Ariel's Crossing (32 page)

—Get, go on! Kip shouted, running ahead of Brice.

Kip’s friend remained reluctant to participate. Over a peanut butter and chokeberry jam sandwich, he’d asked his mother about those heads over at the lodge, and how they stuffed them.

—Why do you ask?

—No reason.

—What’re you boys up to? she’d answered before going on to explain that taxidermy was a science, even an art. It was something for people who’d gone to school to study how to do it. Preemptive strike, she thought.

He more or less repeated these words now to Kip, who stood over the buck, having thrown a length of rope and the scavenged plywood on the ground beside it.

—You told your mother, didn’t you, Kip said.

—No.

An endless quarter of an hour passed from the time Kip took the hacksaw to a point midway down the length of the neck—Brice held up the buck’s heavy head while staring away at the canyon cliffs, at clouds, at anything that might distract him from Kip’s dissection—to a moment when the head separated from the body. Kip tied a knot around the base of the antler rack and hung it as high as he could in the scorched ponderosa.

Once they’d finished, Kip asked Brice, —You sick? You’re white as dried spit.

Brice said, —And you’re soaked red with blood.

After Kip got caught climbing through his bedroom window that night, he found himself marching down into Bayo Canyon for a third time, though now with flashlights and accompanied not by Brice but his father, who was livid. The apparition of the buck head swaying helplessly in the warm nocturnal breezes was startling even to Kip. Its eyes were blanker than before, if that was possible. The poor thing looked deader than when he’d decapitated it. His father made him bury the buck in the sandy canyon. Kip dug for most of the night to make the hole. After he finished, as father and son were hiking back out of the canyon in light morning rain, his old man uncorked that line about every animal’s death bearing the promise of one’s own. A week passed before he and Brice were allowed to see each other again, and when they finally did, Kip offered up the saying as if it were his own formulation. They were sitting on the front stoop of Brice’s house.

—I’d have helped you dig the grave if my parents let me, you know. I guess your dad wanted you to do it yourself.

—Well, I didn’t need nobody’s help. I got it done on my own.

—It wasn’t a very good idea in the first place.

—You’re wrong. It was a great idea.

—What was so great about it? I still think people shouldn’t have dead animals hung on their walls.

—They should. Everybody should.

—I don’t get you, boy.

—I guess it’s over your head.

—What’s over my head?

—Besides the sky?

Brice laughed, but Kip didn’t, so Brice stopped.

It was then that Kip intoned, in a voice more or less replicating the pastor’s at Los Alamos’s interdenominational chapel, —The death of every creature is the promise of your own. That’s why I wanted to put that buck on the wall, boy. To help us remember.

—Don’t call me boy, shouted Brice.

—Remember it, boy, Kip said, though now he himself remembered the thought and its narrative, as he sat under a scorching sun that dazzled and punished all beneath it save for this gemsbok, dead on the desert floor, which reminded him of the buck they’d once found in Bayo. Kip had repeated his father’s words then as a kind of threat, but today they returned to him with their original import.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the present carcass, and perhaps to the one upon which he’d visited such indignity way back. Wagner always liked that story, commended his father for both his method of atonement and the plainspoken philosophy of coda.

What Brice and Kip had discovered, though they hadn’t had the knowledge to discern it then, was far more sinister than a hairless patch on a buck’s haunch, down there in the canyon where Project waste was laid to rest in thousands of unmarked shallow sepulchers, and where its authors’ wilder children played their private games. This oryx gazelle was half bald itself, but surely any connection between it and that dead buck lay exclusively in Kip’s imagination, as he, like it, was little more than a footnote in the history of restricted-entry installations.

Kip didn’t really want to touch the hollowed shell of this antelope-like creature, but he found it impossible not to. He laid his hand, palm open and quaking before it settled, on the smooth hide so beautiful as to be otherworldly and uttered a helpless petition for all those who find themselves in a place where they do not belong. For Kip knew that he—like this descendant of the original herd shipped by the government out here in the late sixties, from the Kalahari in Africa for the eventual enjoyment of servicemen who got a bang out of hunting exotics—did not belong. Nor did he want to belong, though like the gemsbok he had tried, with notably less success. He pulled out the compass he’d borrowed, or rather stolen, from Delfino, and took a reading. The gemsbok’s foreleg happened to be pointed toward magnetic north, and Kip put this small serendipity to use, spreading his map of the Tularosa basin and Jornada del Muerto—of White Sands Missile Range,
Whiz-mer,
the locals called it—on a patch of splintered bedrock between them.

