Trinity Fields (11 page)

Is this how the insanely criminal feel? Welcomed because their desires are so comprehensive as to seem like needs? Confident that needs, like laws, must be upheld? Justified because so clearly embraced by circumstances they had only the subtlest hand in bringing into being? I mean to say, it
did
feel as if the house solicited us, that Mary Bendel's recent presence in it provoked our presence, too.

Whatever the answers to such questions might be, we moved through the Bendels' house slowly, deliberately. We felt strangely proprietary but not so much so that our hearts weren't heaving, in quick pumping bursts like those of a rabbit's heart when you hold him in your arms and pet him and place your palm on his breast. The moon lit the rooms enough so we didn't stumble into furniture, and soon we found ourselves in their bedroom,
her
bedroom, where we discovered the drawers in the chest that held her clothes, the soft cottons and dangerous bits of lace. That first time we hadn't thought to bring a flashlight, but I remember you so carefully lifting something of hers to your face and breathing in and how I said, —Bring it over here, boy, and you carried it to the window where we looked at it, a chemise,
Mary's
chemise, satin with narrow lace trim, a perplexity of fragile straps and fluid margins, looked at it rapt, smelled its trifle of perfume merged with a recognizable human scent, its Maryness. We must have been in the house for half an hour, maybe longer, touching and smelling and, yes, even kissing her woolen dresses in the closet, her sweaters arranged in piles on the shelf above, careful as we could be not to disturb how they were hung or folded, our heads in a swim—but a drowner's swim, slow-motion and learning to love the warmth of the water in our lungs. To anybody but us the scene we'd created for ourselves here would have been either ludicrous or disgusting; but Kip, for us it was a real passage. And after we'd done it once, there was no way for us not to do it again.

And so we did. And it didn't stop with touching and smelling and kissing Mary's things, it went a ways beyond just that. And it didn't stop with Mary, either. There were others. We learned a lot about many houses, and the wives and daughters who lived in them, how they lived, what some of their secrets were. But as the visits got more elaborate they became less struck by mystery. The clothes, these inanimate reminiscences of their wearers, became the point of the exercise—to touch, smell, and sometimes actually wear them for the dizzy minutes we dared to—rather than pushing ourselves into the private lives of those who'd chosen them at some shop, brought them home, worn them. We began to lose track of the meaning of what we were doing, and half a year after we'd first trespassed Mary Bendel's home we were done with our visits. We'd fallen in and out of love for the second time, virgins still, but now gratefully sullied ones.

Genuine love was not going to treat us with the same genial if curious touch. Jessica, our Jessie, dear Jess, is—as they say—a whole other story.

The moon ascends, a dollop of apricot sherbet, and I come awake from a dream that I have already forgotten but for the single detail that in it I was holding someone's hand. I look at the ceiling, see a spider in one corner working very hard on a web, and then go through the moment all unseasoned travelers suffer: the recognition that my surroundings are unfamiliar.

I remember, then stand and look out the window toward the ridge across the valley and am seized—I'm wide awake now, and know just where I am—by the need to see the mountains, and I climb into my pants and throw a jacket around me and walk barefoot out onto the ruined veranda and across the stretch of grass there until I reach a coyote fence, a vertical knitting of ragged sticks, and turn to look back over the low roof of the small hacienda and see them again, way off in the distance, the Jemez of my childhood, and it seems to me as I stand in the dew-wet chill of the predawn that the mountains rise away from the earth as if from a need to be as far removed from it as possible. It's like a dream, still. Do spiders dream? Probably not, I think. Too assiduous to squander time with dreams. I draw a deep breath of gaunt air, close my eyes and open them.

The clouds begin to take on their morning colors, in the same way pigments cut by mineral spirits and poured over fine, unprimed canvas would spread in billowing shapes until the surface was all beautifully stained. The intricacy of the basin that gives into this smaller canyon, the cloud-crowned peaks, the sawtooth of trees and bushes along the horizon, the Russian olive and the tamarisk, the lilac and paintbrush, the hacienda itself whose irregular white adobe walls are covered with the fingers of creeping vines, the whole scape radiating a fragile strength, all come to me at once.

