He slammed the butt of one hand against the steering wheel, shot me a look, muttered something like, —Okay, then set his jaw and began gradually to brake the car, gradually slowed us way down and, still driving, ignoring the horn blasts from the rig behind us, shouted, —Yeah, that’s just great, that’s a great idea.
I didn’t know how to respond. Everything was happening at once, it seemed. Kip’s move was working. As the car slowed more, the man in the truck behind us had apparently had enough and, blessedly, noisily, was passing us. Once the rig blew by, buffeting us as it offered one last deafening blast from its horn, the atmosphere completely changed. The truck—moments ago so massive, bearing down like guilt upon us—diminished before disappearing altogether around a sheer stone cliff. Kip, trembling a little, brought the car to the side of the road. We sat suddenly swamped by silence, intense and enveloping.
After a moment, Kip in a raspy whisper said, —You know, Brice, sometimes I really don’t get you. I already told you we can’t go back to the Hill. You know what’s going to happen to us if we go back there?
—All I know is I’m not sure that what we’re doing is the best idea.
He rolled his head back on his shoulders and looked straight up to the sky. —Okay, all right. You got a better idea?
He was still shuddering, but now I noticed that it wasn’t so much from terror as anger.
I heard myself say, —Better idea than what? and as I said it, I thought, What a fool you can be at times, Brice.
—We been driving all morning and now you’re going to ask what we’re doing?
I said nothing because I knew it wasn’t really a question he had asked, at least not a question he expected me to answer.
Soon enough he answered it himself.
—We just go on is all.
I couldn’t look him in the eye. Again my mind drifted back to those horses—wild cayuses, by definition never lost—and I thought of being a cowboy twin with Kip in Montana, a homesteader with him in the North country, and about the original meaning of our pilgrimage. They, our parents and our people back on the Hill, were guiltier than we, this much we knew as truth. And so, given the nature of life on the Hill, why return? Kip, whose eyes I could feel were hard on me—Kip was right. I must have reddened, I sensed my ears burning bright. How could I have failed him like that? Yet, still, the tiniest flicker of dread kindled in me, too, a combined fear of losing Kip, knowing I would not have him forever for my very own as I’d had him when we were sequestered on the Hill, and inchoate perception of what the world might do to my friend, my heart’s pal, especially in light of how unafraid of it he seemed to be. These must have been feelings. I doubt I’d have been able to put them into words.
Frightened eyes can be lucid eyes, and I remember feeling I was seeing Kip for the first time, as if through some clarifying lens. So it was I remember feeling, fair enough, but what was more likely was this. Not that my own eyes were sharper, instead that Kip’s view of how he might approach his life minutely yet radically shifted. Last night was different from today. Last night we were both ecstatic. Our plan had worked. We’d been free, had freed ourselves. We’d toured across a landscape only dreamed at for months and years before. Yet this morning it was obvious that Kip was strengthened by being a runaway.
I stared at my hands and when finally I looked up I saw that he was smiling at me, a tight crescent smile, his lips brown in the flickering shadows thrown by the tall pines by the road. The ponderosas gave off a heavy scent of vanilla. I knew my lips were white. Suddenly, I would have given anything for a piece of angel food cake.
—We off now?
I said yes, and thought, Nice big piece with ice cream on top.
—Well, come on then, he laughed.
Sleepy, Jess says, “What’s it like there?”
“You’ve been here, Jessica. More buildings, more roads, more people, more dogs, but still New Mexico.”
“What’s their place like, Lyse and Michael’s?”
“It’s all right. Where I’m staying tonight is new New Mexican. And their house is an old wandering adobe thing with heated floors, kind of old-new New Mexican.”
“Heated floors?”
“Hot-water pipes, there’s hot pipes just under the tiles so that the floor is warm in the winter.”
Why are we talking architecture, I wonder, then Jessica—as if overhearing my thought—says, “Do you think you ought to come home now?”
“You know what surprises me?”
Jessica asks me what.
“What surprises me is that you still don’t think I ought to be here. What would you think if I weren’t here?”
“I don’t know.”
“See what I mean?”
