Ariel's Crossing (10 page)

A silver bracelet that Marcos had given her flashed in the sun as she drew her hand across her forehead. She had driven out to Nambé on an impulse to fess up, so Marcos hadn’t been expecting her. Kip, who’d vanished into the violet shadows of the
portal,
was the only one who knew she was here. Wind chimes hanging from the low eaves made their uncanny music as she looked around. She could retreat to her car, parked beside the adobe archway on the far side of the hacienda, without being seen. Who would be any the wiser if she simply fled? So she fled, and as she did the realization she could just keep driving west until she reached California hovered before her like a beacon. By the time she crested the knoll overlooking Santa Fe, however, the idea dimmed, then departed.

The procession of vehicles behind the waxed hearse rolled through Carrizozo. Headlights shone pale and bleak beneath the early afternoon swelter of sun. In her wooden coffin lay Agnes Montoya. Delfino, now her widower but only the day before yesterday her husband of forty-nine years, refused to be chauffeured in a black town car from the mortuary. Instead, he’d driven his Ford pickup with his nephew, Marcos, riding shotgun.

Agnes would not have been surprised at his bullheaded behavior. She’d have been touched, though, that rather than wearing one of his usual turquoise bolo ties he’d dug out the only necktie he owned, which Marcos had knotted for him back at the bungalow. Agnes would have loved to see her man dressed proud like this, and had she made it to their golden anniversary it might have happened. As it was, one would have to go back and look at wedding photos from ’thirty-nine to see Delfino similarly decked out.

A few members of her family were here from Oklahoma, and on Delfino’s side people were down from Nambé. All were sad but not shocked. Once Agnes had been diagnosed in Las Cruces and it was understood that the growth was inoperable, her dying had moved swiftly.

A brother of hers—John Bryant, his name had been—who’d come with her to this valley toward the end of the Depression, was buried not far north, at White Oaks Cemetery, fenced by wrought iron and cradled by forested mountains. It was her wish, fulfilled now, if she couldn’t be buried at Dripping Spring, the homestead she and Delfino had settled years before, that she be laid to rest beside this brother. Dust blew as the minister read. 1926–1988. A few people succinctly spoke of her qualities and virtues. The ceremony was, again according to her wish, brief. Afterward, they entouraged back through Carrizozo and on toward Tularosa, as the massive skies spun toward eventide and a first planet brazenly flickered in the still-pale blue behind them on the horizon. After the mortuary people took their leave, with gravity and antique courtesies, Agnes’s families drove down to Alamogordo to have a smorgasbord dinner at the Holiday Inn. Delfino was lost in an understandable daze, but spoke with Marcos, red in the face not from grief but flourishing anger.

—Her tumor was their tumor, Delfino said.

Marcos did not question his uncle. Tacitly he agreed, shaking his head while choking on a deviled egg. Muzak, strangely soothing, underscored the quiet conversing among these two families, who did not know each other well.

—They’ll be hearing from me, Delfino assured his nephew.

—What are you going to tell them? he asked, daring to look at his uncle who had shed, by now, black tie and jacket, leaving buttoned his weskit from another era, of purple, orange, and gold paisley, white shirtsleeves rolled up, the grief only enhanced in his profile.

Marcos didn’t inquire who
they
were. He’d known for years who they were and happened to agree that Delfino and Agnes had been evicted, defrauded, gypped, swindled, deceived, fucked up and down by the amorphous, considerable
them.

—These people murdered my wife and to add insult to injury they murdered her after they’d already killed her. How many times is a soul supposed to die?

His nephew sat still.

—First they made it so she couldn’t have a baby, with all their radiation drifting over the mountain. Then they made it so the only thing that could grow inside her was cancer.

Marcos placed a tentative hand on his uncle’s shoulder.

—I hope they’re happy.

Astounding, thought Marcos, that the tune “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” should be piped through the sound system as his uncle spoke, but there it was. He watched Delfino lay his fork on the plate of uneaten food.
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red
—

—As if Communist socialism ever stood a snowball’s chance.

Sarah Montoya had been eavesdropping on her brother-in-law while she engaged with others in the funeral party. —Delfino, I’m sure you’re right, but don’t you think Agnes would want us to leave them out of the discussion on this day of all days? Her voice was demure, even tranquil, and her hand found Delfino’s where it lay like some wounded animal on the white tablecloth.

