Our Ecstatic Days (29 page)

however much it means to either of them, Brontë might as well have said China. All Lulu knows she remembers is red. In her mind she’s been on this journey a long time, with its rails of green and yellow and its tracks of orange and purple
(Tyrone the Train! I want to ride away with you …)
as they rumble through the Mojave marshlands. After nearly forty-eight hours without sleep, Brontë sleeps until the train jolts her awake and pitches her
upward; she’s momentarily disoriented, and for an instant she thinks Lulu is dead. Jeez, she cries softly touching the woman’s cheek, to which Lulu opens her eyes and turns to look at her. By this time they’ve been on the train all day. It seems to be moving slower and slower, crossing landscape more and more barren although, looking out the other side of the train, Brontë notes snow on far northern mountains. Every ten or fifteen minutes a tiny house glitters in the distance. Twilight falls in blueless magenta; a spreading red sky from the west is scratched with livid vapor trails, like God trying to claw his way in. Plutonium sagebrush blows south.

Lulu mutters in her sleep. Brontë gives her more water, trying again without success to get her to eat; then the younger woman dozes again and the next time she wakes, the train has stopped completely. In the night outside their window, symmetrically staggered in concentric circles around them and stretching out for miles like battlefield bunkers, single abandoned railway cars are lit by the lightning of a desert storm. The lightning is so fierce that the flash of it across Lulu’s face, as well as the tremendous thunder that follows almost immediately, wakes her as well. Brontë sits up looking around them. No one else is on the train except, at the far end, the conductor in his own seat; when he sees his last passengers have awakened, he saunters up the aisle.

silence of a dreamless delta, while at the same time I also believed it was

Pueblo d’Elektrik, he announces idly.

“Is this Chicago?” asks Brontë.

“Pueblo d’Elektrik. Last stop.”

“I thought this train goes to Chicago.”

“You have to transfer here. Nothing between here and Occupied Albuquerque and that’s another two hundred miles.”

“When does the Chicago train come through?”

“You’ll have to check with the station.” He leans down to look out the windows on the other side of the train. “Couple of days, I think. Station may be closed for the night.”

“A couple of days?”

“Might be open in the morning,” he says, “you can find out then. In the meantime you can probably get a room here at the pueblo. Yes,” he laughs at something he finds extremely funny, “you probably can. Yes,” he goes on laughing, “I would think so.” Brontë helps the older woman to her feet and moves her down the aisle. Down the stairs and off the train, she scurries Lulu to the shelter of an outside corridor that links the station to the railroad hotel next door, then moves the bags as the conductor watches. With Lulu and the baggage huddled against a wall, the younger woman darts from one dark window of the pueblo to the next, trying to see in. She finds a door and raps loudly; the rain and lightning and thunder grow. The conductor still watches from the top of the car as the train pulls out, heading down the track. Brontë has almost decided to break one of the windows when a light

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.

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.