Ariel's Crossing (35 page)

There was a time in Vientiane, after the West considered the war over and done with, when Wagner and Kip had this bicycle repair shop that served as a clandestine front to help Hmong out of Laos and over into Thailand. A matter of moving them from shithole to ratnest, as Wagner put it. Both men knew it was not healthy to develop a fondness for any of their entrusted wards, given the mission’s uneven success rate—the Mekong was a greedy river—and the absolute necessity that Wagner and Kip appear in the eyes of the Pathet Lao to be nonpartisan. Word of a capsized dugout, perhaps overloaded with Lao Sung desperate to get back to Tibet or North Myanmar, not realizing that the Communists would no more welcome them home than tolerate their Buddhism in the new Laos, naturally threw the estranged Ravens into miserable depression. Putting on a brave face, a countenance of ignorance or indifference, only made the job more trying. But imagine if one of the drowned had been, well, the object of an affection. No need to risk double disheartenments when so many individual failures came their way.

Wagner, not Kip, broke the rule once. A woman from Ban Huay Sai who had traveled with her family to Luang Prabang, where he first met her, then down to a safehouse outside the capital. She spoke French and was neither young nor pretty by any orthodox criteria. Her family was huge. Many cousins, many aunts and uncles, many sisters, though no brother. They were diverse in their religious beliefs, which was pretty unusual. Animists mixing with Buddhists and Christians. She told Kip, during the New Year celebration in April, that in her family they were always observing some holy day or other. —
Toujours les Saints, toujours Dieux! A chaque saint sa chandelle!

A midnight Pathet Lao patrol intercepted their precarious raft just shy of the Thai border. It was July, middle of the wet season. Black low monsoon sky, no stars, and the river running high and inky. Some of the refugees jumped overboard in a panic to escape being towed back to Laos, where they would be sent north to a reeducation camp, never to be seen again. Some were summarily shot. A few were repatriated, Wagner’s friend among them.

Neither Wagner nor Kip ever saw her again. She went the way of King Savangvathana and all his beloved family, banished into oblivion after the Congress of People’s Representatives decided he best abdicate his ridiculous throne so Laos could become a land of the proletariat, the peasant. When, years later, Wagner himself was disappeared, Kip wondered if he hadn’t pushed the Pathet government into it, hoping he’d land in the same camp as she.

Kip would never know, would he. But Wagner would be honored to be remembered, just here and now, out in a desert he’d only read about and never suffered in, as such.

—When you’re not sure what you’re doing, but you’re sure that what you’re doing must be done, then you’re thinking with your blood, my man, and thus your heart.

His brother Wagner would be proud that Kip remembered all this with clarity. So would his daughter, Ariel. After all, Kip was blood thinking of blood.

Now get on with it, soldier. Down the road.

The voice on the phone was Sarah’s, but was not the same nurturing voice Mary was accustomed to hearing. “Franny, I want you to come out to Nambé right now, or else I’m coming to Santa Fe.”

Three in the morning. Not like Sarah, either. But nothing had been routine these last twenty-four hours. After leaving the ranch, she spent that night and the following day in hiding. Her only contact with the world was a call from Marcos, on the road to Tularosa with Ariel, reconfirming her promise to keep Delfino’s secret. The documents he’d given her during their awful discussion constituted nothing less than a paper time bomb whose fuse could not be lit until the end of this not-yet-dawning day. Mary owed Marcos that much. Delfino’s letter and all it meant had to be kept hidden for just a little while longer, and then she’d be free of every Montoya responsibility, whether she liked it or not.

“What’s happened?” she asked, innocently as she could.

“Where’s Marcos?”

“I—”

“Is he there?”

“He was,” she lied.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.” She was grateful to be able to offer a half truth.

“You know what’s happened, and I’d like to know, too.”

“What makes you think—”

“You’ve never lied to me before, Franny, have you?”

Mary mumbled no.

“Don’t let me down now.”

“I’ll come out right away,” Mary said, and hung up before Sarah had the chance to say anything further.

A halogen burned at the far end of the long Pajarito driveway, down by the kitchen door. Mary’d driven with the windows open to the biting dry-damp desert air, negotiating the curves along the dusty potholed pueblo road with an abandon that reminded her she was losing control—no, had lost it completely. Sometimes the truth sets you too free.

