Ariel's Crossing (37 page)

“Not far now,” Delfino told no one in particular.

First sight of it came in late dawnlight. Marcos fell back with the packhorse. The possibility that Kip might be nearby made Ariel feel suddenly very wide awake. Alert, she breathed in hard and the landscape crystallized before her. But there appeared to be no one at Dripping Spring other than themselves. She tightened her grip on the reins, bringing her horse to a halt, and allowed Delfino to ride up first.

The old windmill still stood, its tail flap looking like the wing of some great russet bird, several windblades dangling, breast feathers ruffled in a blow. That was what she saw before anything else. Then, as they moved across the smooth flats of the low mesa, the rest of the ranch came into view. Its colors were those of the land in which it sat, and so it was discernible mostly by its forms, the collection of man-made angles in a place of natural faults, needles, jumbles, crests, scarps. The porch had collapsed. The tin roof, scalloped like a shell along its fore edges, remained intact but was rusted to the color of a rotten orange. It sat like an origami children’s hat, boat-shaped and sideways on its rectangular adobe head. Gutters for rain collection clung to the eaves, and dusty vegetation clung to the rain gutters. Window frames still had traces of green paint on the weathered wood. The house was surrounded by a low stone wall. Delfino tied up his horse, but before he began inspecting the hacienda, he tugged at a pile of metal sheets on the ground at the base of the windmill.

Marcos asked Ariel how she was faring.

“Okay,” she answered gamely, climbing down. He helped her tie her horse, and together they got the pack animal unburdened. “What’s your uncle doing?”

“I expect he’s looking to see if the well’s got water.”

“You think I can shout now?”

Marcos said, “Don’t see why not. We’re here, aren’t we.”

Ariel heard her voice come back to her in echoes after she cried out, “Kip?”
kip-epp-epp.
“Kip Calder?” forming her hands around her mouth and directing her voice toward the cliffs in the box canyon. Marcos cried out “Kip” with her. They listened but no sound returned other than the aftermath of their own.

“Let’s see if we can’t help Delfino,” she said.

The floor of the collection tank next to the mill was cracked earth, crumbly as Sakrete, utterly porous and useless. Delfino thought water would seep through there faster than through regular ground. Didn’t bode well for there being anything wet in the cistern. The three of them peeled back layers of tin siding that had been laid over the artesian well, opened it, and stood back as dank, unmusty but stale air surfaced in a languid burst. That there was any odor at all was a good sign. A dry well would smell like sand, like nothing much. Expecting the worst, Marcos dropped a chunk of stone into the narrow hole. They heard not a damp thud but a small splash. Their faces broke into smiles. Some boiling, some iodine tablets, maybe some filtering through cloth, and the water would be potable.

“Let’s see if anything’s left inside.”

“Just hope it’s not a coyote den.”

As it happened, the house was unoccupied and barren. When the Montoyas had been forced to evacuate, they hadn’t been given much time to pack. Delfino had no precise memory anymore of what they left behind. Had the orphaned belongings disintegrated? Or did they reside now as souvenirs in barracks, or Quonsets, or wherever the people who ran this place lived? In either case, everything was gone and the questions, Delfino realized, weren’t even worth asking. The rooms were lifeless voids, covered in fine anemic silt, and were sun-blanched.

Quicker than the gone chattels, morning vanished, too. In the busyness of unpacking and then repairing what was absolutely essential to securing the place—they boarded windows, got the plank door on the front porch to work, barricaded rooms that had fallen into such desuetude as to be dangerous—in the bustle of getting the horses fed, watered, and put up in the scarecrow barn, and paying out their own crude barbed-wire fence around the conclave of buildings, making something of a stronghold, they began to note an important anomaly. And that was this: Still no rangers, no guards, nobody had come out to challenge them, trespassers on restricted government property. Not one soul, including Kip, who Delfino sensed really ought to be here by now, unless he was lost.

