Ariel's Crossing (2 page)

The visions that followed Francisca in her continuous dream were so richly whole as to make her unaware of time’s presence. One thing she missed, however, was the raw tactility of her former waking life. She never bruised or bled now. Drought didn’t make her thirsty. Winter frost failed to chill her. She walked the fields unable to feel the sharp stalks of corn or bulbs of purple garlic. Raindrops in their hurry to reach the ground passed through her body. Amazed, she would extend her arm and watch the drizzle penetrate her palm as if she were not there at all. How she wished she could feel the holy clay of Chimayó, its grainy coolness. But over time she learned not to wish for more than flight and fragrances and the remembrance of touch.

Doubt is a ghost’s most dangerous adversary. Hoping she was somehow not a ghost had kept her going, but after decades gathered themselves and fell behind the arc of the new century, even Doña Francisca de Peña began to wane. Lately, daybreak exhausted her, and she crouched in shadowy corners of the crumbling fieldhouse, wondering if a dreamer could dream within her dreams other dreams. She began to venture more often into the murky world of doubt, only to return feeling worn down, bereft as some cleric who had lost his calling. She told herself that this unfinished presence, this separating spirit that seemed the furtherance of a life led, was probably some fond but spurious dream that one small part of her heart had wished into being, even though it lay as dust on the ground. Could it be that a single speck of her waking or dreaming self had simply refused to die and, as a result, was now caught in a fantasy? That she had misunderstood her death, and all this was a prophecy of a future that hadn’t come to pass?

There really were signs she was wasting away. Sometimes she forgot how to ascend the veiled staircase of air. How to smell or see. Sometimes she had to work to convince herself she was the same woman, animated and full of opinions about everything, just as she always had been when this land was hers, and the name Doña Francisca of Nambé carried a weight of authority and respect throughout the valley and outlying lands.

It wasn’t until this boy saw her, this boy christened Mark but nicknamed Marcos by those who worked on the horse ranch—Rancho Pajarito, they called it now—that she began to believe in herself again. She’d wandered these fields for so long that she hadn’t noticed that no one noticed her after Juliar Montoya cast her ashes here, in the century before the advent of electric power and telephone lines and cellular towers, before cars ferried people in from and out to the highway where the school building had been converted into a shining sad new Indian casino down at the junction of the roads to Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Taos, and Chimayó village.

With a look of terror and skepticism tailored by reverence in his squinting eyes, Carl’s son, Marcos, confirmed for her the prospect that she was there, a figure, a shape, a vision in someone else’s mind, not just the spectral issue of her own weird genius. The question was, how could she express the gratitude she felt without frightening off her only witness?

A quiver of excitement stirred the air around her. Marcos, then thirteen, reminded her of her father, Trinidad: strong, rangy, carven-faced, shy yet with a stubborn cast in those midnight-blue eyes. Like her father, he bore a scar on his left forearm. Even as the boy was shocked to see her floating above the field, he wore the same determined frown of Francisca’s father.

Marcos’s mind was racing, What the hell?

Reaching out toward him, head tipped, she gestured, beckoning him to understand that she was the same deliberately tenacious woman as ever, possessed of the same hardness as the earth beneath them. She tried to tell him that though time had worn her down a little, and that she’d been roughened by its voluptuous desolation, she
was
—she was, she existed. How else could she extend her arm and open her fingers like this?

Marcos stared.

Heavy wind rolled slow over the desert past Tesuque, down what used to be Kit Carson Highway, past Cities of Gold casino whose name chides Coronado even as its gamblers pantomime his weakness, up the reservation road past Pojoaque cemetery where a fresh grave was decorated with pink plastic carnations and a wooden crucifix painted white. It meandered, this wind, along those same lands where Old World conquerors came, brutal Don Juan de Oñate in 1605, Don Diego de Vargas who retook the pueblos after the Indian rebellion at the end of the seventeenth century, alongside hundreds of other souls whose names were also scratched into Inscription Rock but who are now known only as icons, as words, letters, flourishes of the nearly forgotten. It meandered where explorers had worked their way into these domains and, circling as wind and humans and history will do, it blew over barrancas and came down into this valley and rushed right through her. The cottonwood leaves rustled on their numb winter limbs. This was the end of February 1981, the evening when Marcos first saw Francisca. She’d lost her sense of smell but keenly remembered the perfume of greasewood, of piñon smoke and grayblue juniper berries crushed between her fingers, the smell of rainripe droppings left by animals domestic and savage. She knew she couldn’t touch the amber bark of the cottonwoods that smelled like vanilla on hot summer days, but drew in breath—air breathing air—and ran her hand over the trunk of the great tree if only to show him she could, prove to him she was more than some desert draft.

