Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [130]
“With him?”
“Of course with him, with all of us.”
“It’s strange talking to somebody’s daughter and knowing the father better than the daughter does, but you ought to trust me on this. If and when Kip turns up he won’t leave until he and Delfino figure they got what they came here for.”
“Stubborn.”
“As a jack mule.”
The water rolled at a boil and Ariel shook instant into the aluminum pan, then poured the coffee into two tin cups. The fire hissed as if some of the greener fronds were surprised to find themselves being burned.
“We don’t know each other, either,” Ariel said.
“We don’t, but why do you say that?”
“No reason. I guess a person just doesn’t expect to find herself in a situation like this with someone she hardly knows.”
“I’m not that hard to get to know. A lot of people where you come from would consider my life really boring. I grew up in Nambé, still live there. I want to do what my father’s always done for a living. Want to get married someday and have some kids who can either become ranchers or writers or doctors. Just not lawyers. I don’t know that many people. Fact is, I know more horses than people.”
“People are overrated.”
“And horses are overpriced.”
“However boring you may think all that is, from where I’m sitting it sounds like unadulterated sanity.”
“I didn’t say I thought it was crazy. Just boring. You’re from New York. That’s the opposite of boring.”
“My father’s a lawyer, by the way. Or, strictly speaking, my legal father, so to say.”
“As lawyers go, I’m sure he’s one of the good guys,” Marcos said. “And if I’ve learned one thing about Kip, it’s never to bet against him. Probably true about both your fathers.”
“I wish I’d come looking for him sooner.”
“You don’t seem to be what my mother calls the wishtful type.”
Wishful plus wistful—a coinage worthy of Granna. “Wistfulness isn’t one of my usual traits, but at least then I would have found him at Pajarito working with you on that fieldhouse, instead of probably not finding him down here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Coulda, shoulda, woulda,” Marcos said.
“Sarah again?”
“Sarah.”
They continued to talk for a while, with surprising ease given the exigency that brought them together there, beneath the growing stars and deepening darkness. A wildcat screeched somewhere up the draw. The bats were out, cloaked in dun velvet, stirring the night. Delfino would soon be rousing.
“Listen, Ariel. I saw a place, couple hundred yards north, where the saddle ridge steepens to a kind of overlook. What I’m thinking is, why don’t we hike up and see if there’s any lights out on the basin.”
They walked by flashlight, Marcos leading the way. Every modest sound—the disturbed stone, the wingbeat of a burrowing owl—registered with grand definition. The climb took what seemed like hours, but when they reached the summit of this foothill saddle and peered out over the night desert, what they witnessed was astonishing.
Moondrenched earth, prehistoric and preadamite. A long garden, the snake offering its pomegranate of knowledge from a perch in the saguaro de vida. Caliban the peccary, Sycorax the scorpion. Ariel lost her footing, nearly slipped into the vortex of this vista.
“Shouldn’t do this, most likely,” said Marcos, shocked by the immensity of his voice in this rare place. He waved his flashlight like a wand, back and forth, beaconing its sightless eye over the basin floor where another eye might see it. “But if Kip spots us, that’s good. And if the White Sands people spot us, that’s good, too. Am I wrong?”
“You couldn’t be more right,” answered Ariel, who waved her own flashlight and began crying out from this aerie. Marcos soon joined her, so that Kip’s name flooded the immediate world.
Hard to believe that once upon a time Brice McCarthy had lain at night in an apartment in Morningside Heights, his thin mattress on the floor stacked with textbooks, way too wide awake, enduring the difficult music of Kip Calder and his new girlfriend Jessica Rankin making love in an adjacent bedroom.