Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [56]
Look. Kip was here. The time had presented itself for her to try again to speak. “Can I ask you to keep it—”
“A secret?”
“Secret seems kind of a strong word. I meant, just keep it to yourself for a while. Do you mind?”
“If you don’t, I don’t.”
“I suppose I should mind, is what you’re saying. But I’ve got to talk to somebody or I’m going to burst.”
Kip suggested, “One question first.”
“Yes?”
“Wouldn’t it be better if Marcos heard whatever it is you’ve got to say?”
“What if he doesn’t understand?”
“Shouldn’t understanding be his problem? Yours is simply to offer him the truth.”
“I can’t right now. I wish I could.”
Kip thought, What would a good father advise? “Say whatever you want to say. Nothing leaves this place. Fair enough?”
“Thanks,” Mary whispered, suddenly grave and compressed into the small sovereign world they inhabited together under these trees and beside this house. She told Kip she was a runaway, and why she had run. She told him her father had raged at his kids from as far back as she could remember, about anything and everything. Told him how the man’s outbursts had come in clusters, like storm cells moving over the family landscape. How, after upbraidings and tongue lashings and shoving and screaming, periods of calm would settle in, not unlike a hangover following a binge. The physical stuff was what had finally pushed her over the edge, she said. Her father had constructed a spanking paddle from a thin flat plank of oak in which he’d drilled half-inch holes that made for a sharper, more succinct blow. The backs of her legs would sometimes bear his appliance’s marks—a polka-dot patterning of welts—and as often as not she’d be grounded, so no one could see the bruises. Badges of honor, she came to think of them. Like those of Saint Catherine on her beautiful wheel of fire, or Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc at the stake. Even early Bogart hoodlums never treated anyone like her father did her. Cagney had at least been a gangster. And Mary? She was Cool Hand Luke unwilling to play the Audrey Hepburn part in Wait Until Dark, except she wasn’t blind and intended to escape with her eyes wide open.
Kip stopped working and listened intently to Mary. Before she finished, she began to cry. It had been years since he tenderly embraced anyone, but he held this Mary Franny Johnson against himself and felt the warmth of her tears on his shoulder, through the thin cotton of his shirt and the even thinner fabric of his skin. She was asking him what she should do. Tell Marcos and risk the possibility that he and his family would never want to have anything to do with her again? Go back to Gallup and face her parents, who might tell her to leave or, worse, to stay? Head back to Albuquerque and catch that plane to Los Angeles the way she had originally planned, back before everything got derailed because she had no money and no connections? Or just remain in this present abeyance, this limbo, living a daily lie that more and more was overtaking her, like a shadow rushing ahead of the very body that cast it in the first place?
“Back up,” Kip said. “What was that about Los Angeles?”
She told him of her aspirations. Sea of Grass. Hepburn, Tracy. The Desert Song. Sundown with Gene Tierney. Susan Hayward, Louise Brooks, even Mae West. Burt Lancaster in Hallelujah Trail and Robert Taylor when he filmed Ambush. They’d come to Gallup to shoot their films at Acoma or in Zuni pueblo. Ronald Reagan and Larraine Day in The Bad Man. William Holden when they did Streets of Laredo. And at night, in the nondescript