We stood, stared. I must have reached out to him, extended my hand, gave him a stolid smile.
Then that daydream soon was gone and Kip yelled, —Hurry up, come on, Brice, and I blinked and may actually have thought to give the old fellow an embrace before I regained my senses and dashed, my cheek on fire, toward the door at the end of the sanctuary.
The sun was so bright the light seemed stiff. We burst from the darkness into the hard white morning heat of the plaza, at a dead run. The reedy words of the old custodian receded as we piled, helter-skelter, Kip limping, into the car.
—Go, man, Martinez shouted, but Kip couldn’t find the keys. Aside from a crumpled roll of dollar bills covered with a pale patina of the sacred dirt, his pockets were empty. He searched the floor of the car, and the seat. —Picale, andale, ir’ya vacas! cried Martinez.
Would that we had clung to the righteousness of our endeavor, is all I can think now, as I remember this scene from my youth; the vain panic, the demoralized and dishonorable flight from a helpless specter of a man. My cheek still has on it a patch of white, this tough welt, which I will always regard as an emblem of the series of bad if heartfelt decisions that were made on the morning following our idealistic—and after its own fashion successful—pilgrimage. While Kip and Martinez argued, and while the old fellow climbed the gentle hill from the zaguan to the top of the plaza, I lamented. Looked up at the hills that ascended above the irrigated flat fields of the valley, rose in parallel and curved mounds to converge, higher and higher, into the low mountain of Tsi Mayoh, and wanted—again, like a child—to bolt, flee my mates, leave behind my mess. I wondered how far away I could get on foot before they caught up. Remembered I had taken a piece of chicken from the refrigerator, a leftover from dinner the night before, wrapped it up in paper, and now I tapped my hands on my pants pockets.
Sometimes the mind can run in so many directions at once. I suppose I had thought ahead to the projected night before me, down in the valley, pictured myself under the heavy stars, hungry and far from the comforts of home. The chicken wing was gone. Must have lost it in the desert where some cayedog got himself a pretty easy morsel. I could picture my mother and sister sitting there at the table last night, talking of this and that, and remembered how I’d eaten second helpings and, bashful, asked for thirds against this secret prospect of famishment.
But then Martinez laughed and pointed, —The keys, man, there they are, let’s go, and sure enough they were still in the ignition where Kip had left them. My mouth was as parched as the soil that covered my lips and cheeks.
—Go away, I shouted at the old caretaker, who was almost upon us, —go away, saying it as much for his sake as ours. Kip got the Plymouth started and slammed the column stick into gear just as he came hobbling to the side of the car, waving those church keys in the air, whooping and sputtering, the mongrel dogs—black, brown, white with spots, all nondescript but for their fat wet swinging tongues—running in close circles around him.
Our tires spun, kicked up pebbles. Our heads heaved forward, came to right. The moronic dogs stopped and, with the miraculous singularity of vision a pack can display, turned their attention from the viejito to us in the car, then one, then another of them bared fangs, and in an instant bounded straight in our direction. Kip, not having seen any of this, fumbled with the stick, hit the gas and suddenly backed up again, slammed into something, pumped the brake, pushed the shift stick to drive. The engine coughed and we lurched out forward as a painful howling rose from under the chrome bumper. I turned and saw that one of the mongrels, crackling with energy, powered itself in a furious scuffle with the earth, its hind end reddened and paralyzed, its head and forelegs churning as it pulled itself in a semicircle, and lunged across the powdery ground snapping in the direction of the car. The old man had sat himself down on the plaza. He watched the injured dog as it ran in arcs, fell, jumped up again, described a half-moon on the dust much the way we used to make snow angels on our backs after a fresh winter flurry, and collapsed once more. The other hounds were right alongside us. Martinez stood in the back seat. To him this was a marvelous circus, I guess. He threw the whiskey bottle at the closest dog, a black and muscular blur, and caught it square in the chops. Beyond the dogs, the bottle, the old man, I saw the santuario receding from view, glazed as it were by the scrim of dustlight. The stout twin spires seemed peaceful and eternal there in the delicate, protecting hands of the cottonwoods, and I knew with the same certainty one knows something in a particularly vivid dream that despite ourselves we had accomplished what we’d come to do, that while our simple-hearted wishes might be beyond the interests of fate to grant, our motives had not been construed as other than good and kind and compassionate. We could eat all the sacred dirt on earth, but still those who loved to make war would make war. My crooked halo whitened—could Kip, could Martinez see?—into the sincerest burning beam for that one small moment, then dimmed away.
