The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (39 page)

It is all that’s left. Hiroshima is supposed to have had a handful of untouched trees at ground zero. Denver the capitol steps. Neither of them says, “Remember men and women of St. Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.” The grace of God.

Part of the stone
is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time,”
but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St. Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast
complex structure from burning down. Which sounds to me like a course description for History Practicum 401. What a fine time to discover what historians are for when I have tossed my chance for being one out the windows as easily as they tossed the pinpoint bomb in! No, sir, the worst is not over.

There are flash burns on the stone, where legend says the Dean of St. Paul’s was kneeling when
the bomb went off. Totally apocryphal, of course, since the front door is hardly an appropriate place for prayers. It is more likely the shadow of a tourist who wandered in to ask the whereabouts of the Windmill Theatre, or the imprint of a girl bringing a volunteer his muffler. Or a cat.

Nothing is saved forever, Dean Matthews, and I knew that when I walked in the west doors that first day,
blinking into the gloom, but it is pretty bad nevertheless. Standing here knee-deep in rubble out of which I will not be able to dig any folding chairs or friends, knowing that Langby died thinking I was a Nazi spy, knowing that Enola came one day and I wasn’t there. It’s pretty bad.

But it is not as bad as it could be. They are both dead, and Dean Matthews too, but they died without knowing
what I knew all along, what sent me to my knees in the Whispering Gallery, sick with grief and guilt: that in the end none of us saved St. Paul’s. And Langby cannot turn to me, stunned and sick at heart, and say, “Who did this? Your friends the Nazis?” And I would have to say, “No, the communists.” That would be the worst.

I have come back to the room and let Kivrin smear more salve on my hands.
She wants me to get some sleep. I know I should pack and get gone. It will be humiliating to have them come and throw me out, but I do not have the strength to fight her. She looks so much like Enola.

January 1
—I have apparently slept not only through the night, but through the morning mail drop as well. When I woke up just now, I found Kivrin sitting on the end of the bed holding an envelope.
“Your grades came,” she said.

I put my arm over my eyes. “They can be marvelously efficient when they want to, can’t they?”

“Yes,” Kivrin said.

“Well, let’s see it,” I said, sitting up. “How long do I have before they come and throw me out?”

She handed the flimsy computer envelope to me. I tore it along the perforation. “Wait,” she said. “Before you open it, I want to say something.” She put
her hand gently on my burns. “You’re wrong about the history department. They’re very good.”

It was not exactly
what I expected her to say. “Good is not the word I’d use to describe Dunworthy,” I said and yanked the inside slip free.

Kivrin’s look did not change, not even when I sat there with the printout on my knees where she could surely see it.

“Well,” I said.

The slip was hand-signed
by the esteemed Dunworthy. I have taken a first. With honors.

January 2
—Two things came in the mail today. One was Kivrin’s assignment. The history department thinks of everything—even to keeping her here long enough to nursemaid me, even to coming up with a prefabricated trial by fire to send their history majors through.

I think I wanted to believe that was what they had done, Enola and Langby
only hired actors, the cat a clever android with its clockwork innards taken out for the final effect, not so much because I wanted to believe Dunworthy was not good at all, but because then I would not have this nagging pain at not knowing what had happened to them.

“You said your practicum was England in 1400?” I said, watching her as suspiciously as I had watched Langby.

“1348,” she said,
and her face went slack with memory. “The plague year.”

“My God,” I said. “How could they do that? The plague’s a ten.”

“I have a natural immunity,” she said, and looked at her hands.

Because I could not think of anything to say I opened the other piece of mail. It was a report on Enola. Computer-printed, facts and dates and statistics, all the numbers the history department so dearly loves,
but it told me what I thought I would have to go without knowing: that she had gotten over her cold and survived the Blitz. Young Tom had been killed in the Baedaker raids on Bath, but Enola had lived until 2006, ten years before they blew up St. Paul’s.

I don’t know whether I believe the report or not, but it does not matter. It is, like Langby’s reading aloud to the old man, a simple act of
human kindness. They think of everything.

