Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [116]
She said yeah.
When he leaned forward to light a cigarette, she saw in his match-lit profile the same look of apprehension she sensed had begun to mark her own face. Had the curious effect of making her feel calmer. “Ride with me a while till it narrows up again,” he said.
The intruders were perhaps six, seven miles in before they caught sight of yellow headlamps to the south. You could see things a long way off in this flat if steppelike place, and it was hard to judge distances at night. The lights, however, were moving toward them.
Delf hushed his horse. His companions came up from behind and halted on either side. For long minutes they sat, fixed on the advancing bright-white eyes of the patrol truck.
“This is why I didn’t want you to come.”
“That them?” Marcos asked his uncle.
“Don’t see who else it would be.”
“Here we go, then,” said Marcos.
“I think you and your friend ought to just turn around and get back out of here while the getting is good.”
“No way.”
“Ariel?”
“Sorry, can’t.”
The rugged plain before them was a patchwork of prickly pear, of lechuguilla and razory greasewood. Crosscut by abrupt cuestas, sudden deep gulches, berserk cracks in the pathless earth, it was tough enough to negotiate on horseback and all but untraversable in a man-made vehicle. That much they had going for them, didn’t they? Still, the rangers probably had a thousand service roads carved out back here.
Delfino had often crossed this uncharted tract in the early days and was confident that they could make it in the dark without much difficulty so long as they weren’t goaded too far off course—in which case they’d never arrive in time to secure Dripping Spring before dawn, square away horses and supplies, paint their signs, and be ready for the delegation that would soon show up, angry and very armed.
The packhorse snorted, unnerved by the lull. The lights sometimes disappeared, then reappeared, like some lidded beast blinking. Ariel asked why they kept turning off their lights.
“They’re not. Just dropping into arroyos, coming back out.”
More minutes. The lights were distinct now one from the other, and less yellow, more white. One vehicle only; the proximity of the headlamps, high on mounts, it seemed, like plowlights, suggested a Hummer. Two men, five at the most.
“How far off are they?”
“Few miles.”
“They’re coming pretty fast.”
Delfino watched.
“They know we’re here.”
“Why shouldn’t they,” he said. “We still haven’t broken any law. Just night riders rambling.”
Ariel had questions but didn’t ask them.
“Okay,” Delfino reflected. “Let’s cut back. I got an idea.”
They retraced their trail several hundred yards, then several hundred more. Ahead, a meteorite stabbed the sky with its silver needle. Alluvial aprons fanned down from the Oscuras into this higher topography, and the three of them soon reached what was a periodic streambed. From there they drove the horses northwest to a hard rise like a curved step that marked the edge of the malpais. Lavastone glistened under the light of the moon, as if damp with dewy crystals.
“We’ll cross through here. This’s the narrowest part of the lava field.”
“Hold on, hold everything.”
Delfino waited for his nephew to continue.
“We’d never get through here in the daytime, let alone now.”
“We’ll get through.”
“Ariel?”
“I’m willing if you are.”
“Delf, you’re sure?”
His uncle was already out into the volcanic stonefield. Ariel and Marcos pushed on, caught him up.
With no inkling that Ariel’s father had shared the same thoughts earlier that day, Marcos speculated