Up out of the wide bowl of land that holds swarming Santa Fe, past Rosario, the soldiers’ cemetery, past the opera house, and into the desert now.
If something frightens you, my mother used to tell me when I woke up in the middle of the night from bad dreams, if something frightens you, Brice, stand up tall and walk straight toward it, you hear me. Walk right at it and threaten to embrace it—embrace it if you must. But no matter what you do when you reach it, that thing that frightens you, at least let it know that it is possible for you to embrace it. That way you not only know that it exists, but you understand why you weren’t wrong to be afraid of it in the first place. It is not wrong to be afraid. Some of the things we fear most are phantoms and not worthy of our fear, but there are other things that merit our fear. The only way to know them and to let them know you is to embrace them.
I haven’t always lived by this, but when I have, I know I’ve been a stronger man, a more courageous man. To know the meaning of one’s fear is not necessarily to fear no more—but at least to measure its value.
I wonder how Kip learned how to use his fears to such great effect so early in his life. If it frightened him, he habitually reached out and grasped it. Chimayó and Bandelier would not turn out to be the last unknowns he attended. Bandelier did prompt his parents to take steps to rein Kip in. Especially his mother, who none of us knew well, and who in some way must have been his model, Emma Inez, distant Mrs. Calder who didn’t take her husband’s surname and was something of a recluse, an enigma—she came into the picture for a time after his second runaway.
It snowed a lot that December, was cold to the marrow. Gossip about what the Calders were going to do with Kip came and went. There was persistent talk of his being sent to a reform school out east—which would have been quite an irony, given that the original settlement in Los Alamos back during the First World War was a ranch school for boys who had problems of health or adjusting to society in one way or another—but that never came about. I didn’t ask about him because I found myself not wanting to be asked about how I felt about it, what I thought they ought to do with Kip. I didn’t think there was much of anything to do with him. He was going to do as he pleased. Kip was spirited, is how I saw it. He was no criminal. He was wildly alive. If he wanted to run, run he would. If he wanted to run, he had his reasons. Having used my running legs once, I remembered well the sensation of freedom seized.
Christmas came, went. Our sixteenth birthdays came and went. New Year’s came and when it went I had had enough.
The night I finally resolved to break the rules and go see him was particularly snowy. A wind rode down the mountain canyons and drove the snow across the mesa in billowing sheets, we’d been inside most all day, school was closed and the blizzard kept us off the pond. As evening fell, the white world tinted to neon blue. The tracks my father had made that morning, headed back to the lab after working late the night before, were long since filled in by drifting snow. I finished drying dishes from the dinner the three of us had shared in his absence and excused myself, saying I was tired.
—But it’s not even nine, Bonnie Jean said. —You can’t be going to bed already.
I said, —Night, all.
Bonnie Jean rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. I thought, Bonnie Jean, if you blow this, I’m going to make you pay, one way or another.
—Goodnight, Brice, my mother said.
—Brice’s weird, said Bonnie, who then uncrossed her arms and looked at Mother.
—Quiet now, Mother told her.
On the way out of the kitchen I made the devil’s horns at her. Mother didn’t see. Bonnie Jean made horns back and I smirked and shook my head. Unredeemable, she replicated my moves. Sometimes I found it hard to believe we were born from the same womb. No doubt, Bonnie now and then had the same thought.
In my bedroom I moved about as quietly and quickly as I could. I set about molding under the bedspread a sleeping figure, a sham Brice, of sweaters and the old Beacon blankets mother stored in the closet. Maybe I had seen this trick done in the movies, who knows, but if someone peeked in without turning on the lights, it really might have looked as if I was curled up in bed. I assumed no one would, however; my parents’ trust I had regained and Bonnie Jean—for the host of other egregious faults I may have attributed to her—was honorable with regard to the sanctity of our separate rooms, and could be depended on to stay away.
