Ariel's Crossing (24 page)

“When we were young, Carl and me, we always heard this adobe was haunted, but I never saw nothing.”

“Don’t look at me,” Kip smiled.

“Well?”

“No such thing as ghosts, just dead people and ones that are alive. I might have thought there were ghosts once, but I don’t anymore. Came too close to being one myself.”

“I’d like to think there’s a ghost here. I always used to tell Marcos and his sister—”

“Lanie.”

“—that spirits haunted the place. Their eyes would get this round. I used to enjoy that. Hell, I sure wouldn’t want to be a ghost.”

“How’s that?”

“Hard enough to get people to believe in you as it is.”

Kip laughed. “I was a ghost once, come to think of it. A spook, at any rate, during Nam. You’re right, it wasn’t much good.”

Couple of old fucks talking about war, death, and ghosts on a beautiful morning like this, thought Kip. Boys of winter.

As they pushed back outdoors, Montoya said again how much he admired the restoration and then, without so much as considering further any possible consequences, he launched straight into his request. “I know you don’t really know me, and I don’t know you, and I know I ought to be thanking you for putting this place down here back together—”

“No,” Kip said. “I’m the one who owes your family the thanks, not the other way.”

“—but I have a favor to ask.”

“Name it, you got it.”

“You might want to hear me out before you go agreeing to anything.”

Kip did hear him out, as they sat together on that same wooden bench where he and Marcos had worked and talked not long before, and where Franny had told him all about Mary. He learned of Delfino’s plan to go back to his homestead at Dripping Spring, out on the military’s most restricted badlands. He wasn’t going to live forever. Time had come. Kip didn’t agree or disagree, but understood the bias. “You ever fished salmon?” Delfino asked.

“In Alaska, once.”

“You ever heard the word
anadromous
?”

“No.”

“My wife, Agnes, liked collecting words like that. Most of them I forget now, but anadromous stuck.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“You know how salmon are born in fresh water then migrate out to live in the saltwater ocean, then come back to spawn in the same river they were born in, then die there, just where they started? That’s anadromous.”

“And that’s what you want to do.”

“Well, I don’t know as I intend to die out there, but I got to force it to some conclusion. If I lived ten lifetimes I know that the bullycrats and burrocrats at the other end of my letters and calls won’t ever bother with me, and I’m damned if I’m going down dead silent.”

Kip agreed to all that Delfino asked of him. He half wished he could mount some reasonable argument against the juggernaut Montoya proposed to bring upon himself, but honestly could not. When all was said and done, wasn’t Kip himself anadromous? He was. And had every intention of helping this fellow migrant.

C
him
ó
was what she called him, using her rudimentary Vietnamese, just a few words really, a couple of phrases she now knew, thanks to Kip.
Chimayó
without an assenting
aye.

“Meaning?”

“Ask Kip.”

“Come on, Franny.”

“
Gian.”

Marcos genially frowned.

“Chim ó
means buzzard.
Gian
is cockroach.”

“Gian
yourself.”

The name calling, all in jest, was her comeback to Marcos’s allegation that she’d been spending more time with Kip than with him, and that maybe there was reason to be suspicious. “And now you want to meet his friend,” he said. “What’s next? A formal announcement?”

“Jealousy becomes you.”

“And English suits you better than Kipamese.”

Franny smiled, disparaged him in Vietnamese once more, then repeated what she’d originally said, that she didn’t want to go to the Hill without Marcos coming along. Los Alamos—
cao nguyên
was Kip’s closest analogue—had entered their conversation because Sarah persuaded her to join them at the center to visit Clifford Carpenter and afterward have lunch. Kip’s convalescent friend had asked for him and, as Sarah said, “Given he doesn’t seem to remember the names of people he’s known there for years, can’t even recall what he does from hour to hour, Kip must have made quite an impression on him.”

“Seems to be a trait of his,” said Franny, who was moved to go visit her uncle out of a combination of curiosity, confidence that he wouldn’t recognize her anyway, and unwonted homesickness—or if not that, the desire to fill some void she herself could neither admit to nor understand.

