Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [169]
Arraignments, bail, conditions for release—all the prelims transpired swiftly, which maybe gave him false hope the rest would as well. After a lot of wrangling, the charges against Ariel and Marcos were dropped, as were those against Kip. The latter was too ill to stand trial, and the former two, it was argued, had been at Dripping Spring not for the purpose of committing a crime, but to help mediate.
Delfino’s was a tougher problem, one that had everything to do with his shotgun having discharged, resulting in the endangerment of government officers. That he had nearly blown off his own head didn’t matter. He was lucky to be alive, but nobody forced him to do what he did. Brice was surprised to discover, however, that a lot of these White Sands people sympathized with the old-timers. Couldn’t doctor history, but the ranchers sure had gotten a damn raw deal back when. As it happened, no one had the stomach to put Delfino Montoya away.
The compromise they hammered out involved his committing to drop all further claims against White Sands or any governmental department or agency attached thereto, and never to trespass on the range again. In exchange, all charges against him would be dismissed, and under strict range supervision, the remains of his wife, Agnes Montoya, would be reinterred at the site of the couple’s former homestead. On his demise, Montoya himself would also be allowed a permanent resting place at Dripping Spring. Kip had asked to be buried there as well, and his request, too, would be granted, but that was to be that. “We’re not running some cemetery here, Mr. McCarthy,” one of the lawyers said, to which comment Brice wanted to retort, “That’s precisely what you’re running here, sir,” but restrained himself in the interest of settling his clients’ affairs. Nor would there be visiting rights for anyone wishing to place flowers of commemoration in the future. Just wasn’t in the cards. They were bending all the rules as it was.
Ariel reluctantly flew back east, knowing she had bent more than a few rules herself. She’d completely neglected her job, for one. Welcomed back to her manuscript-strewn office with greater forgiveness than seemed justifiable, she tried to reenter that world which only weeks before she’d inhabited like a sociable character in one of her more benign books. But it wasn’t her world anymore. She was sorry to resign, but did, and as she cleaned out her desk and bade goodbye to her colleagues, she was overtaken by an intuition that while she had no firm idea of what she was doing, the gesture was sufficient unto itself. She who never moved rashly was now expelling her past with heretical dispatch, and against the chances of no certain future. At least in borrowing her parents’ car—the Dart was still in Los Alamos, poor dusty warrior—and driving to the farmhouse, collecting David’s things, boxing them up, and sending them back to him, with “Forward If Necessary” written on the box, she declared one future finished. In a moment of madness, stone-cold sober on the back porch, gazing out into the hills of sugar maples some of whose leaves were just starting to turn, she dialed his number one last time, to let him know her plans. Not that she expected anything from him. To the contrary. A canned voice told her the number had been changed. Then another said unlisted.
During that aberrant September and into early fall, she seemed to live for word of Kip, of Sarah and Delfino. Above all of Marcos, who called most every night after she returned to New York, to hear about her day and tell her about his.
“Is the criminal of the household in?” he would begin.
“Speaking.”
Or else, “Is there a con around?”
“Who’s asking?”
“A pro.”
“Pro con?”
“Not very.”
Shuck and jive, meant perhaps to disburden the darker story behind their having met, not as any mockery of Delfino or Kip, rather as a language of bonding.
He called from the kitchen. It wasn’t hard to imagine him beside the refrigerator decorated with Polaroids and postcards, sitting on the hardwood counter—Sarah wished he would