Ariel's Crossing (14 page)

“Permission to go crazy?” she asked herself, climbing the knoll to the house. “Permission granted,” she answered.

She knew what lay ahead, at least in the proximate sense, at least insofar as what she herself could do about matters. There was no real choice. No number of hours or days spent sitting around in this farmhouse was going to resolve or mend the fractured thing she’d both been given and become. She telephoned her parents the next morning and told them she was going to New Mexico to find out what happened to Kip Calder. She phoned work and with apologies said she needed to take an emergency leave of absence. Family crisis. She packed a few clothes in the car, locked up the house. The dormant village of Callicoon was where the bridge crossed the Delaware from New York State over into Pennsylvania. Long ago, she’d waded halfway across with Brice in the shallow, stone-bottomed upper reaches of that river, and even now she could recall how heavy her tennis shoes were, cold and hefty in the swift flat water, and how frightened she’d felt being so far from the riverbank where her mother sat, but also how unwilling she’d been to let her father see her fear. A big brown trout had broken the surface twenty feet out toward the deeper channel and she’d screamed with excitement. To be in the river and see the fish emerge from its waters into her airy world for that briefest instant seemed terrifying, wonderful. But now she crossed the Delaware in her car and, without consulting a map—she didn’t have one and didn’t really want one—drove beyond Callicoon into Wayne County and through a hamlet prayerfully called Galilee which led her through Rileyville and on through townships with names like Dyberry and Canaan, knowing at a minimum she was headed in the right direction. She knew, too, that though this was not a dream, her truly going to Chimayó to look for Kip was nonetheless tinged by the surreal.

Was it the brilliant physicist John von Neumann who once told his brilliant colleague Richard Feynman that cultivating the concept of social irresponsibility was the first step toward becoming a happy man, or was it Feynman who said it to von Neumann—the godfather of radar, game theory, nuclear deterrence, artificial intelligence, and the superbomb, to name just a few of his progeny? Kip knew it was one or the other. Both had worked on the Hill. Each had tried to use his genius to build, as the phrase goes, the future.

But which had proved himself to be more irresponsible? Feynman in that he enjoyed playing the bongos and cracking wild jokes? Von Neumann who indulged himself in the obsessive habit, to the chagrin of Los Alamos secretaries, of peeking up women’s skirts? And how did one go about defining responsibility, anyway?

Kip remembered that both had been, yes, brilliant, and both also barbarian in their different ways. Too, he recalled one evening back at the convalescent center—not far from where Feynman and von Neumann dwelled during their days at the lab—when he and his fellow patients congregated in the rec room to watch satellite television after downing cranberry juice and angel food cake in celebration of some birthday. The resident patients chortled and coughed warmly through an episode of
The Simpsons,
a cartoon Kip found neither humorous nor entertaining. Yet he was the only one in that bedeviled audience to laugh, laugh hard and long, when Homer Simpson averred in a philosophical moment, “Trying is the first step toward failure.” Another brilliant barbarism, in its way.

Kip now stood before the fieldhouse, which itself stood at the northwest margin of the lower pasture at Pajarito, and these few thoughts more or less stood there with him—them—as he looked at this old ruined bastion from an earlier century, erected a short reach from Rio Nambé, which he could hear scuttling along unseen on the other side of a coyote fence overhung with vines. He had gotten it into his head he was going to restore this fallen-down place and make it his home so long as he stayed with the Montoyas.

Having been here for a couple years, he’d become an honorary Montoya. Hard to fathom. The bridges he’d burned over the course of his life had never been rebuilt, not even the one he’d attempted pallidly to extend toward his daughter. The fires had burned hot and thoroughly, and none so much as smoldered now or allowed reaccess to any place he’d ever called home. Whereas home had always been an idea to inhabit, a truant hunch, a somewhere other, now the idea had morphed. Nambé, for Kip, was as close to a real home as he could imagine.

But more and more he didn’t like living in undeserved comfort at the far end of the
portal,
in a nice room he knew the Montoyas might otherwise use to put up clients or visiting family. He had no use for its antique mirrors, its radio, its photographs of show horses, or even for the almond-scented soap that Sarah set out for him in his bathroom. Further, he believed he still had no talent for society, didn’t know how to be near people. Even charitable people like the Montoyas. The fieldhouse suited him, too, because it was set at a remove from all but brat horses and punk ponies they let into the adjacent pasture.