Marcos proposed that on their way up they take a couple of hours and hike the Indian ruins of Tsankawi. He’d loved the mesa since he was a kid and wanted to share it with her. Not often having witnessed this side of Marcos, in which he waxed nostalgic about his childhood—his telling her about spying on the
vatos
being an earlier instance—she wanted to know more. Besides, they too rarely got to be by themselves, all joking about Kip aside. It might give her the opening she’d been looking for to broach her idea about California. Why not?
“Xin mòi anh di.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, All right, cowboy. Well, sort of.”

“No Vietnamese spoken there, though. Promise.”

“I promise nothing.”

Marcos waited until she finally said, “Okay, I promise.”

Copper out the windshield, sun reflecting in clay and stone and stems, off rabbit brush and seared saltbush. Light the hue of dying golden asters hovered in the white tuffstone of the canyon heights as they drove across the Rio Grande. Like one on sudden furlough who wanted to kick up heels for the simple joy of it, Franny said she’d like to wade in the river, whose water ranged from Navajo tea brown to sedimentary red to sheep-shit obsidian. Marcos said, “Let’s do Tsankawi first, then the convalescent center, and if you still want to wade at Otowi on the way home, you got it,” which seemed fair to Franny.

She felt oddly free this morning, liberated from past or pasts. Maybe it was delusional, definitely ironic, but who cared? There was something positive in the idea of seeing poor Uncle Clifford, not that she could do a thing to help him. She trusted Kip not to breathe a word about Gallup, but she knew more clearly than ever that he was right about what she had to do. Maybe, just maybe, the visit would help her to confess her duplicity, her many lies, to Marcos. Meanwhile, she would inhale this mountain air deep into herself and set the world aside for the day.

They took the road toward White Rock, soon pulled over and parked on the shoulder. An open solitude settled heavily over the vista as they hiked in the warming breeze down a rocky gulleywash trail. Having made their way through the sparse piñon and juniper woods, they began their ascent up the ancient trail worn deep into the stone by women and men whose dwellings in the southern cliffs came into view. Franny followed Marcos along this sunken path, one foot directly in front of the other as if on a recessed tightrope, climbing the pumice rim well below the flat summit, snaking their way mutely, beholding the vast widening valley as raptors dark as the smoke-charred ceilings of the ruins circled on updrafts. A mountain bluebird toppled by in a tumult of azurine. Red ants charted courses across the winding, rising trail. Crickets chirruped in shady spots. To the left were holes chiseled into the cliffs, handholds and toeholds for accessing the table mesa where, Marcos told Franny, the community of Tsankawi thrived in its three-storied pueblos a millennium or so ago.

“How’re you doing?” he asked.

“My god, it’s just too much.”

“Should we go back?” turning like some awkward dancer, feet caught in the stone furrows. He’d forgotten what an arduous trek this was, a difficult hike even for him now that he was no longer climbing with the pliant legs of a boy.

“No, I mean this is unbelievable,” she answered, gazing out at the long horizons that spread below. “Imagine them in the winter after a snowstorm, huddled in these cliffs with only fire and each other to keep them warm. Reminds me of when I was young and saw Red Rocks for the first time.”

“Red Rocks outside Gallup?”

“Yes—no.”

“The ones near Denver?”

“What?”

“Which Red Rocks? I’ve been both places.”

“You misunderstood but it doesn’t matter,” she tried, her flight into the past brought to earth by Marcos’s innocent question, itself prompted by her own slipup. He let it go, unaware he’d touched on a place even more protected than these rimrock steeps. The guise, though—was it beginning to collapse of its own accord?

After a rugged hour, they made it to the southeastern face of Tsankawi and sat with legs dangling over a five-hundred-foot plunge. The world lay literally at their feet. Marcos named from north to south the faraway summits of the Sangres. “Jicarilla, Sheepshead, then Truchas and Sierra Mosca, West Pecos Baldy and Capulin,” between which lay Nambé, due east. She listened intently to these beautiful names, leaning into Marcos, her arm over his shoulder as if to protect him from herself. Given the stark transcendence of this place and his deep love for it, Franny began to lose her nerve about discussing a future for them elsewhere. She never felt so alone with Marcos before, and though she liked the abundance of this world of his, its natural dignity, she had to wonder how and if she could ever fit into it. Still, she had to try to say something.

