The A

The bell rang at six.

He was asleep, and then he was lying in the dark listening to it, coming from a long way off, across the town: a single bell, not a church bell, flatter than that, rung slowly, the way a person rings a bell who has been told exactly how many times and is counting. Dong. A pause. Dong.

Then every telephone in Palo Verde Hall went off at once.

All down the corridor, through the walls, there was the same small chime, two notes, rising, and then the sound of three hundred people sitting up.

UNIVERSITY OF THE MARCH. FIRST COOL MORNING. HEAT OFFICE DECLARES INDEX BELOW THRESHOLD. FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS: THE A. GATE 6.20.

A door banged somewhere. Somebody in the corridor shouted, with enormous joy, “IT’S COLD,” and somebody else shouted “SHUT UP,” and then they both laughed, and a third person began to sing.

There was a knock at the door. Two knuckles.

“Sir,” said Rhys, through it, in a whisper that could have been heard in Mesa. “Fred. It’s the bell.”

---

“Tyler,” said Frederick.

Tyler was a shape under the blankets on the bed by the window, with the hood of the sweatshirt showing at the top. The screens over the desk were dark. The raid, whatever it had been, had ended, by the look of the empty cans, at about five.

“Tyler. It’s the A.”

The shape did not move.

“What A,” it said.

“The A on the butte. We paint it. All the first-years. It’s now.”

There was a long pause under the blankets.

“Is it outside?”

“Yes.”

“Is it before nine?”

“Yes.”

The shape considered this. Then it turned over, slowly, with great dignity, and faced the wall.

“Tell me how it goes,” said Tyler.

---

It was sixty-one degrees.

He found that out in the corridor, from Sam, who was standing outside three hundred and sixteen with the thermometer on its lanyard round his neck, writing it down. It was the coldest it had been in the Valley since April. It felt like a morning in the Cotswolds in June, mild and soft, with a smell of watered grass; but the third floor of Palo Verde Hall had come out of its rooms in hoods and blankets, and the girl from Yuma was standing at the top of the stairs in a knitted hat and mittens, shaking, with an expression of absolute wonder.

Frederick had the jumper on.

He had taken it down off the shelf at five past six and put it on without thinking about it at all, and it was only in the corridor, with the weight of it on his shoulders, heavy and warm, that he understood he had been waiting to do it since August.

Rhys looked at it.

“Is that…?”

“My mother.”

Rhys looked at it with the expression of a man calculating how much paint there would be on a hill.

“It’s sixty-one,” he said.

“It’s October.”

---

Mr Luna was at the desk, at the end of his shift, with his cardigan buttoned to the top. He watched the three of them come down the forty-five steps, and looked at the jumper, and did not say anything until they reached the desk.

“That’s the bell, son.”

“I know.”

“Sixty-one.” Mr Luna wrote it on the clipboard, 6 a.m. 61, outside, and underlined it, which Frederick had not seen him do before. “I’ve been waiting since May to write that.” He looked at the jumper again. “Don’t wear anything you want to keep.”

“It’s from my mother.”

Mr Luna considered the jumper with the gravity of a man who had seen thirty first cool mornings go out of that door and come back in again.

“Then roll your sleeves up,” he said, “and keep ‘em up.”

---

The whole town was going up the hill.

He had expected the first-years. He had not expected the Avenue at a quarter past six in the grey light with its shops still shut and its pavements full from the kerb to the shutters, a slow river of people going north toward the butte: families with children on their shoulders, old couples arm in arm, a woman in a wheelchair with a thermos in her lap, dogs, a brass band carrying its instruments as though it might, and over all of it, still going, from the roof of the town hall behind them, the bell.

“It’s the ferry bell,” said Sam, beside him, with the notebook out. “Off the old ferry. Eighteen seventy-one. The Heat Office keeps it on the roof of the town hall for this.” He wrote something down. “Sixty-one strokes. One for every degree.”

“Is it?”

“No,” said Sam. “I made that up.” He looked at the notebook. “I wanted to see what it felt like.”

At the front, a long way ahead, where the Avenue met the foot of the butte, there was a woman in a long chain.

