Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [115]
“Wouldn’t mind trying one of them on for size,” Marcos said.
“They’d break you like a twig,” said his uncle.
Ariel found herself wondering whether this jostling ride might not cause a spontaneous miscarriage, a thought that made her feel odd, unhappy even. She was startled by how successful she’d been, these past days, at suppressing the pregnancy. Ignoring it, hoping it would pass? Not really; it flitted at the fringes of her consciousness. She’d been thinking about it, just not with her mind.
The three continued west. Heading along the farthest stretch of the lavaflow, they made their way toward its tip where they’d tack west through a nick in the mountains, between the fancifully named Hog Sup Spring and Moya, toward a box canyon nestled against the steep Oscura. This last had sheltered it from the famous blast that occurred a mere eight miles due west, on David McDonald’s ranch back in the forties.
More low hogbacks like granite swells thrust upward into the waning light. Under the hooves of their horses crunched the sweet gypsum that looked like baked sugar and smelled a little like it, too. Or warm frost on pinkbrown crockery. For more than an hour they didn’t speak. As the darkness deepened, the micaed sky grew closer, or seemed to, lending credence to Wernher von Braun’s dream that the postwar rockets he launched from this very valley would “pave a road to the stars.” A gentle wind whipped over the desert crust, warm then cool. At the travelers’ backs the Sacramentos and last lights of Carrizozo sank into the gloom, and ahead, too, the night took up residence. Full moon rose.
With her free hand, Ariel snapped up her jacket. Where was Kip in all this? He’d been caught off base before. Trained as an insurgent, he’d surely been downed behind enemy lines and in places so dark—in spookdom’s sense of the word—that knowing your ass from a hole in the ground made less than no difference to the elements or the adversary. She glanced around, having heard an unfamiliar noise—though none of these noises was familiar—and, being startled, wanted to identify its source.
Nothing there, nothing. She pulled a deep breath through her nostrils, threw her head back on her shoulders, and exhaled upward through pursed lips. An old trick of hers to exorcise fear. She wondered how Granna was faring, hoped she wasn’t worried or angry. She wished she could have called from the bungalow but could no more risk telling Granna where she was than Marcos could Sarah. Were Brice and Jessica on their way to Los Alamos? Inhale, exhale.
Composure provisionally regained, she faced forward as her horse walked, following at some distance now the packhorse whose tail whipped like a broken clock weight, Marcos having passed her. As her resolve returned she made faces in the dark, stuck her tongue out at the moon. Orion was up, her favorite constellation, still a little faint across the cold screen of heaven. Orion who always seemed the model of tenacity, never quite closing the permanent chasm that the earliest astronomers had set between him and his beloved Pleiades. Yet he never stopped trying, did he. Never despaired of catching up with the other stars. Arms raised high, legs striding, he marched his way across the black infinities each and every night. She’d learned to tell what time it was, when she was a girl, by the seasonal position of Orion out the farmhouse window. Another neat trick, and sometimes as useful as blowing her fears through pursed lips right back to where they came from.
That made her smile. Good Orion, his sword twinkled and girdle shimmered, still low in the sky. Kip, what are you really doing out here? Can’t you for once tackle your own war? Must you always run off to fight the next man’s?
Time passed in a fixed kind of way, passed without really moving forward. Ariel guessed it must be ten or eleven, though some few high clouds were still tinted by weird dusk hues, like a desert aurora borealis. She saw shadowy waves of grama grass