The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (22 page)

“It has?” Nathan looked up from
his keyboard. “Here?”

“No. In Oceanside, Oregon. And in Springfield, Illinois.”

Nathan found them on the map. Two thousand miles apart. He checked their barometer readings, temperatures, snowfall amounts. No similarity. Springfield had thirty-two inches, Oceanside an inch and a half. And in every single town around them, it was still snowing hard. In Tillamook, six miles away, it was coming
down at the rate of five inches an hour.

But ten minutes later, Chin reported the snow stopping in Gillette, Wyoming; Roulette, Massachusetts; and Saginaw, Michigan; and within half an hour the number of stations reporting in was over thirty, though they seemed just as randomly scattered all over the map as the storm’s beginning had been.

“Maybe it has to do with their names,” Chin said.

“Their
names?” Nathan said.

“Yeah. Look at this. It’s stopped in Joker, West Virginia; Bluff, Utah; and Blackjack, Georgia.”

At 7:22 P.M., the snow began to taper off in Wendover, Utah. Neither the Lucky Lady Casino nor the Big Nugget had any windows, so the event went unnoticed until Barbara Gomez, playing the quarter slots, ran out of money at 9:05 P.M. and had to go out to her car to get the emergency
twenty she kept taped under the dashboard. By this time, the snow had nearly stopped. Barbara told the change girl, who said, “Oh, good. I was worried about driving to Battle Mountain tomorrow. Were the plows out?”

Barbara said she didn’t know and asked for four rolls of nickels, which she promptly lost playing video poker.

By 7:30 P.M. CNBC had replaced its logo
with
Digging Out
, and ABC had
retreated to Bing and
White Christmas
, though CNN still had side-by-side experts discussing the possibility of a new ice age, and on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera was intoning, “In his classic poem, ‘Fire and Ice,’ Robert Frost speculated that the world might end in ice. Today we are seeing the coming true of that dire prediction—”

The rest had obviously gotten the word, though, and CBS and the WB
had both gone back to their regular programming. The movie
White Christmas
was on AMC.

“Whatever this was, it’s stopping,” Nathan said, watching “1-80 now open from Lincoln to Ogalallah,” scroll across the bottom of NBC’s screen.

“Well, whatever you do, don’t tell those corporate guys,” Chin said, and, as if on cue, one of the businessmen Nathan had met with that morning called.

“I just wanted
you to know we’ve voted to approve your grant,” he said.

“Really? Thank you,” Nathan said, trying to ignore Chin, who was mouthing, “Are they giving us the money?”

“Yes,” he mouthed back.

Chin scribbled down something and shoved it in front of Nathan. “Get it in writing,” it said.

“We all agreed this discontinuity thing is worth studying,” the businessman said, then, shakily, “They’ve been
talking on TV about the end of the world. You don’t think this discontinuity thing is that bad, do you?”

“No,” Nathan said, “in fact—”

“Ix-nay, ix-nay,” Chin mouthed, wildly crossing his arms.

Nathan glared at him. “—we’re not even sure yet if it is a discontinuity. It doesn’t—”

“Well, we’re not taking any chances,” the businessman said. “What’s your fax number? I want to send you that confirmation
before the power goes out over here. We want you to get started working on this thing as soon as you can.”

Nathan gave him the number. “There’s really no need—” he said.

Chin jabbed his finger violently at the logo
False Alarm
on the screen of Adler’s TV.

“Consider it a Christmas present,” the businessman said, and the fax machine began to whir. “There
is
going to be a Christmas, isn’t there?”

Chin yanked the fax out of the machine with a whoop.

“Definitely,” Nathan said. “Merry Christmas,” but the businessman had already hung up.

Chin was still looking at the fax. “How much did you ask them for?”

“Fifty thousand,” Nathan said.

Chin slapped the grant approval down in front of him. “And a merry Christmas to you, too,” he said.

At 7:30 P. M., after
watching infomercials for NordicTrack,
a combination egg poacher and waffle iron, and the revolutionary new DuckBed, Bev put on her thin coat and her still-damp gloves and went downstairs. There had to be a restaurant open somewhere in Santa Fe. She would find one and have a margarita and a beef chimichanga, sitting in a room decorated with sombreros or piñatas with striped curtains pulled across the windows to shut the snow out.

