The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [133]
"Yeah, well. So was I." His eyes remained, more or less, straight ahead as he sang quietly, "But that was long ago and very far away."
"Exactly," Anne smiled. "My darling: the nearest closet is four and a third light years from here. Sofia knows. I know. Marc—"
"Is my confessor."
"Jimmy and George don’t have a clue, but it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to either of them," said Anne. "Which leaves Emilio."
D.W. sank slowly to his knees and motioned Anne to stay back. Moving cautiously, he brought his hand out over a little tuft of dusty lavender foliage and remained in position for several seconds. Then his hand shot out, carefully covering and then lifting a small two-legged snakeneck, which had been virtually undetectable pushing its way slowly into something else’s burrow, hoping to find lunch. He stood and handed it to Anne.
"Isn’t it pretty! Look, you can see a couple of vestigial front legs on this one," she cried, holding it out for him to see. "I never find stuff like that. You are amazing."
"You grow up like I did, ma’am, you learn a fair bit about camouflage."
"I’ll bet you do, at that," she said. She put the snakeneck back down by the burrow and they continued their walk. "Emilio thinks the world of you, D.W. Okay, sure. He’s probably carrying around some unexamined macho crapola he’d have to reconsider, but he’s capable of adjusting an attitude."
"Hell, I know that," D.W. said. "And I’m not ashamed of what I am. But if he’d known when he was a kid, he wouldn’t have come within a mile of me. And after all these years of him not knowin’, what’s the point of sayin’ anything?"
"To put down a load. To be accepted, entirely, as you are." He smiled at that without looking at her and draped an arm over her shoulders. "Surely you don’t imagine that he’d think less of you."
"Well, now, see. There’s exactly the problem, Anne. I’m afraid he’d think more of me. Which is to say, I’m afraid the whole issue would occupy his mind to some extent and I don’t want to distract him with trivia right now. Course, he’d work it all through and he’d realize that I’d played straight with him all along—"
"So to speak."
He laughed. "Poor choice of words." He stopped and scuffed a rock out of the ground with his foot. "It’s not like I ever lied to him. Subject just never came up. I never asked him if he was straight and he never asked me if I wasn’t. Closest we ever came to it was when he asked me about another guy, years ago. I just told him, hell, we ain’t all abstainin’ from the same thing."
"And what did he make of that?" Anne asked, smiling.
"Took it at face value." D.W. looked at the mountains south of them. Somewhere on the other side of the range was Alan Pace’s grave. "Look, Anne. The way things are is fine. I don’t need anything from Emilio. What went on inside my head years ago is my business. And it’s history."
She couldn’t argue with that. She might have said the same thing herself, had their positions been reversed. "Okay, okay. Message received."
"I ’preciate the thought, Anne, I surely do, and under other circumstances, you might be right. But, here, now—" D.W. leaned over to pick up the rock he’d unearthed and whipped it off across the gorge, loose-shouldered and accurate. It fell just short of the other side and rattled down the cliff to the river below them. "What concerns me is the big picture. You know as well as I do, everything about this mission has been damn near to miraculous. And Emilio is the key to it. I don’t want to muddy the waters! I don’t want him thinkin’ about me. Or Mendes either, far as that goes. I ain’t gonna make an issue of them workin’ together because they’re handlin’ it okay. And they’re doin’ some fine research. But, frankly, I’m holdin’ my breath."
There was a silence, and Anne sat down, legs dangling over the ledge. D.W. stood for a while, less confident about the stability of the rock formation, but joined her at last and occupied his hands by flipping stones out into the void.
"D.W, I’m not arguing with you. I’m just asking, okay?"