Ariel's Crossing (26 page)

Kip awoke the next day with a preposterous idea, almost absurd in its simplicity. He was going to accompany Delfino Montoya back to Tularosa, and with Delfino he was going to ride on horseback across the basin and help him expropriate from the government his spread, or whatever might be left of it, at Dripping Spring. Delfino had never killed a man. Kip had. Not that Montoya intended to kill or even hurt anybody, but chances were pretty good that the military range security guys would enjoin him with force. If things got violent, wouldn’t it be better for someone with blood on his hands to stain them again, leaving innocence to the innocent? Kip believed that if there was a hell, he was probably going there. He was sure, with the bold unexpected surety of dawning insight, that this was why he’d survived everything—Los Alamos, Southeast Asia, the wide wild world—to arrive in Nambé: to serve out a final role as the younger brother Delfino needed. In a way, to subvert Big Brother. Not Carl, but the fatherland in one of its more miserable guises.

Two Wagnerisms combined to bring Kip to this decision. The first was
Um einen Gegenstand zu kennen, muss ich zwar nicht seine externen
—
aber ich muss alle seine internen Eigenschaften kennen.
As with Kip’s couple dozen phrases memorized in Lao and Vietnamese back during lulls in the war, words learned in the interest of killing time rather than Pathet Lao soldiers, this German fragment had no adjuncts in his memory. It was a stand-alone, just as Kip himself had so often been, and as he wanted Delfino not to be. He knew what the passage meant but couldn’t recall who had written or said it.
In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.

He fired up his small gas stove, put on the coffeepot. He lit a rare cigarette. He sat at his new-old table on his new-old chair and ate one of the oatmeal cookies that Sarah had given him, wrapped in a napkin, after dinner last night. The second Wagnerism was even simpler than the first. It came in the form of a Sufi precept—the primary of Sufi truths, in fact. All souls are in exile from their maker and are born longing to return and lose themselves in that birthsoul, despite how nourished or confused they may be by mortal attractions. Wagner had cherished the Sufi journey of souls back to the locus of beginnings more than any other idea in any other religion.

Standing over the slim dead body of a Vietcong insurgent deep in-country near Ban Pak Mène, in the last year of the war, Wagner had asked Kip if he ever noticed how the dying tend to curl themselves into the fetal position. As if in preparation to be reborn. No, Kip never noticed before Wagner drew it to his attention that faraway Laotian afternoon, amid the greens and reds, on one of their few personal sorties undertaken on foot from Luang Prabang rather than in the air.

—It’s all about pilgrimage, man, Wagner remarked. —We just think we’re walking forward. What we’re really doing is walking back to where we started every time we take a step. Like with everything fucking else, Einstein had it right. Light bends, time bends. Check it out. I’m staring at the back of my head, no matter where I look. So are you.

Coffee always smelled like life, preamble to the day. Was it any wonder everybody was addicted to it? Kip thought, stubbing out the half-smoked cigarette on the bottom of his shoe and dropping the butt into his pants cuff. How would he tell Delfino of his intention to join him? After all, hadn’t he already promised that he’d pass along to the family news of this gambit?

—You’ve been to Wat Xieng Khwan, near Vientiane. We were there together, remember that big Buddha statue thirty feet tall with the four arms made it look like a spider? Four heads facing every direction at the same time, with six Buddhas in lotus position on the heads of the four Buddhas, and more stone Buddhas atop those, and all surrounded by more Buddhas, a hundred stone Buddhas… . Wagner was coming in loud and clear this morning—less, it seemed, from within Kip’s head than from some distance without. Kip asked him, Is it a good idea for me to go to Dripping Spring with Delfino Montoya? Isn’t it a way of looking at World War Two from its altruistic, damnable birth down in the Jornada by staring dead straight into the teeth of Vietnam, finally? None of what Kip was proposing to do was any harder than learning to ride a bike, or jumping like some tiger through a ring of fire. The more difficult part would be to convince Delfino to allow him, an outsider and the son of one of the minds that had consigned the older man to a life of exile, to participate, however lamely, in his act of retribution.

