Ariel's Crossing (48 page)

Delfino Montoya was injured by what would prove to be one of his own shells. The gaping, mangled wound looked dire under their flashlights, though it appeared worse in the field than it soon would to the surgeon in his operating room, which was bad enough. The girl, whom Marcos embraced even as she embraced his uncle, was splattered with blood that turned out not to be hers but the old rancher’s. The whole fracas took mere minutes, but those minutes were concentratedly terrible. The aerovac got there more swiftly than in a dream. Marcos sat beside her, and Delfino lay in the rear of the same chopper receiving emergency medical aid as Ariel watched Dripping Spring recede beneath them, a mere disarray of ruins and boundary markers getting smaller and smaller under the first pinks of dawn ascending the Sacramentos.

What happened would always seem unreal. Delfino was rushed into surgery, Marcos and Ariel were taken into the infirmary. Led to different rooms, they were checked over and found only to be exhausted and dehydrated. Each felt bewildered by this separation from the other.

“You did this knowing you’re pregnant?” the doctor chided.

Not like he was wrong. It had been madness, but with purpose. He’d never understand so she took his criticism silently. She really wanted Marcos to be here. Of anyone, he understood.

Within the hour they were moved to a conference room in another building. Carl was allowed to talk with them, and soon afterward Brice came in, having made calls to Nambé as well as back east to colleagues for legal advice. He’d already expedited scheduling hearings with local authorities for the next morning. After hugging his daughter, Brice asked the obvious question—“What the hell did you think you were doing?”—and heard straightforward answers about what had brought her and Marcos Montoya to this juncture. When Kip lit out on Delfino, and Delfino refused to abandon his plan, there really wasn’t much Ariel and Marcos could do other than turn them in or follow along. Brice didn’t foresee too much difficulty arranging their release on bail. Kip’s, either. Delfino, assuming that he came out of surgery okay, would be more complicated. But given the history of similar strife in the basin and the old man’s record of lawful behavior, Brice figured he would, when the time came, be able to bargain for parole in exchange for a plea of guilty. Surely the White Sands attorneys would prefer leniency to drawing the attention that would come from putting an elderly evicted rancher in jail. It wasn’t necessarily what Delfino was going to want, but it seemed the only responsible strategy.

Ariel listened, but her mind was elsewhere. Her interrupted talk with Delfino contended with the immediate present. God, she hoped he was going to be all right. What he’d said about her being courageous beleaguered her. She wasn’t courageous. In fact, she was the least courageous person she knew. That’s how she saw it. Right or wrong, the time had come to take another step at least in the direction of Delfino’s sanguine thought. She asked to see Kip.

“He’s not looking good,” warned Brice, all too aware he’d soon enough have to tell her about her grandmother.

“Neither am I,” glancing down at her torn, bloodstained dress.

“Let me try to get authorization,” Brice said, and left the room.

“Your father told me the story during our drive down,” said Carl, watching Marcos’s eyes on Ariel and hers on him and thinking he’d never seen Franny and his son exchange looks like that. “Not everybody gets to have two fathers.”

“Does that mean I’m lucky or cursed?”

“If it’s cursed, it’s a good kind of curse,” said Marcos. “You’ll see.”

With a uniformed man at his side, Brice returned. He put his arm around Ariel and said, “I’m proud of you, proud you’re our daughter,” and she left with a backward glance at Marcos and one more at Brice.

She was led out of the building and back to the infirmary, down a corridor until they came to his door. After unlocking it, the MP stood aside. When she entered Kip’s room, father’s and daughter’s eyes met, and what they saw was so familiar yet singular that it was as if they glimpsed for the first time their own reflections in a mirror. Each was overwhelmed by the resemblance, yes, but also by the intense, actual presence of the other. For some inconceivable reason, Ariel thought of her best childhood pal, Buddha. Buddy?

“Ariel,” Kip said, and she walked to him.

“Dad,” the impossible word coming through so readily.

The warmth of their embrace, the ease of it. Kip whispered her name again, and she laid her head on his paltry shoulder and said his full name, both perhaps by way of convincing themselves they were really here.

