Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [76]
Delfino smiled. “You’re getting warmer.’’
The glass-plate photo showed thin boys in light-gray shirts, probably the only shirts they owned at the time, some with broad suspenders. All wore baggy pantaloons and boots that resembled leather puddles in the dust. On the beast’s back was a black contraption, squarish and somewhat sinister-looking. Seven boys held to their ears the ends of thick wires that were connected to the saddled box, while another loitered under the sun without a hat, leaning on what appeared to be a crutch, waiting his turn to listen. The majordomo and his wife stood solemn at either edge of the frame, he frowning under his bowler, she with hands on the sturdiest of hips. Not a living tree in sight, only scrabble wilderness rock. Behind them was a log structure that might have been a ranch house or the office of a mining company.
“What do you think they were listening to?”
“John Philip Sousa was around back then—maybe it was ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’”
“Probably a jingle for Coke.”
“Marcos.”
“The real thing.”
“I doubt those kids had the faintest idea what they were hearing. Look at their faces.”
Kip studied the sepia wasteland scene of adults and children listening to a scratchy black disk—Chincester, Bell, and Tainter wax-board going around at seventy-eight or thereabouts—and spoke for the first time. “Must have been the absolute strangest thing that ever happened to any of them.”
“Depends on how long they lived after eighteen ninety,” said Sarah.
Kip agreed, “Model T, the Wright brothers. It did all happen pretty fast.”
“Not to mention discovering the atom.”
“Men on the moon in less than a hundred years,” said Marcos, and Franny added, “Don’t forget about the Internet.”
“Christ save us,” said Delfino, suddenly realizing his gift didn’t mean quite what he had intended.
“Christ-dot-com, you mean.”
Sure, the image alluded to Dripping Spring, the old ranch and old dream, and as such it was a memento of his strong fondness for the place. But now he recognized it also marked the nanosecond when technology had first come to the desert, and with that the irreversible wave of scientific systems under which he himself had faded, as much a memento from yesteryear as those folks gathered around a mule with a gramophone strapped to its sagging back.
For dinner they ate cayenne chicken and grilled squash from the kitchen garden. The small dining room was redolent with food and wine.
“What brings you to Nambé?” Carl asked his brother.
“Felt like it.”
“Come on. Nothing gets you here unless something’s up.”
“I felt like seeing you. No crime in that.”
“Nothing doing, Hoss.”
“This is their old game,” Sarah told Franny and Kip. “Carl still doesn’t get why his brother left Nambé for downstate back when they were Marcos’s age.”
“Younger than Marcos,” said Carl.
“Wanted to breathe some fresh air is why.”
“Nambé air is a hell of a lot fresher than Tularosa basin.”
“Not to my nose.”
“This,” Sarah continued, “is where I stop listening.”
“I always told you you ought to get your nose examined.”
“And you ought to have yours looked at by a vet.”
“I don’t need a vet to tell me horse shit smells better than cow shit.”
“See what I mean?” said Sarah.
Turning to Kip, who was seated across the table in his best linen shirt, the visitor changed the subject, not to mention the spirit of the conversation. “My sister-in-law here tells me you come from Los Alamos.”
“Born and raised, but I haven’t lived there since I was a kid.”
“Not my favorite place on earth, forgive me, Sarah.”
“If you’re referring to the Project, it’s not my favorite place, either,” Kip said, seeing in Delfino’s half smiling eyes the look of one of those overwhelmed boys hearing music from a gramophone for the first time. He believed he saw fear there, apprehension about some unexplored future. He knew the demeanor. A blasphemy of calm. Had seen this sanguine look before on the faces