Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

Ralph nodded with monkish resignation most unusual in a Fontana brother, and swept open a glass door by its gilded phoenix handle.

Temple moved into the chill air inside, onto the soft hush of thick carpeting, secretly hoping that she would soon see a suave and elegant Fontana brother screaming and shaking and losing his lunch.

Because she had dropped in without making previous arrangements like a proper PR person, Temple and Ralph had to queue up and pay up at the ticket kiosk like any tourists.

“I could —” Ralph suggested, easing a supple calfskin wallet from his inside jacket pocket as another, cruder sort of fellow might tease the butt of a Beretta forth from the same site.

“No tips, please.” Temple frowned, employing her sternest tone. “I want to see how the system works without greasing.”

“I hope they grease the tracks,” Ralph muttered under his breath.

Temple noticed that his warm Italian skin now matched the pallor of his fine Italian tailoring.

The kiosk was manned by a Calamity Jane type. Temple had nixed the first suggestion of a dance hall girl with cleavage.

Calamity Jane came with side arms instead. “Howdy!” She paused in her spiel to aim her handy pistol at an animated bushwhacker in the faux desert terrain. “Don’t mind him. Jest a claim-jumper. Guess he’s jumped all the way back to St. Louis now. Jest follow the folks up front and keep to four lines and watch out for bushwhackers.”

“This bushwhacker,” Ralph asked. “Where did the expression come from?”

PR people are supposed to know everything, so Temple took an uneducated guess. “I suppose from all the missed shots miners fired at each other defending their claims. They probably hit more bushes than people.”

Ralph nodded, impressed. All that had touched his land of origin in the last century or so had been world wars. “The Wild West.”

“I hope so.” Temple was buoyed to see that the line was long. They had to baby-step along behind a full complement of riders. Once they had moved into the Old West Saloon the lights grew dim, the piano music came up, and they were passing a laughing crowd of seated patrons watching a burlesque show on the stage.

Part of the scene were live actors, part animatronic figures, and the line moved just fast enough that you couldn’t be sure which was which.

People around them laughed at the punchlines or buzzed about some subtle bit of business in one corner or the other. The scene was complex enough that repeated viewings would reveal new details.

There! Temple noted. In the corner. That byplay between the drunken snake-oil salesman, the temperance lady, and the visiting English duke was hers. She was a playwright!

She realized that people in line were turning around to eye her and Ralph. Did they know she was the creative genius behind this display?

Then Temple looked at the people looking at them. Tourists clad in saggy shorts and baggy T-shirts. She in high heels and Ralph in Armani looked out of place in the Wild West ambiance of the Jersey Joe Jackson Action Attraction. Jersey Joe Jackson had probably, and fortunately, never lived long enough to hear the word “ambiance” used.

Temple cleared her throat and looked down as their path led onto a crude wooden elevator. She catwalked onto the contrivance, setting each foot down so her spindly heels didn’t wedge into the spaces between the rough board floor.

“Something of an impulsive outing?” Ralph asked.

There was little chance to answer as the influxing mob crowded them against the wooden struts that formed the elevator’s sides. Otis Packing Crate Company, at your service.

“This is authentically rickety,” Ralph commented as the mechanism creaked and lurched down a story or two.

Once they had been jolted to the ground level, they were in the sudden, cool darkness of a mine tunnel. Only the fluorescent lines on the cavern floor, between which they were ordered to queue up, indicated where they were to go next.

A rocky wall melted away like cheesecloth as lights penetrated it and an overhead voice urged them to move sideways. Temple grabbed Ralph’s creamy sleeve and pulled him beside her.

“We want to sit together, we line up horizontally,” she whispered up at him.

“Ah, you may not want to sit together.” Ralph’s suit was delicately yellow, but his face was tinted green. “I don’t like violent amusement park rides.”

“Nonsense. This ride is certified safe for an eight-year-old.”

“I didn’t like violent amusement park rides when I was eight years old.”

Come to think of it, Temple hadn’t at that age either.

Too late.

They were in the Disneyland-pioneered pattern: a controlled mob boxed into sequential spaces. Beyond the vanished wall sat a string of mine carts, miniboxcars. Convertible, of course. Open to the dank underground air. She who lives by the convertible will die by the convertible.

She and Ralph ended up shuffling into place on a seating bank of four, buckling safety belts across their laps. Ralph frowned to see the fluid drape of his suitcoat puckering like seersucker under the belt’s firm clasp.

Temple’s belt didn’t seem to tighten enough. Maybe she would fly out on the first turn. Eight-year-olds, she told herself. Surely she wasn’t smaller than the average eight-year-old.

The rich, whiskey-and-tobacco-salted voice rolling out from the concealed speakers described Jersey Joe’s colorful Las Vegas history: paydirt-hitting prospector, early Las Vegas developer, founder of the Joshua Tree Hotel from whose ashes the Crystal Phoenix had risen in exquisite glory only years before, busted millionaire living on in a 1940s suite at the abandoned Joshua Tree until life abandoned him and only his ghost remained….

The train of cars jerked into motion, then wrenched their passengers right and left as it careened through the serpentine tunnels under caged bare bulbs of light.

Light. And dark. Swinging, swaying light. And dark.

People shrieked, the uninhibited, pleasurable shrieks of kid-again wonderment, with an edge of adult unease that knew Something Could Go Wrong.

Ralph put an arm around Temple to hold her down. Her small frame was rattling around in her seat despite the belt. She screeched, exhilarated and a little nervous. Having primal fun, but part of the thrill was her reservations. What if she should slip out of her belt…if the ride should run off the rails, if —

Water dripped from jeweled stalactites onto the rising pinnacles of stalagmites as their ore carrier rattled through a wonderland of an underground kingdom seemingly decorated by Jack Frost Inc.

Kids were oohing and aahing between squeals, making Temple grin like a proud department store Christmas window decorator.

The passing stone walls flashed veins of silver and gold and other rich subterranean mineral finds, geodes as lavish as any showgirl’s crystal-and-sequined costume, nature’s naked glittering chorus line, all purveying actual mineral wonders. Genuine silicon silicone, so to speak.

The walls grew gauzy, revealing moving pictures from Jersey Joe’s rise and fall of a life: the Joshua Tree growing out of the desert floor like a manmade geode, all angular stucco and early Southwest style ziggurats. Small planes descending on the spare desert landing strip like tribal thunderbirds, then cars coming, from L.A., many of them Thunderbirds. Then night fell and the lights in the Joshua Tree winked like stars, darkening one by one.

The riders grew hushed. The next scene showed the sun scorching the once-vibrant building, Las Vegas landmarks exploding around it like fireworks, the Joshua Tree a lifeless hulk amidst a neon jungle.

Then…a dark tunnel, like an umbilical passage. The cars sped into more darkness. The moving walls showed the Joshua Tree imploding, exploding, its stucco walls breaking open like the dull surface of a rock containing a geode…and the faceted, glassine elegance of the Crystal Phoenix was revealed at its center like the heart of a chocolate Easter egg’s raspberry-ice nougat.