The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  The ultimate “Wait till your father gets home,” threat, Mel thought.

  “And how do I know these things are coming?” the radio said. “I’ll tell you how. The Lord came to me in a dream, and He said, ‘These shall be the signs of my coming. There will be wars and rumors of wars.’ Iraq, my friends, that’s what he’s talking about. The sun’s face will be covered, and the godless will prosper. Look around you. Who do you see prospering? Abortion doctors and homosexuals and godless atheists. But when Christ comes, they will be punished. He’s told me so. The Lord spoke to me, just like he spoke to Moses, just like he spoke to Isaiah. …”

  He switched off the radio, but it didn’t do any good. Because this was what had been bothering him ever since he started out. How did he know his vision wasn’t just like some radio evangelist’s?

  Because his is born out of hatred, bigotry, and revenge, Mel thought. God no more spoke to him than did the man in the moon.

  And how do you know He spoke to you? Because it felt real? The voices telling the bomber to destroy the abortion clinic felt real, too. Emotion isn’t proof. Signs aren’t evidence. “Do you have any outside confirmation?” he could hear B.T. saying skeptically.

  The sun came out, and the glare off the white road, the white fields, was worse than the snow had been. He almost didn’t see the truck off to the side. Its emergency flashers weren’t on, and at first he thought it had just slid off the road, but as he went past, he saw it was one of the carnival trucks with its hood up and steam coming out. A young man in a denim jacket was standing next to it, hooking his thumb for a ride.

  I should stop, Mel thought, but he was already past, and picking up hitchhikers was dangerous. He had found that out when he’d preached a sermon on the Good Samaritan last year. “Let us not be like the Levite or the Pharisee who passes by the stranded motorist, the injured victim,” he had told his congregation. “Let us be like the Samaritan, who stopped and helped.”

  It had seemed like a perfectly harmless sermon topic, and he had been totally unprepared for the uproar that ensued. “I cannot believe you told people to pick up hitchhikers!” Dan Crosby had raged. “If one of my daughters ends up raped, I’m holding you responsible.”

  “What were you thinking of?” Mrs. Bilderbeck had said, hanging up after fending off Mable Jenkins. “On CNN last week there was a story about somebody who stopped to help a couple who was out of gas, and they cut off his head.”

  He had had to issue a retraction the next Sunday, saying that women had no business helping anyone (which had made Mamie Rollet mad, for feminist reasons) and that the best thing for everyone else to do was to alert the state patrol on their cell phones and let them take care of it, unless they knew the person, although somehow he couldn’t imagine the Good Samaritan with a cell phone.

  There was a median crossing up ahead, but it was marked with a sign that read “Authorized Vehicles Only.” And if I get my head cut off, he thought, the congregation will have no sympathy at all.

  But it was threatening to snow again, and the green interstate sign up ahead said “Wayside, 28 Mi.” And the carnival had been his Good Samaritan last night.

  “‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me,’” he murmured, and turned into the median crossing and onto the eastbound side of the highway, and started back.

  The truck was still there, though he couldn’t see the driver. Good, he thought, looking for a place to cross. Some other Samaritan’s picked him up. But when he pulled up behind the truck, the man got out of the truck’s cab and started over to the car, his hands jammed into his denim jacket. Mel began to feel sorry he’d stopped. The man had a ragged scar across his forehead, and his hair was lank and greasy.

  He slouched over to the side of the car, and Mel saw that he was much younger than he’d looked at first. He’s just a kid, Mel thought.

  Yeah, well, so was Billy the Kid, he reminded himself. And Andrew Cunanan.

  Mel leaned across and pulled down the passenger window. “What’s the trouble?”

  The kid leaned down to talk to him. “Died,” he said, and grinned.

  “Do you need a lift into town?” he asked, and the kid immediately opened the car door, keeping his right hand in his jacket pocket. Where the gun is, Mel thought.