Delfino was down in the barn with Carl and Marcos. They were saddling a new horse, of the kind Marcos called a
no-history
—not a
puke,
just unknown to them. And it looked as if Delfino got to be the one to give her a go.

“Might just be a dullard,” Marcos encouraged him.

“Or else the horse from Hades,” Carl muttered. “You sure you want to try her out? Marcos here’s young enough that broke bones don’t matter to him.”

“Kip, you’re just in time to watch Delfino break his neck.”

“That’s too bad,” Kip said.

“I ain’t breaking anything but this horse.”

Delfino was up on her, this green, unbroken stick, and she did herself and him proud, loping around the ring like a natural. When Delfino circled her around to the post-and-rail where they leaned, scrutinizing the performance, Kip asked, “Mind if I have a go?” Marcos looked more concerned than Kip might have liked. “I’m no horseman like Delfino, but I know how to hang on.”

Having leapt down, Delfino handed Kip the reins, saying, “Seems a talented horse.”

Carl said, “Talented enough this morning. Just don’t want to see Kip hurt himself.”

“I rode a lot as a kid.”

“Baby hair don’t know and gray hair don’t remember.”

Kip shoved his boot into the stirrup, grabbed the horn, and lifted himself into the saddle, just momentarily catching his knee on the cantle. The horse appeared not to understand she had a rider aboard. Gently reining her away into a slow walk around the ring, Kip maintained the illusion of not being there. He made no audible sound. Several laps tracking left, several right. He never pushed her beyond a walk, nor did he relinquish control. Kept his back straight, pushed his heels down and legs forward, sat deep, hands quiet and low—two parts of the same beating heart, as he remembered his father telling him when he first learned how to do this, so many years ago.

Then it was as if the horse, too, remembered something, changed her mind. Rearing her head, tipping it to the side, she looked this rider in the eye before lighting out at a sudden full zigzag gallop, stopping abruptly to tack, lurch, halt. Kip was first thrown back, nearly losing the reins, then pitched forward. The onlookers began shouting and waving their hands, though Kip couldn’t hear or see them. The corral fence loomed and he prepared himself for a rude launching, but as suddenly as she’d gone mad on him, the horse calmed down.

“What the hell was that?” Marcos said.

Kip shrugged.

“Held his own, didn’t he,” Carl laughed, holding the reins as Kip climbed down.

Not a bad showing, which was all Kip had hoped to accomplish. Delfino couldn’t reasonably reject his new friend and self-appointed conscript on the ground he couldn’t ride—that was the point. Marcos clapped him on the shoulder with more exuberance than was necessary, yet with an affection that Kip realized, to his slight chagrin, he was going to miss. The inveterate veteran outcast riding a crazy horse around a corral before an audience of friends? Of his own volition, even at his insistence? Wagner would never have believed it possible. Nor Brice, the other of Kip’s twin towers, or towering twins, both rising—Brice and Wagner, antiwar hero and sainted soldier—to greet him on this same resolving if raveling day. He thanked them for the spin, excused himself, and retreated to the fieldhouse, more or less to hide from all that was incoming—clairvoyant bombardment as he, always the covert warrior, saw it. His mind was made up about Dripping Spring, however. It was the necessary end to all his wars, personal and public.

He was suddenly exhausted. Maybe the gray-hair gibe hadn’t been so far off the mark. His mind was troubling him, but then his mind had been troubling him, tiring him, more and more these past days. They say this happens to people—they keep it together until some dream is attained, then promptly fall apart. He lay down on his unmade bed and slept with the sun on his face, fitful, dreaming.

The next living voice he heard asked, “Kip?” and he opened his eyes to catch Franny looking at him with concern. “Are you all right?”

Still dressed in shirt, pants, boots, Kip blinked and pushed himself up onto one elbow.

“You were crying out. I heard you all the way from the far end of the paddock. I thought you were dying or something.”

He was speechless.

“That must’ve been some kind of nightmare you were having,” she said, sitting beside him on his bed.

“Daymare,” he managed, squinting in the noon light. His pulse was quickened by these shifts of consciousness, and a kind of drear disgust hovered over him like a surreal smog. As one who felt he’d achieved what Oppenheimer once termed “profound serenity through discipline”—the discipline of renunciation, no hatreds, no ambitions for self, no desires other than to vanish into the ether—he was astonished by his dream. The world was drawing him back into its current, and his expressive unconscious exhibited good evidence as to why it had become preferable for him to be out of rather than in the flow.

