The Gateway

Tom Fitzgerald had never in his life seen so many people in the Reno airport, and he had never seen it snow like this on a morning the whole world was trying to land.

He worked the ground crew at Reno Municipal, and the terminal he worked out of was barely a year old, put up in a hurry because the games were coming to Squaw Valley and everybody with sense had understood that the games would come through Reno first. There was no other way to do it. Squaw Valley was a bowl in the mountains forty-some miles west, up the old highway over the pass, and it had no airport of its own and never would, and so the athletes and the officials and the newspapermen from countries Tom could not have found on a map all flew into Reno and were bused up the mountain, and for the last week the little terminal had been a thing Tom did not recognize, full of ski cases and foreign languages and men in blazers with rings of countries on them.

This morning it was full and nothing was moving. The storm had come in before dawn on the day of the opening ceremony and it had shut the sky. There was a foot of new snow on the field and more coming sideways, and the planes that were supposed to land were stacked up somewhere above the clouds burning fuel, and the planes that had landed sat at the edge of the apron with snow building on their wings while men like Tom went at them with brooms and hot water and cursed the weather in the flat cheerful way of men who are being paid to be out in it. Inside, past the glass, the terminal was a wall of people watching the field, watching the snow, watching for any airplane at all, some of them with tickets up the mountain for a ceremony that was supposed to start in a few hours and that half of them were plainly going to miss.

Tom was thirty. He had grown up in the old Fitzgerald house downtown, the one his grandfather Michael had built the retaining walls of the river park a mile from, and he had bought a new house two years ago out on the west side, on a street that had been a hayfield when he was a boy, and he and Linda had a girl named Anne who was five and who had asked him that morning, watching him leave in the dark, whether he would see the Olympics. He had told her he would see the edge of them. That was true. He was going to see the edge of the whole world come down out of the sky onto a field he shoveled, if it ever stopped snowing long enough to let it.

He knew the town was doing this everywhere, not just at the airport. The Riverside had named its showroom the Olympic Room for the year. The Mapes had given over rooms to the newspapermen and their typewriters and their wire machines. Down at Harold’s Club they had rounded up every employee who spoke a second language and pinned little flags on them, so a Norwegian could ask where the men’s room was in Norwegian and get an answer, and Tom had heard there was a fellow down there, a music teacher, who spoke a dozen tongues and stood in the middle of it translating like a one-man tower of Babel. The town had put on its good clothes. It had understood, the way it understood a big fight or a big divorce, that the world was going to look at it for a little while, and it meant to be looked at.

The buses ran up the mountain all day and half the night, out the west end of town and onto the old highway, U.S. 40, that climbed toward the pass through Truckee, the only road there was, because the interstate the government kept promising was still mostly a line on a map and a few miles of cut and fill. Tom had driven that road his whole life, to fish and to ski and once to bury an uncle over in Auburn, and it was a strange thing now to picture it with those buses on it, the same curves he knew in the dark carrying the flags of the world up to a valley that a few winters ago had been a summer pasture with a single rope tow. The town he had grown up in kept turning out to be the front door of things. It had been the front door of the railroad and the front door of the divorce trade, and now it was the front door of this, and a man could live his whole life in a place and never notice it was a doorway until the crowd came through it.

What the town did not put in the newspaper, and what Tom thought about while he swept snow off a wing, was that some of the visitors coming through had found out the hard way what kind of place they had come to. There had been trouble, quiet trouble, over which people the clubs would serve and which they would not, and word had gotten around, all the way to Washington, that a town about to host the world had a color line running through it that the world was not going to like. Something was shifting because of it. Not enough, and not fast, but the games were leaning on the town in a way the town had not expected, and a few doors that had been shut were being told, for the sake of the cameras, to open. Tom did not know what to make of all of it. He only knew that it was strange to be part of a thing so big that it reached down and moved something in your own town that had not moved on its own.

Around ten the wind dropped. It happened the way it happens in the mountains, all at once, the snow thinning and then quitting, and a hard cold blue coming up over the Sierra to the west, and out on the field the men straightened up and looked at the sky. Then the first of the stacked airplanes came down through the last of it, low over the terminal, wheels reaching, and the whole wall of people inside the glass made a sound Tom could hear through the window, a rising sound, and the plane touched and threw its spray of snow and rolled out, and behind it, spaced along the clean cold sky to the horizon, were the others, coming home.

Tom leaned on his broom and watched them come. Somewhere up the mountain a man was going to light a flame in a few hours and the newsreels were going to send it around the earth, and Tom Fitzgerald was going to be down here in the snow, chocking wheels and hauling stairs up to the doors, meeting it as it landed. He found he did not mind that at all. He had told Anne he would see the edge of it. He put his gloves back on. The first door was opening, and the world was starting down the stairs into Reno, and he went out across the field to meet it.

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