She tried to speak, a wispy
gracías,
but intuited by the way his jaw tightened and his cheekbones knobbed out, and his mouth twisted into a scowl of confusion, that he couldn’t hear her. Or didn’t understand. Stubborn as ever, Francisca tried to tell him stories about all the freedoms she enjoyed. Told him that, being lighter than pollen, she could balance herself on the anther of a desert hollyhock. And on the tip of her finger, at that. Told him how she could swim up the heartwood center trunk of any of these trees, counting its rings as she went, then pass the rest of the night listening to an embryo’s heart beat in a hawk egg high in its branches, without ever disturbing the nesting mother.

The kid didn’t move.—Christ on a crutch, he said.

She tried to tell him that on starless nights she’d retraced the same steps she’d taken over the many years, along the
portal
hung with liver-red ristras, past the room he now occupied, on whose wooden door sprays of myrtle were nailed to ward off spirits—a talisman that had no effect on her one way or the other.

Hadn’t he noticed her before? the vapor breathed.

No answer.

Yes, she continued, drifting closer, flowing like sketchy mist off dry ice. She’d been here all along.

Marcos shook his head, closed his eyes and opened them looking away from the apparition. Clapping the fresh-fallen snow off the sleeves of his canvas barn jacket, he smacked his lips in disgust, hiked up the long rise to the house, ridiculing himself for being just plain out of his fricking gourd.

He thought no more about it the rest of that winter and on through the spring. There was work to do and he didn’t need this crazy bullshit cramping his style. Besides, if he said anything his father would laugh him right off the ranch.

The second time Marcos caught sight of her was on a warm June night, the year after that first encounter. New moon, ebony sky, stars arrayed like pulverized crystal on black velvet. Stillness but for the genial hubbub of scuttling stone in the riverbed. The horses slept standing in their stalls. His father had asked him to check on a mare who was late to foal. Striding briskly down the cindered aisle of the wide barn, he heard nesting birds shuffling in the eaves. The mare stood in her fullness, not yet ready to drop. Nothing to do but wait, he knew. Sliding the stall door shut, he set out to kill some time by tramping over to Conchas Park to spy on the
vatos,
the lowriders from Chimayó who hung out half a mile east of Rancho Pajarito.

He walked up the pebbly road that paralleled the riverbank, listening to the voices in the water with the drowsy sense that if he were fluent in their language he might be able to understand what they uttered. His feet knew the path as he loped along, dropping his head now and again to duck some low-slung branches of scraggly riverside trees. Hands thrust deep into his pockets, he looked over at the austere creek whose pocked face dully sparkled. His jeans were loose, clenched by a rawhide belt with a worn silver buckle. His T-shirt was black.

This was his favorite dangerous game. He knew that if they caught him snooping, they would try to chase him down and beat him up. The rumor was some guy from Las Trampas who’d come down to the valley on a lark had gotten himself knifed for trying to join their party uninvited. Marcos had no rational right to be watching the
vatos,
but that was why he found them such an irresistible spectacle.

Not that they did much. Built a driftwood bonfire in their forsaken park and drank cervezas, maybe blew some horse, bragged and prattled in Spanglish. Their women—mallbang coifs teased up above their foreheads like turkey fans—sat in their sleek finned cars listening to the radio while they knocked some back, snorted and smoked, drifting through the slow ritual of a weekend bender. For his part, Marcos hid in undergrowth on the shadowy shore opposite and gazed and eavesdropped. Had the night been starless he would have shimmied out over Rio Nambé on a fallen tree trunk to sit astraddle and smoke a butt, concealing the tangerine fire in the bowl of his hand. He could while away hours here and often did.

