Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [80]
And what kind of a name was Kip? Sounded like an acronym. Keep Isolation Pure. Kismet Isn’t Practical. Karma Is Pain.
Word games. She’d come an awfully long way to sit at a kitchen table in Los Alamos and think up Sunday morning acronyms, reminisce about games with her grandfather and idiosyncrasies surrounding her birth. What about Granna and Kip? The now. She had to reach her parents this morning. She wanted to phone David again, but had less to say to him than ever, and besides, she couldn’t take his rejection of her again. Having left no messages on her machine, he’d become a complete absence. Except for the pain that more or less replaced him.
Maybe ought to give herself a break, she could almost hear her grandfather’s advice. Her life had been largely floated on words. Airy, eerie, weirdie. On her name she’d heard every pun in the book. Time to forget conundra and homonyms and get some breakfast going, head over to the hospital. Ask around about Kip Calder. Make discreet inquiries about where one might have a procedure done to abort an early-term. Above all, stay off the train tracks.
Both men were up with the magpies. Each saw the sun cut sickles of light into ten thousand dense cloud waves that rose like white vulcan smoke on fenders edged purple as locoweed, datura in the shadows. They met, as if on some kind of businessmen’s schedule, in the kitchen of the hacienda. Kip hand-ground coffee beans while Delfino put up water in the kettle on the big black Wolf stove. One asked the other if he’d slept well. Yes, and you? He did, though the drive doesn’t get any goddamn shorter. Which led them to Tularosa and the Jornada del Muerto, a province of New Mexico Kip knew better than Delfino might have expected.
“My father worked at the lab during the Manhattan Project. He was down there the day they detonated the first A-bomb.”
“Trinity?”
“He saw the whole thing from Compañia Hill.”
“July forty-four. I should know, I was there, too.”
This surprised Kip, who looked carefully at the man in the room with him, a handsome cayuse in his seventies, strong, lean, weathered as any who lived his life under a desert sun, with a prominent browned nose narrow as a ruler, a taut wide mouth, high Hispanic cheekbones, and furrowed cheeks. With black eyes, and tall—easily as tall as Kip himself—Delfino cut quite a figure. The younger of them sensed that while they were of distinct generations, their very different lives had ruined them in ways that had the odd result of breaking down their differences. Embracing them both, time and fate had brought them here, and though Kip knew nothing of Delfino’s plan, he did sense something was at work. This notion blew through him like light. “Nobody told me you’d worked on the Project.”
“I didn’t. More like the Project worked on me.”
“Meaning?”
“Long story,” Delfino said. “But no, I had nothing to do with the bomb, other than being pushed out of its way.”
“Better out of its way than in it.”
How was it possible that in half a century, Delfino Montoya had never quite thought of it in those precise terms? “You’re right. But that’s not how I saw it back then, and it still isn’t.”
“How do you see it?”
Innocent enough question, though Montoya frowned—not at Kip but some specter over and behind his shoulder.
“I was in Tularosa, just east of the mountains behind where