A Miracle of Rare Device, Ray Bradbury

A Miracle of Rare Device

On a day neither too mellow nor too tart, too hot nor too cold, the ancient tin lizzie came over the desert hill traveling at commotion speed. The vibration of the various armored parts of the car caused road-runners to spurt up in floury bursts of dust.

Gila monsters, lazy displays of Indian jewelry, took themselves out of the way. Like an infestation, the Ford clamored and dinned away into the deeps of the wilderness.

In the front seat, squinting back, Old Will Bantlin shouted, “Turn off!”

Bob Greenhill spun-swung the lizzie off behind a billboard. Instantly both men turned. Both peered over the crumpled top of their car, praying to the dust they had wheeled up on the air. “Lay down! Lay low! Please!” And the dust blew slowly down. Just in time.

“Duck!”

A motorcycle, looking as if it had burned through all nine rings of hell, thundered by. Hunched over its oily handlebars, a hurricane figure, a man with a creased and most unpleasant face, goggled and sun-deviled, leaned on the wind. Roaring bike and man flung away down the road.

The two old men sat up in their lizzie, exhaling.

“So long, Ned Hopper,” said Bob Greenhill.

“Why?” said Will Bantlin. “Why’s he always tailing us?”

“Willy-William, talk sense,” said Greenhill. “We’re his luck, his Judas goats. Why should he let us go, when trailing us around the land makes him rich and happy and us poor and wise?”

The two men looked at each other, half in, half out their smiles. What the world hadn’t done to them, thinking about it had. They had enjoyed thirty years of nonviolence together, in their case meaning non-work. “I feel a harve’s coming on,” Will would say, and they’d clear out of town before the wheat ripened. Or, “Those apples are ready to fall!” So they’d stand back about three hundred miles so as not to get hit on the head.

Now Bob Greenhill slowly let the car, in a magnificent controlled detonation, drift back out on the road.

“Willy, friend, don’t be discouraged.”

“I’ve been through ‘discouraged,’ “said Will. “I’m knee deep in ‘accepting.”

“Accepting what?”

“Finding a treasure chest of canned fish one day and no can opener. Finding a thousand can openers next day and no fish.”

Bob Greenhill listened to the motor talking to itself like an old man under the hood, sounding like sleepless nights and rusty bones and well-worn dreams. “Our bad luck can’t last forever, Willy.”

“No, but it sure tries. You and me sell ties and who’s across the street ten cents cheaper?”

“Ned Hopper.”

“We strike gold in Tonopah and who registers the claim first?”

“Old Ned.”

“Haven’t we done him a lifetime of favors? Aren’t we overdue for something just ours, that never winds up his?”

“Prune’s ripe, Willy,” said Robert, driving calmly. “Trouble is, you, me, Ned never really decided what we wanted. We’ve run through all the ghost towns, see something, grab. Ned sees and grabs, too. He don’t want it, he just wants it because we want it.

He keeps it ’till we’re out of sight, then tears it up and hang-dogs after us for more litter. The day we really know what we want is the day Ned gets scared of us and runs off forever. Ah, hell.” Bob Greenhill breathed the clear fresh-water air running in morning stream over the windshield. “It’s good anyway. That sky. Those hills. The desert and …

His voice faded. Will Bantlin glanced over. “What’s wrong?”

“For some reason …” Bob Greenhill’s eyes rolled, his tanned hands turned the wheel slow, “we got to … pull off … the road.”

The lizzie bumped on the dirt shoulder. They drove down in a dusty wash and up out and suddenly along a dry pen of land overlooking the desert. Bob Greenhill, looking hypnotized, put out his hand to turn the ignition key. The old man under the hood stopped complaining about the insomnia, and slept.

“Now, why did you do that?” asked Will Bantlin.

Bob Greenhill gazed at the wheel in his suddenly intuitive hands.

“Seemed as if I had to. Why?” He blinked up. He let his bones settle and his eyes grow lazy. “Maybe only to look at the land out there. Good. All of it been here a billion of years.

“Except for that city,” said Will Bantlin.

“City?” said Bob. He turned to look and the desert was there and the distant hills the color of lions, and far out beyond, suspended in a sea of warm morning sand and light, was a kind of floating image, a hasty sketch of a city. “That can’t be Phoenix,” said Bob Greenhill “Phoenix is ninety miles off. No other big place around.”

Will Bantlin rumpled the map on his knees, searching. “No. No other town.”

“It’s coming clearer!” cried Bob Greenhill, suddenly.

