Ariel's Crossing (15 page)

Christ, she was way overweary. Nevertheless, here she was, her father’s daughter. Or fathers’. Or rather, grandfathers’ granddaughter. That protracted desolation on the printed map, White Sands, its barrenness plain to see, lay beneath her fingers on the pleated page. When her three eggs scrambled were set before her, yellow rice and refried beans with them, she shook a heavy dusting of salt and pepper from shakers shaped like chili peppers, then drizzled a river of Tabasco over the food. She ate hungrily, and as she did she followed the line of highway farther north, having left the map where it was, like a place mat. Long stretches of Route 25 were townless. Jornada del Muerto, Bosque del Apache, Sierra Ladrones. From the journey of death to the thieves’ mountains she traced her course like Coronado before her until it reached Albuquerque. After that came Santa Fe, then left to Los Alamos or right to Chimayó, heaven only knew which.

Glancing around, she pulled her wallet from her backpack and counted four hundred in twenties. It would have to last a while. She extracted the ledger and looked again at the photo of the youthful Kip and Brice. She had this and Kip Calder’s name but not much more to work with when asking around. What it was. She left a generous tip for the waitress who wore a memorable vintage pair of crimson lizard pumps.

Through bony splendor she drove, through massive upheavings that resembled stone skirts blown high skyward from the recumbent desert with its flora here and there. Most of the traffic was high in the sky, aircraft with military markings or no markings at all, in a multitude of shapes—now stout, now trim as a firepin—and never silver like the
Enolas
of old but matte black. Her map, embellished by Tabasco stains, fluttered beside her, applauding as she whisked along the straight road through these arid ranges and flat arbitrating plains. Isolated towns whose names she recognized from her map reading hugged either side of the highway—parched low buildings with a sporadic general store ascending to a second tier. Dogs napped in their blue shade. Once in a while she saw a person walking dreamily along.

Darkness had fallen by the time she finally made Albuquerque and pressed on through Santa Fe. Ariel decided she would crash at the next motel on the road and face what she had to face in morning light. A blinking neon sign read
Vaca cy,
and she entered another exhausted room, this one different from the others with its hopeful framed print of pastel pueblo people, an Indian family gazing out from a butte, the father shielding his eyes from the sun, cliché squaw beside him, children gathered around her clutching at the beaded hem of her deerskin dress. The bedspread, curtains, and couch fabrics bore matching prints of someone’s idea of Anasazi geometries. The carpet was gray, the windows unopenable. Curled on her side beneath the covers, she quickly fell asleep.

Somewhere between postmidnight and predawn. The weird sense of waking up not knowing where she was. And the weirder one of then realizing. Morning sickness forced her out of bed and across the cement rug into the blindingly bright bath. As she knelt over the toilet bowl, naked but for her black sweatshirt with the stenciled legend
Leave Me Alone
on the back, Ariel thought how wonderful religion must sometimes be for those who have faith. Believing in Christ would certainly make abortion a moot point. Believing might offer other strengths, too, that she sure could use right about now. Christ had never walked with her as a child, though. And he sure as hell wasn’t here in the bathroom of the Cities of Gold Casino motel.

Grandmother McCarthy would bemoan her son’s lack of religion all over again, and probably in stronger language than ever, when she learned that her granddaughter had come, unannounced, unanticipated, in search of a father who wasn’t her son. Brice and Jessica’s God-free household did have something to do with her present malaise, no getting around it. But in fairness she had to admit that even if they’d been married ministers she’d likely have fallen from the faith. Born apostate? More like a blind spot, a missing strand of DNA.

—Charity’s church enough, Brice always said, and Ariel as always listened. —Most of these pious lambs who flock to houses of worship are either sheep getting sheared or, often as not, wolves in sheep’s clothes doing a bit of fleecing themselves.

Pretty harsh. Still, she never felt more alone. And as such, she wished she knew how to pray. Whom to pray to. Eyes closed, she even tried.
Dear God, Ariel here, asking your help. You probably already know that I’m Ariel. You probably already know everything. Well, of course you do. What I wanted to ask is … Maybe never mind. I’m sorry. Amen.

No better than usual, she thought, washing her face. Once you come up against omniscience, any presumption of dialogue collapses.

