Up In The Croquet Wicket of the Gods

There was only one completely inexplicable moment on Testy and Rachel’s drive East. It happened in St. Louis, where they stopped for a day to look around after surviving the depredations of truck stop hamburgers and bouffant-haired waitresses through the wastelands of Nevada and the barrenness of Utah and the geographical curlicues of Colorado and the flatness of Kansas. St. Louis was the place to stop, Testy announced, rather than Kansas City before or Chicago further along because it offered them– indeed, it featured centrally– its famous Arch, which she’d never had a chance to visit before and which she refused to miss this time.

“I have a thing for arches, honey,” she explained briefly.

Rachel, stupefied by the mile after mile of corn, the sticky weather, and the endless heaving roll of the Drag Racer, was just glad for a break.

“What do we do now?” she asked hours later, when they’d spent the whole day exploring Downtown, which meant touring one historic courthouse with a spectacular domed mural overhanging its rotunda, and hanging out in the classic railway station that had been converted to a mall.

They had worked their way toward the Mississippi and thus the Arch, and now stood nearly under it, staring at its steely sides and gaping up at its great height. It hung over the river front like the world’s largest tuning fork re-fashioned into an upside-down horseshoe. Its metal glinted with the falling sun and had blinded them now and again as they’d walked closer.

“Go up,” Testy told her. “Or go down and then go up. There’s a visitors’ center underneath. I mean underground. Really underneath. Then there are little cars that climb the legs. I read about ‘em. See?” She brandished a guidebook at Rachel.

“Okay,” the ex-showgirl agreed doubtfully. She felt decidedly uncertain whether this was a good idea– to cram herself into some undersized gondola and ride miles upward inside something that looked far too insubstantial to fit human beings. But she followed Testy gamely.

The cars were like little aspirins, and each one had five miniature seats that turned and swivelled as they spun their way up through the Arch. At the top, Testy led the way up one final set of stairs, and they found themselves in a narrow hallway lined with portholes, cheap carpet, and hordes of children. The million-dollar observation deck hanging tenuously above the Mississippi’s concrete waterfront turned out to be indistinguishable from an access corridor backstage at home.

“This is it?” Rachel wondered.

“Don’t judge,” Testy admonished. “Let’s check out the view.”

They pressed their faces to the layered glass and stared East over the Mississippi, and then West over the city. They marveled at how little there was worth looking at from there.

“Is this it?” Rachel asked Testy.

“Hm. Not so thrilling, is it?” the drag queen replied. “Kind of hazy. And not the greatest view, either.”

Rachel nodded and stepped away from the western windows to look across the river again.
And something dark flew through below the Arch. She caught a glimpse of it just as she stepped up to an empty porthole. She pressed closer and shoved her nose against the glass, practically climbing onto the waist-high, child-friendly shelf to see.

Nothing. The sky, river, and warehouse district on the far bank were empty. She wondered, a second later when she had her next coherent thought, whether she should be afraid.
Rachel retraced her steps and peered out over Testy’s shoulder once again.

“Did you see that?” she asked.

“See what?”

Rachel shook her head. “I don’t know how to describe it. Something dark. Like a small plane, but more massive. Like a huge bat. It flew right underneath us. Through the Arch.”

Testy let a moment pass, and then she reached up to lay a palm on Rachel’s forehead. “Are you feeling okay, honey?”

Rachel squeezed her eyes shut and nodded vigorously. “Yes, I feel fine. I saw something. Just for an instant. It must have flown out this way. Weren’t you watching?”

“Maybe it was just something that blew up from the park below, and it looked big to you because you didn’t see it clearly. Some paper, an old box or something.”

“I know what a box looks like.”

“Okay, okay. But nothing flew out underneath on this side, honey. I mean, a few years ago this guy flew a glider through here, and got arrested, but I’d notice if I saw that, believe me.”

Rachel frowned, furrowed her brow. “I saw something.” She looked around the observation deck. None of the other people around, a couple dozen in all, seemed to have noticed anything.

“Maybe we’ll see something from back on the ground,” she said doubtfully. “Can we go back down?”

“Oh yeah. Nothing going on up here, anyway. And the top of the world’s biggest paper clip is probably not the safest place to be if there are going to be mysterious dark objects flitting in and out underneath.”

Rachel was already walking toward the far end of the observation platform, where a line was formed to catch the next aspirin tablet going down.

NEXT POST: DRAGON IN THE DESERT (Monday 10/19/09)