It was an odd storm. She watched it from the picture window in her hotel room. She saw four small figures crossing the flat desert field, the storm giving chase behind them, blue and black with rage.
They were three men and a boy. From what she could tell, they were oldest to youngest, which might have made them three generations running.
A lightning stripe crossed above them, emerging from the air like a hot white note. The thunder smacked against the glass and her forehead and she turned from the rattle of the window.
She turned back with a ring in her ears. One of her wrists hurt. She squinted out to see. It appeared that the boy had fallen. One of the younger men ran back to give assistance. The boy appeared to be weeping, but they were still quite a distance from the road and the hotel, and what were they doing in the field anyway, a boy, two young men, and an old man?
In the dining hall at lunch, people whispered to the rumor of storm, as if it were a loved one who’d escaped prison. Tornado, someone threatened. She was on her way to her son’s place in the south. She’d stopped here for the night. She was no stranger to weather. Once she’d seen a cow snatched from its breakfast as if it were not a cow at all. She remembered before it disappeared how it had one eye closed against horizontal hail.
The bearded sky, the deep gray canvas, so close now, the hotel trembling. Maybe it was ink in the distance coming or black sand on the wind. The men raced for the road, the boy now limping, all of them heedless of low bush and brittle grass. It was hard to tell whether the boy was weeping or singing.
The old man began to lumber, so it seemed to her. The younger men ran. But they moved with hesitation; they had their shoulders turned and as they progressed they beckoned to the old man and the boy. A series of lightning strikes ripped at their hair and shoulders; the four people stopped and crouched. That’s when she saw the van, a Border Patrol van, at the side of the road.
She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. Another boost of thunder rolled off the desert, like a great solid ball. She stepped away from the window. She felt a shudder in the floor.
The young men made it out; they came up a rise to the roadside. The border patrol officers entered the rainless wind, opened the back doors, and pulled the men into the van, who gave their arms up with little resistance. The old man was next. An officer went for him. The old man stopped and put his palms on his knees to catch his breath. He raised a hand to the officer as if to say wait, just a little rest please.
Three forks of lightning lit the sky simultaneously, one near, one far, and another still farther, the most distant light tucked back in the clouds so that its light sheeted horizontally then withdrew.
The officer assisted the old man into the van. He slammed the doors shut and ran to the passenger door and leapt in and the van eased onto the road and disappeared outside of view. Big drops of rain shattered against the window. The sudden rain snapped something.
She rushed down the hall and took the elevator to the first floor. As she flew past the front desk, a young man said, “There’s a tornado watch, senora. Everyone’s going down to the basement floor.” The auto door swooshed aside. She walked quickly to the side of the building. The rain’s weight on her shoulders reminded her of aggressive cats. She crossed the road with a hand up to protect her eyes and went to the edge of the field where the van had waited, the field with its leaning grass and thrashing branches, thunder crushed.
The ground out there had turned red. The bodies of the bushes shook. The yucca spears were amazingly still. Thunder knocked across the road.
She heard someone call. She turned. A man was standing just behind the yellow median stripe. He was protecting his head with a magazine.
“What are you doing?” he shouted. “There might be a tornado. What are you doing?”
She opened her mouth to explain. “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t.”
