Ariel's Crossing (29 page)

—Get out of here, Kip smirked.

—You get out. Everybody remembers the moment of conception.

Kip was sitting not quite out of the rain. The Laotian morning was young. A few nodding Hmong, some Kmhmu guerrillas, and a couple specters in from Vientiane smoking expensive Camels, sat listening in a leaking thatched hootch by the muddy runway at Long Tieng.

—Let me try it from the opposite angle, Kippy. Do you think that when you die you’ll experience that moment of transition in all its glory or inglory, pain or magnificence?

Kip didn’t feel like being an amicable bodhisattva so didn’t reply.

Wagner looked around at the others gathered among his miserable audience. —Well? What do you say? You there.

A Hmong nodded.

—He agrees with me.

—He doesn’t understand you, said Kip.

—You’re wrong. He understands me better than you do.

Kip shrugged. —That’s not saying much.

—Wrong again, I think. Do you understand my question?

The Hmong nodded again, quietly.

—I think his answer is yes. Do you believe you’ll comprehend the moment of your death?

—Yeah, the man answered.

Wagner paused, then glanced at the CIA cats. —And do you remember the moment you were conceived?

They looked at one another and dragged on their cigarettes.

—What about you? to the Hmong.

The Hmong again nodded.

—I’m telling you he doesn’t understand you, Wagner.

—He does, and I think you do, too.

Jess remembered Kip’s writing her about that episode. Ariel had already been born and had forgotten, in Jessica’s estimation, the moment of her conception, if she ever perceived it in the first place. However, Kip hadn’t been long deterred by his initial doubts. By the time he penned his letter, which he sent through a friend down in Thailand toward the end of everything, months before the People’s Army declared victory and not all that long before he and Wagner went far beyond bamboo, giving up everything to live with the Lao along the Mekong’s lackadaisical waters, Kip had come around to believing in Wagner’s doctrine of instant consciousness.

She never mentioned the letter to Brice. Things had been tough enough without the inevitable commentary Kip’s absurd ideas would have provoked. War
is
madness, Brice would say. Kip is war. War is madness. Kip is mad.

He had no better explanation for his friend’s psychological catastrophe than this old-hat Aristotelian model. So Jessica—who herself had nothing to offer by way of understanding Kip—hid the letter, saving it for many years until she finally lost track of it. Proving once more the law of loss.

Kip was flying through Ariel’s thoughts, too, now that she’d accepted Sarah Montoya’s offer to drive her to Nambé. Her only hesitation was whether it might be better if Sarah let Kip know his daughter was in Los Alamos, anxious to see him. At least that way he wouldn’t be taken completely by surprise, would have time to do whatever it was people did in such circumstances—even if it was as negligible as putting on fresh clothes, combing his hair, pondering what first words might be appropriate.

One of Ariel’s grandfather’s conundrums came to mind:

The part of a raven not in the sky,
That swims in the river
And yet remains dry.
Who am I?

That was one that stumped her when she was young. Now it seemed both obvious and apropos, as Ariel was to encounter both Raven and shadow, no longer acting some heedless role in a word game. Easy though it had been to imagine she’d be tense if this moment ever came to pass, Ariel never dreamed she’d be so short of breath, so terrified. Her mouth was drier than that conundrum shadow. Why wait?

“I’ve come a long way to meet him, Mrs. Montoya—”

“Sarah. Let’s go, then. You can stay at Pajarito tonight if you like, and if not, my son can bring you back to the Hill.”

Ariel took Bonnie Jean aside to say she couldn’t explain everything right now, but would later. Then she kissed Granna on the forehead and left. As they passed the rusting guard tower where, back when Kip and Brice were boys, all who entered or left Los Alamos had to produce a security pass, Ariel asked Sarah to tell her about Kip, what he was like, how his health was, whether he ever mentioned her.

“He’s given up hope of ever seeing you. Doesn’t talk much about it, but not because he doesn’t care. He’s no complainer. Private man, fragile and tough at the same time, not somebody who tolerates prying. But I’ve found if I show I’m curious and bide my time, he tends to open up.”

“That sounds like advice.”

“I guess. Although with you, who knows? He’ll probably act very different.”