“Maybe I’d think more of you if you hadn’t gone is what I mean—no, I don’t mean that. It doesn’t matter, does it? I think you have to be where you are, and that’s why you’re there and I’m here, because this is where I should be.”
“You’re sure,” I ask.
“Brice.”
“Because if you think you should be here—”
“I don’t. It’s not my place. If I thought it were, I’d be there.”
I say, “Have you talked with Ariel about the birthday party?”
“She’ll be here Sunday.”
“She doesn’t mind that it’s after the fact?”
“I don’t think she cares about these things as much as her father does. Do you think she’s too old for me to make that vile birthday cake she used to love?”
“Chocolate with peanut butter frosting—”
“—just disgusting.”
“She may be too old but I’m not.”
“You’ll be here, no matter what?”
I could tell that Jessica had been crying before I called. When I hung up and turned out the light to try to get some sleep, I began seriously to contemplate apologizing to my impromptu hosts in the morning, and catching the bus to Albuquerque. I could be back in the city by tomorrow night. There’d be very little discussion about my change of heart. Bonnie Jean and Mother’d never know that I was here, so neither regrets nor explanations would have to be extended to them. Kip might wait for me all day Friday, but he’d get the picture by afternoon, and he’d have to accept my decision. Surely it would be unreasonable of him not to have considered that there was an excellent chance his long-ago friend Brice might determine to leave the past in the past. Resurrections have ever been dangerous business. Monsters resuscitate with the same alacrity as angels. How many times have I seen it happen in a courtroom, when I walk in, thinking my case is prepared and that my client has told me everything, only to have an entire defense go under because someone has remembered something, some small thing that capsizes all in its wake? I have seen it, and more than once. Kip, I think. More than half a lifetime ago, my friend. Are you angel or monster?
I can hear him, his taut, clear voice that I remember so well. His answer, Only one way for you to find out, Brice, and besides you know it’s never as simple as sorting angels from monsters. You yourself were the one who always empathized with Caliban.
I did, it is true.
And his voice fades with the words, Well, what makes you think I’m not the same as Caliban, eh, Mr. Prospero?
After deciding to go forward, to match our emotional distance from Los Alamos in geographic measure, we’d continued down the pass below Picuris Peak half a dozen miles before realizing that Fernando Martinez was no longer asleep in the back seat. Indeed, he had vanished.
—What the—? and Kip turned us around. We drove back to the turnout where we had parked not a quarter hour before.
Nothing, no sign of our mercurial companion. We stood on the shoulder and peered down through the thick forest of old fir and knew he was there somewhere. We called his name. Wind tinkered its way in rising and dying waves, caused the shadows to play over the floor of brown needles below, heightened the eeriness of his disappearance. Clouds crept across the horizon above the serrate treeline.
—Martinez, we shouted.
It was as if he had been an hallucination.
—Should we look for him?
Kip shook his head. —You know what. I never wanted to bring him along in the first place.
—You were the one driving. You didn’t have to stop.
—Who spotted him? Who said, Slow down, Kip, slow down, there’s somebody standing there by the road?
—Don’t try to blame this on me.
Kip stared ahead, chin forward, hands in his pockets, defiant. —I never liked that guy, he said again.
—What you want to do now? I asked in what must have been a revisit of my feeble voice, but uneasiness had settled in on Kip this time too, and he shrugged.
Again I wanted to broach the obvious with him, that this was not working, what we did last night was right and righteous but now we were coming undone, and wouldn’t it be better to go back and take whatever is in store for us—after all, we did it, we suffered the remedy, we ate the dirt, nothing can hurt us—but instead we both stood there mute while the air walked through the sparkling pines, me left with my unanswered question and Kip with unmasked confusion until he said, finally, —Idiot.
The reference, I thought, might have been to me.
Then he finished, —Let’s go, and once more we were headed down toward Taos. Kip peered into the dry canyon out to the east, peered out at the far peaks and frothing clouds, and without saying a word gave me to understand that he could read my silence, and that he had no intention of reversing course.