Poor believing Granna had tried to teach her years before. Having admonished Ariel that it was bad luck to bow in prayer at the end of a bed, the woman had knelt with her, elbow to elbow, during one of the girl’s half dozen previous solo trips to Los Alamos. Ariel could even now see that bed covered with its white
broderie de Marseilles
wedding quilt patterned with laurel and mockingbirds, an antique older than Brice’s mother’s mother, from whom she had inherited it. Ariel could still hear Granna saying, in a voice frighteningly gentle, —Dear Lord Savior, in Jesus’ name I beseech thee, come unto this young girl and show her, Lord, how to address thee, in God’s name, and how to beseech thy grace and comfort … and on and on, until Ariel thought how Granna’s prayer was lasting for many more minutes than she would have imagined necessary for God to make contact with them had he so desired. But then, how was anybody, God included, supposed to hear Granna’s whispering so softly that even she who was on bended knee right next to her had to strain to understand? The prayer lesson might have seemed a consummate failure had her grandmother not declared it quite successful.

Now things weren’t so pure as that beautiful quilt. Granna’s prayerful clarity held no sway over this ungentle night. Now everything in Ariel’s surround seemed struck by discord, disorder, and dislocation.

Back in bed, she pulled the ledger onto her lap and opened it to that page on which her grandfather questioned why his son kept running away. Outside, in the distance, the familiar sound of a siren disrupted Kip’s father’s written voice and harkened her back to New York and the day of her revelation. How curious that a moment so consequential could already be hazing over in memory. Was this a mind protecting itself, detraumatizing the pain by making its own personal history murky? She felt mildly comforted, as the siren faded into the distance, by a growing belief that this new truth was the right one.

“Ariel Calder,” she tried it out loud. The old Ariel truths were frauds, sort of, but she decided not to dismiss them. She made a decision, a cutting off of all other possibilities, which was after all what the word
decision
meant. She wouldn’t banish the old truths, however crippled they were, because they still were truths. They might be contradictory, but both old and new truths were irrefutable.

She flipped the wall switch beside the bed to extinguish the lights, tried to sleep, but couldn’t. The hard fact that she was in Pojoaque, seven thousand-plus feet above sea level, two thousand miles or so from the farmhouse, and possibly near the man who’d given her life, sat like a stone in her gut.

Ariel had daydreamed her way west. She opened her eyes into the pulsating darkness, closed them to some pretense of sleep, but still reveries came in evolving bundles. They came in color; they came in shades of gold. They streamed, or swelled. She reached for the lamp toggle and pushed. She dialed David in New York and when he answered, she said, “I’m really sorry about what’s happened and I don’t blame you for any of it.” He hung up. Quivering, after listening to the dial tone for some seconds, she replaced the handset on the bedside table and turned on the television, of all things, for distraction. A game show,
Jeopardy!
Just perfect, she thought. Jeopardy before and jeopardy behind. She pulled the sheets over her head.

Before she finally fell asleep again, one of the things her grandfather McCarthy used to tell her came to mind. When one person does a foolish thing, it’s foolish. When two people do a foolish thing, it’s still foolish. When three do a foolish thing, it is foolish.

A lifetime before Ariel wended her way north between the Rio Grande and the Jornada del Muerto, just east of the Oscura Mountains, which ranged out the passenger window of her car, a dusty and limping jackbottom had stood staring down the length of dry ditch into which it had stumbled, appearing for all the world to be the foreigner it was there. A salamander and Delfino Montoya watched this forlorn ass, which shook its loaflong head with the magnificent obtuseness and ponderousness available to this singular beast and no other, or so it would have seemed on that overwarm midday. The salamander had stretched itself under the sun on the far side of this same acequia, and for his part Delfino sat on the tan grass some hundred feet back behind his bungalow, under a shattered, shedding cottonwood, leaning against the hard trunk of the tree, his feet splayed before him like unearthed roots. What sweltering shade this cottonwood cast, Delfino occupied. The heavy sun produced dark pockets in every hollow, chink, and cove in view, whether natural or fashioned by the hands of those few people who had bothered to try to make a go of it in this tough valley.

