—Got something here, Wagner.
Wagner asked what did he have.
—I’m going in to find out. Stay high.
Wagner stood away as Kip dropped down to see what was there. As he came in low over the sightment he had just enough time to note the covers coming off two of the three guns situated in a perfect triangle around the lure. He saw tracers coming at him from three directions. He was suddenly in the convergence zone. The tracers were flaming heavy, and he knew that for every tracer he saw, there were four invisible slugs. The sky was a stream of fire. He couldn’t hear the sound because he’d shoved the throttle forward, pushed the stick hard down and headed toward the trees. Climbing up would be the end of him, so he dropped to the tops of the green. Two hundred feet. His one hope of escape was to dip below the line of fire. The only reason they missed was that they were as surprised to see him as he was to see them. The flight back to Luang Prabang was quiet. “That’s true too,” he says. “Maybe all wars are strange, but that was one strange war.”
Is it in a poem by Horace that merchants in a town are standing in the doorways of their shops watching soldiers march off to war, and these merchants think to themselves, How fortunate the soldiers are to go off to battle where they’ll either die in honor or come home heroes, while the soldiers look in envy at the merchants thinking, How lucky these shopkeepers are, getting to stay home while we have to march off to our deaths. I think of this as Kip is offering me the most unexpected judgment I’d ever heard about the war.
“What’s strangest of all is that I’ve come around to your way of thinking. Maybe not exactly the same, but closer than I’d ever thought possible. Like we were both walkers in that meditation I described, it’s like we’ve come to the same point on the path, just that one of us walked down while the other ascended.”
“What do you mean?”
Kip says, “How can I put it. To me it’s like this. If Nagasaki was our national orgasm, the fall of Saigon was a postcoital depression.”
“What do you mean?” I say again.
“I started to get it, how those wars linked up—War Two and Vietnam. It took me long enough, but I finally started seeing the light just recently.”
He has aged into this new individual, I am allowing myself to see, but it is less an overt physical change than a difference in articulation, in how he expresses himself, how he moves—little, in fact—and the modulation of voice, which is a kind of spirited monotone. The creek rattles in its muddied banks. Someone has set a grand bouquet of plastic flowers on the concrete altar down here, bright reds, blues, pinks. The services finished, the priest has left the outdoor sanctuary, and Kip and I are alone.
He is speaking. I can hear him. I’m listening to him and what I am beginning to hear is a part of me speaking. Listen, I think.
“I started to get it that 1945 only began to perish in 1975, it took that long. Just as you fight fire with fire, it took one kind of shame to begin to erase another, Brice. And in that way Vietnam was the best, most wonderful tragedy that could ever befall our country. One of the catchphrases you used to hear during the war was frontier sealing. We were doing some serious frontier sealing over there is what. But it was we who needed the damned frontier sealing, not them. We were in desperate need of a confidence reduction, and our failure in Vietnam was the leech Fate, like a wise physician, applied to our impudent body politic. Not that the Communists were heroic, don’t get me wrong. Because they weren’t. They were corrupt and savvy and deceitful and they were ruthless. Their comeuppance is already upon them and don’t they deserve it, too, in their way. But we had to lose, the dominoes that Eisenhower was so worried about falling in Southeast Asia—and for all his blindness Eisenhower did have the foresight to see Laos as the first domino—they had to fall, or else they’d fall the other way and our sick narcissism would carry us across the face of the world to yankify and cartoonize everyone and everything, and turn—sooner rather than later—the whole planet into an American theme park, a grotesquerie. You get what I’m saying, Brice?”
I understand, I tell him.
Kip adds, “I’m proud that I was there to witness it, man. I am proud to have taken part in the loss. My only regrets, and don’t think they’re not colossal, have to do with what happened to the villagers in Laos to whom we made all our pretty promises. We’d help them help themselves. That’s what the CIA told them. That’s what the ambassador told them. Help them protect their homelands against the aggressors. We set them up sure as hell in Laos, we gave them just enough rope and now the ones who the Pathet Lao didn’t exterminate or reeducate out there in the jungles where no roads run, no houses are, where there’s nothing but the gulags that we here in the West to this day don’t know about, the ones who didn’t have that for their fate are still waiting, in dismal camps along the Mekong in Thailand, waiting for nothing, for deportation. The Thai want them out and before too long we’ll send them back, repatriate them to the mountains where one by one their old enemies will quietly annihilate them with yellow rain or worse.”
But it doesn’t matter anymore to America, I wanted to tell him. Wars have come and gone between now and then. A generation has blossomed in the interim, a generation that might respond to the fashion of the period, but doesn’t know more than what they’re fed by the same blighted media that only half covered the war in the first place. Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, Nicaragua, Iraq, Croatia, Somalia, where hadn’t war broken out to carry our limited attentions in the exhausted wake of Vietnam.
“Exterminate them, murder them, feed them to the dogs, and then slaughter the dogs and eat the dogs, too.”
