When Kip ran away again it felt as if my heart had been cored, the same way you extract the center of an apple. A yellow apple. I was yellow with fear, protected only by my thin skin, it seemed to me—and far too afraid to go out and find him. I sensed everyone was looking at me, quietly laughing at Kip’s best friend who had been left behind. I suffered it all the way. The sober, stern face I put on my response was meant to keep my family and secondary friends away from that suffering. Bonnie Jean had the good sense not to tease, and Alyse came by, I remember, and just hung around with me, not saying much but willing to listen if I wanted to talk. Which I didn’t. Solemn poker was better than solitaire, I supposed, and so we whiled away some days at the movies and riding trails out on Kwage Mesa past the rodeo grounds. Alyse was a skilled rider and tried to help me with my technique, but I never excelled. We rode, she with her perfect English style and me riding rugged Western, leaning way back over the horse’s rump, grasping for the saddle horn, my toes falling out of the stirrups.
—Brice, you’re a terrible rider, she shouted.
—Nobody asked you to watch.
—One of these days I’m afraid you’re going to go over a cliff.
—I get where I’m going, don’t I? I shouted back, and spurred my horse, galloped past her along the narrow path, in order to prove my point, while nearly proving hers.
Still, for all Alyse’s friendship, I missed Kip.
—Doesn’t surprise me, was how I replied to the question of what I thought about Kip’s act.
But it did surprise me, it shocked me. How could he leave me behind like this?—another cliche, how they can smart. I waited for someone to tell me he had left a note that would explain why he hadn’t come by my house on the sly and offered me the chance to go with him again. There was no note. I felt at loose ends, my stomach ached, it was more like feeling homesick than lonely, akin less to having been abandoned than being disowned.
This time he had defected on foot. Word was he had taken off in the opposite direction of where we had traveled before. A woman said she had seen him in White Rock, which might mean he was headed toward Bandelier, where there were many Indian ruins to hide in, countless caves and cliff dwellings, and water and berries enough to survive for a good long time. But there was no question in my mind they weren’t right. He might have ventured down to White Rock in order to be seen there, I reasoned, the motive being to set in motion a rumor such as the very one that was about, but I hadn’t the faintest doubt that he was on his way to Chimayó, if he weren’t there already. When my mother asked me to be straight with her and tell her where Kip was, I swore I didn’t know, but meantime I struggled hard between my loyalty to Kip and the pathetic temptation to send her—all of them—looking in what I thought was the right direction. To what end would I have done that? Probably to punish him, repatriate him, show him that how far he could get without me wasn’t very far at all. In the end, I kept my mouth shut.
Two days, then three, then five, passed. A week went by. I sensed that I was being watched for clues, was eyed with suspicion. I suppose it made sense that if anybody would know something about Kip’s latest flight, it would be me. I kept to myself as much as possible. I put an innocent look on my face, a mask that probably expressed guilt—paradoxically, the result of trying too hard. And then, one afternoon, just what I might never have wanted to happen: I was paid a visit by Kip’s father. He found me sitting on the wooden porch steps of our house. A dark, elegant, slight man with a wide face and heavy eyebrows, long easy-flowing arms like those of his son, and yet a man who looked perpetually as if he hadn’t slept for months from worry, so deep were the creases across his forehead and pronounced the pouches beneath his eyes. He spoke before I had any chance of fleeing.
—Your parents have been kind enough to let me have a few words with you, he said, which gave me to understand that even if I’d fled, there would have been no avoiding the discussion we were about to have.
—I see.
—Brice, would you be willing to take a walk with me down to Pierotti’s?
I went—what else was I to do?—and listened to him as the lowering sun lengthened the shadows across Seventeenth. Since he wasn’t going to get from me what I assumed he wanted, I told myself that this act of walking down the street, conversing with an adult, wasn’t wrong, wasn’t collaborating with the enemy. Pierotti’s was an older-style soda bar for older-style folks, and I knew if any of our friends were around, they’d be over at the newer Baskin Robbins shop by the movie theater, the Centre, so I was safe from being spotted.
—We’ve never had much of a chance to get to know each other, have we?
—No, sir.
—I’m sorry about that, because I know how much Kip thinks of you.
I wondered whether he thought he knew Kip any better than he knew me, but kept walking. I didn’t have much interest in eating ice cream. It was a warm autumn evening, with little puffs of cool air billowing through from time to time, like when you are swimming in a pond and the water goes from warm to cold as you paddle over a place where there’s a spring. Pierotti’s was dead, for which I was grateful. We sat at the counter. It occurred to me that I was too old for this.
He asked, —What’ll it be, Brice? A sundae?
—All right.
—Hot fudge?
—I guess.
He had the same. We sat and watched them being made. When the sodajerk brought them over and placed them in front of us, I took up my spoon and remembered one of my mother’s favorite adages: He that would eat with the devil needs a long spoon. It was a sundae spoon, long enough.
Unthinking, I took an initiative. —Do they know where Kip is yet?