Not quite. They did not tell me what happened to Langby. But I find as I write this that I already know: I saved his life. It does not seem to matter that he might have died in hospital next day, and I find, in spite of all the hard lessons the history department has tried to teach me, I do not quite believe this one: that nothing is saved forever. It
seems to me that perhaps Langby is.

January 3
—I
went to see Dunworthy today. I don’t know what I intended to say—some pompous drivel about my willingness to serve in the fire watch of history, standing guard against the falling incendiaries of the human heart, silent and saintly.

But he blinked at me nearsightedly across his desk, and it seemed to me that he was blinking at that last bright
image of St. Paul’s in sunlight before it was gone forever and that he knew better than anyone that the past cannot be saved, and I said instead, “I’m sorry that I broke your glasses, sir.”

“How did you like St. Paul’s?” he said, and like my first meeting with Enola, I felt I must be somehow reading the signals all wrong, that he was not feeling loss, but something quite different.

“I loved
it, sir,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “So do I.”

Dean Matthews is
wrong. I have fought with memory
my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul’s at
what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.

Every town’s got a claim to fame. No town is too little and dried out to have some kind of tourist attraction. John Garfield’s grave, Willa Cather’s house, the dahlia capital of America. And if they don’t have a house or a grave or a Pony Express station, they make something up. Sasquatch footprints in Oregon. The Martha lights in Texas. Elvis sightings. Something.

Except,
apparently, Portales, New Mexico.

“Sights?” the cute Hispanic girl at the desk of the Portales Inn said when I asked what there was to see. “There’s Billy the Kid’s grave over in Fort Sumner. It’s about seventy miles.”

I’d just driven all the way from Bisbee, Arizona. The last thing I wanted to do was get back in a car and drive a hundred and sixty miles round trip to see a crooked wooden tombstone
with the name worn off.

“Isn’t there anything famous to see in town?”

“In Portales?” she said, and it was obvious from her tone there wasn’t.

“There’s Blackwater Draw Museum on the way up to Clovis,” she said finally. “You take Highway 70 north about eight miles and it’s on your right. It’s an archaeological dig. Or you could drive out west of town and see the peanut fields.”

Great. Bones
and dirt.

“Thanks,” I said and went back up to my room.

It was my own
fault. Cross wasn’t going to be back till tomorrow, but I’d decided to come to Portales a day early to “take a look around” before I talked to him, but that was no excuse. I’d been in little towns all over the west for the last five years. I knew how long it took to look around. About fifteen minutes. And five to see it had
dead end written all over it. So here I was in Sightless Portales on a Sunday with nothing to do for a whole day but think about Cross’s offer and try to come up with a reason not to take it.

“It’s a good, steady job,” my friend Denny’d said when he called to tell me Cross needed somebody. “Portales is a nice town. And it’s got to be better than spending your life in a car. Driving all over kingdom
come trying to sell inventions to people who don’t want them. What kind of future is there in that?”

No future at all. The farmers weren’t interested in solar powered irrigation equipment or water conservation devices. And lately Hammond, the guy I worked for, hadn’t seemed very interested in them either.

My room didn’t have air-conditioning. I cranked the window open and turned the TV on. It
didn’t have cable either. I watched five minutes of a sermon and then called Hammond.

“It’s Carter Stewart,” I said as if I were in the habit of calling him on Sundays. “I’m in Portales. I got here earlier than I thought, and the guy I’m supposed to see isn’t here till tomorrow. You got any other customers you want me to look up?”

“In Portales?” he said, sounding barely interested. “Who were
you supposed to see there?”

“Hudd at Southwest Agricultural Supply. I’ve got an appointment with him at eleven.” And an appointment with Cross at ten, I thought. “I got in last night. Bisbee didn’t take as long as I thought it would.”

“Hudd’s our only contact in Portales,” he said.

“Anybody in Clovis? Or Tucumcari?”

“No,” he said, too fast to have looked them up. “There’s nobody much in that
part of the state.”

