The Antarctica Signal (Part 3)
The storm came in on a Sunday night and took the top half of the aerial with it.
Alvarez phoned the school on Monday, which he had never done before. By the time Kenji got to the shed, the old man was already up on the roof of the fire station in a yellow coat, holding one end of a bent aluminum pole and looking at it the way people look at an X-ray.
“Hold this,” he said. “Don’t let go when I let go.”
They worked until dark, and then they worked the next four evenings. The broken pole came down. The old wire, green after thirty years of coast air, came down after it. Kenji learned the names of things: the mast, the clamps, the feed line, the small white pieces that keep the wire from touching the metal. Alvarez was a bad teacher in the way that good engineers often are. He explained nothing until Kenji did something wrong, and then he explained it exactly once.
Before they lifted the new mast, Kenji walked all the way around the fire station twice, looking up.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure nothing’s in the way to the south.”
The old man looked at him for a long moment. “Put it on the west corner,” he said.
The new mast went up on the Thursday, taller and stronger than the old one, and when it was standing the two of them sat on the roof with their backs against the chimney and watched the light go off the river. That was when Kenji finally asked.
“1998. What went wrong?”
Alvarez was quiet long enough that Kenji thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“Nothing went wrong with the antenna,” he said. “The antenna was fine. My brother and I put it up in August. It was taller than this one, and it was straight, and it was fixed properly.” He looked out at the water. “We put it in the wrong place. Ten meters that way, behind the water tower. The tower stood between us and everything south of here. Two of us, both of us clever, and we never once walked around the building to look.”
“You could have moved it.”
“He got sick that October.” Alvarez stood up and brushed the water off his coat. “I never had the heart to touch it again.”
Then, after a moment: “Bring the notebook Saturday. And bring the times.”