Ariel's Crossing (19 page)

Marcos shared these stories with Kip while they worked on the restoration, and Kip listened quietly as he sawed fresh latillas from cedar saplings and then later slung on scratch-coat mud—clay, sand, straw—after they’d scraped the wall’s eroded surfaces. When Marcos, during a break, surprised himself by telling Kip about the ghost who lived here, and how he’d come to believe she was the legendary Francisca de Peña, daughter of the ranch’s first settler, Kip suggested that if there had been some kind of spell on the place, wasn’t it about time to break it? “Set the poor spirit free, so to say. At least make it a place for the living as well as the dead.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Marcos.

“I believe you, by the way.”

“About the ghost?”

“Why not.”

At times like this, when Marcos opened himself up to Kip, the older man found himself growing impatient with Mary’s ongoing fraud. He sympathized with her but having himself been down duplicitous roads over the years, having failed people, some of them very badly, Kip hated to watch this probable disaster unfold before him. What was more, he saw himself being drawn into new duplicity and increasingly didn’t like it. Proverbial rock and hard place, though. He wished them both impossible happiness. Or was that the prerogative only of parents, such a wish?

Either way, as Kip toiled down here, he found he was able to take some measure of where he was in relation to where he had been. In his mind he walked from the adobe in lines that radiated from it like rays of the
zia.
If he began his march at the new front door, headed straight across the porchstone—now scrubbed and reset—due east, he would walk parallel to Rio Nambé and up into the foothills until he reached Trampas, where the trout ran in the cold mountain streams of his boyhood. Were he to walk in the opposite direction, his feet would carry him across Pojoaque reservation land to San Ildefonso pueblo. He’d ford the Rio Grande in his mind and climb into the canyons below the Los Alamos mesas of the Jemez. To his right was Tesuque pueblo, and beyond that Santa Fe. And over his left shoulder was the wide shallow creek and the main settlement of Nambé, population three hundred, give or take. Then desert, more desert.

Kip found that he could spend many hours on end working, half haloed under the wooden beam collar of the doorjamb, and make these treks in his imagination. Sometimes one of the bad-tempered or maladied horses would wander across the fenced meadow and eye him, this thin figure, then wander off again to browse the orchard grass while breezes curled around the wet-limed walls, jostling shutters and making the rusty hinges on the set of pedimented doors sing like stuttering crickets.

Alone one morning, a Friday in August, he drew with a stick
Elena
in the soft adobe mud. And beside it,
Ariel.
He looked at the two words and, again shepherding thoughts that were outside his unfatherly rights, wished both of them peace. Peace beyond all understanding, as Wagner had sometimes said, in the Buddhist blessing. Then, before Marcos happened to come down with Franny, or Sarah, or Carl, or anyone else, he smoothed the names over with the palm of his hand.

Years ago a woman with straight silver hair, framing a sunned oval face and spacious cobalt eyes, walked into a room to find her husband, his head bowed as if in prayer, illuminated by lamplight, studying a piece of literature. Peering over his shoulder, she read aloud, —“Hot deals on cool stuff.” The man pretended to ignore her, as now he recalled. Thinking back, he only wished he could hear her clear, strong voice once more. He would give a year off whatever was left of his life to relive just one such typical, even banal exchange as they had that evening.

—Agnes, he complained.

—“Factory closeout blowout sale of a lifetime”?

—Please, I’m reading.

—So you are, she needled Delfino, who shuffled the catalog then concentrated again on studying this gaudy illustrated page, which offered a free quiver with every purchase of a smooth-shooting, one-cam, superstrike Bear bow. —What cool stuff have we here?

—Nothing, some guns and bows.

—Why you reading about guns and bows?

He refused to respond. She walked away, then returned and asked the question again.

—History, all right? It interests me.

