Ariel's Crossing (45 page)

The problem was this. Everything had always been Kip, Kip, Kip. Even when he tried to be generous, the Kip fix was in. His chaplain behavior toward Franny had bordered on emotional slapstick. Who was he to preach? Besides, Franny received the fatherly concern he’d always denied Ariel, and while he meant the tenderness he hoped was expressed, it was misdirected. The fieldhouse sheltered whose head from the sun and snow if not his own? His invitation to Brice those few years ago, what was it but a dead man’s trying to stave off death by thieving the life’s breath from another man’s happiness? Even Delfino was to be robbed of his desperate revolt in the name of fraternity. And now Ariel had tracked down her travesty of a father. At least she would have the chance to see what little she’d missed out on. Wake-up call. The disappointment would be healthy for her. Odd idea, that by letting your daughter down one last time you’d be doing her the biggest favor you ever managed.

Ariel would have been saddened by all this self-condemnation were she aware of it, but she was caught in a swirl of thoughts very different from these. Rereading Kip’s letter in the ledger, hoping to draw strength for the standoff, she’d come to other conclusions about him. Her day had transpired in slow minutes. A governor from the last century proposed,
All experience gained elsewhere fails in New Mexico,
and Ariel could now only agree. Lew Wallace’s awful novel
Ben-Hur,
once the most popular book in America aside from the Bible itself, had been a childhood Christmas present from Granna, and his aphorism came courtesy of her grandfather Calder, whose journal she’d not only been studying but had begun to supplement with her own nervous thoughts. Leaf after leaf of invitingly blank paper lay in the binding behind the pages her grandfather and Kip had used. All in the family. And what, she thought, sitting in the shade as the precarious afternoon inched along, was more vulnerable than empty pages? The person who would presume to fill them?

Marcos ferried to and fro between Ariel and his uncle. Ever since he’d traipsed back up the scree gulch a second time with the news that Kip had been found—the rangers had pulled back a hundred yards, not trusting Delfino to lay off the shotgun—he noticed Ariel withdrawing a little. Sitting beside her, he watched her write in her notebook. She didn’t seem to mind that he read over her shoulder, an oddly intimate allowance. The afternoon chickenhawks ellipsed way upstairs, and she made note of it in the heavy ledger on her lap. The freight train ran diminutive along the floor of the clay basin, whispering in its tracks, and she made note. Marcos sat beside her and said he was as torn as she about what to do now, and without much thought, she made note.
Marcos and I don’t know what to do.

For his part, Delfino stood sentinel at his stone rampart. At the edge of his thoughts loomed one that was outrageous, maddening, in fact, grievous. They’d made it in, set up temporary camp, been confronted, handed over his documentation and demand—all had gone according to plan. The one thing he hadn’t over the years predicted was this strong, growing realization that even if they gave him Dripping Spring lock, stock, and barrel, he would never be able to bring the place back to life. Fact was, Delfino Montoya was an old man. He’d hitched every hope to the prospect of one day standing right here, and now that he was, he understood he was as razed as the very stone rampart on which his foot rested. Momentum was all that carried him forward.

The sun moved down toward its evening berth. They watered the horses, had something to eat. The army guys had made their contact and, it seemed, were content to wait and see. None of these tactics could work for long, all of them on both sides of the fragile fence knew that, and Ariel made note.

“Do you believe there’s a reason for everything?”

“That’s out of the blue.” She glanced up from her writing and looked into his eyes.

“Not really.”

Ariel thought about it for a minute. “No, I don’t,” she said, knowing she was being merely counterintuitive and didn’t in fact have any answer one way or the other. See what he’s saying.

“You believe in ghosts?”

Ariel laughed. “Marcos, the sun’s crisping your brain.”

“Probably.”

As they sat out of earshot, Delfino scanned the vertical ridges up behind them through his binoculars.

Remembering that curious moment only a few infinite weeks ago back at the farmhouse, when she could have sworn her cat Buddha nuzzled her where she slept on the warm bluestone wall, Ariel said, “Probability is, ghosts don’t exist and there’s not a reason for everything. But for argument’s sake, let’s just say they do exist.”

“I know they do.”

“Okay then. Why?”