Out the casement window, in the manner of the visit nights, and into the storm. As I shoved along, I breathed in the frosty air, and began to worry how I might go about seeing him without the Calders catching me, and also what I might say to Kip if we were able to talk. Gusts caught up the powder and sent it spiraling and gnarling like spectral twisters along the deserted street. Pine boughs clad in white bowed to the blue-white ground. No one was out tonight. My toes began to smart and bursts of quivering ran through me.
When our family moved from the Sundt house on the old road that was next door to the Calders’, I remember how upset Kip and I were. We couldn’t have been more than three or four. I wonder if I’ve ever forgiven Bonnie Jean, since it was her birth that made it so the house was too small for us.
The old road wasn’t far, and soon enough I stood behind a row of cars, each with snow hats, and watched the house, its tangerine windows. Smoke poured from the central chimney, the rich, black coal smoke from the furnace. Jogged in place a little to keep the blood moving in my feet, flexed my fingers as fast as I could but already the icy snow was clinging to my deerskin mittens. Made more brazen by the glacial wind, I gave up my cover, pitched my way, heaved through the deepening snow to the side of the house, and looked in the nearest window.
There he was. Emma Inez was with him. He was talking to her. I couldn’t hear, of course, but tried to read if not his lips his countenance. He was different, both his face and carriage were hard to interpret. I hadn’t seen Kip this close-up for half a year, since mid-late summer—that is, I hadn’t been able really to look at him—and was astonished to witness how much he had aged.
The change was subtle, sharp. What was it about him? I forgot the cold, stood there fixed in one place as I stared at that face, collecting snowflakes on my clothes and wondering whether I dare envy him still or learn somehow to master my habit of feeling a lesser boy, a dependent.
My feet led me around to the front porch of Kip’s house, up to his door, on which I knocked with my knuckles, having pulled my mitten off, and Emma Inez came to the door, opened it, and said, —My god, Brice. Come in.
My cheeks, I was told later, were mottled white and matte blue.
—Brice? Kip said.
I was making a ridiculous chattering sound, all the while wanting only to apologize for intruding and just to ask them both if they wouldn’t mind just helping me to warm up and let me sneak back home without telling my parents about what I’d done. She said something about getting my hands and feet into warm water. I watched them both, from inside myself, my shaking hard body, and saw Emma Inez carry a deep wide bowl of warm water to the chair I sat in while Kip removed my boots and peeled off my white socks. It felt like some of my skin was glued to the socks and I remembered the days we all used to challenge each other in the middle of winter to press our tongues to the jungle gym, and how those who rose to the challenge found that the hide of their tongue stuck and was flayed away, left clinging to the bar of steel. But I wasn’t frostbitten, and was given some reheated coffee, which warmed me up. I expected Emma Inez to send me home—per the edict that our families had set forth—but instead she left the room, a tacit blessing of sorts. I had always figured it was Kip’s father, and my own, rather than our mothers, who decreed that Kip and I should be kept apart for a while, and her mercy led me to believe I’d been right about that. Maybe this was all mere wishful thinking, though. Perhaps she’d gone in another room to telephone my home to tell my folks their son was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, and that they had better come and pick the boy up. I didn’t c
are one way or the other, or so I told myself.
—So how’ve you been?
—All right, I said.
Even his voice seemed older. I thought to try to lower the register of my own voice, so as to sound to him as mature as he sounded to me, but the chill that ran through me hampered my idea. —What about you? I asked, and heard the tremulousness and kidlike tenor behind the words.
—You’re not supposed to be here.
I shrugged and smiled. He sat in his father’s large overstuffed chair, a grown man really, thin and long of frame, and didn’t smile back. He was taking me in. Measuring, like always.
—Do your parents know you’re here, Brice?
—No, I said.
—So what’s up?
—I wanted to see how you’re doing, I said.
—I’m all right, I guess. Aren’t you worried about getting grounded again?
—I’m still grounded from before.
He liked that. That made him laugh a little. —We’re too old for groundings.
—You can say that again.
