Mel was already barely creeping along, but he slowed further, still unable to see anything. “Was it on our side of the highway?”
“Yes…I don’t know,” B.T. said, leaning forward. “I don’t see it now. But I’m sure it was there.”
Mel crawled forward squinting into the whiteness. “Could it have been a truck? The carnival truck had a yellow arrow,” he said, and saw the lights.
And they were definitely not a sign for a carnival ride. They filled the road just ahead, flashing yellow and red and blue, all out of synch with each other. Police cars or fire trucks or ambulances. Definitely an accident. He pumped the brakes, hoping whoever was behind him could see his taillights, and slowed to a stop.
A patrolman appeared out of the fog, holding up his hand in the sign for “stop.” He was wearing a yellow poncho and a clear plastic cover over his brown hat.
Mel rolled his window down, and the patrolman leaned in to talk to them. “Road up ahead’s closed. You need to get off at this exit.”
“Exit?” Mel said, looking to the right. He could just make out a green outline in the fog.
“It’s right there, up about a hundred yards,” the patrolman said, pointing into nothingness. “We’ll come tell you when it’s open again.”
“Are you closing it because of the weather?” B.T. asked.
The patrolman shook his head. “Accident,” he said. “Big mess. It’ll be a while.” He motioned them off to the right.
Mel felt his way to the exit and off the highway. At least it had a truck stop instead of just a gas station. He and B.T. parked and went into the restaurant.
It was jammed. Every booth, every seat at the counter was full. Mel and B.T. sat down at the last unoccupied table, and it immediately became clear why it had been unoccupied. The draft when the door opened made B.T., who had just taken his coat off, put it back on and then zip it up.
Mel had expected everyone to be angry about the delay, but the waitresses and customers all seemed to be in a holiday mood. Truckers leaned across the backs of the booths to talk to each other, laughing, and the waitresses, carrying pots of coffee, were smiling. One of them had, inexplicably, a plastic kewpie doll stuck in her beehive hairdo.
The door opened again, sending an Arctic blast across their table, and a paramedic came in and went up to the counter to talk to the waitress. “…accident…” Mel heard him say and shake his head, “…carnival truck…”
Mel went over. “Excuse me,” he said. “I heard you say something about a carnival truck. Is that what had the accident?”
“Disaster is more like it,” the paramedic said, shaking his head. “Took a turn too sharp and lost his whole load. And don’t ask me what a carnival’s doing up here in the middle of winter.”
“Was the driver hurt?” Mel asked anxiously.
“Hurt? Hell, no. Not a scratch. But that road’s going to be closed the rest of the day.” He pulled a bamboo Chinese finger trap out of his pocket and handed it to Mel. “Truck was carrying all the prizes and stuff for the midway. The whole road’s covered in stuffed animals and baseballs. And you can’t even see to clean ’em up.”
Mel went back to the table and told B.T. what had happened.
“We could go south and pick up Highway 33,” B.T. said, consulting the road atlas.
“No, you can’t,” the waitress, appearing with two pots of coffee, said. “It’s closed. Fog. So’s 15 north.” She poured coffee into their cups. “You’re not going anywhere.”
The draft hit them again, and the waitress glanced over at the door. “Hey! Don’t just stand there—shut the door!”
Mel looked toward the door. Cassie was standing there, wearing a bulky orange sweater that made her look even rounder, and scanning the restaurant for an empty booth. She was carrying a red dinosaur under one arm and her bright green tote bag over the other.
“Cassie!” Mel called to her, and she smiled and came over.
“Put your dinosaur down and join us,” B.T. said.
“It’s not a dinosaur,” she said, setting it on the table. “It’s a dragon. See?” she said, pointing to two pieces of red felt on its back. “Wings.”
“Where’d you get it?” Mel said.
“The driver of the truck that spilled them gave it to me,” she said. “I’d better call my sister before she hears about this on the news,” she said, looking around the restaurant. “Do you think the phones are working?”
B.T. pointed at a sign that said “Phones,” and she left.
