Ariel's Crossing (33 page)

“Such as it is to paint,” Marcos said, trying but failing to lighten the edgy, somber mood.

Carl said, “I wouldn’t worry. Delfino’s been visiting from out of town these past couple days, and him and Kip hit it off, so like I say, I’d bet they’re out somewhere getting happy.”

“Maybe I’ll take you up on that offer to drop me back at the Hill tonight, if it isn’t too much trouble,” Ariel said at last. Sarah persuaded her to have a quick bite with them before Marcos drove her home. As Ariel sat and ate with the Montoyas and Franny, she imagined Kip doing the same these past years. Noticing how Marcos glared across at Franny, who kept her eyes on anyone else at the table but him, she said, “It probably wasn’t the best idea for me to drop in on him like this anyway. Tomorrow I can drive back down after I’ve spoken with him on the phone. Make sure he really wants
to
meet me.”

“Of course he does,” said Sarah.

Marcos carried his plate into the kitchen after Ariel turned to Franny and said, “I apologize for barging in on you.”

“What’s more important than finding a parent,” Mary asked in an answering voice.

“Finding yourself, I guess? “Ariel answered in an asking voice.

“Is there a difference?”

“I hope there is, put it that way.”

“Franny lost her father in the service,” Sarah said.

“I’m sorry.”

Mary suddenly left the room after offering her own regrets, confessing she wasn’t feeling well. Before she went, she, too, assured Ariel that Kip would be elated to meet his daughter. Marcos returned from the kitchen meaning to follow her, but decided not to, so sat again. He would later look back on that moment as defining, though hearing Mary’s car in the gravel drive might have clued him in then and there on the way things were going.

Within the course of that conflating hour, Kip coughed up blood on the same tree Delfino had once leaned against where the jackbottom loped, way back when, out behind the bungalow where Agnes’s widower was now fixing dinner for his guest; and Marcos discovered that Mary’s clothes were gone and the dresser drawers left ajar; and Ariel learned from that same Marcos—after they left Pajarito headed west toward Los Alamos but then, down at the intersection where Pojoaque ended and San Ildefonso began, veered downstate instead, past Santa Fe and Albuquerque and Belen—that they needed to catch up with Delfino and Kip Calder before the two men inaugurated another journey; and Carl and Sarah Montoya went to bed and slept, reckoning some of what was transpiring here, not suspecting most of the rest, but aware the sun was bound to rise within a matter of hours for worse or for better.

Nightfall continued to gather, though the sun ahead was still fiery in the cloud notches. They crossed through a dead grove of skeleton pistachio trees planted in hopeful rows and rode down through an acequia whose dried mud bed looked like a mass of broken plates. Illuminating twigs and the tracery of lifeless flowers with its fireworks as they made their way beyond the failed orchard, the bold clear hard dying sun also enkindled windows and metal roofs in the woeful hamlet of Willow Springs. Citron, marigold, clementine sang forth from glass shards and corrugated tin, all contrasted with the pale but deepening purple that settled over everything. To reach the confiscated property would take them all night. Delfino hoped to get there unaccosted, but didn’t presume they would. Why should they? While it ought to have been his face that glowed with the most faith, in fact it was Ariel’s. Maybe she was credulous, or good at ignoring her terror, or maybe her resolve simply ran so deep that she never considered the possibility they might not make it. Her dark eyes were now darker than the malpais that stretched ahead.

Once they rose up out of the shallow aqueduct, they passed by an abandoned morada, tumbledown and barren, its penitentes long dead and its wooden water tank buckled, sunken on timber knees as if in prayer for the souls of those who’d built it, wrongly certain it would hold up in such a cruel place as this. This holy house was now a place where young couples sometimes met to smoke, drink beer, make love in the litter of moonlight that glanced through chinks in its walls. Here the riders left the semblance of a road behind.

