Ariel's Crossing (50 page)

Last time she saw him was probably the last time she would ever lay eyes on Marcos Montoya, at Kip’s memorial. More Irish wake than dirgeful funeral, since Kip himself had planned the party ahead of time. By April his condition had so deteriorated that no further medical therapy was prescribed beyond pain management. His nine lives had been used up, and no chemo could change that. Ariel had acted as his amanuensis, writing down his final thoughts. The festivities were to take place at the old adobe fieldhouse, summer solstice. There was to be champagne and caviar, music and dancing, the works. Nobody was to be excluded.

His plans were followed to the letter. The revelry lasted deep into the Nambé night. Hard to imagine she and Ariel danced together to some Frank Sinatra song on the record player they’d set up beside the icetub filled with bottles of bubbly. It was not unlike one of those jazz funerals where the band tours the streets riffing out the melody of a man’s life come to its end, a noisy triumph of redemption, drum and cymbal applauding the deeds now all done. Ariel’s baby lay in her bassinet, surrounded by doting relatives and friends. She was cute as the proverbial button, Franny thought, and slept through the raucous wake like an angel.

All the while, the man of the hour lay far from these noisy festivities. Ariel, dancing now with Delfino, had acted as sole witness to the burial. He was settled in the sandy loam alongside Agnes Montoya’s bones at Dripping Spring. Just where Delfino himself, dancing a little drunkenly with Marcos’s fiancée, would someday be laid to rest, according to his own hard-won wishes.

At midnight, the music having been silenced, Marcos set off fireworks—again Kip’s orchestration—that lit the starry black sky in a shower of sparks, then vanished in threads of light coming back to earth. And as Franny stood beside her uncle Clifford, whom she’d driven up from Gallup to attend, she wondered if anybody other than herself would ever make the connection between Delfino Montoya, his two companions, and Sergeant Carpenter. The world was ever a small place, like they say, but since Franny had never disclosed what she knew to either family, it hadn’t grown smaller yet. What good could come of her telling anyone about the chance convergence? Clifford probably would appreciate it, she thought. He seemed more spaced out than ever, but also much happier now that her parents had brought him back home to live. Next time she went out to visit, maybe she’d let him in on the secret. Just the kind of thing Kip would have found amusing. Dear Kip who’d tried his best to father her through the bad old days. She would always be grateful that he’d taken an interest, pushed her in the right direction. Sarah, too, and Marcos in his way, as well. She’d always think of herself, like Kip, as an honorary Montoya.

But look, here she was at the studio. Time to lay aside these memories. Time to shine.

In Bandelier the parched brush had accumulated. The fuel load was high. Park service workers, some of whom had been around for the fire on Burnt Mesa back in seventy-seven, which took out entire ponderosa forests that hadn’t burned for a century, didn’t like what they saw. Wheatgrass had sprouted up fast under the spring sunshine, and throughout the monument—up on Escobas and over toward State Road 4—gambel oak thrived in sere acorned thickets, narrowleaf cottonwoods with them, chokecherry and desert olive, piñon-juniper woodlands that promised choice kindling for a lightning bolt or dropped cigarette. They used to pursue a policy of outright fire suppression back in the old days, but controlled burning was the new methodology, the science of which was simply to cheat a potential blaze out of the woodland fuel that would allow it to jump from tree to tree, mesa to mesa. Just as the surgeon cuts to cure, the park service burned to prevent fire.

There had already been some wildfires around the state. When Marcos and Ariel Montoya made the millennium pilgrimage to Chimayó, one fire was raging down in Ruidoso and another near Farmington. April had been a month of winds this year and though there had been some showers the river was skinny, and the mountains, usually still covered with deep fields of winter snow even now, were nearly bald. Chimayó valley was tawny with dust, and the murder of two pilgrim youngsters from the Hill cast a pall over the annual celebration. The promise of calamity hung in the drought-dry air.

Ariel, well along with her second child, left Miranda in Delfino’s care, watching in horror the television news about what had begun to transpire in Los Alamos. Sarah had phoned minutes before from the center, breathless, more apprehensive than Ariel had ever heard her. They were evacuating not just the convalescent facility and hospital, but all fourteen thousand people on the Hill.

