The Biggest Show

The airplane was the thing nobody would believe, so Carl Kellerman stopped trying to describe it and just told people to come and see.

He had been at the MGM Grand a month, since the first week of May when it opened its doors out on the east side of town and hired, in one swallow, more people than had ever worked at the Mapes in its life. A thousand rooms, and a second tower already drawn. A casino floor you could have set the whole Mapes down on and lost it. He had come over from the Mapes, where his mother had spent thirty years and where he had spent twelve, as a pit supervisor on the graveyard shift, and he had told himself he was doing it for the money, which was true, and for the pension, which was also true, and had not told himself the other thing, which was that he had wanted for once in his life to work somewhere that was not already dying when he got there.

Tonight the show opened.

They had been building it on the stage for months while the casino ran around it. He had walked past the theater doors on his breaks and heard hammering inside at four in the morning and the same six bars of a song played over and over on a piano, and once a sound like a freight train that he had not been able to account for. The hotel had put it on every billboard between here and Sacramento. The biggest show in the world. On the biggest stage in the world. In the biggest little city in the world. Carl had thought that was a lot of biggest for one sentence, and had said so to his mother, who had said that in her experience a place that told you three times how big it was had usually just found out how small it felt.

His mother was fifty-nine and had worked the Mapes from the winter it opened and was still there, on the desk, in the lobby that had once been the finest room in Nevada and was now a room people walked through on their way to somewhere else. He had gotten her a ticket. She had said she would not come and had come, in the good blue dress, and sat now beside him at a table near the back of a theater that held more people than the Mapes had rooms, with a drink in front of her she was not drinking, looking at the ceiling.

“Where does it come from,” she said.

“The plane?”

“The plane.”

“I do not know. I have never seen it. They keep the doors shut.”

The lights went down.

He would remember afterward that the first ten minutes had been what he expected, which was to say more of everything. More girls than a stage should hold, in more feathers. Staircases that went up into the dark and kept going. A curtain that was not one curtain but a dozen, each one rising on a scene bigger than the last, a street, a ballroom, a movie lot with its own lights and cameras, all of it moving, all of it at once, and an orchestra somewhere underneath it making a sound like weather. His mother sat with her hands in her lap. He could not tell what she thought. Then the stage went dark and there was the freight-train sound he had heard through the doors in the small hours, and a wind came down the aisle that moved the tablecloths, and the airplane came out over their heads.

It came out of the back of the stage, nose first, lit, an airliner, not a model of one, the size of the real thing or near enough that his body could not tell the difference, and it flew. It came out over the first rows and the middle rows and it kept coming, low, with its landing lights on and its engines roaring out of speakers he could not see, until it was over the back of the house, over him, over his mother, close enough that he ducked, and everyone ducked, the whole house going down in their chairs at once like a wave, and then it stopped there, hanging in the air above the tables with the light pouring off it, and the girls came out on its wings.

Helen had not ducked. He looked over and she was sitting perfectly upright with her face turned up to the underside of the thing, and her mouth was a little open, and he had not seen that expression on her since he was a child.

Afterward, in the lobby, with the crowd going past them out to the floor where the money was waiting, she took his arm.

“Your grandfather Frank,” she said, “used to say that Reno was a town where you could see the whole thing from one bar stool. The whole town. That was what he liked about it.” She watched a woman in an evening dress walk by with a plastic cup of quarters. “I stood on the top floor of the Mapes the night it opened and I could see all the way to the mountains. I thought that was the top. I thought there was nothing you could build in this valley that would be bigger than that.”

“It is bigger,” Carl said.

“It is bigger.” She let go of his arm. “It is not higher. That is not the same thing, and you will find that out. But it is bigger, and I am glad I saw the airplane, and now I would like to go home.”

He walked her out through the casino, past his own pit, where the graveyard crew was already dealing under the lights, past the rows of machines that went on farther than he could see, and out the doors into a June night with the whole east side of town lit up around them where two years ago there had been a field. She stood on the curb waiting for the cab and looked back at the building once, the towers of it, and then at him.

“Go on back in,” she said. “You have a shift.”

He did. He had a shift. He went back in past the theater doors, where they were already resetting the airplane for the ten o’clock, and he thought, going down the long floor toward his pit, that his mother was right and would not be right forever. Then the engines started up again behind the doors, for the next house, and he went to work.

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