The crowd had run along to homes in the night. Nothing more was heard. After a while, Kip returned to his bed. He sat down slowly, then lay back. Chills shook him, but nothing agitated him more than the possibility that Wagner had been caught. Please don’t let him be seen, Kip prayed, shaking like a dead leaf in an autumn gust. Don’t let him be captured.
In the morning, hot sun spilled into the room and made soft shapes on the floor.
—Wagner? Kip tried, as he walked down the stairs from the upper to the ground floor. —Wagner.
But Wagner was history, all over. They told him that day, and they repeated themselves, quite hysterical in their solace and support, the next day too, and the day after that. Wagner was gone, had been seized by the authorities while helping a family in their fatally desperate effort to leave this admirable country. He was gone and the several people who were trying to escape were gone with him. Nobody could say where they’d been taken, when they’d come back.
The fever left, Kip got well.
Does a person have to have a cause to explain what he’s doing? I ask him.
“Wagner thought so,” says Kip.
“And what do you think?”
“I didn’t think so then.”
“But what do you think now?”
“I think now that you have to have a reason for what you do. ‘What’s your cause, Calder?’ I can still hear those words over all the rain splashing down in the mud.”
Kip is looking down at his hands and I look at them with him, maybe as a way of avoiding what I must say next.
“So my cause, what was my cause, that’s what Wagner wanted to know, and then I realized something back in the room, when I was reading this letter that was old by then, that it was too late for me to come running back—I mean, I did come back, but there was no real coming back for me.”
This is it, I am thinking, now we’re coming to it, and say nothing, but wait for him to continue, which he does. “I came back as much to leave as anything else. Leave for once and for all. If I’d suspected you and she were in love before I left, I knew it for a fact the first week I was there with you.”
And I decide to leap ahead. “Jessica and I are married, Kip.”
“I know,” he says.
“You do? How?”
“Because she’s written all over your face. It happens with people who live together. I see her in you and hear her, too.”
“I see.”
“Brice, I’m glad for you. All right? Since you’ve brought it up, may I ask how is Ariel?”
“Ariel’s fine,” I say, listening to how pinched my voice has gotten just now. “Ariel’s wonderful, Kip. She’s a wonderful young woman.”
“Is she your only child?”
“We tried to have another. It didn’t work,” I said. “Ariel’s had more energy than three children all on her own anyhow. She had a way of filling the house like a gang of kids. Reminds me of someone else I know.”
That made him grin, and as he did a breeze shook the highest branches of the cottonwoods and the scads of colorful rosaries swayed where they were draped over either of Jesus’s outstretched white arms, whose paint was peeling.
“Do you think it’s possible for a person to change?”
“It’s possible.”
Kip asks, Brice answers.
I think, this is hard, what I’m doing here is hard. Do I need to do this? And the answer from my mind to my mind, as if they were separate entities, is: Of course I do. My knees are sore, my bones are damp from the ground, my back hurts. Far cry from the child who’d vaulted drunken down here and leapt onto the low tin roof and crawled through to the nave from the dormer window that is still there, with unglassed frame and crawl space that would lead you from outside to inside. Not dead yet but these bones draw in the chill unlike times buried in the dry, dry past. And I am thinking, Brice, your friend is dying, and you’re worried about your brittle bones? I am thinking, Brice, will you never change?
“I never used to think so. I always figured a person grew up a certain way and that was the way they were, you know. Like they would learn more and know more things but the basic person stayed the same underneath. But I don’t think that’s right anymore. You had every reason not to come here, and you came. You know how I used to call you a traitor? I don’t think that’s fair anymore.”
I move from inside to out. I say, “Maybe it was never fair, Kip. Did you stop to think that?”
“Don’t hate me for saying this, Brice, but fair or not, that’s what I used to think about you sometimes, and when I came back from Laos that first time and saw the way you were with Jessica and with Ariel, too, I thought, Man, there he is in his final flowering, the ultimate traitor incarnate, the fucking Judas of Judases. I still loved you, but I felt the knife at my back.”