  The kid slid in and shut the door, still using only one hand. When they find me robbed and murdered, they’ll be convinced I was involved in some kind of drug deal, Mel thought. He started the car.

  “Man, it was cold out there,” the kid said, taking his right hand out of his pocket and rubbing his hands together. “I been waiting forever.”

  Mel kicked the heater over to high, and the kid leaned forward and held his hands in front of the vent. There was a peace sign tattooed on the back of one of them and a fierce-looking lion on the other. Both looked like they’d been done by hand.

  The kid rubbed his hands together, wincing, and Mel took another look. His hands were red with cold and between the tattoo lines there were ugly white splotches. The kid started rubbing them again.

  “Don’t—” Mel said, putting out his hand unthinkingly to stop him. “That looks like frostbite. Don’t rub it. You’re supposed to…” he said, and then couldn’t remember. Put them in warm water? Wrap them up? “They’re supposed to warm up slowly,” he said finally.

  “You mean like by warming ’em up in front of a heater?” the kid said, holding his hands in front of the vent again. He put up his hand and touched the ding in the windshield. “That’s gonna spread,” he said.

  His hand looked even worse now that it was warming up. The sickly white splotches stood out starkly against the rest of his skin.

  Mel took off his gloves, switching hands on the steering wheel and using his teeth to get the second one off. “Here,” he said, handing them to the kid. “These are insulated.”

  The kid looked at him for a minute and then put them on.

  “You should get your hands looked at,” Mel said. “I can take you to the emergency room when we get to town.”

  “I’ll be okay,” the kid said. “You get used to being cold, working a carny.”

  “What’s a carnival doing here in the middle of winter, anyway?” Mel asked.

  “Best time,” the kid said. “Catches ’em by surprise. What’re you doin’ out here?”

  He wondered what the kid would say if he told him. “I’m a minister,” he said instead.

  “A preacher, huh?” he said. “You believe in the Second Coming?”

  “The Second Coming” Mel gasped, caught off-guard.

  “Yeah, we had a preacher come to the carny the other day telling us Jesus was coming back and was gonna punish everybody for hanging him on the cross, knock down the mountains, burn the whole planet up. You believe all that’s gonna happen?”

  “No,” Mel said. “I don’t think Jesus is coming back to punish anybody.”

  “The preacher said it was all right there in the Bible.”

  “There are lots of things in the Bible. They don’t always turn out to mean what you thought they did.”

  The kid nodded sagely. “Like the Siamese twins.”

  “Siamese twins?” Mel said, unable to remember any Siamese twins in the Bible.

  “Yeah, like this one carny up in Fargo. It had a big sign saying ‘See the Siamese twins,’ and everybody pays a buck, thinking they’re gonna see two people hooked together. And when they get there it’s a cage with two Siamese kittens in it. Like that.”

  “Not exactly,” Mel said. “The prophecies aren’t a scam to cheat people, they’re—”

  “What about Roswell? The alien autopsy and all that. You think that’s a scam, too?”

  Well, there was some outside confirmation for you. Mel was in a class with scam artists and UFO nuts.

  “After what happened the first time, I don’t know if I’d wanta come back or not,” the kid said, and it took Mel a minute to realize he was talking about Christ. “If I did,
I’d wear some kind of disguise or something.”

  Like the last time, Mel thought, when He came disguised as a baby.

  The kid was still preoccupied with the ding. “There’s stuff you could do to keep it from spreading for a little while,” he said, “but it’s still gonna spread. There ain’t nothing that can stop it.” He pointed out the window at a sign. “Wayside, exit 1 mile.”

  Mel pulled off and into a Total station, apparently all there was to Wayside. The kid opened the door and started to take off the gloves.

  “Keep them,” Mel said. “Do you want me to wait till you find out if they’ve got a tow truck?”

  The kid shook his head. “I’ll call Pete.” He reached into the pocket of the denim jacket and handed Mel three orange cardboard tickets. They were marked “Admit One Free.”

