Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [120]
Wagner once told him, —The only thing that elucidates history is blood. Blood inherits and dispenses history better than ideas have ever done. You can learn ideas and forget them. Whereas blood you can never learn nor ever forget. Blood’s the remnant of all that every human ever accomplished. Pippers like blood, so do Jollys. Oscar Deuces love blood, so do Slicks. The machines that kill and the ones that try to save love blood, is all I am saying. Daisy Cutters were put here on earth to rid men of blood, and Fox Mikes to keep it in them. LAU-68s slay your bloody ass while Sandys try to save it. KIA. MIA. KBA. So many words for so many things, but at the end of the day there’s only one word, and it’s either flowing in your veins or going down with you back into the earth. Dirt knows better what to do with most men’s blood than the donors ever did. Remember that. And remember to make sure you use your pissant allotment for positive capable intercept operations, man. You copy, blood? You got the snot?
Kip’s pulse raced in his temples, pounded in his neck, and it was as if his grandparents and his mother and father and Wagner and Jessica and Brice and the Montoyas and, yes, Ariel, all of them were risen within him, demanding that he act in a way that would make them proud. Losing a little blood never hurt anybody. Get up and get on.
He walked calmly at a thousand feet or ten thousand, who could tell the difference? His blood took on a voice and the voice said simply, Do this. And if he sank to a knee or hesitated, the blood drummed with greater weight and his ears were so burdened with the music of his blood that he found himself paralyzed, shotgun butt hard to his shoulder, double barrels silverblue down the headline, the ghost in white walking straight into the V of his sights, his finger at the first trigger colder than if he had plunged it, along with hand and arm to the shoulder, into a winter fishing hole up in the high Truchas Mountains.
There was a time in Vientiane, after the West considered the war over and done with, when Wagner and Kip had this bicycle repair shop that served as a clandestine front to help Hmong out of Laos and over into Thailand. A matter of moving them from shithole to ratnest, as Wagner put it. Both men knew it was not healthy to develop a fondness for any of their entrusted wards, given the mission’s uneven success rate—the Mekong was a greedy river—and the absolute necessity that Wagner and Kip appear in the eyes of the Pathet Lao to be nonpartisan. Word of a capsized dugout, perhaps overloaded with Lao Sung desperate to get back to Tibet or North Myanmar, not realizing that the Communists would no more welcome them home than tolerate their Buddhism in the new Laos, naturally threw the estranged Ravens into miserable depression. Putting on a brave face, a countenance of ignorance or indifference, only made the job more trying. But imagine if one of the drowned had been, well, the object of an affection. No need to risk double disheartenments when so many individual failures came their way.
Wagner, not Kip, broke the rule once. A woman from Ban Huay Sai who had traveled with her family to Luang Prabang, where he first met her, then down to a safehouse outside the capital. She spoke French and was neither young nor pretty by any orthodox criteria. Her family was huge. Many cousins, many aunts and uncles, many sisters, though no brother. They were diverse in their religious beliefs, which was pretty unusual. Animists mixing with Buddhists and Christians. She told Kip, during the New Year celebration in April, that in her family they were always observing some holy day or other. —Toujours les Saints, toujours Dieux! A chaque saint sa chandelle!
A midnight Pathet Lao patrol intercepted their precarious raft just shy of the Thai border. It was July, middle of the wet season. Black low monsoon sky, no stars, and the river running high and inky.