Ariel's Crossing (27 page)

Ariel read from an essay by the latter. “‘My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.’”

She lifted her fingers then her braceleted wrist and quaking arm off the bedsheets and said the words
Self
and
Reliance
separately, enunciating each with painstaking care. Nodding, Ariel continued as the woman lay her hand on her chest with deliberate heedfulness, as if she were holding some gossamer string connected to life itself.

Sooner than any of them might have expected, the doctors advised Bonnie Jean that her mother had made wonderful progress and needed to begin physical and speech therapy. The prognosis for a complete recovery was entirely positive. Plans were made to transfer her to a convalescent facility where she could recuperate. Under cloudless blue skies and a white sun that made her blink and brought to her lips another partly lopsided smile, she was moved in an ambulette van. Her daughter decorated her new room with metallic balloons emblazoned with the words
Get Well Soon
and a huge—Bonnie might have thought a little overhuge—arrangement of gladiolas from Brice and Jessica. Explaining to her mother that no, this wasn’t a nursing home, Bonnie Jean assured her she was going to be here for only a month, or six weeks at the most, and then it would be back to Pear Street. Ariel added that her departure would be not in a wheelchair but on her own two feet.

“That sounds good, doesn’t it?”

“Yeh,” gazing as it were into Ariel’s very soul.

And into her soul, that very evening at Granna’s house, Ariel herself began, in the wake of this aberration from her purpose here, to address anew her own quixotic quest. She’d finally reached Brice the day after his mother’s hospitalization and told him everything, reassuring him there was no immediate need to fly out. She felt a twinge of guilty selfishness about wanting her parents to stay away from Los Alamos for the time being. That and a sense of disgraceful collusion with her aunt, whose sibling rivalry with Brice she found distasteful. But Ariel desperately desired to have a week or two to finish what she’d begun, removed from Jessica and her father. She saw this with cold clarity, and the idea caused a shiver to run through her. Be that as it may, when Brice agreed that Ariel and her aunt could handle matters until Granna settled into this convalescent center, whereafter he’d come assist with whatever there was to shoulder, Ariel exonerated herself from further worry. There was the question, also, of when or if Brice intended to tell his mother and sister about Kip Calder’s true relationship with Ariel herself. For the moment, she let it pass. Family dynamics. As always, the indelicate balance.

Afternoons, she continued looking for Kip. She drove to Rancho de Taos and asked around until she found the funky motel where he had lived till three years before. The proprietor remembered him well. Bright man, kind of sickly, kept to himself a lot.

“Left his room way nicer than he found it. Fact, it’s almost like it was when he took off. I don’t let people in there unless I’m full up and have to. Best apartment in the joint.”

Ariel asked if she could have a peek.

“Vacant right now, I don’t mind,” she was told.

Its walls could not have been whiter, nor the room more simple, spartan. Its warm wooden floor was sanded and varnished like some pauper ballroom’s. For a vagrant, a wanderer, he surely had a refined ascetic sense of what home, if only a plain room, should be. Like some monastic cell, but purer yet. She left, reminded of how she had felt once when she visited Arrowhead, up in Massachusetts, the austere house where Melville had written his great novel. Kip was no novelist, but she could imagine his mind swimming through kindred dark waters. And what shores had Melville beached on if not the most desperate and melancholy, convinced of his failure even as he merely triumphed?

Feeling conflicted—as she knew it was not her place to divulge her parents’ long-held secret to Brice’s mother and sister—she decided to go ahead and put up a few tentative posters in places Bonnie and her husband wouldn’t likely see them. Bowling alley, a couple bars—certainly no churches, and nowhere near the center. Had to do something; even half-measures were better than none.

Missing
William “Kip” Calder
Born Los Alamos 1944
,
Viet Vet
Any Information Leading
To His Whereabouts Appreciated
Please Contact…

appended with Ariel’s name and the Pear Street number. Up they went, handmade things, foolish and hopeless. Muddy way-outdated photograph and no reward. Notices for stray dogs were more assured of success.

She contacted Social Security but got nowhere: Privacy Act, and besides, she didn’t have his number. Went through every local phone book in the state, looking up Calder in the central library. She even encountered a few, but ran up a telephone bill without result. Hesitant, she finally called the police to inquire if there was any William Calder in their records. Brice could have told her how unhelpful she’d find them. A visit to the morgue was equally in vain.

