“The Park Service can sue me. See you later, maybe.”
The telephone clicked off. Marcy felt her skin flush with anger, not simply at Evan’s desertion but at the futility of his decision. Florissant was miles away, right through the inner city, and there was no way Evan could hope to get there in the horrid ruin St. Louis had become. All he had done by running off was to make himself useless, to his family and the tourists and everyone else.
Marcy called Richards’s office, but no one answered. Neither did anyone else. Maybe they’d all run home.
The tram rattled back into the station. Marcy smelled smoke on the wind that was blasting through the observation platform. She opened the tram doors and thumbed on the microphone.
“We will start boarding the tram in a moment,” she said. “Please form a line…” Marcy was somewhat surprised to find that a line was actually formed—two-thirds of her visitors silently took up their places on the stairs.
She turned to look at the remainder. The Japanese couple, who seemed uncertain. A few others. And the elderly woman and her mother, both of whom looked very stubborn indeed.
Marcy approached the group. Licked her lips, tried to sound reasonable and persuasive. “The tram is safe, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve just seen it go down and come up. No one was hurt. No one was stranded.”
The elderly woman’s lips were compressed in a thin line. “I’m not getting into one of those cars again. I want to see the stairs.”
“Ma’am,” Marcy said. An aftershock rumbled up through the soles of her shoes. Just a little tremor, she thought, and decided to ignore it, but she saw her visitors turn pale, saw their eyes grow wide. “Ma’am,” she began again, “there are a lot of those stairs. And I don’t know how safe they are—there could be damage there.”
“Elevator not safe,” the Japanese man said. “Is earthquake.” The elderly woman’s daughter looked angry. “I’m not sending my mother down in those elevators!” she said. Her voice was nearly a shout. “They weren’t safe the first time!” Marcy took a step back from this ferocity. She wished she were older and had more authority. She wished she were a football player and could just mash these people into the trams one by one.
“Please keep your voice down, ma’am,” she said. “I don’t want you starting a panic.” The woman lowered her voice to a hiss. “Then don’t bother my mother!” she snapped. Marcy backed away again. “I’ll send this group down,” she said. “That should show you it’s safe.”
“Not safe,” the Japanese man repeated. “Earthquake.”
Marcy went to her station and told the passengers to board the trams. None of them looked very happy. At the last second two of them froze, and one of them ran back to the observation platform with panic plain on his face. Marcy knew that she wasn’t going to stop him.
“Please enter the tram, sir,” she told the other. He was a burly older man, dressed in bright shorts and a kind of tarn o’ shanter. He carried a disposable Kodak camera, one of those that came in a yellow cardboard wrapper. His face was pale.
Marcy went down the stairs and touched the man on the arm. “Please go in, sir,” she said. She saw that the nearest tram had two women already seated. “Those ladies need someone to look after them, okay?” she said.
“Hm?” he said, surprised. “Why yes, all right.”
He allowed Marcy to lead him to the tram. She seated him between the two women and returned to her station. She closed the doors and set the little train rolling downward.
She picked up the phone and called to let someone know the tram was on its way, but there was no answer. What were they all doing? she wondered.
Or maybe, she thought, they were all dead. The huge concourse and museum beneath the Gateway Arch were below ground leveclass="underline" what if the roof had fallen in? What if a pipe had burst, or the Mississippi found its way in, and the whole place was flooded? What if she was sending the visitors to certain death by drowning?
No. She had been on the phone with people since the quake. The concourse was above the level of the Mississippi even at flood stage. Nothing had happened down on the concourse except that people were very busy dealing with damage to the exhibits and to people.
Marcy turned to her remaining visitors. She counted nine, including the man who had panicked and run rather than board the tram.
She took a deep breath and began to argue. The trams were safe. She’d run them up and down twice and no one had been injured. The power supply to the Gateway Arch had multiple backups and had never failed.
Her heart sank as she spoke. She didn’t convince a one of them.
No pencil can paint the distress of the many movers! Men, women and children, barefooted and naked! without money and without food.
Nick and Viondi stood by the Oldsmobile. The car was in the crevasse, pitched over at an angle of maybe forty degrees, rear wheels still on the road with the tail in the air, the grille rammed into the side of the fracture. The front wheels hung in air. Something had cut Viondi, and blood ran down his face—the car had an air bag only on the driver’s side. Nick and Viondi had got out of the car by climbing over the front seats into the back, and then leaving the car by the back doors, from which they could take the long, nervous step to firm ground.
It was hard to say how deep the crevasse was. The water table was high here, and water had filled the crack to within ten feet of the surface. The water was far from still—a storm of bubbles rose to the top, and foam was beginning to gather in stripes on the surface.
“Earthquake, I guess,” Nick said, gazing down. His heart still throbbed in his chest.
“New Madrid fault,” Viondi said. “Shit.” He wiped blood from his face. “I gotta get back to St. Louis. Gotta get to my family.”
“At least my family’s well out of it.”
Viondi gave him a quick glance, blood dripping down his face. “You sure about that?” Nick hesitated. “The earthquake couldn’t hit Toussaint that hard.” He hesitated. “Could it?”
“We get out of here, then we’ll know.”
Nick looked at the car. “Wherever we go, it’ll be on foot.”
“Give me the keys.” Viondi opened the trunk, took out Nick’s suitcase, his own box of clothes, and the silver samovar, which he jammed down on top of his clothing.
“You’re not going to take the samovar, are you?” Nick asked.
“Shit, man, it’s solid silver. I’m not gonna leave it in an abandoned car in Buttfuck, Tennessee, that’s for sure.” His grim look grew more thoughtful. “Besides, if we can find drinkable water, we’re going to need something to carry it in, and this is all we’ve got.”
“Let me try to stop that bleeding before we go anywhere. I’ve got some Band-Aids and stuff in my bag.” There was nothing to clean the wound with, so Nick ended up using one of his T-shirts. He had some disinfectant cream, which Viondi patiently let him smear on the cut, and then he tried to close it with the adhesive strips. The cut was big, and blood kept pouring out while he was working, so Nick ended up using three different strips to try to hold the edges of the wound together. The adhesive strips, which he’d bought on sale, were what used to be called “flesh,” meaning a light tan color intended to blend in with the skin of Caucasians, and it contrasted strangely with Viondi’s black skin.
The strips also had little green dinosaurs on them.
At least they stopped some of the bleeding.
“I guess we might as well go,” Nick said. He put his satchel on his shoulder, picked up his soft-sided suitcase, then turned north.