The New Arch

Ray Callahan stood in the crowd on Virginia Street on the last night of 1963 and watched them get ready to light an arch he had not built, and he kept his hands in the pockets of his coat, because his hands wanted to do something and there was nothing for them to do.

He was sixty-five. Thirty-seven years had passed since the morning he had stood in the bed of a truck at this same corner and looked up at sixty feet of red and gold steel that the crews had bolted together in the night, and had given it its light, bank after bank of incandescent bulbs arranged to burn like torches on either side of the word RENO. He had been twenty-eight then. He had thought the arch had no right to exist in a railroad town in the desert, and he had wired it anyway, every socket by hand, and when they threw the switch at the dedication and the whole thing came up gold against the October dark, Ray had understood for the first time that a town could decide to tell itself something and then build the thing that said it.

The old arch was gone now. They had taken it down earlier in the year, unbolted it and carried it off to a city yard somewhere to sit under a tarp, the steel he had climbed and the sockets he had filled, and Ray had not gone to watch them do it. A man did not need to watch that. He had read about it in the Gazette, two paragraphs, and he had folded the paper and gone out to the garage and sat for a while among his tools, the conduit benders and the spools of wire, and then he had come back inside and not said anything to anyone.

The new one had been the idea of two men from Harolds Club, Powers and Lent, who had wanted something for the centennial, something to mark a hundred years of Nevada, and they had raised the money the way Reno raised money for things it cared about, a hundred thousand dollars passed hat to hat down Virginia Street, and now the new arch stood over the corner waiting for midnight, and Ray had to admit, standing under it, that it was a thing to see. It was bigger than his. The letters of RENO rode on bright plastic panels, orange and yellow, lit from behind, and below the name an inverted arch curved down carrying the old slogan, BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD, and at the top a great star waited to turn. Twenty-five thousand bulbs, the paper said. He had wired his with a fraction of that, and his had burned like fire, and this one would not burn, this one would glow, even and cool and modern, the light coming through colored plastic instead of off a naked filament, and Ray stood there in the cold and tried to decide what he felt about that and could not, quite.

It was not better and it was not worse. That was the hard thing to hold. It was only later. The men who made it had not been trying to outdo Ray Callahan, who they had never heard of, who was an old electrician in the crowd with his hands in his pockets. They had been doing what he had done, which was to build the thing the town wanted to say about itself, and the town in 1963 wanted to say something different than the town of 1926 had wanted to say. In 1926 the town had wanted to say that it was permanent, that it mattered, that steel and fire could make a crossroads into a city. In 1963 the town wanted to say that it was new, that it was bright, that a hundred years had only made it younger. Ray could see the logic of it. He had spent his life with logic, with mathematics that did not lie, and the mathematics of the new arch were sound. It was the rest of him that had not caught up.

The crowd thickened toward midnight. Families, gamblers in good coats, children up far past any sense, their breath rising in the floodlights. Out front a platform had been set up, and on the platform the mayor stood next to a slot machine, an actual slot machine they had wheeled out into the street and wired to the arch, because that was the joke and the truth of the town all at once, that the lights would come on when a man pulled the handle of a one-armed bandit. Ray watched the mayor take hold of the handle. He thought of the switch he had thrown in 1926, an honest knife switch in a steel box, and he almost smiled.

A man beside him, younger, maybe forty, nodded up at the arch and said, to no one, to the night, “They don’t build them like the old one anymore.”

Ray looked at him. The man had not been born when the old one went up. He was saying a thing people said, the way they said it about everything, and he did not know that the old one had been built by a man standing next to him, and Ray found that he did not want to tell him. The old one had not been better. The old one had only been his.

“No,” Ray said. “They don’t.”

Then the count came down off the platform, the whole street saying the numbers together, and at the bottom of it the mayor pulled the handle, and the slot machine clattered out its rigged win, and the arch came on.

It did not come on like fire. It came on like dawn, all at once and everywhere, the orange and the yellow flooding up through the plastic, RENO standing out bright and clean against the dark, the slogan glowing below, and at the top the star began to turn, throwing its points of light out over the upturned faces of ten thousand people who roared as if they had done it themselves, as if the light had come from them. Ray felt the sound go through his chest. He felt the cold and the noise and the brightness, and somewhere under all of it he felt his right hand come up out of his coat pocket, by itself, the way it had come up to a switch a long time ago, and he stood there with his old electrician’s hand half raised in the crowd, palm open toward the light, and he let it stay there, and he did not bring it down until the star had gone all the way around.

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