When I hear those words I know that Kip will never believe he hadn’t been betrayed by me. Rather than protest, I remain silent. We look each other straight in the eye.
“But I was wrong. It was Wagner, when he got caught instead of me, and when they came and asked me about him, what did I do but obfuscate in order to save myself? I was the traitor, then, too, and saw how it looked from the inside looking out. Sometimes I told myself that Wagner’d have done the same thing if the tables were turned, but I don’t believe that’s so. If I’d told them the truth, at least they would have taken me away too, maybe to the same place they had him, and if we were both alive still, maybe we’d have found a way out together.”
“Those are pretty substantial maybes, Kip.”
“They’re pretty empty maybes is what they are.”
“From what you’ve told me about him, I think that Wagner would forgive you if he knew the circumstances.”
“But he doesn’t and he can’t. And that was what I was left with. I packed up as quietly as I could and left Laos soon after that myself. Partly because I knew my days were numbered there, partly because everywhere were reminders of my failure. It was in Nam Yao that I began to think about how I’d treated you in the past, labeled you the traitor, even though you had never really sold me down the river any more than I had Wagner.”
“That was why you ran away to Bandelier that time without me, isn’t it,” I say.
“Runners run and traitors are left behind. That’s how I had it added up.”
“Maybe all these labels and definitions don’t mean much in the last analysis.”
“Maybe not, I don’t know. What I do know is I used to hate you for loving Jessica even more than I did. But no more.” Kip looks at his hands again; that old habit of his, staring down hard at his fingers as if there were signs there that, if he could only read them, might give him the answer to any question he’d ever want to pose. “I’m sure you’ve raised Ariel better than I ever could have,” he says.
“Who knows and who cares?” I hear myself say. The words are out of me before I have a moment to ponder them. Very unlawyerlike of me, although not out of character. In fact, I think Kip might well have been wrong.
“Brice. Will you believe me when I tell you I’ve come a long way to say these few simple things? Our lives turned out one hell of a lot unlike anything I’d ever have been able to guess. I have spent half my life knowing you were my best friend ever, and the second half knowing you were my worst enemy. And now I can at least be sure that I’ve been wrong for half my life. It was like I just woke up one morning and realized, Man, that’s probably wrong, you’re probably way off, and for all these years it’s been doing a slow rasp against you and it’s going to ruin whatever days or years you’ve got left if you don’t face a few things. And that’s why I’m here. I don’t want to go down like my poor dad, unresolved and like a puzzle done in parts but with other parts scattered all over the floor. One last question?”
“Of course.”
Kip’s hesitance gives me just enough time to gather what is coming. When he says the words it is almost as if they were my own, which reminds me of the days when Kip and I were so
close that we barely had to speak to know what the other was thinking. It brought to mind something I could remember thinking when I stood at the door all those years ago in New York, after he’d pulled me to my feet, shook my hand, heaved his duffel bag up over his shoulder and departed my life—left me there thinking how easy it once had been for us to walk in unbroken step, side by side, and how that had been made impossible after we’d come down off the Hill and entered into the ways of the world. But here it was again, in its curious way, that synchronicity we once took for granted, in the form of a question we seemed to utter at just the same moment, Kip aloud and I silent. “If I’m her father, or one of them, does Ariel know about it?”
“If you still are unsure of it yourself, why would you want her to know?” are the words that come out of my mouth. No sooner do they touch the air between us than I begin to feel some deep shame. Kip is quicker to seize on it than the lawyer in me might have anticipated.
“It’s a simple question, you don’t need to answer, really. But it’s a question I thought you might want to ask yourself once you knew what did happen to me. I am Ariel’s father, aren’t I.”
