Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [104]
“What am I supposed to tell her and Carl in the meantime, with you and Kip just disappearing like this?”
“You’re obviously a born liar, or else the great actress you always wanted to be.”
“That’s cruel.”
“Tell them whatever you want. I’m sure they’ll believe whatever you make up.”
“Please don’t shout.”
He turned and stared at her averted eyes. “You’re really from Gallup then?”
“Yes.”
“Your father, he didn’t die in Africa.”
Mary said nothing, just smoothed a wisp of hair behind her ear with a quaking finger.
“And your mother lives in Gallup, not Princeton.”
“I think so.”
“You think so.”
“I haven’t been in touch with her for a while.”
“Why not?”
Nothing. She held back tears because she didn’t want sympathy, didn’t want to be judged or misjudged by Marcos. Her face was rigid as a mask, her lips white, shoulders quaking. Kip had, in his way, warned her that this moment was inevitable. But he’d never intimated how she was to behave when it came.
“You’re in some kind of trouble?”
How she would have liked to laugh. “Other than this, of course not.”
“Don’t fucking say of course not. Nothing’s of course or of course not.”
A melancholy settled over the room for protracted minutes, then Mary asked, “What do you want to do?”
Marcos answered in so quiet a voice that she could hardly hear him, “I don’t know anything except I can’t let those stupid old fools go in there and get themselves killed.”
“I’m so sorry, Marcos.”
“Not half as sorry as I am.”
Mary placed her hand on his and as she did there came a knock on the curtained glass of their door, in the narrow alcove that gave onto the long, tiled portal. Sunset had palely lit the room through the casements—they hadn’t noticed—and now they sat in evening darkness. Neither moved. Marcos instinctively rubbed Mary’s hand, which was icy. Another knock.
“Now what,” he said.
“Marcos, you there?”
Sarah’s voice.
“What is it?” he asked, but his own voice didn’t carry.
“I’m so sorry, Marcos,” Mary repeated.
“Marcos?”
“Yes,” he answered, letting go of Mary’s hand and rising to open the door. Sarah stood on the other side of the screen. Drawn to the porch lamp, moths circled and arabesqued above her head. She was sorry to disturb him and Franny, but wondered if he knew where Kip happened to be tonight. She’d been down to the fieldhouse—no sign of him. There was someone here who had traveled a great distance to meet him, Sarah explained, as Marcos saw the face of a young woman behind his mother in the assembling shadows.
Part III
Jornada del Muerto
Nambé and New York
to Tularosa Basin
1996
THEY SET OUT from nowhere. The horses chuffed in protest when they backed them out of the rusty van along this unpeopled strait. They abandoned their truck and trailer in a sandy ravine beside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Saddled and outfitted, they rode along a grit service road that would take them through Willow Springs and west toward the red Oscuras. Jakes Hill receded, somewhere between Tularosa and Carrizozo, while before them silvergreen clouds crowned the sawtooth horizon. They saw pencil rain fall in spectral columns in the distance, evaporating before it ever reached the ground. They saw the last of the day’s small black birds pitching home like little rocks across the wide sky, and heard their meager peeping. Saw paloverde shrubs, solitary green dabs. And pink chaparral and soaptree yucca with its dried dead blossoms that looked like rattlesnake bellies reshaped into tapers. Saw backlit spiderwebs that looked like dreamcatchers woven in rabbit-brush spurs and creosote elbows. Here they passed the corpse of a black rubber auto tire. There they saw tiny dunes of sand populated by little yellow cushion plants in the vague violet shade of a tamarisk grove. They heard crickets trill and a kit fox yap as they caravaned past weathered telephone poles with clear glass insulators still in place from the forties, their wires long since snipped. They saw alkali that resembled frost on the pinkbrown desert