“All I want for Christmas is you,” I said.
“Really? I was thinking maybe we should start with ‘Angels We Have Heard on High,’ or—”
“That wasn’t a song title,” I said.
“Oh,” he said and turned to the Altairi. “The answer to your question is yes.”
“These are tidings of great joy,” the one in the center said.
“There shall be many mistletoeings,” the one on the end added.
The second Altairus on the left glared at them. “I think we’d better sing,” I said, and squeezed into the first row, between Reverend McIntyre and an African American woman in a turban and dashiki.
Calvin stepped onto the podium. “The Hallelujah Chorus,” Calvin said, and there was a shuffling of pages as people found their music. The woman next to me held out her music to me so we could share and whispered, “It’s considered proper etiquette to stand for this. In honor of King George the Third. He’s supposed to have stood up the first time he heard it.”
“Actually,” Reverend McIntyre whispered to me, “he may merely have been startled out of a sound sleep, but rising out of respect and admiration is still an appropriate response.”
I nodded. Calvin raised his baton, and the entire auditorium, except for the Altairi, rose as one and began to sing. And if I’d thought “Adeste Fideles” sounded wonderful, “The Hallelujah Chorus” was absolutely breathtaking, and suddenly all those lyrics about glorious songs of old and anthems sweet and repeating the sounding joy made sense. “And the whole world give back the song,” I thought, “which now the angels sing.”
And apparently the Altairi were as overwhelmed by the music as I was. After the fifth “Hal-leh-eh-lu-jah!” they rose into the air like they’d done before. And rose. And rose, till they floated giddily just below the high domed ceiling.
I knew just how they felt.
It was definitely a communications breakthrough. The Altairi haven’t stopped talking since the All-City Sing, though we’re not actually much farther along than we were before. They’re much better at asking questions than answering them. They did finally tell us where they came from—the star Alsafi in the constellation Draco. But since the meaning of Altair is “the flying one” (and Alsafi means “cooking tripod”), everyone still calls them the Altairi.
They also told us why they’d turned up at Calvin’s apartment and kept following me (“We glimpsed interesting possibilities of accord between you and Mr. Ledbetter”) and explained, more or less, how their spaceship works, which the Air Force has found extremely interesting. But we still don’t know why they came here. Or what they want. The only thing they’ve told us specifically was that they wanted to have Dr. Morthman and Reverend Thresher removed from the commission and to have Dr. Wakamura put in charge. It turns out they like being squirted, at least as much as they like anything we do. They still glare.
So does Aunt Judith. She called me the day after the All-City Sing to tell me she’d seen me on CNN and thought I’d done a nice job saving the planet, but what on earth was I wearing? Didn’t I know one was supposed to dress up for a concert? I told her everything that had happened was all thanks to her, and she glared at me (I could feel it, even over the phone) and hung up.
But she must not be too mad. When she heard I was engaged, she called my sister Tracy and told her she expected to be invited to the wedding shower. My mother is cleaning like mad.
I wonder if the Altairi will give us a fish slice. Or a birthday card with a dollar in it. Or faster-than-light travel.
Afterword for “All Seated on the Ground”
When I wrote this story, I relied heavily on my thirty-odd years of experience singing in church choirs, during which I sang every Christmas carol ever written and learned way more than I ever wanted to know about them. And about everything else.
As I have often said, everything you need to know about the world can be learned by singing in a church choir. Comedy, drama, intrigue, romance, revenge, pride, lust, envy, greed, vainglory . . . You name it, church choirs have it all. Plus, you find out a bunch of other useful stuff to get you through life. Like:
1. If the person singing next to you is flat, it’s fairly easy to stay on pitch. If they’re sharp, you’re doomed.
2. The third verse of any hymn (or the fifth if it has six verses) is where they stick the really terrible lyrics, which is why so many ministers opt for “verses 1, 2, and 4.” Verse 3 is where you’ll find gems like “sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying” and “O mysterious condescending! O abandonment sublime!”
3. On the other hand, at least hymns with bad lyrics are interesting, unlike most of modern praise music, which is boring beyond belief. I’ll take “Nor thorns infest the ground” over “Oh, God, you’re so awesome” any day.
4. Divinely inspired is not the same as good. Many beloved hymns and Christmas carols are actually hideous, which you would know if you had to sing them every year.
I particularly loathe “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” During one of those Christmas Eve services where they tell the carol’s history and then the choir sings it (the carol, not the history), the minister described in detail the circumstances under which “O Little Town” had been written.
The author, the minister said, an Episcopal priest named Phillips Brooks, had visited the Holy Land, ridden to Bethlehem on horseback, and, once there, sat through a five-hour church service, and had been so inspired by the whole experience that he’d immediately sat down (really? I find the entire story somewhat questionable) and written the carol.
After which account, my daughter (also in the choir and sitting next to me) leaned over and whispered to me, “Oh, well, I guess it’s the thought that counts, Mom,” followed by sputters of suppressed laughter and our not being allowed to sit together anymore.
THE LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOS
On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road. I was in the far left lane of Van Buren, ten lanes away from it, and its long legs were facing away from me, the squarish muzzle flat against the pavement so it looked narrower than it really was, and for a minute I thought it was a dog.