So it was nothing unusual for him to be ambling back home late along this stark stretch of road, as he was doing on the night Marcos again glimpsed the figure in the field. Intending to check on the mare once more before going to bed, he unlatched the aluminum gates which gave a slight clatter. Glancing across the corral to the right, down at the far margin of the meadow, he saw it—or, her—an insinuation of whiteness in the window of the deserted adobe.

His shoulder quaked. He winced and the quietest cry came out of him, a muffled yelp. Whiteness first, then a kind of blue, he saw, a pallid bluish white like watered-down skim milk, indistinct, at first stationary. After several incalculable moments the light moved more quickly than he might have thought possible. How he knew the figure was a woman he would not be able to say. She glided over the ground as a skein of light illuminated from within, a demure storm cloud, away from then back toward the ruined fieldhouse. Marcos stared breathless, seized less by fear than a kind of wishful skepticism, a hope that what was happening here wasn’t in fact happening. Without turning her head—for she did now have features, deep gray eyes, purling plaited hair, a magisterial, even haughty mouth, and on her face a look of abstracted curiosity—she again shifted direction to confront him, began deliberately to cross the pasture toward the oval-mouthed boy. She was as close as his trembling, outstretched palms when he stumbled back against the rattling metal paddock gate and her light frayed, faded, and vanished.

As before, Marcos told no one. After a month of walking down to that lower pasture at the same time every night to find himself saying ridiculous, insipid things like,—I’m here, or,—You can come out now, he himself began to question what he had twice seen. Even though Francisca de Peña was there, moving slowly around him, hovering before him, passing through him, she failed to make her presence known.

That mare, named Dolores, foaled finally, and her filly grew and foaled as well in the ensuing years. Having graduated from Los Alamos High, Marcos worked full-time now at the ranch. He broke new tenant horses in the day and in the evening drove to Tesuque for beer and spiced fries with friends. His bedroom wall was covered with blue and red ribbons, proving his rise through the competitive ranks as a horseman. Although a boy no more, he was unable, however, to erase from his thoughts the apparition in the field.

There had to be a logical explanation for his unworldly vision. Will-o’-the-wisp, he’d heard about such occurrences. Haze from the river. A dewcloud. Both times when he’d seen his apparition it had been the middle of the night. He had been tired, burned out. Before that last occasion he’d snuck a shot of tequila from his father’s liquor case. That explained it. Still, Marcos stopped putting the better studhorses out in the lower paddocks. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. Whole thing never happened. He’d long since lost interest in spying on the
vatos,
so why bother with this ghost? Kid stuff, he scolded himself. Goddamn it, grow up, man.

Over in McKinley County, a young woman named Mary grew up with her sister and two brothers in a modest, tin-roofed battenboard house that overlooked dusty Gallup from the northern bluffs. Both her parents worked in town, her mother part-time at the post office and father for the utility company. Mary ran away from home when she was seventeen. Not knowing anyone beyond Gallup, adrift on a dream of making it big in Hollywood, she hitched to Albuquerque, since that’s where the airport was.

Mary lived near Old Town for a while on the savings she had secretly amassed back home but, scared, couldn’t bring herself to board a plane for California. For one, she had little money and didn’t want to wind up on the Walk of Fame with all the other runaways, scraping a buck any way she could. Stalled and broke, she went to Santa Fe where she heard there was a waitressing job on the plaza. She enrolled in acting classes at night and found she did have a flair for improvisation and creating theater roles. The idea was that maybe after a year, two at the outside, she’d have enough money to leave New Mexico on her own terms.

Being shy, she was liked by her fellow employees and the boss but made few friends. This was fine with Mary, since friends are by definition people who know things about you. Under the assumed name of Franny Johnson—
Franny
being the character from a book by her favorite writer and
Johnson
lifted from another restaurant—she rented a small bungalow apartment in northwestern Santa Fe. At night she could hear the eighteen-wheelers headed toward Taos, or south, in the opposite direction. The eloquent music of these trucks put her in mind of a beautiful river even though the very place she’d escaped from was bisected by a highway whose perpetual traffic nearly drove her mad. Here, though poor as the proverbial church mouse, she relished her newfound independence. When she decided to grow her hair long, she did. When she decided to highlight it with streaks of orange and indigo, she did. When she got tired of all that, she dyed it back to dark blond. No one laughed at her ambition of becoming an actress because, fellow workshop hopefuls aside, no one knew.