Thinking back on it, I’ve come to adore El Santuario de Chimayó more and more over the years, despite my distance and the fact I’m not a religious man, don’t attend church, don’t intend to attend church in the future. Chimayó is more than a church, has to it a spiritual richness beyond what any religion offers. Sturdy and luminous, it is a holy yet secular place, secular as in saecular, saecularis, worldly and pagan, made of earth, of dust and water. Open to all, it shuns not the least among us. What else can a sinner say? Chimayó proposes, in its simplicity, that all churches should be made of hand-hewn timber and hand-plied mud, since wood and adobe sustain the spirit better than the finest marble or firmest granite. The Europeans can keep their pallid fortresses, with rose windows and spires to take your breath away, with golden doors to baptisteries and campaniles touching the lower stratosphere. The believers who, in the early part of the last century, fashioned Chimayó from the barest elements around them, knew that trees rise from wet earth, and that wood and mud are old biological friends. More than this seems an excess, and somehow faithless. If man is made of clay, why not his houses of worship? It remains as extraordinary to me today as it was then that not an hour’s distance from this valley was the Hill where a fire was built that could burn not just wood but earth as well.
—Shut up, man, I turned toward Martinez. How could he find all this so funny? He hooted something in dialect at the old man, pumped a defiant middle finger into the morning breeze. I hadn’t noticed, the night before, that he had his own brand. A scar ran from a point just below his eye down his smooth brown cheek to the edge of his jaw. It was thick as a worm and dull pink. He turned, offered me a smile—or rather, an inverted frown. His teeth were gap-spaced but there was a delicacy to him. Who was this guy? I turned around and sat back. And, of course, who were we?
Martinez laughed some more.
—Cállete la boca, Kip told him.
Martinez responded, —Cállete ’l hocico yourself, then pulled himself together, got serious all of a sudden, and said, —So what is next, my friends?
—What do you mean what’s next? What’s next is you’re gone, is what’s next.
—I think I’ll stay along for a little while yet.
—You’re crackers, boy.
—Kip?
—What.
—Maybe we better go back home now.
—No way, he said, and took a hard right turn, started driving faster, through what there was of this small village, past some broken-down wooden stalls and houses, toward fields with shade trees here and there and cattle with yokes of lashed sticks grazing in the mild calm of their simple world. I stayed quiet, was grateful that Fernando Martinez decided to be quiet. The determination in Kip’s face made me ponder what we were going to do, where we were to go now.
We had no plan. What fragment of an agenda we did have in place the night before had been fulfilled, more or less. Kip and I each had a lode of tierra bendita in our bellies, as proposed, but beyond Chimayó, Kip and I had failed to scheme. There wasn’t time to discuss it, and so hav
ing passed the Capilla del Santo Niño, surged beneath the trees that lined the narrow dirt lane, having sped down the main road, a road that would lead us not back toward Los Alamos, but rather toward Truchas and Taos, we found ourselves farther away from home and deeper into trouble. I glanced over at Kip again and saw him wince when he weighed down on the pedal with his hurt foot. I breathed in deep the pristine air off Tsi Mayoh, off the alluvial soil of El Potrero, off the Rio Quemado and Santa Cruz, and thought that I ought to have some say about what we were doing, but then figured, Leave it alone, after all what does it matter now that we’re pure, now that we’ve eaten from the well of earth, there’s nothing anybody can do to hurt us.