He smiled, genuinely it seemed, and said, —Of course I was hoping it’d be you who could tell me where he is. On the other hand, I know you can’t. That isn’t how friends behave and—
—Mr. Calder, I don’t know where he is.
—and I can respect that. Friendship is very important. But that isn’t why I wanted to talk to you, Brice.
What was going on? We ate in silence for a while. He made an effort to find out how I was doing in school. —Your mother is a wonderful teacher, you’re lucky to have her for a mom, he said. He asked after my sister.
—She’s all right, I said.
After we finished he paid, and we walked back outside. Again I glanced around, hoping none of the kids I knew was there.
—Walk you home, Brice?
I sensed that by being compliant I could avoid giving him what he wanted from me, whatever that would be. It seemed the more vulnerable I appeared, the more likely he’d avoid pressuring me. I kicked a bottle cap on the sidewalk, figuring it would magnify his sense of my boyishness, youth, innocence, that sort of thing. Fifteen years old and look at what I already knew about the art of manipulation. We walked along, I kicked it again and it rolled ahead of us, and when we reached it I kicked once more. I was the very image of a good boy. What an actor. Have such powers become so ingrained that I don’t recognize them for what they are anymore? Or have I simply lost them? No, I’m sure I am still capable of that much feint, and worse. After all, isn’t it how I make my living, at least in part?
Kip’s father was asking me something, I’d drifted, and I heard him saying, —Do the words blue pony mean anything to you, Brice?
—Blue pony, I repeated, knew I knew it, but couldn’t put the words to what I knew. —How come? I asked.
I made the mistake of looking up at him, at Kip’s father, and in the now dimming, hazy light saw the disarming thing we all carry with us through our lives no matter who we are or how far we run. Kip was there in his face, the flat tall forehead, determined lips, the austere dark irises, the gentle seriousness behind which lurked a fount of potency, of vitality. I drifted again, or rather willed myself to conjure Kip, to force his father to disappear and render in his place my friend. I stared and squinted and pulled on my memory like one might pull on the rope in a tug-of-war. Harde
r to do than I might have thought because for one Kip’s appearance, his countenance, was as mercurial as his manner. His eyes looked at you with multiplicity of purpose. Wide-set, they had a way of drawing you in, of embracing you, even as they refused to allow you much insight into what it was they saw when they looked at you. They are dark, as I say, dark brown as raisins, and flicker with burnt gold flecks. The whites around the irises are just that, just pure white, even when Kip had been up for days. The high cheekbones almost Native American. The skin of a delicacy, a kind of thinness that made the angles, shapes, and variations of the bone beneath most immediate. And those bushy eyebrows that resembled dark clouds on his horizon.
—How come? I asked again.
As he raised his hand, began to gesticulate with the answer, he touched his fingers to his concave cheek, and I felt myself pull back. It was as if he were going to hit me, was how I thought, or rather, as if they were going to, Kip and his father fused into one.
—Well, it’s strange, Brice. I don’t know that it means a thing, but we found a notebook of his, and he’d been writing in the back of it, and he wrote blue pony in it over and over. I just wondered if you knew what a blue pony was.
Overcome with the sense of having experienced an important insight, I simultaneously knew, with a certainty firm as stone, that I not only didn’t understand what that insight meant, but didn’t even know truly what it was. Hard to describe; it was startling and had to do with the necessary rifts that come between young friends as they begin to grow into their own identities. I stared straight ahead. Kip had vanished.
—Blue pony? I asked.
—Yes, do you know what a blue pony is?
—I don’t think so.
—You don’t know, or you don’t think you know?
These were our parents, these were logicians and scientists, thorns in the side, nitpickers and ergoists, but the distinction—a very nice distinction—brought it back, though I didn’t know quite why, what happened one afternoon, what it meant. It was one day down in the peppers-game canyon, Kip and I were sunning ourselves, lying on our backs in the scant grass, naming cloud shapes. Anvils big as towns flowed by. There were monsters, many white monsters. Some like dragons with wings, others great birds like pterodactyls. The vapor trails of jets stretched for hundreds of miles across the sky and, as the high winds began to break them up, came to look like skeletons of snakes. And in the middle of an enormous cumulus a patch of blue sky appeared, an opening we watched there, entranced, as slowly it began to take the shape of a pony, a blue pony, and I’ll never forget how when the pony was fully shaped Kip said, —That’s what I want to ride, Brice, what I’m going to ride right out of this place, that sky pony there.
And I said, —Me too.
To which Kip responded, —No. You’re an earth person and I’m a sky person.
—What’s that supposed to mean?
—I think you got red blood in your body, boy.
—So what, I said. Red’s the color it’s supposed to be.
—That’s true. But I’m telling you mine’s the color of that pony there.
—Look, I’ve seen you bleed, boy, and it isn’t any blue. It’s red just like anybody else’s.
—No. It’s not.
—Is so.
Kip said, —You may not want to believe it, boy, but we’re different, you and me.
—No we’re not, I said.
—We are.
I felt sad, I remember, and said, —Not so different.
He said nothing more.
And now here I was walking along beside his father. He wasn’t wrong, I guess.
