Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [29]
He had many weaknesses, as he would have been first to admit, but in spite of every effort to push her out of mind, his greatest remained Ariel. She circled him, influencing his tides of thought, even as she began to seem imaginary rather than the only flesh relative he had left on earth. Because he knew Ariel would never have anything to do with him, or because he couldn’t help himself, he found he was drawn to Franny Johnson. In Franny he divined a similar yet different kinship. He had no idea what all this meant but felt somehow paternal toward her from the first time they met, at the convalescent center. She herself recognized a conversant hiddenness in Kip’s eyes, the eyes of a fellow runner. When Franny shook his parchment-dry hand the day they were introduced, she saw in those ancient eyes something difficult to define.
For one worn down by life, Kip had seemed unwontedly spirited when Franny asked him about his past. Presaging their Roadrunner evenings, he told her and Marcos he had been everywhere they could find on a map. Forty days in God’s dark desert and then some. He cobbled together a mosaic, one she hoped was true if only because someone should live such an audacious life.
Nor did he concoct a boring spreadsheet of triumphs. Rather, the reverse. He’d failed once as a cowboy in Arizona and again in Argentina. Been a failure as a stevedore on a rustbucket registered in Holland and chartered up beyond Yankutat Bay, where retirees cruised to see whales and polar bears and vast chunks of million-year-old ice sliding off floes into the cold black Alaskan water.
That was only the geographic As. Bangkok, Beirut briefly. Camotlán de Milleflores, never making money at any turn. He was once so poor he drove stolen cars from the States to Mexico, where they were sold then repurchased for cash under the table, driven back, and finally resold to the border dealerships from which they originated. He never ran drugs, never ran guns. In the course of his turbulent journey he gave away everything he ever owned.
“Really?” she asked.
“Sure really. I don’t own one damn thing.”
“I mean, really did you drive stolen cars across the border?”
He shrugged. “Despicable episode. Better to fail at the worst legit job than succeed at stupidity like that.”
He had once given up everything—whatever everything meant—to go follow the dream of living alone in a stone cottage in Newfoundland. Worked as a lighthouse keeper on a rock island.
“Two months out, one week ashore.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“I got bored with the company I was keeping.”
All three smiled, though Franny sensed at the time that William’s anecdotes were as fragile as his health. Still, she couldn’t be sure. Her perception of this man as a fellow counterfeit acquired its own dubiety, since the stories he so freely reeled off seemed just too far outside the realm of possibility to be falsehoods.
Now he lived at Rancho Pajarito. Ailing William had metamorphosed into Kip the late-blooming ranch hand, frail but sailing forward. A phoenix, Sarah dubbed him. Anything but counterfeit, he was yet mysterious to Franny. Not given to chisme, she was no meddler but