Ariel's Crossing (9 page)

The family continued eating.

—What’s that? his mother asked.

—I heard that people think we’re pirates.

—Really? asked Johnny.

—You heard me.

—I don’t get it, said Johnny.

—Me neither, Rose added.

—Hey, Dad?

—What.

—Why do you think people would say something like that?

—People say crazy things all the time and only crazy people listen to them.

They ate.

—Pirates. Jimmy shook his head dramatically. —It must be that pirate flag that gives them the idea.

Russell’s hand swiped the boy’s cheek so fast, so hard, that the pain spread across his face before Jimmy even knew what had happened. Reddening, he scraped his chair back violently and fled the table.

—Jim, you stop right there, his father said.

—Let him go, his mother breathed.

The boy halted.

—He didn’t mean anything.

Jimmy’s father rose from the table and with a hooking finger motioned his son to follow. When they returned to the room, Russ, like some prison guard, followed his elder son whose chin was as if attached to his chest, eyes downcast, shoulders narrowed, hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets. No one asked any questions, though the quietest was Mary who understood better than most her father’s will to punish.

His ire would have been funny had it not been ugly. A stern disciplinarian, Russ fancied marine protocol and order, however ad-libbed, and brought them to bear on his household. Later that night, Jim and his brother and sisters would agree in secret that their mean friends might not be so far off the mark. Maybe it made sense to disparage the pirate flag and Russell Carpenter who waved it in everybody’s face because he was jealous his brothers were dead or deranged heroes, while he was just a living grunt stuck in a low-end job at Continental Divide Electric, dangling from the transmission grid, stringing 230-kilovolt line thirty feet above the ground. Not even high enough that if he fell it would necessarily kill him.

For somebody whose life was electricity he seemed, at least in the eyes of his daughter Mary, unenlightened. No, worse. Utterly lost in the dark.

Kip settled in at Nambé with greater ease than he or the Montoyas might have imagined. Through that first summer and into autumn, he learned his way around by watching and helping out whenever the chance arose. He took his time, which, as Sarah said, was the right time for him to take. Carl offered wages on top of room and board, but Kip told him to keep his money. All of it was Montoya charity as far as he was concerned. When he got enough strength back so he could pull weight to merit a wage, the money would go straight to the convalescent center.

Friday evenings, Marcos and Franny brought him along to the highwayside Roadrunner Cafe in Pojoaque pueblo. He was treated to quesadillas and even drank a beer with Marcos’s friends, bemused if bemusing in the role of raconteur. Tales of Laos captivated his small, fascinated audience—
Lales of Taos,
he said after indulging in the cerveza. Hootch narratives. Stories of crashing, surviving, being caught in crossfire as he and his copilot were choppered out in a blizzard of tracer bursts. Describing Mekong refugee camps as running sewers—
running sores,
as the beer would have it—into which he ferried grateful Hmong families. The beauty and industry of subjugated Meo farmers who reinvented themselves as fierce mountain warriors and whose losses were far worse than ours after Saigon fell. The troupe of monkeys that befriended the CIA and Ravens, attended their dinners like invited guests, sat along the runway watching FAC planes ascend into morning mists for another day of reconnaissance along the Nam Nhiep, or up near Ban Ban, or down the Nam Sane, which the men naturally dubbed the
Non Sane.

He had many weaknesses, as he would have been first to admit, but in spite of every effort to push her out of mind, his greatest remained Ariel. She circled him, influencing his tides of thought, even as she began to seem imaginary rather than the only flesh relative he had left on earth. Because he knew Ariel would never have anything to do with him, or because he couldn’t help himself, he found he was drawn to Franny Johnson. In Franny he divined a similar yet different kinship. He had no idea what all this meant but felt somehow paternal toward her from the first time they met, at the convalescent center. She herself recognized a conversant hiddenness in Kip’s eyes, the eyes of a fellow runner. When Franny shook his parchment-dry hand the day they were introduced, she saw in those ancient eyes something difficult to define.

For one worn down by life, Kip had seemed unwontedly spirited when Franny asked him about his past. Presaging their Roadrunner evenings, he told her and Marcos he had been everywhere they could find on a map. Forty days in God’s dark desert and then some. He cobbled together a mosaic, one she hoped was true if only because someone should live such an audacious life.

