Trinity Fields (8 page)

Still, fear has a way of tucking itself beneath a pretty quilt of optimism. We were all pumped up. The pain in my eyes and head and in my back from having slept on the ground disappeared some under the brilliance of the sky and clouds. We seemed to drift into tranquility once we reached the long plateau stretch on the high road to Taos. The dogs were far behind us now. I imagined that the old caretaker had bestirred himself, climbed to his feet, knocked the dust from his trousers, and walked back down to the santuario to finish his morning's business there, little the worse for wear from his encounter, and relieved to find out that we boys hadn't broken anything, and hadn't taken anything that God wouldn't be able quite easily to replace.

We encountered no one besides a farmer on a tractor going the opposite way, outside Cordova. Red-brown cattle munched orchard grass down in their pale green valley oases. The moon was setting. Smoke issued in whiskers from hornos and chimneys. Some silhouettes of swallows in the sky. A small herd of wild horses—one a tall lank roan with speckles the cast and shape of eggs over his back—stood beside the shoulder of the highway. Each faced a different direction, looking lost, which made me wonder, How can they be lost if they don't have a home? which in turn reminded me of Fernando Martinez who had curled himself up in the back seat into a fetal position and fallen asleep much like one of those dogs back there probably was doing right now, following his tail in a tight circle three times, lying down, maybe smacking his chops, the picture of contentment, and in a trice was dreaming.

As it was with Kip, Martinez seemed to be at home with himself. I stared at him. The wind whipped his hair in thatches. His shirt was untucked and missing buttons, and looked to be a third- or fourth-generation hand-me-down. Likewise his denims and fraying tennis shoes. His moustache, in the light of day, was in fact that of a boy, and when I turned around I allowed myself a moment to study Kip. If I could look like anyone in the world I would look like Kip, I thought. His contours were sharp and his movements astute. The darkness of his eyes belied such cunning light, his forehead was smoother than riverstone and browned by the sun, his cheeks and jaw and nose were so defined as to seem drawn in ink against the world around him. —What? he asked, sensing my eyes on him, and I said, —Nothing, and faced forward.

We were like a thrown rock. Never had I been on the road going as fast as this. What freedom and what fear, and as we carried on in silence I could feel those fears lift away just as our words and laughter had the night before, and tumble into nothingness behind. I was here with Kip, true brother. We'd done something special together and it was as if this car were our new home. Home is where you are most alive, most aware, most content, isn't it? I closed my eyes tight and watched the crystals of changing colors the sunlight played on my lids. The blood in my head sang.

By late morning we neared Ranchos de Taos. As the air got thinner and cooler among the rising peaks, the nausea we'd been feeling began to fade and with it faded our hysteria. Kip was driving slower now, one hand on the wheel and the other drumming his knee to the beat of the radio music. Borne forward in a haze of peaceful pleasure, we were above and beyond everyone and everything. The old Spanish saying
Noche alegre, mañanita triste
—a night of revelry, a morning of grief—didn't seem to apply to us anymore. We knew it couldn't last, but for an hour we didn't care. We wore the world like a crown.

We had stopped for fruit and candy bars in Las Trampas, one of the poor farm villages along the way. Kip decided to let me try to drive, but I wasn't good at it, had the car now on the center line, now on the shoulder, and without any protest from me, he took the wheel again. We counted the money we had taken—stolen, in fact—from hiding places back on the Hill. My contribution to our runaway money came from the cookie jar in our kitchen, a jovial Sambo whose gentle, foolish smile shamed me when I plunged my hand into his fat paunch in search not of pecan sandies but the plastic bag in which my mother stowed reserve cash. Kip had filched from his father's more ingenious but not invulnerable hiding place, which was simply a manila envelope taped to the underside of a table in their front room.

Most of my money was in single bills, with a few fives. I had folded it up and carried it in my breast pocket. When I thought about our thefts, I could feel the crown on my head begin to slip away. By the time I finished eating a hard green apple from the grocery, and tossed the core into the ditch along the side of the road, my euphoria had passed and my fears began to take its place.

