Against the Day (126 page)

code among gunhandlers for Boot Hill. Frank gazed brightly,
all but sympathetically, into the eyes of his target, waiting for a fateful
tell.

Out of nowhere, “Well, hi everbody,”
a cheerful voice broke in, “whatchy’all doin?” It was Ewball Oust, pretending
not to be a cold, bleakeyed Anarchist who’d left all operational doubt miles
back in the romantic mists of youth, whenever that was.

“Damn,” breathed the pointyeared
gent, in a long, unrequited sigh. Everybody at their own pace went about
relocating their everyday selves.

“So nice runnin into you again,”
Hatch as if preparing to kiss Stray’s hand, “and don’t you be a stranger, now.”

“Next time,” nodded the sidekick with
a poignant smile at Ewball. “Maybe in church. What church y’all go to?” he
seemed to want to know, in an oily voice.

“Me?” Ewball laughed, far exceeding
the humor of the moment. “I’m Mexican Orthodox. How about you? Amigo?”

Whereupon the sidekick was observed
to take a hesitant step or two backward. Stray and Hatch over his hat crown
exchanging a look.

   
“Sorry
I’m late,” said Ewball.

   
“You’re
right on time,” said Frank.

“
My
keeper
,”
Frank
introduced Ewball to Stray. They had given up looking for a decent saloon in El
Paso and were sitting in a cantina across the river. “Worries about me all the
time.”

“You part of this deal?” her eyes
more sparkling, it seemed to Frank, than business talk quite required.

Ewball shifted his eyes a couplethree
times back and forth between her and Frank before shrugging. “Pretty much
Frank’s.” Waiting a second before adding, “This time around. I just happened to
be in town for a teetotalers’ convention.”

“She’s got the goods, Ewb,” said
Frank, “and we’re figurin out a rendezvous point. Seems like that that Dwayne
was straightshootin on this one after all.”

“Be lookin for the imminent return of
the baby Jesus any day now.” Ewball finished his glass of tequila, took Frank’s
beer to chase it with, rose and took Stray’s hand. “Been a pleasure, Miss
Briggs. You children behave, now. Eyes of Texas are upon you.”

   
“Where
you fixin to be later?” Frank said.

   
“Usually,
midnight will find me in Rosie’s Cantina.”

   
“South
side of town, as I recall,” said Stray, “just outside the city limits.”

“Happy they’re still in business, gay
little establishment, used to be at least one presentable dancin girl?”

“That’s the place. The L.&O.L.
makes noises, but not so much since ’em seventeen mounted cowboys started
runnin their patrol.”

   
After
Ewball left, she just sat looking at Frank for a while.

“Expectin you to be more, don’t know,
froze up by now. Way men will get sometimes?”

   
“Me?
Same warm, easy fellow here.”

   
“Heard
that you found that Sloat Fresno.”

   
“Luck.”

   
“And
that didn’t—”

“Estrella, maybe there’s kids out
there one notch makes a hardcase, but us older gentlemen are not always that
eager for a career in firearms activity.”

   
“You
looked more’n ready to do Hatch’s friend back there.”

“Oh, but they wa’n that serious.
Sloat was somethin somebody would’ve had to do.”

   
She
might have hesitated. “Had to. ’Cause
. . .
what,
’cause Reef didn’t do it?”

“Reef is somewhere doin what he’s
doin, ’s all, I just happened that time to walk in onto Sloat. And no luck with
Deuce anyplace, so old Sloat may end up bein my one and only.”

   
“You’ve
been on this awhile now, Frank.”

   
He
shrugged. “My Pa is still dead.”

In fact, Frank, who by day you
wouldn’t think got too carried away by his imagination, was plagued at night by
variations on one recurring dream about Webb. He stands before a door that will
not open—wood sometimes, iron, but always the same door, set into a wall,
maybe in the anonymous middle of some city block, unattended, no one in control
of who enters and who can’t, a blank door hardly different from the wall it is
set into, silent, inert, no handle or knob, no lock or keyhole, fitting so
tightly into its wall that not even a knifeblade can be slipped between them
. . . .
He could wait across the street,
keep vigil all night and day and night again, praying though not in the usual
way, exactly, for the unmarked hour when at last the quality of shadow at the
edges of the door might slowly begin to change, the geometry deepen and shift,
and unaskedfor as that, the route to some sofarundreamable interior lie open, a
way in whose way back out lies too far ahead in the dream to worry about. The
sky is always bleak and cloudless, with lateafternoon light draining

away. Through the clairvoyance of
dreams, Frank is certain—can actually

see—his father, just the other side of the closed door,
refusing to acknowledge Frank’s increasingly desperate pounding. Pleading,
even, by the end, crying. “Pa, did you ever think I was good for anything?
don’t you want me with you? On your side?” Understanding that “side” also means
the side of the wall Webb is on, and hoping that this double sense will be
enough, smart or powerful enough, like a password in an old tale, to gain him
entrance. But though he tries to stop it, his crying at some point will steepen
from sorrow into hoarse rage, heedless assault on the dumb solidity before him.
Reef and Kit are usually around someplace, too, though how close depends on how
much silence lies among them all. And Lake, she’s never there. Frank wants to
ask where she is, but because his motives are recognizably impure, whenever he
tries to, or it even looks like he’s about to ask, his brothers turn away, and
that more often than not is what he would wake from, into the borderlands of
the early night, having by now come to understand that it had been prelude and
étude to whatever waited deeper in.