“Make up every spare bed we’ve got and get Marcos to clear out the greatroom. We’ve got to put up a lot of folks,” she said. “And tell Carl to make space for more horses.”

“How many?”

“As many as he can manage.”

“Should we come up there to help?”

“The police’ll just turn you back.”

“Sarah, are you in danger?”

“They’re saying people’s houses are already starting to go up on the northwest edge of town. I’m leaving now.”

“Sarah?”

But the line went dead and when Ariel redialed she got a fast busy signal. She ran down to the barn where Marcos was working with Carl. Together they dashed to the upper pasture and could see it, the massive plume of gray obscuring the Jemez. Carl tried to call Sarah from the stable, but by then a recorded message was advising that all lines were currently busy, please try again later. Bonnie Jean did manage to get through to the ranch, and Delfino told her to come straight down with Charlie and Sam, there was plenty of room.

The wind got worse, and within hours all hope of early containment had vanished. Los Alamos had not seen such an exodus since the days of secret practice drills in the forties and fifties, rehearsal evacuations trialed to get Hill personnel and families away from the then-fledgling nuclear lab as quickly as possible in case of enemy attack. Down the canyons thousands of cars and trucks now streamed, even as up those same roads crew after crew of engine companies rushed from Española and Santa Fe and beyond. A firestorm, as Brice would believe but never tell a soul, revisiting the birthplace of other firestorms. Mathematics and probabilities mounting some kind of iniquitous backdraft.

The acrid stench of smoke rose high and wide, seeping toward Santa Clara with the fire following behind, and smoke settled across the wide pueblo terrain beyond the Rio Grande as far as the Sangre de Cristos themselves. One after another, families began arriving at Pajarito, where the Montoyas helped unload horses, dogs and cats and caged birds, a dozen children of all ages, another dozen women and men, friends some of them, others friends of friends. The night was going to be long, but hopes were high that the thing would be under control by morning.

It was not. Flames fanned by winds that they themselves created worked their way through lifeless homes, up and down streets razed like flinted tinder to the ground as crews ran out of water, and the fire raged from block to block toward and then past concrete bunkers berthing explosives and others housing fireproof containers of radioactive inventory. White Rock nearby had thus far been spared by the widening inferno, and with it innumerable drums and fiberglass chalices of asbestos, PCBs, plutonium waste. But the next day brought no relief. Four thousand scorched acres became sixteen, then twenty; a hundred annihilated houses were soon two hundred. Then three dozen more. Blackened chimneys and charred swing sets and rubbled foundations. Residents watched their houses being destroyed over and again on newscasts. All they could do in Nambé was wait. Sarah had completely lost touch with half her staff, and her patients had been distributed to shelters or sent home to their families as the fish swam unaware in the long aquarium tank whose aerator had gone off with the power failure, resurging at the behest of a generator good for another day.

It seemed as if the world were on fire. An hour east of the Hill another blaze burned, Manuelitas and Canoncito near Las Vegas covered in flames. And another down where Delfino used to live, Cloudcroft and Weed, the towns with the pretty names Ariel had seen on her map, years ago now, when she drove from El Paso to Chimayó, in the forests above Tularosa, which sank in smoke as three thousand acres were scorched in a handful of hours.

Meantime the fire on the Hill was given a name, Cerro Grande, as the destroyed acreage neared fifty thousand, and questions began to be asked about the tritium and uranium and plutonium remnants in the brush and soil of those canyons where Brice and Kip had once played. Then, not as quickly as it began—a week had passed since Sarah made that first urgent call to Ariel—the fire faltered under calm skies, firefighters grabbed the advantage, and the largest fire in New Mexico’s history was over.

Family by family they left Pajarito, as did thousands from other refuges, some returning to find scorched shards, others to houses that reeked of smoke and fire retardants but were still intact. The workers handed them Teddy bears as they boarded buses for the tour of their town. Some horses were repastured at other ranches, some were bought and sold. The convalescent center remained unscathed, while Bonnie’s place, though not burned, lay under a carpet of ash, looking for all the world like an outlandish cocoon. Her geraniums, her patio, the evasive lizard—gone. But she and her family were among the fortunate ones.