I told him I understood. And as I watched him talk I realized that we had somehow come full circle. Here I’d always considered myself to be the antiwar saint of sorts—not, to borrow one of Kip’s terms, that I should cartoonize myself, or indulge in self-slander—but it seemed to have turned out that it was Kip who’d gone up against his superiors and denied war some victims it would otherwise surely have devoured. Reminded of that Goya painting of Saturn eating his young, I mixed mythologies and saw Kip as a David, sighting the old bastard cannibal between the eyes and releasing that stone to find its mark.
Kip, the fighter turned eccentric peacemaker. And I, who abandoned this place over half a lifetime ago, the runner.
“Will you help me to figure out a way to tell them about this? Everyone wants reconciliation and forgiveness now, everyone wants to see Vietnam as a chapter in our history come to an end. But it’s like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These things, if they’re to come to an end, have got to be looked at square and clearly. Do you know that we have detonated eight-hundred-and-fifty-plus nuclear weapons, and that you can get a list from the government when and where each of these tests took place, whether it was an underground test or one out in the Pacific Ocean—and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are right there with all the other detonations, right there listed as tests, no mention of casualties, though the list does acknowledge they were tested in combat, but fails to put in a little footnote at the bottom of the page that would explain what they mean when they call them tests?”
I still am not sure what it is Kip wants me to do about all this.
He is looking at his hands and they are palms up with fingers opened into a symmetrical basket, as if he were holding a globe of air in them, bobbing it gently up and down, shaking it like you do a birthday present in order to hear if it makes a noise so that you can guess what is inside.
“If they tell you that the yellow rain doesn’t exist? if they tell you that these people are dying from the urine of giant bees—and don’t laugh, because that’s one of the stories I’ve heard—that swarms of bees deluge the skies over their villages and rain yellow on them and that’s what’s behind all this illness? If they tell you that? It’s lies.”
“What did I used to say back when we were in school?”
“I won’t argue. You were right, in certain ways, wrong in others.”
�
�Just like you.”
“Just like me, like most everyone. But I know this, Brice, and with what I know and what you know maybe something good and decent could come of it for somebody else. For me it’s neither here nor there, finally. It could just as easily have been something else. And it’s not that I didn’t deserve it, when you get down to it. But there are those that don’t.”
“What are you asking me to do?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Nothing. You’re a lawyer and I’ll bet you turned out to be a good lawyer. When these things come up before Congress, which they have already and will, as the curtains get drawn aside on what really happened during Vietnam and afterward, then you can take my story there, maybe, and set it alongside all the others, and that way we’ll have done something together, just like we once wanted to, way back when.”
“Let me get you some medical care, Kip. Come back to New York with me and we’ll have somebody really good have a look at you. If what you want is to be my friend, let me be your friend, let me help you.”
Kip looks at me and says, “You know what we should do? We should go inside.”
“Take Communion?”
Kip laughs, “Oh hell no,” which I must admit makes me feel affectionate toward him—all this reconciliatory spirit is wonderful but also is weird, like the pleasure of pain, or eros and thanatos, it holds conundrums in it that I like and do not like. At least Kip has maintained his distance from certain things. What am I saying? At least his illness hasn’t forced him into orthodoxy.
“You mean, the dirt?”
“What harm can come of it?”
He seems suddenly filled with vitality. He puts his hand on my shoulder, “Brice, you remember way long ago when you talked me into coming down here with you—”
“Of course.”
“—well, I thought I owed you the favor in return.”
The line has dwindled away to a hundred. There are many people still milling about in the plaza. We walk up the dusty common and take our place. Soon enough we cross a footbridge directly in front of the archway. Birds chirp in the pressed cedars just within the brown walls. Kip and I are nearly out of words. We watch the others, hear the children screaming gleefully as they skip about barefooted, and wade in the acequia. Pilgrims who might have walked a very long way to be here cool their feet in the rushing water of the irrigation ditch. A family just beyond has laid out supper on one of the wooden picnic tables, the mother being helped by her daughter, setting out paper plates covered with tinfoil. Dogs run up and down in the water, splashing everyone. When I hear the father of this family shout at the dogs to get away, his expression, “Váyanse,” has a shock of familiarity to it. Váyanse, hijos del demonio! and my eye finds him —not the old custodian who’d cried out at us so long ago—but Fernando Martinez, and I think to myself, You’re seeing people who are not there again, Brice, and turn to Kip and begin to say, “Do you see that guy over there . . . ,” but Kip doesn’t hear me.
His focus is on the two steeples of El Santuario. “Did you ever notice that only one of the towers has a bell in it?” he asks.
I’d noticed, but I didn’t know why it was so. As he tells me about how expensive bells used to be, my eye goes over to the family once more and I see that they are sitting down now to their meal, three, four, five children all dressed for the day’s festivities and look once more at the man with such concentration that he’s somehow willed to glance up at me. Our eyes meet, and when I see him nod and smile, without the faintest trace of recognition, I nod back and hear my Kip. He’s telling me that everyone in the parish would give donations—not just from the little money they had, as this was always a poor place, but spoons, a broken axle, anything of metal—and the bell was especially smelted for the church. In Chimayó they could afford only one bell. The other tower to this day remains empty. And as for the bell that does hang in its belfry, it is only rarely rung—when a local parishioner dies—and then it must be chimed by hand, with a hammer or a rock, as it has no clapper.