I said, —We're pretty rotten, you know.

—What're you talking about?

—It's a pretty rotten thing to've done what we did taking our folks' money, don't you think?

—Hey, keep it down, Kip said, jerking his head toward the back seat. Then he said, quietly as he could, —Rotten? That's what you'd call
us
, rotten?

—Well.

—We're not the ones who're rotten, boy.

I didn't know what to say. Said, —I don't know.

—So, all right. We're rich and rotten.

I breathed in hard; I didn't want to be a stupid little kid anymore. I wanted to be strong. I said, —No more rotten than how the stuff got earned, I guess.

—All right, he said. —You said that right.

There were more and more signs of life, and with every person we encountered along the way, the dire nature of our quandary, the mess we were creating for ourselves, began to sharpen into greater focus, grow despite our unconscious best efforts to be oblivious to the thought of how worried our parents and friends must be, back up there on the Hill. We devoured our candy, squinted in the sun, and kept going. Onward was our only way, onward and upward. The flats at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos lay out ahead, and Colorado, secreted behind their snow-laden tops, beyond.

I knew my geography from school, I'd always loved maps, and it was nothing for me to close my eyes and conjure the land and life that lay ahead of us—north and north, through Colorado, maybe along the foothills up through Pueblo and Denver and on to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and north through Casper toward the Bighorn Mountains and Montana, where we'd hire ourselves out as ranch hands or vaqueros. Mow alfalfa and bundle it in bales, shear sheep, bust broncos. Then, after some adventures there, we'd get stir-crazy, and one morning before the dawn broke we'd be back in our car, headed north up into Canada, maybe high into Saskatchewan where we would become strong sawyers, build our own timber mill by some great river upon whose grassy shore we'd fish grayling or salmon for breakfast, hunt wild moose for our supper, and then we would go all the way up into the Northwest Territories, where we would wear sealskins and build ourselves a house of tundra peat, and let the rest of the world fare its wars below while we—heroes larger than life—sang songs, carved quaint scenes in reindeer horns, and smoked pipes by a fire crackling in the hearth.

Back and forth, back and forth. So my daydreams went. In the meantime, again more fellow travelers along the road, and by now more creeping remorse in my heart, and probably in Kip's as well. We were both quiet. I tried hard to keep my thoughts on the high times ahead rather than what might be happening back on the Hill. Time passed in odd blurts and shapes. More people saw us, a farmer on his tractor pulling his loaded spreader along the shoulder, headed probably from his tumble-down barn to a field, looked us over as we passed him slowly on a rough patch. I noticed Kip's eyes darting from the rearview mirror to the highway, felt us pick up speed again, and although he and I didn't say anything to each other, I sensed that Kip sensed that I sensed that we were being watched. We had every right to be paranoid.

Yes, a noble house of stone, with a crackling yellow fire in the corner hearth, and a big pot of black coffee on the cast-iron stove. And wives, strong wise wives, Eskimo girls with flat wide faces and knowing eyes, with bright woven clothing and reindeer moccasins.

A station wagon with side-by-side headlights and fins passed us, a woman and some children in the back, the eldest a girl with bangs and a coppery barrette not so much younger than we—they studied us too closely. There were others. One truck driver in particular who had come upon us when we were descending through the pine-forested mountains past Rio Pueblo, taking the switchback curves of Borrego Canyon much faster than we should have, bore down on our car and seemed to study the three of us from the height of his silver cab. Kip sped up, slowed down, but couldn't shake him.

—What are we doing, Kip? I heard myself say.

He didn't look at me, but had his eyes trained on the mirror as if in a trance, shifting them back to the meandering road from second to second, and said, —Not now.

The noble stone house and Eskimo wives faded, and I saw my father's face as if it were right before me, saw his eyes, even saw that he'd cut himself shaving and could almost smell his styptic pencil, and I was afraid.

—Why not now? Let's pull over.

Kip yelled, —How'm I supposed to pull over? Look at this guy back here.

I didn't know. I didn't want to cry.

—You're in fifty-fifty here, Kip went on. —You tell me what we're supposed to do.

