Ariel's Crossing Read Free

that she’d been roughened by its voluptuous desolation, she was —she was, she existed. How else could she extend her arm and open her fingers like this?
    Marcos stared.
    Heavy wind rolled slow over the desert past Tesuque, down what used to be Kit Carson Highway, past Cities of Gold casino whose name chides Coronado even as its gamblers pantomime his weakness, up the reservation road past Pojoaque cemetery where a fresh grave was decorated with pink plastic carnations and a wooden crucifix painted white. It meandered, this wind, along those same lands where Old World conquerors came, brutal Don Juan de Oñate in 1605, Don Diego de Vargas who retook the pueblos after the Indian rebellion at the end of the seventeenth century, alongside hundreds of other souls whose names were also scratched into Inscription Rock but who are now known only as icons, as words, letters, flourishes of the nearly forgotten. It meandered where explorers had worked their way into these domains and, circling as wind and humans and history will do, it blew over barrancas and came down into this valley and rushed right through her. The cottonwood leaves rustled on their numb winter limbs. This was the end of February 1981, the evening when Marcos first saw Francisca. She’d lost her sense of smell but keenly remembered the perfume of greasewood, of piñon smoke and grayblue juniper berries crushed between her fingers, the smell of rainripe droppings left by animals domestic and savage. She knew she couldn’t touch the amber bark of the cottonwoods that smelled like vanilla on hot summer days, but drew in breath—air breathing air—and ran her hand over the trunk of the great tree if only to show him she could, prove to him she was more than some desert draft.
    She tried to speak, a wispy gracías, but intuited by the way his jaw tightened and his cheekbones knobbed out, and his mouth twisted into a scowl of confusion, that he couldn’t hear her. Or didn’t understand. Stubborn as ever, Francisca tried to tell him stories about all the freedoms she enjoyed. Told him that, being lighter than pollen, she could balance herself on the anther of a desert hollyhock. And on the tip of her finger, at that. Told him how she could swim up the heartwood center trunk of any of these trees, counting its rings as she went, then pass the rest of the night listening to an embryo’s heart beat in a hawk egg high in its branches, without ever disturbing the nesting mother.
    The kid didn’t move.—Christ on a crutch, he said.
    She tried to tell him that on starless nights she’d retraced the same steps she’d taken over the many years, along the portal hung with liver-red ristras, past the room he now occupied, on whose wooden door sprays of myrtle were nailed to ward off spirits—a talisman that had no effect on her one way or the other.
    Hadn’t he noticed her before? the vapor breathed.
    No answer.
    Yes, she continued, drifting closer, flowing like sketchy mist off dry ice. She’d been here all along.
    Marcos shook his head, closed his eyes and opened them looking away from the apparition. Clapping the fresh-fallen snow off the sleeves of his canvas barn jacket, he smacked his lips in disgust, hiked up the long rise to the house, ridiculing himself for being just plain out of his fricking gourd.
    He thought no more about it the rest of that winter and on through the spring. There was work to do and he didn’t need this crazy bullshit cramping his style. Besides, if he said anything his father would laugh him right off the ranch.
    The second time Marcos caught sight of her was on a warm June night, the year after that first encounter. New moon, ebony sky, stars arrayed like pulverized crystal on black velvet. Stillness but for the genial hubbub of scuttling stone in the riverbed. The horses slept standing in their stalls. His father had asked him to check on a mare who was late to foal. Striding briskly down the cindered aisle of the wide barn, he heard