Thin as a shade the man was, and smelled somehow of juniper vanilla, smelled like a newborn. Maybe she was weeping; the room was suddenly a blur. For minutes neither spoke. When Ariel finally stepped back, holding Kip’s hands and looking deeper into his ravaged and sunken eyes, she heard him say—did he truly?—“I love you,” as if these were the simplest words he ever articulated, whereas in fact he never expressed them to anyone other than Jessica Rankin, long ago. Ariel voiced the same three words to him. Then again. And once more. Each time uttered so dissimilarly that the phrase seemed to mean three different things.

Later she would view this as the moment when she decided to forgo an abortion, to take her developing progeny to term, her girl or boy, and let the rest of the world set whatever course it wished. She helped Kip onto the bed and sat beside him there, holding his narrow hand. What could they say? Everything, nothing.

They glowed in each other’s company. Kip was reminded of Emma Inez, Ariel of that tattered photograph of a young man with his closest friend, arms over shoulders with Shiprock looming in the distance. Rarer than love at first sight, it felt to each of them like they had solved an irresolvable problem, or found they could suddenly speak Chinese or play virtuoso violin. While Ariel looked the worse for wear, and Kip worse yet, neither recalled ever having witnessed another person so full of spirit.

“You should lie down,” she said. “Here, let me help you.”

Kip allowed her to arrange his pillows, then took her hand as he eased himself back on the bed. Without asking, she dipped a washcloth into the pitcher of ice water on his bedside table and daubed his forehead. Not at all used to the touch of another—or was it simply the cold?—he flinched a little, then relinquished his fear. It was not the cold. This was his daughter, trying to tend to a sick, face it, dying, man. Would he presume, after every single thing he’d denied her, to take that away from her now? From himself, as well? He would not.

Ariel wondered if he was feeling well enough to tell her some stories, the most provisional memoir, some images for her as she began to paint for herself a picture of his life. “Tell me anything—the least things about yourself would be more interesting than you can imagine. I’m here to listen.”

And at that he did gather some memories and began to describe them, leaving out the invented stuff about being a lighthouse keeper and driving stolen cars across the border. He was only amazed by his lack of fear, not to mention of that inveterate will to run away. Why had he run in the first place? he had to wonder, as he tried to tell Ariel what his life had been like after he left her mother.

“Do I have any sisters or brothers? “Ariel asked, remembering her conversation on the subject with Granna.

“No blood kin.”

“You have no family?”

Kip shook his head. “No, not really. No, in fact.”

“Just me, then.”

“Just you.”

They smiled at the revelation, then Kip turned the focus on her.

“And you? You’re not married,” holding up her ringless hand.

“No.”

“Boyfriend, or how do they call it now, a significant other?”

“There’ve been a few, one in particular these last couple years who I thought might be the real thing, but that’s over.”

“Tell me about your growing up,” he asked, and she did her best to portray herself, though as her narrative progressed it dawned on her that she’d never truly thrown herself at life emphatic, firm, aflame—whatever right word might measure up to the dense passion she’d felt these last days and weeks—until she set out to search for him.

She told him as much, and when she did, something that had been lurking still, bothering him, came to the fore. Had she looked for him and not found him those few years ago, after he gave his father’s ledger to Brice in Chimayó?

Ariel admitted she hadn’t.

He asked, “Why now, then?” and she finally came up against the very question she’d traveled here to have answered. It was as if the oracle were querying the supplicant rather than the other way around.

“Because I’m going to have a child,” she said, simply.

“You are? That’s wonderful.”

“No husband, no wedlock. Still wonderful?”

“Wonderful no matter what. But Ariel, I’m not making the connection, why you came here now if before—”

She squeezed his hand and said, “Because I needed to see my father in order to know whether I should ever be a mother. You gave me up for the longest time, and you had your reasons. I couldn’t do that. It would have to be all or nothing for me.”

“I’m so sorry about everything, Ariel—”

“Me, too.”

“You deserved a better father than I could have been.”

She thought for a moment, and said, “When I was a little girl, I was the opposite of you and Brice. You two ran up the mountains and down the canyons, and even after you grew up you just kept on flying straight into the teeth of life. So much of my flying’s been done in my head. Nothing wrong with that, but you should know I don’t hold anything you’ve done against you.”

“You’re quite a young woman.”

