Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [73]
Bonnie Jean agreed with her niece.
“You’re not eating very much,” Charlie noticed.
“I guess I’m not that hungry.” Soft warm air rose from the canyon below. Religious music downloaded at random from a satellite piped through the television in a room off the patio. John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, with its cadences of Russian Orthodox chant. “Granna would like this,” she said.
“Poor thing,” Bonnie whispered, then pulled herself together, moved the subject away from her mother.
So then. What was Ariel up to in New Mexico? Did Bonnie Jean know a man named Kip? Kip Calder, know him? No offense to Charlie here but there was a time in her life when she thought she was in love with Kip Calder, believed that he and she might even get married one day. He was a little too much like Brice, though. Always running, always skipping out on family and home. Well, at least he served his country when the time came. Like Dad did with his work here in Los Alamos. And served, she’d heard rumor say, with distinction. Again, no offense but he’d been an extremely handsome young man, just a little touched is all, but then who isn’t? Kip Calder. The last time Brice was here, he’d mentioned something about Kip.
“Did they ever have their reunion?” she asked, leaving Ariel in a perfect limbo between telling and denying her one truth that might lead to others she hadn’t the strength this night to address.
Scents of concession food wafted on azure smoke. Toasted corncobs in blackened husks and hot salted piñole nuts. An aroma of burned coffee mingled with the smell of sausages stewed in jalepeños on a Bunsen burner stove. Cactus candy, used clothes, mildewed books. Under a wide sky, people pawed through piles of stuff, bartered, hustled, peeled off bills and placed them in hands. Beyond that ridge was the opera house, standing empty today but only last week filled with an audience come to hear Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Sets now struck, orchestra and singers all gone home, and the aria
They go a-riding
Whom do they meet?
Three scarecrows
And a pair of feet …
carried off by desert breezes.
What remained were businessfolk and bargain hunters. Old hippies, road people. Honest antiquers and hucksters who’d given up dealing pot for the purity of caravaning the Southwest from fair to fair, selling nothing new under the sun, their wares spread out on blankets or under the tarpaulin shade of stalls. Here was a rarity, a bull-pizzle walking stick. There were Hopi moccasins, Navajo squash blossoms. Mickey Mouse memorabilia, a portrait of Elvis on black velvet. Bulovas from the forties, when somebody’s young daddy had fallen charging the beach at Normandy, his watch just like this one, still ticking on a lifeless seawashed wrist.
And here was Kip communing with these artifacts and feeling somewhat artifactual himself, wandering the rows of merchandisers, gazing at their recycled arcana, their fur hats that wouldn’t fit any head, their sheep bells from Pakistan, their scratchy vinyls of John Denver and The Doors. Franny and Marcos followed, holding hands, poking through the relics, too. Kip bought a kerosene lamp for three dollars. He haggled down the price of a green rain slicker. Marcos got Franny a nice old piece of goldblack-veined turquoise mounted on a silver bracelet. They ate fresh tortillas and Marcos gnawed on came seca—venison or beef, he couldn’t tell which, really, so spiced was the shredded meat that stuck in his teeth. Kip found a sheepskin rug that would go beside the bed he and Marcos had welded back together earlier that same morning, as well as some army blankets, chairs, and a chest of drawers. Things to outfit the fieldhouse. And Franny bought Kip a battered painting from Mexico, on a warped piece of tin, for him to hang in his sitting room. A saint spearing a dragon.
“Housewarming present,” she said, handing it to him with the warmest smile Kip had yet seen on her face, as they drove back to Pajarito in the pickup with their finds. “I thought he kind