Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [128]
Ariel heard her voice come back to her in echoes after she cried out, “Kip?” kip-epp-epp. “Kip Calder?” forming her hands around her mouth and directing her voice toward the cliffs in the box canyon. Marcos cried out “Kip” with her. They listened but no sound returned other than the aftermath of their own.
“Let’s see if we can’t help Delfino,” she said.
The floor of the collection tank next to the mill was cracked earth, crumbly as Sakrete, utterly porous and useless. Delfino thought water would seep through there faster than through regular ground. Didn’t bode well for there being anything wet in the cistern. The three of them peeled back layers of tin siding that had been laid over the artesian well, opened it, and stood back as dank, unmusty but stale air surfaced in a languid burst. That there was any odor at all was a good sign. A dry well would smell like sand, like nothing much. Expecting the worst, Marcos dropped a chunk of stone into the narrow hole. They heard not a damp thud but a small splash. Their faces broke into smiles. Some boiling, some iodine tablets, maybe some filtering through cloth, and the water would be potable.
“Let’s see if anything’s left inside.”
“Just hope it’s not a coyote den.”
As it happened, the house was unoccupied and barren. When the Montoyas had been forced to evacuate, they hadn’t been given much time to pack. Delfino had no precise memory anymore of what they left behind. Had the orphaned belongings disintegrated? Or did they reside now as souvenirs in barracks, or Quonsets, or wherever the people who ran this place lived? In either case, everything was gone and the questions, Delfino realized, weren’t even worth asking. The rooms were lifeless voids, covered in fine anemic silt, and were sun-blanched.
Quicker than the gone chattels, morning vanished, too. In the busyness of unpacking and then repairing what was absolutely essential to securing the place—they boarded windows, got the plank door on the front porch to work, barricaded rooms that had fallen into such desuetude as to be dangerous—in the bustle of getting the horses fed, watered, and put up in the scarecrow barn, and paying out their own crude barbed-wire fence around the conclave of buildings, making something of a stronghold, they began to note an important anomaly. And that was this: Still no rangers, no guards, nobody had come out to challenge them, trespassers on restricted government property. Not one soul, including Kip, who Delfino sensed really ought to be here by now, unless he was lost.
“Weird,” commented Marcos, who had rigged up a canvas dip pail for the well, which he now lowered to water level on a rope. “I got to confess. Yesterday when we were getting ready, I told myself, It won’t be you who unpacks this gear tomorrow night. It’ll be some MP laying our stuff out on a tarp so they can take photos of it for the trial. I even heard their questions. Where you folks think you’re headed? Montoya stead, we say. Ain’t no Montoya stead. Sure there is, up near Helms’s ranch by Dripping Spring, we say. Think you better come with us, they say. But at this rate,” Marcos went on, “we may wind up running out of food before they even realize we’re here.”
Ariel, having given up calling Kip’s name for the time being, walked over and sat against one of the saddles.
“Still no luck?” Marcos asked.
“No.”
“We’ll look for him once everything’s squared away.”
“He’s out there. I can feel him.”
“Me too,” offered Delfino.
“If he is, we’ll find him.”
They ate in what shade the hacienda offered from the unwavering hard light of postnoon. Exhaustion finally subdued them. Although they’d intended to stand watch in shifts, soon after lunch all three fell asleep in the front room.
Day became dusk. When Ariel woke up, the floorboards under her were uneven, splintery. Her tongue and lips were dry, her legs were sore, her back ached. Her eye settled on nothing familiar. Chinks in the rotted roof conceded tiny divots, creating a small primitive planetarium. Her last thought before dozing had been the same as her