“Had thirty customers since we left this afternoon,” he observed. “Got to shut down soon, though. Only ten minutes of sun left.”
William stared at a single bean on the end of his fork. “Tell me again: Why? Why every time our luck is good, Ned Hopper jumps out of the earth.”
Robert sighed on the opera-glass lenses and wiped them on his cuff.
“Because, friend Will, we are the pure in heart. We shine with a light. And the villains of the world, they see that light beyond the hills and say, “Why, now, there’s some innocent, some sweet all-day sucker.” And the villains come to warm their hands at us. I don’t know what we can do about it, except maybe put out the light.”
“I wouldn’t want to do that.” William brooded gently, his palms to the fire. “It’s just I was hoping this time was comeuppance time. A man like Ned Hopper, living his white underbelly life, ain’t he about due for a bolt of lightning?”
“Due?” Robert screwed the opera glasses tighter into his eyes. “Why, it just struck! Oh, ye of little faith!” William jumped up beside him.
They shared the glasses, one lens each, peering down. “Look!” And William, looking, cried, “Peduncle Q. Mackinaw!”
“Also, Gullable M. Crackers!”
For, far below, Ned Hopper was stomping around outside a car. People gesticulated at him. He handed them some money. The car drove off. Faintly you could hear Ned’s anguished cries.
William gasped. “He’s giving money back! Now he almost hit that man there. The man shook his fist at him! Ned’s paid him back, too! Look-more fond farewells!”
“Yah-hee!” whooped Robert, happy with his half of the glasses.
Below, all the cars were dusting away now. Old Ned did a violent kicking dance, threw his goggles into the dust, tore down the sign, let forth a terrible oath.
“Dear me,” mused Robert. “I’m glad I can’t hear them words. Come on, Willy!”
As William Bantlin and Robert Greenhill drove back up to the Mysterious City turn-off, Ned Hopper rocketed out in a screaming fury. Braying, roaring on his cycle, he hurled the painted cardboard through the air. The sign whistled up, a boomerang.
It hissed, narrowly missing Bob. Long after Ned was gone in his banging thunder, the sign sank down and lay on the earth, where William picked it up and brushed it off.
It was twilight indeed now and the sun touching the far hills and the land quiet and hushed and Ned Hopper gone away, and the two men alone in the abandoned territory in the thousand-treaded dust, looking out at the sand and the strange air.
“Oh, no…”
“Yes,” said Robert.
The desert was empty in the pink-gold light of the set ting sun. The mirage was gone. A few dust devils whirled and fell apart, way out on the horizon, but that was all.
William let out a huge groan of bereavement. “He did it! Ned! Ned Hopper, come back, you! Oh, damn it, Ned, you spoiled it all! Blast you to perdition!” He stopped. “Bob, how can you stand there!”
Robert smiled sadly. “Right now I’m feeling sorry for Ned Hopper. He never saw what we saw. He never saw what anybody saw. He never believed for one second. And you know what? Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.”
William searched the disinhabited land. “Is that what happened?” “Who knows?” Robert shook his head. “One thing sure: when folks drove in here, the city, the cities, the mirage, whatever, was there. But it’s awful hard to see when people stand in your way. Without so much as moving, Ned Hopper put his big hand across the sun. First thing you know, theater’s closed for good.”
“Can’t we–” William hesitated. “Can’t we open it up again?”
“How? How do you bring a thing like that back?”
They let their eyes play over the sand, the hills, the few long clouds, the sky emptied of wind and very still. “Maybe if we just look out the sides of our eyes, not direct at it, relax, take it easy…”
They both looked down at their shoes, their hands, the rocks at their feet, anything. But at last William mourned, “Are we? Are we the pure in heart?”
Robert laughed just a little bit. “Oh, not like the kids who came through here today and saw anything they wanted to see, and not like the big simple people born in the wheat fields and by God’s grace wandering the world and will never grow up. We’re neither the little children nor the big children of the world, Willy, but we are one thing: glad to be alive.
We know the air mornings on the road, how the stars go up and then down the sky. That villain, he stopped being glad a long time ago. I hate to think of him driving his cycle on the road the rest of the night, the rest of the year.”
As he finished this, Robert noticed that William was sliding his eyes carefully to one side, toward the desert.
Robert whispered carefully, “See anything?”
A single car came down the highway. The two men glanced at each other. A wild look of hope flashed in their eyes. But they could not quite bring themselves to fling up their hands and yell. They simply stood with the painted sign held in their arms.
The car roared by. The two men followed it with their wistful eyes.
The car braked. It backed up. In it were a man, a woman, a boy, a girl. The man called out, “You closed for the night?” William said, “It’s no use–” Robert cut in “He means, no use giving us money! Last customer of the day, and family, free! On the house!” “Thank you, neighbor, thank you!”
The car roared out onto the viewpoint. William seized Robert’s elbow.
“Bob, what offs you? Disappoint those kids, that nice family?” “Hush up,” said Robert gently. “Come on.”
The kids piled out of the car. The man and his wife climbed slowly out into the sunset. The sky was gold and blue now, and a bird sang somewhere in the fields of send and bon-pollen. “Watch,” said Robert.
And they moved up to stand behind the family where it was lined up now to look out over the desert.
William held his breath. The man and wife squinted into the twilight uneasily. The kids said nothing. Their eyes flexed and filled with a distillation of late sunlight.
William cleared his throat, “It’s late. Uh–can’t see too–” The man was going to reply, when the boy said, “Oh, we can see fine!”
“Sure!” The girl pointed. “There!” The mother and father followed her gesture, as if it might help, and it did.
“Lord,” said the woman, “for a moment I thought … But now.. Yes, there it is!” The man read his wife’s face, saw a thing there, borrowed it and placed it on the land and in the air.
“Yes,” he said, at last “Oh, yes.” William stared at them, at the desert and then at Robert, who smiled and nodded.
The faces of the father, the mother, the daughter, the son were glowing now, looking off at the desert. “Oh,” murmured the girl, “is it really there?”
And the father nodded, his face bright with what he saw that was just within seeing and just beyond knowing. He spoke as if he stood alone in a great forest church. “Yes. And, Lord, it’s beautiful.”
William started to lift his head, but Robert whispered, “Easy. It’s coming. Don’t try. Easy, Will.” And then William knew what to do.
“I..” he said, “I am going to go stand with the kids.”
And he walked slowly over and stood right behind the boy and the girl. He stood for a long time there, like a man between two warm fires on a cool evening, and they warmed him and he breathed easy and at last let his eyes drift up, let his attention wander easy out toward the twilight desert and the hoped-for city in the dusk.
And there in the dust softly blown high from the land, reassembled on the wind into half-shapes of towers and spires and minarets, was the mirage.
He felt Robert’s breath on his neck, close, whispering, half talking to himself.
“It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice
And the city was there. And the sun set and the first stars came out. And the city was very clear, as William heard himself repeat, aloud or perhaps for only his secret pleasure, “It was a miracle of rare device…”
And they stood in the dark until they could not see.
1962
The end