He’d not come as far as he might have hoped. His sense of position was primitive, as he didn’t know the area, but from what he could glean, keying off what must be North Oscura Peak due west, peering over the sunken barrel of furred ribs, his hike would take at least another long day.

Sickness came in waves, but he knew he could do it. He’d been in tough places before and got the job done. Besides, he did belong here. He was right where he belonged.

Accustomed to being Franny, Mary was going to miss her. But Franny Johnson was abolished now, kicked like the bad habit she’d become. Lying in bed in Santa Fe, Mary watched a spider spin a corner web. Her accidental confession to Marcos—that Franny was a stitched fabric of deceit meant to cloak an unhappy childhood and dress up the admittedly fading dream of starstruck adolescence—hadn’t gone the way she might have wanted. Indeed, yesterday’s admission had played out the reverse of how she envisioned it. She hoped that surely Marcos would understand how a screwed-up youth could have led her to such desperate measures. Yes, okay, she lied in the beginning to protect herself, and continued with the ruse because she was afraid. But Marcos would sympathize and forgive, she brought herself to believe. With Kip’s fieldhouse finished, and summer at its end, conclusions were in the air. All she meant to bring to a close was her fictitious self, not every single factual thing around her.

Instead, safe to say, Marcos quietly flipped out. Less safe to assume that Mary herself felt inchoate jealousy, or rivalry, or some undefined anxiety toward Ariel, who left with him abruptly on the same night their lives collided. First laying eyes on Ariel ranging tall behind Sarah at the opened door of Marcos’s room, Mary was struck by the thought that here was a woman whom Franny, some real Franny with realizable instead of unfounded dreams, might look like. A fine, haunted face conveying all the paradoxes of stardom. And as Ariel’s story unfolded, the four of them having moved from the room to the
portal
outside, in the evening air so rich with calm that Mary only wished it might envelop them and wash away all these human crises, her sense that Ariel was a preeminent Franny had the effect of further discouraging her. Ironic, given that Mary wanted to renounce Franny anyway.

The confluences were crazy. Like the made-up Franny, Ariel had been raised back east. Like Franny, Ariel had an educated mother and an absent father. Like the Franny invented in Santa Fe, the persona that Mary had presented to Marcos back in those early months when they first started seeing each other, this Ariel appeared to be determined rather than disoriented. She seemed possessed of a will to know things—though rather than wanting to learn how to ride, or about the artificial insemination of horses, or about how life worked on a pueblo ranch, Ariel was motivated by the dramatic heft of a true tale, starring a father who abandoned everything, thereafter to wander the world. By her very inflections and gestures, Ariel seemed to shine with the earthy elegance that Mary had tried always to inspire in Franny. Standing in the umbra, Mary listened, wilting, as Kip, whom she’d adopted as a surrogate father, was now being taken away from her, too, usurped by his true daughter. She bit her lip, knowing there was nothing she could do to alter what was unfolding before her.

“Franny, you okay?” Sarah’s aside had gone nearly unnoticed as Ariel asked Marcos where Kip’s daily routine might have taken him, since she and Sarah hadn’t found him down at the fieldhouse.

Mary offered Sarah a tenuous nod.

“I’m not sure,” Marcos told Ariel, buying himself some time, he supposed, until he could figure out what next to do. It dawned on him how shockingly easy it was to fabricate a lie right here, cool as the proverbial cucumber, in front of his mother. “Did you look around the paddocks and barn? Might be helping Carl.”

“Why don’t you walk Ariel down there and see,” Sarah said.

Too much pulling him in too many directions. He instinctively looked at Franny—no,
Mary
—who said, “We can finish our talk later if you want.”

