because he was starved of his own umbilical dreams that the glistening yolk of
comes on and a freckled man with cropped red hair opens the door. We need a room, Brontë says.
In the shadow of the light behind him, the man with the red hair considers this. “It’s late”
“Yes, well, please explain that to the train that left us here,” Brontë snaps, pointing down the track. The man squints at the train disappearing in the distance. He seems to find the situation confounding until a particularly vicious crack of lightning catches his attention. He opens the door and Brontë hustles Lulu inside and brings in the bags. At the front desk she pays the man a deposit and the man gives the young woman a key to a room upstairs at the farthest end even though, as Brontë will learn, all the downstairs rooms are empty and there’s no other guest in the hotel except one whose light seeps out beneath the door three down from theirs. Slowly Brontë moves Lulu up the stairs, then hauls up the bags one by one as the hotel manager watches. She’s gotten the last suitcase up to the landing at the top in time to see an Indian girl a year or two younger knocking quietly on the door of the other occupied room; the light goes out and the door opens, and the girl glances over her shoulder at Brontë before slipping in through an electric white rip in the dark.
From their room in this section of the pueblo that juts out from the top floor, Brontë can see in almost every direction a molten desert bubbling with silver racket and tumbling from the navajo plateaus to the north. Outside the western window a grove of incinerated trees struggles skyward in black webs, and surrounding rings of single railway cars divert the storm from trains that slither through the countryside. The light and clamor are so relentless that all
Kierkegaard Blumenthal broke and emptied from me, and that night dropping
Brontë can do is huddle in her bed trying to decide whether to cover her ears or eyes; she wishes they had never left the lake. She’s only seen such fire and noise once before but can’t remember it. The next morning she finally gets Lulu to eat some cereal cooked by the manager’s wife; next door she finds the station still closed, and when it’s still closed that afternoon and the next morning and the next afternoon as well, she gets this feeling. Oh any time, says Roy the manager with red hair when Brontë asks what hour the station opens. Deep in the middle of the third night, in the middle of a dream she hears a rumbling and rushes to the window in time to see the light of a train disappearing down the track. Yes, replies Roy the following morning when she asks, anytime now that train ought to be coming back through here: maybe tomorrow or the next day. You said that yesterday, Brontë finally stops answering after a while.
After a while longer she stops asking. Built in the Nineteenth Century as the grandest estancia in northern Arizona by a Spanish aristocrat who fled San Sebastian in disgrace with his fortune, then eventually handed down to his great great grandson, the pueblo was finally lost by the family in the Wall Street crash of ninety-nine years ago. Serenely the great great grandson walked out through the adobe porticoes into the desert never to be seen again. Taken over by the Santa Fe railway, the mansion was converted into a railroad hotel. In the fourth and fifth decades of the Twentieth Century it bustled with travelers to and from the Midwest stopping for a meal or the night; with its sweeping entryways and arched passages and suspended staircases, the pueblo was all blue tile and hacienda-deco then. A quarter century ago the electrical storms blew in from the Juarez wastelands to the east, and both the railroad and hotel began to die. The tile isn’t blue anymore, and besides Roy and his wife Wanda there’s no one
to my knees I moaned for him to come back come back come back, dropping to
else in the hotel except Barbrasita the Navajo girl who delivers meals and cleans the rooms and mops the wide black-oak hallways, and Rollin the other guest three rooms down.
Moving from city to city selling shady weather reports until stranded by a west-bound train a few weeks before, Rollin is a traveling meteorologist in his mid-fifties. Soon after Brontë and Lulu’s arrival he takes to rapping on their door day and night, posting himself there for hours on end, chatting up the younger woman. He’s too unabashedly stupefied by her breasts to even pretend interest in anything else about her. If his knock goes unanswered, he invites himself in regardless. Ceaselessly he recounts the itinerary of his life and expounds with great expertise on the caprice of lightning, talking about anything and everything except — as Wanda dryly points out — his wife and daughter back in St. Louis. Bronte finds him too ridiculous to be threatening, but when he accosts her one night in a darkened corridor, she can’t help wondering where’s a whip and a good pair of handcuffs when a girl needs them. As the nights go by, the moody Barbrasita who Brontë saw slipping into Rollin’s room the first night becomes more sullen, lingering outside his door to less and less attention, as the music of a radio can be plainly heard on the other side.
Whenever she sees Brontë, Barbrasita’s expression grows darker. Delivering dinner from the kitchen downstairs, she practically hurls it in the other’s face, and when she refuses to help change Lulu’s bed a week later, the two young women have a blistering bilingual argument in the hallway that neither understands. “I think,” Bronte finally tries to confront things head-on, “perhaps you’ve the wrong idea about me and your weatherman—” to which Barbrasita grabs the soup spoon from a meal tray and lunges at the other woman to scoop out her eyes, before Wanda pulls
my knees I retracted every stern admonition I had already given him, I scooped
her away. Walking the hotel corridors at night, Brontë takes to rounding darkened corners at a wide arc in anticipation of ambush. When she’s not waking to the sound of trains, it’s to the expectation of the Indian girl standing over her, lethal spoon in hand. Somehow Rollin is oblivious to all this. He assumes everyone basks in his bonhomie. Day after day then week after week, as Barbrasita lurks outside his room, he lurks outside Brontë’s, telling again and again the same stories he’s told before, each time embellishing wildly as though no one ever would notice the variance with earlier versions. Sometimes Bronte thinks he’s forgotten about seduction altogether, so satisfied is he by his own regalement. It occurs to her to set him straight on her preferences but she’s got the feeling Rollin would just find further inspiration in ever preposterous reveries of the two women in all their possible permutations.
A couple of weeks stretch into a couple more. Only after Brontë and Lulu have been at the pueblo almost a month does Rollin — peviously in no great hurry to leave a hotel so conveniently remote and teeming with comely Indian maidens and pneumatic golden-haired pixies — suddenly become very anxious himself about the next train. For several nights Brontë hears the sound of terrible fights coming from his room. Whatever Barbrasita is saying, Rollin seems to understand very well.