This was a Wagner move, he supposed. Distancing himself from the living while paradoxically embracing the idea of life. Yet Kip figured that when he left Nambé one day, as surely he would, the field-house restoration might be some kind of legacy. And while he remained here it could be—another truth and another paradox—his reason not to leave. He would, of course, continue with his chores. He’d fully adapted to, even cherished, his role as an assistant and felt his strength growing whenever he raked the reddish cinder-dust scoria aisleway that ran down the center of the barn (“It’s an art, man,” Marcos explained, “like zen gardening”), or washing down a horse with chlorhexadine scrub mixed with shampoo, rinsing it with warm water, spraying it with lanolin, then walking it back to its stall. He learned how to clean tack and restitch saddles. He helped, when and as he could, with feeding, watering, rotating broodmares into and out of the several pastures. These tasks had become his bread and butter. The fieldhouse would be caviar.

Marcos, with whom he’d first shared his idea, was enthusiastic and volunteered to help in his spare time. So did Franny, or Mary, whoever she was—Marcos still didn’t know and Kip would never snitch on her. He knew what it was like to be assumed and unassuming. He remembered von Neumann’s sly riposte to Oppenheimer’s famous words quoted from the
Bhagavad Gita
after the Trinity implosion was heard around the world on July 16, 1945. Oppie had intoned, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” but von Neumann upped him one with, “Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”

Why was all this circulating through Kip’s psyche now? Because he still couldn’t shake the idea of her, no matter how pathetic it was to be thinking about it three years after the fact, as if he’d just posed the problem to Brice the week before. Because increasingly he thought of his letter to Ariel as a travesty, a confession of the kind von Neumann had accused Oppenheimer of making. Unsubtly pressing Ariel and her parents for credit where none was due. Perjuring himself by asking a daughter to know who her real father was, when indeed—in deeds—he certainly was not. Hiding from Ariel even after he’d clumsily invited her to search him out, since hadn’t that been the deeper, even deepest, motive behind his meeting with Brice in Chimayó? To give him that diary he himself could barely read? Not to forget his own maudlin letter. Even carrying on thinking about it was preposterous. Why not just get over it. Understand she has not come and won’t.

Kip was hotly aware of his sins, his false claims and bad credits. Maybe if he built something tangible with his hands, with what was left of his physical self, it would help offset a little of what he’d ruined. He had divulged some of these thoughts to Sarah that morning up at Los Alamos, and she had attempted to reassure him that we all share such imperfections. Well and good, he’d thought then. But now he told himself, Don’t fuck up, Kip. Make something right. Even if it’s only a bustdown clay hovel, it’s better than the bustdown clay mongrel who stands before it. This place at least once served a worthy purpose. Who knows? Restoring it might teach you a thing or two about yourself.

So he thought as he traipsed through the tall cheatgrass and rye, peering through the fieldhouse windows into its dark interior and imagining how once this place had been a habitat where people slept, woke, loved, argued, thought, lived. They’d probably planted these sweet grasses that brushed against his hands, and which flourished like all thirsty desert plants do near running water. He remembered it was called cheatgrass because Europeans had introduced it in Nambé for stock feed. Well, at least Kip was native rather than cheat, even though the cheatgrass thrived better than he ever would.

Sarah said she would speak with Carl about the proposition.

“He have any experience building?” Carl wondered.

“You know sure as day he’s too proud to say he’ll do something he can’t,” kneeling beside her husband in one of the stalls, where he was wrapping a filly’s leg with supportive bandages. “He seems to know something about everything, and I doubt he’d make the offer if he wasn’t equal to the task.”

“People do things all the time they’re not qualified to do. Kip isn’t that kind, though, I’ll admit.”

“Listen, the fieldhouse is such a wreck nobody could do but make it better. I’m more worried about whether he’s up to it physically than whether the place could tolerate an attempted restoration.”

“Hand me that standing wrap.” Carl Montoya did not look at his wife but concentrated instead on the tender fetlock of this four-year-old, whom he considered way too wild for all the training they’d put her through. “I got to tell this gal’s owners we can’t board their crazy horse anymore.” Carl chewed his words like a cheroot, with amiable disgust, as he rose to look the bay in her wet velvety black eye. “You’re an ugly hag of a nag,” he told the ribboned show horse with a smile. “Too smart for your own good. Handgalloped me right into the rail today.”