She was back instantly. “There’s a line,” she said, and sat down. The waitress came by again with coffee and menus, and they ordered pie, and then Cassie went to check the phones again.
“There’s still a line,” she said, coming back. “My sister will have a fit when she hears about this. She already thinks I’m crazy. And out there in that fog today I thought so, too. I wish my grandmother had never looked up verses in the Bible.”
“The Bible?” Mel said.
She waved her hand dismissively. “It’s a long story.”
“We seem to have plenty of time,” B.T. said.
“Well,” she said, settling herself. “I’m an English teacher—was an English teacher—and the school board offered this early-retirement bonus that was too good to turn down, so I retired in June, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I’d always wanted to travel, but I hate traveling alone, and I didn’t know where I wanted to go. So I got on the sub list—our district has a terrible time getting subs, and there’s been all this flu.”
It is going to be a long story, Mel thought. He picked up the finger trap and idly stuck his finger into one end. B.T. leaned back in his chair.
“Well, anyway I was subbing for Carla Sewell, who teaches sophomore lit, Julius Caesar, and I couldn’t remember the speech about our fate being in the stars, dear Brutus.”
Mel stuck a forefinger into the other side of the finger trap.
“So I was looking it up, but I read the page number wrong, so when I looked it up, it wasn’t Julius Caesar, it was Twelfth Night.”
Mel stretched the finger trap experimentally. It tightened on his fingers.
“‘Westward, ho!’ it said,” Cassie said, “and sitting there, reading it, I had this epiphany.”
“Epiphany?” Mel said, yanking his fingers apart.
“Epiphany?” B.T. said.
“I’m sorry,” Cassie said. “I keep thinking I’m still an English teacher. Epiphany is a literary term for a revelation, a sudden understanding, like in James Joyce’s The Dubliners. The word comes from—”
“The story of the wise men,” Mel said.
“Yes,” she said delightedly, and Mel half-expected her to announce that he had gotten an A. “Epiphany is the word for their arrival at the manger.”
And there it was again. The feeling that he knew where Christ was. The wise men’s arrival at the manger. James Joyce.
“When I read the words ‘Westward, ho!’” Cassie was saying, “I thought, that means me. I have to go west. Something important is going to happen.” She looked from one to the other. “You probably think I’m crazy, doing something because of a line in Bartlett’s Quotations. But whenever my grandmother had an important decision to make, she used to close her eyes and open her Bible and point at a Scripture, and when she opened her eyes, whatever the Scripture said to do, she’d do it. And, after all, Bartlett’s is the Bible of English teachers. So I tried it. I closed the book and my eyes and picked a quotation at random, and it said, ‘Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.’”
“Tennyson,” Mel said.
She nodded. “So here I am.”
“And has something important happened?” B.T. asked.
“Not yet,” she said, sounding completely unconcerned. “But it’s going to happen soon—I’m sure of it. And in the meantime, I’m seeing all these wonderful sights. I went to Gene Stratton Porter’s cabin in Geneva, and the house where Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal,
Missouri, and Sherwood Anderson’s museum.”
She looked at Mel. “Struggling against it doesn’t work,” she said, pushing her index fingers together, and Mel realized he was struggling vainly to free his fingers from the finger trap. “You have to push them together.”
There was a blast of icy air and a patrolman wearing three pink plastic leis around his neck and carrying a spotted plush leopard came in.
“Road’s open,” he said, and there was a general scramble for coats. “It’s still real foggy out there,” he said, raising his voice, “so don’t get carried away.”
Mel freed himself from the finger trap and helped Cassie into her coat while B.T. paid the bill. “Do you want to follow us?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “I’m going to try to call my sister again, and if she’s heard about this accident, it’ll take forever. You go on.”
B.T. came back from paying, and they went out to the car, which had acquired a thin, rock-hard coating of ice. Mel, chipping at the windshield with the scraper, started a new offshoot in the rapidly spreading crack.