Granna’s house was another story. Little remained but the foundation and the wrought-iron grille on her screen door. A pan, a pot, the ruined battleship of her old Frigidaire. Ariel and Bonnie walked its ruins together, Bonnie weeping, Ariel in disbelief. The little library, burned to nothing. The bed in which the woman had slept for so many years, first with her husband and then by herself, scorched beyond their ability to so much as find it. The photos, the family album, the memento of a hike up Turtle Mountain way back when, an oblivion of charcoal. The bottle of gin she’d left behind, burned and melted.

When they were asked by authorities if they wanted to rebuild, and asked what had been lost and what they assessed the damage to be, they couldn’t correctly answer the questions.

“What would Granna want us to do?” Ariel asked Bonnie Jean.

“I wonder,” she said, wiping her eyes as they stood on the pavement of the street, its trees now skeletons, its sidewalks thick with melancholy wet ash mud, stinking of defeat.

“I have an idea,” said Ariel.

Her aunt listened, straightaway agreed, and though they made their decision without consulting Brice, they knew he would concur.

“Nothing,” Bonnie told the FEMA adjustor.

“Sorry?”

“We mean we want you to do nothing here. Nothing at all.”

“You want to sell it, you mean?”

“Never.”

“You want help cleaning up the debris?”

“Good of you to offer,” said Ariel.

“But we’ll take care of it ourselves,” Bonnie finished.

He looked at them. “That’s it, then?” he said.

“Yes,” they said. “Thank you.”

Later that same day, and on a number of days that followed, they came back with Marcos and begin to pick through the remains, clean up the lot so it could renaturalize. They found relics here and there. The brass knocker from the front door. A little glass pig she kept for good luck. The bone-handled knife used to carve Thanksgiving turkey when Brice and Bonnie were yet kids, now singed beyond purpose but identified and soon to become part of a tiny McCarthy museum in her daughter’s house.

“It was a miracle no one died,” Ariel said one afternoon as they worked their way across the lot, Marcos beside her with a shovel covered in soot.

“Well, some did, many did,” Bonnie Jean said quietly. “They might not know, but they did, no doubt.”

Eventually the lot would become a homemade memorial park. Around the seedlings and small bushes they planted in the raked soil, a blade of grass sprouted, and another before that summer ended. Then some wildflowers, and then some more.

She had come to think of the river as a friend. Walking the narrow dirt path beside it at dusk, as now, was one of her most cherished indulgences. Her mind cleared. Her heart slowed. If she needed to ponder a problem, she could. If she wanted only to listen to evening birds and scuttling stream stones and contemplate nothing whatever, she could. Whenever she was able to grab an hour at the end of the day, while the grandparents or Uncle Delfino looked after little Miranda, or Marcos took over fathering her, she loved walking east along the shambled bank to Conchas Park, where weathered poplars and cottonwoods jutted forth, their roots exposed because the loam had given way under quickwash from hard rains. The Chimayó lowrider gang that used to party here had moved on, leaving nothing behind except for a rusting oil drum knocked onto its side, their bonfire barrel now a cylindrical sculpture some coydog might nose for prey in the night before trotting on. Otherwise only the running water, rustling leaves prodded by lazy air, birdcalls, and overhead the vast purpling heaven and its first faint stars.

Conchas Park, conscious park. She heard the crunch of earth underfoot, turning back toward home this evening, heard her small rhythmic contribution to nature’s improvised music. She heard her breathing, which came more easily now than it had when she first moved in at the ranch after the wedding. Ironic that living in thin air made your blood grow richer. But hers, she thought, was richer in ways that had nothing to do with altitudes above sea level. And this unborn life inside her, this gift of her love with Marcos, this boy—as the sonogram promised—whom her husband had finally named Chase because he imagined him a venturer as Kip had been, was his blood equally enriched? When he kicked, as just now, was he dancing to the quiet rhythm of her stride, as his father once had danced in Sarah’s womb? Yes, surely it was so.

The sun had gone down half an hour ago and she saw the moon meagerly reflected in the murmuring water. She picked up a stone and tossed it, watched the quivering white orb shatter then regather itself on the river’s face. She was unafraid walking this lonely road, though really there was no reason for her to feel safe. The dark was gaining quickly, the clouds over the Jemez having lost their afterglow, so she moved along a little faster.