Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“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.

Faster the cars went, twining and soaring in the tunnel, passing scenes of glittering festivity, until finally there was only the intimate glimpse of a private suite, the decor harking back to the 1940s, a silver-haired ghost of a dirt-poor miner moving through the scene like a holographic host at a Halloween party.

Jersey Joe Jackson’s faint image went to the prow of the train of cars, Tinker Bell as figurehead, leading them into the darkness and the future like a headlight.

Walls flashed by, dark and stony, lit by veins of unimagined richness. Subterranean minerals gleamed like phosphorescent fish schooling in some dry sea bed long deserted by a polar wave of warming.

Temple blinked. For an instant Jersey Joe’s ghostly figure took on iconic form, white and gleaming…Elvis!

No, another illusion. Another dip into the collective unconscious. They were hurtling toward the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was solid, warm, and bright.

Daylight.

The cars rocked to a standstill. They had stopped in the Crystal Palace, a glass-domed tropical garden flooded with brightness. Fluorescent flamingos moved among the green leaves. Huge tropical flower faces sang in holographic harmony, inviting the admiration of an invisible Alice. A massive neon caterpillar rippled with rainbow segments.

Everyone struggled out of their seat belts and the cars, blinking, the scenes viewed in the darkened tunnels still imprinting their retinas.

Ralph smoothed out his suit coat, pleasantly surprised. “It was not as tumultuous as I had thought.”

“But it was fun?” Temple was anxious to be reassured.

“An experience,” he said, patting his inside coat pockets delicately until reassured as to the integrity of the contents of both pockets.

Temple tried to imagine hunting for a wayward Beretta in those dark tunnels and was glad this was just a fictional scenario.

People, buzzing as contentedly as honey-fed bees, fanned into the artificial garden the performance artist Domingo had wrought.

It was a garden of sound as well as sight, hushed songs from vintage radios, hushed soothing voices.

Temple ignored all the fascinating constructions, moving, blinking, changing color, changing voices, looking for one specific landmark.

“What are you hunting for?” Ralph asked.

“I don’t know. A plaque, I suppose.”

“Like on a public fountain?”

“Right,” she said. “Some acknowledgment…He’d probably build it into the overall theme. Nothing obvious.”

“Nothing obvious is ever worth hunting,” Ralph noted with lofty Fontana-brother certainty.

Temple stopped dead. “That’s rather profound.”

“I’m sorry. The ride upset my stomach.”

“Maybe I’m too short to see it. That’s always a problem.”

The problem was solved in an instant. Ralph bent and lifted Temple up, his hands fixed at her waist.

So. This is what it felt like to be tall. She gazed into the elephant-ear plants, read the hidden neon messages that flashed off and on like shy Rorschach blots. Domingo had said. He had promised to acknowledge Matt with this exhibit. How? Where?