Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [66]
Delfino deflected her, —I always carried a Bowie knife when I was a boy. We all did. Carl, Daddy, even Kayley.
—Your mother never carried a damn Bowie knife.
—Course she did. Sometimes.
Agnes said nothing by way of response, which registered more loudly than if she had thundered her distaste for the things offered in the catalog.
Delfino finished, —No crime against reading.
—Reading’s not the crime that worries me.
As if it were only yesterday, not over a decade ago, Delfino could remember her final parry, her parting gibe, reading over his shoulder once more, —“Conceal yourself in the bush of these unused old French military BVDs.” These guys are comic geniuses.
Delfino chuckled.
—That’s what you need, old man. Vichy underwear.
—Lord, he said, and stuck the catalog in his documents drawer in the kitchen. He was tired, was going to bed.
But he couldn’t disagree with her, even as he meditated on how these obsolete weapons presented no problem for one who desired to remilitarize them. Sure, it’d be easier to go down to the gun store and acquire something licensed, Delfino reasoned that night as he drifted off to sleep. Yet there stirred in him an unnameable attraction, an instinct that using period pieces from the war that ruined his simple life would equate fighting might with right.
Agnes let the matter rest. She’d made her opinion known. This was her marginal form of protest, not that she truly protested her husband’s idea, which grew in his heart like some sedulous cancer. She did not ask to look more closely at the catalog, knowing even more pernicious armaments were displayed in its colorful pages. She respected how hard Delfino worked every day to contain his perennial anger, and believed he would never, without her blessing, maybe even her collaboration, pursue his dream of retaking his ranch from the government that had stolen it from them.
She and her husband were equally part of each other, had grown into each other through their marriage. Were like a unique organism melded by time, love, trust. Agnes didn’t give his catalog much further thought after that evening. Nor, however, was she shocked when he indulged himself in the purchase of a night-vision monoscope.
He insisted, —Just for the hey of it.
—Did I ask? she answered.
The Montoyas of downstate had been through many trials and disappointments over their decades together, but their setbacks were rarely visited on one by the other. If Delfino became possessed of some curious desire, Agnes might tease a little, needle him, even complain some, but she seldom denied him. And if Agnes liked wearing her stupid red shoes on her birthday, well then, have at it, live it up. After they lost Dripping Spring, and after they learned that the lease forced on them during the war was to be extended, then regrettably extended again, and then again, little rehabilitations such as some unnecessary nightscope were just that—compensatory gestures against the larger depression that hovered near them at all times.
They found they lacked some essential talent for giving up hope of returning to their vacated land. This was true of most of the families that had been similarly evicted from the Jornada and Tularosa flats on either side of Mockingbird Gap back in ’forty-four. The Trinity bomb worked; the war was won. But the lease and lockout continued. Some clung to a fading belief they’d be allowed to return and, as they waited, slowly lost the strength needed to move along and set up some kind of substitute life elsewhere. Like blue moons, the waxing of any confidence in reaching a fair settlement with the government became rarer and rarer. Alamogordo prospered as the military base grew. Rockets populated their skies at unexpected, odd moments in the day, and during the night they might be awakened by roaring overhead as stealthy mechanisms broke sound barriers, racing through darknesses hundreds of miles long in matters of seconds, more or less out of the world’s purview.
Delf watched sometimes,