—I mean, maybe we ought to just go back to the Hill.

He slammed the butt of one hand against the steering wheel, shot me a look, muttered something like, —Okay, then set his jaw and began gradually to brake the car, gradually slowed us way down and, still driving, ignoring the horn blasts from the rig behind us, shouted, —Yeah, that's just great, that's a great idea.

I didn't know how to respond. Everything was happening at once, it seemed. Kip's move was working. As the car slowed more, the man in the truck behind us had apparently had enough and, blessedly, noisily, was passing us. Once the rig blew by, buffeting us as it offered one last deafening blast from its horn, the atmosphere completely changed. The truck—moments ago so massive, bearing down like guilt upon us—diminished before disappearing altogether around a sheer stone cliff. Kip, trembling a little, brought the car to the side of the road. We sat suddenly swamped by silence, intense and enveloping.

After a moment, Kip in a raspy whisper said, —You know, Brice, sometimes I really don't get you. I already told you we can't go back to the Hill. You know what's going to happen to us if we go back there?

—All I know is I'm not sure that what we're doing is the best idea.

He rolled his head back on his shoulders and looked straight up to the sky. —Okay, all right. You got a better idea?

He was still shuddering, but now I noticed that it wasn't so much from terror as anger.

I heard myself say, —Better idea than what? and as I said it, I thought, What a fool you can be at times, Brice.

—We been driving all morning and now you're going to ask what we're doing?

I said nothing because I knew it wasn't really a question he had asked, at least not a question he expected me to answer.

Soon enough he answered it himself.

—We just go on is all.

I couldn't look him in the eye. Again my mind drifted back to those horses—wild cayuses, by definition never lost—and I thought of being a cowboy twin with Kip in Montana, a homesteader with him in the North country, and about the original meaning of our pilgrimage. They, our parents and our people back on the Hill, were guiltier than we, this much we knew as truth. And so, given the nature of life on the Hill, why return? Kip, whose eyes I could feel were hard on me—Kip was right. I must have reddened, I sensed my ears burning bright. How could I have failed him like that? Yet, still, the tiniest flicker of dread kindled in me, too, a combined fear of losing Kip, knowing I would not have him forever for my very own as I'd had him when we were sequestered on the Hill, and inchoate perception of what the world might do to my friend, my heart's pal, especially in light of how unafraid of it he seemed to be. These must have been feelings. I doubt I'd have been able to put them into words.

Frightened eyes can be lucid eyes, and I remember feeling I was seeing Kip for the first time, as if through some clarifying lens. So it was I remember feeling, fair enough, but what was more likely was this. Not that my own eyes were sharper, instead that Kip's view of how he might approach his life minutely yet radically shifted. Last night was different from today. Last night we were both ecstatic. Our plan had worked. We'd been free, had freed ourselves. We'd toured across a landscape only dreamed at for months and years before. Yet this morning it was obvious that Kip was strengthened by being a runaway.

I stared at my hands and when finally I looked up I saw that he was smiling at me, a tight crescent smile, his lips brown in the flickering shadows thrown by the tall pines by the road. The ponderosas gave off a heavy scent of vanilla. I knew my lips were white. Suddenly, I would have given anything for a piece of angel food cake.

—We off now?

I said yes, and thought, Nice big piece with ice cream on top.

—Well, come on then, he laughed.

Sleepy, Jess says, “What's it like there?”

“You've been here, Jessica. More buildings, more roads, more people, more dogs, but still New Mexico.”

“What's their place like, Lyse and Michael's?”

“It's all right. Where I'm staying tonight is new New Mexican. And their house is an old wandering adobe thing with heated floors, kind of old-new New Mexican.”

“Heated floors?”

“Hot-water pipes, there's hot pipes just under the tiles so that the floor is warm in the winter.”

Why are we talking architecture, I wonder, then Jessica—as if overhearing my thought—says, “Do you think you ought to come home now?”

“You know what surprises me?”

Jessica asks me what.

“What surprises me is that you still don't think I ought to be here. What would you think if I weren't here?”