Arrivals

The day after Thanksgiving, Palo Verde Hall was a building with half its teeth out.

Everybody from the Valley had gone home on Wednesday in their parents’ cars, with laundry, and would come back on Saturday morning for the game, with more laundry, and the dining hall had served Thanksgiving dinner to the hundred and forty who were left, on paper plates, under a banner that said GIVING THANKS with the second N hanging by one corner. Tyler had stayed, because a flight to Cleveland the day before Thanksgiving cost more than his first car, and because it had snowed in Parma on Tuesday, eight inches, and his mother had sent a photograph with a yardstick in it. He had eaten three plates of turkey, and come back up the stairs, and said “Thanks” to the ceiling, and gone to sleep with the headphones on at four in the afternoon.

At half past two on Friday Frederick went down the forty-five steps with Sam behind him and out under the arcade and across the road to the tram.

“What time does he land?” said Sam, at the stop.

“Twenty to four.”

“It’s on time.” Sam had looked. “It’s been on time since Iceland.”

---

The tram ran over the river and out across the flat brown country by the water towards the airport, nearly empty, and at the airport’s edge there was a little driverless train, two cars long, that came gliding up to the platform with nobody in the front of it at all and took them across the field to Terminal Four, past the long rows of tails, with a recorded woman saying the names of things.

Frederick stood at the front of it, where the driver was not, and watched the terminal come.

“You’re doing your face,” said Sam.

“What face?”

Sam considered it.

“The one you do at the butte,” said Sam. “Did.”

---

He came out of the doors at four minutes past four, in a red sweatshirt and a white hat.

It was a cricket hat. It was the white floppy kind that umpires wore, and old men, with a wide soft brim that came down all the way round and made him look like a mushroom that had decided to travel; and he came through the sliding doors with a rucksack and a carrier bag and his shoulders up round his ears, braced, the way a man walks into the sea in April.

The doors shut behind him.

Frederick watched him stop on the pavement in the strip of shade under the canopy, and wait for it, and not get it.

Jack stood there for some time. He lifted his face out from under the brim and looked at the sky, which was blue, and at the palms moving a little in a breeze, and at a woman going past in a quilted jacket with the hood up, and then at Frederick, by a pillar, with his hands in his pockets.

“It’s nice,” said Jack.

“I told you.”

“You said it’d be eighty.”

“It’s seventy-six.”

Jack did the sum. Frederick watched him do it, on his face, under the brim.

“That’s twenty-four,” said Jack. “That’s a good day. That’s the best day of the year. That’s the fete.” He looked round at the airport in the sun with the deep suspicion of a man who has been sold something. “Where’s the bit where you go outside and your face comes off? I’ve had my shoulders like this since Iceland.”

“It’s November.”

“It was going to kill me. You said.”

“I never said.”

“Milwaukee said,” said Jack. “He said a hundred and fifteen. He said I’d die.” He let his shoulders come down, slowly, an inch at a time, like a man putting down a wardrobe. “I bought a hat.”

“It’s a good hat.”

“It’s a terrible hat. It was my grandad’s. It’s been in a drawer since 1997.” He took it off and looked at it and put it back on. “Hello, Hanover.”

“Hello.”

And then for a moment neither of them said anything, on the pavement outside Terminal Four, and Jack put down the carrier bag and put one arm round him, quickly and hard, with his hand flat on the middle of Frederick’s back, and held on for exactly as long as two men hold on outside an airport, and not one second more, and let go, and picked up the bag.

Sam was standing by the next pillar, looking at the departures board with great interest.

Jack looked at him.

“You’re one of hers,” said Jack.

“Sam,” said Sam. “Accounting.”

Jack considered this for a moment. Then he nodded, as one professional to another.

“Jack,” he said. “Pubs.”

---

On the tram back he sat by the window with the hat on his knee and looked at the March of Arizona going past with his mouth a little open, as he had two years ago in August, except that this time he was the right colour. Everything was brown, he said: the ground and the hills and the buildings and a dog; and everything that was not brown was so green that it looked as though somebody had gone round with a hose, which, Frederick told him, somebody had.

The tram came round the long curve by the river, and there it was, as it had been from Theo’s car in August, standing up out of the flat town by itself at the end of the water: the butte, brown, rough, the colour of a flowerpot, with the stepped path going up the face of it in its thin pale zigzag, and the A on its side, bright, since October.