  “It’s a ticket to the show,” the kid said. “We got a triple Ferris wheel, three wheels one inside the other. And a great roller coaster. The Comet.”

  Mel splayed the tickets apart. “There are three tickets here.”

  “Bring your friends,” the kid said, slapped the car door, and ambled off toward the gas station.

  Bring your friends.

  Mel got back on the highway. It was getting dark. He hoped the next exit wasn’t as far, or as uninhabited, as this one.

  Bring your friends. I should have told B.T, he thought, even though he would have said, Don’t go, you’re crazy, let me recommend a good psychiatrist.

  “I still should have told him,” he said out loud, and was as certain of it as he had been of what he should do in that moment in the church. And now he had cut himself off from B.T not only by hundreds of miles of closed highways and “icy and snow-packed conditions,” but by his deception, his failure to tell him.

  The next exit didn’t even have a gas station, and the one after that nothing but a Dairy Queen. It was nearly eight by the time he got to Zion Center and a Holiday Inn.

  He walked straight in, not even stopping to get his luggage out of the trunk, and across the lobby toward the phones.

  “Hello!” The short plump woman he’d seen the night before waylaid him. “Here we are again, orphans of the storm. Weren’t the roads awful?” she said cheerfully. “I almost went off in the ditch twice. My little Honda doesn’t have four-wheel drive, and—”

  “Excuse me,” Mel interrupted her. “I have a phone call I have to make.”

  “You can’t,” she said, still cheerfully. “The lines are down.”

  “Down?”

  “Because of the storm. I tried to call my sister just now, and the clerk told me the phone’s been out all day. I don’t know what she’s going to think when she doesn’t hear from me. I promised faithfully that I’d call her every night and tell her where I was and that I’d gotten there safely.”

  He couldn’t call B.T. Or get to him. “Excuse me,” he said, and started back across the lobby to the registration desk.

  “Has the interstate going east opened up yet?” he asked the girl behind the counter.

  She shook her head. “It’s still closed between Malcolm and Iowa City. Ground blizzards,” she said. “Will you be checking in, sir? How many are there in your party?”

  “Two,” a voice said.

  Mel turned. And there, leaning against the end of the registration desk, was B.T.

  “And there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold a great red dragon.”

  —Revelation 12:3

  For a moment he couldn’t speak for the joy, the relief he felt. He clutched the check-out counter, vaguely aware that the girl behind the counter was saying something.

  “What are you doing here?” he said finally.

  B.T. smiled his slow checkmate smile. “Aren’t I the one who should be asking that?”

  And now that he was here, he would have to tell him. Mel felt the relief turn into resentment. “I thought the roads were closed,” he said.

  “I didn’t come that way,” B.T. said.

  “And how would you like to pay for that, sir?” the clerk said, and Mel knew she had asked him before.

  “Credit card,” he said, fumbling for his wallet.

  “License number?” the clerk asked.

  “I flew to Omaha and rented a car,” B.T. said.

  Mel handed her his MasterCard. “TY 804.”

  “State?”

  “Pennsylvania.” He looked at B.T. “How did you find me?”

  “‘License number?’” B.T. said, mimicking the clerk. “‘Will you be putting this on your credit card, sir?’ If you’ve got a computer, it’s the easiest thing in the world to find someone these days, especially if they’re using that.” He gestured at the MasterCard the clerk was handing back to Mel.

  She handed him a folder. “Your room number is written inside, sir. It’s not on the key for security purposes,” the clerk said, as if his room number weren’t in the computer, too. B.T. probably already knew it.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” B.T. said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I have to go get my suitcase,” Mel said, and walked past him and out to the parking lot and his car. He opened the trunk.

  B.T. reached past him and picked up Mel’s suitcase, as if taking it into custody.

  “How did you know I was missing?” Mel asked, but he already knew the answer to that. “Mrs. Bilderbeck sent you.”

  B.T. nodded. “She said she was worried about you, that you’d called and something was seriously wrong. She said she knew because you hadn’t tried to get out of the ecumenical meeting on Thursday. She said you always tried to get out of it.”