I had not seen an animal in the road like that for fifteen years. They can’t get onto the divideds, of course, and most of the multiways are fenced. And people are more careful of their animals.
The jackal was probably somebody’s pet. This part of Phoenix was mostly residential, and after all this time people still think they can turn the nasty, carrion-loving creatures into pets. Which was no reason to have hit it and, worse, left it there. It’s a felony to strike an animal and another one to not report it, but whoever had hit it was long gone.
I pulled the Hitori over onto the center shoulder and sat there awhile, staring at the empty multiway. I wondered who had hit it and whether they had stopped to see if it was dead.
Katie had stopped. She had hit the brakes so hard she sent her car into a skid that brought it up against the ditch, and jumped out of the jeep. I was still running toward him, floundering in the snow. We made it to him almost at the same time. I knelt beside him, the camera dangling from my neck, its broken case hanging half-open.
“I hit him,” Katie had said. “I hit him with the jeep.”
I looked in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t even see over the pile of camera equipment in the backseat with the eisenstadt balanced on top. I got out. I had come nearly a mile, and looking back, I couldn’t see the jackal, though I knew now that that was what it was.
“McCombe! David! Are you there yet?” Ramirez’s voice said from inside the car.
I leaned in. “No,” I shouted in the general direction of the phone’s receiver. “I’m still on the multiway.”
“Mother of God, what’s taking you so long? The governor’s conference is at twelve, and I want you to go out to Scottsdale and do a layout on the closing of Taliesin West. The appointment’s for ten. Listen, McCombe, I got the poop on the Amblers for you. They bill themselves as ‘One-Hundred Percent Au
thentic,’ but they’re not. Their RV isn’t really a Winnebago, it’s an Open Road.
“It is the last RV on the road, though, according to Highway Patrol. A man named Eldridge was touring with one, also not a Winnebago, a Shasta, until March, but he lost his license in Oklahoma for using a tanker lane, so this is it. Recreation vehicles are banned in all but four states. Texas has legislation in committee, and Utah has a full-divided bill coming up next month. Arizona will be next, so take lots of pictures, Danny Boy. This may be your last chance. And get some of the zoo.”
“What about the Amblers?” I said.
“Their name is Ambler, believe it or not. I ran a lifeline on them. He was a welder. She was a bank teller. No kids. They’ve been doing this since eighty-nine when he retired. Nineteen years. David, are you using the eisenstadt?”
We had been through this the last three times I’d been on a shoot. “I’m not there yet,” I said.
“Well, I want you to use it at the governor’s conference. Set it on his desk if you can.”
I intended to set it on a desk, all right. One of the desks at the back, and let it get some nice shots of the rear ends of reporters as they reached wildly for a little clear airspace to shoot their pictures in, some of them holding their vidcams in their upstretched arms and aiming them in what they hope is the right direction because they can’t see the governor at all, or let it get a nice shot of one of the reporter’s arms as he knocked it facedown on the desk.
“This one’s a new model. It’s got a trigger. It’s set for faces, full-lengths, and vehicles.”
So great. I come home with a hundred-frame cartridge full of passersby and tricycles. How the hell did it know when to click the shutter or which one was the governor in a press conference of eight hundred people, full-length or face? It was supposed to have all kinds of fancy light-metrics and computer-composition features, but all it could really do was mindlessly snap whatever passed in front of its idiot lens, just like the highway speed cameras.
It had probably been designed by the same government types who’d put the highway cameras along the road instead of overhead so that all it takes is a little speed to reduce the new side license plates to a blur, and people go faster than ever. A great camera, the eisenstadt. I could hardly wait to use it.
“Sun-co’s very interested in the eisenstadt,” Ramirez said. She didn’t say good-bye. She never does. She just stops talking and then starts up again later. I looked back in the direction of the jackal.
The multiway was completely deserted. New cars and singles don’t use the undivided multiways much, even during rush hours. Too many of the little cars have been squashed by tankers. Usually there are at least a few obsoletes and renegade semis taking advantage of the Patrol’s being on the divideds, but there wasn’t anybody at all.
I got back in the car and backed up even with the jackal. I turned off the ignition but didn’t get out. I could see the trickle of blood from its mouth from here. A tanker went roaring past out of nowhere, trying to beat the cameras, straddling the three middle lanes and crushing the jackal’s rear half to a bloody mush. It was a good thing I hadn’t been trying to cross the road. He never would have even seen me.
I started the car and drove to the nearest off-ramp to find a phone. There was one at an old 7-Eleven on McDowell.
“I’m calling to report a dead animal on the road,” I told the woman who answered the Society’s phone.
“Name and number?”
“It’s a jackal,” I said. “It’s between Thirtieth and Thirty-second on Van Buren. It’s in the far right lane.”
“Did you render emergency assistance?”
“There was no assistance to be rendered. It was dead.”
“Did you move the animal to the side of the road?”
“No.”
“Why not?” she said, her tone suddenly sharper, more alert.
Because I thought it was a dog. “I didn’t have a shovel,” I said, and hung up.