Marcos thought about Doña Francisca de Peña. Or rather, about his ghost who he’d come to believe was Francisca. “Because they’re dead but don’t want to leave off living. I’ve seen a hundred foals that didn’t know for hours they were alive. Their mothers had to lick their eyes open for them to see. Same way you have to spank a baby to make it realize it’s got to breathe. No reason the reverse doesn’t happen. Some people just don’t know their life’s over.”

She sensed she’d begun to understand the blue from which these thoughts were arising. “You think there’s some chance your uncle Delfino is risking becoming a ghost?”

“I never thought about it that way.”

Time passed—hollow, absentminded, tranquil—as she wrote
never believed in ghosts
in the ledger and sketched a willowy phantasm next to it. “By the way, I don’t,” she said, breaking the silence.

“Believe in ghosts?”

“Not on your life. I love ghost stories but I come from a family of scientists and lawyers and atheists and none of them believe in ghosts. My grandmother’s a Rock of Ages Christian, and I’m sure the only ghost she believes in is the Holy Ghost.”

“Too bad.”

She liked Marcos. “Maybe so. But what about Delfino. You think he’s trying to get himself converted into a ghost? Some words from you could make a difference. Tell him you prefer a living uncle to a dead ghost.”

“Aren’t you worried about Kip?”

“Talk to Delfino and I’ll get to see Kip.”

“You could leave right now.”

“Something tells me Kip would want me to stand in for him here with you and your uncle. Does that sound crazy?”

“Probably. No, yes, definitely it does.”

“Maybe the sun’s getting into my head, too. I don’t know. Why is it too bad not to believe in ghosts?”

“Let me ask you a question. It’d be a way of responding.”

She noticed the shadows lengthening.

“What are you doing sitting in the dust by a fallen-down ranch house with the likes of me and my uncle, caught in the middle of something you hardly know a thing about?”

Ariel folded her hands on the open ledger.

“I’m asking in all innocence,” he added.

“Nothing’s innocent.”

“Ariel.”

“You really want me to say I’m chasing a ghost?”

Delfino was calling them, his voice interrupting the larger silence that had strangely settled in over Dripping Spring.

Ariel finished, “You’ll have to tell me about your ghosts sometime.”

“There’s just one.”

He stood and extended his hand to her, which she took.

“You’re serious, aren’t you,” coming to her feet. She brushed the dust off her dress after dropping the pencil in the ledger to mark her place. “Man, woman, or child?”

“A woman,” he said. “Are you coming?”

They walked side by side into the dirt yard. Delfino extended the field glasses to Marcos with some urgency.

“They’re behind there, too,” he blurted, his chin raised toward the Oscuras.

The younger man trained the glasses on granite terraces and pediments whose capitals still shone in slantlight even as their bases were beginning to swim in pale muddied purple. More rangers. Of course they’d surround them. Made perfect sense.

“What’s your thinking, Uncle?”

Delfino pursed his lips. “Same as ever. Except I think you two oughta clear out. You did a kindness helping me get here, and I’m grateful. But you should turn yourselves in and go be with Kip.”

“But what about you? “Ariel said.

“Like I say, I’m right where I need to be. You’re not.”

Marcos looked at Ariel. “I think he’s right, at least about you turning yourself over. I sure as hell have to stay, though.”

“You’re eating my food, Marcos. You’re in the way now.”

Delfino’s nephew pushed his hands into his back pockets. He understood his uncle’s comment wasn’t selfish but rather a spin at protectiveness. Ariel’s idea that he talk his uncle down from the ledge, so to speak, was a good one. He’d wait for the right moment and give it his best shot.

As if materializing out of thin air, Jim abruptly added his thoughts to their deliberation. “I think Mr. Montoya’s got a good point.” The three turned to face the sergeant who had climbed the rise with nonchalant stealth and now stood thirty paces from the rampart returning their stares, though with immeasurably greater composure. Instinctively, Delfino grabbed his shotgun and just as instinctively Jim unholstered his handgun, saying, “Easy there. Why don’t you set down the musket—”

“Twelve-gauge Remington.”

“—and I’ll do the same.”

A quiet breeze mussed the sand at their feet.

“You first,” Delfino said.

