Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [49]
“Montoya said it’s fine, so all’s well.”
Kip looked around and smiled, then went back to scraping off decades of pale soil as if he’d only been born to the task.
“By the way, he asked if you’d ever done this kind of work before.”
Kip pulled himself up straight, hand over hand, using the shovel for support, then crooked up one shoulder.
“I guess that means yes?”
“I’ll do it right.”
Men, thought Sarah Montoya. Jesus God save us from men, and left for the Hill.
With no map to guide her, Ariel contented herself with a westward drive weighted by a gentle southward drift. Perhaps nervousness made her a wilier, more savoring observer, causing her to notice with fresh eyes such everyday things as a pink dawn or fiery Clementine sunset. Or maybe fatigue had somewhat stripped her down, giving the world clearer access to her consciousness. Either way, she bristled with acumen. The fine hairs on her arm tingled in the freeway wind like needles when she cocked her bare elbow out the open window. A cardinal that bounded through a bank of rhododendrons on the shore of the Kanawha near Charleston, West Virginia, displayed the purest, brightest red Ariel had ever seen. As she drove past miles of voracious steel furnaces in Tennessee, smelting coal and iron ore filled the sky with symphonic clouds. Oil refineries in East Texas tasted savory, like burnt molasses on her tongue. For one who felt as if her life had tumbled into a darkening pit, the world beyond the windshield seemed anything but a dreary catacombs.
Still, these moments of intense witnessing were counterpointed by equally strong waves of anxiety. Panic came over her whenever she thought of the evolving life in her belly and about whether she should, in fact, get an abortion in New Mexico, where few knew her and no one need ever know it happened. Grief over the irreparable rift with David, no matter how inevitable it had been. Fear regarding how very unlikely it was, over three years after Brice and Kip had their brief reunion, that she would discover anything in Chimayó or Los Alamos but a gravestone. All these crosscutting thoughts and the mapless journey itself made every waking instant as brash as a slap in the face. And now, having driven up against the border that separated New from old Mexico, and dry brown Texas from both, she recognized that the time had come to give up edgy dead reckoning for a slightly more composed approach.
El Paso. A banquette table at yet another diner. She spread the brand-new map of New Mexico before her, as if to lay a grid of rationality over her darting mind. Setting down her coffee cup on Carlsbad Caverns, Ariel traced the final miles of her trip with her forefinger. Las Cruces she would hit first, following the blue ink of the Rio Grande. Up past a settlement called Radium Springs. Past the town of Truth or Consequences, above Caballo Reservoir. All the while skirting the desolate stretch of desert east of her chosen route, aptly colored on the map in pewter, also aptly shaped like a blunt-nosed bullet casing—White Sands, the missile range wreathed along its westernmost edge by the San Andres Mountains and marked at the eastern frontier by that place with the comely name Alamogordo. Around Alamogordo there were hamlets with equally evocative names like Sunspot and Cloudcroft, Weed and Bent. The outline of a plane, indicating an airport in Alamogordo, brought to mind the Enola Gay, that unhappy bomber, presently housed in a Smithsonian warehouse, which had been repatriated on a nearby Roswell runway after its deadly flight over Hiroshima. Now here it was again, circling back into her own life.
Christ, she was way overweary. Nevertheless, here she was, her father’s daughter. Or fathers’. Or rather, grandfathers’ granddaughter. That protracted desolation on the printed map, White Sands, its barrenness plain to see, lay beneath her fingers on the pleated page. When her three eggs scrambled were set before her, yellow rice and refried beans