She was walking at the very front of the whole river of people, with a little group round her, old, upright, in good shoes, who walked as though the road belonged to them, because, Rhys said, reading it off his telephone, it did. “The old families. They always go first. And that’s the Lord Mayor. The chain’s made of the ferry rope.” He looked up. “There’s a lot about the ferry.”

---

At the gate there was a small woman in a straw hat with a megaphone.

She stood on the low stone wall beside the green sign that said PATH OPEN, with a tablet in one hand, and as the front of the river reached her she lifted the megaphone and said, in the voice of a woman who loved this more than her own birthday:

“Good morning, Tempe.”

The town said good morning back.

“The overnight low at the site,” said the woman in the straw hat, and looked at the tablet, although she plainly did not need to, “taken at the foot of Hayden Butte, at five forty-one this morning, was…” She paused. She let it go on. Somebody in the crowd shouted come on. “Sixty-one degrees.”

And the town cheered.

Frederick stood at the foot of the butte in his mother’s jumper and listened to several thousand people cheer a number, the way people cheer a goal. Old men took their hats off. The brass band played something very loud and not quite together, and the old families went through the gate with the Lord Mayor in her chain, and began to go up.

“That’s the Heat Officer,” said Rhys, with reverence, about the woman in the straw hat. “She’s a physiologist.” He looked at her the way he had looked at Brennan in August. “She’s famous.”

---

The first-years went up behind the town, and stopped at the A.

There were thousands of them, in a long dense column in their hoods, and where the path crossed the top of the letter they turned off it, by halls, on to the slope, where somebody in the night had laid out buckets: hundreds of them, in rows on the rock, all down the face of the A, white plastic with the university’s sun on the side, and beside every row a stack of rollers and a sophomore with a clipboard. And on a flat rock at the top of the crossbar, with her back to the Valley, in a gold wig and a maroon sweatshirt and a megaphone, there was Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz.

Rhys made a small sound.

“FIRST YEARS,” said the megaphone.

The slope said something.

“That was Tucson,” said Kaylee. “FIRST YEARS.”

Louder.

“Okay. So.” She held up a piece of paper. “This is called the whitewash.”

Somebody near Frederick said, quite reasonably, “It’s maroon.”

“It’s called the whitewash,” said Kaylee. “It’s been maroon since before your parents were born. It was white once. It isn’t now. It’s still called the whitewash.” She lowered the paper. “I know. Deal with it.”

Beside Frederick, Sam lifted one hand off his notebook with one finger up, considered it, and put it down again, as a man withdraws a point of order.

“The A is for Arizona,” said Kaylee.

“Which is what we call Tucson,” said Rhys, under his breath.

“Don’t,” said Kaylee, through the megaphone, without looking at him, to the entire slope.

---

Palo Verde had the left leg, from the crossbar down. And the cracks.

“The cracks,” said the sophomore with the clipboard, a thin boy with the face of a man who had done the cracks himself a year ago and was not going to talk about it, “are done by hand. The rollers won’t go in. It’s rock.” He handed Frederick a roller anyway. “Do the flat with this. When you get to a crack, put the roller down and use your fingers.” He looked at the jumper. “You want to roll those up.”

“I have.”

He had rolled them at the gate, as Mr Luna said, to above the elbow, and the gold bands sat in two neat rings round his upper arms like the stripes of some very minor order.

“Higher,” said the sophomore, and went on to the next row.

They did the flat first. It was easy, and it was wonderful: a roller in a tray of maroon so dark it was nearly black, and the rock going from the faded colour of an old sunburn to a deep wet red that shone, a stripe and then another, and Rhys on his left doing the same, and Sam on his right with his tongue between his teeth, doing it in perfectly straight lines, and on every side of them two thousand people in hoods doing it too, laughing and swearing at the rollers, which dripped, so that the whole face of the butte was going maroon a yard at a time, like a blush coming up a neck.

It was the happiest he had been since the Kreuzberg.

He did not say so. He did not need to. He knelt on the warm rock in his mother’s jumper with the roller and a stripe of wet maroon in front of him and the smell of the paint, sharp and sweet, and nobody looked at him at all, because they were all looking at the rock.

At twenty-eight minutes to seven, high above them, the town began to cheer.