  They say it’s the little mistakes that trip criminals up, Mel thought.

  “She said she thought you were sick and were going to see a specialist,” B.T. said, his black face gray with worry. “Out of town, so nobody in the congregation would find out about it. A brain tumor, she said.” He shifted the suitcase to his other hand. “Do you have a brain tumor?”

  A brain tumor. That would be a nice, convenient explanation. When Ivor Sorenson had had a brain tumor, he had stood up during the offertory, convinced there was an ostrich sitting in the pew next to him.

  “Are you sick?” B.T. said.

  “No.”

  “But it is something serious.”

  “It’s freezing out here,” Mel said. “Let’s discuss this inside.”

  B.T. didn’t move. “Whatever it is, no matter how bad it is, you can tell me.”

  “All right. Fine. ‘For ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.’ Matthew 25:13,” Mel said. “I had a revelation. About the Second Coming. I think He’s here already, that the Second Coming’s already happened.”

  Whatever B.T. had imagined—terminal illness or embezzlement or some other, worse crime—it obviously wasn’t as bad as this. His face went even grayer. “The Second Coming,” he said. “Of Christ?”

  “Yes,” Mel said. He told him what had happened during the sermon Sunday. “I scared the choir half out of their wits,” he said.

  B.T. nodded. “Mrs. Bilderbeck told me. She said you stopped in the middle of a sentence and just stood there, staring into space with your hand up to your forehead. That’s why she thought you had a brain tumor. How long did this…vision last?”

  “It wasn’t a vision,” Mel said. “It was a revelation, a conviction…an epiphany.”

  “An epiphany,” B.T. said in a flat, expressionless voice. “And it told you He was here? In Zion Center?”

  “No,” Mel said. “I don’t know where He is.”

  “You don’t know where He is,” B.T. repeated. “You just got in your car and started driving?”

  “West,” Mel said. “I knew He was somewhere west.”

  “Somewhere west,” B.T. said softly. He rubbed his hand over his mouth.

  “Why don’t you say it?” Mel said. He slammed the trunk shut. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “I think we’re both crazy,” he said, “stand
ing out here in the snow, fighting. Have you had supper?”

  “No,” Mel said.

  “Neither have I,” B.T. said. He took Mel’s arm. “Let’s go get some dinner.”

  “And a dose of antidepressants? A nice straitjacket?”

  “I was thinking steak,” B.T. said, and tried to smile. “Isn’t that what they eat here in Iowa?”

  “Corn,” Mel said.

  “And when I looked, behold…the appearance of the wheels was as the colour of a beryl stone and…as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel.”

  —Jeremiah 10:9-10

  Neither corn nor steak was on the menu, which had the Holiday Inn star on the front, and they were out of nearly everything else. “Because of the interstate being closed,” the waitress said. “We’ve got chicken teriyaki and beef chow mein.”

  They ordered the chow mein and coffee, and the waitress left. Mel braced himself for more questions, but B.T. only asked, “How were the roads today?” and told him about the problems he’d had getting a flight and a rental car. “Chicago O’Hare was shut down because of a winter storm,” he said, “and Denver and Kansas City. I had to fly into Albuquerque and then up to Omaha.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go to all that trouble,” Mel said.

  “I was worried about you.”

  The waitress arrived with their chow mein, which came with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans.

  “Interesting,” B.T. said, poking at the gravy. He made a half-hearted attempt at the chow mein, and then pushed the plate away.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “The Second Coming is when Christ returns, right? I thought He was supposed to appear in the clouds in a blaze of glory, complete with trumpets and angel choirs.”

  Mel nodded.

  “Then how can He already be here without anybody knowing?”

  “I don’t know,” Mel said. “I don’t understand any of this any more than you do. I just know He’s here.”

  “But you don’t know where.”

  “No. I thought when I got out here there would be a sign.”

  “A sign,” B.T. said.