Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [18]
She didn’t disagree then or even lately, nor did she complain about working side by side with her parents in the soup kitchens over the holidays. Charity volunteering was still trademark Ariel come December. A familiar way of shirking society even as she contributed to its unfortunates.
Not a bad life. She remembered her beloved little Buddha, as alleywise as any cat from the animal shelter over in Kip’s Bay Remembered her bedroom wall shelved with books, many of them twice read, thrice—some children’s books but mostly history and science, novels and poetry, biographies of Mary Shelley and Madame Curie and Harry Truman (whom her grandfather once met). As the older Ariel gazed back at herself, she framed what she saw much the same way she’d framed that drawing of transgressive birds. With an eye toward making the past inspire the present.
Brice had never been less than a complete father. How could she even consider another? Those Christmas revelers bearing trees years ago down the snowy streets were gone, never to be seen again. Her foundling cat lay buried under a stone cairn in the yard of their upstate farmhouse. Some things you didn’t miss, others you would always miss. Either way, your story went on with or without your consent. As an only child, hadn’t she always been furnished with a generous private imagination and felt sufficiently nourished by her books, her drawings and penciled stories, her friendship with her parents, that she rarely if ever perceived her life as defective in any way? Damned if it was any different now.
The boys had left and taken their toy boat with them. She awakened as if from a dream. The evening breeze was scented with new flowers and, she could swear, the bay brine of tidal rivers. She carried Kip’s ledger and envelope back to her East Village apartment and found a box in which to store them. Tying the bundle with dental floss—wasteful, but she had no string in the house and was driven by a deeper urgency to finish its entombment than she cared to contemplate—she placed it behind an obsolete encyclopedia on the top shelf of her tallest bookcase. She burned a votive candle and sat cross-legged on the floor. When the flame guttered, she swore off thinking about faith, fathers, and the risky weight of unknown ancestries.
Every curve, every rise and dip of earth out in the pueblolands of Pojoaque and San Ildefonso, every flat and vista returned like an old confrere to feverish Kip Calder, who rode with Sarah and Marcos in the Jeep while some country singer on the radio carried on about love lost and love regained. He winced at the music but was mesmerized by the careening world beyond the windows.
If visual memories could be judged with the exactitude of musical perfect pitch, Kip’s recall of the various shades of sand and brush as he squinted over his right shoulder toward Black Mesa was so clear that he could name the notes with his back turned to the piano. Sarah noticed that the man who sat beside her seemed to anticipate where to look and when. She was intrigued that he’d begun to stare out toward the north after they passed Arroyo San Antonia, and let out an involuntary moan when this butte, known to San Ildefonsoans as Tunyo, the Orphan Mesa, came into view. As sacred as it was starkly conspicuous on the wind-flattened plain, Black Mesa—the mesa of the abandoned—was a landmark that had fascinated Kip as a boy. His father told him a giant named Savayo once lived there and was set on devouring all the children of San Ildefonso pueblo until a local cacique slaughtered him in an explosion of flaming blood and lava. He wanted to tell Sarah the story but couldn’t, of course, and still hide from her his intimacy with the area. Besides, he figured that she, who wasn’t that much older than he was, already knew the legend from her own father.
When they descended toward Otowi and the greener river-fed lands clotted with cottonwoods, he flinched at the grandeur of the brown Rio