Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [75]
For his part, Marcos had a question for his friend here on the bench mottled by sun moving past its zenith. “You mind me asking how you lost it?”
“Lost what?” jolted from his darkening reverie.
Marcos nodded toward where Kip’s hands worked at the wood laid across his lap.
“What, my virginity?” Kip quipped, hoping to lighten his sinking mood.
“That’d be an interesting story, but I mean your left hand. I always wanted to ask why you’re missing part of that finger.”
“The rest of it’s in Laos somewhere.”
“The war?”
“I lost a lot more important things than my finger there, but that’s another story.”
“Your war stories are interesting.”
“Hand me that, would you?”
“I like hearing them, I’m not sure why.”
“Because, thank god, you’ve never been and don’t face having to go.”
Marcos handed him a wire brush that lay on the ground. “War.”
Kip ignored the word, tried to. Crazy, wasn’t it, that such a complicated enterprise of mass destruction was summed up in a small burst of air across the lips. War.
“I would think the most important thing not to lose in a war is your life. At least you came home with that.”
“Nobody comes home from a war with anything other than his country’s victory or its surrender. Everything else in a war is lost, no matter which side you fought on, and don’t let any fool tell you otherwise. All my fingers are gone. They just look like they’re here.”
Marcos said, “Well, they say you can’t be a good carpenter and have all ten fingers.”
“You don’t mean to offend me so I won’t take it that way. I wasn’t a good soldier. I didn’t belong in Vietnam so I connived my way to Laos, but I didn’t belong in Laos, either. In retrospect I’m proud I wasn’t that good a soldier. I tried to be, just wasn’t. I still have the middle finger left, and that’s the one I raise to salute our fine Indo-chinese war and all valiant, important, and necessary wars waged from now until kingdom come. Maybe we ought to call it a day with these shutters. I’m sure Carl needs some help.”
“Yeah, got a couple more horses to work. Guess I’ll get to it,” Marcos said, wanting to apologize for having touched a nerve but understanding that he could not.
When Marcos stood up, covered with fine sky-blue paint from his scraping and sanding, Kip was reminded of Krishna, the blue Hindu boy god. His earlier fondness returned immediately, not that it had ever left. Shouldn’t have been so short with him, but what’s family for if not to work out your hardest ideas on?
The season of largesse, of things and stuff, continued that evening when Delfino, who’d arrived before sundown, brought out a present for his brother’s family, as he always did when he visited them. In years past, Delfino’s visit gifts, as they were called, had been magnificently ordinary (a cropper’s spade) or funny (a whirligig of a gunslinger bowing to a barmaid) or just plain odd (a glassed display case of rattlesnake tails mounted with pins). This evening’s present was a nineteenth-century photograph of some people formally gathered around a mule, taken just a few miles, Delfino believed, from Dripping Spring.
Sarah held it up to the light and thanked him, saying, “Why, that’s just beautiful.”
“Wonder how old it is?” Carl said.
“If anybody ought to know it’d be you, Methuselah.”
“Very funny.”
Fraternal banter.
“Look,” said Marcos. “Somebody wrote 1890 on the back.”
“Well, then, not quite as old as Carl,” said Delfino.
“Go ahead, ruin your presentation of the visit gift, see if I care.” They chided each other with relaxed, toothy smiles.
“What you think they’re doing?”
“Mule beauty contest,” said Carl.
“Carl,” said Sarah.
“Damn handsome mule,” said Marcos.
“Always thought you were a sheep fancier,” said Carl.
“Carl,” said Sarah.
The mule did, however, have a fuzzy white muzzle and the soulful eyes