Still, fear has a way of tucking itself beneath a pretty quilt of optimism. We were all pumped up. The pain in my eyes and head and in my back from having slept on the ground disappeared some under the brilliance of the sky and clouds. We seemed to drift into tranquility once we reached the long plateau stretch on the high road to Taos. The dogs were far behind us now. I imagined that the old caretaker had bestirred himself, climbed to his feet, knocked the dust from his trousers, and walked back down to the santuario to finish his morning’s business there, little the worse for wear from his encounter, and relieved to find out that we boys hadn’t broken anything, and hadn’t taken anything that God wouldn’t be able quite easily to replace.
We encountered no one besides a farmer on a tractor going the opposite way, outside Cordova. Red-brown cattle munched orchard grass down in their pale green valley oases. The moon was setting. Smoke issued in whiskers from hornos and chimneys. Some silhouettes of swallows in the sky. A small herd of wild horses—one a tall lank roan with speckles the cast and shape of eggs over his back—stood beside the shoulder of the highway. Each faced a different direction, looking lost, which made me wonder, How can they be lost if they don’t have a home? which in turn reminded me of Fernando Martinez who had curled himself up in the back seat into a fetal position and fallen asleep much like one of those dogs back there probably was doing right now, following his tail in a tight circle three times, lying down, maybe smacking his chops, the picture of contentment, and in a trice was dreaming.
As it was with Kip, Martinez seemed to be at home with himself. I stared at him. The wind whipped his hair in thatches. His shirt was untucked and missing buttons, and looked to be a third- or fourth-generation hand-me-down. Likewise his denims and fraying tennis shoes. His moustache, in the light of day, was in fact that of a boy, and when I turned around I allowed myself a moment to study Kip. If I could look like anyone in the world I would look like Kip, I thought. His contours were sharp and his movements astute. The darkness of his eyes belied such cunning light, his forehead was smoother than riverstone and browned by the sun, his cheeks and jaw and nose were so defined as to seem drawn in ink against the world around him. —What? he asked, sensing my eyes on him, and I said, —Nothing, and faced forward.
We were like a thrown rock. Never had I been on the road going as fast as this. What freedom and what fear, and as we carried on in silence I could feel those fears lift away just as our words and laughter had the night before, and tumble into nothingness behind. I was here with Kip, true brother. We’d done something special together and it was as if this car were our new home. Home is where you are most alive, most aware, most content, isn’t it? I closed my eyes tight and watched the crystals of changing colors the sunlight played on my lids. The blood in my head sang.
By late morning we neared Ranchos de Taos. As the air got thinner and cooler among the rising peaks, the nausea we’d been feeling began to fade and with it faded our hysteria. Kip was driving slower now, one hand on the wheel and the other drumming his knee to the beat of the radio music. Borne forward in a haze of peaceful pleasure, we were above and beyond everyone and everything. The old Spanish saying Noche alegre, mañanita triste—a night of revelry, a morning of grief—didn’t seem to apply to us anymore. We knew it couldn’t last, but for an hour we didn’t care. We wore the world like a crown.
We had stopped for fruit and candy bars in Las Trampas, one of the poor farm villages along the way. Kip decided to let me try to drive, but I wasn’t good at it, had the car now on the center line, now on the shoulder, and without any protest from me, he took the wheel again. We counted the money we had taken—stolen, in fact—from hiding places back on the Hill. My contribution to our runaway money came from the cookie jar in our kitchen, a jovial Sambo whose gentle, foolish smile shamed me when I plunged my hand into his fat paunch in search not of pecan sandies but the plastic bag in which my mother stowed reserve cash. Kip had filched from his father’s more ingenious but not invulnerable hiding place, which was simply a manila envelope taped to the underside of a table in their front room.
Most of my money was in single bills, with a few fives. I had folded it up and carried it in my breast pocket. When I thought about our thefts, I could feel the crown on my head begin to slip away. By the time I finished eating a hard green apple from the grocery, and tossed the core into the ditch along the side of the road, my euphoria had passed and my fears began to take its place.
I said, —We’re pretty rotten, you know.
—What’re you talking about?
—It’s a pretty rotten thing to’ve done what we did taking our folks’ money, don’t you think?