“I used to love Robert Louis Stevenson. He wrote something I always thought was wise, and maybe I think so even more today. It went something like, To love playthings when you’re a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, then to settle when the time comes into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor. Separately, maybe we haven’t been the best artists of life, but put us together and you’ve got something deserving well of ourselves and each other.”

“Thank you, Ariel. For finding me.”

“I’m just sorry I didn’t—”

He put his finger to her lips.

“Just think,” he said. “A child.”

She sat with him another hour, leaving only when he fell asleep. As she was escorted back to join the others, she realized that almost everybody knew her secret except Jessica and Brice, though no one besides Kip, of course, was aware she had determined to go ahead. She would confess, or rather shout it to the rafters, as soon as the right moments proposed themselves.

Incorrigible, exquisite Granna McCarthy was buried with her Bible and her pipe, laid beside her husband in a simple service. More mourners turned out than her family expected. Middle-aged former students, church friends, even some people no one recognized. Her inspiring nets had been widely cast. While in his eulogy Brice spoke of faith and loyalty, he felt profoundly troubled by his own bad faith and disloyalty in having neglected to follow through on his earlier promise to visit his mother. In the weeks that followed, while seeing Ariel through the trauma of gain and loss as best he could, Brice found himself shuttling between New York and New Mexico on redeye specials, having committed himself to extricating his daughter and the Montoyas from their legal tangle. He stayed in the guest bedroom of Bonnie’s house when he was up north, and in the Tularosa bungalow when downstate. He sometimes visited Pear Street to pass some thoughtful hours there. He knew this was a displaced case of better late than never, but so be it.

Arraignments, bail, conditions for release—all the prelims transpired swiftly, which maybe gave him false hope the rest would as well. After a lot of wrangling, the charges against Ariel and Marcos were dropped, as were those against Kip. The latter was too ill to stand trial, and the former two, it was argued, had been at Dripping Spring not for the purpose of committing a crime, but to help mediate.

Delfino’s was a tougher problem, one that had everything to do with his shotgun having discharged, resulting in the endangerment of government officers. That he had nearly blown off his own head didn’t matter. He was lucky to be alive, but nobody forced him to do what he did. Brice was surprised to discover, however, that a lot of these White Sands people sympathized with the old-timers. Couldn’t doctor history, but the ranchers sure had gotten a damn raw deal back when. As it happened, no one had the stomach to put Delfino Montoya away.

The compromise they hammered out involved his committing to drop all further claims against White Sands or any governmental department or agency attached thereto, and never to trespass on the range again. In exchange, all charges against him would be dismissed, and under strict range supervision, the remains of his wife, Agnes Montoya, would be reinterred at the site of the couple’s former homestead. On his demise, Montoya himself would also be allowed a permanent resting place at Dripping Spring. Kip had asked to be buried there as well, and his request, too, would be granted, but that was to be that. “We’re not running some cemetery here, Mr. McCarthy,” one of the lawyers said, to which comment Brice wanted to retort, “That’s precisely what you’re running here, sir,” but restrained himself in the interest of settling his clients’ affairs. Nor would there be visiting rights for anyone wishing to place flowers of commemoration in the future. Just wasn’t in the cards. They were bending all the rules as it was.

Ariel reluctantly flew back east, knowing she had bent more than a few rules herself. She’d completely neglected her job, for one. Welcomed back to her manuscript-strewn office with greater forgiveness than seemed justifiable, she tried to reenter that world which only weeks before she’d inhabited like a sociable character in one of her more benign books. But it wasn’t her world anymore. She was sorry to resign, but did, and as she cleaned out her desk and bade goodbye to her colleagues, she was overtaken by an intuition that while she had no firm idea of what she was doing, the gesture was sufficient unto itself. She who never moved rashly was now expelling her past with heretical dispatch, and against the chances of no certain future. At least in borrowing her parents’ car—the Dart was still in Los Alamos, poor dusty warrior—and driving to the farmhouse, collecting David’s things, boxing them up, and sending them back to him, with “Forward If Necessary” written on the box, she declared one future finished. In a moment of madness, stone-cold sober on the back porch, gazing out into the hills of sugar maples some of whose leaves were just starting to turn, she dialed his number one last time, to let him know her plans. Not that she expected anything from him. To the contrary. A canned voice told her the number had been changed. Then another said unlisted.