Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [52]
A lifetime before Ariel wended her way north between the Rio Grande and the Jornada del Muerto, just east of the Oscura Mountains, which ranged out the passenger window of her car, a dusty and limping jackbottom had stood staring down the length of dry ditch into which it had stumbled, appearing for all the world to be the foreigner it was there. A salamander and Delfino Montoya watched this forlorn ass, which shook its loaflong head with the magnificent obtuseness and ponderousness available to this singular beast and no other, or so it would have seemed on that overwarm midday. The salamander had stretched itself under the sun on the far side of this same acequia, and for his part Delfino sat on the tan grass some hundred feet back behind his bungalow, under a shattered, shedding cottonwood, leaning against the hard trunk of the tree, his feet splayed before him like unearthed roots. What sweltering shade this cottonwood cast, Delfino occupied. The heavy sun produced dark pockets in every hollow, chink, and cove in view, whether natural or fashioned by the hands of those few people who had bothered to try to make a go of it in this tough valley.
At hand, on the scrabbly dirt floor beneath the shade tree, were a pencil and a paper tablet on which Delfino had tried without success to shape his ideas, his profound resentments, into words. Instead, now, he stared at this wild mule that had wandered off the cantankerous plain, maybe thirsty or out to pillage somebody’s garden. It scowled with a forager’s dullish eye and gave short shrift to the salamander’s sharper gaze, as well as Delfino’s own, as it hobbled and slumped toward both in search of a way to higher ground. Delfino, without moving, looked about for a stone to throw at it. The jackbottom did not take this in, nor did the salamander bestir itself. In the distance a freight train ran across the valley floor and a delicate clattering along the tracks could be heard. A dog barked, then another barked back without enthusiasm into the dead hot breath of the desert day. The ass continued to gimp along the trench, raising trivial puffs of dust with each fall of its dull grayblue hooves.
Finding no pebble within reach, Delfino chucked his pencil stub at the beast. Neither the jackbottom nor the long-tailed salamander noticed, nor for that matter did Delfino know what possessed him to throw his pencil at the trapped animal. The pencil, which he’d sharpened with his pocketknife, lay on the bottom of the waterditch in the dust, bright yellow against dun brown, and the jack trod on it without ado and without knowing it had done so.
No damn pencil was doing him any good anyhow, and so what did it matter, Delfino reasoned.
Then he thought, There you are, Montoya. There you are, old man. You’re no smarter than that goddamn jackybottom stuck in that gully. No wonder you’re throwing things at it. You’re no better than some thickhead jack yourself.
The salamander had meanwhile disappeared.
When the jack passed directly in front of Delfino, like some four-footed storm cloud before a frowning moon, it paused and turned its massive laggard head in the seated man’s direction, taking him in where he still sat, unmoving. A marginal breeze stirred the paper beside Delfino, and the jackbottom—not ten feet from the man who watched him under this heavy weather of pale blue and fierce sun—bared its yellowed tombstone teeth in a nasty smile of feigned threat, very feigned, very exhausted, and eccentrically pacific.
—You numbskull tub of shit, Delfino said.
It breathed dryly. The ribs on its sides stood up in the day like long curved mummified barrel bands stretching its speckled and putrid and dust-shellacked hide. Cataracts made its eyes, each the size of a rotted-to-black patio tomato, evocatively clouded. Delfino clapped his hands, but the jackbottom did not flinch. He clapped a couple of times more, harder, and the animal only continued to look at him.
—You deaf? he shouted at the ass, which