They got back on the interstate. The fog was thicker than ever. Mel peered through it, looking at objects dimly visible at the sides of the road. The debris from the accident—baseballs and plastic leis and Coke bottles. Stuffed animals and kewpie dolls littered the median, looking in the fog like the casualties of some great battle.
“I suppose you consider this the sign you were looking for,” B.T. said.
“What?” Mel said.
“Cassie’s so-called epiphany. You can read anything you want into random quotations,” B.T. said. “You realize that, don’t you? It’s like reading your horoscope. Or a fortune cookie.”
“The Devil can quote scripture to his own ends,” Mel murmured.
“Exactly” B.T. said, opening the Gideon Bible and closing his eyes. “Look,” he said “Psalm 115, verse 5. ‘Eyes have they, but they see not.’ Obviously a reference to the fog.’”
He flipped to another page and stabbed his finger at it. “‘Thou shalt not eat any abominable thing.’ Oh, dear, we shouldn’t have ordered that pie. You can make them mean anything. And you heard her, she’d retired, she liked to travel, she was obviously looking for an excuse to go somewhere. And her epiphany only said something important was going to happen. It didn’t say a word about the Second Coming.”
“It told her to go west,” Mel said, trying to remember exactly what she had said. She had been looking for a speech from Julius Caesar and had stumbled on Twelfth Night instead. Twelfth night. Epiphany.
“How many times is the word ‘west’ mentioned in Bartlett’s Quotations?” B.T. said. “A hundred? ‘Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the west’? ‘Go west, young man’? ‘One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’?” He shut the Bible. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just—” He turned and looked out his window at nothing. “It looks like it might be breaking up.”
It wasn’t. The fog thinned a little, swirling away from the car in little eddies, and then descended again, more smothering than ever.
“Suppose you do find Him? What do you do then?” B.T. said. “Bow down and worship Him? Give Him frankincense and myrrh?”
“Help Him,” Mel said.
“Help Him what? Separate the sheep from the goats? Fight the battle of Armageddon?”
“I don’t know,” Mel said. “Maybe.”
“You really think there’s going to be a battle between good and evil?”
“There’s always a battle between good and evil,” Mel said. “Look at the first time He came. He hadn’t been on earth a week before Herod’s men were out looking for Him. They murdered every baby and two-year-old in Bethlehem, trying to kill Him.”
And thirty-three years later they succeeded, Mel thought. Only killing couldn’t stop Him. Nothing could stop Him.
Who had said that? The kid from the carnival, talking about the windshield. “Nothing can stop it. There’s stuff you could do to keep it from spreading for a while, but it’s still going to spread. There ain’t nothing that can stop it.”
He felt a flicker of the feeling again. Something about the kid from the carnival. What had he been talking about before that? Siamese twins. And Roswell. No. Something else.
He tried to think what Cassie had said at the truck stop. Something about the wise men arriving at the manger. And not struggling. “You have to push them together,” she had said.
It stayed tantalizingly out of reach, as elusive as a road sign glimpsed in the fog.
B.T. reached forward and flicked on the radio. “Foggy tonight, and colder,” it said. “In the teens for eastern Nebraska, down in the…” it faded to static. B.T. twisted the knob.
“And do you know what will happen to us when Jesus comes?” an evangelist shouted, “The Book of Revelation tells us we will be tormented with fire and brimstone, unless we repent now; before it’s too late!”
“A little fire and brimstone would be welcome right about now,” B.T. said, reaching forward to turn the heater up to high.
“There’s a blanket in the backseat,” Mel said, and B.T. reached back and wrapped himself up in it.
“We will be scorched with fire,” the radio said, “and the smoke of our torment will rise up forever and ever.”
B.T. leaned his head against the doorjamb. “Just so it’s warm,” he murmured and closed his eyes.
“But that’s not all that will happen to us if we do not repent,” the evangelist said, “if we do not take Jesus as our personal Savior. The Book of Revelation tells us in Chapter 14 that we will be cast into the winepress of God’s wrath and be trodden in it till our blood covers the ground for a thousand miles! And don’t fool yourselves, that day is coming soon! The signs are all around us! Wait till your father gets home.”
