Ariel's Crossing

Ariel's Crossing Read Free Page A

Book: Ariel's Crossing Read Free
Author: Bradford Morrow
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nesting birds shuffling in the eaves. The mare stood in her fullness, not yet ready to drop. Nothing to do but wait, he knew. Sliding the stall door shut, he set out to kill some time by tramping over to Conchas Park to spy on the vatos, the lowriders from Chimayó who hung out half a mile east of Rancho Pajarito.
    He walked up the pebbly road that paralleled the riverbank, listening to the voices in the water with the drowsy sense that if he were fluent in their language he might be able to understand what they uttered. His feet knew the path as he loped along, dropping his head now and again to duck some low-slung branches of scraggly riverside trees. Hands thrust deep into his pockets, he looked over at the austere creek whose pocked face dully sparkled. His jeans were loose, clenched by a rawhide belt with a worn silver buckle. His T-shirt was black.
    This was his favorite dangerous game. He knew that if they caught him snooping, they would try to chase him down and beat him up. The rumor was some guy from Las Trampas who’d come down to the valley on a lark had gotten himself knifed for trying to join their party uninvited. Marcos had no rational right to be watching the vatos, but that was why he found them such an irresistible spectacle.
    Not that they did much. Built a driftwood bonfire in their forsaken park and drank cervezas, maybe blew some horse, bragged and prattled in Spanglish. Their women—mallbang coifs teased up above their foreheads like turkey fans—sat in their sleek finned cars listening to the radio while they knocked some back, snorted and smoked, drifting through the slow ritual of a weekend bender. For his part, Marcos hid in undergrowth on the shadowy shore opposite and gazed and eavesdropped. Had the night been starless he would have shimmied out over Rio Nambé on a fallen tree trunk to sit astraddle and smoke a butt, concealing the tangerine fire in the bowl of his hand. He could while away hours here and often did.
    So it was nothing unusual for him to be ambling back home late along this stark stretch of road, as he was doing on the night Marcos again glimpsed the figure in the field. Intending to check on the mare once more before going to bed, he unlatched the aluminum gates which gave a slight clatter. Glancing across the corral to the right, down at the far margin of the meadow, he saw it—or, her—an insinuation of whiteness in the window of the deserted adobe.
    His shoulder quaked. He winced and the quietest cry came out of him, a muffled yelp. Whiteness first, then a kind of blue, he saw, a pallid bluish white like watered-down skim milk, indistinct, at first stationary. After several incalculable moments the light moved more quickly than he might have thought possible. How he knew the figure was a woman he would not be able to say. She glided over the ground as a skein of light illuminated from within, a demure storm cloud, away from then back toward the ruined fieldhouse. Marcos stared breathless, seized less by fear than a kind of wishful skepticism, a hope that what was happening here wasn’t in fact happening. Without turning her head—for she did now have features, deep gray eyes, purling plaited hair, a magisterial, even haughty mouth, and on her face a look of abstracted curiosity—she again shifted direction to confront him, began deliberately to cross the pasture toward the oval-mouthed boy. She was as close as his trembling, outstretched palms when he stumbled back against the rattling metal paddock gate and her light frayed, faded, and vanished.
    As before, Marcos told no one. After a month of walking down to that lower pasture at the same time every night to find himself saying ridiculous, insipid things like,—I’m here, or,—You can come out now, he himself began to question what he had twice seen. Even though Francisca de Peña was there, moving slowly around him, hovering before him, passing through him, she failed to make her presence known.
    That mare, named

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