Arrivals

There were four windows in the hold.

An hour out, Master Sergeant Gorski walked the floor between the rows and said, not loudly, you can unbuckle, stay off the ramp, don’t touch anything yellow. The windows were small and round, the size of a dinner plate, set high in the four doors, two forward and two aft, with thick scratched perspex. Frederick went to the front one on the left and stood a little on his toes.

Red.

The same vast cracked tray of rust and gold and purple as from twenty-three A on Tuesday, cloud shadows lying across it, canyons cut into it like writing. Only now the shadows pointed the other way.

And the line. He found it the way you find a face you know in a crowd: thin, straight, ruled across the red from one side of the window to the other, with nothing on it.

There should have been a train on it. The Southwest Chief left Union Station in Los Angeles every evening at six for Chicago, and Friday’s would be about here by now, a long silver thread on the dark one. There had been no Friday train. No Thursday train. Lieutenant Yeboah had come down the ladder with a printout from the radio: the Chief and the Pacific and the Sunset Limited were all in the yards by the river with their doors shut, and would stay there until somebody had walked the line from Los Angeles to the desert on foot.

He was going east over it faster than anything on it had ever gone, and there was nothing on it underneath him.

---

“Is that the March?” Theo was at his shoulder in the enormous T-shirt with the orange plugs still in, looking past him.

“Yes.”

“There’s still nothing there.”

“There are fourteen million people there. They’re mostly in Phoenix.”

“I know. You told me.” Theo looked at the red. “I was going to say it first this time, so you’d know I’d listened.” He thought. “And the railway. The straight one. That’s the main line to the coast. The longest stretch of straight track in the Realm.”

Frederick turned round.

“See,” said Theo, quite pleased, and went back to his seat.

---

Kansas was square again. Pale green and dark green and brown, the roads ruled at right angles, farms at the corners, and every so often a little grey knot of a town with a water tower and a grain elevator and a railway running out of it both ways as straight as a pencil.

Priya came to the window in her socks, shoes left under her seat, no crisps, no bag. He moved over half a step.

“Is that Kansas?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s square.”

She nearly laughed. Then she looked at the squares a long time.

“I sent my grandmother the other one on Tuesday night. The Kansas one, with the storm. I told her it was Manhattan, because you said. When I got through to her from the line at Franklin she said she’d had it on her telephone screen all day beside the television, and kept looking at it. She said it was the last thing she had from me that wasn’t the news.”

She took out her phone, cracked across one corner, eleven per cent in red.

“I’m going to take another one for her. So she’s got the other side.”

She held it to the scratched perspex and took Kansas: the squares, an elevator, the railway going east, a little grey town on a river that might have been Manhattan.

“Is it Manhattan?”

He looked at the river and the town and the sun, and at the watch Lieutenant Yeboah had lent him that morning, set to Eastern already to save him the sum.

“I don’t know. I think it’s further south. I think it might be somewhere I don’t know.”

Priya looked at him.

“You’ve never said that before.”

“No.”

“I’m going to tell her it’s Manhattan anyway,” said Priya, and padded back to her seat.

---

Lunch was a white cardboard box the size of a book. Gorski pushed a cart from the galley; Mr Abernathy walked beside it with the carton list, counting, down one side and up the other. Ham and cheese in cling film, an apple, a cookie, a small milk with a straw taped to it, a napkin with the Air Force crest in blue.

“Same box the Army gets,” said Gorski, to the hold. “Good enough for the Army.”

“Is there a vegetarian one?” said Devon.

Gorski reached into the bottom of the cart without a word and handed over a box with a green sticker. Devon opened it.

“It’s the same sandwich without the ham.”

“That’s what vegetarian means, son.”

The hold laughed, and Devon ate it.

Frederick ate his on his knees in the roar, all of it, and found when it was gone that he could have eaten another, and another after that. He had not been hungry like this since two croissants at the hotel window on Thursday morning.

Airman Soto, coming up the row with a black sack for the boxes, looked at the empty one and at his face, went back to the galley, and came back with a second sandwich and put it on his knee.

He ate that too.

---

Mr Abernathy sat at the end of the right-hand row under the aft window with the carton list on his knee. He had been reading it on and off since Riverside, from the top, with his finger. His left hand was in a proper white bandage now, clean, done again by somebody that morning.

Frederick sat beside him.

Mr Abernathy finished his line. Then he took his glasses off, folded them, and held them in his good hand, looking at the floor.

“Hanover.”

“Sir.”

“I’m not calling the register. I’m saying your name.” He turned the glasses over. “I’ve taken children on trips for twenty-two years. This is the twenty-third. Philadelphia every spring for eleven years before they changed it. Boston twice. The capital more times than I can count, and I’ve counted most things. Coaches, trains, boats, aircraft, the incline railway at Pittsburgh, a lift in the Monument that stuck for forty minutes. I’ve never once left a gap.” He looked at the carton. “Until Friday at two.”

Frederick waited.

“I said your name four times. Then I started again at the top. Six times. Hartigan will have told you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I knew you weren’t there the first time. I’m not a fool.” His finger went to the bottom of the carton, to the last mark. “I did it six times because if I’d stopped I’d have had to do something else, and there wasn’t anything else in the whole world for a man of fifty-eight on a playing field to do but read the names of fifty-eight children in order and see if one of them came back.” He took his finger away. “So I read them.”

