The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  I looked around the dashboard for an exclusion button.

  “What the hell is going on, David? First you ditch two big stories, now you can’t even get your pictures in. Jesus, if something’s wrong, you can tell me. I want to help. It has something to do with Colorado, doesn’t it?”

  I found the exclusion button and cut her off.

  Van Buren got crowded as the afternoon rush spilled over off the divideds. Out past the curve, where Van Buren turns into Apache Boulevard, they were putting in new lanes. The cement forms were already up on the eastbound side, and they were building the wooden forms up in two of the six lanes on my side.

  The Amblers must have just beaten the workmen, though at the rate the men were working right now, leaning on their shovels in the hot afternoon sun and smoking stew, it had probably taken them six weeks to do this stretch.

  Mesa was still open multiway, but as soon as I was through downtown, the construction started again, and this stretch was nearly done—forms up on both sides and most of the cement poured. The Amblers couldn’t have come in from Globe on this road. The lanes were barely wide enough for the Hitori, and the tanker lanes were gated. Superstition Mountain is full-divided, and the old highway down from Roosevelt is, too, which meant they hadn’t come in from Globe at all. I wondered how they had come in—probably in some tanker lane on a multiway.

  “Oh, my, the things we’ve seen,” Mrs. Ambler had said. I wondered how much they’d been able to see skittering across the dark desert like a couple of kangaroo mice, trying to beat the cameras.

  The roadworkers didn’t have the new exit signs up yet, and I missed the exit for Apache Junction and had to go halfway to Superior, trapped in my narrow, cement-sided lane, till I hit a change-lanes and could get turned around.

  Katie’s address was in Superstition Estates, a development pushed up as close to the base of Superstition Mountain as it could get. I thought about what I would say to Katie when I got there. I had said maybe ten sentences altogether to her, most of them shouted directions, in the two hours we had been together. In the Jeep on the way to the vet’s I had talked to Aberfan, and after we got there, sitting in the waiting room, we hadn’t talked at all.

  It occurred to me that I might not recognize her. I didn’t really remember what she looked like—only the sunburned nose and that terrible openness, and now, fifteen years later, it seemed unlikely that she would have either of them. The Arizona sun would have taken care of the first, and she had gotten married and divorced, been fired, had who knows what else happen to her in fifteen years to close her face. In which case, there had been no point in my driving all the way out here. But Mrs. Ambler had had an almost impenetrable public face, and you could still catch her off guard. If you got her talking about the dogs. If she didn’t know she was being photographed.

  Katie’s house was an old-style passive solar, with flat black panels on the roof. It looked presentable, but not compulsively neat. There wasn’t any grass—tankers won’t waste their credits coming this far out, and Apache Junction isn’t big enough to match the bribes and incentives of Phoenix or Tempe—but the front yard was laid out with alternating patches of black lava chips and prickly pear. The side yard had a parched-looking palo verde tree, and there was a cat tied to it. A little girl was playing under the tree with toy cars.

  I took the eisenstadt out of the back and went up to the front door and rang the bell. At the last moment, when it was too late to change my mind, walk away, because she was already opening the screen door, it occurred to me that she might not recognize me, that I might have to tell her who I was.

  Her nose wasn’t sunburned, and she had put on the weight a sixteen-year-old puts on to get to be thirty, but otherwise she looked the same as she had that day in front of my house. And her face hadn’t completely closed. I could tell, looking at her, that she recognized me and that she had known I was coming. She must have put a notify on her lifeline to have them warn her if I asked her whereabouts. I thought about what that meant.

  She opened the screen door a little, the way I had to the Humane Society. “What do you want?” she said.

  I had never seen her angry, not even when I turned on her at the vet’s. “I wanted to see you,” I said.

  I had thought I might tell her I had run across her name while I was working on a story and wondered if it was the same person or that I was doing a piece on the last of the passive solars. “I saw a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said.

