Ariel's Crossing (30 page)

“Except you.”

“Just so.”

Better to be talking, thought Delfino. Keeps apprehension more at bay. You talk, you stay calm, stay strong that way. Silence was dangerous, Agnes had always believed. One of her sayings went, —In silence we the tempest fear.

If she’d only known it, Franny would have concurred with Agnes’s truism when she got back to Pajarito that night after work to find Marcos more agitated than she’d ever seen him. Up and down their room he was pacing in angry silence, enraged but not with anyone other than himself. “My god,” she asked, “what’s the matter?”

“I’m an idiot is what’s the matter,” not glancing up but instead pounding his fists against his thighs as he marched back and forth.

Franny knew she’d been found out. He refused even to look at her. She sat on the end of the bed, waiting. Mary, so infrequently real to anyone, entered Franny’s consciousness and pleaded the inevitable. Tell him everything, and tell him now. Apologize from your soul and maybe take the chance of asking if we shouldn’t start over, give it a fresh try in a new place where neither of us has a past. Who knows but good might come of it? Franny asked Marcos again, in a tentative voice, what was wrong.

He didn’t hear her, or maybe her voice was so subdued by anxiety that it never left her lips. She found herself simply conceding, “Marcos, I guess you know I’m not who I’ve been saying I am. But I hope you’ll hear me out.”

“What?” he asked, only mildly distracted from his own thoughts.

“I said, I’m not who you think I am.”

“Nobody ever is.” Crisp cynicism, unusual for Marcos. Maybe she’d misunderstood the cause of his anger. She sat still, not daring to tip the uneasy balance one way or the other. But it was too late. Marcos turned a very confused, questioning eye on her. “What are you talking about, Franny?”

“You shouldn’t call me that anymore.”

“Has everybody around here gone mental?”

“I’m not Franny Johnson.”

Marcos looked at the ceiling, then back at her. “Great, fine, wonderful. Would you mind telling me who you are, then?”

“My name is Mary.”

His unbreathing mouth tensed into a slow frown. This was, he sensed, a moment whose magnitudes of disappointment were of a kind everybody must experience at some point in life, and from which few entirely bounce back.

“Mary Carpenter,” she whispered through first tears.

Even if Marcos had wanted to say something—repeat this new name, try it out—he wouldn’t have been able to. His voice, along with his faith in Franny, escaped him. He listened to her explanation of who she really was, and how and why she had transformed herself from Mary, a runaway from Gallup, into Franny. He was awed, stunned, impressed, really, by the breadth of her fraudulence.

“I’m the same person, Marcos. I’m exactly the same inside.” She didn’t, however, bring up Los Angeles, or the possible Utopian future that could come with his forgiveness and their fresh beginning.

He sat on the bed beside her, his back to her, elbows on knees and head in hands. The silence welled until she broke it, her voice trembling, “Isn’t that what you were angry about?”

“What, that you’ve completely lied to me about yourself from the first moment we met? You’re too good a phony for me to have found out on my own. That isn’t what I was pissed about before.”

“I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”

“Everything, now.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Everything. I’ve got to go stop them.”

“Stop who?”

“Idiots, all three of us. Me especially.” He told her that Delfino and Kip had gone south, chasing a verdict against the government, and that they’d given him the responsibility of informing Carl and Sarah the day after tomorrow. He couldn’t tell his parents because they’d call the police, and he didn’t want Kip and Delfino to get into trouble with the authorities even before they’d broken any laws. He had to go after them, and she had to cover his absence, no matter whether she was the fucking Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene.

“That’s not funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” He handed her Delfino’s documents and said, “Give these to Sarah in two days if you don’t hear otherwise from me.”

“What am I supposed to tell her and Carl in the meantime, with you and Kip just disappearing like this?”

“You’re obviously a born liar, or else the great actress you always wanted to be.”

“That’s cruel.”

“Tell them whatever you want. I’m sure they’ll believe whatever you make up.”

“Please don’t shout.”

He turned and stared at her averted eyes. “You’re really from Gallup then?”

“Yes.”

“Your father, he didn’t die in Africa.”

Mary said nothing, just smoothed a wisp of hair behind her ear with a quaking finger.

“And your mother lives in Gallup, not Princeton.”