That we made it through Taos without being apprehended seems astonishing. Was this because a couple of boys said to be missing from up on the Hill didn’t register with the authorities as being quite as significant in the great scheme of life as it was to me and Kip? Was it possible, Kip and I asked each other, they hadn’t made a connection between our disappearance and that of the Wrights’ Plymouth convertible? We’d left no note, had taken off in the middle of the night, silent and swift as elf owls that descend from their cactus-hole perches to dominate the darkness—or so we’d have metaphorically flattered ourselves. But was it possible that no one had deciphered our signature in the theft?—that of all the cars in town to take, we’d chosen one owned by the parents of our favorite childhood adversary, a boy who hated us as much as we did him, for no reason beyond our juvenile need to mark territory and dominate it in the time-honored fashion boys and wild animals have followed since ages immemorial, a kid Kip and I thought ourselves incredibly clever to have nicknamed “Wrong,” the joke being, of course, that here was an instance where two Wrights made a wrong. It would not have been in the least foolish of them to have sent, by now, search parties into the canyons near home, down in Bayo where we used to ride ponies, or in Pueblo, or up higher into the Jemez toward the caldera, the opulent, grassy Valle Grande where one could walk for days without encountering another living soul. Insofar as we’d been rumored to have passed through Chimayó, a fact we found out later, isn’t it true the caretaker back in the church might well have been half-blind and perceived to be a senile and unreliable witness? He had no corroborator—though, of course, Martinez was now a potential fink, if suspect and unreliable himself—and so our mysterious good luck at having not been caught was perhaps not so mysterious after all. We assumed that so long as we moved along shrewd and cautious and quiet we would be safe. By nightfall our second day we’d figured out how to raise the canvas top of the convertible over its steel ribs, and found some blankets in the trunk. We parked the car behind what seemed to be an abandoned bus station and slept as best we could, me in front, Kip in back.
In the morning, we indulged in 7UP and a tin of sardines for breakfast. It was when I reached into my pocket to pay for gas and a map that I discovered my money was missing.
—Damn, I said, as it came clear. —Damn damn damn.
Kip checked his pockets and his wad was there, and he paid, hissing between his gritted teeth, —I knew it. Did I know it, or what? I never liked that guy.
Once we pulled out of the station, left behind the peal of pneumatic bells and smell of oil, we both began cursing at the top of our lungs. What disaster, what stupidity. Born yesterday, wet behind the ears. Green as meadow grass and about as easy to walk all over. My fist came down on my knee.
—I told you so, said Kip.
—We gonna go back and find him?
—I didn’t like him, I didn’t like him one bit.
—You already said that.
And then I saw my wad of bills lying on the floor. Double fool, I thought, and held them up between my trembling fingers. Kip laughed so hard he had to pull over and idle for a moment.
—You’re too much, boy, he said.
—I didn’t think he’d done it.
—I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about you.
—Never mind, lay off. Everything’s all right now. Like I say, I didn’t think he’d done it.
—He might as well have.
We kept going, Kip chuckling every so often, me concentrating on the map.
Taos was left behind in a quiet fever of optimism. Gone were the high spirits of the first hours of our escape. Now our journey had matured; now we were going to find our way forward into the unknown. We would take our time, enjoy the views; or maybe it was that we wanted now to be captured, but could not admit it to ourselves. Hard to know, but the day was rich in its tardiness, and that was just what we wanted. Look at this, look at that—there were many lapses in our progress. Midafternoon drifted into dusk, the sunset of pale yellows in the cloudless sky, not so very memorable except that it, too, seemed to counsel calm. In an act of forgiveness, or trust, in an act of friendship maybe, Kip had handed me his money, saying, —Once lost twice found, you be banker.
Thus all was steadied between us again. I tallied our money, sorted it, found a sickly rubber band in the glove compartment to wrap around it. Seventy-eight dollars. Not bad at all. Into my pocket it went.
—Sorry, Kip, I said.
He ignored me. Maybe he hadn’t heard.
—I’m sorry about losing that money.
—I don’t know what you’re talking about.
