Heraclitus said that war is the parent of all
things; this could more properly be said of love;
but his paradox seems to be confirmed in the
case of friendship.
—GEORGE SANTAYANA

      Grim and giddy, we'd have been a sight to see if anybody had been there to see us. But the highway between Pojoaque and Chimayo was empty. We stopped once to walk into the desert a few hundred feet and throw ourselves down on our backs and look up at the stout stars and wobbly moon and howl and curse and dance, and just be cool, bad outlaws, while back on the road the radio blasted "Tuttu Frutti" and this Martinez guy began to carry on because Kip asked him what he was doing at the pueblo if he lived over here on the high road to Taos, and the kid started bragging that he just popped his first cherry.

      I said, --No you didn't.

      And he said, --Did so.

      And Kip said, You lie like a dog, man.

      And he said, --You like like a rug, man.

      But it didn't really matter because when he asked us what we were doing out here in the night in a stolen car, good boys like us, crewcut and white as soaptree yucca petals, here in our T-shirts and bluejeans cuffed over brown shoes, when we told him what we were doing, he didn't believe us any more than we believed him. We told him we were from up on the Hill and we were making a pilgrimage to the valley of the little church where the dirt is sacred, because we were sick and our parents were sick and every last one of our neighbors was sick. All of us were guilty, tainted black to the pit of our souls by what had happened at our home.

      This was what we said. We, they, all of us needed to be cured, and the only way to be absolved of the infamy of so many murders was to go, pay homage, and partake of the magic purifying soil at Chimayo.

      Fernando Martinez coughed loud, spat hard, and rolled around in the arroyo laughing like somebody who didn't have the sense God gave an apple, and said, --You guys are nuts, and he said, --Are not, and he said, --You're out of your minds. And we started running like jackrabbits to the car, and Martinez was at our heels shouting, --Hey, wait for me! and though we didn't, he managed to leap into the back seat on the fly in time to ride with us all the way down into the village, and we didn't mind because nothing mattered, we were in such trouble now, nothing mattered at all except getting to the church in order to be blessed with the miraculous dirt that would sanctify our great escape and confirm our newfound manhood.

      The plaza of El Potreto was dead. After we pitched to a halt, a willowy cloud of dust came washing over us, and what descended in its wake was a glorious silence, sweet and haunted. We sat, staring up at it, awed almost to sobriety. A dog barked in the near distance, short choppy echoing yelps. Then everything was silent again.

      El Santuario de Chimayo, humble in the moonlight, an enchanted godhouse whose curved lines and organic shapes made it seem like a thing built by fairybook creatures, so phantasmagoric were its adobe towers and rounded mud walls. It was more sublime, more modest than anything we had ever witnessed. At that moment, without having to confirm in words what we were thinking, we knew, both of us, that we had not guessed wrong. Chimayo was just where Kip and I had to come, we night riders in the tradition of Las Gorras Blancas who journeyed across New Mexico from dusk to dawn a century ago cutting the cursed barbed wire, fighting the bosses who were fencing us in even then--our people, our land, our lives--we kids, we midnight penitentes burdened less by our own sins (ours were still ahead of us) than those of our community.

      And this was why we were here. Because we had finally gotten it through our thick adolescent heads, finally comprehended our exile and why our fathers were both revered and hated--revered because they were heroes who brought the war to an end, hated because in order to end the war they created something that in turn promised to destroy the very people it was meant to protect.

      Deep in the heart of our ambivalence it took moonlight to shine in upon certain truths, for, back on the hill of poplars where we lived--poplars are los alamos--there were things so buried in the dark, the sun didn't know how to make them manifest.

      Good old pock-faced buttery yellow daddy moon, we drank to him, lifting our bottle high to where he nestled in the cottonwood trees and big box elders. All was aglow and appeared to pulse. I can remember feeling scared and happy. I belived in what we were about.

      --How do we get in?

      --See, I was baptized here, I know this place good, Martinez assured us, his voice a low mewl, ignoring my question. He was more talkative now that he'd become one of the impromptu gang, the leader in fact for the moment. We didn't speak, but studied him as he tried the carved wooden doors that led into the santuary. --Damn, he said.

      The doors were shut tight and it was too dark to jimmy the old lock. After a few elastic moments of silence Martinez reappeared, ran his forearm over his mouth, and led us around to the west side of the church. The stars burned cold and bright above the steeples and through the tree limbs, but seemed different here than back on the Pojoaque flats, more razorlike and frozen and sharp. The sky between them was purple toward the horizon, bluish black at the center overhead, and dirty white like aspen bark around the body of the full moon. On the far side of the river, over at the margin of several hectares of pasture, rose Tsi Mayoh, the hill from which this valley takes its name. It was a long, curvilinear granite hump that resembled some dozing ancient beast. Scrub bushes crowded its backlit profile like crooked teeth. The moon kissed its horizon and I thought if I were the moon, I would, too.