Illumination came slowly to Ariel, but come it did.

Kip Calder was gone, extinct, vanished, never to return. It had to be so. The conscientious thing for her to do was abandon her search. Pathetic, the forsaken child hunting for the wayward father. One of the oldest, most hackneyed tales in the book. Kip as grail, as end of the rainbow, as Wiles’s solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. No, no. She would see her grandmother through her crisis, and then would get back to New York and start over. As for the pregnancy, she hated to admit it, but maybe David was right that she wasn’t mother material and an abortion was the only wise choice. All else was leading to nothing but a botch. Damned if Emerson hadn’t nailed it. Self-reliance was our beginning and our end. You had only yourself to work with. Others might show kindness toward you along the path, or meanness. But only your feet walked that path, only yours chose the course at every crossroads. Platitudes, surely. But it seemed to Ariel tonight that these carried the weight of truth. Every cliché was once a revolutionary concept.

From the vantage of a few winding miles up the dry riverbed of Rio Nambé, they could see the big satellite dishes far off in the western distance catching and reflecting sunlight from their safeguarded perches on Mesita del Buey and Frijoles. The three men of three generations sat down to rest on the bank, and Marcos smoked slowly and tossed egg-shaped stones into the current, which ran meager even in the deepest channels, threading its way down to Pojoaque. They’d talked about this and that on their walk, some about good old days, some about bad ones. Turned out Delfino had noticed a newspaper article Kip clipped a few weeks ago, a lengthy obituary of Kenneth Bainbridge, gone to his maker in July. Why had Kip scissored that particular column from the paper? he asked, sensing that through Bainbridge their paths converged once again.

“My father knew him a little,” said Kip. “You probably met him yourself.”

“Not personally, but he had his impact on my life.”

“All our lives. Not only did he build that first cyclotron at Harvard that they moved up to the Hill when they were just getting started, but he was there at the end.”

“Top of command down at Trinity—oversaw the building of the tower, positioning of the device, that first explosion. They say if it’d hangfired, he’d have been the one to go out there to see what went wrong.”

“You wish it’d hangfired.”

Delfino said, “Let’s get this straight. I didn’t want us to lose the war. In my small way, I was trying to help us win. All I’m saying is, they could’ve done their work, then kept their word. What good’s a homeland if you got no home? When it comes to nukes, the brass has always had a hard time keeping its word about anything. Pretty weird getting screwed by the government when all’s you’re doing is acting like a patriot.”

Kip saw the half-smoked cigarette in his trouser cuff. Marcos offered him a fresh one but he declined, relighting the fag.

They had their way of making you feel you were the one who was nuts, and even if you were, a little, they rendered the definition of nuts obsolete, passé. Delfino had seen so-called UFOs, but knew they’d been launched from quite close quarters and so never for a moment bought into extraterrestrials. Spacemen were for the birds, even if they did exist.

“Look here, a lot of things exist that shouldn’t.” It didn’t matter a good goddamn, Delfino continued, whether we were or weren’t being observed by intelligences from other solar systems. They were out there, most likely. So? What he had learned during his years of research sickened him, earned him the badge in his heart of the disgusted, the abused, the ruined.

Kip sat listening, empathizing more than Delfino might have thought. A pragmatist, he knew that when things went wrong one needn’t point one’s finger to the heavens at either God or green men.

In 1951, Delfino went on, the Atomic Energy Commission established three-point-nine rads as the max threshold for troop exposure to ionizing radiation. Seven miles from ground zero was set as the safety distance for nuclear tests in Nevada. A year later, eight volunteer officers were hunkered down in shallow trenches, flanked by cactuses and nothing else, at a distance of just two thousand yards out, to play a part in Shot Simon. A dozen others were located at twenty-five hundred yards for Shot Badger, and other officers beheld Shot Nancy from the same distance. These shots were umbrellaed under the dumbshit code name Upshot-Knothole, or as one clever serviceman renamed it,
Up Your Nuthole.
The officers were exposed to at least a hundred rads on deton. Some were temporarily blinded. All were burned, leaving them with skin ulcers that looked like silvery purple worms wandering a scrapheap of shriveled beets. The men underwent physical and psychological exams before and after the guinea-pig tests, but none was given any intelligible consent form to sign off on. Other troops were ordered into combat attack mode. They ran with bayonets toward ground zero, shouting and crying as the earth rolled under their feet in waves, like some dirt ocean heading for shore. They returned to camp bleeding from noses, eyes, ears, and muted mouths. As for the phantom enemy who was supposed to be frightened by all this, he heard none of their shouting that day because he had no ears. He didn’t see their bayonets because he had no eyes.