Nor did he concoct a boring spreadsheet of triumphs. Rather, the reverse. He’d failed once as a cowboy in Arizona and again in Argentina. Been a failure as a stevedore on a rustbucket registered in Holland and chartered up beyond Yankutat Bay, where retirees cruised to see whales and polar bears and vast chunks of million-year-old ice sliding off floes into the cold black Alaskan water.

That was only the geographic
A
s. Bangkok, Beirut briefly. Camotlán de Milleflores, never making money at any turn. He was once so poor he drove stolen cars from the States to Mexico, where they were sold then repurchased for cash under the table, driven back, and finally resold to the border dealerships from which they originated. He never ran drugs, never ran guns. In the course of his turbulent journey he gave away everything he ever owned.

“Really?” she asked.

“Sure really. I don’t own one damn thing.”

“I mean, really did you drive stolen cars across the border?”

He shrugged. “Despicable episode. Better to fail at the worst legit job than succeed at stupidity like that.”

He had once given up everything—whatever
everything
meant—to go follow the dream of living alone in a stone cottage in Newfoundland. Worked as a lighthouse keeper on a rock island.

“Two months out, one week ashore.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I got bored with the company I was keeping.”

All three smiled, though Franny sensed at the time that William’s anecdotes were as fragile as his health. Still, she couldn’t be sure. Her perception of this man as a fellow counterfeit acquired its own dubiety, since the stories he so freely reeled off seemed just too far outside the realm of possibility to be falsehoods.

Now he lived at Rancho Pajarito. Ailing William had metamorphosed into Kip the late-blooming ranch hand, frail but sailing forward. A phoenix, Sarah dubbed him. Anything but counterfeit, he was yet mysterious to Franny. Not given to
chisme,
she was
no
meddler but had watched him closely these past months. And this presumptive, damaged father figure likewise watched her, whose countenance bore the intangible marks of a classified past, like encrypted stigmata invisible to anyone who didn’t bear similar wounds.

Vernal equinox. Kip walked up the slow rise, returning from the barn, long arms swinging at his sides, dressed in worn denim pants and a holey jacket inherited from Marcos. Headed toward the paddocks in the opposite direction, Franny strolled beside an unshorn saffron hedge twittering with small birds. Each had been much on the other’s mind these days but when they collided, knocking heads, both were so caught up in thoughts having nothing to do with the other that they hardly recognized who stood before them.

In Franny’s face Kip mistook the prospect of Ariel. In Kip’s, Franny saw a shocked confusion that anticipated how Marcos would look today when, or if, he learned the truth about her past, her variant selves.

“My god, sorry, I wasn’t paying attention,” she exhaled. “You all right?”

Drawing up hard, he grasped her forearms as much to capture his own balance as to help her keep hers. She looked like she’d seen a hallucination see another hallucination.

“All I can say is, you’re as hardheaded as I am,” and he gamely laughed.

Rubbing his temple, he thought, What a curious girl. Weathered but pristine as some of those children he’d seen back in his cloying war. She had on a jean skirt and floppy wool sweater whose sleeves came down past the tips of her fingers; her plum hair was in disarray, not unlike his own grayed brown. Franny reached out and touched his face, searching for a bruise or cut, then straightened his hair. Thirty years ago he might have fallen in love on the spot.

Hearing that word
Franny
while peering into his wizened but piercing eyes, she wondered, wouldn’t this cockamamie old Kip be her perfect confessor? She knew Marcos liked him—had begun to adore him, in fact, as had Carl and Sarah. By working to the very edge of his reserves, he’d become a part of the ranch itself. And Kip seemed to value the Montoyas in ways she felt she didn’t dare, given the big lie that hovered behind her relationship with them. Maybe she and Kip were meant literally to bump into each other. Maybe he could hear her out first, before Marcos.

The Mary within hesitated, but Franny said, “Hard heads hide soft hearts. Isn’t that the saying?”