  “And you thought I killed it?” she said. She tried to shut the screen door.

  I put out my hand without thinking, to stop her. “No,” I said. I took my hand off the door. “No, of course I don’t think that. Can I come in? I just want to talk to you.”

  The little girl had come over, clutching her toy cars to her pink T-shirt, and was standing off to the side, watching curiously.

  “Come on inside, Jana,” Katie said, and opened the screen door a fraction wider. The little girl scooted through. “Go on in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll fix you some Kool-Aid.” She looked up at me. “I used to have nightmares about your coming. I’d dream that I’d go to the door and there you’d be.”

  “It’s really hot out here,” I said, and knew I sounded like Hunter. “Can I come in?”

  She opened the screen door all the way. “I’ve got to make my daughter something to drink,” she said, and led the way into the kitchen, the little girl dancing in front of her.

  “What kind of Kool-Aid do you want?” Katie asked her, and she shouted, “Red!”

  The kitchen counter faced the stove, refrigerator, and water cooler across a narrow aisle that opened out into an alcove with a table and chairs. I put the eisenstadt down on the table and then sat down myself so she wouldn’t suggest moving into another room.

  Katie reached a plastic pitcher down from one of the shelves and stuck it under the water tank to fill it. Jana dumped her cars on the counter, clambered up beside them, and began opening the cupboard doors.

  “How old’s your little girl?” I asked.

  Katie got a wooden spoon out of the drawer next to the stove and brought it and the pitcher over to the table. “She’s four,” she said. “Did you find the Kool-Aid?” she asked the little girl.

  “Yes,” the little girl said, but it wasn’t Kool-Aid. It was a pinkish cube she peeled a plastic wrapping off of. It fizzed and turned a thinnish red when she dropped it into the pitcher. Kool-Aid must have become extinct, too, along with Winnebagos and passive solar. Or else changed beyond recognition. Like the Humane Society.

  Katie poured the red stuff into a glass with a cartoon whale on it.

  “Is she your only one?” I asked.

  “No, I have a little boy,” she said, but warily, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell me, even though if I’d requested the lifeline, I already had access to all this information. Jana asked if she could have a cookie and then took it and her Kool-Aid back down the hall and outside. I could hear the screen door slam.

  Katie put the pitcher in the refrigerator and leaned against the kitchen counter, her arms folded across her chest. “What do you want?”

  She was just out of range of the eisenstadt, her face in the shadow of the narrow aisle.

  “There was a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said. I kept my voice low so she would lean forward into the light to try and hear me. “It’d been hit by a car, and it was lying funny, at an angle. It looked like a dog. I wanted to talk to somebody who remembered Aberfan, somebody who knew him.”

  “I didn’t know him,” she said. “I only killed him, remember? That’s why you did this, isn’t it, because I killed Aberfan?”

  She didn’t look at the eisenstadt, hadn’t even glanced at it when I set it on the table, but I wondered suddenly if she knew what I was up to. She was still carefully out of range. And what if I said to her, “That’s right. That’s why I did this, because you killed him, and I didn’t have any pictures of him. You owe me.
If I can’t have a picture of Aberfan, you at least owe me a picture of you remembering him.”

  Only she didn’t remember him, didn’t know anything about him except what she had seen on the way to the vet’s, Aberfan lying on my lap and looking up at me, already dying. I had had no business coming here, dredging all this up again. No business.

  “At first I thought you were going to have me arrested,” Katie said, “and then after all the dogs died, I thought you were going to kill me.”

  The screen door banged. “Forgot my cars,” the little girl said, and scooped them into the tail of her T-shirt. Katie tousled her hair as she went past and then folded her arms again.

