Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [47]
Kip now stood before the fieldhouse, which itself stood at the northwest margin of the lower pasture at Pajarito, and these few thoughts more or less stood there with him—them—as he looked at this old ruined bastion from an earlier century, erected a short reach from Rio Nambé, which he could hear scuttling along unseen on the other side of a coyote fence overhung with vines. He had gotten it into his head he was going to restore this fallen-down place and make it his home so long as he stayed with the Montoyas.
Having been here for a couple years, he’d become an honorary Montoya. Hard to fathom. The bridges he’d burned over the course of his life had never been rebuilt, not even the one he’d attempted pallidly to extend toward his daughter. The fires had burned hot and thoroughly, and none so much as smoldered now or allowed reaccess to any place he’d ever called home. Whereas home had always been an idea to inhabit, a truant hunch, a somewhere other, now the idea had morphed. Nambé, for Kip, was as close to a real home as he could imagine.
But more and more he didn’t like living in undeserved comfort at the far end of the portal, in a nice room he knew the Montoyas might otherwise use to put up clients or visiting family. He had no use for its antique mirrors, its radio, its photographs of show horses, or even for the almond-scented soap that Sarah set out for him in his bathroom. Further, he believed he still had no talent for society, didn’t know how to be near people. Even charitable people like the Montoyas. The fieldhouse suited him, too, because it was set at a remove from all but brat horses and punk ponies they let into the adjacent pasture.
This was a Wagner move, he supposed. Distancing himself from the living while paradoxically embracing the idea of life. Yet Kip figured that when he left Nambé one day, as surely he would, the field-house restoration might be some kind of legacy. And while he remained here it could be—another truth and another paradox—his reason not to leave. He would, of course, continue with his chores. He’d fully adapted to, even cherished, his role as an assistant and felt his strength growing whenever he raked the reddish cinder-dust scoria aisleway that ran down the center of the barn (“It’s an art, man,” Marcos explained, “like zen gardening”), or washing down a horse with chlorhexadine scrub mixed with shampoo, rinsing it with warm water, spraying it with lanolin, then walking it back to its stall. He learned how to clean tack and restitch saddles. He helped, when and as he could, with feeding, watering, rotating broodmares into and out of the several pastures. These tasks had become his bread and butter. The fieldhouse would be caviar.
Marcos, with whom he’d first shared his idea, was enthusiastic and volunteered to help in his spare time. So did Franny, or Mary, whoever she was—Marcos still didn’t know and Kip would never snitch on her. He knew what it was like to be assumed and unassuming. He remembered von Neumann’s sly riposte to Oppenheimer’s famous words quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the Trinity implosion was heard around the world on July 16, 1945. Oppie had intoned, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” but von Neumann upped him one with, “Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”
Why was all this circulating through Kip’s psyche now? Because he still couldn’t shake the idea of her, no matter how pathetic it was to be thinking about it three years after the fact, as if he’d just posed the problem to Brice the week before. Because increasingly he thought of his letter to Ariel as a travesty, a confession of the kind von Neumann had accused Oppenheimer of making. Unsubtly pressing Ariel and her parents for credit where none was due. Perjuring himself by asking a daughter to know who her real father was, when indeed—in deeds—he certainly was not. Hiding from Ariel even after he’d clumsily invited her to search him