Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [95]
“My whole life. But it haunts every single person in the world, whether they ever think about it or not. At the end of the day I’m afraid it’ll take us all out.”
“Holocaust?”
“It’d be a total statistical anomaly if it didn’t happen. The ratio of warheads to maniacs with access is too high to avoid it. Could be the next generation, the one after, but it’s a total probability. Kubrick got it right all the way back in the early sixties—”
“Who’s that?”
“Film director. Dr. Strangelove.”
“Never saw it.”
“Slim Pickens riding an A-bomb like one of Saint John’s horses, waving his cowboy hat and hollering all the way down to the target—probably the most perfect image of human lunacy any movie director ever shot. But my point is that when it does happen, it’ll be because somebody screwed up, somebody had too much scotch—”
“Vodka, more like,” said Marcos.
“—somebody keystroked in the wrong numbers, overrode failsafes by mistake. Kind of makes all your stories about atomic veterans even sadder than they already are. Why kill rats in the lab when your field research already shows you know how to kill rats? It’s less clinical than flat-out homicidal.”
Delfino thought about that for a moment, then stood up and brushed the sand and dust off the back of his trousers. The others got up, too. Their shadows stretched long behind them in the creek bed as they walked back toward Pajarito.
His stay in Nambé was nearing an end. Most of what he came here to accomplish had been accomplished, and what few things he hadn’t been sure about seemed clear now. He wished he could tell his brother what he was going to do but knew Carl would repeat it to Sarah, and Sarah would move heaven and earth to dissuade him. Probably ought to be dissuaded, he thought, but he didn’t want to be. Kip had proven to be the unexpected catalyst. He’d inadvertently made the concept seem real, as if it had hardness to it, body to match soul.
Souls, bodies, laws, earth. Delfino pondered what to do about Kip’s proposal he accompany him into the basin. Wasn’t a question of whether he’d earned his saddle. He had earned his berth, such as it was, in this highly promising disaster in the making. Nor was Delfino’s hesitation prompted by the fact that he didn’t really know Kip, and that sharing a potentially suicidal experience with someone you didn’t know might be an even greater madness. None of this bothered Delfino, nor even did the realization that Kip’s joining him would mean Kip couldn’t fulfill his promise to tell the family what was going on, give them the documents Delfino had entrusted to him. No, what troubled Delfino was Agnes. Would she be looking on, thinking, Who is this other man? Would Kip somehow dilute what was to be, finally, a spiritual experience? Delfino mulled this as the three of them made their way back down the riverbed. It didn’t occur to any of them, as each trod his own thoughtful path, that they constituted the river that ran here today. None recognized at that moment, though they would understand it later, that they were able to march along, to think, to worry, to struggle, only because they were Rio Nambé in this fleeting instance. They were water and clay, the difficult thinking, meandering, willful kind, and they flowed back toward their sources.
The solitariness of Granna’s sainthood was confirmed by how rarely her phone rang. If not Bonnie Jean, the caller was either Brice or someone soliciting for a magazine subscription or new, lower long-distance rates. Hearing Charlie on the other end was unexpected,