It had rained
in the night, and some of the
ocotillo fences had sprouted some green. Stray had just got word that the Krags
were delivered safely and en route to their invisible destiny.

   
“Time
to get back to what we were doin I guess,” she said.

“I’m back and forth a lot,” Frank
said. “Ain’t out of the question is it we’ll maybe do this again. Like you say,
sit still long enough in El Paso.”

“You know when I saw you in that
little tearoom I thought it was Reef for a second. Sorrowful, ain’t it? All
this time.”

   
“Stranger
things,” Frank with a small lopsided smile. “Have faith.”

“I always figured me for the one that
wouldn’t stick.” They looked out across the river. In the early light, Juárez
was all pink and red. “Every time he stood by me, that one big night down in
Cortez, Leadville all the time, o’ course, Rock Springs when they come after us
with those repeating shotguns
. . .
him
always there like that, between me and them, making sure I got out—I
wouldn’t deny none of it, couldn’t, but is it too forward of a gal to in fact
mention returning the favor once or twice, and not with some little Ladies’
Friend neither? Creede? whooee
. . . .
For
a while there, we were unbeatable
. . . .

“By the time Jesse showed up, though,
maybe it was beginnin to soak in, we’re too old for it, no mess that getting
out of it meant any hope of getting out for good anymore—at best just for
some breathin time till the next one jumped us, maybe. And meantime the inches,
it’s always inches ain’t it, kept

gettin shorter, all narrowin down,
sometimes had to schedule a week ahead just to pick m’nose.”

Frank was gazing at her, the face men
got in dance halls sometimes, almost a smile.

“Not like that I was ever some lady,”
she tentatively dropped a hook, “got used to certain comforts I didn’t want to
give up—where’d I ever see any of that? hell I was twenty before I owned
a mirror I could sit and look into.
There
was a mistake, I give the
thing right away, went back to saloon mirrors and shop windows, where there was
still some mercy to the light.”

“Oh, make up another one, I saw you
when you were twenty.” If she hadn’t known better she might have taken his gaze
for resentful. Finally, “Stray, the first time I saw you, I knew I’d never see
anybody that beautiful again, and I never did, until you walked in that li’l
doily joint the other day.”

   
“What
I get for fishin.”

   
“That
mean the deal’s off?”

   
“Frank—”

   
“Hey.
I love him too.”

It
hadn’t been all fishing, of course. She got sometimes to feeling too close to
an edge, a due date, the fear of living on borrowed time. Because for all her
winters got through and returns to valley and creekside in the spring, for all
the dayandnight hard riding through the artemisia setting off sage grouse like
thunderclaps to right and left, with the onceperfect rhythms of the horse
beneath her gone faltering and mortal, yet she couldn’t see her luck as other
than purchased in the worn unlucky coin of all those girls who hadn’t kept
coming back, who’d gone down before their time, Dixies and Fans and
Mignonettes, too fair to be alone, too crazy for town, ending their days too
soon in barrelhouses, in shelters dug not quite deep enough into the unyielding
freeze of the hillside, for the sake of boys too stupefied with their own love
of exploding into the dark, with girlsize hands clasped, too tight to pry
loose, around a locket, holding a picture of a mother, of a child, left back
the other side of a watershed, birth names lost as well behind aliases taken
for reasons of commerce or plain safety, out in some blighted corner too far
from God’s notice to matter much what she had done or would have to do to
outride those onto whose list of chores the right to judge had found its way it
seemed
. . .
Stray was here, and they
were gone, and Reef was God knew where—Frank’s wishful family lookalike,
Jesse’s father and Webb’s uncertain avenger and her own sad story, her dream,
recurring, bad, broken, never come true.

hat with card games in the changing rooms and the platoons of
ladies who gathered each shift’s end at the tunnel entrances in their
respective countries, it wasn’t like either Reef or Flaco was squirreling much
away, though there was no shortage of work. “It’s a seller’s market,” they kept
hearing as they went gypsying from one European tunnel to the next, “you boys
can write your own ticket.” The Austrian Alps in particular were just hopping.
Everybody expected war between Austria and Italy to break out any minute, over
old territorial claims Reef wasn’t sure he’d ever understand, and even if the
countries remained at peace, Austria still wanted to be able to move massive
forces south whenever it took a mind to. Within the period 19016, on the new
Karawankenbahn alone, fortyseven tunnels were driven through the mountains,
with similar blasting ~opportunites in the Tauern and Wochein ranges.

   
At
the Simplon a massive tunnel project had been under way since 1898 to connect
train lines between Brigue in Switzerland and Domodossola in Italy, replacing a
ninehour trip by horsedrawn diligence. Reef and Flaco arrived in time for some
epic difficulties. On the Swiss side, hot springs had driven everybody out and
stopped work—an iron door was keeping in a great reservoir of very hot
water three hundred yards long. All effort was redirected to the approach being
made at the same time from the Italian side, where the hotwater springs were
only slightly less bothersome. Since two parallel galleries were being driven
through the mountain, it was often necessary to cross over from one to the
other and work back for short stretches in the opposite direction. It did not
help to be one of those folks who became nervous in tight places. Twofoot
drills got worn down to three inches faster than poolchalk and