“Weird,” commented Marcos, who had rigged up a canvas dip pail for the well, which he now lowered to water level on a rope. “I got to confess. Yesterday when we were getting ready, I told myself, It won’t be you who unpacks this gear tomorrow night. It’ll be some MP laying our stuff out on a tarp so they can take photos of it for the trial. I even heard their questions. Where you folks think you’re headed? Montoya stead, we say. Ain’t no Montoya stead. Sure there is, up near Helms’s ranch by Dripping Spring, we say. Think you better come with us, they say. But at this rate,” Marcos went on, “we may wind up running out of food before they even realize we’re here.”

Ariel, having given up calling Kip’s name for the time being, walked over and sat against one of the saddles.

“Still no luck?” Marcos asked.

“No.”

“We’ll look for him once everything’s squared away.”

“He’s out there. I can feel him.”

“Me too,” offered Delfino.

“If he is, we’ll find him.”

They ate in what shade the hacienda offered from the unwavering hard light of postnoon. Exhaustion finally subdued them. Although they’d intended to stand watch in shifts, soon after lunch all three fell asleep in the front room.

Day became dusk. When Ariel woke up, the floorboards under her were uneven, splintery. Her tongue and lips were dry, her legs were sore, her back ached. Her eye settled on nothing familiar. Chinks in the rotted roof conceded tiny divots, creating a small primitive planetarium. Her last thought before dozing had been the same as her first thought now, upon awakening next to the slumbering bodies of these men. Why was she really here? Was she running toward or from frontiers? Perhaps there was truth to the theory that in order to understand who you are, you have to leave yourself behind, wander away from the person you’ve always known. A matter of perspective.

She stirred while the others continued to sleep, climbing to her feet stiffly, surprised by what a chill marked the air. Hands on hips, she arched her back, leaned left and right, pondering the irony of her having ventured so far only to be less sure now of finding him than she had been the day before.

Maybe this was worse than a fool’s game. Risking her job, ditching her parents, not to mention deserting poor Granna, all for an unprodigal father—sheer folly. What could he have to say for himself that would matter? Could Kip truly know one single thing his daughter couldn’t very well live without? She looked at Marcos and thought she’d never seen such a blameless face. Maybe should open up to him about some of these confusions. Surely he’d gotten to know Kip during these last years in Nambé.

Walking lightly across the room, her boots in hand, she stepped outside into the muted purple, half expecting to see silhouettes of the men who were going to throw Delfino Montoya off his ranch one final time. She imagined they would have irked expressions on their faces. Pictured the posse lined up as if in an uninspired western, black Stetsons on their heads, their rifles held at angles, chewing cheroots, spitting tobacco. She climbed into her boots, zipped the front of her jacket, and turned up the collar. A peach moon was just now rising on the far side of Tularosa basin.

Toppling jostles of Virginia creeper vines crowded the broken panes along the southeastern face of the building. Hadn’t noticed them earlier. Pendant flowers glistening in the thin light. She looked around for kindling. Her boot laces remained untied, trailing behind her as she tramped around what had once been the foreyard. Odd how she had become accustomed to moving around in the dark. Ariel gathered greasewood sticks, staves of mesquite, and brought them back to the firepit they’d built earlier. Kneeling, she lit a match, blew softly into the kindling. The air filled with smoke and then, as if some spirit leapt, the fire danced into fast flames. She fed it with old lumber they’d salvaged from a shed Delfino proposed be sacrificed for the purpose. Fire in the night—Delfino had said it would be one of the best ways to signal their presence. She hoped he wouldn’t mind that she’d lit it while he still slept.

A cool draft spilled down the eastern declivity of the mountains. Remarkable how seductive the earth and sky were here, so recurrently dwarfing one’s human problems. Long way from home, she thought, yet the basin was oddly embracing in its way. Home is the place where you’re most alive, Brice once told his young daughter. She couldn’t now remember the circumstances that prompted the paternal adage, but could hear his voice. —Home can be anywhere. On the road, in a rut. Home is wherever you are most at home.

“Ariel?”

Her surprised shriek resounded up the canyon. A silence before they both broke out laughing.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Marcos apologized.

“My mind was a thousand miles away.”

“Pretty good fire building for a city girl,” he teased. “You planning on burning the barn to make the coffee?”

“Probably not.”

“I could use some coffee myself. Besides, I want Kip to see we’re here, too.”

