Trinity Fields (16 page)

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 have 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.

After that things settled down. I was determined to be happy. Alyse was almost a girlfriend, but never quite, despite how much my mother would have liked to see it happen. Bonnie I treated almost as a brother should treat his sister. Soon enough I succeeded so thoroughly in my endeavor to enjoy these last seasons on the Hill that the odd, temporary disturbance in the nature of my bond with Kip faded into oblivion. We were best friends again.

Kip came back to himself, his edge was there once more. I don't know how it happened, it wasn't gradual. And yet he wasn't the young Kip, cocksure and cutting. Yes, he was sharp again, but how to put it? It was as if he had more substance to him, like spiritual girth. His voice heavier, his walk more weighted with each long step. Did anyone see this besides myself? I doubt it. Possibly Emma Inez, but no one else. While he was less callous, he was more intimidating; while less quick to state his opinion about anything, more given to quirks such as prolonged stares, head tilted perhaps to one side and mouth closed into a straight, unrevelatory line.

Our games changed. What we'd loved to do once we loved no more. Peppers was now something, Kip said, for little kids. —Better we go jacklighting bucks, he told me and I disagreed, —That's not hunting, and he said, —So what is it? and I answered, —Jacklighting's for bad shots and sissies, it's like some kind of execution, and he said, —The Indians do it and they're not sissies and they're not bad shots, and I thought he was wrong. I mean, what kind of sport is it to shoot some poor deer, mesmerized in the night by the beam of a flashlight? I said nothing more, and was relieved when we never followed through.

We did other things. We fly-fished. We tried to trap a beaver for a couple of months with the idea that we could sell it to a zoo somewhere and have money to spend. We still rode horses, bareback and whipping the hackamore reins, rough-and-tumble down into the canyons and through meadows, over Barranca mesa and over to Pine Springs, almost all the way to Española, spurring them on with the heels of our bare feet and shouting, —Giddyup, until their hides darkened with sweat and the corners of their mouths collected foam. We just wasted time, too, could pass hours together without speaking. We knew what we didn't want to do. We had no interest in football, for instance. Not street hockey, not even baseball. Nothing that had to do with teams, with balls or bats, nothing to do with keeping score.

—That stuff's kidjunk, Kip said.

We didn't consider ourselves outcasts. It was just that the others were flockers.

For a few months after our reconciliation and before we left for school, we lived for movies. By the purple velvet ropes and brass stanchions, along the carpeted path past the great double doors and into the hushed gloom of the auditorium we strode. We favored front row center the first time we saw a given picture, then for later viewings moved back into the body of the hall to cause trouble if necessary. We never saw a movie only once, not even the worst of them. The more action there was, the more we went. Newsreels and cartoons we studied, too—anything to do with Mickey Mouse we hated, Bugs Bunny was our boy, Bugs was more shrewd, knew how to get himself in and out of scrapes. Theater life was anonymous, safe, dark, cool in summer, warm in winter, scented with popcorn and salty butter, hotdogs and mustard. Here was a sanctuary where we could lead other people's varied lives, witness their adventures, travel the world with them, win the hearts of beautiful women, fight ignoble and ugly men, be spies, cowboys, riverboat captains, gamblers, detectives, heroes. Flyboy movies—about aviators, men who rode blue ponies—were Kip's favorites beyond all others. The grand silver passenger plane that carried star-crossed lovers far away from each other, crop dusters, Grumman biplanes that buzzed aerodromes upside down and then righted themselves so that goggled stuntmen could walk their wings, these were the subject of awe and cause for joy. Whenever there was an airplane on the screen he leaned forward, absorbed, even entranced. In the darkness of the theater Kip seemed to take on some of his boyishness again, let down his guard. We would fillip kernels of popcorn at unsuspecting couples whenever there was a love scene and the music ascended to violins and the lights dimmed. Most of what little money we made doing small jobs here and there went into the hands of the woman who sat in the glass booth at the entrance to the Centre theater, that winter and on into the early months of summer. We hadn't the slightest idea that we might be a bit immature for our age. The days went soft as a sumptuous fog during this last season of isolated contentment we would enjoy. It set in upon Kip first, and what came over him readily came over me as if we were one patient suffering a single malaise, one creature bewitched by a single spell.

In the meantime, Alyse wisely found another kid in whom to invest her affection.

M
y
mother. I have to be prepared that she may not know me. She threads in and out of recognition when I telephone her, has for some years. She knows Bonnie Jean but sometimes seems unclear about or uninterested in specifically identifying her, even though my sister—as Bonnie Jean herself has told me—visits Mother most every afternoon. It will be a very different kind of sadness for me to see her as she is now, as she's become, than it has been to hear her on the phone. When her monologue ranges and extends in illogical ways, I can sit there at my desk and listen in a half-there-half-not way while I study the framed photograph of her and Father I keep with other family photos, and can let my imagination modify things just a little, turn back time toward the moment she and Dad stood smiling triumphantly, having climbed to the summit of Sandia Peak, when youthfulness still was hers. I can read what she wrote on the verso of the photo—it's framed with a special window in the back so the inscription is visible—
for Brice, from his loving mom
&
dad here at the top of the Tewa world, Turtle Mountain (Sandia Peak), September 1967.

Radiance and exuberance emanated from both their faces, back on that autumn afternoon in the mountains near Albuquerque, flushed from the long hike up and up through the turning aspens. Toasting their successful ascent to the summit, she lifts her flask in the air, and father waves his walking stick. Her figure is, as always, slim, her clothing smart, sensible. In her eyes is the confidence that she will live forever—and when I connect that look with the voice I am hearing, a voice that has been so influential in my life, I don't feel so awful about where she is now, and who she is. After all, she's still convinced of her immortality—and she's got two millennia of belief, ceremony, and tradition with which to back up her assertions. She borders on insanity, I think, at times. But the radiance and exuberance have never abandoned her. It isn't insanity anyway—it's something else; but if it were insanity, it would be a savant's, and a damned cheerful savant at that. The elements I can use to find the cherished
old her
in the becharmed
new her
are right there before me, then, as I merge that photograph with her present voice and perspectives.