Ariel's Crossing (42 page)

“He’s no friend of mine.”

“This is going nowhere,” one scowled.

“He doesn’t look too good,” said another.

“You don’t look too good yourself,” Kip managed.

“Let’s take him in.”

“I don’t think so,” said Kip.

“You’ve done enough thinking for the time being, my friend.”

They saw no need for handcuffs. In spite of himself, their perp seemed grateful for the water and candy bar they gave him. There were no medics riding with this detachment, but they went ahead and treated his bloodied feet—which were still securely fastened to his legs, as it turned out—with hydrogen peroxide from the first-aid kit in the vehicle. He would have screamed had he any feeling down there, but he didn’t.

“I’m pretty tired,” he wheezed, before passing out in their custody.

They radioed for medevac. Didn’t need to lose a civvy. And plus that, the crazy fucker had guts. Whatever the devil he thought he was doing, this Montoya had definitely shown some serious intestinal fortitude, even if he was a wiseass. Sunstroke, exposure, lack of sleep can do that to a person. He’d probably be okay after a few days’ rest. They needed to find out who Kip Calder was, though. No doubt he was one of the three over at Dripping Spring. That could be a different story.

One of the reasons Delfino had sited his house where he did, on this bluff overlooking the draw and plain beyond, was so he could see when company was coming. Now, having dressed himself formally for this long-awaited day, he walked out onto the ruinous ramshackle porch and over to the cold fire. A match under kindling got things going again. He gathered a faggot of shed planks and tendered it into the pit. Wood he himself had probably sawn and nailed into place fifty years and better gone by, now fuel for a fire. Well, it was fine. All right. He would make coffee for himself and the kids. And sure, if these four horseless horsemen of the apocalypse, these four men marching in no rush up the dry draw, were of a mind, they could share a cup with him before returning to whence they’d come. He moved around with a slow nonchalance that would have suggested to any onlooker nothing out of the ordinary was happening here. Not that he was cavalier, but Delfino had lived out this moment in his head so many times that its actuality did seem routine.

Marcos and Ariel lay asleep in their bedrolls inside. Sun had breached the eastern mountains. A dragon-shaped cloud high overhead laced itself in pinks and whites. Delfino fed the horses, watered them. They were hungrier than he remembered his own horses ever having been, and their feed wasn’t lasting as long as he’d planned, so he might have to ask the rangers for oats, or better yet just give them the hungry beasts. Then again, no point thinking of them as friendly neighbors dropping in for a breakfast to discuss the welfare of his livestock.

After setting a pan of water on the fire, he gathered the several placards he had painted earlier. Down along the front edge of the dirt yard was the remnant of a stone wall, and now, using rocks and sticks, he propped his
No Trespassing
signs at different intervals along the low bulwark. Knowing that the rangers would see him stirring through their binoculars, just as he watched them approach through his, he left the shotgun inside the casita leaning against the wall by the door. No need to get anybody riled up yet. At least not more than they likely already were. The smoke smelled good. What did it matter that they’d consider him no better than a Mescalero marauder—or hell, even a hair worse? It was right to be back, whatever the consequences.

Once upon a time his breast had harbored a true patriotic heart instead of the crummy thing that pummeled away in there now. He remembered when some suits, company men, had shown up at the Tularosa bungalow, the last time he’d ever been paid a visit by the govvies. Two of them, one uniformed like these fellows now hiking up the hill, the other in a pale gray suit. They informed him the government had determined to lease his land for a further extended period. Would have been in the late sixties.

He refused to take the manila envelope they proffered, saying, —Why don’t you gentlemen just tell me what you want?

Graysuit said, —If you’ll just read these materials carefully. Do you have an attorney, in other words a lawyer?

—I know what the word attorney means. Do you know what the word necropolis means?

The men looked at each other, thinking, Here we go.

—Didn’t think so.

—Mr. Montoya?

—A town of dead people is what it is.

—Mr. Montoya.

—Thanks to you and the people you represent, me and my wife live in a necropolis. All these towns along the basin, except Alamogordo, where your people live, are necropolises. Ghost towns complete with walking, talking ghosts. I count myself one of them.