Jack looked at it for a long time.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s your hill.”

“Yes.”

“From the Kreuzberg.” Jack turned and looked at him. “Every morning for four years. You said. Top of a monument, in the snow, sun coming up, Alex with his programme, me with a bell. I rang a bell, Hanover. In Berlin. A man in a vest told me to shut up.” He looked back at the hill. “How many mornings?”

Frederick looked at the hill too.

“Some,” he said.

“How many is some?”

“About six weeks.”

There was a silence on the tram.

Two seats behind them, Sam took out his phone and looked at it with great concentration.

“Six weeks,” said Jack.

“It was very hot.”

“It’s a hill.”

“It was a hundred and one at six in the morning, Jack. In August. At six.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t hot.” Jack was beginning to go red, from the neck, which was what Jack did instead of laughing when he was trying not to, and it was going to fail. “I’m saying four years. I’m saying you said four years, in front of the German Emperor, and you did six weeks.” He turned round in his seat. “Sam.”

Sam looked up.

“How many times did he go up?”

Sam looked at Frederick. Frederick looked at the hill.

“Thirty-four,” said Sam. “Out of fourteen hundred and sixty-one.” He considered it. “Two point three three per cent.”

Jack put his hat over his face and stayed like that until Mill Avenue.

---

At the desk in the lobby of Palo Verde Hall there was a form.

The girl on the day desk, a sophomore with her hair up in a pencil, gave it to him on a clipboard. Overnight Guest Registration. Three nights at most. Host to sign. Guest to sign, and show identification. Roommate to sign, consenting.

“Roommate has to sign?” said Frederick.

“It’s the rule,” said the girl. “In a double. In case he doesn’t want a guest.”

So they went up the forty-five steps with the clipboard, Jack counting under his breath and getting forty-four, and along the quiet corridor to the door with Tyler’s paper sun on it and the small rectangle of old tape beside it where Frederick’s had been, and went in.

Tyler was on the bed by the window with the keyboard on his knees and the headphones on and the blind down, and on the two screens over the desk the snow was coming down on the dark forest as it had come down since August.

Frederick held out the clipboard.

Tyler looked at it. He took one hand off the keyboard, and took the pen, and signed it on his knee where it said ROOMMATE, without taking the headphones off, without looking at the form, without looking at Jack, without, as far as Frederick could see, having any idea what he was signing at all; and gave the pen back, and put the hand back on the keyboard; and then, as an afterthought, lifted one side of the headphones an inch.

“Hey,” he said, to Jack.

“All right?” said Jack.

“You’re British.”

“Gloucestershire.”

“Cool,” said Tyler.

There was a pause. Frederick watched Jack try not to say it, and fail.

“It’s near Wales,” said Jack.

“Cool,” said Tyler, and the headphones went back on; and then, after a moment, came off again, and he leaned down off the side of the bed and opened the little white refrigerator and held out, across the gap, a bottle of something blue.

“You want a Glacier?”

Jack took it. He turned it round and read the label, and drank some, and looked at it.

“That’s the bluest thing I’ve ever had in my mouth,” he said.

“It’s electrolytes,” said Tyler, and went back to the fire.

Out in the corridor, with the door shut, Jack leaned on the wall beside the paper sun and put his hand over his eyes.

“He doesn’t know,” said Jack.

“No.”

“He looked right at me. He looked right at you. He signed a form with your name on the top of it in capital letters.”

“He didn’t read it.”

“He doesn’t know who you are.” Jack took the hand away. His face was shining. “Oh, I love him. I love him, Hanover. Can I keep him?”

---

Rhys came at six with a camp bed.

It came in a green nylon bag the size of a loaf, with a foot pump, and Rhys said it was out of his kit, and Jack asked what kind of kit a student had with a camp bed in it, and Rhys went pink and said a sensible kind, and there was no further discussion.

It took Jack twenty minutes to pump it up, standing on one foot in the white hat, while the mat unfolded itself across the floor like something waking up, and grew, and went on growing, until it filled the whole of the space between the two beds, from the wardrobes to the desk, and one corner of it had gone up under Tyler’s bed and was lifting it, very slightly, on that side.