“Look, it might give Kip a sense of purpose. My worry is he’s started thinking he’s underfoot.”

“Who says he isn’t?”

“That’s nice. Look, I took responsibility for him, and I want to do the best I can by the poor guy.”

Carl placed his palm gently on the filly’s roan teacup muzzle, then ran his hand up her smooth jaw to her throatlatch. “She took responsibility, and when are
you
gonna learn not to run me into the fence, jerk?” he said, his voice purring, as the horse nodded and sputtered appeasement.

“Come on, Carl.”

Her husband turned his squint on her. “I don’t know why you bother to ask, being as you intend to let him go ahead no matter what I say.”

“It’s your decision.”

“I like old Kip, too, and if rebuilding that fieldhouse is what he wants to do, let him go ahead so long as he can keep up with his load down here. Anyways, he’s like you. He’ll go ahead even if I don’t want him to. I lost control of this place a long time ago.”

“You’re an ugly nag yourself, you know.”

He chuffed at the compliment, said he had work to do, and went on about his business.

Sarah found Kip already down at the fieldhouse that morning, himself chuffing and soughing like confused wind as he shoveled the thin loam that had drifted into what used to be the entryway to this lowly morada-style structure.

“Montoya said it’s fine, so all’s well.”

Kip looked around and smiled, then went back to scraping off decades of pale soil as if he’d only been born to the task.

“By the way, he asked if you’d ever done this kind of work before.”

Kip pulled himself up straight, hand over hand, using the shovel for support, then crooked up one shoulder.

“I guess that means yes?”

“I’ll do it right.”

Men, thought Sarah Montoya. Jesus God save us from men, and left for the Hill.

With no map to guide her, Ariel contented herself with a westward drive weighted by a gentle southward drift. Perhaps nervousness made her a wilier, more savoring observer, causing her to notice with fresh eyes such everyday things as a pink dawn or fiery Clementine sunset. Or maybe fatigue had somewhat stripped her down, giving the world clearer access to her consciousness. Either way, she bristled with acumen. The fine hairs on her arm tingled in the freeway wind like needles when she cocked her bare elbow out the open window. A cardinal that bounded through a bank of rhododendrons on the shore of the Kanawha near Charleston, West Virginia, displayed the purest, brightest red Ariel had ever seen. As she drove past miles of voracious steel furnaces in Tennessee, smelting coal and iron ore filled the sky with symphonic clouds. Oil refineries in East Texas tasted savory, like burnt molasses on her tongue. For one who felt as if her life had tumbled into a darkening pit, the world beyond the windshield seemed anything but a dreary catacombs.

Still, these moments of intense witnessing were counterpointed by equally strong waves of anxiety. Panic came over her whenever she thought of the evolving life in her belly and about whether she should, in fact, get an abortion in New Mexico, where few knew her and no one need ever know it happened. Grief over the irreparable rift with David, no matter how inevitable it had been. Fear regarding how very unlikely it was, over three years after Brice and Kip had their brief reunion, that she would discover anything in Chimayó or Los Alamos but a gravestone. All these crosscutting thoughts and the mapless journey itself made every waking instant as brash as a slap in the face. And now, having driven up against the border that separated New from old Mexico, and dry brown Texas from both, she recognized that the time had come to give up edgy dead reckoning for a slightly more composed approach.

El Paso. A banquette table at yet another diner. She spread the brand-new map of New Mexico before her, as if to lay a grid of rationality over her darting mind. Setting down her coffee cup on Carlsbad Caverns, Ariel traced the final miles of her trip with her forefinger. Las Cruces she would hit first, following the blue ink of the Rio Grande. Up past a settlement called Radium Springs. Past the town of Truth or Consequences, above Caballo Reservoir. All the while skirting the desolate stretch of desert east of her chosen route, aptly colored on the map in pewter, also aptly shaped like a blunt-nosed bullet casing—White Sands, the missile range wreathed along its westernmost edge by the San Andres Mountains and marked at the eastern frontier by that place with the comely name Alamogordo. Around Alamogordo there were hamlets with equally evocative names like Sunspot and Cloudcroft, Weed and Bent. The outline of a plane, indicating an airport in Alamogordo, brought to mind the
Enola Gay,
that unhappy bomber, presently housed in a Smithsonian warehouse, which had been repatriated on a nearby Roswell runway after its deadly flight over Hiroshima. Now here it was again, circling back into her own life.