      Martinez was carrying on.

      --Yeah yeah, I was saved here when I was just little, you know. See, I was born too small, size of a grasshopper, my bed was a shoe box, and I kept getting bloody noses and headaches and when I'm in third grade they're afraid I'm gonna die, and the doctor in Taos say I got a brain tumor and he wants to operate and my mother decides to bring me to Chimayo, so we go inside the church here, we pray, and after we pray we go in the little room and I kneel down, I bend over, and they sprinkle the dirt right there on the back of my head. Sprinkle dirt just like you sprinkle holy water. I still remember the smell of that cool dirt. It smells like...real earth. You'll see. God he lets things happen bad and good, but for me it was good.

      Along the length of the plaza side of the santuario runs a room that, I later discovered, used to be a vestment chamber where the priest would don his robes for Mass, but was converted to a sacristy where pilgrims pause to give thanks, having visited the posito and partaken of the sacred dirt. It is in this room the faithful leave behind their crutches, after experiencing the miracle of the soil. Martinez pointed to the dormer window that protuded from the roof of the sacristy.

      --Up there, he said.

      The edge of the roof was just high enough that Kip and I had to boost Martinez on our shoulders to hoist him up. Once there, he whispered, --Come on, and extended his hand down to us. Kip climbed on my shoulders and Martinez pulled him onto the roof.

      --Now what? I said.

      --Jump, said Martinez.

      I tossed the bottle up to them and jumped high as I could, my arms outstretched over my head. I touched their fingers, but fell back to the ground. Jumped again, again fell. The third time one hand caught mine, then another, and I swung freely in the night until the two of them hauled me aloft. We sat on the corrugated tin to catch our breath, then Martinez crawled to the dormer window. Panes of glass were missing, and when we reached in to unlock the window frame he disturbed some roosting pigeons that launched themselves over his shoulder, making a raucous exodus of wings clacking and bleats like terrified babies. As Martinez slid backwards on the tin we all let out our own cries of terror. But then, at nightmare speed--too slow, too swift--we saw Martinez open the window and disappear into the crawl space.

      --Yeah okay, he said from within, as if he were talking to somebody inside, his voice echoing off walls we could not see. Kip shimmied into the blackness after him, and I after Kip.

      Now it was fully pitch-dark.

      --Come on, we could hear Martinez ten or twenty feet ahead of where we lay on our sides, breathing hard from fear. We heard him crawl on all fours forward, and we heard him pause before he jumped. When he landed he gave a grunt as if the wind were knocked out of him. Footsteps down in the nave. We scraped along, edged forward, bumping into one another, feeling our way deeper and deeper into the church.

      Suddenly the square opening ahead became illuminated. A faint white flickered in vague space. We crept to the end of the shaft and looked down into the void.

      Fernando Martinez stood below, a ghost shedding light upon ghost altar, ghost santos, ghost pews. He'd lit a candle and held it over his head. He wore a broad smile on his face. --Told you I know this place good, he said.

      I looked at Kip and Kip looked at me, and we dropped down feet first into the sanctuary, two drunk virgins, larcenous and saturated not just in hot, smooth swig but the innocence of angry idealism, hardly belived where we were.

      --Now we go to the well of earth, Martinez said.

      Years later I discovered that there is a word for the act we performed on behalf of all the guilty souls back home on the Hill at Los Alamos. Geophagy, it is.

      Having hit our heads on the lintel of the doorway near the altar, we found ourselves in a claustrophobic chamber, a cell whose air was humid and ceiling low, with one small window. Here it was, the posito, a primitive circular hole carved a forearm's length wide and about as deep in the ground. We knelt. First we washed our hands with the dirt, then our faces, and finally we began to eat. From the tips of our fingers, from the bowls of our palms, we ate from the bottom of this hole handfuls of damp, crumbly loam known as the tierra bendita, choking, hacking and spitting, holding it down though it wanted to come up. Fernando Martinez sat against the adobe wall of the room and regarded us, amused and sodden and calm. He forebore to join our earthen feast. The candle flickered and made our shadows jump, giant and grotesque on the walls, while he finished off the whiskey and soon enough drifted into a dreamy stupor.

