TWO CARS AND A van are driving along the southern New Mexico desert. Two women, two brothers, an old woman and a baby—they are traveling away from the westering sun as if they are being beckoned by something they cannot resist. The gravity pulls them and they are tired of fighting. They drive free into that something they’ve never known. That unknown something does not frighten them.
The dark-haired brother is thinking about how his wife will look in the desert, how her dark eyes will look like coal against the endless sky, how she will grow more beautiful than the yucca in bloom, how her hair will turn the color of the earth, how her face will mirror the blinding sun and burn itself into his eyes. He wonders if she will love him less in this desert. He is looking across the great expanse—and knows he is even smaller than he ever thought. He is beginning to feel a kind of thirst he was never known. And the dark-haired man’s brother is thinking: ‘T have found my brother, but I have lost my Joaquin. And now I am moving toward a strange doorway, but I do not know that place.” But as he looks at the clouds, dark as anything he has ever known, he thinks: “I have lived in a doorway all my life. Perhaps I am going home.” He drives one of the cars alone, and yet he does not feel as if he is alone anymore. He takes out a cigarette from his pocket and smokes it. He thinks of his dead lover, and how he once walked up to him in a bar, took a cigarette out of his mouth, kissed him, then placed it back in his mouth and said, “Promise me you’ll quit, gringo.” He smiles at the memory. “I’ll quit when I get to the promised land.” He laughs to himself, and wonders at the large sky in front of him. He has never seen anything as large, as forbidding. It is startling and vast and as deep as the death he feels inside himself. He can see the storm across the desert and knows he is driving toward it. He wants it to swallow him. He lets out a puff of smoke through his nose. He sees lightning in the distance, then hears the thunder. It is like the sound of an earthquake, he thinks. I have lived through earthquakes. And the dark-haired woman holding her child in her arms is thinking: “I can smell it already—home—I can smell it, my mother, my brother, my skin.” “Do you see?” she whispers to her deaf son. “This is what you are made of.” And the other woman whose hair is much older than her skin is thinking: “This is the place I saw in my dream. Now it is more than a dream.” And the old woman is dreaming as she sleeps: “Yes, this will be a good place to die.”
The old woman continues to sleep as her daughter drives them into the storm. The daughter breathes in the smell of the desert, pungent and sweet. It makes her want to lick the earth, kiss it, take it into herself, take her clothes off and make love to it, the sand warmer and softer than any man’s hands. She thinks: “The clouds are as dark as Joaquin’s eyes in his final days.” She is startled by the sound of the thunder. She remembers a storm in Chicago when she was five. She had been playing outside, not noticing the gathering clouds. When the thunder and lightning began, her mother rushed outside and carried her indoors as the rain poured down around them, carried her as if she were the rain itself. She remembers the smell of her mother’s neck. She places her right hand on her mother’s lap for a few seconds then places it back on the wheel. Soon, they will be driving into the torrent. She thinks she has heard this thunder in the last breaths of her patients who died too young, too alone, too angry. She knows she has heard this thunder. Soon, she thinks, we will be surrounded by the rain.
The caravan slowly reaches the center of the storm, the darkness enfolding them like a hungry lover who has been celibate for too many years. Slowly, they stop by the side of the road and wait for the downpour to cease before they continue traveling. The lightning strikes and strikes, the thunder surrounds them. And the man with the cigarette thinks: “Joaquin said the earth was animate and holy and now I know it is true.” And then he thinks: “I have struck and struck—I have been the thunder,” and the old woman—now more awake than she had ever been—thinks: “I have felt the thunder all my life and I am not broken,” and her daughter, whose hair is as old as her mother’s, looks out into the great storm and thinks: “I have dreamed of being the thunder, and will become it,” and the dark-haired man looks in awe of the rain and thinks: “I have hidden from the thunder all my life, and now I must stop hiding,” and then he thinks of the time he trembled in his wife’s arms and told her about a cruel father whose thunder almost broke him as a boy; and the woman holding the child wants to yell for joy at the sound of the crackling sky: “I have come back to the thunder.” She feels the rain pulling her to itself. Unable to contain herself any longer, she places the child in her husband’s arms and runs out of the van into the arms of the rain. She begins dancing in the mud by the side of the road. The other young woman runs out of her car and begins to dance with her. They take each other’s hands and swing each other in a circle. The dark-haired man watches his wife and her friend dancing in the mud, unafraid of the thunder, unafraid of the rain, unafraid of the anger of the skies. Through the sheets of pouring rain, he sees and hears them laugh. He sees them imperfectly, but knows he is seeing the perfect image of freedom.