Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [50]
Glancing around, she pulled her wallet from her backpack and counted four hundred in twenties. It would have to last a while. She extracted the ledger and looked again at the photo of the youthful Kip and Brice. She had this and Kip Calder’s name but not much more to work with when asking around. What it was. She left a generous tip for the waitress who wore a memorable vintage pair of crimson lizard pumps.
Through bony splendor she drove, through massive upheavings that resembled stone skirts blown high skyward from the recumbent desert with its flora here and there. Most of the traffic was high in the sky, aircraft with military markings or no markings at all, in a multitude of shapes—now stout, now trim as a firepin—and never silver like the Enolas of old but matte black. Her map, embellished by Tabasco stains, fluttered beside her, applauding as she whisked along the straight road through these arid ranges and flat arbitrating plains. Isolated towns whose names she recognized from her map reading hugged either side of the highway—parched low buildings with a sporadic general store ascending to a second tier. Dogs napped in their blue shade. Once in a while she saw a person walking dreamily along.
Darkness had fallen by the time she finally made Albuquerque and pressed on through Santa Fe. Ariel decided she would crash at the next motel on the road and face what she had to face in morning light. A blinking neon sign read Vaca cy, and she entered another exhausted room, this one different from the others with its hopeful framed print of pastel pueblo people, an Indian family gazing out from a butte, the father shielding his eyes from the sun, cliché squaw beside him, children gathered around her clutching at the beaded hem of her deerskin dress. The bedspread, curtains, and couch fabrics bore matching prints of someone’s idea of Anasazi geometries. The carpet was gray, the windows unopenable. Curled on her side beneath the covers, she quickly fell asleep.
Somewhere between postmidnight and predawn. The weird sense of waking up not knowing where she was. And the weirder one of then realizing. Morning sickness forced her out of bed and across the cement rug into the blindingly bright bath. As she knelt over the toilet bowl, naked but for her black sweatshirt with the stenciled legend Leave Me Alone on the back, Ariel thought how wonderful religion must sometimes be for those who have faith. Believing in Christ would certainly make abortion a moot point. Believing might offer other strengths, too, that she sure could use right about now. Christ had never walked with her as a child, though. And he sure as hell wasn’t here in the bathroom of the Cities of Gold Casino motel.
Grandmother McCarthy would bemoan her son’s lack of religion all over again, and probably in stronger language than ever, when she learned that her granddaughter had come, unannounced, unanticipated, in search of a father who wasn’t her son. Brice and Jessica’s God-free household did have something to do with her present malaise, no getting around it. But in fairness she had to admit that even if they’d been married ministers she’d likely have fallen from the faith. Born apostate? More like a blind spot, a missing strand of DNA.
—Charity’s church enough, Brice always said, and Ariel as always listened. —Most of these pious lambs who flock to houses of worship are either sheep getting sheared or, often as not, wolves in sheep’s clothes doing a bit of fleecing themselves.