“You remember when I came out to Pajarito that first time and you were asking me about my plans for the future?”

“Sure.”

“How I said that once I saved enough money, I wanted to go overseas, just anywhere far away? Timbuktu, I think I said.”

“I remember. You bought tickets without telling me?”

She smiled. “No. Besides, I don’t think I care about flying around the world anymore.”

“Why bother when you’re sitting on top of it right here?”

“That’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Sitting on top of the world?”

“You know how devoted I am to my acting.”

“Why shouldn’t you be? You’re good.”

“Well, I was talking with the director of the company and he said the only way for me to get ahead, really excel, is to go out to the Coast.”

“Coast.”

“You know, West Coast.”

“Hollywood.”

“That’s where all the real actors are, the dedicated ones. There and New York. Why swim in a small pond when there’s a great big world out there just waiting?”

“So we’ll go to California, if that would help you.”

“Marcos, you’ll meet more powerful people in your field, too,” Franny said, her heart leaping, hardly believing her ears.

She needn’t have doubted, since Marcos went on to say that while it wouldn’t be easy, he could hire some outside help to keep the stables going for a month, maybe more. The regionals had taken him all over the West, but he’d never been to California. Would they need to be out there longer than that?

“Probably, well, I’m not sure.” Insane of her to ask such a thing of him. What was she going to do? “Thank you, Marcos,” she said, hiding her profound disappointment.

“For what?”

“For being such a good man.” Kissing him, she noticed out of the corner of her eye a pottery shard—there were many along the path—and pulled away to pick it up. Simple black design on an ivory field, last touched, probably, by one who had used it for carrying water up to the pueblo from a nearby canyon.

“Here,” and gave it to him. “For good luck and protection always.”

In the aftermath of Tsankawi and the feelings it stirred in Franny and Marcos, who made love in one of the cliff houses at the easternmost brim of the trail, the drive to the convalescent center was marked by streaming stillness. Marcos drove with one hand, the other resting in Franny’s. He sensed something had changed between them, but not knowing what it possibly could be, kept the intuition to himself. They parked on the perimeter of Acid Rock and were greeted by Sarah, who took them to the glassed atrium where Kip and Clifford sat together, talking, pointing at exotics in the new aquarium.

“Clifford?”

He turned his face toward the three who stood there, his eyes not leaving the world of the saltwater tank, and in particular a small spotted blue shark that cruised it with undulating authority.

“Clifford, I’d like to introduce you to my son, Marcos, and his friend Franny Johnson.”

“Good to know you,” Clifford said, his eyes darting from the aquarium to the others and quickly back.

“Hello, Clifford,” Marcos said, stepping forward and taking his hand, gently shaking it.

“Oh, yes, hello.”

Now Clifford did look at Marcos, who smiled at him. Clifford peeked over at Kip as if to ask whether he was supposed to return the smile. Kip nodded and the man smiled back at Marcos.

“Clifford.” Sarah spoke a bit more loudly than necessary, given he wasn’t hard of hearing but simply unpunctual in the way he responded. “This is Franny.”

She put on the strongest smile she could manage, while gazing at her father’s brother from a depth of grief she had never anticipated. “Hello there,” she said, stretching her hand toward this frail man whom she’d known from her early childhood, the perennial bachelor, the crazy uncle who’d been touched even before he went crazy.

“Hello,” Clifford answered, shaking her hand.

Kip watched Franny even as Clifford found it impossible either to stop looking into her eyes or release her hand.

“Hello,” he said again.

“Hello,” she answered this time, very tenderly attempting to free herself from his grasp.

“Mary, what took you so long?” he asked.

She looked at Kip, then at Sarah and Marcos.

“I’m sorry?” she asked, with a broad smile.

“Mary. You’re my niece, aren’t you?”

Removing her hand she stood up straight, turning to Sarah. “Does this happen? What should I do?”

“Just go along with him,” Sarah said. “No harm.”

“Yes, Clifford, if you say so.”

“Why’d you take so long?”

Clearing her throat, reaching behind her for Marcos’s hand, she said, “Take so long?”