He heard it go up. It was a long rising sound, thousands of voices at once at the top of the hill, the old families and the Lord Mayor and the brass band and the children on shoulders, and he knew what it was. It was the sun. It had come up over the mountains beyond Mesa at the minute the Heat Office had said it would, and the people on the top were looking at it; and he was on the west face, in the shadow of the hill, with his back to it, kneeling on the A with a roller, and he did not see it.

He heard the sunrise. He did not see it. He found that he did not mind.

Across the Valley, in front of him, the light came. It came on the towers of Phoenix first, very far off, gold at the tops, and then across the roofs and the freeways and the long flat grid of the town, toward the butte, until everything he could see was lit except the hill he was on; and he knelt in the blue shade and watched it come, and then went back to the rock.

Then they got to the cracks.

---

The rock of the butte was not flat anywhere, really; it was broken into plates and long thin fissures, a finger wide, an arm deep, and the paint had to go into all of them, or the old colour showed through in a line, like the edge of a bandage.

He put the roller down and dipped his fingers in the tray.

It was cold. It was the first cold thing he had touched in Arizona. He pushed his fingers down into the crack and drew them along it, and the paint went in, and the old pink line went maroon, and he dipped them again, and did the next bit, and then he was doing it with his whole hand, flat, because it went faster, and then with both hands, and the paint was over his knuckles and up his wrists, and he did not care in the slightest.

“There’s a deep one,” said Rhys, on the left, after a while, pointing. “Under the ledge. You can’t reach it.”

“I can.”

“You’ll need your whole arm.”

“Then I’ll use my whole arm,” said Frederick, and did.

---

It was the bucket that did it.

It happened at about ten past seven, or a quarter past; he never knew, and Sam, who did, would not say. The buckets were coming down the slope in a chain, hand to hand, full, with the lids off, and one of the hands was Rhys’s; and Rhys was looking at Kaylee, because Kaylee had just said through the megaphone, with great authority, that the A had first been painted in nineteen fifty-eight, and Rhys, who had read the whole of the university’s history in August, had turned his head to look at her with the face of a man watching a building fall down.

The bucket went past his hands.

It went past the girl below him, who was also looking at Kaylee, and landed on the slope on its base, upright, and stood there for a moment as though it were thinking about it; and then it began, quite slowly, to tip, outward, downhill, over Palo Verde’s part of the left leg, with about two gallons of maroon in it, toward the long flat stripe of fresh paint that Sam had done in perfectly straight lines.

Frederick was nearest.

He did not think. He went sideways across the rock on his knees and got both arms round it, round the outside of it, as it went over, and held it against himself, not against the jumper, out in front, with his bare forearms, the way you would hold a small child that had decided to fall off something; and the paint came up out of the top of it in a great dark wave and went over his arms, both of them, from the wrists to the elbows, and stopped, exactly, at the rolled-up sleeves.

He knelt on the rock with the bucket held upright in his arms.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Not Rhys, with his hands still out in the place where the bucket had been. Not Sam, kneeling by his perfectly straight lines, which were perfectly intact.

Then he began to laugh.

He could not help it. He knelt on the face of Hayden Butte at a quarter past seven in the morning in the first cool weather of the year with a bucket of maroon in his arms and his arms maroon to the elbows, shining, dripping on the rock, and his mother’s jumper clean, every inch of it, and he laughed until he had to put the bucket down, carefully, on a flat place, and sit back on his heels; and he held up his arms in front of him, both of them, with the hands open and the paint running off his elbows, like a surgeon who has just scrubbed and is waiting for somebody to put the gloves on, and looked at them, and laughed at them.

Somewhere up the slope, very close, a camera went.

---

It was a woman of about sixty in a canvas hat, with two cameras round her neck on straps, standing on the rock at the edge of the path a few yards above him, with one of the cameras up to her eye.

She took it down. She looked at him for a moment over the top of it, and came down the rock to him.

“Gazette,” she said. “I do the first cool morning. I’ve done it thirty-one years.” She had a notebook out, a small one, with a pencil. “I’ll need a name for the caption.”

Rhys, on his left, began to stand up.