Westward again, having jogged north for a patch, they climbed a rise through a drift of stout cacti each crowned by dull red blooms that looked like perfumed skulls mortified by small spikes. Delfino turned to ascertain how much ground they’d covered. Willow Springs was about a mile behind already. Smoke from a chimney, or maybe from a barrel of trash on fire, lifted like a delicate finger to point at the first stars above. Ahead, a sundog flared so bright in the clouds that Ariel had to hold her palm up before her eyes. Noon at dusk, she thought. The world was like that here. Evening in one valley and daybreak the next valley over. Harsh drab scratchland here, a small lush oasis of stubborn life there, and beyond, pure white dunes or volcanic black or just plain gray desert ornamented by spindly cholla and saltbush like false rosemary. What would Jessica think, or Brice, or David, or anyone else who knew her? No one down here aside from these two men knew her right now, she realized. And they barely knew her, either. She’d had a few weeks of no one’s knowing her, or knowing more than some scant part of whoever she thought she was. Not that she could say she knew herself just now. Knowing thyself. Aristotle, old pal, was it even possible under the best of circumstances?

Pretty soon they would be entering the firing range. She felt weirdly exhilarated, oddly honored to be here, grateful for Marcos’s kindness toward her, his help in bridging her to Kip. Yet for all this nervous elation, the scene into which they were riding—with its dust-devil swale, its long mountains sinking into lavender shadow, its quills of radiance—didn’t seem real to her. Tularosa valley was vaster by far than any stretch of land she, or most anyone, had ever beheld. Mercuric spirit light seemed to pour down into the world with news of things to come. But here there was no virgin for a holy ghost to husband, nor any angels to descend on painted wings. This was a place angels would shun and spirits forgo. Martians might like it here. Or Beelzebub himself.

The crickets were ever-present, and sounded like miniature sleighbells a very long way from snow. A lean mottled mustang, then another, then seven more, wild horses speckled dirty white and brown, started from a gully. The riders watched them scatter and regroup.

“Wouldn’t mind trying one of them on for size,” Marcos said.

“They’d break you like a twig,” said his uncle.

Ariel found herself wondering whether this jostling ride might not cause a spontaneous miscarriage, a thought that made her feel odd, unhappy even. She was startled by how successful she’d been, these past days, at suppressing the pregnancy. Ignoring it, hoping it would pass? Not really; it flitted at the fringes of her consciousness. She’d been thinking about it, just not with her mind.

The three continued west. Heading along the farthest stretch of the lavaflow, they made their way toward its tip where they’d tack west through a nick in the mountains, between the fancifully named Hog Sup Spring and Moya, toward a box canyon nestled against the steep Oscura. This last had sheltered it from the famous blast that occurred a mere eight miles due west, on David McDonald’s ranch back in the forties.

More low hogbacks like granite swells thrust upward into the waning light. Under the hooves of their horses crunched the sweet gypsum that looked like baked sugar and smelled a little like it, too. Or warm frost on pinkbrown crockery. For more than an hour they didn’t speak. As the darkness deepened, the micaed sky grew closer, or seemed to, lending credence to Wernher von Braun’s dream that the postwar rockets he launched from this very valley would “pave a road to the stars.” A gentle wind whipped over the desert crust, warm then cool. At the travelers’ backs the Sacramentos and last lights of Carrizozo sank into the gloom, and ahead, too, the night took up residence. Full moon rose.

With her free hand, Ariel snapped up her jacket. Where was Kip in all this? He’d been caught off base before. Trained as an insurgent, he’d surely been downed behind enemy lines and in places so dark—in spookdom’s sense of the word—that knowing your ass from a hole in the ground made less than no difference to the elements or the adversary. She glanced around, having heard an unfamiliar noise—though none of these noises was familiar—and, being startled, wanted to identify its source.

Nothing there, nothing. She pulled a deep breath through her nostrils, threw her head back on her shoulders, and exhaled upward through pursed lips. An old trick of hers to exorcise fear. She wondered how Granna was faring, hoped she wasn’t worried or angry. She wished she could have called from the bungalow but could no more risk telling Granna where she was than Marcos could Sarah. Were Brice and Jessica on their way to Los Alamos? Inhale, exhale.

