The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “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.

  Nonstop to Portales

  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, loo
king 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.

  I backtracked and went the other way. I didn’t run into any other dead ends, or any sights either, and by 10:15 I was back at the Portales Inn, with only twenty-four hours to kill and Billy the Kid’s grave looking better by the minute.

  There was a tour bus in the Inn’s parking lot. NONSTOP TOURS, it said in red and gray letters, and a long line of people was getting on it. A young woman was standing by the door of the bus, ticking off names on a clipboard. She was cute, with short yellow hair and a nice figure. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt and a short denim skirt.

  An older couple in Bermuda shorts and Disney World T-shirts were climbing the stairs onto the bus, slowing up the line.

  “Hi,” I said to the tour guide. “What’s going on?”

  She looked up from her list at me, startled, and the old couple froze halfway up the steps. The tour guide looked down at her clipboard and then back up at me, and the startled look was gone, but her cheeks were as red as the letters on the side of the bus.

  “We’re taking a tour of the local sights,” she said. She motioned to the next person in line, a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt, and the old couple went on up the steps and into the bus.

  “I didn’t think there were any,” I said. “Local sights.”

  The fat guy was gaping at me.

  “Name?” the tour guide said.

  “Giles H. Paul,” he said, still staring at me. She motioned him onto the bus.

  “Name?” I said, and she looked startled all over again. “What’s your name? It’s probably on that clipboard in case you’ve forgotten it.”

  She smiled. “Tonia Randall.”

  “So, Tonia, where’s this tour headed?”

  “We’re going out to the ranch.”

  “The ranch?”

  “Where he grew up,” she said, her cheeks flaming again. She motioned to the next person in line. “Where he got his start.”

  Where who started to what? I wanted to ask, but she was busy with a tall man who moved almost as stiffly as the old couple, and anyway, it was obvious everybody in line knew who she was talking about. They couldn’t wait to get on the bus, and the young couple who were last in line kept pointing things out to their little kid—the courthouse, the Portales Inn sign, a big tree on the other side of the street.

  “Is it private? Your tour?” I said. “Can anybody pay to go on it?” And what was I doing? I’d taken a tour in the Black Hills one time, when I’d had my job about a month and still wanted to see the sights, and it was even more depressing than thinking about the future. Looking out blue-tinted windows while the tour guide tells memorized facts and unfunny jokes. Trooping off the bus to look at Wild Bill Hickok’s grave for five minutes, trooping back on. Listening to bawling kids and complaining wives. I didn’t want to go on this tour.

  But when Tonia blushed and said, “No, I’m sorry,” I felt a rush of disappointment at not seeing her again.

  “Sure,” I said, because I didn’t want her to see it. “Just wondering. Well, have a nice time,” and started for the front door of the Inn.

  “Wait,” she said, leaving the couple and their kid standing there and coming over to me. “Do you live here in Portales?”

  “No,” I said, and realized I’d decided not to take the job. “Just passing through. I came to town to see a guy. I got here early, and there’s nothing to do. That ever happen to you?”

  She smiled, as if I’d said something funny. “So you don’t know anyone here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you know the person you’ve got the appointment with?”

  I shook my head, wondering what that had to do with anything.

  She consulted her clipboard again. “It seems a pity for you to miss seeing it,” she said, “and if you’re just passing through…just a minute.” She walked back to the bus, stepped up inside, and said something to the driver. They consulted a few minutes, and then she came back down the steps. The couple and their kid came up to her, and she stopped a minute and checked their names off and waved them onto the bus, and then came back over to me. “The bus is full. Do you mind standing?”

  Bawling kids, videocams, and no place to sit to go see the ranch where somebody I’d probably never heard of got his start. At least I’d heard of Billy the Kid, and if I drove over to Fort Sumner I could take as long as I wanted to look at his grave. “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind.” I pulled out my wallet. “Maybe I better ask before we go any farther, how much is the tour?”

  She looked startled again. “No charge. Because the tour’s already full.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’d like to go.”

  She smiled and motioned me on board with her clipboard. Inside, it looked more like a city bus than a tour bus—the front and back seats were sideways along the walls, and there were straps for hanging onto. There was even a cord for signaling your stop, which might come in handy if the tour turned out to be as bad as the Wild Bill Hickok tour. I grabbed hold of a strap near the front.

  The bus was packed with people of all ages. A white-haired man older than the Disney World couple, middle-aged people, teenagers, kids. I counted at least four under age five. I wondered if I should yank the cord right now.

  Tonia counted heads and nodded to the driver. The door whooshed shut, and the bus lumbered out of the parking lot and slowly through a neighborhood of trees and tract houses. The Disney World couple were sitting in the front seat. They scooted over to make room for me, and I gestured to Tonia, but she motioned me to sit down.

  She put
down her clipboard and held on to the pole just behind the driver’s seat. “The first stop on today’s tour,” she said, “will be the house. He did the greater part of his work here,” and I began to wonder if I was going to go the whole tour without ever finding out who the tour was about. When she’d said “the ranch,” I’d assumed it was some Old West figure, but these houses had all been built in the thirties and forties.

  “He moved into this house with his wife, Blanche, shortly after they were married.”

  The bus ground down its gears and stopped next to a white house with a porch on a corner lot.

  “He lived here from 1947 to…” She paused and looked sideways at me. “…he present. It was while he was living here that he wrote Seetee Ship and The Black Sun and came up with the idea of genetic engineering.”

  He was a writer, which narrowed it down some, but none of the titles she’d mentioned rang a bell. But he was famous enough to fill a tour bus, so his books must have been turned into movies. Tom Clancy? Stephen King? I’d have expected both of them to have a lot fancier houses.

  “The windows in front are the living room,” Tonia said. “You can’t see his study from here. It’s on the south side of the house. That’s where he keeps his Grand Master Nebula Award, right above where he works.”

  That didn’t ring a bell either, but everybody looked impressed, and the couple with the kid got out of their seats to peer out the tinted windows. “The two rear windows are the kitchen, where he read the paper and watched TV at breakfast before going to work. He used a typewriter and then in later years a personal computer. He’s not at home this weekend. He’s out of town at a science fiction convention.”

  Which was probably a good thing. I wondered how he felt about tour buses parking out front, whoever he was. A science fiction writer. Isaac Asimov, maybe.