“Hanover,” said Frederick. “F.”

The woman wrote it down. She did not look up.

“First-year?”

“Yes.”

“Hall?”

“Palo Verde.”

“Palo Verde,” said the woman. “Of course. The cracks.” She wrote that down too, and then she looked up, at last, and looked at him: at his face, and his hair, and the maroon to his elbows, and the jumper, for what felt like a long time and was probably about four seconds.

“Thank you, Mr Hanover,” she said.

She closed the notebook and went back up the path with her two cameras, and did not look back.

Rhys was standing now, all the way up, with his telephone in his hand.

“Sir,” he said, very quietly. “That’s the Gazette.”

“I know.”

“She knows who you are.”

“I know,” said Frederick, and looked at his arms. “She asked for my name. I gave it to her.” He picked up the roller again, and then put it down, because his hands were already the colour of the rock, and there was a crack beside his knee that nobody had done yet. “It’s my name.”

---

Breakfast was at the mill.

It was the old flour mill at the foot of the butte, where the ferry had been, with tables on the terrace under strings of lights, and the town came down off the hill at eight and ate there at long tables in whatever order it sat down, the Lord Mayor with her chain over the back of her chair, where a small boy was examining it closely.

The maroon did not come off.

He tried in the washroom with soap and hot water and a nail brush, and his arms went from wet maroon to dry maroon and stayed there, a deep even red from the knuckles to the elbows, with a clean line at the top where the sleeves had been, as sharp as a tide mark.

“It doesn’t come off,” said a very old woman at the end of the long table, when he came back out, without looking up from her eggs. She was tiny, and brown, and about ninety, in a black dress with a gold cross, and she had been at the front of the whole town at the gate, behind the Lord Mayor, with a stick. “It’s not meant to. It’s meant to last.” She ate some egg. “Butter.”

“Butter?”

“Butter first. Rub it in. Then dish soap. Then you wait.” She pushed the dish of butter down the table toward him, a whole block of it in a china dish. “It goes by Thanksgiving.” She looked at him for the first time, at the arms, and at the jumper, and at his face. “Montoya,” she said, and tapped her own chest. “We were here before the ferry.”

“Hanover,” said Frederick.

“I know,” said Mrs Montoya, and went back to her eggs.

---

At a quarter past twelve he was sitting on his bed in Palo Verde Hall with his arms on a towel, buttered, waiting, as instructed, when Sam knocked and came in without waiting to be told, which Sam had never done.

Tyler was asleep. He had not moved since six, apart from to pull the blanket over his head.

Sam held out his telephone.

On it was the front page of the Arizona Gazette’s website, and on the front page, across the whole width of the screen, was the photograph.

It was the moment after the bucket. He was kneeling on the face of the A in the blue shade of the butte, in his mother’s maroon jumper with the gold at the cuffs pushed up above the elbow, and his arms were held up in front of him with the hands open, maroon to the elbows, shining, with the paint running off them, and he was laughing; not smiling, laughing, with his head a little back and his eyes nearly shut; and behind him, out beyond the edge of the rock, filling the whole of the rest of the picture, was the Valley, lit, gold, to the mountains, in the early sun.

In the background, a little out of focus, on the left, a tall fair young man was standing with his hands still out in the place where a bucket had been, with his mouth open. On the right, a young man in round glasses was kneeling by a stripe of perfectly straight paint and looking, alone of everyone in the photograph, directly at the camera.

Under it, in small type, the caption said: F. Hanover, a first-year of Palo Verde Hall, at the whitewash of the A on Tuesday morning. Palo Verde does the cracks.

He looked at it for a long time.

“It’s been up forty minutes,” said Sam.

“It’s a good photograph.”

“It’s a very good photograph.” Sam took the telephone back and looked at it himself, at the young man in round glasses looking at the camera, with no expression whatever. “I’m in it.”

“You’re looking at her.”

“It’s my job to look at her.” Sam put the telephone in his pocket. He stood by the door for a moment with the thermometer still round his neck. “The wire’s got it.”

“What does that mean?”

Sam looked at him over the round glasses for a moment, as a man looks at a column of figures he has added twice.

“It means everybody’s got it,” he said.