The rain drummed on the roof of the cruiser as they pulled away from the billboard and headed back into town and Holly Coronado’s house. Morgan was driving – he had insisted, though Solomon would have been happier to walk, even with the rain. He kept the window wide open as a compromise, the rain blowing in through it as they drove along. They headed up Main Street, past the rain-glossed storefronts and all the closed stores.
‘I guess it’s going to put a big dent in your tourist income, this fire,’ Solomon said.
Morgan nodded. ‘Guess so.’
‘Must be a worry, town this size.’
‘Money’s always a worry, but we do OK.’
‘How?’
Morgan sighed, as though talking was a burden. ‘Are you genuinely interested or just passing the time?’
‘I’m interested.’
‘OK, so we got the airfield, that brings in more than tourist dollars, what with the storage fees we get from the military and salvage money too. We also got a number of long-standing civic trusts in place that keep things running and the bills paid. We’re all right, don’t you worry about that.’
‘I’m not worried. I don’t live here.’
They turned off Main Street and started heading towards the spill piles. Beyond it Solomon could see the airfield, lines and lines of parked aircraft sitting wing to wing, their engines and windows wrapped in some kind of white protective covering to keep the dust out. There were hundreds of them, thousands; military, commercial, old, new, their various shapes prompting names and information to riffle through his mind as well as a question. ‘The plane that crashed, what kind was it?’
‘It was a Beechcraft, AT-7. You know planes, Mr Creed?’
He pictured a compact, single-winged plane with two big engine cowls and a wide twin-finned tail. ‘Advanced Training version of the Model 18,’ Solomon said. ‘Used to train navigators in World War Two.’
Morgan smiled and shook his head. ‘For a man with no memory you sure seem to know a lot of stuff.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘This model was a real beaut. Re-conditioned Pratt and Whitneys, brand-new hydraulic systems and electrics, the whole nine yards. Here –’ he showed him a picture – ‘ain’t she something?’
Solomon studied the screen. It matched the image his mind had already conjured, but there was one crucial difference. The plane that crashed had shone. Apart from its serial number the fuselage had been stripped of all paint or markings and polished until the aluminium shone like chrome, or …
‘… Mirror.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It looks like it’s made of mirror.’
‘They call it brightwork: no paint just a real high polish on the aluminium then a clear lacquer to seal it. Cuts down on drag. Damn shame we lost it. Was looking forward to flying it myself.’
Solomon thought back to the mirror in the church and the momentary illusion he had experienced that his reflection was not his own, that the mirror was in fact a doorway with someone else standing on the other side of it. He looked at the picture of the plane, taken on a desert runway, so highly polished it reflected the land and sky.
‘Maybe that’s how I got here.’
‘You think you were on that plane now?’
‘No, I meant …’ He shook his head, his thoughts incomplete and tricky to explain. He changed the subject. ‘You a pilot, Chief Morgan?’
‘Me? Oh yeah. I guess if you live by the sea, everyone’s a sailor, right? Here everyone’s a pilot. I was in the Air Reserve, 944th Fighter Wing. Ground crew. Some of the F-16s I maintained are now parked out there in the Boneyard – that’s what we call the storage part of the airfield. We get a lot of old planes coming through here. Some for repair, some for storage. Climate here is dry as it gets, means metal don’t corrode much, and the desert is caliche – you know what that is?’
‘Calcium carbonate. Like a naturally occurring cement.’
‘Exactly. Means the planes can sit right out there on the ground without the need to build concrete parking areas. We got whole squadrons of B-52s been standing out there twenty years with not so much as a crack in the ground. Damn shame. Birds like that should be in the air, not sitting around gathering dust.’
‘How come they’re here?’
‘Timing, I guess. The main copper seam ran out at about the same time the Second Word War was ending. The military needed somewhere to store all the war surplus and the town needed to find new jobs. It was Bill Cassidy’s idea to expand the airfield, Ernie’s – the present mayor’s – grandfather.’
‘Jack Cassidy’s son?’
‘Grandson.’
‘Quite a dynasty.’
‘That’s for sure.’
‘And it’s all coming to an end.’
Morgan turned slightly in his seat. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Mayor Cassidy has no children.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Morgan went quiet and Solomon stared out at the town slipping by: souvenir stores, an empty parking lot, a livery yard with blood-red barns and a sign promising ‘Desert trekking’ and ‘Stagecoach Rides up to the Historic Cemetery’. There was a corral spread out back from the road, horses huddled inside it against the weather. Then the mine slipped into view, the spill piles rising up in gravelled mountains behind a high fence topped with razor wire. The rain ran in fresh rivulets down the sides of them, thrumming on the roofs of empty-looking buildings and forming puddles around a closed gate with a sign saying DANGER. KEEP OUT. WORKING MINE.
‘You said the mine gave out at the end of the Second World War?’
Morgan glanced over at the sign. ‘It did. We opened her up again ’bout five years back. New methods of extraction.’
‘All the buildings look deserted.’
‘Most of them are. The new operation is much less labour intensive.’
He turned off the road and accelerated away from the mine and into a maze of neat residential streets. The further they rose up the hill and away from the mine, the nicer the houses became, their gardens wide and deep and opening out on to the desert beyond. American flags flew on poles in front of most of them, some Arizona state flags too – thirteen rays of red and yellow radiating from a copper star with a band of blue beneath. Solomon watched them flapping wetly in the rain, his mind automatically decoding the symbolism:
Blue the colour of liberty.
Copper for the state’s main industry.
Thirteen original colonies of the United States.
Red and yellow for the Spanish flag carried here by conquistadors like Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, namesake of the woman he was about to meet.
‘This is us,’ Morgan said, turning into a drive and pulling to a stop behind a small car. ‘Now remember this lady just lost her husband.’
Solomon gazed up at the perfect-looking house – white picket fence, rocker on the stoop, grey-painted weatherboards. ‘I only want to see if she knows me,’ he said, then stepped out of the car and into the rain, glad to be outside and feel the ground beneath his bare feet again.
Morgan turned off the engine and followed him out, fixing his hat to protect him from the rain. ‘Let me go first,’ he said, hurrying over to the covered porch. ‘She might not be in, or she might not want to—’ He turned at the sound of the screen door banging open and stopped when he saw the woman step through it, dress torn, eyes blazing, shotgun in her hands pointing straight at him.