This was dusk, after dinner. Was before bed, when they used to sit together in the bungalow’s small living room. The early eighties, a time when their valley world had gone from reticent to terribly reticent. When neighbors didn’t need to speak with one another about what might be going on down at the base, or why Roswell, over to the east of the mountains, had become the capital of night sightings of the inexplicable. This was dusk, when their windows and doors were left open from May through September, and sometimes of a summer night they could hear other aging couples arguing, or a baby screeching, or young marrieds coupling, or some cat in heat mewling, or a bitch dog barking in the distance under the sumptuous diffusion of stars. When, in their hearts, they knew that the outside world had forgotten them and they remembered themselves only upon hearing—whether by design or mistake—other Tularosans, people or beasts.

Delfino recollected her pressing further the next day, catching him again hunched over the catalog. —You never showed this much interest in the history of guns and knives and combat gear before. He remembered her returning to stand behind him, quoting in a voice honeyed with soft sarcasm, —“Government surplus bargains. Veteran used gear that’s ready to serve you for mere dimes on the dollar.” Question is, are you ready to serve time for spending those dimes?

Look here now, he was reading a mail-order catalog, was all. Not against the law. A warehouse-overstock clearance pamphlet he’d received from an outfit with a post-office box up in Montana, for sportsmen who fancied owning, say, this night-vision monocular scope with infrared illumination, these cotton duck overalls in camouflage print, these thirty-round magazine sets for the carbines Delfino never really wanted or needed before, as such, but that had begun to enter his imagination as something he might not be averse to owning. If only for their collector’s value, he might rationalize.

—“Bowie knife prices slashed to the bone”? That’s clever, Agnes harried further, knowing him better than anybody and maybe sensing what really interested him here.

Delfino deflected her, —I always carried a Bowie knife when I was a boy. We all did. Carl, Daddy, even Kayley.

—Your mother never carried a damn Bowie knife.

—Course she did. Sometimes.

Agnes said nothing by way of response, which registered more loudly than if she had thundered her distaste for the things offered in the catalog.

Delfino finished, —No crime against reading.

—Reading’s not the crime that worries me.

As if it were only yesterday, not over a decade ago, Delfino could remember her final parry, her parting gibe, reading over his shoulder once more, —“Conceal yourself in the bush of these unused old French military BVDs.” These guys are comic geniuses.

Delfino chuckled.

—That’s what you need, old man. Vichy underwear.

—Lord, he said, and stuck the catalog in his documents drawer in the kitchen. He was tired, was going to bed.

But he couldn’t disagree with her, even as he meditated on how these obsolete weapons presented no problem for one who desired to remilitarize them. Sure, it’d be easier to go down to the gun store and acquire something licensed, Delfino reasoned that night as he drifted off to sleep. Yet there stirred in him an unnameable attraction, an instinct that using period pieces from the war that ruined his simple life would equate fighting might with right.

Agnes let the matter rest. She’d made her opinion known. This was her marginal form of protest, not that she truly protested her husband’s idea, which grew in his heart like some sedulous cancer. She did not ask to look more closely at the catalog, knowing even more pernicious armaments were displayed in its colorful pages. She respected how hard Delfino worked every day to contain his perennial anger, and believed he would never, without her blessing, maybe even her collaboration, pursue his dream of retaking his ranch from the government that had stolen it from them.

She and her husband were equally part of each other, had grown into each other through their marriage. Were like a unique organism melded by time, love, trust. Agnes didn’t give his catalog much further thought after that evening. Nor, however, was she shocked when he indulged himself in the purchase of a night-vision monoscope.

He insisted, —Just for the hey of it.

—Did I ask? she answered.

The Montoyas of downstate had been through many trials and disappointments over their decades together, but their setbacks were rarely visited on one by the other. If Delfino became possessed of some curious desire, Agnes might tease a little, needle him, even complain some, but she seldom denied him. And if Agnes liked wearing her stupid red shoes on her birthday, well then, have at it, live it up. After they lost Dripping Spring, and after they learned that the lease forced on them during the war was to be extended, then regrettably extended again, and then again, little rehabilitations such as some unnecessary nightscope were just that—compensatory gestures against the larger depression that hovered near them at all times.

