Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [114]
Nightfall continued to gather, though the sun ahead was still fiery in the cloud notches. They crossed through a dead grove of skeleton pistachio trees planted in hopeful rows and rode down through an acequia whose dried mud bed looked like a mass of broken plates. Illuminating twigs and the tracery of lifeless flowers with its fireworks as they made their way beyond the failed orchard, the bold clear hard dying sun also enkindled windows and metal roofs in the woeful hamlet of Willow Springs. Citron, marigold, clementine sang forth from glass shards and corrugated tin, all contrasted with the pale but deepening purple that settled over everything. To reach the confiscated property would take them all night. Delfino hoped to get there unaccosted, but didn’t presume they would. Why should they? While it ought to have been his face that glowed with the most faith, in fact it was Ariel’s. Maybe she was credulous, or good at ignoring her terror, or maybe her resolve simply ran so deep that she never considered the possibility they might not make it. Her dark eyes were now darker than the malpais that stretched ahead.
Once they rose up out of the shallow aqueduct, they passed by an abandoned morada, tumbledown and barren, its penitentes long dead and its wooden water tank buckled, sunken on timber knees as if in prayer for the souls of those who’d built it, wrongly certain it would hold up in such a cruel place as this. This holy house was now a place where young couples sometimes met to smoke, drink beer, make love in the litter of moonlight that glanced through chinks in its walls. Here the riders left the semblance of a road behind.
Westward again, having jogged north for a patch, they climbed a rise through a drift of stout cacti each crowned by dull red blooms that looked like perfumed skulls mortified by small spikes. Delfino turned to ascertain how much ground they’d covered. Willow Springs was about a mile behind already. Smoke from a chimney, or maybe from a barrel of trash on fire, lifted like a delicate finger to point at the first stars above. Ahead, a sundog flared so bright in the clouds that Ariel had to hold her palm up before her eyes. Noon at dusk, she thought. The world was like that here. Evening in one valley and daybreak the next valley over. Harsh drab scratchland here, a small lush oasis of stubborn life there, and beyond, pure white dunes or volcanic black or just plain gray desert ornamented by spindly cholla and saltbush like false rosemary. What would Jessica think, or Brice, or David, or anyone else who knew her? No one down here aside from these two men knew her right now, she realized. And they barely knew her, either. She’d had a few weeks of no one’s knowing her, or knowing more than some scant part of whoever she thought she was. Not that she could say she knew herself just now. Knowing thyself. Aristotle, old pal, was it even possible under the best of circumstances?
Pretty soon they would be entering the firing range. She felt weirdly exhilarated, oddly honored to be here, grateful for Marcos’s kindness toward her, his help in bridging her to Kip. Yet for all this nervous elation, the scene into which they were riding—with its dust-devil swale, its long mountains sinking into lavender shadow, its quills of radiance—didn’t seem real to her. Tularosa valley was vaster by far than any stretch of land she, or most anyone, had ever beheld. Mercuric spirit light seemed to pour down into the world with news of things to come. But here there was no virgin for a holy ghost to husband, nor any angels to descend on painted wings. This was a place angels would shun and spirits forgo. Martians might like it here. Or Beelzebub himself.
The crickets were ever-present, and sounded like miniature sleighbells a very long way from snow. A lean mottled mustang, then another, then seven more, wild horses speckled