Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [11]
Should have been as simple to answer as it was fair to ask. Yet Brice McCarthy hesitated, sensing his life was somehow falling out of its precarious balance. “I answered that question over twenty-five years ago, Kip. The answer is the same now as it was then. I wish you’d believed me. You might have spared yourself a lot of useless pain. Assuming you have suffered because of it.”
“Assuming I have suffered …”
“You were wrong not to believe me.”
“It’s true,” he said, which again disarmed his friend. “But does she know about me? is what I’m asking. Does she know who her father was—is, I mean.”
She did not. She had grown up in the dark, kept there as much by Kip as Brice and her mother, Jessica Rankin, the woman both men had loved. Wasn’t it time to tell Ariel of her tangled heritage?
After securing Brice’s pledge, Kip pulled a bound ledgerbook from a leather satchel that lay beside him on the grass. “Something I’d like for Ariel to have, if you might see fit to give it to her,” and handed it to him, along with a tattered envelope. Brice placed them on his lap as the sun lowered itself slowly behind the tawny notch and hills that rimmed this valley, one hard ray illuminating his friend’s drawn face. He asked, as delicately as he could, about his failing health.
War, Kip said, was the cause. He’d been poisoned by yellow rain—poor man’s atom bomb, they called it—that the Communists had dropped over the mountains of Laos. Not unlike the black rain that drizzled on Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bomb their own fathers helped create. “It comes in other colors: blue rain, red rain, white rain, black rain, too, a colorful rainbow of venom… . You begin to bleed, from your nose and mouth and ears. You cry blood. And I’m one of the lucky ones because I didn’t get that big a dose of it.” Kip described how after the fall of Saigon he stayed behind illegally to help Hmong refugees flee the Pathet Lao by escaping into northern Thailand. Far up in the highlands, he was visiting a thatched encampment filled with poor farmers and their children when the attack came. Aerial poisoning by choppers. He’d been a peripheral victim and wounded ever since.
Brice said, “I always thought it would be Los Alamos that got us. You remember where we used to play when we were kids? I wonder about some of those canyons, what they buried down there before they knew more about radiation.”
“I’m probably sick from that war, too. Who knows. Maybe I’m just worn out and it has nothing to do with rain of any color, just the marathoner coming to his wire a little earlier than others. Strange race where you lose by coming in first.”
As the afternoon drew down, these two men who’d been estranged for half their lives told each other about what they had done, where they’d been, what they believed. They talked about Hill people, as Los Alamos natives called themselves, and others they’d known from college days in New York. With every passing story, the natural rhythms of friendship reemerged, the way a wilted flower pulled from the garden and tossed onto the compost heap will sometimes take root and rebloom.
Brice nodded toward the ledger, though he had already guessed what Kip was passing along to Ariel. His father’s Los Alamos notebook. Kip claimed not to have read the thing, saying he couldn’t decipher the physics and theoretical stuff—Ariel might not either. But interspersed with the math and science were personal diaries and some ink drawings that would give her the chance to know her third grandfather a little.
“Your father was a good man.”
“Both our fathers were.”
“Hard for kids to know things like that at the time.”
“Hard for us, anyway.”
In the envelope was a key to the storage locker where Kip had stowed his parents’ possessions after the accident that took their lives. He’d kept up with the bills, he said, but had no idea what was in there