And if they were all closed, she would come back and order from room service. Or starve. But she was
not
going to ask at the desk and have them phone ahead and tell her the El Charito had closed early because of the weather, she was not going to let them cut off all avenues of escape, like Carmelita. She walked determinedly past the registration desk toward the double doors.

“Mrs. Carey!” the
clerk called to her, and when she kept walking, he hurried around the desk and across the lobby to her. “I have a message for you from Carmelita. She wanted me to tell you midnight mass at the cathedral has been cancelled,” he said. “The bishop was worried about people driving home on the icy roads. But Carmelita said to tell you they’re having mass at eight o’clock, if you’d like to come to that.
The cathedral’s right up the street at the end of the plaza. If you go out the north door,” he pointed, “it’s only two blocks. It’s a very pretty service, with the luminarias and all.”

And it’s somewhere to go, Bev thought, letting him lead her to the north door. It’s something to do. “Tell Carmelita thank you for me,” she said at the door. “And
Feliz Navidad
.”

“Merry Christmas.” He opened the
door. “You go down this street, turn left, and it’s right there,” he said and ducked back inside, out of the snow.

It was inches deep on the
sidewalk as she hurried along the narrow street, head down, and snowing hard. By morning it would look just like back home. It’s not fair, she thought. She turned the corner and looked up at the sound of an organ.

The cathedral stood at the head of the
Plaza, its windows glowing like flames, and she had been wrong about the luminarias being ruined—they stood in rows leading up the walk, up the steps to the wide doors, lining the adobe walls and the roofs and the towers, burning steadily in the descending snow.

It fell silently, in great, spangled flakes, glittering in the light of the street lamps, covering the wooden-posted porches, the pots
of cactus, the pink adobe buildings. The sky above the cathedral was pink, too, and the whole scene had an unreal quality, like a movie set.

“Oh, Howard,” Bev said, as if she had just opened a present, and then flinched away from the thought of him, waiting for the thrust of the knife; but it didn’t come. She felt only regret that he couldn’t be here to see this and amusement that the sequined
snowflakes sifting down on her hair, on her coat sleeve, looked just like the fake snow at the end of White Christmas. And, arching over it all, like the pink sky, she felt affection—for the snow, for the moment, for Howard.

“You did this,” she said, and started to cry.

The tears didn’t trickle down her cheeks, they poured out, drenching her face, her coat, melting the snowflakes instantly where
they fell. Healing tears, she thought, and realized suddenly that when she had asked Howard how the movie ended, he hadn’t said, “They lived happily ever after.” He had said, “They got a white Christmas.”

“Oh, Howard.”

The bells for the service began to ring. I need to stop crying and go in, she thought, fumbling for a tissue, but she couldn’t. The tears kept coming, as if someone had opened
a spigot.

A black-shawled woman carrying a prayer book put her hand on Bev’s shoulder and said, “Are you all right,
señora?”

“Yes,” Bev said, “I’ll be fine,” and something in her voice must have reassured the woman because she patted Bev’s arm and went on into the cathedral.

The bells stopped ringing and the organ began again, but Bev continued to stand there until long after the mass had started,
looking up at the falling snow.

“I don’t know how you did this, Howard,” she said, “but I know you’re responsible.”

At eight P.M., after anxiously
checking the news to make sure the roads were still closed, Pilar put Miguel to bed. “Now go to sleep,” she said, kissing him good-night. “Santa’s coming soon.” “Hunh-unh,” he said, looking like he was going to cry. “It’s snowing too hard.”

He’s
worried about the roads being closed, she thought. “Santa doesn’t need roads,” she said. “Remember, he has a magic sleigh that flies through the air even if it’s snowing.”

“Hunh-
unh
,” he said, getting out of bed to get his Rudolph book. He showed her the illustration of the whirling blizzard and Santa shaking his head, and then stood up on his bed, pulled back the curtain, and pointed through
the window. She had to admit it did look just like the picture.

“But he had Rudolph to show the way“ she said. “See?” and turned the page, but Miguel continued to look skeptical until she had read the book all the way through twice.

At 10:15 P.M. Warren Nesvick went down to the hotel’s bar. He had tried to explain to Shara that Marjean was his five-year-old niece, but she had gotten completely
unreasonable. “So I’m a cancelled flight out of Cincinnati, am I?” she’d shouted. “Well, I’m canceling you, you bastard!” and slammed out, leaving him high and dry. On Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake.