Composure provisionally regained, she faced forward as her horse walked, following at some distance now the packhorse whose tail whipped like a broken clock weight, Marcos having passed her. As her resolve returned she made faces in the dark, stuck her tongue out at the moon. Orion was up, her favorite constellation, still a little faint across the cold screen of heaven. Orion who always seemed the model of tenacity, never quite closing the permanent chasm that the earliest astronomers had set between him and his beloved Pleiades. Yet he never stopped trying, did he. Never despaired of catching up with the other stars. Arms raised high, legs striding, he marched his way across the black infinities each and every night. She’d learned to tell what time it was, when she was a girl, by the seasonal position of Orion out the farmhouse window. Another neat trick, and sometimes as useful as blowing her fears through pursed lips right back to where they came from.

That made her smile. Good Orion, his sword twinkled and girdle shimmered, still low in the sky. Kip, what are you really doing out here? Can’t you for once tackle your own war? Must you always run off to fight the next man’s?

Time passed in a fixed kind of way, passed without really moving forward. Ariel guessed it must be ten or eleven, though some few high clouds were still tinted by weird dusk hues, like a desert aurora borealis. She saw shadowy waves of grama grass and black hummocks of primeval rock, forms out on the desert floor that had for eons stood in the same spot, blind sentry guarding ruinous blind sentry, each under the constant watch of the equally blind frontier sun and cadaver-faced moon. They threatened no one, made no sound, yet she knew that whatever fears she’d felt were not unjustified. Not, as they say, just in her head. She made a double-click against the back of her teeth, gently dug heels into her horse, and caught up with Marcos, who asked, “You all right?”

She said yeah.

When he leaned forward to light a cigarette, she saw in his match-lit profile the same look of apprehension she sensed had begun to mark her own face. Had the curious effect of making her feel calmer. “Ride with me a while till it narrows up again,” he said.

The intruders were perhaps six, seven miles in before they caught sight of yellow headlamps to the south. You could see things a long way off in this flat if steppelike place, and it was hard to judge distances at night. The lights, however, were moving toward them.

Delf hushed his horse. His companions came up from behind and halted on either side. For long minutes they sat, fixed on the advancing bright-white eyes of the patrol truck.

“This is why I didn’t want you to come.”

“That them?” Marcos asked his uncle.

“Don’t see who else it would be.”

“Here we go, then,” said Marcos.

“I think you and your friend ought to just turn around and get back out of here while the getting is good.”

“No way.”

“Ariel?”

“Sorry, can’t.”

The rugged plain before them was a patchwork of prickly pear, of lechuguilla and razory greasewood. Crosscut by abrupt cuestas, sudden deep gulches, berserk cracks in the pathless earth, it was tough enough to negotiate on horseback and all but untraversable in a man-made vehicle. That much they had going for them, didn’t they? Still, the rangers probably had a thousand service roads carved out back here.

Delfino had often crossed this uncharted tract in the early days and was confident that they could make it in the dark without much difficulty so long as they weren’t goaded too far off course—in which case they’d never arrive in time to secure Dripping Spring before dawn, square away horses and supplies, paint their signs, and be ready for the delegation that would soon show up, angry and very armed.

The packhorse snorted, unnerved by the lull. The lights sometimes disappeared, then reappeared, like some lidded beast blinking. Ariel asked why they kept turning off their lights.

“They’re not. Just dropping into arroyos, coming back out.”

More minutes. The lights were distinct now one from the other, and less yellow, more white. One vehicle only; the proximity of the headlamps, high on mounts, it seemed, like plowlights, suggested a Hummer. Two men, five at the most.

“How far off are they?”

“Few miles.”

“They’re coming pretty fast.”

Delfino watched.

“They know we’re here.”

“Why shouldn’t they,” he said. “We still haven’t broken any law. Just night riders rambling.”

Ariel had questions but didn’t ask them.

“Okay,” Delfino reflected. “Let’s cut back. I got an idea.”

They retraced their trail several hundred yards, then several hundred more. Ahead, a meteorite stabbed the sky with its silver needle. Alluvial aprons fanned down from the Oscuras into this higher topography, and the three of them soon reached what was a periodic streambed. From there they drove the horses northwest to a hard rise like a curved step that marked the edge of the malpais. Lavastone glistened under the light of the moon, as if damp with dewy crystals.

“We’ll cross through here. This’s the narrowest part of the lava field.”

“Hold on, hold everything.”

Delfino waited for his nephew to continue.

“We’d never get through here in the daytime, let alone now.”