“What made you so afraid?”

Kip lay back on his pillow soaked with sweat.

“I don’t know,” he lied.

“Marcos told me you were in the ring this morning. I didn’t know you could ride.”

The image of a dignified woman atop a funeral pyre was as if seared onto the back of his lids. Her eyes were wide open, and she looked knowingly at him. He must have been floating above her as the smoke drifted upward, just like it did during second passes in Laos, flying low over fast terrain to lay down white phosphorus in places where the living would soon be dead.

“I can almost do anything, Mary. Emphasis on almost.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Call you by your right name, you mean?”

Franny stood up. She was wearing a loose white dress that in this limewashed, sundrenched chamber gave her the appearance of a statue draped in finely hewn, supple marble. “I’m just trying to be nice, Kip. You’ve already made your opinion known about what I’m doing. Besides, you promised.”

“I remember my dream now.”

The statue remained standing, unmoving, listening to Kip as he concocted a dream in which three people—Franny, Marcos, and Mary—who had all been good friends were told by the doctor they couldn’t see one another anymore because each had a disease that, though not threatening to his or her own health, would be fatal to the other two.

“That’s no nightmare. You’re making it up.” Franny had never been cross with Kip before, but his fake, even preachy dream distressed her. She’d built him up in her mind as a kind of guru, with earned convictions and a light, disinterested touch. Why was he pressing her? Of course, the problem he raised was as real as the dream he used to pose it was sham. “I’ll leave you to your fictions,” was about as disparaging a remark as she could manage.

“Thanks for troubling yourself, really. I’m fine now.”

She turned to go, to flee this reminder—the last Kip would ever furnish on the subject—but couldn’t escape his final observation. “I had a friend back in Laos, very religious person, for a killer. He slaughtered the enemy without fussing, was a deadeye with any weapon you put in his hands. Still, this guy never met a spiritual creed he didn’t like. Philosopher. He had a saying I was thinking about earlier this morning. The only way to know somebody is from the inside out, not the other way around.”

“You can’t be a murderer and a religious man at the same time.”

“Most murderers think they’re God. And God has blood on his hands, too, don’t forget.”

“Well, none of this has anything to do with me.”

“You’re right. I apologize.”

“What you mean is, Marcos doesn’t know me.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Franny’s white dress swung luminous in the doorway, and once she had gone, Kip listened to the birds chattering and scolding one another in the high branches.

What right do I have? he thought. What right in the world.

Her left side was partially paralyzed, though her fingers moved at the doctor’s command and her thin wrist rose with difficulty but nonetheless rose. She could feel the hands that held her own, and pleased everyone with her ready half smiles. The stroke had mildly slurred her speech—she didn’t feel much like speaking those first days, anyway—but her physician believed she had every chance of regaining full articulation. She fought sadness and fear as best she could. She prayed, though her prayers, begun with energy and commitment, would trail away before she got to a proper Amen. She tired, slept, awakened refreshed, then tired again.

Once they moved her out of intensive care and into her own room, she brightened up altogether. Fewer external stimuli, no moaning beyond the drawn curtain. Less frightening equipment, just intravenous and a catheter. Her cheeks blushed with new color when she found she could clasp a rubber ball. Bonnie Jean and Ariel worked out an alternating routine—Ariel in the morning, Bonnie the afternoon, either or both in the evening—so she was never alone during visiting hours. Daughter watched television with her, soap operas and talk shows. Granddaughter arranged orchids in a round glass bowl of water and set them on her windowsill. Granna saw that the mountains were upside down in the globular vase.

“Refrac … shion,” she said slowly, appreciatively.

Ariel chose books to read to her from Granna’s shelves. She brought a Bible to the hospital, and other volumes that appeared to have been left purposely within reach of her reading chair in the cottage living room.

“Wall Whitman,” the patient requested, impatient with her diffident tongue. Then tried again a bit harder, straining and succeeding with, “Walt Whitman or … or Eh … merson.”