They both stood absolutely straight up in the car and stared over the dusty windshield, the wind whining softly over their craggy faces.

“Why, you know what that is, Bob? A mirage! Sure, that’s t it! Light rays just right, atmosphere, sky, temperature. City’s the other side of the horizon somewhere. Look how it jumps, fades in and out. It’s reflected against that sky up there like a mirror and comes down here where we can see it! A mirage, by Gosh!”

“That big,-” Bob Greenhill measured the city as it grew taller, clearer in a shift of wind, a soft far whirlabout of sand. “The granddaddy of them all! That’s not Phoenix. Not Santa Fe or Alamogordo, no. Let’s see. It’s not Kansas City.”

“That’s too far off, anyway.”

“Yeah, but look at those buildings. Big! Tallest in the country. Only one place like that in the world.”

“You don’t mean-New York?”

Will Bantlin nodded slowly and they both stood in the silence looking out at the mirage. And the city was tall and shining now and almost perfect in the early-morning light.

“Oh, my,” said Bob, after a long while. “That’s fine.”

“It is,” said Will.

“But,” said Will, a moment later, whispering, as if afraid the city might hear, “what’s it doing three thousand miles from home, here in the middle of Nowhere, Arizona?”

Bob Greenhill gazed and spoke. “Willy, friend, never question nature. It just sits there and minds its knitting. Radio waves, rainbows, northern lights, all that, heck, let’s just say a great big picture got took of New York City and is being developed here, three thousand miles away on a mom when we need cheering, just for us.”

“Not just us.” Will peered over the side of the car. “Look!” There in the floury dust lay innumerable crosshatchings, diagonals, fascinating symbols printed out in a quiet tapestry. “Tire marks,” said Bob Greenhill. “Hundreds of them. Thousands. Lots of cars pulled off here.”

“For what, Bob?” Will Bantlin leaped from the car, landed on the earth, tromped it, turned on it, knelt to touch it with a swift and suddenly trembling hand. “For what, for what? To see the mirage?”

“Yes, sir! To see the mirage!”

“Boy, howdy!” Will stood up, thrummed his voice like a motor. “Brrrummm!” He turned an imaginary wheel. He ran along a tire track.”Brrrumm! Eeeee! Brakes on! Robert, Bob, you know what we got here? Look east! Look west. This is the only point in miles you can pull off the highway and sit and stare your eyes out!”

“Sure, it’s nice people have an eye for beauty-“

“Beauty, my socks! Who owns this land?”

“The state, I reckon.”

“You reckon wrong! You and me! We set up camp, register a claim, improve the property, and the law reads it’s ours. Right?”

“Hold on!” Bob Greenhill was staring out at the desert and the strange city there. “You mean you want to homestead a mirage?”

“Right, by zingo! Homestead a mirage!”

Robert Greenhill stood down and wandered around the car looking at the tire-treaded earth. “Can we do that?” “Do it? Excuse my dust!” In an instant Will Bantlin was pounding tent pegs into the soil, stringing twine. “From here to here, and here to here, it’s a gold mine, we pan it, it’s a cow we milk, it’s a lakeful of money, we swim in it!”

Rummaging in the car, he heaved out cases and brought forth a large cardboard which had once advertised cheap cravats. This, reversed, he painted over with a brush and began lettering.

“Willy,” said his friend, “nobody’s going to pay to see any darned old-“

“Mirage? Put up a fence, tell folks they can’t see a thing, and that’s just their itch. There!” He held up the sign.

SECRET VIEW MIRAGE-THE MYSTERIOUS CITY
25 cents per car.
Motorbikes a dime.

“Here comes a car. Watch!”

“William!”

But Will, running, lifted the sign.

“Hey! Look! Hey!” The car roared past, a buff ignoring the matador.

Bob shut his eyes so as not to see Will’s smile wiped away.

But then-a marvelous sound. The squeal of brakes. The car was backing up. Will was leaping forward, waving, pointing. “Yes, sir! Yes, ma’am! Secret View Mirage! The Mysterious City! Drive right here!”

The treadmarks in the simple dust became numerous, and then, quite suddenly, innumerable.

A great ball of heat-wafted dust hung over the dry peninsula where in a vast sound of arrivals, with braked tires, slammed doors, stilled engines, the cars of many kinds from many places came and took their places in a line.

And the people in the cars were as different as people can be who come from four directions but are drawn in a single moment by a single thing, all talking at first, but growing still at last at what they saw out in the desert.

The wind blew softly about their faces, fluttering the hair of the women, the open shirt collars of the men. They sat in their