She made an effort to straighten herself up, appear at least a little calm before entering. The kitchen window was aglow, and she easily imagined Sarah sitting on the banco drinking black coffee, which was how she found her.

Sarah saw her ashen face and reddened eyes but didn’t hesitate before asking, “Where are they?”

“Who?”

Silence.

“All of them. Tell me anything.”

“Where’s Carl?” asked Mary, faltering yet by the door.

“Asleep in bed. Now I’ve answered you, you answer me.”

“I’m not supposed to say until tomorrow.”

Sarah glanced up at the wall clock. “It’s tomorrow.”

“I promised them,” Mary shook her head. A further silence, then she said quickly, as if by compacting her words she could make them somehow less real, “Delfino and Kip went to Tularosa. And Marcos went down there after them.”

“Ariel, too?”

“I think so.”

“What for? Why the exodus?”

“Something to do with Delfino’s old ranch?”

“Are you asking me or telling?”

“I don’t know.” Mary thought, I’m a fraudulent person telling an honest person a mistruth. Great, just great.

“Come on, Franny. What’s going on? Not that I don’t think I already know.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said.

A truly complicated look plagued Sarah’s face. Mary thought she’d never seen Marcos’s mother quite this old. Beautiful wrinkled face, weathered eyes. If she and Marcos ever had a daughter—and they never would—she might have looked a little like this in sixty years.

“I just, I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that. I mean, you called me up in the middle of the night and I came right out.”

Sarah waited.

“They’re going to Delfino’s old ranch, Kip and Delfino are.”

“No.”

“Marcos and Ariel went after them to talk them out of it,” and she began to cry, the last thing on this earth she wanted to do.

Worst fears confirmed, Sarah rose, walked to the telephone and dialed Delfino. Nine rings, ten, twelve; no answer. Replacing the handset on the wall phone, she turned toward the young woman and wondered if the right moment hadn’t arrived to let her in on the fact that she more or less knew who she was, had known her identity for days. Clifford was the one who had first posed the problem. Mad Clifford, who continued to ask Sarah when Mary was coming again to visit.

“Who do you think Mary really is, Clifford?” Sarah had asked.

“Why, she’s my nice niece.”

“That was good of her to visit you that time, wasn’t it?”

“Very good of her. Very nice.”

“You remember when you first came here?”

“No,” he said, empty-eyed.

“Me either. You’ve been here a while, haven’t you.”

“Long time.”

After asking Clifford if he was sure Mary was his niece, she returned to her office and pulled up his records on the computer. Nearest of kin: Russell Carpenter, brother. Home confirmed as Gallup.

Sarah had spoken with the girl’s mother not long after Franny and Marcos climbed Tsankawi. Rebecca Carpenter wanted to know where Mary was, whether she was all right, how Sarah had discovered her whereabouts, when could she see her daughter? But while Sarah answered as many questions as she thought was appropriate, she did refuse to provide any address or phone number. At the time it felt deviant, this resolve to side with Mary even as she persisted agilely with her fake identity and Franny persona. But as Sarah told Mrs. Carpenter, not knowing whether she was breaking some law by doing so, “It’ll be Mary’s decision when she wants to tell me who she is, just as it seems to me it’s her decision to be in touch with you. She’s fine, but she’s got to work this out for herself.”

Sarah asked Mary now, “Why did you run away from home?”

“Where’d you get the idea that I ran away from home?”

Sarah thought, Go forward. “Because your mother told me.”

“My mother?”

“You act as if you forgot you had one.”

“I mean, she’s not that easy to find.”

“Being such a busy mathematician and all.”

Mary said nothing.

“I don’t think it adds up, speaking of math. Do you?”

She knew that Sarah knew, though she softly answered, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“Funny how sometimes when you’re completely certain you understand another person, it’s just exactly the moment when you’ve totally got them wrong. That ever happen to you?”

Mary knew it was now merely a question of how, rather than if or when, to concede the charade. Hers was a tired burden and Sarah might be the last counsel left among her dwindling acquaintance. With a last gasp of false innocence, she asked, “What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is you’re probably going to find that the way back to yourself might be a little more treacherous than simply telling the truth.”

“I’m lost,” she said, honestly.

“I know, Mary.”

Mary sat down on the tile floor, her back against the cool adobe wall. Sarah came over and sat next to her, put an arm over her shoulder. “You must’ve had good reason to do what you did, Mary.”