I want to change direction and say, “It’s late in the season for us to be asking and answering these questions,” but he had forestalled that by being so unguarded about why he asked that we meet. It was not too late, was his perspective. I could almost viscerally feel Jessica’s fear rise inside me as we approached this subject. I say, finally, “I answered that question over twenty-five years ago, Kip. The answer is the same now as it was then. I wish you’d believed me. You might have spared yourself a lot of useless pain. Assuming you have suffered because of it.”
“Assuming I have suffered . . .”
“You were wrong not to believe me.”
“It’s true,” he says, which once more disarms me. “But does she know about me? is what I’m asking. Does she know who her father was—is, I mean.”
“Insofar as it was I who raised Ariel with her mother, adopted her, and—”
“You never told her.”
“I’m sorry, but as far as Ariel knows I am her father. And you are a mysterious stranger. That’s what you are. You’re a lost man we knew, a half-brother of some sort, an old friend who probably died in Vietnam, someone who it’s been better not to talk about. You’ve been ambiguous to us and vague to her.”
“Do you think she deserves to know the truth?”
“Look, there are times when I think Ariel does know the truth without her mother or me ever having told her a thing. I don’t even know why I think this. There isn’t any specific moment where she’d said something that I could repeat, that would prove what I’m saying.”
“I see,” he says, and is quiet. It is dawning on me so clearly that he is right to be bringing all this up, inspiring and intimidating both of us at the same time, just like my Kip of olden days. This is a harvest, an April harvest, marking the end of absence and winter. Ariel, I think, is a lucky woman. She has a father in Kip toward whom whatever love she might come to feel would be love wisely offered.
I have hesitated long enough, so I go ahead and say it: “Do you want me to tell her?”
“You would be willing to tell her?”
Question answered with question, my same old friend.
“Jessica and I had promised ourselves that on Ariel’s twenty-first birthday we would tell her. But you know what happened? It came, and it went. We didn’t do it, we can’t even talk about it, it seems. It’s been the greatest failing of our lives.”
Nothing is spoken for minutes.
“I’m sorry,” he says, finally.
“Maybe now that I have something I can tell her, something concrete—now maybe we’ll be willing at least to think about it.”
“Well, it looks like that’s up to you. After all, you’re her father, not me.”
“Kip,” I say. “Why don’t you come back with me?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Well, at least give me your address, so that Ariel can find you if she wants to.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“How come?”
“I don’t want her to see me like this.”
“Like that? You look fine,” I say.
The eyes with which Kip looks at me have in them suddenly more diversity of meanings and emotions than I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes. They call me a liar. They tell me that I am beloved. They ask me to be quiet. They let me know Kip is pleased by what he has heard. They well with dignity and sadness, mischief and disaster. For one instant I am in the presence of Kip as a being full of grace that has been acquired through a process so unenviable as to be sickening, and yet so complete as to be holy. “I have something for her, by the way,” and he pulls from a leather satchel that has been lying on the ground at his side a bound notebook. “I still haven’t had it in me to read the thing. It may be a big disappointment, it may bring shame on me, I just don’t know. But it’s something I’d like for Ariel to have, if you might see fit to give it to her.”
It is his father’s diary, the one Kip hid away for safekeeping after his parents had died in the accident.
“And there’s this, too,” as he hands me an envelope. I open it and there is an address and a key inside. “Your mother told me to put their possessions in storage and so I did. It’s all still there and since I’m the end of the line so to speak I thought it ought to be passed along to you. After all these years, I don’t know what’s there or even if there’s anything left of it that the mice haven’t found. I set it up a long time ago that the rent would be paid every year from interest on the money my parents left.”
“I’ll take care of it, Kip,” I say.
“If it’s a burden—”
“No burden.” I stand. I reach out my hand and he says, “Did you know that there are twelve cottonwood trees down there, one for each disciple?” as he takes it and is pulled to his feet.
“Ariel will know,” I say. “I promise.”