Tyler, on the lifted bed, without taking the headphones off, put a hand out flat against the wall.

“Sorry,” said Jack.

Tyler did not hear him. On the screen something in the forest was coming, and he was busy with the fire.

Jack lay down on the camp bed on his back with his hands behind his head and the hat over his face.

“Brilliant,” he said, from under the hat. “Never better.”

---

They ate on the Avenue, which was nearly empty, because the people who would fill it tomorrow were still at home in Scottsdale and Chandler eating leftovers; and afterwards, walking back under the lamps in the warm dark, Jack stopped dead outside a bar.

It was an ordinary bar, a low brick front with a striped awning and a chalk drawing on the pavement board of a cactus in a hat. But in front of it, along the kerb, set into the pavement on two iron posts, there was a rail. A plain iron rail, waist high, painted black, about eight feet long, with a brass plate screwed to one of the posts. And under the rail, on the pavement, on four iron feet, there was a long galvanised trough, full to the brim with clean water, with the lamplight lying on it.

Jack looked at it for a long time.

“What’s that?”

“A hitching rail.”

“For horses?”

“In law, for horses. And the trough.” Frederick nodded at the plate. “Every licensed house in the March has to have one. It’s the oldest law they’ve got. It’s older than the March.”

Jack bent down and read the brass plate. TRAVELLERS’ ACT 1864. He read it again. Then he straightened up, and looked at the trough, and in through the window of the bar at the long counter and the people at it, and the man behind it with a towel on his shoulder, and back at the trough.

“Every pub,” he said.

“Every pub. Every bar. And nobody keeping water by a road is allowed to refuse it to a traveller. It’s the first law they teach you at school here. Nobody is refused water. Every child in the March can say it.”

Jack stood in his grandfather’s hat and said nothing for a while. Then he took a photograph of the trough, carefully, from two sides, and of the brass plate, close up.

“For Mum,” he said.

“What’s she going to do with it?”

“Put it on the wall. Behind the bar. With the brewery calendar.” He put the phone away. “That’s it, isn’t it. That’s the whole job. She says it. She’s said it since I was twelve. You never refuse anybody water. Doesn’t matter who. Doesn’t matter if they’re barred. Doesn’t matter if it’s Purvis. They come in, they want water, they get water, and you put it down before they ask.” He looked at the trough. “And they wrote it down. They made it a law. In 1864. For everybody.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ve never been anywhere that wrote down the right thing before.”

The man behind the bar had seen them through the window. He lifted a hand. Jack lifted his.

“Is that him?” said Jack. “The traveller? Is that what I am?”

“I think so.”

“Brilliant,” said Jack, quietly, and walked on.

---

“How is she?” said Jack, by the canal, where the Avenue stopped and the path went along under the trees in the dark.

He said it the way Jack said things that mattered, which was without any warning at all, in the middle of walking, to the path in front of him.

“She says it’s the same.”

“What does she say when she’s not saying that?”

Frederick walked for a while.

“My father’s bought a chair,” he said.

Jack looked at him.

“For the landing. At home. In London. Halfway up the stairs, so she can sit down. He went to a shop in Marylebone on his own and chose it and paid for it and had it carried up.” He watched the dark water in the canal, moving, not moving. “It’s green. It’s got buttons.”

Jack did not say anything for a long time.

“On his own,” he said.

“With Brannigan.”

“Your dad.” Jack’s voice had gone strange. “Your dad, who can’t… who finds the words one at a time. He went to a shop. In Marylebone. And bought a chair.” He stopped on the path and looked at the water. “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, Hanover.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

They stood on the canal path in the dark. Somewhere along it, a long way off, a bicycle bell rang, twice, and Jack turned his head at it, sharply, and then away.

“What does Milwaukee say?” said Jack.

“Theo asks how she sounded.”

“And how did she sound?”

Frederick did not answer, and Jack did not ask again, and after a while they walked on.

---

Mr Luna had come on at ten.

He was at the desk when they came in at eleven, in the cardigan, under the lamp, with the radio low and the clipboard, on which, Frederick could see from the door, he had written 11 p.m. 72. He looked up at them over his glasses. He looked at Jack, and the hat, and the red sweatshirt, for some time.

“Guest,” said Mr Luna.