—I’m sorry, he nodded.

—No need for apology. I just want you to be all right.

He lifted a piece of bread to his mouth but couldn’t eat it so put it down again beside his plate before telling Marcos, quietly, —Fact is, they probably are. Happy about it, I mean—proud of themselves.

—How could anybody be proud of pushing folks off their land and then slowly depriving them of life?

—That’s how it works. That’s how it was. And the more they do nothing, more they just keep good and tight-lipped and leave us dangling, the more all that’s left of us die off. One day it’ll come to pass that nothing will have happened. I’ll be with Agnes. The Onsruds’ll be gone, like the Harmans, the Wards, the Stearns, the McDonalds, everybody. Every one of the other ranchers down here’ll be dead and gone and that’ll mean they were right and we weren’t. Why wouldn’t they be proud of being right?

Sarah overheard, despite his whispering. —Maybe you’d like some coffee, Delf.

—He’s okay, Marcos said, and rose, after his uncle did, to follow him to the men’s room where the widower wept quietly in one of the stalls. Marcos washed his face and dried it with a paper towel. He left the echoing room, then waited outside in the corridor for some while before his uncle emerged, stonefaced, to take his nephew by the elbow and ask him to accompany him to the parking lot. Would he mind making the necessary excuses for an old man who had to get back home, and who truly appreciated everybody’s concern and the effort they’d all gone to, coming from such distances to be with Agnes today?

The air outside was sere and smarting with gypsum sand carried on the breeze from the white dunes west of town, past the gargantuan air force base. —Tell Sarah and your father I’m fine, just tired is all. Need to be by myself.

Marcos asked if he might drive Delfino up the road to Tularosa. His uncle was grateful but climbed into the pickup with no further comment, turned over the engine, and pulled out onto the highway that bisected Alamogordo, paralleling the old El Paso—to—White Oaks railroad line, which had, before drought settled in a century before, falsely promised this catastrophic basin fruits and wealth beyond dreaming.

When he got home, the widower folded his necktie into a kind of crunched coil, like some burned and flattened sidewinder, then placed it ceremoniously in Agnes’s rags drawer. He changed out of his suit into a flannel workshirt and khaki trousers, then set himself the task of laundering his wife’s clothing—her seersucker robe, her cotton nightshirts, her thin white ankle socks. He had it in mind that on the following morning he would bundle everything up and take it to the Salvation Army in El Paso.

Others would be wearing Agnes’s wardrobe by next week, in Juárez and Carlsbad and even Galveston. They would never have heard of Agnes Montoya, a ranching wife who’d poured every energy of her youth into homesteading a few hundred acres of wickedly thorny land up by Dripping Spring on this side of the San Andres. Some woman visiting her sister down in El Paso would score Agnes’s favorite dress at the thrift shop, a dark-blue polka-dotted rayon number with a scalloped hem. She’d drive back to Truth or Consequences feeling extravagant as the wind ruffled its sleeves. Others would carry away her stuff, too, unaware that in the early forties their original owner had helped build a house, dig its cistern, erect the windmill, herd cattle, and break wild cayuses at her husband’s side. None who wore Agnes’s jewelry, slacks, coats would ever know how deep had been her grief that she and Delfino never had children. Nor how devastated she’d felt when, in 1944, the army evicted them from their ranch, promising that they could return once the war was over. And how angry over the passing years this wife and her husband had grown, after the government tested its plutonium device just beyond the mountain, on McDonald’s spread, and then other gadgets, rockets, bombers, no one knew altogether just what, on their own usurped land. A girl who wore her shawl to a Halloween party up in Galisteo would never be able to imagine how Agnes and Delfino had lived out their marginal lives in exile. Nor would the welfare woman who fancied the pair of red lizard-skin shoes, which she would pass on to her daughter years later, ever know how much Agnes used to love those chukkas, as she called them, which she always wore with such pleasure on birthdays in their little nothing house in Tularosa.

