Ariel's Crossing Read Free Page B

Dolores, foaled finally, and her filly grew and foaled as well in the ensuing years. Having graduated from Los Alamos High, Marcos worked full-time now at the ranch. He broke new tenant horses in the day and in the evening drove to Tesuque for beer and spiced fries with friends. His bedroom wall was covered with blue and red ribbons, proving his rise through the competitive ranks as a horseman. Although a boy no more, he was unable, however, to erase from his thoughts the apparition in the field.
    There had to be a logical explanation for his unworldly vision. Will-o’-the-wisp, he’d heard about such occurrences. Haze from the river. A dewcloud. Both times when he’d seen his apparition it had been the middle of the night. He had been tired, burned out. Before that last occasion he’d snuck a shot of tequila from his father’s liquor case. That explained it. Still, Marcos stopped putting the better studhorses out in the lower paddocks. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. Whole thing never happened. He’d long since lost interest in spying on the vatos, so why bother with this ghost? Kid stuff, he scolded himself. Goddamn it, grow up, man.
    Over in McKinley County, a young woman named Mary grew up with her sister and two brothers in a modest, tin-roofed battenboard house that overlooked dusty Gallup from the northern bluffs. Both her parents worked in town, her mother part-time at the post office and father for the utility company. Mary ran away from home when she was seventeen. Not knowing anyone beyond Gallup, adrift on a dream of making it big in Hollywood, she hitched to Albuquerque, since that’s where the airport was.
    Mary lived near Old Town for a while on the savings she had secretly amassed back home but, scared, couldn’t bring herself to board a plane for California. For one, she had little money and didn’t want to wind up on the Walk of Fame with all the other runaways, scraping a buck any way she could. Stalled and broke, she went to Santa Fe where she heard there was a waitressing job on the plaza. She enrolled in acting classes at night and found she did have a flair for improvisation and creating theater roles. The idea was that maybe after a year, two at the outside, she’d have enough money to leave New Mexico on her own terms.
    Being shy, she was liked by her fellow employees and the boss but made few friends. This was fine with Mary, since friends are by definition people who know things about you. Under the assumed name of Franny Johnson— Franny being the character from a book by her favorite writer and Johnson lifted from another restaurant—she rented a small bungalow apartment in northwestern Santa Fe. At night she could hear the eighteen-wheelers headed toward Taos, or south, in the opposite direction. The eloquent music of these trucks put her in mind of a beautiful river even though the very place she’d escaped from was bisected by a highway whose perpetual traffic nearly drove her mad. Here, though poor as the proverbial church mouse, she relished her newfound independence. When she decided to grow her hair long, she did. When she decided to highlight it with streaks of orange and indigo, she did. When she got tired of all that, she dyed it back to dark blond. No one laughed at her ambition of becoming an actress because, fellow workshop hopefuls aside, no one knew.
    Franny turned nineteen before finally writing her parents she was fine, not to worry. She took a bus to Denver to mail this letter, believing the postmark would help foil any attempt to track her. The ride back down the front range was strangely gloomy. She understood, gazing at the disinterested landscape out the window, just how alone she truly was. This small epiphany made her want to cling all the more to her ambition—a girlhood dream launched in darkened theaters, crystallizing when she first waited tables at Gallup’s most famous hotel, El Rancho, where every star who’d ever shot a western dined back