Then that silence prevailed once more. Had he thought there were other reasons I hadn’t come by before now to see him besides being grounded, did he think I’d chosen to stay away from him? That bothered me, but I wouldn’t bring it up. I drank from the cup, and noticed that on it were Navajo squashblossom designs. It made me wish for summer. The canyons and cliffs and the mesas. The hot springs in the Jemez above us smelling of sulfur. The games.
—You done running away from home, Kip?
He glanced over toward the open door where Emma Inez had gone and shook his head no while he said, —Yeah, sure am.
That was Kip all over. While shaking my head yes I said, —Well, if you do get it in mind to run off like that again, don’t count on me coming along.
—I won’t, he said, shaking his yes in return.
That was more like it, I thought.
—Good, I said.
Strange, after all my boldness coming here to talk with him, there wasn’t much to say. Maybe he knew what I’d been doing, through the grapevine, not that I’d been doing very much. Maybe it didn’t matter to him. The fact was, our fathers seemed to have been right about one matter, wise engineers that they were. Friendships are inevitably synergistic. The energy of two friends equals more than the sum of their individual parts. Whatever Kip and I did separately was less dangerous, less provocative, less inspired than what we did together.
—I’m feeling better now, I said, though he hadn’t asked. —Don’t think I got frostbit.
—That’s good.
What was missing in Kip’s eyes? A dullness, as difficult to fathom as to describe, was dusted over them. They almost looked like somebody else’s eyes. But then, I told myself, Kip’s been through more than I have these months since we last talked—recovery, chastisement, escape, capture—maybe that explains it. And also, what exactly is this “it” I think I see? He didn’t seem defeated. Was he the same, and were my eyes looking at him differently?
When Emma Inez came into the room, after a quarter of an hour or so, she said with her rich Cuban accent, —The snow is let up now. Time you better go back home.
—Mrs. Calder, can I ask you a favor?
She said, —I won’t say anything about this, Brice. Don’t do it again.
—Thanks, I said, realizing too late I’d addressed her with the wrong name. —See you around, Kip.
The edict was lifted sometime the next week. I was certain that my mother and Emma Inez had discussed the matter and made the decision; I think Emma Inez kept the confidence as promised, too, and if she didn’t, my mother didn’t let on that she knew I’d broken rules and gone to visit Kip. Bonnie Jean allowed she’d heard Emma Inez explain to my mother that she figured Kip was a runner, and was more likely to run when left by himself than when allowed to be with me who wasn’t, all of us knew, a runner at heart. I will never forget my mother, sitting across from me at the kitchen table, tapping blackened tobacco out of her small pipe into the palm of her hand, holding my gaze level and calm, saying, —Don’t blow it, Brice.
Spring and summer wafted by. The last year of high school began. We never spoke of it, but we knew we were biding time against the approach of our official home-leaving when we would go off to college, get away from the Hill. Our lives settled into routines, some old, some new. We weren’t exactly outcasts, but neither were we members of clubs or teams. We floated on those months as if they were innertubes on the slowest river, and books, dances, school assignments, chores, instructors, meals, rising in the morning and undressing at the end of the day, all just came into view and laggardly were swept behind as we drifted along this time stream, dragging our hands and feet in its dream waters, and waiting for some white rapids we suspected lay ahead.
The annual Christmas party was witness to pine boughs and electric candles along the windowsills, caroling down the streets, presents in colorful wrapping and tied with shimmery ribbons under the newly cut blue spruce tree that was so prickly we had to wear gloves to string the lights and hang the ornaments, bizcochitos that tasted of anise and cinnamon, divinity candies, smiles and laughter. Small bonfires of piñon, luminarias, burned outside at corners, a place for carolers and those carrying presents from one house to another, to warm themselves. Farolitos everywhere you cast your eye, paper sacks with a candle burning inside making the most genial glow, lining our walks and rooftops, yellowy in the night, lighting the way for the pastores on their hike to church on Christmas Eve. It was about this time that we seemed to come awake again. There is no accounting for why. We did, is all.
