Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [254]
Among the fountains of light that arched and showered down, intense green, red, yellow, and blue balls now burned in the air. Because he said nothing, and because she was ashamed of her outburst and afraid of silence, she said, shrugging out a little laugh, “How do they make all those colors?”
“Colors?” Frank said. “Metallic salts. The yellow’s sodium, the white’s magnesium. Red’s calcium, I think, and the green may be copper salts, maybe barium. I don’t really know. I’m no fireworks expert.”
“You’re an expert in so many things.” She felt almost as if she were going to vomit; she had to keep swallowing her Adam’s apple to keep it down. “I can’t imagine how a woman could have lived all those years in the canyon without her Corps of Engineers. That was the best time of all the West. I loved those years.”
He made a small indeterminate noise, hm or mm or ha. The light of a rocket two and a half miles away brushed his face with ghastly green. She saw it shine and fade in his eyes. “I didn’t come down here to see Oliver, you know.”
Almost to herself she said, “I know.”
“I came down hoping they’d all be gone to town but you.”
“Yes,” she said, though she felt she should not.
“I never see you any more.”
“But Frank, you see me all the time!”
“In a crowd. With the family. Always managing a houseful.”
“There’s been so much to do.”
“Well that will be changed, at least.”
His laugh was so short and unpleasant that it wrung her heart. The wretched ditch had changed him as it had changed them all.
Beyond his lean profile the lights were coming less thickly, as if both enthusiasm and ammunition had run out. The booming and crackling were dying down, but the reddish mist still hung above the town. Speaking away from her, indifferently watching the dying-down of the fire fountains, he said, “I miss the rides, do you? I miss sitting while you draw me. I miss talking to you. I could stand it if I could just be alone with you once in a while, the way it used to be.”
“But there were three whole years when you didn’t see me at all, and then more than a year when I was in Victoria.”
“Yes. And I’m a dead pigeon the minute I see you again, no matter how long it’s been. Remember that day in the canyon, just when you were getting ready to leave? I had myself all persuaded. You were a friend, no more. Then I looked up from that corral and saw you waving from the doorway and I blew down like an old shed. The whole place was abandoned, there was nothing but failure in sight, and there you were in your white dress looking as cool and immaculate as if you were just about to call on somebody. Going down with all flags flying, the way you would. I don’t know, you looked so brave and untouched up there on the hill, I . . .”
“Brave?” she said in a weak voice. “Untouched? Oh no!”
“Oh yes. You’re one thing I am an expert on.”
“There are no flags flying now.”
“Plenty in Boise. Hip hip hurrah. Statehood.”
She had to laugh. “Isn’t it ridiculous? Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it pitiful, even. Years ago, when we left you in Leadville and went to Mexico, I fell in love with Mexican civilization, and the grace of their housekeeping, and the romantic medieval way they lived . . .”
“I know. I read your articles. Down in Tombstone.”
“Did you? Oh, that makes me feel good. I was talking to you without knowing it. Then you remember those great houses we stopped at coming home, Queréndaro, Tepetongo, Tepetitlán, and the others. That’s what Oliver’s dreamed of making here. He wanted to build me such a place. Even the tile floors–those are Mexican. The stone and adobe house, and the way it nearly encloses a courtyard. It was going to enclose it completely some day–well, you remember from the canyon, when we used to plan it so carefully–so from the outside rooms we could look outward on this reclaimed desert, and from the inner rooms we’d see only the protected center–flowers, and stillness, and the dripping