Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [88]
“Wild bronco.”
“Sodbust jenny.”
“What does Franny think?”
“Jesus, don’t drag her into this,” Marcos grinned.
“Gelding. Glue base.”
“That’s enough already,” Sarah said. “Really, Delf. Don’t say no without giving it some thought.”
Carl reversed course, abruptly becoming tranquil, pensive. “So what was on your agenda today, Montoya? Saw your truck was gone the afternoon.”
This was how it was done, by hard turns. Delfino immediately joined his brother’s solemnity. “I went over to visit Kayley and Daddy. Been a while since I was there. Quite a few fresh stones.”
“That’s what happens in graveyards.”
Was this why skulls smiled? Kip wondered.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Delfino couldn’t resist. “Laid some fresh flowers for the grandparents, too. Hard to imagine Juliar’s been dead almost a century.”
“If Marcos here has children who have children, I wonder if they’ll bother to lay fresh-cut flowers at our graves.”
“Plastic ones, more like,” Marcos said, “or virtual,” trying to joust, to keep up with the other Montoya men, though the mention of his great-grandfather stirred a memory of his youthful sightings of what he still believed was a ghost from Juliar’s day, the woman rumored to have built this ranch.
“Better plastic than nothing. Or virtual, whatever that is.”
As the evening drew on, conversation flowed with great affable angularity, while Marcos withdrew into his thoughts, recalling that apparition and wondering whether, if he ever had a son or daughter, he or she would walk that same river road and see her in the cottonwood field. Ghosts were, he’d decided, for children. Adults with heads screwed on straight couldn’t see them—at least he hadn’t been able to, he who had seen her easily enough when he was younger. Maybe ghosts are attracted to children, since what they must really wish for is to be as wildly alive as youngsters. Maybe it was the wine, or the visit to Tsankawi, or that look Kip was giving him from beyond some pale himself, but Marcos had the strangest thought. This nonexistent child of his, would it understand what was happening when it was still in the womb? Comprehend through some process of human biology—the same process of information coding that told its small body to develop five fingers on each hand—what its life might be like? Was a fetus like a prebirth ghost? Could it predream? Sarah once told him that she’d held a radio up to her belly when she was pregnant with him and he’d responded with a vigorous dance recital. Brahms, Chubby Checker, it didn’t matter. After that she’d often let the unborn Marcos listen to music, he and she playing together that way, across the distance of her taut skin. How had he known the Twist? When he kicked and punched and pushed, what had he, the unnamed Marcos, believed he was seeing through his closed eyes in that amniotic cosmos?
God, it was getting late. For all of them. From cemetery to womb and back to the life that lay between. Marcos took Franny’s hand and said goodnight. Sarah hoped everybody would sleep well. Carl yawned and went to bed. Delfino and Kip sat at the table alone, washed by silence, saying nothing yet somehow everything.
Kip awoke the next day with a preposterous idea, almost absurd in its simplicity. He was going to accompany Delfino Montoya back to Tularosa, and with Delfino he was going to ride on horseback across the basin and help him expropriate from the government his spread, or whatever might be left of it, at Dripping Spring. Delfino had never killed a man. Kip had. Not that Montoya intended to kill or even hurt anybody, but chances were pretty good that the military range security guys would enjoin him with force. If things got violent, wouldn’t it be better for someone with blood on his hands to stain them again, leaving innocence to the innocent? Kip believed that if there was a hell, he was probably going there. He was sure, with the bold unexpected surety of dawning insight, that this was why he’d survived everything—Los Alamos, Southeast Asia, the wide wild world—to arrive in Nambé: to serve out a final role