Ariel's Crossing (46 page)

How to convey such an idea to her without undermining Russell was another story. Maybe some wounds never do mend.

“I’m so nervous,” she told Johnny, who was at the wheel.

“Who wouldn’t be. So am I.”

They first paid a call on Clifford, who had aged since last they saw him but seemed chipper this afternoon as he shuffled along the corridor. And he was downright ecstatic when they mentioned that they’d come also to visit Mary.

“She here now?” he asked, a broad toothy smile erupting across his white face. They hovered beside the aquarium.

“Not now,” his sister-in-law said. “But if she wants, we can bring her by tomorrow.”

“You do,” Clifford said, turning his attention back to the fish.

They checked into a motel in Los Alamos and telephoned Sarah Montoya at Pajarito. With Carl and Brice having left for Tularosa, she’d decided to let the center run itself for a few days, and taken up overseeing ranch matters until things got resolved downstate. Johnny told her, “We’re here, if Mary would still like to see us.”

The difficult delicacy of her role had never been more apparent. This collective upheaval was beginning to wear on her. She asked for their number at the motel and promised to pass it on to Mary.

“We’re only staying the night. So please let her know as soon as you can.”

“Your uncle Clifford is doing well, don’t you think?”

“It was good to see him,” Johnny said. “Tell Mary our fingers are crossed.”

Mary was sitting right there on the banco in the kitchen and heard Sarah’s half of the conversation.

“Here’s the number. Their fingers are crossed that you’ll call, your brother said.”

“Jim?”

“No, Johnny.”

“Johnny’s with my mother?”

Sarah nodded.

“Guess this is it, then.”

“Whatever kind of rapport you want with your family from here on out is up to you. Not that you haven’t held the key all along.”

Mary ran her hand over the back of her neck. Having made the decision to return the silver necklace Marcos had bought at San Felipe de Nerí for her twenty-first birthday—she’d placed it, with a note, in his dresser drawer, along with the other jewelry he’d given her—she nonetheless felt oddly naked in its absence. Unprotected somehow, exposed.

“Let me ask you a question, Mary. What’s to prevent you from trying to follow through on what you originally planned to do when you left Gallup?”

“I’m not good enough.”

“That’s not what Marcos says. You’re the best actor in that company, according to him.”

“No offense, but how would he know good acting from bad?”

“Franny Johnson wasn’t such a bad performance.”

“It couldn’t have been worse.”

“All I’m saying is, why not follow your dream, see what gives. You’re young, pretty, smart. Reconciling with Gallup might free you to go on. As it is, you’re not where you wanted to be.”

She didn’t speak.

“Marcos told me you suggested that the two of you try swimming in a larger pond than Nambé.”

“Los Angeles. He wasn’t interested.”

“Some people, I’d venture to guess most, don’t think in terms of small ponds versus big ones. Nothing wrong with believing either way. But you know it’s not how Marcos thinks.”

“He’s ambitious.”

“For his horses and family, yes. For you, too.”

“He’s going to be one of the best at what he does.”

“But for him it’s different. He doesn’t much care if anybody notices, whereas you have to. It’s fundamental to what you want to do.

Just because Marcos is the way he is doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take your own leap of faith in yourself.”

Sarah left the room to give Mary privacy as she placed her call to Los Alamos. Afterward, looking for her, Mary instead found Jessica out in the yard sitting beside a ruined fountain, a marble artifact of Spanish design that must have looked magnificent as an architectural centerpiece at the turn of the century, but now was something of a nostalgic eyesore. A salamander was gyrating along through its murk of standing water and brown leaves.

“Hello,” she said.

Jessica started.

“Didn’t mean to bother you, but have you seen Sarah?”

“No, Mary.”

“Would you mind telling her I’ve gone to meet my mother and brother, and that I said to thank her for everything?”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Good, then. It was nice to meet you.”

“Sounds like you’re not coming back.”

The salamander, a tiger common to the valley, reefed itself on a sandwich of floating leaves. A dragonfly settled on a nearby raft of Russian olive twigs.

“I don’t know if I am or not.”

“Mary, we’ve never spent a moment alone together and we don’t know each other, but I gather that you and Kip are pretty close. What’s he like?”