Ariel said, “The military must already know, so I figured—”

“I’d be shocked if they didn’t. Most likely they’ve already identified us and are running some checks through the computers, seeing if any of us are wanted on other charges.’’

“Isn’t that a little paranoid?”

“Ariel, you’re standing at the epicenter of global paranoia. They probably know your shoe size by now, your dental history, your favorite color, whether you put butter on your bread or margarine. They’ll swing by when it suits them.”

“All I really want to do is hang around long enough to see if Kip shows up, then leave.”

“With him?”

“Of course with him, with all of us.”

“It’s strange talking to somebody’s daughter and knowing the father better than the daughter does, but you ought to trust me on this. If and when Kip turns up he won’t leave until he and Delfino figure they got what they came here for.”

“Stubborn.”

“As a jack mule.”

The water rolled at a boil and Ariel shook instant into the aluminum pan, then poured the coffee into two tin cups. The fire hissed as if some of the greener fronds were surprised to find themselves being burned.

“We don’t know each other, either,” Ariel said.

“We don’t, but why do you say that?”

“No reason. I guess a person just doesn’t expect to find herself in a situation like this with someone she hardly knows.”

“I’m not that hard to get to know. A lot of people where you come from would consider my life really boring. I grew up in Nambé, still live there. I want to do what my father’s always done for a living. Want to get married someday and have some kids who can either become ranchers or writers or doctors. Just not lawyers. I don’t know that many people. Fact is, I know more horses than people.”

“People are overrated.”

“And horses are overpriced.”

“However boring you may think all that is, from where I’m sitting it sounds like unadulterated sanity.”

“I didn’t say I thought it was crazy. Just boring. You’re from New York. That’s the opposite of boring.”

“My father’s a lawyer, by the way. Or, strictly speaking, my legal father, so to say.”

“As lawyers go, I’m sure he’s one of the good guys,” Marcos said. “And if I’ve learned one thing about Kip, it’s never to bet against him. Probably true about both your fathers.”

“I wish I’d come looking for him sooner.”

“You don’t seem to be what my mother calls the
wishtful type.
”

Wishful
plus
wistful
—a coinage worthy of Granna. “Wistfulness isn’t one of my usual traits, but at least then I would have found him at Pajarito working with you on that fieldhouse, instead of probably not finding him down here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Coulda, shoulda, woulda,” Marcos said.

“Sarah again?”

“Sarah.”

They continued to talk for a while, with surprising ease given the exigency that brought them together there, beneath the growing stars and deepening darkness. A wildcat screeched somewhere up the draw. The bats were out, cloaked in dun velvet, stirring the night. Delfino would soon be rousing.

“Listen, Ariel. I saw a place, couple hundred yards north, where the saddle ridge steepens to a kind of overlook. What I’m thinking is, why don’t we hike up and see if there’s any lights out on the basin.”

They walked by flashlight, Marcos leading the way. Every modest sound—the disturbed stone, the wingbeat of a burrowing owl—registered with grand definition. The climb took what seemed like hours, but when they reached the summit of this foothill saddle and peered out over the night desert, what they witnessed was astonishing.

Moondrenched earth, prehistoric and preadamite. A long garden, the snake offering its pomegranate of knowledge from a perch in the saguaro de vida. Caliban the peccary, Sycorax the scorpion. Ariel lost her footing, nearly slipped into the vortex of this vista.

“Shouldn’t do this, most likely,” said Marcos, shocked by the immensity of his voice in this rare place. He waved his flashlight like a wand, back and forth, beaconing its sightless eye over the basin floor where another eye might see it. “But if Kip spots us, that’s good. And if the White Sands people spot us, that’s good, too. Am I wrong?”

“You couldn’t be more right,” answered Ariel, who waved her own flashlight and began crying out from this aerie. Marcos soon joined her, so that Kip’s name flooded the immediate world.

Hard to believe that once upon a time Brice McCarthy had lain at night in an apartment in Morningside Heights, his thin mattress on the floor stacked with textbooks, way too wide awake, enduring the difficult music of Kip Calder and his new girlfriend Jessica Rankin making love in an adjacent bedroom. Here and now, as the jet began its descent into Albuquerque, this memory still played devilishly in Brice’s head, though Jessica’s rested against no shoulder other than his own.