—Hey, keep it down, Kip said, jerking his head toward the back seat. Then he said, quietly as he could, —Rotten? That’s what you’d call us, rotten?
—Well.
—We’re not the ones who’re rotten, boy.
I didn’t know what to say. Said, —I don’t know.
—So, all right. We’re rich and rotten.
I breathed in hard; I didn’t want to be a stupid little kid anymore. I wanted to be strong. I said, —No more rotten than how the stuff got earned, I guess.
—All right, he said. —You said that right.
There were more and more signs of life, and with every person we encountered along the way, the dire nature of our quandary, the mess we were creating for ourselves, began to sharpen into greater focus, grow despite our unconscious best efforts to be oblivious to the thought of how worried our parents and friends must be, back up there on the Hill. We devoured our candy, squinted in the sun, and kept going. Onward was our only way, onward and upward. The flats at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos lay out ahead, and Colorado, secreted behind their snow-laden tops, beyond.
I knew my geography from school, I’d always loved maps, and it was nothing for me to close my eyes and conjure the land and life that lay ahead of us—north and north, through Colorado, maybe along the foothills up through Pueblo and Denver and on to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and north through Casper toward the Bighorn Mountains and Montana, where we’d hire ourselves out as ranch hands or vaqueros. Mow alfalfa and bundle it in bales, shear sheep, bust broncos. Then, after some adventures there, we’d get stir-crazy, and one morning before the dawn broke we’d be back in our car, headed north up into Canada, maybe high into Saskatchewan where we would become strong sawyers, build our own timber mill by some great river upon whose grassy shore we’d fish grayling or salmon for breakfast, hunt wild moose for our supper, and then we would go all the way up into the Northwest Territories, where we would wear sealskins and build ourselves a house of tundra peat, and let the rest of the world fare its wars below while we—heroes larger than life—sang songs, carved quaint scenes in reindeer horns, and smoked pipes by a fire crackling in the hearth.
Back and forth, back and forth. So my daydreams went. In the meantime, again more fellow travelers along the road, and by now more creeping remorse in my heart, and probably in Kip’s as well. We were both quiet. I tried hard to keep my thoughts on the high times ahead rather than what might be happening back on the Hill. Time passed in odd blurts and shapes. More people saw us, a farmer on his tractor pulling his loaded spreader along the shoulder, headed probably from his tumble-down barn to a field, looked us over as we passed him slowly
on a rough patch. I noticed Kip’s eyes darting from the rearview mirror to the highway, felt us pick up speed again, and although he and I didn’t say anything to each other, I sensed that Kip sensed that I sensed that we were being watched. We had every right to be paranoid.
Yes, a noble house of stone, with a crackling yellow fire in the corner hearth, and a big pot of black coffee on the cast-iron stove. And wives, strong wise wives, Eskimo girls with flat wide faces and knowing eyes, with bright woven clothing and reindeer moccasins.
A station wagon with side-by-side headlights and fins passed us, a woman and some children in the back, the eldest a girl with bangs and a coppery barrette not so much younger than we—they studied us too closely. There were others. One truck driver in particular who had come upon us when we were descending through the pine-forested mountains past Rio Pueblo, taking the switchback curves of Borrego Canyon much faster than we should have, bore down on our car and seemed to study the three of us from the height of his silver cab. Kip sped up, slowed down, but couldn’t shake him.
—What are we doing, Kip? I heard myself say.
He didn’t look at me, but had his eyes trained on the mirror as if in a trance, shifting them back to the meandering road from second to second, and said, —Not now.
The noble stone house and Eskimo wives faded, and I saw my father’s face as if it were right before me, saw his eyes, even saw that he’d cut himself shaving and could almost smell his styptic pencil, and I was afraid.
—Why not now? Let’s pull over.
Kip yelled, —How’m I supposed to pull over? Look at this guy back here.
I didn’t know. I didn’t want to cry.
—You’re in fifty-fifty here, Kip went on. —You tell me what we’re supposed to do.
—I mean, maybe we ought to just go back to the Hill.
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