Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [82]
“I’d like to think there’s a ghost here. I always used to tell Marcos and his sister—”
“Lanie.”
“—that spirits haunted the place. Their eyes would get this round. I used to enjoy that. Hell, I sure wouldn’t want to be a ghost.”
“How’s that?”
“Hard enough to get people to believe in you as it is.”
Kip laughed. “I was a ghost once, come to think of it. A spook, at any rate, during Nam. You’re right, it wasn’t much good.”
Couple of old fucks talking about war, death, and ghosts on a beautiful morning like this, thought Kip. Boys of winter.
As they pushed back outdoors, Montoya said again how much he admired the restoration and then, without so much as considering further any possible consequences, he launched straight into his request. “I know you don’t really know me, and I don’t know you, and I know I ought to be thanking you for putting this place down here back together—”
“No,” Kip said. “I’m the one who owes your family the thanks, not the other way.”
“—but I have a favor to ask.”
“Name it, you got it.”
“You might want to hear me out before you go agreeing to anything.”
Kip did hear him out, as they sat together on that same wooden bench where he and Marcos had worked and talked not long before, and where Franny had told him all about Mary. He learned of Delfino’s plan to go back to his homestead at Dripping Spring, out on the military’s most restricted badlands. He wasn’t going to live forever. Time had come. Kip didn’t agree or disagree, but understood the bias. “You ever fished salmon?” Delfino asked.
“In Alaska, once.”
“You ever heard the word anadromous?”
“No.”
“My wife, Agnes, liked collecting words like that. Most of them I forget now, but anadromous stuck.”
“So what’s it mean?”
“You know how salmon are born in fresh water then migrate out to live in the saltwater ocean, then come back to spawn in the same river they were born in, then die there, just where they started? That’s anadromous.”
“And that’s what you want to do.”
“Well, I don’t know as I intend to die out there, but I got to force it to some conclusion. If I lived ten lifetimes I know that the bullycrats and burrocrats at the other end of my letters and calls won’t ever bother with me, and I’m damned if I’m going down dead silent.”
Kip agreed to all that Delfino asked of him. He half wished he could mount some reasonable argument against the juggernaut Montoya proposed to bring upon himself, but honestly could not. When all was said and done, wasn’t Kip himself anadromous? He was. And had every intention of helping this fellow migrant.
Chim ó was what she called him, using her rudimentary Vietnamese, just a few words really, a couple of phrases she now knew, thanks to Kip. Chimayó without an assenting aye.
“Meaning?”
“Ask Kip.”
“Come on, Franny.”
“Gian.”
Marcos genially frowned.
“Chim ó means buzzard. Gian is cockroach.”
“Gian yourself.”
The name calling, all in jest, was her comeback to Marcos’s allegation that she’d been spending more time with Kip than with him, and that maybe there was reason to be suspicious. “And now you want to meet his friend,” he said. “What’s next? A formal announcement?”
“Jealousy becomes you.”
“And English suits you better than Kipamese.”
Franny smiled, disparaged him in Vietnamese once more, then repeated what she’d originally said, that she didn’t want to go to the Hill without Marcos coming along. Los Alamos—cao nguyên was Kip’s closest analogue—had entered their conversation because Sarah persuaded her to join them at the center to visit Clifford Carpenter and afterward have lunch. Kip’s convalescent friend had asked for him and, as Sarah said, “Given he doesn’t seem to remember the names of people he’s known there for years, can’t even recall what he does from hour to hour, Kip must have made quite an impression on him.”
“Seems to be a trait of his,” said Franny, who was moved to go visit her uncle out of a combination of curiosity, confidence that he wouldn’t recognize her anyway, and unwonted homesickness—or if not that, the desire to fill some