I got out to Tempe by eight-thirty, in spite of the fact that every tanker in the state suddenly decided to take Van Buren. I got pushed out onto the shoulder and drove on that most of the way.
The Winnebago was set up in the fairgrounds between Phoenix and Tempe, next to the old zoo. The flyer had said they would be open from nine to nine, and I had wanted to get most of my pictures before they opened, but it was already a quarter to nine, and even if there were no cars in the dusty parking lot, I was probably too late.
It’s a tough job being a photographer. The minute most people see a camera, their real faces close like a shutter in too much light, and all that’s left is their camera face, their public face. It’s a smiling face, except for Saudi terrorists and senators, but, smiling or not, it shows no real emotion. Actors, politicians, people who have their picture taken all the time are the worst. The longer the person’s been in the public eye, the easier it is for me to get great vidcam footage and the harder it is to get anything approaching a real photograph, and the Amblers had been at this for nearly twenty years. By a quarter to nine they would already have their camera faces on.
I parked down at the foot of the hill next to the clump of ocotillos and yucca where the zoo sign had been, pulled my Nikon longshot out of the mess in the backseat, and took some shots of the sign they’d set up by the multiway: See a Genuine Winnebago. One-Hundred Percent Authentic.
The Genuine Winnebago was parked longways against the stone banks of cactus and palms at the front of the zoo. Ramirez had said it wasn’t a real Winnebago, but it had the identifying W with its extending stripes running the length of the RV, and it seemed to me to be the right shape, though I hadn’t seen one in at least ten years.
I was probably the wrong person for this story. I had never had any great love for RVs, and my first thought when Ramirez called with the assignment was that there are some things that should be extinct, like mosquitoes and lane dividers, and RVs are right at the top of the list. They had been everywhere in the mountains when I’d lived in Colorado, crawling along in the left-hand lane, taking up two lanes even in the days when a lane was fifteen feet wide, with a train of cursing cars behind them.
I’d been behind one on Independence Pass that had stopped cold while a ten-year-old got out to take pictures of the scenery with an Instamatic, and one of them had tried to take the curve in front of my house and ended up in my ditch, looking like a beached whale. But that was always a bad curve.
An old man in an ironed short-sleeved shirt came out the side door and around to the front end and began washing the Winnebago with a sponge and a bucket. I wondered where he had gotten the water. According to Ramirez’s advance work, which she’d sent me over the modem about the Winnebago, it had maybe a fifty-gallon water tank, tops, which is barely enough for drinking water, a shower, and maybe washing a dish or two, and there certainly weren’t any hookups here at the zoo, but he was swilling water onto the front bumper and even over the tires as if he had more than enough.
I took a few shots of the RV standing in the huge expanse of parking lot and then hit the longshot to full for a picture of the old man working on the bumper. He had large reddish-brown freckles on his arms and the top of his bald head, and he scrubbed away at the bumper with a vengeance.
After a minute he stopped and stepped back, and then called to his wife. He looked worried, or maybe just crabby. I was too far away to tell if he had snapped out her name impatiently or simply called her to come and look, and I couldn’t see his face. She opened the metal side door, with its narrow louvered window, and stepped down onto the metal step.
The old man asked her something, and she, still standing on the step, looked out toward the multiway and shook her head, and then came around to the front, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and they both stood there looking at his handiwork.
They were One-Hundred Percent Authentic, even if the Winnebago wasn’t, down to her flowered blouse and polyester slacks, probably also One-Hundred Percent, and the cr
oss-stitched rooster on the dish towel. She had on brown leather slip-ons like I remembered my grandmother wearing, and I was willing to bet she had set her thinning white hair on bobby pins.
Their bio said they were in their eighties, but I would have put them in their nineties, although I wondered if they were too perfect and therefore fake, like the Winnebago. But she went on wiping her hands on the dish towel the way my grandmother had when she was upset, even though I couldn’t see if her face was showing any emotion, and that action at least looked authentic.
She apparently told him the bumper looked fine because he dropped the dripping sponge into the bucket and went around behind the Winnebago. She went back inside, shutting the metal door behind her even though it had to be already at least a hundred and ten out, and they hadn’t even bothered to park under what scanty shade the palms provided.
I put the longshot back in the car.
The old man came around the front with a big plywood sign. He propped it against the vehicle’s side. “The Last of the Winnebagos,” the sign read in somebody’s idea of what Indian writing should look like. “See a vanishing breed. Admission—Adults—$8.00, Children under twelve—$5.00 Open 9 A.M. to Sunset.”
He strung up a row of red and yellow flags, and then picked up the bucket and started toward the door, but halfway there he stopped and took a few steps down the parking lot to where I thought he probably had a good view of the road, and then went back, walking like an old man, and took another swipe at the bumper with the sponge.
“Are you done with the RV yet, McCombe?” Ramirez said on the car phone.
I slung the camera into the back. “I just got here. Every tanker in Arizona was on Van Buren this morning. Why the hell don’t you have me do a piece on abuses of the multiway system by water haulers?”
“Because I want you to get to Tempe alive. The governor’s press conference has been moved to one, so you’re okay. Have you used the eisenstadt yet?”