myself with him then, splashed him on my face and neck and breasts until I
held or kissed or spoken to him.
Brontë goes back through all the other old books of the hotel to try and find out what happened to the son left behind. But as the forbidden history of the pueblo would have it, he’s still standing in the doorway waiting for his father, and at night sometimes Brontë wakes to his small sirocco-cry from somewhere in the hotel. She presses her ear to the walls listening for him, convinced the brown-haired brown-eyed child scampers up and down secret passages between the rooms looking for his father who’s hiding from him, as though his abandonment has been only a game. Outside, the storms seem to stop moving over the mesas, rather it’s as though the earth continues turning its way into a single endless storm that rolls on and on and on into the coming years.
As Barbrasita gets bigger, she begins lumbering slowly up and down the hall snarling at the growing child inside her in ever blacker language. Even to someone who doesn’t understand the Spanish, it’s awful. In her sleep Lulu hears the girl cursing her unborn baby and murmurs for someone to make her stop. Bronte stands at the window staring for trains and thinks that between the dying woman in the bed behind her and the pregnant girl outside in the hall, perhaps she’ll go insane: Perhaps I will. Then what willthey do, she rages silently, what will they do when I’m crazy. As her belly grows in the passing months, Barbrasita curses it more and Lulu curses back, and this exchange continues until the night Brontë finally wakes to find the Mistress sitting straight up in bed, streaked with the electric frost of the storm outside, eyes wide to the sound of something Bronte can’t hear through the cracked euphonium of the storm, until it trails off in a baby’s cry.
Brontë rushes into the hall of the darkened pueblo. Searching for
couldn’t distinguish the tears of my eyes from the discharge of my uterus, until
the sound of the crying, she finds Barbrasita who, like a cat, has taken her labor into the linen closet, producing a bloody baby between her thighs, umbilical snake singing between them; the young Indian mother seems in shock. Down the dark deserted halls Bronte runs knocking on doors until Wanda appears. Calmly taking a flashlight hanging from a hook, grabbing from the kitchen the knife used for slicing Brontë’s lemons, she follows the crying to its source and, with a single swipe, slashes the cord. Its song howls into silence. Bronte reels. “Can you warm up a pot of water, miss,” Wanda says, “not too hot?”
Barbrasita doesn’t curse her baby anymore after that. In the days after that, she sits in her bed so rapt at the sight of the little boy that she almost has to be reminded to feed him, his small hands pawing her breast. Trying to explain it’s not a good idea for the two to sleep together, Wanda has to gently pry the child from the mother’s arms: You could roll over on him dear, she says, wedging the baby on his side in a small makeshift cradle a few feet away. Commissioned to keep an eye on the infant while Barbrasita sleeps, Brontë fumes. It’s very convenient for everyone isn’t it.It’s very convenient that a train abandoned me here so I could baby-sit a dying woman and a newborn. Brontë feels no affinity for babies. She believes she has a man’s sense of privacy that doesn’t accommodate babies. But as more weeks pass and she tires of watching for trains in whose arrival she has no more faith, she finds herself looking in on the baby anyway, even when the mother is awake. “Just thought I should check,” she tells the Indian girl. “Force of habit.”
Later, almost four hundred days after coming to the Pueblod’Elektrik, standing out on the station platform one night and seeing at long last, long after faith’s exhaustion, the small distant
both had seeped into me and I was bone dry, profoundly unmistakably empty,
light of an approaching train, Brontë will note it’s not so much like a full moon at all. But one night a few months before, before she can even imagine let alone know what’s to happen, out on the station platform one night she sees a globe of light emerge down the line over the far ridge and for a moment thinks it’s a train before realizing it’s the moon growing larger and larger like a plummeting airplane, its nose a burning bomb. That’s when she doesn’t believe in trains anymore. That’s when she thinks that she and the Mistress have as much chance of riding the moon to Chicago — assuming the moon ever traveled from west to east. But of course this moon like all others travels from east to west, back the way they came from. There in the pueblo station, what Brontë doesn’t yet know is that, as the four hundred days of the Pueblo d’Elektrik tick down, the two women come nearer their destination than she thinks: the end of the lie that they can or ever could leave the lake, or live beyond it.
Enthralled by her child, Barbrasita is paralyzed. In the weeks after his birth she can’t even bring herself to name the little boy, so afraid is she that her first maternal act will be a mistake, setting everything thereafter wrong. What if I name him something bad? she asks Brontë in broken English. She’s consumed with guilt about having cursed the baby when he was inside her. She’s convinced he heard every word, so now she pets his brown hair and begs his small brown eyes to forgive her. She seems to Brontë in a trance. One night when lightning strikes one of the railway cars outside, the reflection of the flaming mausoleum through the window makes the Indian’s face appear on fire, ecstatic, purged by love; that’s the night Brontë checks in one more time on the Mistress three doors down, turns down the lamp by Barbrasita’s bed, closes Barbrasita’s door behind her, and then takes off her clothes. Is the look on the Indian girl’s face just a variation of the
and then it was after that that I dreamed, for the first time in my life, not
one she always wears now as a mother, or a response to Brontë’s naked body next to her? Never with another girl before huh,Brontë whispers, careful should the wound of birth still be tender. Vixen, Bron të accuses herself, I’m no better than Rollin. Afterward, as the young Navajo woman sleeps in her breasts, wrapped in her long gold hair, out of her sleep Brontë reaches over in the dark and slowly rocks the cradle.
But in the ensuing days, the fire that’s been cast in Barbrasita’s face doesn’t die, rather ecstasy burns down to the diamond of a fixed notion. In her heart, her nameless little boy has opened the door to a vast plateau of fear, stretching out beyond her young years when mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable. In the beginning, perhaps her dread was attached to nothing she could name but now she can name it, pyre of the railway car outside flaming in her face: it’s the way she cursed him made manifest that’s coming for him. Like it was a thought wandering the desert waiting for her to rescue it, she’s come to know in no way she can explain even to herself that it doesn’t matter where she goes, it doesn’t matter how far she tries to get her little boy away,the lightning outside will keep coming for him, moving through the labyrinth of railway cars ring by outer ring, striking closer and closer, and that she can’t be paralyzed anymore. Out in the storm, out where the sky curses the earth in sound and light, lurks her son’s doom and she must stop it. She has to shake herself loose of the love that holds her down and find inside her the love that will save him. She has to go to war with the sky that would take him.