Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [68]
One thing she didn’t know, however, was that Delfino, in a rare moment of acting behind his wife’s back, had ordered several vintage rifles from that catalog she’d long since forgotten about. Rifles and quite a few rounds of ammunition. Moreover, he took great care to hide them from Agnes. She died without ever discovering them.
Now they looked both pathetic and arrogant on the oilcloth where Delfino laid them out the evening before he left for Nambé. He was reminded of the excitement he had felt on Christmas Eves, when his mother, Kayley, made her kids set out their nightshirts and turn back their beds all neat and nice before they were allowed to join the adults in the casa greatroom, where a fire crackled in the hearth that was taller than either young Delf or Carlos, raggedy punks with bowl haircuts. Christmas nog, chocolate fudge squares, snow on the ocotillos that made them look like anorexic Jack Frosts. A profound feeling of order settled over those bygone Navidad nights, and Delfino, impressed by the chimera of such a memory, now felt that youthful sense of promise again, however disparate might be the image of his bed and nightclothes and presents under the tree—the lovely lost past—with these shotguns, rifles, rounds, and five-gallon plastic water canisters beside them. He had paint and boards for the signs he would make, and lengths of barbed wire rolled and stored in a canvas satchel. Dried food was packed in saddle bags. Bedroll, binoculars, of course the nightscope. To hell with sunscreen, he thought with a laugh—he couldn’t get any more burned than he already was. While the authorities and news media would no doubt declare him criminal, berserk, an extremist—if they bothered with him at all—he was in truth none of those. Rather, a ticked-off romantic. Dreamy maverick. Or else just a guy who got it into his head he wanted to go home. Even if he were able to think through all the probable tragic consequences, as they would phrase it on the radio, he could never talk himself out of it now. Deeper forces were at work.
The wall clock read four. Meticulously, upon finishing setting out his desert gear in the garage, he shaved and showered, then packed a couple of clean shirts and climbed into the truck. He’d always loved the heavens on clear nights such as this, loved how unquestionably the Milky Way traversed the sky and earned its name. Driving, terribly awake, toward Carrizozo, he listened to the wind pummel the hood and windscreen of the pickup.
First he would have to visit what was left of his family. Carl, Sarah, Marcos. He didn’t want to be remembered as anything other than a gentleman by those who loved him. He would meet Marcos’s friend Franny and wish her every advantage in the world. He was curious about this man whom Sarah had mentioned so often, the veteran who fixed up the fieldhouse. And he wanted to visit the place of his birth and childhood, if only to make some kind of peace with it and pay respect at gravesides.
He felt very light of heart, standing under the first pinks and sundry blues and the fluorescence of the gas station as he filled the tank, and when he got back into the cab and made toward Bingham and San Antonio, past the malpais with its whiskery cacti flickering in the dawn rising behind him, he felt voluptuously at peace, more so than in any recent year.
He’d be there by late afternoon, poking along, taking in the familiar geography as he went. Somewhere down the road he’d phone his