Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [54]
As Agnes had followed through with her conception of the right and proper response to finding some abstracted savage mule in the acequia, and as Agnes had so resolutely left it there on the valley floor to fend for itself, so Delfino resolved to try one last time, with pencil and paper, yes, but also with his hands and his feet, to bring to pass what he’d told his wife he someday wanted to do, told her more than once, told her often, told her ad nauseam. One or two things to do, then in he would go. After that, it wouldn’t matter.
This was a story Delfino Montoya would soon tell his brother and sister-in-law’s salvage, that fellow Sarah kept mentioning whenever they spoke on the phone. Fellow with the peculiar name, Kip. It would thereafter become one of Calder’s favorite stories because he felt a deep empathy for that jackbottom and wondered whether their fates might not one day be the same.
During Kip’s year up at the convalescent center he met a man named Clifford who was afflicted with mild dementia. Kip had befriended Clifford as much as anyone could befriend such a man. He enjoyed listening to Clifford’s stories about his hometown of Gallup, which he memorably said wasn’t a kindly place for folks whose minds were like shafts of grain, because the wind galed hard through town. Wind in the form of cars. Threw and blew. Tornado alley of a different stamp. The united flakes of America coasting west and east on their way to this shining sea or that.
Ever since Kip had returned to Rancho Pajarito, he’d been wondering whether or not he ought to ask Franny Johnson if she happened to know this Clifford. Not that he was of her generation—not hardly—but Gallup was the kind of town where people knew one another, despite old Route 66 running through its dusty heart. Or maybe it was precisely because Route 66 ran through it that the town hung together. Somebody had to know somebody.
Kip first met Clifford down on one knee in a corridor, very absorbed with trying over and again to pick up a black scuff mark off the green linoleum floor.
“What’re you doing there?” Kip asked, neutral, hands in his pockets.
“Can you help me get this thing up, sir?”
Clifford hadn’t looked at his interlocutor, but continued with his repeated gesture of plucking at the smudge.
Kip kneeled down beside the man. “Let me give it a try.”
“Thanks,” Clifford said, dramatically moving away to give Kip room enough to address the task.
Startled by Clifford’s quickness, Kip looked levelly at him and saw that he was staring at the scuff mark in a state of combined horror and fascination. Reaching down with his thumb and forefinger, Kip then made a display of trying to lift the black mark from the floor.
“What do you think?” Clifford asked.
“Not sure.”
After several further attempts, Kip glanced once more at Clifford, who was now staring saucer-eyed and with smiling panic at him. “Too heavy for you, too, huh?” said Clifford, and Kip rose slowly to his feet, even as did Clifford, and replied, “Too heavy for both of us.”
Clifford walked away with perfect outward ease, giving the impression that all was right with the world, and all ends had been met, loose or otherwise. Kip admired that, envied that, though he did feel the need to remove his shoe and erase the scuff mark with a back-and-forth of his sock. He would think of this incident any number of times before he later entered some realm of true dementia himself. He would remember Clifford with respect, yes, but he would also recall the compassionate Kip Calder of that particular moment—a Kip he was proud of. He who was proud of so little.
That small incident came to mind this morning, some days after Carl Montoya had given his approval for the fieldhouse project, because Franny had the day off from the restaurant and had come down to see if she could help him. As she walked