August in Arizona, and it’s so hot. Metaphors come up wanting. “You could fry an egg on that sidewalk,” they tell you. No. You could microwave an egg, on our sidewalks.
You feel the heat – a tangible, living thing – floating up off the concrete, bear-hugging you, suffocating you, and you hip-hop as fast as you can from the pool to the porch, wincing at those sharp, stinging milliseconds of exposed flesh on burning stone.
Sometimes, it makes me think of Claire Wilson.
This week marks 54 years since Claire, 18 and eight months pregnant, walked out of the student union on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin with her boyfriend, Tom Eckman. They were discussing her diet, on their way to put a few quarters in the parking meter. Tom was afraid she wasn’t drinking enough orange juice.
They were laughing, and in love. They were making big plans. They were both into politics, determined to change the world.
And then, in a moment, the world changed them.
It was a nearly a hundred degrees in the noontime heat, as they started across the school’s broad south plaza. Claire heard a distant boom, and then she was falling, a sharp pain burning through her stomach. Tom lunged to catch her, then fell himself, dead before he hit the ground.
Three hundred feet above them, in the landmark clock tower that dominated the campus and surrounding area, a sniper had begun picking off students, staff, and professors, one by one. He was a trained marksman, dropping almost anything within 500 yards of his vantage point. Those were the days before paramedics and SWAT teams, and his position was nearly impregnable. For 90 minutes, he killed with impunity.
Claire realized Tom was dead, and sensed that her baby was, too. She was wearing a sun dress, and her bare shoulders and legs were cooking as she lay in agony on the blazing sidewalk. She played dead. Cried for help. Felt her own blood soaking into her dress. Watched people fall all around her. Listened to the gunshots ... and the slow pealing, every 15 minutes, of the clock tower bells.
Half an hour passed.
She was beginning to lose consciousness when she saw a sudden blur of movement, coming from her left, and heard a scutch-scutch-scutch of shoes on concrete. Then a young woman’s face, framed by a long cascade of bright red hair, was leaning over her, asking if she was all right – if there was anything she could do.
“Let me help you,” she said. Gunshots rang and bullets spattered around them.
“Go, go, go!” Claire warned her. “Get down!”
The young woman ignored her. “What’s your name?” she asked. Claire told her.
“I’m Rita,” the woman said. “I’m here with you now, okay?” And with that, she lay down next to Claire on the burning concrete.
She was wearing a sundress, too.
She began plying Claire with the usual student questions, trying to keep her from fading into shock. “What’s your major?” “Where are you from?” “Do you live on campus?”
Gunshots. Distant screams. The slow chiming of the tower.
For more than an hour, Rita kept Claire talking. Finally, they heard a flurry of scrambling feet, and two young men appeared – grabbing Claire, arms and ankles, and staggering with her to cover. A third man hoisted Tom’s body over his shoulder and followed. Rita leapt to her feet and sprinted away.
A policeman got the sniper. Claire spent the next three months in the hospital, healing from her wounds and learning to walk again. She was the last survivor to leave. Forty-seven people had been shot; 16 – including Tom and her baby – had died.
A few weeks into her hospital stay, Claire looked up to see Rita in the doorway . Rita, it turned out, was an artist; she had brought Claire one of her pictures. Claire thanked her for that … for her courage, and her company … and for lying beside her – frying beside her – on the scorching concrete of that bloody mall.
Rita smiled, and after a few minutes, hugged Claire and went away. Claire never saw her again.
“I’ve heard that expression,” Claire told a friend, later, “‘Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.’ But I never had anyone lie down for me before.”
It would be wonderful to close this by noting that either Rita or Claire was a Christian, or became one. But there’s no testimony to that. Still, courage is a rare, beautiful, astonishing thing – wherever, in whomever, we find it.
So I remember them, sometimes, as I cross a hot asphalt on these searing summer days. I wonder if I’d have it in me to risk my life for someone else. I am not an especially brave fellow, but perhaps, in the surging adrenalin of some frantic moment, something inside me would try.
It would be much more difficult, I suspect, to just lay there beside someone, and burn.
Comments