—Well. If you don’t have an attorney, I think it would be advisable for you to contact one. There are some very fine lawyers—

—Soon as anybody’s kid is able to walk, he walks right out of this dump, thanks to you. That’s how a necropolis works.

—Fine lawyers down in Alamogordo, or El Paso. Go over the offer here with an attorney. I think you will find the proposal very equitable.

—You just think you think.

The officer looked at his wristwatch. He’d run into this bullshit before, and he never enjoyed it. He was young, with a pate shaved balder than a newborn’s. The flamboyant mustache waxed into small corkscrews, a style from another century worn in this one by his colleague—who now held a document file out in front of him—did little to disguise that man’s youth, either. These were mere children themselves, Delfino realized, marionettes whose wires were pulled by yet others dictating this little local cataclysm, folks who had very probably never even been to Tularosa.

—You think and you believe, he finished.

The same shotgun that presently stood behind the door had stood on that other day, decades ago, just out of sight, and for a moment Delfino had considered reaching for it. Quite the surprise that would have been. Ended things right then and there. His argument wasn’t with those two, however, but with puppetmasters he would never meet. He recalled accepting the folder from the outstretched hand, thanking the men—himself suddenly possessed of politeness—and shutting the front door of the house, a house that looked just like the houses on either side of it, houses in turn resembling houses that stood on either side of them, and so on down the block, which paralleled some emaciated trees whose leaves rattled as ever in the sugary gypsumed air.

No leaves rattled here, but the sun brought with it a light breeze, warm and heavy, as the day took hold. The four rangers had fanned out and closed the distance between them and the stead to a quarter mile, give or take. Marcos was up, came out and stood beside his uncle. He saw the figures climbing the rocky rise, too. “Your call what we do,” he said.

“What we do is have some coffee.”

“Good, fine.” Marcos mixed the instant and handed the cup to Delfino.

“Something about Ariel I ought to tell you,” Marcos said.

“In a bit.”

“It’s important.”

“What?”

Marcos reconsidered what he was about to say. She could very well speak for herself if she chose. “I’ll be back.”

His uncle sipped the rotgut coffee, which tasted to him, at that moment, delicious. Best coffee ever passed his lips.

Bearing another cup in two hands, Marcos returned inside to where Ariel lay, still asleep, hair cascading over her face, mouth ajar, her blanketed body curled into a C, like a sleeping cat. How easy it would be to love her. Even though, as he was learning, her life was anything but easy to figure. She was beautiful, but not in any conventional way. Open yet perversely intractable. Pregnant but aborting. Confident but conflicted. A fatherless waif with two fathers.

He would be glad when this confrontation was over. As he knelt beside Ariel, he thought that by now Mary must surely have explained their disappearance to Carl and Sarah. He hoped they could come up with a better idea about how to protect Delfino from his willful fate than he himself had been able to. And here was Ariel, in her way just as stubborn as her father and his uncle. It was becoming clear he should never have committed himself to keeping Kip and Delfino’s secret that day in Nambé. Shouldn’t have driven Ariel down to Tularosa. Should have phoned the police instead of helping to pack gear and saddle horses. So many shoulds and shouldn’ts. Not to mention last night’s kiss between two people literally in the dark about their futures. What had that been? A payback to Mary? Worse, maybe. He meant the kiss.

But what had the kiss meant about him? Could he so easily chuck aside the years of friendship with Franny? More than friendship, of course. He had even thought about asking her if she’d like to take it to another level, half intended to discuss their getting engaged the morning they hiked up Tsankawi, before she brought that flight of fancy crashing back to earth with her talk of moving out to Los Angeles, the two of them. He’d sooner move to Mars. And then her confession, her extraordinary fraud. He didn’t feel angry toward her, curiously enough, didn’t feel reproachful or vengeful. He’d forgiven her, yes, but in the same emotional gesture had released her as well. She had made up a story and like most stories it had a beginning, middle, and end. It’d been a good fiction, as fictions went. But Marcos much preferred fact.

Ariel’s eyes were open, looking at him. He snapped to.

