Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [13]
He must have slept if only because he sort of woke up, finding himself curled like some shoveled snake under the wooden porch of a faded turquoise trailer house, the Nambé Smoke Shop, then set out again, more slowly, stumblingly than before, not seeing those few who saw him but left him alone, assuming he was stoned or mad or both. The day passed—rising, nooning, setting—with a weird density and quickness that proposed it never happened. Wind kicked up through that afternoon, chasing the last winter leaves from their branches, driving tumbleweeds across the scape, sequining Kip with elm pennies, catkins, and twigs that caught in his hair and clothes. He’d lost his satchel somewhere along the way.
Next morning, a wan milky sun lifted over the Sangres. Kip might have reached the intersection where the highway connected with the road to Los Alamos had he not instead fallen asleep in somebody’s horse stalls in Nambé. Blood, dried to an evocative blotch at the corner of his mouth, caused the woman who found him lying there in hay and dung to cry out.
The few women in the world who might have cared about Kip would have screamed with her had they seen him so annihilated. Instead, two thousand miles away, a serene Ariel Rankin set out for her morning walk from the East Village through Union Square to work. In Chelsea, her mother, Jessica, sat beside a window, thinking about her husband’s momentous call from New Mexico, pondering the best way to admit to Ariel what they’d kept hidden for so many years. And many more thousands of miles away, Kip’s Vietnamese wife, who had been east of Haiphong just long enough to help get citizenship for her boys, was asleep in Hanoi.
Marcos’s mother, Sarah, who came upon this sick vagrant, was neither serene nor meditative nor dreaming, much as she wished she were. She leaned close to his face, presuming he was dead, but saw the pulse in his neck and heard his breathing. He opened his eyes, and again she screamed. Apologizing in a language that seemed like English but was more a dialect of delirium, Kip tried to crawl onto his hands and knees. “What’s the matter?” she asked, but he looked at her as if to say he had no idea. They worked together to get him to his provisional feet. Despite his continued efforts to avoid remedy—Kip mouthed apology after apology for trespassing, then collapsed again under himself, knees buckling—he had wandered into a place of refuge. Sarah sturdied him along the barn road to the ranch house, his arm over her shoulder and hers around his back, his slim ribs reminding her of the tines of a pitchfork.
Spent, starving, sore as hell, Kip was possessed of sufficient presence of mind—or a professional spook’s habit—to give, when asked in the kitchen where Sarah led him, a name that was both false and yet his own. “William,” he said, offering his given name, eyes darting about as he thanked her son for the fresh change of clothes. He demurred at Sarah Montoya’s proposal that when he was feeling a bit better, she and Marcos might drive him up to the Hill so that a doctor could look him over at the convalescent center where she worked. He was much obliged to her, he said, and to her husband, Carl Montoya, who sat there straight and tall as winter yucca. He thanked them for offering to put him up—“In a bed, not the barn,” said Carl—but would probably pass on the opportunity of visiting the clinic overlooking Acid Canyon, one of the very ravines he and Brice roved back in the fifties, rowdy boys with bottle rockets and homemade wire squirrel traps and a talent for hiding in the caves of North Mesa beyond.
“We’ll see how you feel about things tomorrow,” said Sarah, looking at his ochred eyes. “Step at a time.”
Carl rose from the table. “Meantime, you’re alive, so get yourself a bath, for all our damn sakes,” he said, with a caballero nonchalance that disconcerted even the wary Calder, whose cup of black darjeeling had begun to bring him around. “See you later. Marcos?”