“Yes.”

Mr Luna pulled the night book towards him, a large green ledger, and found the page, and uncapped the pen.

“Name, son.”

“Jack Fennell.”

“Where from?”

“Gloucestershire.”

Mr Luna wrote it down, slowly, all of it, in his small neat hand, and then looked up.

“Where’s that?”

Jack opened his mouth. Frederick watched him reach for it, the thing he always said, the thing he had said to a barman in Phoenix and a doorman in Old Town and a roommate four hours ago, and get hold of it, and bring it out.

“It’s near Wales,” said Jack.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses with no expression whatsoever.

“Where’s Wales?”

There was a long pause in the lobby of Palo Verde Hall.

“Near Gloucestershire,” said Jack, at last, with great dignity; and Mr Luna looked at him a moment longer, and then wrote, in the column headed Notes, a single word that Frederick could not read upside down, and blotted it, and closed the book.

---

At one in the morning Frederick woke and the camp bed was empty.

It lay across the floor in the light from the gap at the edge of the blind, with the hat on the pillow end, and Tyler, on the lifted bed, with his hand still flat on the wall as though he had gone to sleep holding the building up, was saying very quietly into the microphone, to Finland, “No. I’ve got it.”

He went down the stairs in his socks.

He heard them before he got to the bottom. He stopped at the turn of the first flight, where the stairs came round and you could hear the whole of the lobby and could not be seen from it, and sat down on the step.

”… but how do you know,” Jack was saying. “When to put it down. Before they ask. Mum knows. She just knows. She’ll have a glass under the tap before they’re through the door and I’ve never once seen her look.”

“You look,” said Mr Luna. “She looks. You just don’t see her doing it.”

“How do you do it?”

“Six hundred kids,” said Mr Luna. “Every year. New ones.” A pause, and the sound of a butterscotch wrapper. “First week, I learn the faces. Second week, I learn the walks. By October I know who’s coming down those stairs before they get to the bottom. I know who’s going to cry and who’s going to be sick and who’s going to say they’re fine.” Another pause. “You learn the walks, son. That’s all it is.”

“Everybody’s got a walk,” said Jack.

“Everybody’s got a walk.”

“There’s a man at home, Purvis, he’s ninety-three, he comes in every night at six, and I can tell from the door if it’s his knees or his temper.” Jack sounded happier than Frederick had heard him in months, the way he sounded behind the bar at the New Inn on a Friday when the room was full and going well. “Knees, it’s a half and a chair by the fire. Temper, it’s a pint and you don’t mention the bullocks.”

“What’s a bullock?”

“It’s a sort of cow that’s angry.”

“We got those,” said Mr Luna.

There was a comfortable silence, the kind two people have who have both stood behind something for a long time and know what it is to sit down.

“I want to do this,” said Jack, after a while.

“Nights?”

“No. Well. Sort of. Behind a bar. Forty years. The New Inn, or one like it. Knowing everybody’s walk.” He was quiet for a moment. “Everybody thinks I should do something else. Go to university. Do something.”

“You came down here,” said Mr Luna, “at one in the morning, on your first night, in a strange country, to ask the porter how he knows when somebody’s going to cry.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be all right, son,” said Mr Luna.

On the step at the turn of the stairs, Frederick sat with his arms round his knees.

“And you can come down,” said Mr Luna, in exactly the same voice, without any change in it at all, “son. I can see your feet.”

---

They went back up at a quarter to two. Forty-four, Jack said. Forty-five, said Frederick; there’s a little one; and Jack said that he had heard about the little one from Theo, on the phone, and did not believe in it, and that it was a lie told to Americans to make them think their stairs were interesting.

Tyler was asleep. The snow was still falling on the screens. Jack lay down on the camp bed in the dark, which sighed under him, and Frederick got into the bed by the door, and for a while neither of them said anything and the room was only the fan in the computer and the sound of three people breathing.

Then, in the dark, from down by the floor, a hand came up over the edge of the bed by the door, and found his, and held it.

Neither of them said anything about it. There was nothing to say. It was the first room in three months that had had Jack in it, and Jack’s hand was rough from barrels and warm, and it held on.

On the bed by the window Tyler turned over, and said in his sleep, quite clearly, “Got the fire,” and was quiet.