“They’re coming,” he said, setting the cup on the floor beside her.

“I’ll be right out.”

At the door, which was dazzled by white-gold sun, he paused. “What happened last night—”

“Don’t worry about anything.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“That’s the last thing you did.”

“We can talk about it.”

“Marcos, I’m not going anywhere. Don’t worry. We need to keep our focus.”

She was right. Delfino had binoculars clamped to his eyes. He looked frail to Marcos yet at the same time principled and proper, courtly, with his flannel shirt tucked into a nice pair of western gabardine trousers. His turquoise bolo and finest silver oval belt buckle sparkled. Sometime earlier he even managed to spit-polish his boots. There was something noble and woeful about the whole thing.

“Can I have a look?”

What Marcos saw through the magnifying lenses was Jim Carpenter looking right back at him through a pair of binoculars of his own. The sergeant had radioed back to command that he was in visual contact with two of the three. Suspects were male, one apparently in his twenties, medium height and build, jeans and denim jacket, the other late sixties or early seventies, tall, slight build, dressed for a church square dance. Stow the humor. Point was, neither of them much looked like your desperado type. Maybe it was as simple as their having gotten lost. He ordered his detachment not to proceed any closer than two hundred meters until they got a visual on the third man. He could report with some confidence that they were not spies or professional agitators. Fact was, nothing they were observed doing hinted at pro behavior. Had base got any further info on that Montoya guy the other team was tracking?

Negative, he was told. Momentarily, though. Proceed with deliberate delay, his orders were, and he radioed same over to his team. Why not take it nice and slow. Sun on his back felt good. Not impossible these folks simply didn’t know the extent and nature of the trouble they were in. Be good to just ease on up there, initiate the dialogue, talk them off the reservation, then let the lawyers duke it out.

Believing this might be the day she would finally meet Kip, Ariel herself spruced up for the occasion by forgoing the dungarees cinched by a scissored-down belt and moleskin jacket she’d borrowed from Delfino. Instead, she wore only the dark-blue silk dress that had served as a makeshift blouse these past days, the dress she’d worn to the center to visit Granna, light-years ago it seemed now. Awfully creased, but it was the thought that counted. She washed her face with canteen water and looked at the morning with clear, bright eyes. Having brushed her hair and collected it into as nice a chignon as she could manage without a mirror, she rummaged lipstick from the bottom of her backpack and applied it, then emerged from the house barefoot. Marcos thought to compliment her, but for all her sudden splendor, Ariel was as sharply centered as Delfino on the impending confrontation. He realized that while she and his uncle had arranged themselves to different purposes, they shared equally the spirit of honoring the moment.

She asked Marcos for the glasses and, too, saw the ranger. “We don’t have any way of communicating with them, do we.”

“We’re telling them what they need to know just by standing here,” said Delfino.

“You think they can read your placards?”

“If they can’t they will soon enough.”

“You mind if I post one of my own?”

Delfino thought for a moment, then said, “Paint’s over there. Your reason for being here’s every bit as good as mine.”

In no time, Delfino’s
No Trespassing Private Property
notices were joined by Ariel’s
Looking for Veteran Kip Calder.
She’d added the word
Veteran
in the hopes it would inspire in these military men compassion toward her father.

“What an insane bunch the bastards must think we are,” said Marcos.

Ariel smiled at him.

“I’d take that as a compliment.” To punctuate his point, Delfino spat into the breeze.

Her movements were studied by the rangers who now determined to advance their positions. Reported back that they had two males and a female. After walleting his field phone, the sergeant squared himself, looking up at the three of them, and gestured his peaceful intent, waving hands slowly above his head. The interlopers didn’t return the courtesy, so he stopped to resurvey them through his binoculars.

Now close enough to read the quaint placards, he relayed their messages on the closed channel back to White Sands and was ordered not to proceed until further instructed. He communicated this to his men, then sat down on an anvil of igneous in the trench gulch after checking it out for snakes. Unwrapping a stick of chewing gum and pushing it into his mouth, he scrutinized the forescape of tawny sills, stone jointings, and a narrowing apron of sand for the best approach to the site.