“Ever since they thought up nukes, they been moving people around like chess pieces, packing some of us off to get us out from underfoot, sending others to slaughter. Worse damn invention in the history of man.”

Marcos continued to toss stones. Kip sat at a kind of weird attention, hands spread on thighs, spine erect. Whenever the bomb came up in conversation or in the news, Kip’s thoughts usually torqued in different directions, either ricocheting away or mothing to the flame. Born during Christmas season, he might as well have been born on Christmas Island, or Eniwetok, Yucca Flat, or Bikini—the bomb had stalked him for half a century, ruined his father’s life, poisoned the lives of so many people he encountered over the years. And here was Delfino now, another casualty category altogether, asking Kip whether being the son of one of the physicists who invented the gadget haunted him.

“My whole life. But it haunts every single person in the world, whether they ever think about it or not. At the end of the day I’m afraid it’ll take us all out.”

“Holocaust?”

“It’d be a total statistical anomaly if it didn’t happen. The ratio of warheads to maniacs with access is too high to avoid it. Could be the next generation, the one after, but it’s a total probability. Kubrick got it right all the way back in the early sixties—”

“Who’s that?”

“Film director.
Dr. Strangelove.”

“Never saw it.”

“Slim Pickens riding an A-bomb like one of Saint John’s horses, waving his cowboy hat and hollering all the way down to the target—probably the most perfect image of human lunacy any movie director ever shot. But my point is that when it does happen, it’ll be because somebody screwed up, somebody had too much scotch—”

“Vodka, more like,” said Marcos.

“—somebody keystroked in the wrong numbers, overrode failsafes by mistake. Kind of makes all your stories about atomic veterans even sadder than they already are. Why kill rats in the lab when your field research already shows you know how to kill rats? It’s less clinical than flat-out homicidal.”

Delfino thought about that for a moment, then stood up and brushed the sand and dust off the back of his trousers. The others got up, too. Their shadows stretched long behind them in the creek bed as they walked back toward Pajarito.

His stay in Nambé was nearing an end. Most of what he came here to accomplish had been accomplished, and what few things he hadn’t been sure about seemed clear now. He wished he could tell his brother what he was going to do but knew Carl would repeat it to Sarah, and Sarah would move heaven and earth to dissuade him. Probably ought to be dissuaded, he thought, but he didn’t want to be. Kip had proven to be the unexpected catalyst. He’d inadvertently made the concept seem real, as if it had hardness to it, body to match soul.

Souls, bodies, laws, earth. Delfino pondered what to do about Kip’s proposal he accompany him into the basin. Wasn’t a question of whether he’d earned his saddle. He had earned his berth, such as it was, in this highly promising disaster in the making. Nor was Delfino’s hesitation prompted by the fact that he didn’t really know Kip, and that sharing a potentially suicidal experience with someone you didn’t know might be an even greater madness. None of this bothered Delfino, nor even did the realization that Kip’s joining him would mean Kip couldn’t fulfill his promise to tell the family what was going on, give them the documents Delfino had entrusted to him. No, what troubled Delfino was Agnes. Would she be looking on, thinking, Who is this other man? Would Kip somehow dilute what was to be, finally, a spiritual experience? Delfino mulled this as the three of them made their way back down the riverbed. It didn’t occur to any of them, as each trod his own thoughtful path, that they constituted the river that ran here today. None recognized at that moment, though they would understand it later, that they were able to march along, to think, to worry, to struggle, only because they
were
Rio Nambé in this fleeting instance. They were water and clay, the difficult thinking, meandering, willful kind, and they flowed back toward their sources.