The Arch

Ray Callahan stood in the bed of the truck at dawn, looking at the steel arch that the crews had finished bolting together the night before. It rose at the corner of Commercial Row and Virginia Street like something that had no right to exist in Reno, Nevada. Sixty feet of graceful metal, painted red and gold, waiting for the light that Ray was supposed to give it.

He was twenty-eight years old. He had been born in Reno, had watched the railroad yards expand and the saloons multiply and the divorce trade transform the town from a quiet crossroads into something that mattered. His father had been a carpenter. His mother had died when he was small. He had learned to wire circuits from a man named Kowalski who ran an electrical supply shop on Second Street and who had taught him that electricity was not magic but mathematics, and that mathematics did not lie.

The arch had cost fifty-five hundred dollars. The newspapers had run photographs of the steel being welded in San Francisco. Ray had read the articles and thought about what a man could buy for fifty-five hundred dollars, and then he had thought about why a town would spend it on light and steel instead of anything practical. He had decided it was because Reno needed to tell itself something. Not to anyone else. To itself.

They had hired Ray three weeks before the dedication. The general contractor was a man from Sacramento named Millhouse who had managed a dozen city projects and who moved through the streets of Reno with the confidence of someone building something permanent. Millhouse had shown Ray the schematics on a table in the railroad office. The incandescent bulbs were arranged in two banks, one on each side of the arch, arranged to look like burning torches. The word RENO would be spelled out in letters that would glow from within.

“How long?” Millhouse had asked.

“Four days, if the weather holds,” Ray had said.

“It’ll hold,” Millhouse had said, and walked away.

Ray had been right about the weather. The October days had been clear and cool, the kind of weather that made the high desert beautiful in a way that was difficult to explain to people who lived elsewhere. He had climbed the scaffolding every morning at six and strung copper wire between the brackets that the ironworkers had set. The bulbs came in wooden crates packed with straw. They were warmer to the touch than Ray would have expected, almost like they were already alive.

The dedication was tomorrow. The governors would come. There were rumors that someone was organizing a parade with bands from San Francisco and Shriners in their ceremonial costumes. Ray did not care much about parades, but he had gone to the newspaper office and bought the daily edition to confirm that tomorrow was real, that this thing he had wired was actually going to be illuminated in front of the whole town.

He had worked into the evening of the fourth day, making final connections, testing each bulb individually before running the full current through the system. Millhouse had stood below, watching, saying nothing. When the last bulb lit, it threw gold light across the intersection and made the street look like the photograph of a better place than Reno actually was. Ray had switched them off and climbed down from the scaffold and Millhouse had nodded and handed him an envelope with his final payment and told him to come back tomorrow at sunset for the dedication.

Ray did not sleep well. He lay in his rented room above the laundry on Sierra Street and thought about the arch and about how electricity moved through copper wire, how it was invisible until it reached the bulb and became visible, became light. He thought about his father, who had died ten years ago, before the big boom, when Reno was still just a railroad town with dust and the Truckee River and not much else. His father would have understood why Ray was nervous about tomorrow.

He arrived at the intersection at four o’clock. They were already setting up chairs for the dignitaries. A platform had been built on the east side, near the Virginia Street sidewalk. Ray could see Millhouse directing workers who were stringing bunting in the Nevada colors between the arch and the nearby buildings. The word RENO was barely visible now, in the daylight, just a suggestion of letters against the steel.

He found the control box in the small electrical housing they had built at the base of the arch. Inside was the main switch, a heavy brass lever mounted on a ceramic base. Ray checked the connections again, though he knew they were correct. Some jobs required second-guessing. This one did not.

At sunset, people began to gather. There were more than Ray had expected. They filled the intersection, stood in groups on the sidewalks, climbed to the second-story windows of the nearby buildings. He recognized some of them. The owner of the hardware store where he bought his supplies. Women in good coats, men in suits that had been pressed for the occasion. Families standing together, waiting for something that would make them feel like Reno was important.

He could not see the governors from where he stood, but he heard the band. The sound of trumpets and drums echoed off the buildings on Virginia Street, growing louder, becoming a weight in the air. The crowd began to quiet. A man approached the platform. He spoke about progress and the future and the Lincoln Highway and the Victory Highway, about commerce and vision, about what a small town could accomplish when it believed in itself. His words were lost in the wind that moved down from the mountains, but the tone was clear enough. This was an important moment. This was a moment that might matter.

Ray waited. The speaker finished and turned, looking toward the electrical housing where Ray stood. Ray moved to the control box and put his hand on the brass lever.

He thought of his father, who had built houses that other people lived in and had been paid modestly for skilled work that was never noticed once it was finished. He thought of Kowalski, who had taught him that the invisible work was the hardest and the most important. He pulled the lever.

The arch lit all at once. The torches blazed white-gold on both sides of the word RENO, and the letters themselves began to glow, throwing light up into the darkening sky, making the street look less like Reno and more like what Reno wanted to become. There was a long moment of silence. Then the crowd began to cheer. The sound was simple and genuine and temporary, like everything else.

Ray stood with his hand still on the lever and watched the light that he had wired burn against the darkness.

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