In the scene that follows, one of the two principle protagonists has been shot down behind enemy lines in Laos--after having joined an elite, eccentric, and highly illegal paramilitary force known as the Ravens. The year is 1972. The war is grinding down toward its inevitable defeat for the U.S. But the mad zealots and "spooks" who are fighting alongside the Hmong against the Pathet Lao forces and the Viet Cong, are oblivious to this fact. And Kip Calder, even more crazed than many of his special-forces colleagues, lies in the elephant grass, maybe wounded, maybe not--and comes ultimately face to face with his worst enemy: himself. The text below differs slightly from the published version: it is the edited manuscript version the author read from during his book tour in 1994, and is published here for the first time.

      From one secret to another he had journeyed. It was as if his life were bound together into a single iridescent winding sheet of stealth, so that Kip was always hidden inside a shroud. From one covert place on earth to another: Los Alamos to Laos. It was second nature to him, though there was nothing secondary about it--more his first nature, this will to move in such clandestine ways.

      So how had it come to pass that he was here, in this clearing, on his side, breathing as quietly as possible, stifling his need to scream? All through the night he discovered then rediscovered how far from home he had managed to come. He did not want to dream. He did not want to hallucinate. Was this the distance necessary for him to feel that home was home? Was home what this was all about? Just the kind of questions he did not want to ask himself. Not now, not here. He had never been much of a sleeper in the past. Insomnia would stand him in good stead in this expanse of knee-high cover. But was he awake? Hard to know.

      The elephant grass whispered. It told him how exposed he was out here. It told him it was grass, and grass could only hide so much.

      Maybe he and the other man should have stayed back in the trees and tangle, but they had understood that their hope of avoiding quick capture was to put as much distance between themselves and the wreckage as they could. They also understood that if they were to be evacuated, it would only be possible from the relative flatness of this rolling field. None of the friendlies would have been able to see let along reach them under the dense canopy where they went down. This is what Kip thought, and he hoped the grass would understand.

      I'll do my best to help you, the grass promised.

      Where was his navigator? he wondered, and no sooner had he considered that than he forgot. Have you gone crazy? he asked himself. What did the grass think? And what did the ant in the grass think?

      Had he been concussed? Had his helmet failed, or had he not secured it? Too many questions. He could not be sure whether he'd even worn his helmet. He touched his skull and his helmet was not there. Maybe he had lost it when running away from the fracas of metal and hollowing clacking of gunfire. In war people died more often from the little mistakes than the grand errors of judgment. A false step, a forgotten detail.

      Now he was trying to think of what he had just thought. Hell met...oh yes, the grass had asked him if he'd met hell.

      --Talk forwards please, he murmured.

      Then he slept, then he woke.

      --YES AND NO, he told the grass. It was an answer, but of course he had unremembered the question that invited it.

      His colleagues had his coordinates, he was almost certain. It was a matter of who found him first, his people or theirs. He had nothing to eat or drink, and though he was not hungry, he was thirsty. Maybe the ant would bring him something to drink. Ants know how to carry heavy loads. A thimbleful of water, sir? he asked the ant. The ant wiggled its antennae, the grass rippled.

      --Oh, forget it, he said.

      Maybe he had a toothpick on him. That would alleviate the thirst and help the time along. His fingers worked through the pockets of his flight vest and touched one by one his possessions. They weren't numerous. His medical kit, his map, his survival knife, his Colt .45 automatic, his bartering gold, his blood chit--a piece of silk folded into a wad with a message printed on it in several languages asking whoever could read it to help the pilot. And here was his pointee-talkee, the phrase book the air attache had given him back in the capital of Vientiane, a bad joke really, the YEAH RIGHT, DREAM ON book he called it, using the same name he once used, upon his discovery that God was dead, for the Bible. The pointee-talkee had English phrases printed on the left-hand pages and Vietnamese and Lao translations on the right. Phrases like "I am hurt, please get me to a safe place, you will be rewarded." Phrases that were likely never to save a single soldier. It was common knowledge the enemy did not bother taking prisoners in Laos. Not a matter of sadism but rather convenience, as there were neither contingencies nor facilities for prisoners here. It was understood that if you went down and you were captured you would not be officially recognized as having had anything to do with anything. Your biography would be rewound to point of departure from Vietnam and odds were you would just flat disappear as if you never existed.

      So much for the pointee-talkee and the blood chit.

      Then he slept, then he woke.

OVERHEAD THE BEAUTIFUL STARS flickered and aligned themselves into patterns. Kip lay like a child on his back and began to count them. He tried to think of all the different worlds at war up there in the black spaces between the twinkling suns. He wondered if someone were lying in a place foreign to them on one of those worlds, looking out into the universe too, wondering what his fate would be, counting the stars to while away the long, long night. This idea pleased him. Stars were ever wonderful medicine. As a boy, when he was sick in bed, he would do this, count the many white grains of light in the heavens above his window.