“I’m not used to being called that.”

“Nobody’s going to call you Franny anymore, not in this house, anyway.”

“Does Carl know?”

“Not if you haven’t told him.”

“I hope he’ll be able to forgive me.”

“He’ll forgive you because that’s his way. Whether he’ll understand you is another question. But what he needs to know first is where his brother and son are, and so do I.”

Mary drew Delfino s letter and will from her back pocket and gave them to Sarah, who read them with mixed feelings of dread and pride.

Silver above, black below. Never had she been devoured so fully by moonlight. The near world swarmed with sounds. Horseshoe iron scraped and hammered the tuff. Eerie deep whimpers surged from her unsteady horse. The music of a coyote, sharp bluesy bark. Her own breathing gnarled by the taste of sulfur and roses in her mouth.

Deadened by the porous terrain, Delfino’s voice up ahead called out, “You with me?”

“Right here,” Ariel answered, and a few lengths behind her came Marcos’s voice, “With you.” Audio guide ropes.

Her back ached, her shoulders were stiff, the insides of her thighs chafed against the saddle. She’d learned to ride as a girl in the upstate mountains along the Delaware—toy hills compared with the colossi here—but this was no bridle path, nor her mount the serene saddle horse she’d grown up with. Under her, instead, was a heavy ranch horse of impulsive spirit who kept her working hard with its sidelong tugs against the bridle and sudden shifts.

They faltered up short and long terraces, down pleats and hollows, stumbling across the valley of extinct firestone. Only a thousand years ago Little Black Peak erupted, flooding this plain, burying Indian fields with blistering magma that eventually cooled into this petrified lode. She wondered how many humans had ever traversed it. Not many. A few traders, settlers. Some lunatics, outlaws, maybe an escapee.

And what was she? Another lunatic escapee? Maybe so. An outlaw? By morning, yes, she’d be considered by some an outlaw.

All she could do was press forward, no turning back. She was reminded of Alice’s free fall
down, down, down
the rabbit hole. How Alice, plummeting through the pitch-black shaft, tried to glimpse where she was going but could see nothing in the impenetrable dark.
Ariel in Wonderland.

A freight train, bound from El Paso up past Vaughn and beyond, moaned behind them on the flats. The clacking of many wheels on the rails played distinct rhythms, and she listened with a detachment that made her realize just how otherworldly her own fall had become. She shook her head. Closed then opened her eyes, closed them again. That was curious, or
curioser.
What she saw when she closed her eyes was much the same as when they were open. Centipedes of light, pale white phosphenes, flickered like shooting stars.

It was frightening to think of Kip out here alone. Although he’d taken one of Delfino’s guns, he neglected to bring along any ammunition. And what in the world had made him think Delfino Montoya would follow his advice to stay home? Kip was, as far as she could make out his pattern, drawn away from others toward an ultimate solitude, a final absence. No compelling argument could contradict this assessment. When all was said and done, despite Kip’s confessing yet promising letter in the ledger she carried in her pack, wasn’t Ariel just one more of the various others he’d left behind in the course of his continual wandering?

When the last reaches of the harsh malpais had given way to soft desert loam, they dismounted.

“That was the toughest patch,” Delfino said. “Smooth as peach fuzz from here on.”

“Why is it I don’t believe him?” Ariel asked Marcos.

“Because he’s lying.”

“Swear to god,” the man said with a laugh, pouring coffee from a thermos and handing out sandwiches in wax paper, which they unwrapped under a flashlight beam. “Was I lying when I told you I had a good idea about how to ditch them back—”

“Look at that,” Ariel interrupted.

“Man,” whispered Marcos.

Clusters of tiny topaz lights, not moving like those Hummer headlamps had been, but in stationary twinkling arrays, way down past the farthest edge of the lava field, on the plain between it and the black mountains. Installations, bunkers, maybe enclosed within electric fences or embraced by razor wire—hard to tell from this distance, even with the binoculars. Launching sites, it seemed, and domes housing cameras that recorded high-speed projectiles bulleting over the basin, in simulation of low-altitude warfare, to detonate some target, an abandoned tank truck or retired chopper they’d parked in a fire zone, there to be atomized. No wonder they didn’t want Delfino Montoya or any of the other evicted ranchers out here. Too bad. The three were back on their mounts within a quarter hour.