Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [83]
Marcos proposed that on their way up they take a couple of hours and hike the Indian ruins of Tsankawi. He’d loved the mesa since he was a kid and wanted to share it with her. Not often having witnessed this side of Marcos, in which he waxed nostalgic about his childhood—his telling her about spying on the vatos being an earlier instance—she wanted to know more. Besides, they too rarely got to be by themselves, all joking about Kip aside. It might give her the opening she’d been looking for to broach her idea about California. Why not? “Xin mòi anh di.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, All right, cowboy. Well, sort of.”
“No Vietnamese spoken there, though. Promise.”
“I promise nothing.”
Marcos waited until she finally said, “Okay, I promise.”
Copper out the windshield, sun reflecting in clay and stone and stems, off rabbit brush and seared saltbush. Light the hue of dying golden asters hovered in the white tuffstone of the canyon heights as they drove across the Rio Grande. Like one on sudden furlough who wanted to kick up heels for the simple joy of it, Franny said she’d like to wade in the river, whose water ranged from Navajo tea brown to sedimentary red to sheep-shit obsidian. Marcos said, “Let’s do Tsankawi first, then the convalescent center, and if you still want to wade at Otowi on the way home, you got it,” which seemed fair to Franny.
She felt oddly free this morning, liberated from past or pasts. Maybe it was delusional, definitely ironic, but who cared? There was something positive in the idea of seeing poor Uncle Clifford, not that she could do a thing to help him. She trusted Kip not to breathe a word about Gallup, but she knew more clearly than ever that he was right about what she had to do. Maybe, just maybe, the visit would help her to confess her duplicity, her many lies, to Marcos. Meanwhile, she would inhale this mountain air deep into herself and set the world aside for the day.
They took the road toward White Rock, soon pulled over and parked on the shoulder. An open solitude settled heavily over the vista as they hiked in the warming breeze down a rocky gulleywash trail. Having made their way through the sparse piñon and juniper woods, they began their ascent up the ancient trail worn deep into the stone by women and men whose dwellings in the southern cliffs came into view. Franny followed Marcos along this sunken path, one foot directly in front of the other as if on a recessed tightrope, climbing the pumice rim well below the flat summit, snaking their way mutely, beholding the vast widening valley as raptors dark as the smoke-charred ceilings of the ruins circled on updrafts. A mountain bluebird toppled by in a tumult of azurine. Red ants charted courses across the winding, rising trail. Crickets chirruped in shady spots. To the left were holes chiseled into the cliffs, handholds and toeholds for accessing the table mesa where, Marcos told Franny, the community of Tsankawi thrived in its three-storied pueblos a millennium or so ago.
“How’re you doing?” he asked.
“My god, it’s just too much.”
“Should we go back?” turning like some awkward dancer, feet caught in the stone furrows. He’d forgotten what an arduous trek this was, a difficult hike even for him now that he was no longer climbing with the pliant legs of a boy.
“No, I mean this is unbelievable,” she answered, gazing out at the long horizons that spread below. “Imagine them in the winter after a snowstorm, huddled in these cliffs with only fire and each other to keep them warm. Reminds me of when I was young and saw Red Rocks for the first time.”
“Red Rocks outside Gallup?”
“Yes—no.”
“The ones near Denver?”
“What?”
“Which Red Rocks? I’ve been both places.”
“You misunderstood but it doesn’t matter,” she tried, her flight into the past brought to earth by Marcos’s innocent question, itself prompted by her own slipup. He let it go, unaware he’d touched on a place even more protected than these rimrock steeps. The guise, though—was it beginning to collapse of its own accord?
After