“I think so.”

“You think so.”

“I haven’t been in touch with her for a while.”

“Why not?”

Nothing. She held back tears because she didn’t want sympathy, didn’t want to be judged or misjudged by Marcos. Her face was rigid as a mask, her lips white, shoulders quaking. Kip had, in his way, warned her that this moment was inevitable. But he’d never intimated how she was to behave when it came.

“You’re in some kind of trouble?”

How she would have liked to laugh. “Other than this, of course not.”

“Don’t fucking say
of course not.
Nothing’s of course or of course not.”

A melancholy settled over the room for protracted minutes, then Mary asked, “What do you want to do?”

Marcos answered in so quiet a voice that she could hardly hear him, “I don’t know anything except I can’t let those stupid old fools go in there and get themselves killed.”

“I’m so sorry, Marcos.”

“Not half as sorry as I am.”

Mary placed her hand on his and as she did there came a knock on the curtained glass of their door, in the narrow alcove that gave onto the long, tiled
portal.
Sunset had palely lit the room through the casements—they hadn’t noticed—and now they sat in evening darkness. Neither moved. Marcos instinctively rubbed Mary’s hand, which was icy. Another knock.

“Now what,” he said.

“Marcos, you there?”

Sarah’s voice.

“What is it?” he asked, but his own voice didn’t carry.

“I’m so sorry, Marcos,” Mary repeated.

“Marcos?”

“Yes,” he answered, letting go of Mary’s hand and rising to open the door. Sarah stood on the other side of the screen. Drawn to the porch lamp, moths circled and arabesqued above her head. She was sorry to disturb him and Franny, but wondered if he knew where Kip happened to be tonight. She’d been down to the fieldhouse—no sign of him. There was someone here who had traveled a great distance to meet him, Sarah explained, as Marcos saw the face of a young woman behind his mother in the assembling shadows.

Part III
Jornada del Muerto
Nambé and New York
to Tularosa Basin
1996

THEY SET OUT
from nowhere. The horses chuffed in protest when they backed them out of the rusty van along this unpeopled strait. They abandoned their truck and trailer in a sandy ravine beside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Saddled and outfitted, they rode along a grit service road that would take them through Willow Springs and west toward the red Oscuras. Jakes Hill receded, somewhere between Tularosa and Carrizozo, while before them silvergreen clouds crowned the sawtooth horizon. They saw pencil rain fall in spectral columns in the distance, evaporating before it ever reached the ground. They saw the last of the day’s small black birds pitching home like little rocks across the wide sky, and heard their meager peeping. Saw paloverde shrubs, solitary green dabs. And pink chaparral and soaptree yucca with its dried dead blossoms that looked like rattlesnake bellies reshaped into tapers. Saw backlit spiderwebs that looked like dreamcatchers woven in rabbit-brush spurs and creosote elbows. Here they passed the corpse of a black rubber auto tire. There they saw tiny dunes of sand populated by little yellow cushion plants in the vague violet shade of a tamarisk grove. They heard crickets trill and a kit fox yap as they caravaned past weathered telephone poles with clear glass insulators still in place from the forties, their wires long since snipped. They saw alkali that resembled frost on the pinkbrown desert floor. They also happened to see a wink of light off in the distance, far downvalley from the sunspout that parodied this magisterial sunset. An obscene glimmer, a tiny chromium glint. Burnished steel that caught the sun and spurned it. Or else the thick glass of a telemetry observation tower. In any case, something even less indigenous to this terrain than the intruders themselves. Either way, they were bathed in a sunset the color of cream pouring into the earth basin. It reminded the young woman of the Annunciation scene painted on an antique retablo she’d noticed on the wall back in Delfino Montoya’s shanty bungalow.

Ariel witnessed these lights, caused by nature and man, which prompted the memory of dawn brightly burning in that pool of water on the kitchen floor of the upstate farmhouse, on that relatively recent morning when she’d decided to come looking for Kip. Seemed naive now. But how could she have imagined she’d end up here? Delfino had already told her she didn’t belong in the desert. Told her and Marcos in no uncertain terms that this was not how it was supposed to happen.

