Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [136]
“That’s a good story,” Ariel said, seeing that Delfino had paused to think. “What happened to them?”
“Well, they got talked into leaving. Told their case would get A-One priority consideration in Washington. Surrendered their guns and left the way they’d come. They probably had their suspicions it’d be the last they’d ever see of the place, but their hopes were raised just high enough so they left figuring they’d won the battle and maybe were on their way toward, well, not winning the war, maybe, but at least reaching some kind of peace treaty. An agreement they could live with.”
“And?”
“Both of them are dead now. One of cancer, one of heartbreak. Government still owns their land. Squatters with the biggest guns on earth.”
Delfino sat for a while, watching the fire dance. Then spoke again.
“The best was old John Prather, though. Gave the feds conniption fits. His place was down south, below the Sacramentos. Scrappy land, couple dozen thousand acres of it between what he’d been deeded and what he leased. Like a lot of cowmen down here, his people come over from Texas in the eighteen eighties and built something out of nothing. Less than nothing. Agnes always said Prather was kind of Egyptian, the way he managed rainwater. Dug long earth catch-sinks with nothing more than a team of horses and an iron follow-about plow. He dug a thousand-foot well while he was at it. Anybody out there thinks they know hard work can try that sometime. Let them try and make a living from raising desert cattle. Prather did.”
Delfino reminisced about how the United States district court in Albuquerque had, in October 1956, ruled in favor of the condemnation proceedings initiated against Prather by the army and ordered him to vacate his land by the end of March the following year. The government needed to annex his property for expansion of its missile testing and military training procedures. Prather wouldn’t budge. He told the army boys to bring in a coffin, said he’d rather die at home than become some tumbleweed blown around by their hot air.
His case had been of interest to Agnes and Delfino Montoya, to people like Hop Lee and cross John Harliss, to all the dispossessed ranchers in the area. Nike missiles were the future, not cows. It was a Cold War whose instruments of mitigating deterrence were being readied in the burning furnace of the Jornada and Tularosa deserts. Old Prather told them to come on over and shoot him. They offered him a couple hundred thousand bucks, plus he could keep his house if he didn’t mind living in a live-ammunition zone. Didn’t interest him. Some United States deputy marshals were sent in to coax him out, no luck. Held out to the bittersweet end.
“They finally killed him, then?”
“Course they did, but slow-like.”
“You mean—”
“Heart or cancer, I forget which.”
“You really admired him.”
“Admired, hell. I wish I was John Prather.”
Ariel lay forward in her bedroll to face the tapering fire. Her head was too warm, but her legs were cold, the blankets dampened from night dew. She sensed that by sometime the next day all this was bound to come to a head. The military police had to be onto them. If her augury about Kip’s being nearby proved wrong, then tomorrow would still bring a crisis, because she would have to leave Delfino to his own war, wouldn’t she? He would understand she had to go look for Kip, maniacal as it might sound. On the other hand, what’s a daughter if not someone who takes up the cause of her father? Especially a father who risked his life advocating. No, she’d stay put. Brice the advocate, Kip the advocator—sleep came over her in dark waves that washed these conflicted thoughts beneath them, even as Delfino told more stories.
Stories about how at a moment in history defined by communications, by digitalized and microprocessed interfacing, by information equals power, here where she and Marcos slept on the floor of the desert was a kind of human black hole, where the fracture between what was known within and what was known without