Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [135]
“The fieldhouse in Nambé was abandoned. This here wasn’t.”
Marcos shrugged off his missed shot at levity. To Ariel he said, “So what is it?”
“What is what?”
“Your favorite color.”
“Paisley,” she said.
“Come on.”
“Really, I like them all.”
“That’s cheating.”
“But it’s the truth. Truth isn’t cheating.”
They worked on, taking occasional breaks to step outside and listen to the night. Nothing stirred other than the occasional waterfall of wind down a stone crevasse.
An hour later they stopped. Although it was colder this night than last, the dust they had raised in the sala sent them back outdoors coughing, and they collected around a fresh-stoked bristling fire, sitting in their makeshift bedrolls. Ariel listened to Delfino muse while Marcos drifted off to sleep by the flames that flickered across the old man’s eyes. For her it was a way of pushing back the dilemmas she would soon have to face. David more distant than ever. Her pregnancy so speculative that the fetus might as well be residing in another womb. Yet with every passing day it took greater hold of her, whether or not she willed it out of mind. At what moment had it graduated from blissfully undifferentiated tissue, from the androgynous, to take on female or male characteristics? Would it be a girl or boy? Would she or he have brown eyes at birth, rare in babies but not without precedent, given that Ariel herself had been born with them? Jessica had told her that at the hospital they’d tickled her toes when she was asleep, just to wake her up so they could marvel at those brown eyes. Please stop it, she thought, and said “Really?” to Delfino, not knowing what he’d been saying these past fleeting moments.
“This land here,” he said, bringing her back into his purview, “was always a land rich in argument, if nothing else. You might not be able to get a good crop, a strike of gold, a drink of cold water, but you could always get yourself a good fight, goddamn guaranteed.”
He spoke of this century, the last century, the century before. Fighting and warring made up the history of most populated scraps of land in this fighting earth. Take this particular stretch of gypsum sand and dead playas and craggy lavabeds and broiling summers—you’d think there wasn’t much point fighting over such a desolation. But people have come here from kinder places than this, and what for if not to fight. “You know what pyrite is?”
“Fool’s gold?”
“Iron disulfide, fool’s gold. In the seventeen nineties some idiot French priest comes into this valley and what does he do but turn himself into a gold miner. Lost Padre, they called his strike. The fact nobody ever found either him or his mine never stopped people from killing each other trying.”
What they were doing here had been done before. That was on the other side of Little Burro, Lady Bug, Skillet Nob.
A woman named Mary McDonald and her uncle Dan had gone into the range without permission, from up off Route 380. Got all the way in to their ranch, quite near Trinity Site itself—a ranch that had once been the homestead of Mary’s father, Dan’s brother George, himself a briery ranchman. What nettled the authorities was that Mary and Dan managed to settle into the old place for a good three days before they were discovered trespassing. Niece and uncle had built a fence around the house and when the rangers showed up to escort them out, Uncle Dan brandished his shotgun and Mary sighted down her thirty-thirty rifle and told them to stand away. As fate would have it, one of the guards had unsuccessfully courted Mary back when they were in high school.
In the calmest voice he could summon, he said, —Come on, Mary, now put that gun down.
—Stand back, she says.
—Well, I’m here to take you two back home.
—We are home, was what Mary said.
—Aw, be reasonable. You know you can’t stay out here.
—We’re staying, says Mary and raises her rifle and trains it right in his eye.
—Now Mary, you know you wouldn’t shoot me. We go back too far.
—Step