“They’re big into peanuts here. You want me to try and talk to some peanut farmers?”

“Why don’t you just take the day off?” he said.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, and hung up and went back downstairs.

There was a dried-up old guy at the desk now, but the word must have spread. “You wanna see something really interesting?” he said. “Down in Roswell’s where the Air Force has got
that space alien they won’t let anybody see. You take Highway 70 south—”

“Didn’t anybody famous ever live here in Portales?” I asked. “A vice-president? Billy the Kid’s cousin?”

He shook his head.

“What about buildings? A railroad station? A courthouse?”

“There’s a
courthouse, but it’s closed on Sundays. The Air Force claims it wasn’t a spaceship, that it was some kind of spy plane, but I
know a guy who saw it coming down. He said it was shaped like a big long cigar and had lights all over it.”

“Highway 70?” I said, to get away from him. “Thanks,” and went out into the parking lot.

I could see the top of the courthouse over the dry-looking treetops, only a couple of blocks away. It was closed on Sundays, but it was better than sitting in my room watching Falwell and thinking
about the job I was going to have to take unless something happened between now and tomorrow morning. And better than getting back in the car to go see something Roswell had made up so it’d have a tourist attraction. And maybe I’d get lucky, and the courthouse would turn out to be the site of the last hanging in New Mexico. Or the first peace march. I walked downtown.

The streets around the courthouse
looked like your typical smalltown post-Wal-Mart business district. No drugstore, no grocery store, no dimestore. There was an Anthony’s standing empty, and a restaurant that would be in another six months, a Western clothing store with a dusty denim shirt and two concho belts in the window, a bank with a sign in the window saying “New Location.”

The courthouse was red brick and looked like every
other courthouse from Nelson, Nebraska, to Tyler, Texas. It stood in a square of grass and trees. I walked around it twice, looking at the war memorial and the flagpole and trying not to think about Hammond and Bisbee. It hadn’t taken as long as I’d thought because I hadn’t even been able to get in to see the buyer, and Hammond hadn’t cared enough to even ask how it had gone. Or to bother to
look up his contacts in Tucumcari. And it wasn’t just that it was Sunday. He’d sounded that way the last two times I’d called him. Like a man getting ready to give up, to pull out.

Which meant I should take Cross’s job offer and be grateful.

“It’s a forty-hour week,” he’d said. “You’ll have time to work on your inventions.”

Right. Or else settle into a routine and forget about them. Five years
ago when I’d taken the job with Hammond, Denny’d said, “You’ll be able to see the sights. The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone.” Yeah, well, I’d seen them. Cave of the Winds, Amazing Mystery House, Indian curios, Genuine Live Jackalope.

I walked around
the courthouse square again and then went down to the railroad tracks to look at the grain elevator and walked back to the courthouse
again. The whole thing took ten minutes. I thought about walking over to the university, but it was getting hot. In another half hour the grass would start browning and the streets would start getting soft, and it would be even hotter out here than in my room. I started back to the Portales Inn.

The street I was on was shady, with white wooden houses, the kind I’d probably live in if I took Cross’s
job, the kind I’d work on my inventions in. If I could get the parts for them at Southwest Agricultural Supply. Or Wal-Mart. If I really did work on them. If I didn’t just give up after awhile.

I turned down a side street. And ran into a dead end. Which was pretty appropriate, under the circumstances. “At least this would be a real job, not a dead end like the one you’re in now,” Cross’d said.
“You’ve got to think about the future.”

Yeah, well, I was the only one. Nobody else was doing it. They kept on using oil like it was water, kept on using water like the Ogalala Aquifer was going to last forever, kept planting and polluting and populating. I’d already thought about the future, and I knew what it was going to be. Another dead end. Another Dust Bowl. The land used up, the oil wells
and the water table pumped dry, Bisbee and Clovis and Tucumcari turned into ghost towns. The Great American Desert all over again, with nobody but a few Indians left on it, waiting in their casinos for customers who weren’t going to come. And me, sitting in Portales, working a forty-hour-a-week job.