Ariel's Crossing (39 page)

Telling the family of a death never got easier, Sarah reflected after hanging up. You offered the astringent words—
Your father has died; Your mother passed away this morning; Yes, it’s about your sister, I’m afraid she took a turn during the night
—and then your words came back to mock you.
The news isn’t good.
How obtuse, how off kilter.

Yet this wasn’t the moment for self-criticism. Getting in touch with Marcos, and through him with Ariel, became paramount. Mary drove Sarah back to Pajarito under an implausibly blue sky, the radiance of which Bonnie’s mother, Sarah’s charge, and Mary’s very brief acquaintance would have laughingly celebrated with a chalice of gin and a pull on her cracked clay pipe.
Shalom,
she’d have said.
Adíos,
Amen.

Ariel and Marcos returned to find Delfino making supper. The smell of cooking mingled with the desert perfume of his faithworthy patch of land, raising memories of Agnes here. After a simple meal under the stars, the three busied themselves with cleaning the casita by candlelight. The room sashayed with shadows and quivered whenever a taper flame was brushed by a sudden small breeze. Powdery dust filled the chamber, catching the light and monochromatizing the air. It made Ariel feel as if she were in some vintage movie.
High Midnight,
maybe.

“I’m beginning to feel like this is my new occupation, fixing up abandoned houses,” Marcos said, breaking the silence.

“The fieldhouse in Nambé was abandoned. This here wasn’t.”

Marcos shrugged off his missed shot at levity. To Ariel he said, “So what is it?”

“What is what?”

“Your favorite color.”

“Paisley,” she said.

“Come on.”

“Really, I like them all.”

“That’s cheating.”

“But it’s the truth. Truth isn’t cheating.”

They worked on, taking occasional breaks to step outside and listen to the night. Nothing stirred other than the occasional waterfall of wind down a stone crevasse.

An hour later they stopped. Although it was colder this night than last, the dust they had raised in the sala sent them back outdoors coughing, and they collected around a fresh-stoked bristling fire, sitting in their makeshift bedrolls. Ariel listened to Delfino muse while Marcos drifted off to sleep by the flames that flickered across the old man’s eyes. For her it was a way of pushing back the dilemmas she would soon have to face. David more distant than ever. Her pregnancy so speculative that the fetus might as well be residing in another womb. Yet with every passing day it took greater hold of her, whether or not she willed it out of mind. At what moment had it graduated from blissfully undifferentiated tissue, from the androgynous, to take on female or male characteristics? Would it be a girl or boy? Would she or he have brown eyes at birth, rare in babies but not without precedent, given that Ariel herself had been born with them? Jessica had told her that at the hospital they’d tickled her toes when she was asleep, just to wake her up so they could marvel at those brown eyes. Please stop it, she thought, and said “Really?” to Delfino, not knowing what he’d been saying these past fleeting moments.

“This land here,” he said, bringing her back into his purview, “was always a land rich in argument, if nothing else. You might not be able to get a good crop, a strike of gold, a drink of cold water, but you could always get yourself a good fight, goddamn guaranteed.”

He spoke of this century, the last century, the century before. Fighting and warring made up the history of most populated scraps of land in this fighting earth. Take this particular stretch of gypsum sand and dead playas and craggy lavabeds and broiling summers—you’d think there wasn’t much point fighting over such a desolation. But people have come here from kinder places than this, and what for if not to fight. “You know what pyrite is?”

“Fool’s gold?”

“Iron disulfide, fool’s gold. In the seventeen nineties some idiot French priest comes into this valley and what does he do but turn himself into a gold miner. Lost Padre, they called his strike. The fact nobody ever found either him or his mine never stopped people from killing each other trying.”

What they were doing here had been done before. That was on the other side of Little Burro, Lady Bug, Skillet Nob.

A woman named Mary McDonald and her uncle Dan had gone into the range without permission, from up off Route 380. Got all the way in to their ranch, quite near Trinity Site itself—a ranch that had once been the homestead of Mary’s father, Dan’s brother George, himself a briery ranchman. What nettled the authorities was that Mary and Dan managed to settle into the old place for a good three days before they were discovered trespassing. Niece and uncle had built a fence around the house and when the rangers showed up to escort them out, Uncle Dan brandished his shotgun and Mary sighted down her thirty-thirty rifle and told them to stand away. As fate would have it, one of the guards had unsuccessfully courted Mary back when they were in high school.