Across the hold Marcus was asleep again under his blanket. Lucía was awake, looking at the floor. Under the opposite window Señora Ruiz was writing in the folder.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“No. You’re not going to do that. Castellanos told me you tried it on him on Twenty-Second Street.” He put the glasses back on. “You went for an old man in a crowd, and an old woman under a house. I left a gap and read the list, and in the end you came back and I made the mark. That’s the whole of it. That’s the trip.” He looked down. “The gap was where it should have been, at the bottom of my list, and not in the floor of that house with nobody in it. I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life that I don’t have to know what it would have been like the other way. That’s not a thank you. It’s a fact. You like facts.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He turned the carton to its printed side. PURIFIED DRINKING WATER. “I wrote eleven of these for the committee on the floor of a gym. Brannigan. Ferrante. The man on the wheel. The two boys on the stairs. The nurse with the little girl. Ruiz.” A pause. “I put Ruiz in. She doesn’t know. Don’t tell her.”

“No, sir.”

“None for myself. That’s proper. A man doesn’t.” He looked down the hold at Theo, asleep with his head back against the cargo net. “Hartigan gave your sergeant something on Friday morning. Folded. He’d been writing for forty minutes with his back to me.” He did not look at Frederick. “I didn’t ask. I’m not going to ask. I’d like it on the record that I didn’t ask.”

He put his finger back at the top and began again, under his breath, from Abara. Frederick sat and listened to all fifty-eight, down to Hanover, where there was a mark now, and then went back to his seat.

---

At twenty to seven, by the lieutenant’s watch, a city lay on a bend of a wide brown river under the front window, four bridges across it. On Tuesday the cloud had broken about here and he had been fairly sure. Today there was no cloud. Louisville.

The evening train to St Louis had come through on the far bank at about ten past six. It would be west of the city by now, lights on, dining car laid, as it had gone on Thursday evening and Friday evening while Los Angeles sat in the dark. Nothing had happened on the Ohio.

The timetable had only stopped at one end.

Four o’clock on the sixth floor of New Westminster General, the bed raised, the newspaper folded on the blanket. Not the westbound. The arrivals. Tomorrow’s arrivals at Union Station in order, the Capitol from Chicago and the Crown Limited from Boston and the locals, read aloud from the book on his knee so his father would know what was coming.

Every day since September except this week. On Thursday morning, from the lobby of the hotel, he had read him the nineteen stations of the Santa Monica line instead, and at the end his father had said one word, which was sea.

---

Airman Soto kept a small green notebook in the leg pocket of her flight suit, with a pencil in the spine, and had been writing in it at her station all the way from Riverside. At seven, Eastern, he went and stood in front of her. She took the headset off one ear.

“Sir?”

“Could I have a page from your notebook? Please.”

She opened it at the back and tore a blank one out carefully along the spine so the edge was clean, and handed him the pencil as well.

He sat down beside Theo, who was awake now, and leaned the page on Señora Ruiz’s folder, and wrote it the way it was set out in AmRail’s thick blue book on the table under the library window: time, train, where from, how.

ARRIVING. SATURDAY 2 JUNE.

7.35 p.m. SCEPTRE, from Riverside. Via the March, Kansas, Louisville. All stations.

Underneath, smaller:

58.

Theo was reading over his shoulder.

“All stations.”

“It means it stops everywhere. Every station on the line. It’s the slow train.”

“I know what it means. It’s on the board at Union Station every morning. I’ve been there with you four hundred times.” He looked at the page. “It didn’t stop everywhere. It stopped at Riverside.”

“It stopped everywhere.”

Theo looked at him a long moment, and at the number at the bottom, and said nothing else about it.

“Is that for your dad?”

“For tomorrow. At four. So he knows what came.” He folded it and put it in his pocket with the permission slip, the strip of collar with its button, and Señora Ruiz’s chewed blue pen.

---

After Louisville the mountains were green. Long low ridges one behind another, north to south, like the swell of a sea, the evening light low from behind so that every ridge had a dark side and a gold side. Rivers in the valleys, roads along the rivers, towns. On every road, at the round window on his toes, he could see cars, and the cars were moving.

At a quarter past seven Major Voss’s voice came through the speaker in the roof, flat and calm and clear through the roar, and the whole hold woke at once.

“Ladies and gentlemen, from the flight deck. We’re starting our descent into the field in Maryland. We’ll be on the ground in twenty minutes. Weather at the field is clear, wind light from the south, seventy-four degrees.” A pause. “Master Sergeant Gorski will be round to check your belts. Please take your seats.” A longer pause. “And on behalf of the crew, it’s been a privilege. Welcome home.”

Nobody said anything. Two rows along the red webbing, fifty-eight and the teachers, Kimura and Brannigan and Castellanos, Clare Kerridge with the dark red case on her knees, sat on in the roar.

Then Marcus said, to nobody, quite loudly, the way people talk with earplugs in: “Seventy-four’s nice.”

The hold laughed, both sides. Gorski came down the floor checking belts. Mr Abernathy put the carton on his knee and took out his pen.

---

He went to the window once more with his belt undone. Gorski saw him there, opened his mouth, shut it, and did the other side first.

Low now. Flatter land, wooded, fields in the woods and houses in the fields, roads wider and closer together, cars on all of them in long lines with the evening sun on their roofs. A town. Another. A wide brown river going south with a long bridge across it. At the very edge of the window, low to the left, beyond the river, white in the evening sun, standing up out of the green at the middle of the long straight line of the Axis, the top of something tall and pointed. He had seen it from the window of the north wing every morning of his life.

Under the aircraft, at a crossroads in a town at the edge of the capital, as they went over low enough to see, a traffic light changed from red to green, and the cars waiting at it moved off together.

The last one he had seen work was on Ocean Avenue at a quarter to nine on Thursday morning, on the way to the pier.

“Sir,” said Gorski behind him, quite gently. “Seat.”

“Yes.”

He buckled in beside Theo with the buckle in the middle and felt the floor tilt and the engines change. In his pocket, the page with one arrival on it. At the end of the right-hand row, glasses on, pen out, carton on his knee, Mr Abernathy waiting to count them off.