Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [67]
More often than not he would come to bed at two in the morning, three, four, slipping in beside his Agnes, having seen nothing but yellowish stars in green fields of vacuumous infinity. Yet once in a while he did spot things up there, fast batlike machines moving high and silent, or on occasion so low to the valley floor he doubted the rationality of the person or being who dared pilot with such absurd abandon. On those nights he would awaken Agnes and tell her what he’d seen. They’d talk for a while, fall asleep. There was no need the next morning to report anything to the local newspaper. Everyone hereabout knew of White Sands and its titanium hawks, its black airships, the so-called secrets being developed on their old lands and tested over their contemporary shelters, some of which were just flearotten trailers and withering adobes and pressure-cooker bungalows. In any desert, hermetism is possible, but secrets are hard to keep.
Growing up on a working ranch, Delfino, like Carl, had learned to be a jack of many trades. Trades of the hand, labor accomplished on your feet, not your derriere. As such, he never had much trouble finding work during the long personal drought that settled over him after their eviction. In a land so terribly unpopulous, where one acre per head was compulsory for the cattleman who wanted to keep a viable herd, the multitude of skills that came to be required of Delfino in order to scrape together a living was noteworthy. Clerk at the Satellite Inn, cook at Sí Señor, picker in the pecan groves. At the time when he ordered his monoscope and began his nightwatches, he was working as a roofer and, most weekends, doubling as a driver for the bus company that ferried souls from Alamogordo to Las Cruces or El Paso and back. Agnes worked part-time for the forest service, at Three Rivers, a petroglyph field twenty miles north of Tularosa.
Tres Ritos was their second-favorite place in all the world. From its black lava heights they could see—looking out over the seeming infinity of desert flats, fenced only by the San Andres at the western edge of this panorama—the bluish alley, a tantalizing tiny hint of what had been their home. They loved few things better than to hike up through impromptu channels of talus, the tough crescendo of rocky slope, until they reached a summit where they might open a knapsack and have their lunch of tomato sandwiches, cucumber salad, and apricots, joined only by the ghosts of Shanta Indians, of Pat Coghlan, Judge Albert Fall, and the misnamed Thomas Fortune Ryan who, like so many, had attempted and failed over the years to tame this basin.
For Agnes and Delfino, sitting on these buffblack stones carved by people long since gone to earth meant something inexpressibly life-allowing. They had their favorite glyphs and visited them like old friends. The kachina with the lightning bolt striking its head or, as Agnes liked to believe, emanating from it. The flock of thunderbirds. The coiled snake. Flute players, deer, rain shaped like combs. A weatherworn open-air museum on whose sculptures they sat gazing toward the vanishing point of the Burrito Range, the Organs—at the foot of whose massive rock pipes the dunes of White Sands glittered bright as a blizzard—and Old Baldy, looming like a shaved head above the timberline. At the center of this overwhelming cosmos were shadows where slopes converged into a level alcove. It was there that their ranch house probably remained, their earth tank and windmill, maybe, and some belongings they left behind on the assumption they’d return sooner rather than later—certainly sooner than never. Even seeing Dripping Spring from such a distance made them feel connected.
Their lives came into scale