The moment is a gift. This was my home. I could resist feeling tentatively cheerful, but don't. I know it won't last anyway.

And then, I realize my feet are stinging with the chill of the night grass, and I run back inside, find some wool socks in my bag, and light the gas burner on the stove to heat water for the coffee Alyse gave me last night after dinner. Coffee beans in a paper sack, some milk and sourdough biscuits. “Just for the morning, to get you started,” she said, and handed me a flashlight for the short walk back. I watch the blue corollas of flame under the kettle and think about last night—maybe as a way of avoiding today, and what it might bring.

The big house was just that. Flagstone staircases circling upward from one level to the next, doors and windows looking out every direction, southwest toward the lights of the city, eastward up the horseshoe canyon and spray of stars. All their shoes assembled by the front door, there must have been two dozen pairs, sandals, boots, moccasins. Gaslit refectory where we ate. Mission furniture mixed with Adirondack twisted hickory and painted old pine. Disarray and warmth. The pleasant, sincere mess of domesticity. They had roasted a chicken, greens, chèvre, some new potatoes with sage. It was evident that most meals here were less lavish—or, not
lavish
, but less structured—than what they'd prepared for me. Michael is an architect, so some of this unconstruction must be on purpose, I think. The wine bottle had a white sheen of dust along one side, the wineglasses were wet from rinsing. Little things gave me to believe this was something of a special occasion for them, and so I was made, despite myself, to feel welcome.

Martha is a pretty girl, self-assured and opinionated, quite a handful. Her first words last evening were, “The sky is on everybody's heads.”

I thought for a moment to correct her, but then realized that she was right, and said, “How smart of you to notice.”

“Thank you,” she smiled.

Abandoning her earlier restraint, Alyse did ask the inevitable, and I warded it off with the half-truth—or incomplete truth—I'd thought to use if it came up. She may well have seen through it, my ruse about wanting to revisit Chimayó during the pilgrimage, clearly enough to recognize that it was no use to pressure me into giving her more. No doubt that subtlety is available to her.

“I never saw you as the religious kind, Brice,” she allowed herself. I always forget how much I like Alyse. It is a satisfaction that grows, unobserved for the most part, over the years. Maybe I find her sympathetic because our contact is so intermittent and unburdened by the give-and-take experiences that become an active—thus possibly threatening—part of a true, lively friendship. She never lost her love of the West, and I admire that.

She told us a story about how when she was taking a walk out in the desert one day she came upon an old kiva that had been mostly buried under dirt and sand, and was long since abandoned by all but a colony of red ants. She sat down on a stone to rest, and found herself watching the ants go about their business, as ants do, with diligence and vigor. The ants came up from the depths of the kiva to the surface in a dark florid procession, each carrying building materials for what appeared to be a very old hill, and every once in a while she noticed that one or two of the ants would be hefting along something rather more shiny than the usual bits of sand or clay, which aroused her interest.

When she walked over to the procession to get a closer look, she saw that what the ants were carrying along were beads they had brought up from the cavern of the old kiva, and she realized that these were beautiful old beads of bone and shell from an Indian necklace or headdress. Before long, without really giving the matter much thought, she began taking the colorful beads from the face of the anthill where they'd been deposited, and soon had collected enough to make a bracelet. She said she went home that night very pleased about her discovery and good luck, and the next day strung for herself a bracelet, just as she'd planned.

But the first time she put it on her wrist and held it up to the light to admire it, she was suddenly seized with guilt that though the bracelet was beautiful, it wasn't hers. She'd stolen it from the ants.

I said, “But the ants stole the beads from the kiva, didn't they? And besides, ants don't care one way or another whether they're building their ant house out of sand or beads or diamonds.”

“You've been in New York too long, Brice.”

