Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [53]
Agnes had come out from the back of the bungalow, having heard her husband shouting these words. —What’s that you’re saying?
—Look at this, Delfino said, climbing to his feet and slapping the dirt off the butt of his work trousers.
—What happened?
—Must’ve wandered off the valley and got himself stuck in the trough, I guess.
—Poor thing. Let’s get some rope.
—All right, Delfino said, and he crossed to the small shed he’d built in their yard and fetched down a length of white rope that hung in a coil on a nail.
Together, Agnes and Delfino got the rope around the animal’s neck and led the docile, cooperative beast a quarter mile down the acequia, to a place where they could walk it up an angled ledge. From there they doubled back across a couple of fields and roads to their bungalow where they kept it tethered in their backyard for the following month. They fed and watered the animal until it seemed strong enough that they felt comfortable about loading it into a borrowed horse trailer and driving it back to the edge of White Sands Range. There they parked, opened the swinging trailer doors, backed it down the clamorous metal ramp, and released it to the parched wilds where it had been conceived and had survived without incident before wandering down into Tularosa proper and getting itself gnarl-kneed, stuck, and salvaged.
The jackbottom stood in the morning, still homely but fatter, kind of weirdly lilac in the dawn light.
—Go on, get, said Delfino.
Agnes watched. She resisted the reluctance she was beginning to feel about returning it to the wasteland, though this had been her idea all along. It was Agnes who’d said that day the month before, —We’ll nurse him back to health, then we’ll take him where he belongs.
—Go on now, Delfino shouted again. —Maybe it’d be easier for all of us if you let me just shoot him, he joked, turning to Agnes for some counsel as to their next move.
Agnes didn’t dignify his humor with any response. She struck the side of the horse trailer with her open palm, shouting, —Go on, now, get.
None of the three of them moved. The jackbottom stood facing the Montoyas, favoring its right foreleg to elicit sympathy.
—Maybe we ought to take him back home, Delfino said.
—He is home.
The ass looked at her, glaucous and unhearing and stubborn with all the stubbornness that inhabits the innermost heart of every beast, whether sentient or idiot, and with the basic recalcitrance it had regained precisely because she and this man had succored it. The ass looked her in the eye and defied her. Surely she was not going to abandon it here in the middle of nowhere? The beast, in all its fear and audacity, even showed its benefactors those squarish rows of agate teeth once more, combining a sneer with a primordial grin. Agnes waved her arms and beseeched, —Go on, go. Yet the jack merely ventured forward a bit, limpingly—both surly and pleading—confused maybe by how alien a human voice sounded in the void of the desert. Unfamiliar, small. Agnes quietly said, —Damn.
Had his wife decided she couldn’t go through with her plan to reintroduce the derelict jackbottom to its habitat, Delfino wouldn’t have argued. But she surprised him that day, just as she surprised him other days. She turned her back on the jacky, climbed into the driver’s side of the pickup, started the engine. Delfino got aboard, saying nothing, and they drove away in a mayhem of dust. Sunlight made her face glow as might an angel’s, he remembered thinking as he looked across at his wife, then in the rearview mirror at the lone powder-cloaked figure of the doubly lost bray standing along the dirt track flanked by ocotillos.
That was back in ’seventy-seven. They’d received right around that time a note from some man in the Ford administration—or was it Carter’s?—who said he passed their letter and their problem along to another department. Maybe the State Department or Defense, who could recall? Not that it mattered