In the calmest voice he could summon, he said, —Come on, Mary, now put that gun down.

—Stand back, she says.

—Well, I’m here to take you two back home.

—We
are
home, was what Mary said.

—Aw, be reasonable. You know you can’t stay out here.

—We’re staying, says Mary and raises her rifle and trains it right in his eye.

—Now Mary, you know you wouldn’t shoot me. We go back too far.

—Step past that fence, you’ll find out how far back you go.

“That’s a good story,” Ariel said, seeing that Delfino had paused to think. “What happened to them?”

“Well, they got talked into leaving. Told their case would get A-One priority consideration in Washington. Surrendered their guns and left the way they’d come. They probably had their suspicions it’d be the last they’d ever see of the place, but their hopes were raised just high enough so they left figuring they’d won the battle and maybe were on their way toward, well, not winning the war, maybe, but at least reaching some kind of peace treaty. An agreement they could live with.”

“And?”

“Both of them are dead now. One of cancer, one of heartbreak. Government still owns their land. Squatters with the biggest guns on earth.”

Delfino sat for a while, watching the fire dance. Then spoke again.

“The best was old John Prather, though. Gave the feds conniption fits. His place was down south, below the Sacramentos. Scrappy land, couple dozen thousand acres of it between what he’d been deeded and what he leased. Like a lot of cowmen down here, his people come over from Texas in the eighteen eighties and built something out of nothing. Less than nothing. Agnes always said Prather was kind of Egyptian, the way he managed rainwater. Dug long earth catch-sinks with nothing more than a team of horses and an iron follow-about plow. He dug a thousand-foot well while he was at it. Anybody out there thinks they know hard work can try that sometime. Let them try and make a living from raising desert cattle. Prather did.”

Delfino reminisced about how the United States district court in Albuquerque had, in October 1956, ruled in favor of the condemnation proceedings initiated against Prather by the army and ordered him to vacate his land by the end of March the following year. The government needed to annex his property for expansion of its missile testing and military training procedures. Prather wouldn’t budge. He told the army boys to bring in a coffin, said he’d rather die at home than become some tumbleweed blown around by their hot air.

His case had been of interest to Agnes and Delfino Montoya, to people like Hop Lee and cross John Harliss, to all the dispossessed ranchers in the area. Nike missiles were the future, not cows. It was a Cold War whose instruments of mitigating deterrence were being readied in the burning furnace of the Jornada and Tularosa deserts. Old Prather told them to come on over and shoot him. They offered him a couple hundred thousand bucks, plus he could keep his house if he didn’t mind living in a live-ammunition zone. Didn’t interest him. Some United States deputy marshals were sent in to coax him out, no luck. Held out to the bittersweet end.

“They finally killed him, then?”

“Course they did, but slow-like.”

“You mean—”

“Heart or cancer, I forget which.”

“You really admired him.”

“Admired, hell. I wish I
was
John Prather.”

Ariel lay forward in her bedroll to face the tapering fire. Her head was too warm, but her legs were cold, the blankets dampened from night dew. She sensed that by sometime the next day all this was bound to come to a head. The military police had to be onto them. If her augury about Kip’s being nearby proved wrong, then tomorrow would still bring a crisis, because she would have to leave Delfino to his own war, wouldn’t she? He would understand she had to go look for Kip, maniacal as it might sound. On the other hand, what’s a daughter if not someone who takes up the cause of her father? Especially a father who risked his life advocating. No, she’d stay put. Brice the advocate, Kip the advocator—sleep came over her in dark waves that washed these conflicted thoughts beneath them, even as Delfino told more stories.

