Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [34]
Sure, she and Delfino wrote dozens of letters, to presidents and senators, representatives, secretaries and undersecretaries of the Department of Defense, a variety of officials in the army and the air force, and White Sands Proving Grounds folks, who were often sympathetic and always unhelpful. They penned articles for the Lincoln County News, sent letters to editors of distant newspapers. They organized meetings, coffees, discussion groups, even drear socials with the other 150 or so families similarly evicted. They waited. Received their disgraceful if not illegal settlement back in ‘seventy-five, along with the others—a sum that failed by many millions to compensate for total ranch values. Ground out more petitions and got back polite letters of nonresponse. Endured the repeated defeat of congressional proposals to establish a commission charged with evaluating claims submitted by those “displaced from their land and livelihood.” Saw the lives of others caught in the same plight vanish.
And Agnes, whose clothes would be floated to the seven winds, had watched Delfino’s life and her own fade as surely as things left too long in the sun.
—He said he needed to go be alone, Marcos told his father and mother when he returned to the dining room.
—Should we check on him? Sarah asked Carl.
—No, I know my brother. Best leave him to his grief. We’ll look in on him tomorrow before we drive back home.
Some days after Agnes was laid to rest—days after Sarah, Carl, and Marcos dropped by with a box of doughnuts before heading back to Nambé, days after his trip down to El Paso, and days subsequent to the departure of everybody who’d turned up for her funeral—Delfino sat himself down to write another letter. Agnes, he believed, would have approved. Giving up had not been in her glossary. He had never yet spent one red penny of the settlement check they’d awarded him. That word awarded had stuck in his craw when one of their public-relations people had called to let them know that the check was being sent via certified mail. The money sat like so much rotten dross in a bank account in Carrizozo, and even when he and Agnes had fallen on the hardest of financial times they never once considered withdrawing it. He would give it all back with interest—so he’d written them before and wrote them now. But what was more, if Delfino died doing so, he was going to get his goddamn ranch back.
A chorus of pond frogs under racing stars. The rising moon like a decayed tooth sunk in the tender flesh of a melon cloud. The plaintive veery in the oak tree. This sagging porch she’d paced over many extinct summers. They all offered their stability to unstable Ariel who, though sitting on her favorite Adirondack chair, felt as if in a free fall. Given the day’s disclosure, she had to ask herself questions she’d never needed to consider before. What would it be like having someone in your life day and night, dawn to dusk to dawn? Someone who has every right to rely on your love, solace, thoughts, values, support, understanding, sustenance?
She drank from a fresh glass of shameful, ridiculous gin and would have scowled had her face not been numbed under its influence. A bat dropped through the silent air, out over the unmown grass studded with wild strawberry and devil’s paintbrush, and she half envied the gnat that was targeted in its orbit. Ariel had always come to the family