Slide - Kyle Beachy [88]
“No. I forgot everything. I just sat here and made like I didn't see him and I was still reading my dumb red-fern book.”
“What was he wearing?”
“I don't know. Pants and a shirt.”
“You should try to remember clothing. Also height and hair color and race. If you can guess age, that's important too. Age can be hard. So can height if you're sitting down there. So be sure to stand before you make your approximation.”
“All he did was walk over and hand me this letter from my mom, then he drove away. And how am I supposed to read this stupid book now?”
“I'd better take a look,” I said.
He looked at me and then over at the yard where the kids had played but today were not. He began to bite his lower lip. The idea of secret mail carriers sounded familiar, but I didn't know why. Nor could I explain my faith that the letter contained a thinly veiled code that, together, the boy and I would try and uncover this afternoon, sitting together on his porch with pencils, solving the puzzle.
“She says not to show it to anyone.”
“She means strangers,” I said.
“No she doesn't,” he said.
three
i said it like, why not, Dad. Suggestion from couch to computer, where he was sitting and working. I downplayed my severe inner turmoil and distress. Why not hey let's just why not go to the Arch or something? Out of the house, father and son.
It cost us six dollars to park on the slanted cobblestone of the levee. I followed my father to the river's edge, where we stood for a minute watching driftwood pass quickly from our left to right. The intermittent noise of mud-water sloshing onto the brick shoreline lent something to the moment, I wanted to call it naturalism, and it was tough not to appreciate the Mississippi for her onetime role as national lifeline, this huge muddy bitch of a river.
Beginning uphill, we climbed the two long flights of stairs up to the Jefferson Memorial Park and Gateway Arch. A thin crowd milled about the lawn and aimed cameras into the sky; park rangers on horseback posed and smiled with tourists. I went to one leg's base and ran fingers across the etchings that scarred the steel close to the ground.
“Catenary curve,” he said. “The same wide as tall. People forget that.”
I did not ask for his help just yet.
We descended a sloping walkway, through metal detectors and into the sprawling subterranean Museum of Westward Expansion. While my father went for tickets, I walked among the exhibits. I peeked into replica tepees and mud huts and listened to ani-matronic actors describe the rigors of the prairie. I was looking closely at a stuffed buffalo when he appeared at my side.
“Eighteen dollars for two adults. I don't remember it being so expensive.”
Not yet, I thought.
We followed a set of painted dash marks to an area in front of a closed elevator door. When the doors opened, we squeezed with two women and another man into an egg of apparitional whiteness with modular plastic seating. A siren blew and we began to climb.
“Remember to swallow so your ears don't pop,” he said.
One of the women offered gum, which I declined. Our capsule climbed for a bit on the angled track, then straightened, and again, continually adjusting for the rondure of the monument's legs.
“The ride is shorter going down,” my father said.
At the top we were welcomed by a man in park-ranger green who proudly rattled off a sequence of facts so extensive you had to wonder if he'd ever been laid. The structure was designed to sway eighteen inches in strong wind. The average speed of the elevator trams was 3.9 miles per hour. The capacity of the observation deck was 140 people.
The windows were wide and squat and low enough that you had to half-crouch to see through them. Facing west, we saw that the clouds had cleared, and from here our tranquil hometown looked big and severe, alive in that fabled eight-million-stories sense of a living city The sky's simple mixture of pale blue and big, Super Ball sun pulled the city upward, into it, and this levitation brought with it movement