At hand, on the scrabbly dirt floor beneath the shade tree, were a pencil and a paper tablet on which Delfino had tried without success to shape his ideas, his profound resentments, into words. Instead, now, he stared at this wild mule that had wandered off the cantankerous plain, maybe thirsty or out to pillage somebody’s garden. It scowled with a forager’s dullish eye and gave short shrift to the salamander’s sharper gaze, as well as Delfino’s own, as it hobbled and slumped toward both in search of a way to higher ground. Delfino, without moving, looked about for a stone to throw at it. The jackbottom did not take this in, nor did the salamander bestir itself. In the distance a freight train ran across the valley floor and a delicate clattering along the tracks could be heard. A dog barked, then another barked back without enthusiasm into the dead hot breath of the desert day. The ass continued to gimp along the trench, raising trivial puffs of dust with each fall of its dull grayblue hooves.

Finding no pebble within reach, Delfino chucked his pencil stub at the beast. Neither the jackbottom nor the long-tailed salamander noticed, nor for that matter did Delfino know what possessed him to throw his pencil at the trapped animal. The pencil, which he’d sharpened with his pocketknife, lay on the bottom of the waterditch in the dust, bright yellow against dun brown, and the jack trod on it without ado and without knowing it had done so.

No damn pencil was doing him any good anyhow, and so what did it matter, Delfino reasoned.

Then he thought, There you are, Montoya. There you are, old man. You’re no smarter than that goddamn jackybottom stuck in that gully. No wonder you’re throwing things at it. You’re no better than some thickhead jack yourself.

The salamander had meanwhile disappeared.

When the jack passed directly in front of Delfino, like some four-footed storm cloud before a frowning moon, it paused and turned its massive laggard head in the seated man’s direction, taking him in where he still sat, unmoving. A marginal breeze stirred the paper beside Delfino, and the jackbottom—not ten feet from the man who watched him under this heavy weather of pale blue and fierce sun—bared its yellowed tombstone teeth in a nasty smile of feigned threat, very feigned, very exhausted, and eccentrically pacific.

—You numbskull tub of shit, Delfino said.

It breathed dryly. The ribs on its sides stood up in the day like long curved mummified barrel bands stretching its speckled and putrid and dust-shellacked hide. Cataracts made its eyes, each the size of a rotted-to-black patio tomato, evocatively clouded. Delfino clapped his hands, but the jackbottom did not flinch. He clapped a couple of times more, harder, and the animal only continued to look at him.

—You deaf? he shouted at the ass, which then turned its large head to study the rock where the salamander had been lounging not three minutes before. —Well, are you?

Agnes had come out from the back of the bungalow, having heard her husband shouting these words. —What’s that you’re saying?

—Look at this, Delfino said, climbing to his feet and slapping the dirt off the butt of his work trousers.

—What happened?

—Must’ve wandered off the valley and got himself stuck in the trough, I guess.

—Poor thing. Let’s get some rope.

—All right, Delfino said, and he crossed to the small shed he’d built in their yard and fetched down a length of white rope that hung in a coil on a nail.

Together, Agnes and Delfino got the rope around the animal’s neck and led the docile, cooperative beast a quarter mile down the acequia, to a place where they could walk it up an angled ledge. From there they doubled back across a couple of fields and roads to their bungalow where they kept it tethered in their backyard for the following month. They fed and watered the animal until it seemed strong enough that they felt comfortable about loading it into a borrowed horse trailer and driving it back to the edge of White Sands Range. There they parked, opened the swinging trailer doors, backed it down the clamorous metal ramp, and released it to the parched wilds where it had been conceived and had survived without incident before wandering down into Tularosa proper and getting itself gnarl-kneed, stuck, and salvaged.

The jackbottom stood in the morning, still homely but fatter, kind of weirdly lilac in the dawn light.

—Go on, get, said Delfino.

Agnes watched. She resisted the reluctance she was beginning to feel about returning it to the wasteland, though this had been her idea all along. It was Agnes who’d said that day the month before, —We’ll nurse him back to health, then we’ll take him where he belongs.

—Go on now, Delfino shouted again. —Maybe it’d be easier for all of us if you let me just shoot him, he joked, turning to Agnes for some counsel as to their next move.