Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [110]
He more or less repeated these words now to Kip, who stood over the buck, having thrown a length of rope and the scavenged plywood on the ground beside it.
—You told your mother, didn’t you, Kip said.
—No.
An endless quarter of an hour passed from the time Kip took the hacksaw to a point midway down the length of the neck—Brice held up the buck’s heavy head while staring away at the canyon cliffs, at clouds, at anything that might distract him from Kip’s dissection—to a moment when the head separated from the body. Kip tied a knot around the base of the antler rack and hung it as high as he could in the scorched ponderosa.
Once they’d finished, Kip asked Brice, —You sick? You’re white as dried spit.
Brice said, —And you’re soaked red with blood.
After Kip got caught climbing through his bedroom window that night, he found himself marching down into Bayo Canyon for a third time, though now with flashlights and accompanied not by Brice but his father, who was livid. The apparition of the buck head swaying helplessly in the warm nocturnal breezes was startling even to Kip. Its eyes were blanker than before, if that was possible. The poor thing looked deader than when he’d decapitated it. His father made him bury the buck in the sandy canyon. Kip dug for most of the night to make the hole. After he finished, as father and son were hiking back out of the canyon in light morning rain, his old man uncorked that line about every animal’s death bearing the promise of one’s own. A week passed before he and Brice were allowed to see each other again, and when they finally did, Kip offered up the saying as if it were his own formulation. They were sitting on the front stoop of Brice’s house.
—I’d have helped you dig the grave if my parents let me, you know. I guess your dad wanted you to do it yourself.
—Well, I didn’t need nobody’s help. I got it done on my own.
—It wasn’t a very good idea in the first place.
—You’re wrong. It was a great idea.
—What was so great about it? I still think people shouldn’t have dead animals hung on their walls.
—They should. Everybody should.
—I don’t get you, boy.
—I guess it’s over your head.
—What’s over my head?
—Besides the sky?
Brice laughed, but Kip didn’t, so Brice stopped.
It was then that Kip intoned, in a voice more or less replicating the pastor’s at Los Alamos’s interdenominational chapel, —The death of every creature is the promise of your own. That’s why I wanted to put that buck on the wall, boy. To help us remember.
—Don’t call me boy, shouted Brice.
—Remember it, boy, Kip said, though now he himself remembered the thought and its narrative, as he sat under a scorching sun that dazzled and punished all beneath it save for this gemsbok, dead on the desert floor, which reminded him of the buck they’d once found in Bayo. Kip had repeated his father’s words then as a kind of threat, but today they returned to him with their original import.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the present carcass, and perhaps to the one upon which he’d visited such indignity way back. Wagner always liked that story, commended his father for both his method of atonement and the plainspoken philosophy of coda.
What Brice and Kip had discovered, though they hadn’t had the knowledge to discern it then, was far more sinister than a hairless patch on a buck’s haunch, down there in the canyon where Project waste was laid to rest in thousands of unmarked shallow sepulchers, and where its authors’ wilder children played their private games. This oryx gazelle was half bald itself, but surely any connection between it and that dead buck lay exclusively in Kip’s imagination, as he, like it, was little more than a footnote in the history of restricted-entry installations.
Kip didn’t really want to touch the hollowed shell of this antelope-like creature, but he found it impossible not to. He laid his hand, palm open and quaking before