—When do we get too old for this shit, Kip whispered, standing by the tree, eggnog cup in hand; we’d spiked ours in the kitchen with some rum Mom’d left on the counter for the grown-ups.
—Doesn’t look like anybody gets too old for it, I answered. The room was full of adults talking and talking. His question brought to mind my thought that time at the soda fountain with his father. Sodas, fudge, pastores, rum—
—Where you applying?
—Columbia, I said.
My father, originally a Bostonian but a New Yorker at heart, had taught there before he was drafted to Los Alamos. New York was where my mother grew up, on Jones Street, one of the shortest streets in the Village, in a brickfaced walk-up apartment building, an only child of a lonely mother—a grandmother I never knew who had been abandoned by a grandfather whose history I also did not know. New York—Columbia—is where my parents met. She was an undergrad at Barnard and he a graduate teaching assistant at the university. Different schools and different departments, a blind date offered to both of them on the spur of the moment, there was a Halloween dance and mutual friends put them together half as a joke, since these friends—long gone, and long lost—supposed my future parents were as oil and water.
It was to be some kind of trick-or-treat hazing, all trick and no treat.
They may have been in the friends’ eyes ill-matched. But they were neither ill-matched nor ill-fated. My mother and father fell in love at first sight—both still maintain this to be what happened: one look and each of them knew—and were seldom apart after that dance. Photographs of New York fill the family scrap-book in its first couple of years. The war just begun. My parents stylish and sage, even grim in the black-and-white images printed on glossy stock with scalloped edges. My father a chemical engineer way out ahead of most of his peers. My mother in her gray gabardine suits, a gentlewoman, formidable and exotic. An intellectual, too, and given to independent-mindedness. Sometimes I have thought it was a wonder she hadn’t joined the Communist Party, though of course that would have come back to haunt her. I can imagine her, back then, seeing value in embracing its apparent humanist side, its concern for the common man, its ideological rejection of greed. It may be that God, in whom she believed—at least in an inchoate way—braked any drift in that direction. Once in a while I have thought it a shame she hadn’t been a member insofar as it might h
ave scotched my father’s chances of working on the Hill.
As it was, they came directly from New York to Los Alamos and it was at Columbia University their son would continue school, there was never a question about it. I didn’t even bother to apply anywhere else.
—Okay, Kip said.
I drank more eggnog. The rum was making me happy, or else just dizzy. I said, —Okay what?
Kip shot me an exuberant scowl. —Okay, he said. —So that’s where I go, too. Can’t break up the old gang.
This wasn’t Kip, not the old Kip. I felt both excited by his declaration of loyalty and pained by the underlying defeat in it. Kip, you weren’t supposed to go along with me, with Briceboy, not so readily as all that, you were supposed to direct not follow, and direct with an imperious decisiveness at that. I must have stared at him and he returned my gaze with a smirk, and then snapped his finger right in my face. What had I missed or misunderstood?
—No, we sure can’t, I agreed once more, voice dropped back into a feeble whisper, more noise than melody, the words intended less to belabor the point than furnish the space between us with something, anything to drive back whatever had emerged from the depths of that look on his face. I snapped my finger in front of his eyes, and a trance was broken.
Part of me wished that Kip wouldn’t or couldn’t come along to New York. How different my life might have played out—not that I could have known this at the time, but I did have the sense that however difficult splitting off from Kip would be, it might be for the best, somehow. Maybe I didn’t actually know this at the time; maybe that is an embellishment. It didn’t matter, finally. Despite his negligences, his disobediences, his occasional hostility toward teachers—my mother excepted—and toward school in general, his grades were excellent, higher than mine. If Kip wanted to get into Columbia, he would. I dipped the glass ladle into the big bowl and refilled my cup. I drank more, tasted nothing, waited for a revelation that was never to come, or at least not that evening. My little sister we caught in the kitchen spiking her own drink with the rum, and instead of threatening to tell Mom, I said, —Merry Christmas, Bonnie Jean, to which she replied quite dryly, —You’re drunk, brother. And so I was.
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