A shadow ascended across her face, and Kip was reminded of
melárchico
children, who were sad because they’d lost someone precious whom they were deeply attached to. Maybe this was what he’d noticed in Franny before, the abandoned
melárchico
look. In the olden days, kind strangers were supposed to tie red ribbons on their wrists in the hope this would cure them. He remembered that it was Brice McCarthy’s mother who had taught him the word back in school, telling him that it wasn’t just boys and girls who became
melárchico;
a pet bird or family cat could be so upset when its mistress or master died that it would no longer sing songs or play with a ball of string.

“I’m not much for sayings. My mother used to swear
There is none that doeth good, no not one,
when she was in a bad mood. Book of Common Prayer. I remember that expression because I never agreed with it.”

“That’s surprising.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re worldly wise and it seems like the kind of proverb somebody who’s been around the block would go along with.”

“Well, Franny. I think it’s more a worldly weary than worldly wise kind of saying.”

“I’m not sure I agree with it, either.”

“My mother had a lot of wisdom in her. She sometimes hated her circumstances, is all.”

“Your father working at Los Alamos and everything, you mean.”

Kip said, “You’re looking for Marcos, I bet.” I was.

“He’ll be happy to see you. Got to go,” Kip smiled and began to walk away.

“Can I ask a question?”

He stopped, turned around, saying nothing.

Hesitant, unsure of herself, she nonetheless took the leap of faith. “Remember how your name was William when I first met you?”

Kip’s premonitory sense about moments such as this kicked into overdrive. She was going to offer him a confidence he might not want to know. He could feel it.

“What if I told you my real name wasn’t Franny?”

“Lot of people have nicknames.” What bogus ingenuousness.

“—wasn’t Franny but something completely different, then what would you think.”

The weather in his mind clouding up, Kip squinted, staring beyond her.

“Like if I made that name up for really good reasons but my name was something else.”

“Franny’s a fine name,” he said lamely, leaning away, somewhat feigning physical distress. What was it about Franny that both drew him to her yet made him want to retreat? She was speaking.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Franny—”

“My name’s Mary.”

Kip said nothing.

“Mary from Gallup, New Mexico, not Princeton, New Jersey.”

A heavy interior squall was settling in. How many times had he done the same thing, invented a past to scuttle a future? Like when he lived in Costa Rica under the crazy pseudonym Brice McCarthy, for no other reason than to walk a mile in another man’s name.

“Mary’s a good name and Gallup is a good place,” he said, one eye closed because the sun was in it.

“Gallup’s anything but a good place.”

“Marcos doesn’t know about this—”

“No.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“I’m not sure, and that’s the truth,” recognizing that today was not going to be the day she set everything straight with Marcos after all. “Because I trust you.”

“Why trust me?”

“I’m not sure about that, either.”

Kip’s faint smile was intended to camouflage his dread. He wanted to engage her, wanted to help somehow, but the miserable failure of a father within him was afraid.

“Well, thanks for listening,” she finished, wondering whether she’d gone too far.

“But I didn’t hear you out at all, Mary.”

“Franny—better call me Franny until I sort things through.”

“Franny. Sorry.”

“We sure seem to be apologizing to each other a lot today. You’re busy, I should let you get back to what you were doing.”

“I was just going to—I’m not busy. Tell me about your name.”

“Maybe we can talk another time.”

“Now is fine.”

She looked pale, confused. “Hey, Kip.”

“Yes.”

“Remember up at the Hill that time when you offered to teach me some phrases in Vietnamese? Are you still willing?”

“I know just enough to get you into trouble and not enough to get you out. But sure, if you want.”

“That’d be great,” she said.

He watched her make her way down the leaf-cluttered path to the paddock, studied her dappled by ten thousand quivering shadows cast by elms and box elders. For her part, caught between the faded urge to speak with Marcos about how she’d run away from home and assumed this new identity, and her unanticipated confessions to Kip, Franny was seized by a twinge of guilt. She’d talked about her problems without showing the least concern over his. How pale and preoccupied he’d looked. Hatless under the Chimayó sun, working outside as he did, he should be burned not bleached. Gone was his berry-brown complexion of those first painful months on the Hill. Funny what a blend of strength and fragility Kip was. She turned back to find him. He had disappeared, though. She would have called out, but she didn’t know what more to say. He might return to where she stood—hovering between her two lives, two lies—and he might smile that knowing, unassuming smile of his. Maybe it wasn’t fair of her to expect him to do more than cope with his own quandaries.