“I’ve heard it,” Kip says. “It gives an indescribable sound. They chime it in syncopation with the bell over at La Capilla del Santa Niño de Atocha. They’ll ring this one fifteen times, then the other one fifteen times, then this one ten times, then the other ten times. The ringing just seizes you in such a way that you feel the soul of the dead person lifting away from the valley.”
“You sound like a believer,” I say.
Kip shakes his head with a calm smile. “I always thought of you as the tower with the bell in it, and me the empty one.”
“That’s funny,” I say. “Just the opposite is how I’ve always thought.”
“I’m not sure that the towers aren’t perfectly equal in their way. One has wind and birds in it, the other has a clapperless bell. They’re both flawed.”
We finally pass through the walled cemetery, around the wooden cross mounted on a small adobe base with its black millstone inset, and into the church.
Thousands of pilgrims have already passed through here this day, and the peace candles warmed the nave, their smoke giving it a smell of antiquity. Kip wants to sit for a while, and we do, together in a pew several rows back from the altar. Just to think, the two of us had stumbled down this very length of flagstone, having guessed with youthful wisdom the impact our community would have on every other community on earth. I stare at Kip, whose head is bowed and whose hands are folded in his lap, and feel a merging of passions to which words would never attach nor from which come forth.
The sky, I swear, is even bigger than it once was. Its midnight blue is bluer than midnight, its moonstruck clouds more capricious, building and building up into massive plumes over against the grand stretches of distant mountains from Trampas Peak to Thompson Peak, then changing shape within the pocket of time it takes slowly to close your eyes and open them again. The daylit pinks seem browner, the pinks of the rock formations, the piñon grayer in its greens. There are more twinkling lights out on the desert, more houses with people in them.
The light, like ghost snow, hints of afterglow in the desert night. I have said goodbye to Kip and know that he accomplished what he’d wanted to do, that he had given me a gift which I could possess for the last third of my life, a quiet and glorious gift, whether it came from largesse or not. Not the diary, that was for Ariel. Nor his inheritance, which was for charity—or rather, for Ariel, too, if she wanted it. The gift was that my youth and my adulthood could now be of a piece, a whole entity with beginning, middle, and yes, an end. Without asking for it, he allowed me to forgive him, and by the same token had forgiven me without my having asked. Forgiveness was the touchstone of redemption, and I hope that Ariel will be able to forgive me for what I’ve failed all these years to tell her.
Whenever she would ask me about how Jess and I met, I answered tangentially, avoiding the whole truth, and thus denying her a birthright. I knew why, of course. Always knew what it was to hedge and shift and equivocate. —We met at Columbia. I’ve already told you that story a hundred times, I would say. And Ariel’d confound me with her Kiplike eyes, looking right through me but not knowing what if anything there was to see there. It has been, almost without my knowing it, my great dark secret—so secret that it’s often invited its possessor to forget. But Kip has changed this. He had so many secrets to hang like clothing around the nakedness of his life and, as it turns out, so have I. But by telling me his, he’s liberated me from holding on any longer to mine. It is as great a gift as anyone has ever given me.
You’re her father, Kip. She will know it, know both her fathers now, and so know her mother, the woman that both of them have loved.
The amber lights on the Hill shine, up ahead. Within the hour, I will be at my mother’s. Time cannot move fast enough for me now that I have the power to tell.
When I awaken, I hear her in the kitchen, humming a song to herself. She still has a fine singing voice, though the melody seems to stray—is she improvising? I recognize it, and rem
ember it was one of her favorite tunes, “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Whoever wrote it, I can’t recall, the Gershwins maybe. In the days when I was growing up, she would sit at the piano and sing it; there was a double entendre she relished, at the expense of the military and the AEC and everyone else who watched over her, who even after the greatest secrecy of the forties carried on into the new decade with a vigilance that beheld a spy behind every rock. But hearing it this morning, it sounds like the wistful love song it was meant to be.
There’s a somebody I’m longing to see,
I hope that he turns out to be—
I sit up and look at my hands—Kip’s old tic—and see that they are still dirty with the soil from the sanctuary desert chapel.
Someone who’ll watch over me—
Look at my watch and see that I had better get a move on if I want to get the car back to Alyse, and make my flight in Albuquerque. I doubt there will be time to drink the coffee I smell that she’s made. My father’s jacket, buttons ineptly but tightly resewn in the middle of the night with needle and thread from her old tin sewing box, lies folded over a trunk at the foot of the bed, offers me the certain pleasure of fulfilling a promise.
Then she’s there in the room before me, and she is smiling. “I’m happy you came to visit, Brice,” she says.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such an absence—”
“Don’t,” she says.
She asks me do I have time to call Bonnie Jean to say goodbye. True to form, I say I’ll call her from the airport, or else from the city later tonight. Not all things change, or at least not all at once, I think.
“All right,” she says.
Then I think, Damn it all, call the woman, she’s your sister. I ask my mother for Bonnie’s number, pull the rotary around in tight incomplete circles, and when she answers begin to thank her for everything.
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