Nothing had gone right. Sometime after Delfino hit the sack last night but before he awakened this morning, Kip had evolved a different plan, a variant itinerary for them both. Delfino discovered that his brand-new friend had defected, after quietly messing up their gear. The keys to his pickup had been nicked, like the pickup itself, which Kip had furtively loaded with backpack, canteen, gun, map. Weak from insomnia and gutsickness, Kip nonetheless managed to roll the truck down the street in neutral, starting the engine only when he was out of earshot. On the drive north, then east to the spot that afforded best access on foot to Dripping Spring, his thoughts had been a whirlwind of hope. He hoped his expertise in reading topographicals was still sharp. Hoped his diminished stamina would suffice to get him there, and that his bygone genius for moving behind enemy lines wasn’t utterly defunct. He hoped, above all, Delfino wouldn’t misunderstand his actions, that he would at least mull over the note he left behind. The logic was simple. Kip would set up a siege at Dripping Spring while referring the military police to Delfino, who could capitalize on this act by bringing press attention to his half-century-old cause.

I’ve lived off your family’s kindness for years now,
Kip’s note began, then continued,

Your brother and Sarah, Marcos, they all love you and even need you. Nobody needs me, as such. We’re both war vets of different strifes who wound up on the same side. Give me the chance to help you. Soon as I get there, I’ll make sure they find me. I’ll throw them back to you, and the show will be yours. Sorry about messing with your stuff. The idea is to slow you down long enough so you have time to think through my proposition. Same way you couldn’t talk about your plan with Carl, I didn’t feel I could discuss mine with you. You’d have tried to talk me out of it and might have succeeded. Stay there and let me do this for you.

Your friend, whether you believe it or not, Kip.

“Bullshit, crap, and fuckall,” Delfino Montoya had exclaimed as he read this, then looked around at the strewn equipment that had been so painstakingly arranged. His natural impulse was to call the police. But, hands lapsing at his sides, he realized he couldn’t. Not if he wanted to proceed with his own plan. He began to laugh. Well, nobody could accuse Kip Calder of lacking pluck.

Delfino had just begun to gather up his provisions, intending fully to ignore Calder’s devisings, when Ariel and Marcos appeared at his door. For crissakes. Wasted and wired from driving all night down-state and over to Carrizozo through the Valley of Fires, the two explained themselves. Marcos assured his uncle that his scheme hadn’t been divulged, he needn’t worry—Franny had been sworn to take care of everything and Marcos was more than confident she was up to the subterfuge. As for Ariel, Delfino wondered how Calder could claim,
Nobody needs me, as such,
when his distraught daughter was right here looking for him. Shocked, aggrieved to discover Kip wasn’t with Delfino, she demanded to know where he was. He handed her the letter. “Maybe you’ll understand this better than I do.”

Heart sinking, Ariel read Kip’s note. The Montoyas, young and old, looked at each other awkwardly. She slowly folded it, gave it back to Delfino, and said in a low, determined voice, “We’ve got to stop him.”

Marcos asked, “How long has he been gone, Delf?”

“Two, three hours? I don’t know. Like I say, I was asleep.”

“He can’t have gotten far.”

“Down here you don’t have to go very far to disappear.”

“Doesn’t matter. We have to look.”

Although morning was no longer in its infancy, and Delfino still had it in mind to depart that evening, they drove Ariel’s car up and down Route 54 looking for the well-intentioned bastard. But nothing doing. Nor did they dare ask around if anyone had seen a dark-eyed, sickly-looking man driving a shanghaied Ford pickup.

“We know where he’s gone,” Delfino said, back at the bungalow. “No point wasting more time. I’ll tell Kip you’re here when I hook up with him at Dripping Spring.”

“No way,” she blurted, taken aback by her brazenness.

Delfino stood unmoving.

“We might be more helpful to you than you think,” Marcos said.

Ariel added, “Don’t underestimate the strengths that come from what you think are weaknesses.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re not going alone. It’d be plain stupid.”

“Look, Marcos, I’m not stupid and I’m not smart. I’m decided, is all. I’d rather go in and find Kip myself.”

“Not wise.”

“Wisdom never got nobody anywhere except into trouble.”

Ariel thought, He’s not wrong. Socrates, Cassandra. “Well then, you can go by yourself, and Marcos and I’ll meet you there.”