“What does New York have to do with it?”

“Anyway,” she laughed. “I took the bracelet back up to the kiva site and unstrung it and threw the beads back on the anthill.”

I smiled into her smile, wondering whether or not she'd made up this fable. I glanced over to Martha for my answer and Martha, rather than staring at her mother with wide-eyed wonder, was absorbed with moving her dinner around her plate with a fork. I could see that to her it was just another piece of her mother's history, not a fairy tale or fable, not a yarn, and therefore could be listened to with one ear, as it were. This happened, simply, to her mother. Not a big deal. And slowly it was coming back to me, this Western quality I had rejected and then forgotten. It seemed so pure, last night, if sentimental. It seems pure this morning, strangely unsentimental. Maybe the hand in the dream was the hand that gave back the beads? I don't think so.

In any event, her being so completely of the West is enviable to an apostate like myself. To me, Lyse is unalloyed and ageless. It has been a good friendship over the years, steady after its own manner, telephone calls from time to time, the occasional visit, an on-and-off friendship only in the sense that our lives have been led in different places. We have never wrangled. I doubt we ever will.

Need I say what happened to the two of us upon our return—or rather, upon our being returned—to Los Alamos? It was predictable, in a way, that we'd be punished for our Chimayó adventure, but the lengths to which our parents went to keep Kip and me apart were, if not drastic, at least for a period of time passionately imposed.

—You two are not to speak, not to see each other, not to communicate with one another in any way shape or form, you hear me, William Brice? If I so much as get a hint that you two are talking, or hanging around together, your father and I . . . well . . . we have discussed what we're willing to do, so don't push it.

Were these words coming from my father's mouth, I might have allowed myself some moments' worry, but I knew my mother. We knew each other. My mother may have been furious on the surface, and was badly hurt beneath, but I guessed that somewhere buried amid her anger and hurt was a dissenter's pride in me and what Kip and I had done. She was, after all, the only one who ever bothered to ask us
why
we'd appropriated a car and driven it into a ditch up near Wyoming. Everyone else assumed it was a joyride. That element of pride was what I kept looking for in my mother's behavior those first few days back on the Hill, and I must admit I had to peer hard sometimes to find it there behind her stringent eyes. Given that I loved her, my poor mother—more than a decade younger then than I am now, standing there in her print dress with flowers, big indigo, puce, magenta, ivory flowers that promised all over its fluent surfaces, whenever she wore it, a decent and happy day—this was a nasty combination of emotions for me to admit to having provoked.

Maybe she sensed what I was thinking, and attempted to deny me. Though I knew better, she did everything in her power to persuade me that she viewed our reckless gambit as just that, an extravagant prank carried out in order to humiliate her, and little more. My father remained more or less absent from home, stayed with his work in a Tech building to which I had no access even if I wanted to talk with him, which I didn't, and as a consequence he was—to my way of thinking—less concerned than she, distant from caring, which was a kind of freedom, since if he didn't care then I wouldn't care. But the days came and went, and rather than forgiving and forgetting, my mother seemed not to want to let the matter go. She said I'd made a fool of her in front of all her students at school, students who happened to be my friends.

—If you decline to show me a modicum of respect, how do you expect them to respect me? she asked, knowing I understood there was not one soul in the community who hadn't known about what we'd done. I wondered how Kip might answer this question, and though I didn't for the longest time speak with him or risk much more than a glance at him outside the classroom where we sat in desks distant from one another, I trusted that he must have been experiencing the same feelings of guilt and disgrace as I, although leavened maybe by some residual defiance I found harder to discover in myself.

—I don't know, I said, hoping she wouldn't call me William Brice again, as she was wont to whenever scolding me.

—You don't know.

She crossed her arms.

—I guess not.

—Well, in the future you might consider thinking things all the way through before you just go and do whatever comes into your head.

Now I had my reply, but wondered whether to voice it.

—Yes? she asked. My mother did know me. —Well?