Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [12]
Such were Kip’s feeble, freighting gifts that day, offered in the shade of twelve leafing cottonwoods and that willow behind El Santuario de Chimayó. Then the dying wanderer and the family man, who shared so much and terribly little, parted company. Kip, who had refused Brice’s offer of help, walked away from the day sicker in spirit than he had expected. Brice felt oddly elated. Years of guilty feelings were about to be lifted off his shoulders by finally confessing to his—their—daughter. He bore his promise to tell Ariel the truth about her paternity like some charmed silver milagro such as those the pilgrims wear for good luck. So he mused as he caught his flight back east.
While Brice would soon enough honor his commitment, others of Kip’s hopes would not be fulfilled. Most prominent among these was that he succumb swiftly to his lymphoma, as his illness had been diagnosed by a Taos doctor. That whatever blossomed so badly inside him might cause his unholy soul to rise into an awaiting purgatory, where it might lodge with the souls of all the men he killed in Vietnam and of those who had participated in the preparation of his own long death by inhalation of trichothecene mycotoxin in Laos. Though he didn’t die promptly in the aftermath of his reunion with Brice, he did make a covenant with himself not to seek medical help. Not to go back home to the Hill where he might still know a few people in the frayed contrail of his warred-out life. Vietnam and Laos, Hiroshima and Nagasaki—enough was enough. But this wish he himself would also inadvertently dash.
Midnight after Easter. Kip found himself alone, still in the village of Chimayó, having spent Saturday and through the night into Sunday with straggling believers, some high on the spirit of the Lord, others on wine or weed, whatever was passed around. He had wandered through Resurrection Day listening to mariachi hymns and prayers at the Stations of the Cross, as the crowd in this place of miracles dwindled.
Time had come for him to leave. But Kip had nowhere to go. The week before, he’d given away his few possessions and quit the single-occupancy motel where he’d been living in Rancho de Taos. He’d told Brice he lived in Chimayó, an innocent ruse to keep him, his wife, Jessica, and Ariel, too, in the dark regarding his true whereabouts. His longing to see his daughter was perfectly matched by the strong desire not to. Vanity, was it? Pride? Simple fear, maybe. The misgivings and conflicted wishes ran deeper within him than he had the power to fathom.
He owned what was on his back and even that seemed a heavy burden. Absurd, he thought, to realize he’d made no plan beyond this encounter. Had he believed he would simply atomize once his desire had been met? He found a bottle of water one of the walkers had left behind and drank it. He slept in the park behind the church, using his leather satchel as a pillow.
Two, three hours before sunrise he began walking in the natural direction his feet carried him, along the crumbly macadam shoulder of the road to Pojoaque. Wanting to avoid anyone else who might be traveling this way, he traipsed along like some fugitive unworthy of pursuit, a hundred paces out in the desert. Putting one foot in front of the other, he paralleled the road, more or less, out of sight and half out of his mind, pushing blindly along toward the finger mesa where he and Brice had been born.
He walked across pueblolands. He crossed wide seco arroyos and breaches in the earth. He climbed with difficulty small hills, grabbing at juniper or outcroppings of stone to hoist himself up over ridges. Lights of distant villages glowed like hallowed clouds, as if their dreaming residents were spinning out auras high over their beds. His head ached and leaden legs pained him. His guts swelled against his ribs and his straining lungs were like two antique bellows whose leather had dried to dust, and now merely whistled and wheezed. His heavy heartbeat made a shushing in his ears that reminded him of an Indonesian sea coruscating