They found they lacked some essential talent for giving up hope of returning to their vacated land. This was true of most of the families that had been similarly evicted from the Jornada and Tularosa flats on either side of Mockingbird Gap back in ’forty-four. The Trinity bomb worked; the war was won. But the lease and lockout continued. Some clung to a fading belief they’d be allowed to return and, as they waited, slowly lost the strength needed to move along and set up some kind of substitute life elsewhere. Like blue moons, the waxing of any confidence in reaching a fair settlement with the government became rarer and rarer. Alamogordo prospered as the military base grew. Rockets populated their skies at unexpected, odd moments in the day, and during the night they might be awakened by roaring overhead as stealthy mechanisms broke sound barriers, racing through darknesses hundreds of miles long in matters of seconds, more or less out of the world’s purview.

Delf watched sometimes, sitting with his nightscope on his quarter acre under the same cover of gloom that the military types used to hide their triumphs and sporadic instances of nonachievement. The crashed turboprop. The lost payload. He watched the night tinted green in the monocular glare and waited to see what might pass through its rounded field of reduced heaven.

More often than not he would come to bed at two in the morning, three, four, slipping in beside his Agnes, having seen nothing but yellowish stars in green fields of vacuumous infinity. Yet once in a while he did spot things up there, fast batlike machines moving high and silent, or on occasion so low to the valley floor he doubted the rationality of the person or being who dared pilot with such absurd abandon. On those nights he would awaken Agnes and tell her what he’d seen. They’d talk for a while, fall asleep. There was no need the next morning to report anything to the local newspaper. Everyone hereabout knew of White Sands and its titanium hawks, its black airships, the so-called secrets being developed on their old lands and tested over their contemporary shelters, some of which were just flearotten trailers and withering adobes and pressure-cooker bungalows. In any desert, hermetism is possible, but secrets are hard to keep.

Growing up on a working ranch, Delfino, like Carl, had learned to be a jack of many trades. Trades of the hand, labor accomplished on your feet, not your derriere. As such, he never had much trouble finding work during the long personal drought that settled over him after their eviction. In a land so terribly unpopulous, where one acre per head was compulsory for the cattleman who wanted to keep a viable herd, the multitude of skills that came to be required of Delfino in order to scrape together a living was noteworthy. Clerk at the Satellite Inn, cook at Sí Señor, picker in the pecan groves. At the time when he ordered his monoscope and began his nightwatches, he was working as a roofer and, most weekends, doubling as a driver for the bus company that ferried souls from Alamogordo to Las Cruces or El Paso and back. Agnes worked part-time for the forest service, at Three Rivers, a petroglyph field twenty miles north of Tularosa.

Tres Ritos was their second-favorite place in all the world. From its black lava heights they could see—looking out over the seeming infinity of desert flats, fenced only by the San Andres at the western edge of this panorama—the bluish alley, a tantalizing tiny hint of what had been their home. They loved few things better than to hike up through impromptu channels of talus, the tough crescendo of rocky slope, until they reached a summit where they might open a knapsack and have their lunch of tomato sandwiches, cucumber salad, and apricots, joined only by the ghosts of Shanta Indians, of Pat Coghlan, Judge Albert Fall, and the misnamed Thomas Fortune Ryan who, like so many, had attempted and failed over the years to tame this basin.

For Agnes and Delfino, sitting on these buffblack stones carved by people long since gone to earth meant something inexpressibly life-allowing. They had their favorite glyphs and visited them like old friends. The kachina with the lightning bolt striking its head or, as Agnes liked to believe, emanating from it. The flock of thunderbirds. The coiled snake. Flute players, deer, rain shaped like combs. A weatherworn open-air museum on whose sculptures they sat gazing toward the vanishing point of the Burrito Range, the Organs—at the foot of whose massive rock pipes the dunes of White Sands glittered bright as a blizzard—and Old Baldy, looming like a shaved head above the timberline. At the center of this overwhelming cosmos were shadows where slopes converged into a level alcove. It was there that their ranch house probably remained, their earth tank and windmill, maybe, and some belongings they left behind on the assumption they’d return sooner rather than later—certainly sooner than never. Even seeing Dripping Spring from such a distance made them feel connected.