One afternoon Brontë sees from her window a distant car, snubbed and blunted like a discharged bullet, weaving its way toward the pueblo through the storm, daring the lightning to take it out. Driving in thirty miles from the northeast, a family of four has come for the train. When dark falls they roam the lobby waiting, an older man and woman and a younger man who dozes on one of the wooden monastery benches strewn throughout the foyer, and a
him up in a puddle and held him in the cup of my hands just as I did up there a
boy of about eleven who plays games on an ancient laptop. It’s not clear to Brontë how the four are related. “Here to bury her son,” the old man shrugs at the woman sitting quietly alone, “killed in the fighting up in Zion. Going back home now,” but not east it turns out, rather back the way Bronte and Lulu came. Graying hair pulled back, the woman sits on her bench for hours saying nothing,staring ahead of her and only lifting her eyes and nodding slightly whenever the old man whispers to her. She never settles into the bench, rather she sits at the edge in anticipation of something she’s already too late for, as though so flabbergasted by her grief she doesn’t feel it, as though distilled in this moment is the tenor of her entire life. For a while Brontë waits up to see with her own eyes if a train actually rolls through, heading any direction.
Finally around midnight she goes back up to her room where, after cooling Lulu’s fevered brow with a damp cloth, she sleeps.
She’s awakened by yet another argument between Rollin and Barbrasita. This is by far the most violent she’s heard, coming not from the room just a few doors away but downstairs. From the darkened landing of the stairs she can see Barbrasita below with a furious grip on Rollin’s arm, pulling him from the family that, apparently, has given up on the train and now means to drive back through the storm and the night; over her screams, desperately Rollin beseeches them to take him. The family seems stricken. Somewhere Roy and Wanda hide beneath their covers. Finally shaking themselves free of their bereaved inertia, the older man and woman, the young man and the boy dash madly for the bullet car; and confronted with the choice of the storm before him or Barbrasita behind him, Rollin bolts in pursuit past the same adobe porticos through which the great great grandson of the San Sebastian aristocrat vanished almost a century ago — as though
few minutes ago on the lake, or down there, whichever way the lake is now, in
he thinks he can charm the lightning.
In the following weeks, Barbrasita watches from the pueblo’s front window for signs of how far Rollin got — but out here, Wanda tells Brontë, even the vultures don’t fly. Soon the Navajo girl gives up her vigil and instead takes to sitting every day for hours on a stark high-back chair in the hallway outside Brontë’s door, not unlike the way the woman who lost her son in the fighting up in Zion sat all night on the bench downstairs. With no rooms other than Brontë’s and Lulu’s to make up, no other clean towels to be delivered, no other lunches or dinners to be served, she stares at her growing belly and rains on it the same black curses she rained on the child’s father the night he left. Sitting at her own window staring out at the desert stonehenge of railway cars surrounding the pueblo, Brontë realizes she no longer knows for sure whether she’s waiting for a train or for the woman in the bed to die; on the frontier of a kind of catalepsy, from time to time Lulu arouses herself to an uncognitive waking, drinking and eating only enough to endure but never to speak or, as far as Bronte can tell, truly know. Brontë herself cannot know, for instance, that, beyond the windows, Lulu sees — as no one else sees — the melody-snakes crawling up out of the parched dust long enough to rattle a few notes before lightning cuts short their songs in a throttled shriek. Female screams fill the charged air. Lulu hears them even as she slips back to sleep, the way Bronte hears trains.
Brontë has no idea why it’s important to get to Chicago. Actuallyshe doesn’t think it’s important at all, Chicago’s just the place the train happens to go to. She doesn’t really suppose it will make any difference to Lulu. But this hotel seems to her an intolerable placefor someone to die — better the Chateau. On the pay phone downstairs, she tra cks down a doctor in the territory who drives in
the gondola where I came from, when his answer to my call came bubbling up
two days later. Half Indian, half white, he’s never diagnosed someone dying of sorrow, dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but sorrow itself: Isn’t there somewhere to take her, Brontë asks, a hospital or rest home? The doctor answers that there’s something about this dying that’s beyond the peace of hospitals and rest homes. When she tries to call him again a week later, the phone is out of order. The weeks become months. Outside, the storm is unmoved by the change of seasons, and the arrival of spring.
Brontë discovers a television one afternoon in one of the back suites on the first floor, but as she might have expected, there’s nothing on it except a faint broadcast from Flagstaff, buzzing out of the clouds to the west. Constantly awakened by trains taunting her, constantly gazing out the windows for signs of a light coming up the track, at night she takes to drifting through the dark hacienda and cold cinderblock foyer, past the bare newsstand and forsaken gift shops and faded Indian murals and the bar lined with tequila bottles and cracked martini glasses drunk on their own dust. She scours the stray pieces of hotel literature as well as the volumes of local lore on the shelves; after a while she knows more about the pueblo and the families that built it and lived here than she does her own life. When the storms originally came, the first part of the hotel to have been closed was the dining room, once the finest in the territory. Now for the pueblo’s rare guest Wanda cooks in the hotel kitchen a traditional soup half spicy black bean and half sweet corn, sending it up to Brontë along with lemon slices.
Boarded up after the dining room was the cavernous ballroom, its once-blue ceiling that’s flecked with silver now gray like the overcast sky outside. The small tadpoles of silver flicker like the
from the bottom, so in the same way the night I miscarried him I splashed
lightning’s stray offspring. One night Brontë peeks past the slabs of wood that barricade the ballroom entrance and pulls one away, stepping through; because of how the silver flashes in the dark ceiling, there in the black of the old ballroom she can almost believe there are no ceiling or walls, that there’s no pueblo at all. She can almost believe the massive Navajo carpet across the ballroom floor is a great rooftop floating high above the earth. Actually tottering a bit where she stands, she reaches for the wall to steady herself; before her, a quadrant of the world is ablaze with lightning. It curves in an electric white arc against the black of space. A lake glitters far below to the west, lunar gales howl in the sky below, and pacing the eye of the storm Brontë contemplates the shimmering suture of the northern mesas. For a moment she can almost believe that here one sleeps above her dreams — for good or ill, depending on the dreams.
Lately Brontë has been having dreams of a small boy. Only after she found a crumbling old book on a remote shelf did she learn the story that the official literature of the hotel doesn’t telclass="underline" that on the afternoon the great great grandson of the Spaniard who built the pueblo walked out its porticos into the desert, he left behind a sole inheritor of his ruin. This was a three-year-old child who he so refused to acknowledge as his own son that the forsaken mother, a local Indian woman, died giving birth in a ravine just beyond the western garden. Even when the infant boy was taken in by the hotel servants, his cry was regarded by the father as simply a stray sirocco blowing through the abandoned ballroom. Thus three years later, with the hacienda empty of everyone else, on his nonchalant stroll into the desert the newly destitute patrician walked right past the child as though he was invisible, and for hours the little boy stood in the open doorway first watching the disappearance then awaiting the return of the father who had never