Kip looks out across the outdoor chapel at the cottonwoods, then back at the willow where we stand. “Did you look at the one we’ve been leaning against?”
I had, I tell him.
“I like this tree,” he says and I know what he is trying to tell me and I say, “So do I, Kip.”
The superstitious have always found Good Friday an ideal repository for their delusions and credos. Like a hat under which you place your head when you are in your most imaginative, hopeful, churlish mood, Good Friday has been there for the wildest oracles and most earnest fanatics. It is a day, according to the laws of antiquity, to take heed of what you accomplish, to pay attention with the same liberality a fishermen pays out line in hopes of catching his fish. A day to fear and embrace. A reflection day.
Bread baked on this particular Friday is said to preserve one’s house from fire, for instance. An egg laid on this day will never become stale, the old wives have it. Good Friday is the best day of the whole year for a mother to begin to wean her child, and it is said anything sewn on this day will never come undone.
Likewise, there are things best not carried out on Good Friday, according to those who are keepers of the flame of superstition. We are warned that clothes washed and hung on the day Christ died are likely to become spotted with blood. There are few greater sins than doing laundry on Good Friday, they say. And woe to the baby born during the light of this day, because his or her life will be full of nothing but sadness and wretched bad luck.
One thing Kip and I never did share was a similar regard for superstitions. Kip deemed them ridiculous from the first, whereas I always thought it better not to press my luck.
And so a ladder leaning up against a building back on the Hill when we were kids would cause me to step out into the street rather than put a foot forward under its jinxed rungs and struts. But Kip? The opposite. Out of his way he would go to prove its impotence, and if a black cat were there to cross his path once he ducked beneath, so much the better.
—Come on, boy, he would say. —What’re you so afraid of?
—Nothing, I’d reply.
—There’s something. What is it?
—I don’t know, I’d say. —Leave me alone.
If I spilled salt, salt would be tossed over my shoulder. If there were a mirror, well. There was never a mirror I didn’t shy away from. And cracks in the sidewalk? I would leap to clear them while Kip’s foot stamped on every last one a sidewalk had to offer him.
Sometimes I’ve thought this superstitious bent is the legacy of my mother. I wasn’t weaned on Good Friday: could that have been the problem all along? No knowing.
One other thing they say about Good Friday is that if work is done on this day, it will have to be done all over again. While there was a time I might have given in to whatever it is in me that’s willing to believe these silly old dicta, that time is not now. Kip’s and my work today is permanent. For whatever it’s worth that is what I say.
Maybe it shouldn’t come as such a blow when someone you used to know but haven’t seen for half your life brings you the news of his dying. In a way, he was already gone. For all you had known, it might have been just as well if he were. But then he appears before you, and you remember that your life, insofar as it has any design, is defined by those you love and hate.
“Yellow rain is what it’s called,” Kip says, and I am reminded of the black rain that fell after they dropped the bomb so long ago in Hiroshima. “It comes in other colors,” as if reading my mind—“blue rain, red rain, white rain, black rain too, a colorful rainbow of venom, and it comes in washing over you and you begin to feel sick, nauseous, and you get the chills, vertigo, and a fogginess sets in on what you see, and then you begin to bleed, from your nose and mouth and ears. You cry blood. And I’m one of the lucky ones because I didn’t get that big a dose of it. You get hit directly and you die vomiting your own lifeblood and excreting your blood while your lungs hemorrhage and your legs run with red, your own gore and heart’s blood. There’s no stopping it and what’s more, the government denies it and just about everybody believes that it doesn’t exist, isn’t happening. And so I may be sick with that, and to be honest with you, Brice, I think I’m sick with the other war, too. You remember where we used to play? I wonder about some of those canyons, what they buried down there before they even knew about radiation. Maybe I’m just worn out and it has nothing to do with rain of any color, just the marathoner coming to his wire a little earlier than others. Strange race where you lose by coming in first. I don’t know.”
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