Stories about how at a moment in history defined by communications, by digitalized and microprocessed interfacing, by information equals power, here where she and Marcos slept on the floor of the desert was a kind of human black hole, where the fracture between what was known within and what was known without couldn’t have been more complete. You could look over the long fence, but you wouldn’t see anything. And if you did happen to see something out there hovering above the white dunes, it would be incomprehensible to you, and if you tried to explain what you’d seen to others, they would shake their heads and question your sanity. Inside the base, they spoke the same language but kept what they knew to themselves. Stealth—just one of the many black appliances they tested under cover of night out there in their spacious playground—could not have been more aptly named.
Stealth
was the word, and the word was
stealth.
Sometimes you might notice a particular hue in the sunset over the mountains, and you couldn’t help but wonder if it was their doing, if they hadn’t got it in their heads to recolor the sun, maybe give the clouds a fluorescent shot in the arm. At night, you were awakened from your sleep by something as subtle as the faint odor of borax. You imagined them out there in a distant playa lakebed. You watched their latest secret flying machine afterburning impossible golds and pinks. Saw a fuselage incinerated and a wing twirlingly ascending moonward, after the pilot lost control and bailed out as a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of equipment plummeted to earth, the fiery spitball of covert hardware gone down in peacetime defeat. And nutty though they were, the theories about Roswell spacemen didn’t begin to cover the point spread. Little green men with pumas’ eyes might fly their saucers here, beaming up housewives and family pets, but they had nothing on local technologies. While you and everyone else slept, the real spacemen were at it. And in the morning, if the ore-of-boron odor had been dispelled by frolicsome breezes, you’d wonder whether the whole business hadn’t been just one more bad dream. There would be nothing to suggest otherwise. And soon you would forget the whole nightmare and carry on with your life, such as it was.

The freeway north was a hasty light show of shrill crimsons and strident whites. Lit billboards and roadside markers, the radio offering a Haydn quartet. Tankers, buses, long haulers, all the streaming cars—where on earth could so many souls be going at this hour, not yet midnight but late enough? Sleepy Albuquerque no more.

They had no idea where they would spend the night but felt giddy from the altitude, if not from the unordinary frisson of having dropped everything to do what had to be done. Normally they’d be asleep in bed by this hour, but tonight they couldn’t be more awake. Granted, Jessica had napped through the second leg of the flight. But Brice was wired, even euphoric. Everybody who meant anything to him was here, one way or the other. Duly acknowledged: All was not as he might have wished. Ariel had not been communicative. His mother’s condition worried him, as did his rapport, or lack thereof, with Bonnie Jean. Kip had, like a new moon, dropped into obscurity. Still, Brice felt optimistic, heartened to be with Jess in the old home state, Land of Disenchantment, as he teasingly called it from time to time. New York, rife with its own disenchantments, often swallowed them up with its reliable solicitude. The client lunch. The court appearance. The dinner with friends. The gym. The movie. The equity trade. The Sunday paper, itself a kind of immersion labor. It was good to be away, even under the circumstances.

“Did I ever tell you that the last time I was here I spent the night in Chimayó in the backseat of a borrowed car?”

“I hope you’re not proposing a repeat performance.”

“Seriously, I did.”

“What was the point? Revisiting your wild youth?”

“Hadn’t thought of it like that. But maybe you’re not wrong.”

“I love it when you put it that way,” she laughed, switching Haydn to rockabilly and turning up the volume. “Maybe possibly I might just be almost not totally incorrect.”

Brice changed the station back to Haydn. Albuquerque’s lights were left behind, and the hour of desert between them and Santa Fe intervened.

“Look. Sleeping in the backseat of a car, if you’re older than sixteen, smells a little like midlife crisis to me. Next thing you know you’re shopping for the red Porsche and the standard-issue twenty-something mistress.”

“This isn’t fair. I couldn’t find a place to spend the night, so I was forced to rough it.”

“Actually, it’s kind of sweet.”

“Sweet?”

“You heard me.”

When they rolled past Santa Fe and back into the darkness of the highway stretching through unpopulous pueblo terrain, the idea of reaching Los Alamos after midnight began to seem iffy. As the sign for Tesuque drew into view, Brice realized his allusion to sleeping in a car those few years ago had some relevance. Without warning, he took the turnoff, and when Jess asked what was up, he said, “I think we ought to go back and spend the night in Santa Fe. Rumor has it you prefer beds to backseats.”