I asked, —Mr. Calder?
He walked on. —Yes?
—How come Kip wants to run away like that?
—Why did you run away, Brice?
If he didn’t know by now, he’d never know. And anyway it was a divisible reason, what else is new, I pledge allegiance to the of the and to the for which it one nation under with and—one nation indivisible with liberty and justice, my ass. Nations aren’t any more indivisible than the folks in them, and I was beginning to see this. The reason I ran was divisible in at least two parts. I went because Kip agreed with me that we should go and eat the dirt Communion, and I went because I believed we had to make our own gesture of remorse on behalf of people like Mr. Calder. —I can’t say, I said.
—Did it have something to do with this blue pony business?
—The blue pony was something we saw in the sky once.
—Something you saw in the sky?
—Just a cloud picture in the sky. That’s all.
Mr. Calder looked at his watch. —Well. Thanks, Brice.
—Thank you for the sundae, Mr. Calder, I said.
As it happens, I misjudged Kip and his whereabouts. Here I had flattered myself that I managed to give his father little unto nothing to work with, whereas if I had simply told him the truth about where I figured Kip had gone, I’d have steered the search in just the wrong direction. The military police picked him up hiding in a cliff dwelling in Bandelier Canyon, a quarter mile up past the Tyuonyi ruins. He was tired, dirty, hungry, but possessed of enough spirit to excoriate his captors as they pulled him out of his roost. Rumor had it he screamed, —Leave me alone, you motherfuckers, at the police, and this made me happy when I heard it, probably because I pictured myself there with him shouting and kicking. But the pleasure I took in hearing about his obscenities soon passed. The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion there was no denying he was further removed from me than ever. His foul language may have bound us together insofar as I was as capable as Kip of fuckthis and fuckthat. We referred to each other using the term futtbucker with boring frequency in those days. —Listen here, futtbucker. —No, you listen, buttmucker. The ritual of bonding through expletives—toiletmouthing, my father called it—was under way with us well before we drove to Chimayó, even though the nastiness of the language we used was not as raw or transgressive as we might have hoped. What made Kip seem so removed was that he had failed to repeat what we had done together. He’d not done anything the way I thought he would. He hadn’t even gone to find Fernando Martinez, as I had, in my jealousy, thought for sure he would. —You motherfuckers, he’d shouted, and I said it too, pretending I’d been there with him.
—You motherfuckers, and I meant it with all my heart, knowing full well how Kip’s reputation as a scandalous runaway grew and that in our conservative community, with its Western taciturnity, anyone associated with him flirted with catastrophe himself. But how I would have preferred disaster to my role as rejected conspirator and failed renegade.
The sky has colored pallid blue straight above, like some wax paper sea. The morning star has withdrawn behind the curtain of light to wait for its chance to shine again tomorrow. Across the valley, Cerro Gordo, the most perfect rounded little mountain, its reddish breast covered uniformly with piñon, offers a sort of confidence. A spotted flicker with his knife beak and red moustaches perches on the coyote fence, studies me, then flies.
Morning. Here I am. I have been offered the loan of an old retired Cadillac. —It won’t get you there fast, but it’ll get you there, Alyse had said. Grand and silver, it should have a set of steer horns attached to the front of the hood. Its bumper sticker reads, NUCLEAR WEAPONS MAY THEY RUST IN PEACE, which won’t go over very well on the Hill. Oh well, I think, I may not go over very well on the Hill, either. Keys in hand, I lock the door behind me and head out.
It is Thursday, the traditional day of preparation and prayer before the penitentes take to the road to walk to the church in the desert, bearing their crosses. I have decided to drive up to Los Alamos to visit my mother, and also Bonnie Jean, her husband and two boys. It’s been a long time since we saw one another, not to mention that I’ve only laid eyes on my youngest nephew, Charlie, but once, when he was just a little boy. I haven’t phoned ahead to let them know I am here, in part because I figure it will be nice to surprise them and in pa
rt because this way I can back out at the last moment without hurting anyone’s feelings. A half-truth and a full truth. My hapless nephews, whose birthdays I don’t even know—bad uncle and bad brother—it would be the right thing to do, call on them, toss them a ball for half an hour if they like, I don’t know, do whatever uncles are supposed to do.
The car handles like a big boat. The highway is a smooth canal of hard black water beneath it. Fins forward and fins aft, the thing is long and commodious. The steering wheel’s enormous and the dash baroque. What better way to travel, I think, than in a relic that dates back to the days of one’s youth.
Out the windows is a cloudless day except for the everpresent clouds along the tops of the mountains at the edges of Pojoaque Valley, clouds the colors of moonstone and rose quartz and chalcedony, with a gray-black twill pattern here and there where a morning rain is falling, far away. I turn on the radio to find a country-western station and settle in with the honeylike music of the pedal steel guitar and the homey nasal voice of a singer singing about the things country singers always sing about—how their lover left them high and dry, or how they’re cheating on the one who’s home with a wedding band on her finger. Banal, but I love the stuff if, for nothing else, its luscious predictability.
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