Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [101]
“I never was much of a housekeeper.”
“Me either.”
“Come on, you had that fieldhouse looking sharper than I’ve ever seen it.”
“I did it for Sarah. Left to my own devices, I doubt I’d have the place looking that good.”
Kip wondered why he just lied to Delfino. He’d been questioning all the way down why he had begun to fabricate a little of this and that about his past. Embellishments more than lies, but not his usual truths, the truths that Wagner had sworn would always set him free.
Kip had insisted, for instance, when Delfino came to the fieldhouse to fetch him earlier that day, that he’d slept like a log. Why bother with such baloney when he damn well hadn’t slept at all but instead spent his final night in Nambé sick as a dog, and haunted by the foreboding that Ariel was somewhere nearby?
Wagner had instructed him to feel such things in his bones, but Kip was never able to until he lost that segment of his finger. It didn’t even happen in a combat situation, but while helping a crew chief load a rocket on his Birddog.
—You heard of ghost limbs? his guru once asked. —People who reach out to shake someone’s hand with an arm they lost years ago? Well, now you’ve got a ghost limb, my man. Use it to good purpose.
Just as some people predict the weather by what they feel in their joints, Kip, under Wagner’s outrageous tutelage, studied his hands for meaning in the world. His missing finger segment often told him more than he wished to know, especially when the flashbacks came, forcing him to relive radical scenes of war, his own lifelong war. He learned to anticipate these nightmares, learned how to handle them. But what he never learned to handle was the inarguable fact that his deeper Vietnam, his saddest Laos, was nothing if not his irremediable abandonment of Ariel. What he’d done to himself, he forgave himself. But Ariel—he had to admit that he had never learned self-charity when it came to her. God knows he’d tried. Tried hard, tried often. He’d made his gesture to contact Brice, meet with the man. Nothing had come of it, not even what would’ve been the easiest closure—death in the desert, or in the Montoyas’ barn, or up at Los Alamos. Three years had passed and the gambit failed. There was only this left to do now. Nambé was over; Los Alamos was over.
And it was of Los Alamos that Brice too thought at that moment, looking down into the city street. Brice who, having gotten off the phone with his wife, was compelled to get out into the night. His shirt was untucked, his khakis rumpled, and he wore no socks with his shoes. He didn’t care what he looked like. The air outside was dense and rubbery. His head ached all of a sudden. He decided to walk a few blocks to a bar. A drink, a pointless conversation with some fellow seated next to him. He walked uncertainly among Friday night couples back to the apartment, legs heavy—heart, too.
His sister heard the answering machine engage. In the few meager moments that lapsed as his message unreeled, she tried to decide whether to leave her news about Ariel—Charlie and Sam having, despite their assurances of secrecy, filled her in. Maybe it would be better for him to hear it on tape, impersonal and chaste. That way he’d have time, she thought, to process his humiliation, yes, before getting back to her. She prepared her abbreviated speech, awaiting the tone, but started when Brice interrupted his own recorded voice, saying, “Hello, hang on.”
“Brice, it’s Bonnie Jean.”
“What’s happened?”
“Why do you always think something’s happened when I call?”
“Because you don’t call unless something’s happened.”
Bonnie cut loose not just with her news from New Mexico but her opinion that his having kept Ariel’s real paternity a dirty secret all these years was beneath comment.
“Then why are you commenting?” he asked. Brice’s face felt as if it were on fire. Who on earth did this woman think she was? Arbiter of all things ethical, maven of morality? Come on, already. He should