“Not knowing him, I won’t be able to tell one way or the other.” Sarah said, “It’s uncanny how much you two look alike.” They traced the switchbacks hugging the canyon cliffs. Ariel’s ears popped. Yawn, take a deep breath, calm yourself.

At the same time, two others traveled an anxious road, past thirteen cornfields and lands rich with alfalfa and pecans. Down through Sabinal hamlet they drove, through sweet cedar thickets, with the Ladrón and Gallinas and Dátil looming against the horizon, mountains named for robbers and chickens and dates. Then on into Bernardo, where the junction would take them on a final leg past desert willows and wild verbena, through arid country the Rio Grande could not water. Flaming sunset behind them. Nambé behind, too. Delfino wondered aloud if it was fair to have left Marcos shouldering the burden of letting the others know what they’d set out to do. But fairness, it struck Kip, hadn’t ever been part of the equation with regard to Dripping Spring, or Long Tieng, for that matter.

“I’d hate to think I was a burden to Marcos.”

“How’s that?”

“Hitching the boy to my war.”

Kip said, “Marcos is solid, like all you Montoyas. He wouldn’t have agreed if he didn’t think it was fair or right. He’s up to handling rough problems.”

Delfino grabbed a glance at Kip, then turned his gaze back to the road, over the steering wheel. “You mentioned something like that yesterday. He have problems besides this load we dropped on him?”

Franny was too much to broach, Kip thought. “Point is, he’ll do everything right.”

Delfino had been gone only a few days but his bungalow, framed in the truck headlights, had already taken on the weary air of abandonment. The brown siding and gray windows reminded him of a dead sparrow, its feathers tawny and its eye blank. Never saw his false home looking so wretched. They went in through a side door.

“I never was much of a housekeeper.”

“Me either.”

“Come on, you had that fieldhouse looking sharper than I’ve ever seen it.”

“I did it for Sarah. Left to my own devices, I doubt I’d have the place looking that good.”

Kip wondered why he just lied to Delfino. He’d been questioning all the way down why he had begun to fabricate a little of this and that about his past. Embellishments more than lies, but not his usual truths, the truths that Wagner had sworn would always set him free.

Kip had insisted, for instance, when Delfino came to the fieldhouse to fetch him earlier that day, that he’d slept like a log. Why bother with such baloney when he damn well hadn’t slept at all but instead spent his final night in Nambé sick as a dog, and haunted by the foreboding that Ariel was somewhere nearby?

Wagner had instructed him to feel such things in his bones, but Kip was never able to until he lost that segment of his finger. It didn’t even happen in a combat situation, but while helping a crew chief load a rocket on his Birddog.

—You heard of ghost limbs? his guru once asked. —People who reach out to shake someone’s hand with an arm they lost years ago? Well, now you’ve got a ghost limb, my man. Use it to good purpose.

Just as some people predict the weather by what they feel in their joints, Kip, under Wagner’s outrageous tutelage, studied his hands for meaning in the world. His missing finger segment often told him more than he wished to know, especially when the flashbacks came, forcing him to relive radical scenes of war, his own lifelong war. He learned to anticipate these nightmares, learned how to handle them. But what he never learned to handle was the inarguable fact that his deeper Vietnam, his saddest Laos, was nothing if not his irremediable abandonment of Ariel. What he’d done to himself, he forgave himself. But Ariel—he had to admit that he had never learned self-charity when it came to her. God knows he’d tried. Tried hard, tried often. He’d made his gesture to contact Brice, meet with the man. Nothing had come of it, not even what would’ve been the easiest closure—death in the desert, or in the Montoyas’ barn, or up at Los Alamos. Three years had passed and the gambit failed. There was only this left to do now. Nambé was over; Los Alamos was over.

And it was of Los Alamos that Brice too thought at that moment, looking down into the city street. Brice who, having gotten off the phone with his wife, was compelled to get out into the night. His shirt was untucked, his khakis rumpled, and he wore no socks with his shoes. He didn’t care what he looked like. The air outside was dense and rubbery. His head ached all of a sudden. He decided to walk a few blocks to a bar. A drink, a pointless conversation with some fellow seated next to him. He walked uncertainly among Friday night couples back to the apartment, legs heavy—heart, too.