“Kip,” she said, watching the salamander briefly sun itself. “I can tell you he’s a gentleman and a good soul, because he is. And that he was always trying to steer me in right directions. But I don’t think anybody could sum him up. Another turn of the screw and he could have been a saint or maniac, there’s that kind of edge. I don’t know. I think he figured me out more than I ever did him.”

“I know the feeling.”

“He’s okay, right? They found him.”

“He’s going to be all right, apparently.”

“And Marcos and the others?”

“Still out there.”

Mary sighed. Like Bonnie’s lizard, their salamander vanished without leaving any evidence it had ever been nearby.

“Everything’s going to work out,” Jessica tried.

“I’m sure,” said Mary, turning to go. “You’ll tell Sarah.”

“Tell her what?”

“That I’ll be in touch,” and she left. Marcos’s mother watched her walk to her car, looking through the window in the greatroom, where the phone rang and, without preamble, Carl told her they were about to get to see Kip in the base hospital at Alamogordo. Reportedly he was dehydrated and burned worse than a bug under a magnifying glass and his feet were all fucked up, but otherwise he was good as gold.

“Why don’t they just go in and bring the other three out?”

“Seems Delfino’s armed. I’ll get back to you.”

Sarah joined Jessica by the fountain. “Keep meaning to clean this out, make it presentable, but it seems I never get the time.”

“I like it the way it is.”

“Just a tar pit. Probably find dinosaur bones in there if you looked hard enough.”

Jessica said, “Nothing’s resolved, then?”

The other woman shook her head, noticing that the cottonwood trees were reflected on the dark face of the stagnant fountain water.

“I feel awful for Brice, losing his mother and now this, but with Ariel out there in the middle of nowhere—I don’t know. I’ve never felt so helpless.”

Sarah rested her hand on Jessica’s forearm.

After talking with Carl, Delfino gave Jim back his field phone and, in dreamlike suspension, retrieved his shotgun from where it rested against the stone wall. He held it not in a threatening attitude but like some third arm, off to the side, oddly casual, numb to any possible consequences.

“I thought we had a gentlemen’s agreement about the weapons, Mr. Montoya,” said Jim.

Carl had read him the riot act, and though Delfino found it hard to disagree with anything that was said, he felt caught between the need to see this through and the urge to chuck it all in. As his brother had pointed out, he’d gotten everyone’s attention. More than he’d managed to do ever before. What now? He needed to think. Hard with all these people staring at him.

“Delfino,” said Marcos. “Let’s put down the gun. He’s talking with you, with all of us.”

“You really have my father?” Ariel asked.

“He’s doing fine,” said Jim, ignoring Delfino’s shotgun. “And yes, I can get you through to him just as easy as I got Mr. Montoya through. But we need to work on some understandings. We need for you to come on down out of here. As it is, nobody’s been hurt and any charges they might want to bring against you would probably be minimal. Everything’ll be fine. You’ll get a good hearing for your grievances.”

“This is just the kind of pretty talk I heard before. Kip’s fine, I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re all just doing fine here today.”

“Mr. Montoya, I’m not the government. I didn’t write the law. I’m trying to defuse what’s obviously not a great situation. There may be ways of getting your land back, but this isn’t one of them.”

Delfino looked down, then up.

“I’m just here to tell you this way won’t get it done.”

Despite himself, Delfino began to believe the sergeant.

“What did Carl say?” asked Marcos.

“Later.”

“Later,” Jim echoed, then asked Marcos, “Meantime, what are we going to do?”

“This place is his, it’s his call.”

To Ariel, “You want to speak to William Calder?”

“She’s here to do just that,” said Marcos. He’d begun to see himself as a kind of translator. No one was speaking quite the same language as anyone else.

Ariel watched mutely as Jim took a look at his own weapon lying dormant beside him on the stone. Confrontation was not in his orders, but humiliation at the hands of some civilian—whether his claims carried weight or not—wasn’t in his nature. Marcos looked at Delfino’s profile, attempting to read through the diminishing options. Delf gazed past Jim, out over the basin, wondering what Agnes might do if she were here with them.

“I would,” said Ariel.

