Red Bricks

Red bricks are New Mexico.

They are red bricks remembered as red bricks even though the reality was tan stucco: the old, jagged kind that will tear up your skin like a cheese grater if you aren’t careful.  They are Gallup, New Mexico in August, sometime between 1998 and 2000.  I know it because I still had only one brother and somewhere between four and two grandparents, yet it’s hard to know whether it was when we were there for her or for him; uncertain because of that age when months in the form of “and-a-quarters” and “and-a-halves” somehow count more than years, as if maybe children know without understanding that it’s the smaller increments of time that matter most.  I tell myself I have forgotten because with some things, remembering the when and the objective reality of a thing, if there is that, isn’t as important as simply knowing it happened – even in the misremembering.

Red-bricks-that-were-stucco are deeply warm on August nights.  They exist as the antithesis of the sapping strength of cold stone, giving back the energy that was stolen.  They hold the heat like the packed red sand in the prickly-pear minefield of my mother’s parents’ back yard, or the cinderblock walls that kept that hill of sand and bone dry weeds from flooding the back door.  Those rough gray walls were witnesses to a lot of death.  Soldiers died, each of them ten times over – a ragtag pack of mismatched cousins groaning and laughing, filled with shot from imaginary machine guns riding on thumbs and forefingers and blown to bits by the mouthed sound effects of grenades thrown from the trenches and air strikes dropped by the plane from our favorite and only war story our grandfather would tell us.  While we played at death – girls dusted in reddish earth and boys with burrs in their shorts running half-crouched through the weeds on foolishly bare feet that would soon be full of cactus thorns – we ignored reality.  As if we simply didn’t have the space for it in our cinderblock lean-to fort.  We were all too preoccupied with the strange Catholic kids next door, the baby blue-bellies we’d catch and stow in a cracked kiddie pool on the hill fattened on hordes of chittering grasshoppers, and the formulation of any clever excuse to escape our mothers-who-were-sisters’ homeschool lessons.  We didn’t stop to think about the logic of traveling hundreds of miles away from home or the source of the strange-smelling hospital equipment in the bedroom or the six-letter curse hanging over our grandparents’ home with more bitter gravitas than any four letters could ever bear.  We wanted to play and stay up late outside of the house that was too small for the two generations holed up there, smelling of corn tortillas with cheese and sopapillas with honey and biscuits and hot sausage gravy with too much Hatch green chile.

On those August nights the red bricks did not hold back the sound.  I learned my nocturnal habits then, lying awake and deathly still to keep the springs on the small, old mattress on the hideaway frame from giving me away as my mother slept with only a couple feet between us.  I would stare at the asbestos ceiling that would glitter a little even in the darkness, and I would listen for the quiet flick of the number cards in the old not-quite-digital clock.  Counting seconds as hundreds of cabooses on the Santa Fe and always missing a few changes of the midnight minutes, I would wait, hoping.  Some nights only the rumble and whistle of the train would pierce the thin, high desert air on its way through or around Gallup, invisible, its noise carried inexplicably from wherever it was to wherever we were.  When I heard the train for a second time – or a second train for the first, for what did I know then of the economics of arrivals and departures? – I would roll over at last, disappointed, knowing the sun would be up soon and there was no more point in waiting.

But on other nights, I would not hear the train I never saw.  What I listened for and counted seconds and ceiling glitter waiting for would come.  A break in the universe that began as a rockslide, built to a throaty explosion, and echoed away over the desert like the distant heartbeat of some restless Native American spirit whose heart was a mountain that pumped gravel instead of a fist-sized muscle that pumped blood.  The dusty old blinds would glow and fade.  I would hear Mom’s mattress creak, and in the corner of my eye, watch the door open.  I would wait with infinite impatience, counting the spaces between flashing glows and rocky roars, thinking myself crafty and very much an adult for not springing to action like one of my younger cousins with no self-control.  When I felt I had waited long enough, I would roll over my bed, cocoon myself in a blanket, and follow like the little duckling I was.  I’d tiptoe down the carpeted hallway and push through the squeaking screen door.

Mom was there under the eaves, leaning against the rough retained warmth of the red-brick-stucco.  In the flashes of light I saw her outstretched hand and a welcoming smile that held a deep and secret understanding I could not fathom.  We shared the blanket, saying nothing, leaning against the dense heat and surety of the house behind and concrete beneath us like the forces of good warring nobly against the strangely dry and prickly chill of the air.  It was just the two of us staring up at the smoke-blue ceiling, watching light and electricity embrace the clouds above us, feeling the thunder in our bones as I clung closer.  Great tendrils of white shot down and connected with some distant cactus or patch of desert sand that would be glassy in the morning.  I watched in mouth-gaping wonder as the fine lines of silky white “cloud-hoppers” danced and spread their many-jointed fingers over, under, and through the dark cotton overhead like celestial cobwebs under the floorboards of Heaven, throwing a ghostly glow across the sky.  Light fell and branched and stuck for what seemed like unreal, countable seconds before fading out – then the fury would give way to the sound.

Huddled beneath the gentle weight of Mom’s arm with the ragged blanket holding our heat and protecting my bare skin from the roughness of stucco-that-has-become-bricks, if the peals of thunder came with great cracks of violence, I do not remember them.  I remember great rumbling roars that grew and echoed, echoed, echoed and never seemed to stop.  Each confession of the sky’s cathartic release of electricity rolled into the next – sometimes crashing and crippling a crescendo, sometimes rising and falling in strangely perfect waves.  Under the eaves, blanket, and arm, a hard place at my back, the shocks and grumblings of the sky held no fear for me.  As the storm raged, rainless and furious, we experienced raw beauty.  Alone with my Mom, I felt only safe, out of reach of my brother and six cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents.  I had no consideration for time – whether the six months for her, or the six months for him – only for the instances of light, and a vague sadness for the inevitable moment when the darkness would swallow the lights and the thunder would grow vague and distant.

The storm would always end.  No matter how I begged through sleep-heavy eyes to stay, I would have to leave the heat of the red-bricks-that-were-not.  Wrapped in the blanket and around her neck or half-crawling through the house, she would take me back to bed.  I would take the images of fractured rivers of light to my dreams, where games of war and death were excitements for guaranteed tomorrows and imagination wanted for nothing because it had yet to notice its chains.  In my drowsiness I accepted the mandate of sleep because I knew there would be another storm to see – because I wanted it, I prayed for it.  There would always be another storm.

Though the ground was thirsty, there would be no rain.