  “‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I was going to tell you when you came to kill me,” she said. “‘It was snowy. He ran right in front of me. I didn’t even see him.’ I looked up everything I could find about newparvo. Preparing for the defense. How it mutated from parvovirus and from cat distemper before that and then kept on mutating, so they couldn’t come up with a vaccine. How even before the third wave they were below the minimum survival population. How it was the fault of the people who owned the last survivors because they wouldn’t risk their dogs to breed them. How the scientists didn’t come up with a vaccine until only the jackals were left. ‘You’re wrong,’ I was going to tell you. ‘It was the puppy-mill owners’ fault that all the dogs died. If they hadn’t kept their dogs in such unsanitary conditions, it never would have gotten out of control in the first place.’ I had my defense all ready. But you’d moved away.”

  Jana banged in again, carrying the empty whale glass. She had a red smear across the whole lower half of her face. “I need some more,” she said, making “some more” into one word. She held the glass in both hands while Katie opened the refrigerator and poured her another glassful.

  “Wait a minute, honey,” she said. “You’ve got Kool-Aid all over you,” and bent to wipe Jana’s face with a paper towel.

  Katie hadn’t said a word in her defense while we waited at the vet’s, not, “It was snowy,” or, “He ran right out in front of me,” or, “I didn’t even see him.” She had sat silently beside me, twisting her mittens in her lap, until the vet came out and told me Aberfan was dead, and then she had said, “I didn’t know there were any left in Colorado. I thought they were all dead.”

  And I had turned to her, to a sixteen-year-old not even old enough to know how to shut her face, and said, “Now they all are. Thanks to you.”

  “That kind of talk isn’t necessary,” the vet had said warningly.

  I had wrenched away from the hand he tried to put on my shoulder. “How does it feel to have killed one of the last dogs in the world?” I shouted at her. “How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?”

  The screen door banged again. Katie was looking at me, still holding the reddened paper towel.

  “You moved away,” she said, “and I thought maybe that meant you’d forgiven me, but it didn’t, did it?” She came over to the table and wiped at the red circle the glass had left. “Why did you do it? To punish me? Or did you think that’s what I’d been doing the last fifteen years, roaring around the roads murdering animals?”

  “What?” I said.

  “The Society’s already been here.”

  “The Society?” I said, not understanding.

  “Yes,” she said, still looking at the red-stained towel. “They said you had reported a dead animal on Van Buren. They wanted to know where I was this morning between eight and nine A.M.”

  I nearly ran down a roadworker on the way back into Phoenix. He leaped for the still-wet cement barrier, dropping the shovel he’d been leaning on all day, and I ran right over it.

  The Society had already been there. They had left my house and gone straight to hers. Only that wasn’t possible, because I hadn’t even called Katie then. I hadn’t even seen the picture of Mrs. Ambler yet. Which meant they had gone to see Ramirez after they left me, and the last thing Ramirez and the paper needed was trouble with the Society.

  “I thought it was suspicious when he didn’t go to the governor’s conference,” she had told them, “and just now he called and asked for a lifeline on this person here. Katherine Powell, 4628 Dutchman Drive. He knew her in Colorado.”

  “Ramirez!” I shouted at the car phone. “I want to talk to you!” There wasn’t any answer.

  I swore at her for a good ten miles before I remembered I had the exclusion button on. I punched it off. “Ramirez, where the hell are you?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” she said. She sounded even angrier than Katie, but not as angry as I was. “You cut me off, you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “So you decided you had it figured out for yourself, and you told your little theory to the Society.”

  “What?” she said, and I recognized that tone, too. I had heard it in my own voice when Katie told me the Society had been there. Ramirez hadn’t told anybody anything, she didn’t even know what I was talking about, but I was going too fast to stop.

  “You told the Society I’d asked for Katie’s lifeline, didn’t you?” I shouted.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t. Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?”

  “Did the Society come see you this afternoon?”

  “No. I told you. They called this morning and wanted to talk to you. I told them you were at the governor’s conference.”

  “And they didn’t call back later?”

  “No. Are you in trouble?”

  I hit the exclusion button. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m in trouble.”