His sister heard the answering machine engage. In the few meager moments that lapsed as his message unreeled, she tried to decide whether to leave her news about Ariel—Charlie and Sam having, despite their assurances of secrecy, filled her in. Maybe it would be better for him to hear it on tape, impersonal and chaste. That way he’d have time, she thought, to process his humiliation, yes, before getting back to her. She prepared her abbreviated speech, awaiting the tone, but started when Brice interrupted his own recorded voice, saying, “Hello, hang on.”

“Brice, it’s Bonnie Jean.”

“What’s happened?”

“Why do you always think something’s happened when I call?”

“Because you don’t call unless something’s happened.”

Bonnie cut loose not just with her news from New Mexico but her opinion that his having kept Ariel’s real paternity a dirty secret all these years was beneath comment.

“Then why are you commenting?” he asked. Brice’s face felt as if it were on fire. Who on earth did this woman think she was? Arbiter of all things ethical, maven of morality? Come on, already. He should simply hang up on her, grab a cab straight to LaGuardia, catch the next flight out. Barely containing his sarcasm, he apologized for not having exposed what he considered a personal matter between himself and his most immediate family. He was sorry she didn’t deem him to be a worthy brother. “We obviously can’t talk about this now,” he finished.

Bonnie was left speechless. Meeting silence with silence, her brother lowered the receiver onto the cradle. To knock one’s head repeatedly against a wall was a sure symptom of chronic stress. Brice remembered this factual detail from a civil lawsuit as he leaned against the prewar plaster and brought his head to its cool surface, withdrew it, struck himself again, pulled back, struck once more.

Kip’s head, too, was aching. He ranged unsteadily out into Delfino’s yard in the early darkness of the Tularosa basin while his host prepared a cupboard feast of canned lima beans and corn potpourri, tortillas furnished with sardines and mustard. At the western edge of the yard loomed a grand cottonwood, fluted like a misplaced Doric column attired in shaggy bark, overhanging the mother ditch—the main artery—of this community. A trickle of muddy water scudded down the acequia. Kip could hear but not see the little flow.

He sat himself down, thinking, What brand of crazy bastard are you? Thinking this because he’d had a new idea. Bark clawed through his damp shirt. His feet were a long way from his head. The darkness curled. His stomach churned as in years past, gurgled like some small choking creature stuck inside him. He massaged the trapped beast with frightened probing fingers. It was as if he could feel the resurgent cancer, a meaty sponge or coral reef of flesh in his gut, wet yet firm, pliable, as he imagined, and he knew this was it. He knew his having hidden from Sarah the new acidic ache in his belly probably amounted to a prideful death sentence. She’d have helped him, might even have been able to save him one more time, but Kip didn’t want to return to the Hill. Souring body and undimmed pride made for the worst combination, he thought, while quietly vomiting under Delfino’s tree. Oh well, yes, he’d been through this onerous drill a few times down at Pajarito recently, mornings and evenings behind the fieldhouse, and saw that the urp was bloodied. What’re you gonna do, sue God? Stand down, Captain. God and all his blessed saints never got along with Satan and all his devils, but they concurred on one absolute verity—at the end of the day, every man and woman and child was articled to wind up like this, first on the ground, then under it. At least he’d managed to conceal his resurrected affliction from those who loved him healthy.

Delfino called him in for supper and Kip gathered himself at the bole of the tree, climbed to his feet, mussed the trivial liquid into the earth, wiped his lips with the sleeve of his work shirt, and joined his host in the bungalow. Had Delfino looked over at the face of his companion and confidant, he might have fainted dead away himself at the sight of the apparition with whom he dined. But he didn’t. They ate, the percussive measure of forks and knives on enameled tin plates telling less about hunger than their abstracted reserve. Kip broke the spell, such as it was, with a question about whether they were going in tomorrow or the day after?

“Tomorrow we get the horses, the perishables, check out all the gear in the garage. We rest a little, then leave at sundown. Best do the trip in the dark.”

“How long does it take to get there?”

“Overnight should do it. Pull in Sunday morning when they’re most likely least staffed. That’s my best guess, anyhow.”

“What about on foot?”

“Why you ask?”

“In case there’s any problem with the horses.”

“Well, we could get in by foot from the road that runs east to west up along the north end of the basin. But we might get caught. Lot of towers over that way. Pretty secured, I think. But if we come in along the edge of the lava flow, nobody’ll be watching because nobody’d bother to try penetrating through there.”