We settled back into the ride, indulging ourselves in self-congratulations only once, pulling over to the side of the highway up toward Eagle Nest, like we had back near the crossroads at Nambé pueblo, to try to dance and holler at the stars and moon. We did our best, but we weren’t the same boys who’d driven hard across the desert to Chimayó. Gone was our giddiness, and now we’d begun to respond to an instinct that continued to lead us away from home, but without the comfort of knowing a destination. No, I don’t believe we were afraid. We did dance, we did laugh, and we marveled at the mountains and stars. Maybe we were dazed by our own unexpected success. Deep down, I doubt either of us had thought we could carry our idea all the way to Chimayó, let alone Taos and Eagle Nest.
For all this, I still wasn’t able to stifle my guilt about our parents, the looming, daunting actuality of what independence meant, or might mean, and the more simple, if as yet unadmitted, feeling of homesickness. These worked at me, gnawed at me.
—You still sure we shouldn’t call, just to let them know we’re okay? I tried.
—So then they’ll know where we are?
—Not if we don’t tell them.
—They could trace the call.
—That’s just in the movies.
Kip said, —I’m not calling. You can do what you want.
Which left me without a choice. —Well, it’s not like there’s a phone around here anyhow.
It all means more in light of what is happening now, all these years later. I’m appalled by our selfishness and impressed by our temerity. We were, in our own way, deliciously irresponsible. When I think back, Kip’s hardness interests me most; his hardness and also the strange prescience he unwittingly managed to exhibit during what happened next, what he caused to happen and how it prefigured something that would come to pass l
ater in life. Uncanny, it still seems now, how our accident foreshadowed another—far more devastating—accident that lay ahead in his, and therefore our, future.
U.S. 64 up over the Sangre de Cristos. Wheeler Peak out to our left, over thirteen thousand feet. The snow on its summits glinted. On over Raton Pass through Trinidad—desolate ghost town, running dogs, the characteristic fingers of chimney smoke reaching up into the blue, birds like rags along the catenary power lines—and into Colorado. Route 25 through Pueblo and its stinking smelters loading the sky with burning black, and up past Castle Rock, which looked like a punk fist of sandstone, through Denver at dusk, the city lights twinkling on either side of the highway and the great long stretches of foothills, front and back ranges, purple under black out to our left.
When Kip fell asleep at the wheel, our fifth night past state lines—overcast, the stars had abandoned us and with them fled our luck—all the way up near the Wyoming border, and flipped us clean over, his presence of mind, the resistance he showed the officers and ambulance attendants, was something to behold. Years of youthful animosity detonated in words.
—Don’t touch me, man, he kept crying. His voice had moved down the register until it came forth as a kind of feral growl.
One of the men must have said something, moved to lift him out.
Kip’s voice again, I can still hear it, —Leave me alone, man, get away from me.
And then, what I surely was hoping he wouldn’t say. —Brice?
—Kip? I answered. I was standing clear of the wreckage, was in a daze, but could hear with wicked clarity.
—Brice, what’re you doing?
There was nothing I could say. They were all over him. It was like he had fallen into derangement, and they’d come to put him away.
—Brice, you lousy—get these . . . get away from me—
It was humiliating. I simply froze. —They’re trying to help, I managed.
—Brice, you traitor, you traitor.
How he did it, exploded at them with such vehemence, is more remarkable given he’d dislocated his shoulder and broken a leg in the flip. I had been tossed into a shallow irrigation ditch—the muddy water and weed-thick bank had cushioned my fall—and seemed to have come out of the smashup only scratched along the cheek and the palm of my hand. The car became altogether fascinating to me as I began to block out Kip’s voice. I studied it where it lay at the end of parallel grooves in the soft shoulder, upside down beside the road, like some helpless insect, a glistening beetle. The men had Kip in a neck brace and he wasn’t shouting anymore. Everything had gone from mayhem to a somber, peculiar hush. Movement, red lights illuminating faces, the stretcher, the vehicles, the trees nodding as if in approval at the edges of the scene. There was my friend at the center of it all, and there was my muddied, hurt hand, which I looked at with the same fascination I’d felt while observing the car, but also with horror as it quivered there in the night—red then black, red then black—as these men around me talked, asked me questions I couldn’t hear over the extravagant racket in my head.
Trinity Fields Page 7