Mel switched it off, but it was too late. The evangelist had hit it, the problem Mel had been trying to avoid since that moment in the sanctuary.
I don’t believe it, he had thought when he’d heard the minister talking about Jesus forbidding believers to associate with outcasts. And he had thought it again when he heard the radio evangelist that first day talking about Christ coming to get revenge.
“I don’t believe it,” he thought, and when B.T. stirred in his corner, he realized he had spoken aloud.
“I don’t believe it,” he murmured. God had so loved the world, He had sent His only begotten Son to live among men, to be a helpless baby and a little boy and a young man, had sent Him to be cold and confused, angry and overjoyed. “To share our common lot,” the Nicene Creed said. To undergo and understand and forgive. “Father, forgive them,” He had said, with nails driven through His hands, and when they had arrested Him, he had made the disciples put away their weapons. He had healed the soldier’s ear Peter had cut off.
He would never, never come back in a blaze of wrath and revenge, slaughtering enemies, tormenting unbelievers, wreaking fire and pestilence and famine on them. Never.
And how can I believe in a revelation about the Second Coming, he thought, when I don’t believe in the Second Coming?
But the epiphany wasn’t about the Second Coming, he thought. He hadn’t seen earthquakes or Armageddon or Christ coming in a blaze of clouds and glory. He’s already here, he had thought, now, and had set out to find Him, to look for a sign.
But there aren’t any, he thought, and saw one off in the mist. “Prairie Home 5, Denver 468.”
Denver. They would be there tomorrow night. And B.T. would want him to fly home with him.
Unless I figure out the key Mel thought. Unless I’m given a sign. Or unless the roads are closed.
“And, lo, the star which they saw in the east, went before them. …”
—Matthew 2:9
“They should be open,” the woman at the Wayfarer Motel said. The Holiday Inn and the Super 8 and the Innkeeper had all been full up, and the Wayfarer had only one room left. “There’s supposed to be fog in the morning, and then it�
��s supposed to be nice all the way till Sunday.”
“What about the roads east?” B.T. asked.
“No problem,” she said.
The Wayfarer didn’t have a coffee shop. They ate supper at the Village Inn on the other end of town. As they were leaving, they ran into Cassie in the parking lot.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” Mel said.
“I’m heading south tomorrow to Red Cloud. When I consulted Bartlett’s, it said, ‘Winter lies too long in country towns.’”
“Oh?” Mel said, wondering what this had to do with going south.
“Willa Cather,” Cassie said. “My Ántonia. I didn’t understand it either, so I tried the Gideon Bible in my hotel, it’s so nice of them to leave them there, and it was Exodus 13:21, ‘And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire.’”
She smiled expectantly at them. “Pillar of fire. Red Cloud. Willa Cather’s museum is in Red Cloud.”
They said goodbye to her and went back to the motel. B.T. sat down on his bed and took his laptop out of his suitcase. “I’ve got some e-mail I’ve got to answer,” he said.
And send? Mel wondered. “Dear Mrs. Bilderbeck, we’ll be in Denver tomorrow. Am hoping to persuade Mel to come home with me. Have straitjacket ready.”
Mel sat down in the room’s only chair with the Rand McNally and looked at the map of Nebraska, searching for a town named Megiddo or New Jerusalem. There was Red Cloud, down near the southern border of Nebraska. Pillar of fire. Why couldn’t he have had a nice straightforward sign like that? A pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. Or a star.
But Moses had wandered around in the wilderness for forty years following said pillar. And the star hadn’t led the wise men to Bethlehem. It had led them straight into King Herod’s arms. They hadn’t had a clue where the newborn Christ was. “Where is He that is born king of the Jews?” they’d asked Herod.
“Where is He?” Mel murmured, and B.T. glanced up from his laptop and then back down at it again, typing steadily.
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories Page 79