  Ramirez hadn’t told them. Maybe somebody else at the paper had, but I didn’t think so. There had after all been Dolores Chiwere’s story about their having illegal access to the lifelines. “How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked me, which meant they’d read my lifeline, too. So they knew we had both lived in Colorado, in the same town, when Aberfan died.

  “What did you tell them?” I had demanded of Katie. She had been standing there in the kitchen still messing with the Kool-Aid-stained towel, and I had wanted to yank it out of her hands and make her look at me. “What did you tell the Society?”

  She looked up at me. “I told them I was on Indian School Road, picking up the month’s programming assignments from my company. Unfortunately, I could just as easily have driven in on Van Buren.”

  “About Aberfan!” I shouted. “What did you tell them about Aberfan?”

  She looked steadily at me. “I didn’t tell them anything. I assumed you’d already told them.”

  I had taken hold of her shoulders. “If they come back, don’t tell them anything. Not even if they arrest you. I’ll take care of this. I’ll…”

  But I hadn’t told her what I’d do because I didn’t know. I had run out of her house, colliding with Jana in the hall on her way in for another refill, and roared off for home, even though I didn’t have any idea what I would do when I got there.

  Call the Society and tell them to leave Katie alone, that she had nothing to do with this? That would be even more suspicious than everything else I’d done so far, and you couldn’t get much more suspicious than that.

  I had seen a dead jackal on the road (or so I said), and instead of reporting it immediately on the phone right there in my car, I’d driven to a convenience store two miles away. I’d called the Society, but I’d refused to give them my name and number. And then I’d canceled two shoots without telling my boss and asked for the lifeline of one Katherine Powell, whom I had known fifteen years ago and who could have been on Van Buren at the time of the accident.

  The connection was obvious, and how long would it take them to make the connection that fifteen years ago was when Aberfan had died?

  Apache was beginning to fill up with rush-hour overflow and a whole fleet of tankers. The overflow obviously spent all their time driving divideds—nobody bothered to signal that they were changing
lanes. Nobody even gave an indication that they knew what a lane was. Going around the curve from Tempe and onto Van Buren, they were all over the road. I moved over into the tanker lane.

  My lifeline didn’t have the vet’s name on it. They were just getting started in those days, and there was a lot of nervousness about invasion of privacy. Nothing went on-line without the person’s permission, especially not medical and bank records, and the lifelines were little more than puff bios: family, occupation, hobbies, pets. The only things on the lifeline besides Aberfan’s name was the date of his death and my address at the time, but that was probably enough. There were only two vets in town.

  The vet hadn’t written Katie’s name down on Aberfan’s record. He had handed her driver’s license back to her without even looking at it, but Katie had told her name to the vet’s assistant. He might have written it down. There was no way I could find out. I couldn’t ask for the vet’s lifeline because the Society had access to the lifelines. They’d get to him before I could. I could maybe have the paper get the vet’s records for me, but I’d have to tell Ramirez what was going on, and the phone was probably tapped, too. And if I showed up at the paper, Ramirez would confiscate the car. I couldn’t go there.

  Wherever the hell I was going, I was driving too fast to get there. When the tanker ahead of me slowed down to ninety, I practically climbed up his back bumper. I had gone past the place where the jackal had been hit without ever seeing it. Even without the traffic, there probably hadn’t been anything to see. What the Society hadn’t taken care of, the overflow probably had, and anyway, there hadn’t been any evidence to begin with. If there had been, if the cameras had seen the car that hit it, they wouldn’t have come after me. And Katie.

  The Society couldn’t charge her with Aberfan’s death—killing an animal hadn’t been a crime back then—but if they found out about Aberfan they would charge her with the jackal’s death, and it wouldn’t matter if a hundred witnesses, a hundred highway cameras had seen her on Indian School Road. It wouldn’t matter if the print-fix on her car was clean. She had killed one of the last dogs, hadn’t she? They would crucify her.