Sure, she and Delfino wrote dozens of letters, to presidents and senators, representatives, secretaries and undersecretaries of the Department of Defense, a variety of officials in the army and the air force, and White Sands Proving Grounds folks, who were often sympathetic and always unhelpful. They penned articles for the
Lincoln County News,
sent letters to editors of distant newspapers. They organized meetings, coffees, discussion groups, even drear socials with the other 150 or so families similarly evicted. They waited. Received their disgraceful if not illegal settlement back in ‘seventy-five, along with the others—a sum that failed by many millions to compensate for total ranch values. Ground out more petitions and got back polite letters of nonresponse. Endured the repeated defeat of congressional proposals to establish a commission charged with evaluating claims submitted by those “displaced from their land and livelihood.” Saw the lives of others caught in the same plight vanish.

And Agnes, whose clothes would be floated to the seven winds, had watched Delfino’s life and her own fade as surely as things left too long in the sun.

—He said he needed to go be alone, Marcos told his father and mother when he returned to the dining room.

—Should we check on him? Sarah asked Carl.

—No, I know my brother. Best leave him to his grief. We’ll look in on him tomorrow before we drive back home.

Some days after Agnes was laid to rest—days after Sarah, Carl, and Marcos dropped by with a box of doughnuts before heading back to Nambé, days after his trip down to El Paso, and days subsequent to the departure of everybody who’d turned up for her funeral—Delfino sat himself down to write another letter. Agnes, he believed, would have approved. Giving up had not been in her glossary. He had never yet spent one red penny of the settlement check they’d awarded him. That word
awarded
had stuck in his craw when one of their public-relations people had called to let them know that the check was being sent via certified mail. The money sat like so much rotten dross in a bank account in Carrizozo, and even when he and Agnes had fallen on the hardest of financial times they never once considered withdrawing it. He would give it all back with interest—so he’d written them before and wrote them now. But what was more, if Delfino died doing so, he was going to get his goddamn ranch back.

A chorus of pond frogs under racing stars. The rising moon like a decayed tooth sunk in the tender flesh of a melon cloud. The plaintive veery in the oak tree. This sagging porch she’d paced over many extinct summers. They all offered their stability to unstable Ariel who, though sitting on her favorite Adirondack chair, felt as if in a free fall. Given the day’s disclosure, she had to ask herself questions she’d never needed to consider before. What would it be like having someone in your life day and night, dawn to dusk to dawn? Someone who has every right to rely on your love, solace, thoughts, values, support, understanding, sustenance?

She drank from a fresh glass of shameful, ridiculous gin and would have scowled had her face not been numbed under its influence. A bat dropped through the silent air, out over the unmown grass studded with wild strawberry and devil’s paintbrush, and she half envied the gnat that was targeted in its orbit. Ariel had always come to the family farmhouse to consider important matters, away from the din of Manhattan. Never, though, did she have weightier business to consider than tonight.

With hasty scissors she cut through the floss and, like some latter-day Pandora, opened the box on her lap. Taking a deep breath, she opened the ledger at random and found a photograph taped to the page, a black-and-white faded toward pale butterscotch. The snapshot had scalloped margins that dated it to the fifties or early sixties. Two boys standing side by side, arms thrown casually over each other’s shoulders. The kid on the left was unmistakably Brice, with his earnest, squinched eyes and broad smile; the other, with a distracted cast and wide forehead wrinkled under the open sun, looked uncannily like Ariel herself.
McCarthy and me, Four Corners area, 19-whatevereth.
At second glance she could see behind them the needly throne of volcanic rock rising over a thousand feet above an otherwise flat desert floor. Altogether unreal, the boys standing before that mythic monument carved by fire and rain. Even more unreal was that Brice looked as if he were there at Shiprock with Ariel, the two of them like brother and sister, a decade before she was even born. If any questions lingered about her parentage, this image dispelled them.

Flipping back through the ambered leaves, she encountered equations, beautiful if incomprehensible strings of numbers framed by detailed marginalia, drawings of plants and animals, butterflies and reptiles, themselves annotated in a tiny hand beneath the pen and inks with notes such as
P.
douglasii, short horned lizard drawn
6.7.49
in alpine tundra Mt. Taylor brick-red with brown blotches and orange chin, big lizard syntypes collected by a David Douglas, no relation to namesake working with Bradbury.