      Home, heavens. What he would give right now to get back home. But what home?

      Home here was called spook heaven, a chaos of enterprise. A gathering place where people of such different backgrounds were tossed together into one grand ferment. Boys chewed opium in the open-air market, girls sold cucumbers and larp and blue eggs. Hmong lived in makeshift huts fashioned of petrol drums and torn parachutes, of sticks and rice sacks. Piglets and chickens walked the runway lined with refugee shacks and hovels which constituted the most pitiful provisional borough he'd ever seen, whose populace was driven here by the secret war, driven into what was nothing less than a political leprosarium. His heart broke as he walked along, but it also beat to a memory of such a familiar rhythm.

      Like Los Alamos, Long Tieng was nicknamed Shangri-La. Like Los Alamos, it was cradled by mountains and hastily built in order to win a war from an odd angle. Shangri-La, poor James Hilton, the memory of his mountaintop movie utopia was once more dragged through the muds of irony. As with Los Alamos, spook heaven was no Shangri-La.

      None of this was lost on Kip. Los Alamos, the most secret place in the world when he was born. Long Tieng, Laos, the most secret place on earth during the Vietnam War, his war, now that he was a man.

      The words had something eerie in common. What was it about them? LAOS, LOS ALAMOS. He wrote them with his finger in the air. LOS ALAMOS, LAOS. And he saw it there, so perfectly apt. The word LAOS was hidden twice inside the words LOS ALAMOS. Laos, Los Alamos.

      He slept, and then he woke.

THE ANT HAD BROUGHT HIM WATER and, as he drank, the ant spoke of William Blake who had written a poem about a fly.

      --"I dance and dream and sing," said the ant, "Till some blind hand shall brush my wing." He may have understood flies, but he never wrote about ants. We were beyond his comprehension.

      --I never would have thought you'd know so much about such things, Kip marvelled.

      The ant demurred.

      When Kip thanked him for the water, the grass laughed a little, and the ant began to laugh along with it.

      --You're drinking air, fool, the grass said, finally.

      When Kip reached out to crush the ant, it was gone, of course. And when he looked at the blades of grass, he saw that they were only blades of grass. He clutched his gun, dear teddy bear, to his heart.

      He slept. Then he woke.

TIGERS, he remembered. They had smartassed about it back in Vientiane. There were many tigers out here in the mountains. It was a joke among the pilots: what more brutal fate than to survive a crash and escape capture, only to be eaten by a tiger out in the jungle. Tyger, tyger, burning bright, he thought. In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?

      The grass had sharp edges. Either that or his skin had thinned during these past hours.

      Predawn. Quieter than ever. The eastern sky was just beginning to brighten, however dully, and the stars had begun to fade under a thickening cover of clouds. It threatened rain, he could smell the moisture. The breeze freshened. His cheek tingled most when its damp flesh faced south. Wind from the south always boded evil in the old romance novels. Soon enough it began to sprinkle. Weather would keep the rescue choppers grounded. That is, if there were any rescue choppers.

      It was time to get moving. He didn't move.

      The clouds continued to lighten.

      Someone quite nearby coughed.

      Kip's stomach began to grind. He didn't breathe.

      A caterpillar of some sort climbed with mechanical vitality over a spear of crushed grass several inches from his eye.

      His finger tightened on the trigger.

      He waited. Nothing happened. Had the cough come from his own mouth? Perhaps he had drifted off to sleep yet again, despite his efforts, and despite his unwonted anguish--anguish more than fear or dread, almost a form of sorrow or a kind of regret, regret because in his progressive delirium he had come upon the hard fact that he was here because he had put himself here.

      --What the fuck, he said.

      The ant was there again and seemed to agree with him. It wiggled its antennae, like a rigid semaphorist.

      --Give it to me straight, Kip beckoned.

      The ant did not reply.

      Kip, stop flowing man, he thought. But keeping his mind steadied was like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall.

      Then it happened. The hand on his shoulder was real, very real, and grasping him. As the fingers tightened he resigned himself to the worst. The ant was gone, the grass was gone, the stars were gone, Blake was gone.

      And as he turned to face who held him in his grasp he thought, though not in words, Secrets beget secrets, but also remind us of what we know too well.

TRINITY FIELDS is available in paperback from Penguin Books, $12.95,
ISBN 0-14-024013-6. Cover photograph, "Rain Broom," copyright 1987 by
Barbara Van Cleve.