Knowing he was covered, Jim played the gambit, laying aside his weapon on a bench of stone.

Delfino followed suit.

“There’s someone on the field phone who wants to have a few words with you.”

“Am I coming to you, or you to me?”

“Either way.”

“Bring it up here, then.”

And Jim did.

Candid high-desert light of such tough clarity. Bonnie sat under it alone. Her husband was at his job. Sam had gone off with friends. She communed with her brave geraniums and pretty petunias. A little green lizard kept her company.

She looked around the patio and thought about all the work that had gone into making it such a nice refuge from the world. Charlie had come up with the idea of designing those herb beds using tires off the car when they bought the new radials.

—No need to go throwing them out, he’d said. —We lay them along the back fence, fill them with topsoil, and presto you got planters.

Sometimes he really got things right, did her husband. Mint prospered in one tire. Sage, rosemary, and verbena in the others. Maybe painting the tires white had been an extravagance, but it looked very professional to Bonnie’s eye. She glanced around at other perfections. Thistle in the bird feeder, so shiny and black. The concrete deck hosed off by her younger son just this morning. Her cup of Sanka on the round glass table. She could remember each and every thing that had gone into creating this small Eden. Every bush pruned to the shape she liked. The garden hose wrapped in a tight circle. Of course, the cedar fence could stand to be restained, but they’d get around to it in time.

In time. That was the point. Just like the Hill where she was born, Bonnie was getting on, and anything that remained as it was when she looked at it last was good. Gone were the days when she and Brice ran around on the muddy April roads from Sundt house to the clapboarded and rustic Tech buildings where the physicists worked. Gone the days when her mother taught school to the handful of first-generation Los Alamos children. Her older son, Sam’s big brother, was gone, and all she had for him was some stupid beeper number he seldom checked—he didn’t even know his grandmother was dead. But look, she thought, the rufous hummingbirds came around each year. One even now sipped nectar from the lilies. The sage she could smell in the sunlight would flourish again next year, if frosts didn’t kill it at the root. And as the sages said, you couldn’t count on anything staying the same. Plants, animals, people. The first scientists who settled this mesa were not coming back, any more than the Anasazi before them.

Well, she didn’t know what she was thinking. Trying to think. Maybe just hoping to keep it together, her fledgling sense of what it means to be parentless. Generations come in waves, and so long as Ma was alive the distance between Bonnie Jean and the shore on which she herself would eventually break seemed farther away. She never thought like this before. We were all just waves coming to shore, Bonnie reflected. How many waves had beached since Creation? Trillions, tens of trillions? On the other hand, what did the numbers matter, anyway? She and Charlie and Brice and Jessica and Kip were next, and nothing could stop it or even should. A life was enough, Bonnie Jean thought. Seventy, eighty years, what more do you want? Dogs are happy to get ten. Some butterflies make do with a day. The milk-bonnet mushroom, so fresh in the morning, melts by noon. People who wish they could live forever are nuts. Pretty as the garden is, good as her husband and children are, nothing remains inspiring forever. Especially nothing you think is yours. You want something so bad you can taste it, and then you possess it, and next thing you know either you’re its possession or you forgot what drew you to it in the first place.

The funeral would be held in a few days. Brice had gone down-state, but promised he’d be back to help carry the casket and make the graveside speech. Jessica and Ariel would be there, too, he’d assured her, though assembling the family wasn’t going to be as easy as it might’ve been under other circumstances. Brice had asked his sister if she wouldn’t mind working out things with the minister. They both knew where their mother had wanted to be laid to rest. Really, in Bonnie Jean’s imagination the funeral service was already accomplished. It was just a matter of reenacting a few hours of ceremony, then a dinner among familiar strangers. But where had that lizard darted off to?

As she rode the switchbacks up to the Hill, Rebecca Carpenter remembered that last phone conversation she had with her runaway daughter, and how disturbing—disabling, even—it had been to hear Mary’s buoyant assurances about life in Denver. She knew her girl better than her girl might have imagined. Had always known what transpired under the roof of her Gallup house. The war between Mary and Russ still rang in her ears, caused her to freeze up even today, thinking back. Mary’d done the right thing cutting out, but made a mistake lumping the whole family together with her father.