dross in a bank account in Carrizozo, and even when he and Agnes had fallen on the hardest of financial times they never once considered withdrawing it. He would give it all back with interest—so he’d written them before and wrote them now. But what was more, if Delfino died doing so, he was going to get his goddamn ranch back.
A chorus of pond frogs under racing stars. The rising moon like a decayed tooth sunk in the tender flesh of a melon cloud. The plaintive veery in the oak tree. This sagging porch she’d paced over many extinct summers. They all offered their stability to unstable Ariel who, though sitting on her favorite Adirondack chair, felt as if in a free fall. Given the day’s disclosure, she had to ask herself questions she’d never needed to consider before. What would it be like having someone in your life day and night, dawn to dusk to dawn? Someone who has every right to rely on your love, solace, thoughts, values, support, understanding, sustenance?
She drank from a fresh glass of shameful, ridiculous gin and would have scowled had her face not been numbed under its influence. A bat dropped through the silent air, out over the unmown grass studded with wild strawberry and devil’s paintbrush, and she half envied the gnat that was targeted in its orbit. Ariel had always come to the family farmhouse to consider important matters, away from the din of Manhattan. Never, though, did she have weightier business to consider than tonight.
With hasty scissors she cut through the floss and, like some latter-day Pandora, opened the box on her lap. Taking a deep breath, she opened the ledger at random and found a photograph taped to the page, a black-and-white faded toward pale butterscotch. The snapshot had scalloped margins that dated it to the fifties or early sixties. Two boys standing side by side, arms thrown casually over each other’s shoulders. The kid on the left was unmistakably Brice, with his earnest, squinched eyes and broad smile; the other, with a distracted cast and wide forehead wrinkled under the open sun, looked uncannily like Ariel herself. McCarthy and me, Four Corners area, 19-whatevereth. At second glance she could see behind them the needly throne of volcanic rock rising over a thousand feet above an otherwise flat desert floor. Altogether unreal, the boys standing before that mythic monument carved by fire and rain. Even more unreal was that Brice looked as if he were there at Shiprock with Ariel, the two of them like brother and sister, a decade before she was even born. If any questions lingered about her parentage, this image dispelled them.
Flipping back through the ambered leaves, she encountered equations, beautiful if incomprehensible strings of numbers framed by detailed marginalia, drawings of plants and animals, butterflies and reptiles, themselves annotated in a tiny hand beneath the pen and inks with notes such as P. douglasii, short horned lizard drawn 6.7.49 in alpine tundra Mt. Taylor brick-red with brown blotches and orange chin, big lizard syntypes collected by a David Douglas, no relation to namesake working with Bradbury.
Musing through the notebook, Ariel admired its purple, blue, and black inks, its meticulous script. Here was a palimpsest of physics, facts, educated guesses, not to mention deep regrets from days as distant as the stars burning above in the present night. Flickering suns, fiery nuclear reactions chained to their positions in the sky, any one of which—all of which, really—might have burned out millennia ago, and who’d be the wiser?
Page after page was saturated with pyramiding blocks of theory—frustrating if not unnerving—punctuated where her eye might rest on something at least half recognizable, such as RaLa core or betatron pulse or U235 , which she remembered from chemistry class and the table of elements that had hung on the wall at school. She turned the pages from left to right, as if reading Japanese, since what could it
A chorus of pond frogs under racing stars. The rising moon like a decayed tooth sunk in the tender flesh of a melon cloud. The plaintive veery in the oak tree. This sagging porch she’d paced over many extinct summers. They all offered their stability to unstable Ariel who, though sitting on her favorite Adirondack chair, felt as if in a free fall. Given the day’s disclosure, she had to ask herself questions she’d never needed to consider before. What would it be like having someone in your life day and night, dawn to dusk to dawn? Someone who has every right to rely on your love, solace, thoughts, values, support, understanding, sustenance?
She drank from a fresh glass of shameful, ridiculous gin and would have scowled had her face not been numbed under its influence. A bat dropped through the silent air, out over the unmown grass studded with wild strawberry and devil’s paintbrush, and she half envied the gnat that was targeted in its orbit. Ariel had always come to the family farmhouse to consider important matters, away from the din of Manhattan. Never, though, did she have weightier business to consider than tonight.
With hasty scissors she cut through the floss and, like some latter-day Pandora, opened the box on her lap. Taking a deep breath, she opened the ledger at random and found a photograph taped to the page, a black-and-white faded toward pale butterscotch. The snapshot had scalloped margins that dated it to the fifties or early sixties. Two boys standing side by side, arms thrown casually over each other’s shoulders. The kid on the left was unmistakably Brice, with his earnest, squinched eyes and broad smile; the other, with a distracted cast and wide forehead wrinkled under the open sun, looked uncannily like Ariel herself. McCarthy and me, Four Corners area, 19-whatevereth. At second glance she could see behind them the needly throne of volcanic rock rising over a thousand feet above an otherwise flat desert floor. Altogether unreal, the boys standing before that mythic monument carved by fire and rain. Even more unreal was that Brice looked as if he were there at Shiprock with Ariel, the two of them like brother and sister, a decade before she was even born. If any questions lingered about her parentage, this image dispelled them.
Flipping back through the ambered leaves, she encountered equations, beautiful if incomprehensible strings of numbers framed by detailed marginalia, drawings of plants and animals, butterflies and reptiles, themselves annotated in a tiny hand beneath the pen and inks with notes such as P. douglasii, short horned lizard drawn 6.7.49 in alpine tundra Mt. Taylor brick-red with brown blotches and orange chin, big lizard syntypes collected by a David Douglas, no relation to namesake working with Bradbury.
Musing through the notebook, Ariel admired its purple, blue, and black inks, its meticulous script. Here was a palimpsest of physics, facts, educated guesses, not to mention deep regrets from days as distant as the stars burning above in the present night. Flickering suns, fiery nuclear reactions chained to their positions in the sky, any one of which—all of which, really—might have burned out millennia ago, and who’d be the wiser?
Page after page was saturated with pyramiding blocks of theory—frustrating if not unnerving—punctuated where her eye might rest on something at least half recognizable, such as RaLa core or betatron pulse or U235 , which she remembered from chemistry class and the table of elements that had hung on the wall at school. She turned the pages from left to right, as if reading Japanese, since what could it
Similar Books
