“I didn’t. More like the Project worked on me.”

“Meaning?”

“Long story,” Delfino said. “But no, I had nothing to do with the bomb, other than being pushed out of its way.”

“Better out of its way than in it.”

How was it possible that in half a century, Delfino Montoya had never quite thought of it in those precise terms? “You’re right. But that’s not how I saw it back then, and it still isn’t.”

“How do you see it?”

Innocent enough question, though Montoya frowned—not at Kip but some specter over and behind his shoulder.

“I was in Tularosa, just east of the mountains behind where they lit their candle that morning. It’d been a rainy night and we were asleep in a rented shack the government had put me and my wife up in. The ground shook, knocked us both right out of bed onto the floor. Don’t remember hearing any sound, really, but there must have been some kind of rumbling, had to have been. The light was brighter than staring at a thousand halogens. Brighter than I can tell you. We ran outside and looked due west and there it was, this huge gray rope of smoke coming straight up over Mockingbird Gap with a boiling mushroom cloud on top. Deathly, filthy, ugly. Ugliest, ghastliest thing I ever seen.”

“That’s just the opposite of how my dad told it.”

Delfino drew a palm across his mouth and down his chin, then dropped his hand into his pocket. “Go on.”

“He never said it was beautiful, but he remembered being awed and flabbergasted that it’d worked. He changed his mind later, as time went on and the war was over and instead of building down the Project they went on to hydrogen and thermonukes. He had a hand in the Nevada tests but eventually withdrew himself and moved over to theoretical work.”

“He still on the Hill, your father?”

“He’s been dead for going on thirty years.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m sorry he had a hand in causing you whatever trouble you’re talking about. I know he’d apologize if he were still around. He used to be proud of his role in the Manhattan Project. Then one day he just wasn’t.”

“What changed his mind?”

“Winning that war was what mattered to the Hill, and nothing got in the way. Among the victims who survived Hiroshima were people like my father. Alcoholism, depression, suicides hit more than one Hill family after the great victory. Not that my father went that way, he didn’t. But privately he renounced the whole business, mostly the tactics of deployment.”

“Japan was a ruthless enemy that might have won. That’s what they always said.”

“Little girls in their school uniforms going to class that morning? Their
mama-sans
washing the breakfast dishes before going to market? Soldiers, sure. They’re supposed to kill each other’s asses. But more often than not, civilian deaths outweigh military ones, certainly in modern war. Soldiers should slay each other by definition, not shoot civvy fish in the barrel. I don’t see why generals and career men shouldn’t be the ones forced to step into the fray, instead of conscripted privates. But that’s war for you. Chop down the innocent. Even Darwin would have been ashamed of the formula.”

Delfino held his tongue, thinking, Here’s a like-minded man if ever I met one. “You were going to show me the fieldhouse.”

Coffee cups in hand, they walked past the horno, down to the path that flanked Rio Nambé and the lower corral.

“Will you look at that,” Delfino exclaimed sincerely at the sight of the adobe, now pale pink in the sunrisen light. “You really have done a job of it. I don’t think it ever looked so sharp, even back in the old days.”

The house did look good, Kip saw.
Relevant
was the word that came into mind. It sat low, clean, modest under the massive trees. “Had a lot of help.”

“That’s not what Sarah says.”

They went inside. “Sarah exaggerates. Marcos and Franny did most of the work. Carl, too.”

The men looked the place over, each noticing, though never commenting, that the other seemed oddly distanced from what was being admired. Each had his strong connection to these walls, but more than that, an ineffable harmony flowed between them. They heard it, saw it in each other’s eyes. Something shared beyond personal histories around the Jornada and its Trinity grounds, the commonality of nearing demise. Each was mortal and had lived beyond what he expected or even wanted. This passed between Kip and Delfino, unspoken. Not even wholly formulated in either’s thoughts.