He’d spent the next hour and a half on the phone. He’d called some women he knew from previous trips but none of them had answered. He’d then tried to call Marjean to tell her the snow was letting
up and United thought they could get him on standby early tomorrow morning and to try to patch things up—she’d seemed kind of upset—but she hadn’t answered either. She’d probably gone to bed.

He’d hung up and gone down to the bar. There wasn’t a soul in the place except the bartender. “How come the place is so dead?” Warren asked him.

“Where the hell have you been?” the bartender said and turned
on the TV above the bar.

“Most widespread snowstorm in recorded history,” Dan Abrams was saying. “Although there are signs of the snow beginning to let up here in Baltimore, in other parts of the country they weren’t so lucky. We take you now to Cincinnati, where emergency crews are still digging victims out of the rubble.” It cut to a reporter standing in front of a sign that read
Cincinnati
International Airport.
“A record forty-six inches of snow caused the roof of the main terminal to collapse this afternoon. Over two hundred passengers were injured, and forty are still missing.”

The goose was a huge
hit, crispy and tender and done to a turn, and everyone raved about the gravy. “Luke made it,” Aunt Lulla said, but Madge and his mom were talking about people not knowing how to
drive in snow and didn’t hear her.

It stopped snowing midway through dessert, and Luke began to worry about the snowman but didn’t have a chance to duck out and check on it till nearly eleven, when everyone was putting on their coats.

It had melted (sort of), leaving a round greasy smear in the snow. “Getting rid of the evidence?” Aunt Lulla asked, coming up behind him in her old-lady coat,
scarf, gloves, and plastic boots. She poked at the smear with the toe of her boot. “I hope it doesn’t kill the grass.”

“I hope it doesn’t affect the environment,” Luke said.

Luke’s mother appeared in the back door. “What are you two doing out there in the dark?” she called to them. “Come in. We’re trying to decide who’s going to have the dinner next Christmas. Madge and Shorty think it’s Uncle
Don’s turn, but—”

“I’ll have it,” Luke said and winked at Lulla.

“Oh,” his mother said, surprised, and went back inside to tell Madge and Shorty and the others.

“But not goose,” Luke said to Lulla. “Something easy. And nonfat.”

“Ian had a wonderful recipe for duck a l’orange Alsacienne, as I remember,” Lulla mused.

“Ian McKellen?”

“No, of course not, Ian Holm. Ian McKellen’s a terrible cook,”
she said. “Or—I’ve got an idea. How about Japanese blowfish?”

By 11:15 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the snow had stopped in New England, the Middle East, the Texas panhandle, most of Canada, and Nooseneck, Rhode Island.

“The storm of the century definitely seems to be winding clown,” Wolf Blitzer was saying in front of CNN’s new logo:
The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow
, “leaving in its wake a white
Christmas for nearly everyone—”

“Hey,” Chin said, handing Nathan the latest batch of temp readings. “I just thought of what it was.”

“What what was?”

“The factor. You said there were thousands
of factors contributing to global warming, and that any one of them, even something really small, could have been what caused this.”

He hadn’t really said that, but never mind. “And you’ve figured out
what this critical factor is?”

“Yeah,” Chin said. “A white Christmas.”

“A white Christmas,” Nathan repeated.

“Yeah! You know how everybody wants it to snow for Christmas, little kids especially, but lots of adults, too. They have this Currier-and-Ives thing of what Christmas should look like, and the songs reinforce it: ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’ and that one that goes, ‘The
weather outside is frightful,’ I never can remember the name—”

“‘Let It Snow,” Nathan said.

“Exactly,” Chin said. “Well, suppose all those people and all those little kids wished for a white Christmas at the same time—”

“They
wished
this snowstorm into being?” Nathan said.

“
No.
They
thought
about it, and their—I don’t know, their brain chemicals or synapses or something—created some kind of
electrochemical field or something, and that’s the factor.”

“That everybody was dreaming of a white Christmas.”

“Yeah. It’s a possibility, right?”

“Maybe,” Nathan said. Maybe there was some critical factor that had caused this. Not wishing for a white Christmas, of course, but something seemingly unconnected to weather patterns, like tiny variations in the earth’s orbit. Or the migratory patterns
of geese.