Jim thumbed in some numbers on the keypad, made the request, signed off. After several minutes the callback came, and he said a few words into the receiver, then took a step toward her handing over the field phone like an awkward calumet.

“You mind?” he asked Delfino, whose shotgun was pointed more at him than not.

Ariel took the well-worn leather-cased radio into her hands as Jim stood back.

“How do I—?”

“Press the talk button to speak, release it to listen back. Channel’s clear, go ahead.”

Ariel looked like some seeker clasping a possible grail, yet doubting its authenticity.

Visibly trembling, she said, “Hello,” holding the earpiece hard against the side of her head.

As she might have expected, no one returned her greeting at the other end.

“Anybody there?” somewhat more forcefully.

The voice was reedy and strained and faraway. “Ariel?”

“Yes?”

“Ariel, it’s your—I’m Kip.”

“Kip?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes, yes.”

How she wanted to say,
Yes, Dad,
but couldn’t invoke the word.

“Ariel, are you all right?”

So this was his voice, what he sounded like. Tenor, somewhat melodic, a bit sandy. Thinned, she guessed, by his ordeal.

“The question is, are you?”

“Delfino and Marcos are there with you?”

“And the military police. Where are you, though?”

“Ariel?”

“Yes.”

The transmission wasn’t clear throughout, instead was flooded with static before going ungarbled again.

“Listen to me. If they make some kind of offer to let you come down to see me in exchange for your giving up on Delfino, don’t do it. You’re there for both you and me now, doing what I wasn’t able to. Can you hear me?”

“I hear.”

“Don’t do it, Ariel. You hear?”

Other voices, none too happy, spoke behind Kip’s.

“I hear,” she repeated just as Jim decided to take back the field phone and cut off the transmission.

“So,” said Jim. “You satisfied?”

“Satisfied with what?”

“With the fact that what you need to do is come out of here so we can all sit down and talk about the problem like adults?”

Declining Jim’s invitation, she turned to Marcos, who’d asked, “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

Delfino wondered aloud if the sergeant wouldn’t mind leaving them alone for the night. They’d gotten as far as they were going to get this evening. Jim, retrieving his gun and turning his back on the three intruders, acceded to the request without saying so much as a word. They watched him, a slow deliberate man, retreat across the short mesa forescape, then down the slope as sunset light played, a thousand beaming fingers signing mute messages across the Tularosa floor. It was then, standing before his decrepit sanctuary—once his pride and future, but now his undoing—that Delfino came to a hard insight.

An idea, in spite of a lifetime of hope otherwise, can unravel and come to nothing. So simple, yet so unbelievable.

Ariel, Marcos, Jim, and his adjuncts camping nearby—none of them was responsible for Delfino’s original disappointment, his aspiration stretching over decades, his present contingency, or his newfound despair. He’d outlived most of his enemies. The officers and staff who’d originally come to Dripping Spring during the war to evict him and Agnes were to a man buried in plots hither and yon, in Missouri and California and Utah, not one left walking. Most of the ranchers were gone and all their treasured livestock. Agnes and her brother, gone. No one left but Delfino Montoya and these few busted buildings, some of whose planks and beams he would burn later that very evening to warm up canned peaches after they finished their meal of dehydrated mixed vegetables and jerky. The moon would shine through these widening chinks and gaps tomorrow night and in the next century, whether or not his hopes were dashed, until this habitat was beaten back down to dust, as it was so destined.

The three retired, Delfino having insisted on taking first watch. Nothing would calm his troubled mind, and he sat by the door listening to Ariel and Marcos breathe as they slept. A wave of shame passed through him for having brought them here.

He quietly climbed to his feet, lifting the shotgun from where he had set it. The air seemed deficient and his own breath came to him uneasily. Outside, the feathery edges of everything were emblazoned by starlight and the moon. As he wandered toward the rampart, stones crunched underfoot, soft round noises, though he strode as lightly as he could.

The world never favors plans, preferring instead moment by moment to unwind itself of its own volition. Destiny is the sum of choices you make in this flashpoint existence. But just because you’re the merest, tiniest fleck in the tempest that is this world doesn’t mean you haven’t the capacity to resist. It’s your earth to walk through. Get up and walk. You’ll be done soon enough.