When the Emperor Was Divine: List 2

On the map the lake was called Intermittent. Intermittent Lake. Because sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn't. It all depended on the rain.

It soared through the air and hit a gnarled trunk of blackened sage as the white house grew smaller and smaller in the distance.

An old woman walked by, swaying slightly from side to side, and the girl smelled something damp and musty that reminded her of rotting leaves. It was the smell of fine, old silk.

The train lurched forward and she leaned over and put her head between her knees.

Three young girls in white dresses whirled by beneath matching white parasols.

The train slowed and crossed a wooden trestle over the dry bed of a river and then there were no more towns by the tracks, there was only the highway, and it was all right to raise up the shades.

The Spaniards had brought them over hundreds of years ago and now there were thousands of horses just roaming around, wild. Every autumn they came down from the hills to graze on the high desert plains.

All summer long they had lived in the old horse stalls in the stables behind the racetrack. In the morning they had washed their faces in the long tin troughs and at night they had slept on mattresses stuffed with straw.

Twice a day when the siren blew they had returned to the stalls for the head count and three times a day they had lined up to eat in the mess hall on the ground floor of the grandstands.

On warm days he had smelled the smell of the horses rising up through the damp linoleum floors and on rainy days when she had stayed inside writing letters to her father in Fort Sam Houston or Lordsburg or wherever it was that he happened to be her brother had gone out in his raincoat and his red rubber boots and walked around and around the muddy racetrack.

"Ride horses!” Mr. Okamura had shouted from the stall on the other side of the partition.

By late afternoon the train had run out of water. The sun shone through the dirty glass panes and the air inside was stuffy and hot.

The boy stared solemnly at the elephant for a long time and then he turned the page.

His hair was flecked with gray around the temples but she could not tell if he was young or old.

She looked at the letters embroidered in gold thread on the corner of his handkerchief and asked him what the “T” stood for.

She looked down at her scarf again. The edges were frayed and worn.

She saw two boys fighting for a window seat and a pair of middle-aged women sitting quietly side by side knitting identical pairs of thick woolen socks in preparation for the bitter winter months yet to come.

She flipped through the pictures of the Indian pueblos and the ancient cliff dwellings until she came to the postcard of the largest and finest auditorium in New Mexico: the Seth Hall Gymnasium at Santa Fe High School.

Seth Hall looked like an enormous adobe house, only with cross bars over the windows.

“What kind of boat was it?” the boy whispered.
“A gondola.”
“Then you were in Venice.”

The sky was lit up by the moon and the dark bodies of the horses were drifting and turning in the moonlight and wherever they went they left behind great billowing clouds of dust as proof of their passage.

It crossed the barren stretch of the Great Salt Lake Desert and then the Great Salt Lake itself.

She covered her eyes with her hand and said, “It’s too bright.’’
“It is unbearably bright,” said her mother.

For several miles they drove past nothing but farms and alfalfa fields and the scenery was very pleasant.

He pressed the scarf to his face and took the girl’s hand and together they stepped out of the bus and into the blinding white glare of the desert.