The Implosion

Kevin Fitzgerald had covered fires and city council and one execution up at the prison, but he had never covered the death of a building, and a little before two in the morning he stood behind the police line on Virginia Street with a few hundred other people who could not sleep and waited for them to blow up Harolds Club.

It was cold, the clear hard cold that comes to the Truckee Meadows in December, and the crowd made the sound crowds make when they are excited and trying to be solemn about it at the same time. He knew half of them. That was the trouble with covering a town you had lived in your whole life; there was no anonymous crowd. There was the woman who had taught his kids their swim lessons, and a guy from the sports desk in a Wolf Pack cap, and an old dealer he had once interviewed for a story about a union drive that never went anywhere. Everyone had a Harolds Club. Everyone had walked under that sign at some point across the last sixty years, fed a machine, brought a visiting aunt to see the guns.

The building stood dark against the other lights, seven stories, stripped now, its windows punched out. He had written about that part too, the weeks of crews pulling out everything worth keeping. The famous mural was already gone, the Covered Wagon, the great porcelain picture of the pioneers and the wagon train that had hung on the Virginia Street face since 1949, thirty-five feet of tile that a man named Theodore McFall had designed, that two generations of children had been told to look up at while their parents finished a hand inside. They had taken it down panel by panel to reinstall it out by the fairgrounds. Kevin had gotten a good quote about that. He had a whole story half-written in his notebook, waiting only for its ending, which was going to be the building coming down.

He thought about his grandfather while he waited, because he could not help it. Michael Fitzgerald had put buildings up. He had gone up the raw steel of the Riverside Hotel in 1927 with a rivet gun, six stories over the river, the tallest thing in the state at the time, and later, when the private work dried up in the Depression, he had built retaining walls for the government along the Truckee, and he had died still proud of both. Kevin had grown up on the story. A Fitzgerald who made the town taller. And here was Kevin, three generations down, standing in the cold with a notebook to write down a building being erased, which was, he supposed, the family trade turned inside out. Bridget had cooked for the men who built the place. Patrick had walked a beat past it. Michael had riveted its neighbors into the sky. Kevin wrote the obituaries of their buildings for the Gazette-Journal and told himself that was a kind of keeping too.

Harolds Club had opened in 1935, a bad year to open anything, when a young man named Harold Smith borrowed five hundred dollars from his father and set up a penny roulette wheel and a couple of slot machines in a narrow storefront and then, against all sense, got rich. His father bought billboards, thousands of them, all across the country and past its edges, HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST under a covered wagon, so that soldiers found the signs in the Pacific and tourists found them in Europe and everyone who drove into Reno for thirty years arrived already knowing the name. Then the old man died and the son sold out to Howard Hughes, and Hughes’s people ran it the way Hughes’s people ran things, and it went hand to hand after that until there was no more hand to pass it to. It closed in the spring of 1995 and stood empty for the rest of the century. Now Harrah’s owned the lot, and Harrah’s wanted the lot, and the fastest way to clear a lot in the last month of 1999 was to lay charges in the columns and press a button.

Somewhere a horn sounded, three long blasts, and the crowd went quiet all at once. Kevin found he was holding his breath the way everyone around him was holding theirs. There was a string of small flashes low in the building, a sound like a bedsheet torn very fast, and then the deep flat concussion he felt in his chest before he heard it, and the seven stories began to come down.

It came down wrong. Kevin did not know enough to know it in the moment, but he could see it plainly even so, that the front dropped the way it was meant to, straight into its own footprint in a rising gray column, and that a whole slab of the back did not. It leaned instead of falling. It hung a half second against nothing. Then it toppled sideways to the north, away from Harrah’s, out into the empty lot where an older piece of the club had already been cleared, and the ground came up through Kevin’s boots, and the dust rolled up the street in a wall, and the crowd stepped back from it as one animal before the dust was on them, in their teeth, in their hair. People were laughing and coughing at the same time. A woman near him said, well, and could not find the rest of the sentence.

It was a while before the word came down the line about what had actually happened. The section that fell wrong had torn open a gas line where it went into the ground, and next door the hotel was walking its guests out into the cold in whatever they had been sleeping in, a couple hundred of them, blinking on the sidewalk under the marquee while men in hard hats moved fast and unhurried through the haze. No one was hurt. That was the thing that would matter by the time the sun came up, that a sixty-four-year-old building had come down in the middle of a city and not killed anybody, and that the guests would be back in their rooms within a few hours with a story of their own now.

But it had not gone as planned, and that was Kevin’s story now, and he felt the small ugly lift a reporter feels when a thing goes wrong, because the thing going wrong is the thing people read. He crossed out the ending he had been carrying half-written for a week, the graceful one, the paragraph about a landmark folding quietly into memory. That was not what he had seen. What he had seen was a building that would not go the way it was told, whose old bones had been welded together by men who built to last, so that even wired to fall it had leaned and fought and taken a piece of the block down sideways with it before it lay in the dust.

His grandfather would have liked that, Kevin thought. He stood in the settling gray with the taste of the old club in his mouth and started to write down the true ending, the one where the thing did not go easy, and all around him the crowd was already turning back toward its cars, carrying it home.

---