“Okay, then. Later, Franny,” thinking
Franny?
—how effortlessly these small deceits multiplied—as he walked alongside Ariel across the yard beyond which the stable lights burned. But to gather so many lies that you create a whole new person out of them?

Ariel was saying something. “Did he ever mention to you that he had a daughter?”

“Kip? Yes, he did, but made it sound like you would never want to have anything to do with him.”

“He said that?”

“Not in so many words, maybe. Just my impression.”

“That’s sad,” she said.

“He might’ve felt sad, but if he did he never let it show. He seemed to think you were within your rights not to bother with him.”

“God, I hope he doesn’t hate me.”

Where the hell was everybody? “Carl?” Marcos shouted down the long corridor as the scoria crunched familiarly underfoot. “Maybe they’re in the east field. I know it needed irrigating,” he assured Ariel, uncertain whether Carl was there or not, but beginning to wonder whether his promise to Delfino might not be outweighed by Ariel’s ambition of finding her father. What if his uncle and Kip were arrested on White Sands, what if they got killed, inadvertently or otherwise? What if they both disappeared without a trace—a remote possibility, but who knew? People are good at keeping secrets, and governments are better, but the military keep secrets at all costs, from friend and foe alike. Even a professional spook like Kip might well change direction if he knew his daughter was here, rather than risk becoming the genesis of some official denial, some motley mystery. Say something, ask her something. “How’d you find out he was your father?”

“He wrote me asking my forgiveness,” she said. “But I’m the one who needs to be forgiven.”

“How’s that?”

“I knew he was sick and I didn’t come. Funny, I always thought of myself as a principled person, but what good are principles when you fail to act on such a basic instinct as loving your father? It’s a miracle, really, that I have a chance to set things right.”

Marcos listened, undistracted despite his turmoil. Ariel’s words settled him at once on the question of whether to confide in her.

“Marcos?” Carl was out here after all. His voice was quiet, though he shouted, and his black silhouette stood distant against the field whose borders were erased by late twilight.

“Yey.”

“Watch out, it’s mucky.”

“Carl, where’s Kip?”

“What boots you got on?”

“Carl, listen. Where’s Kip?”

“I was gonna ask you, damn it. I could’ve used his help this afternoon. What boots you got on?”

Ariel hovered at Marcos’s side in the closing darkness. The round moon had risen into wispy clouds that looked like they’d been combed. White hair gathered up with a luminescent barrette. Its light sparkled like cultured pearls on the flat flooded field. Now Marcos and Ariel could hear water trickling across the hard ground. They ventured out closer toward Carl’s far-off flashlight which shone in their direction.

“Not the right ones for irrigating.”

“Come help me anyway, you mind?”

“Carl, there’s someone here. It’s important. Kip’s daughter’s come to see him.”

“What? Look, I’m almost done, just got to close off the feed ditches. He’s around somewhere.”

“This won’t take but a few minutes,” Marcos apologized. “Let me help him, then we’ll go find Kip.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, look, it’s all mud.”

Ariel did follow him into the blackness of the settling night, but after catching one of her boots in the deepening mire, she dropped back and watched them moving like shadow pantomime figures a hundred yards upslope toward the far top of the enclosure. Water gurgled around her where she stood, as if the earth itself were murmuring some garbled message. So, tell me what it is you want to say, she thought. Nothing but burbles. Old baby earth. She laughed silently, sadly. Something was wrong. He wasn’t here. Marcos knew it, she could tell. The planet itself was trying to clue her in. And that girl Franny looked like she’d just witnessed a murder.

“So you say you’re Kip Calder’s kid?” Carl shook her hand, having walked with Marcos back to where she waited.

“He says he’s my dad.”

Their faces were illuminated by flashlights.

“Good man, your father. Let’s go find him.”

They searched Rancho Pajarito for Kip and Delfino both, Marcos feeling rotten for putting his parents and Ariel through all these unnecessary paces. More than once he reasoned himself into blurting out what he knew, but a remembrance of Kip’s resolute handshake and his uncle’s proud farewell embrace compelled him to go on with his absurd performance.

When Carl finally saw that Delfino’s truck was missing, he made the correct assumption they’d gone off together. “Old coots are probably over in Española painting the town,” he encouraged Ariel.