Against the Day (127 page)

needed changing dozens of times a day. The noise was hellish,
the air wet and hot and stifling when it wasn’t full of stone dust, which the
new Brandt drills, mounted on tripods like Hotchkiss machine guns, being
faster, were supposed to be cutting down on. But there weren’t enough of them
for everybody, and Reef usually found himself singlejacking or augering with a breastplate
rig holding the butt end of the drill against his body.

Oldtimers on the crew—Nikos,
Fulvio, Gerhardt, the opera singer, the Albanian—when they first
penetrated the mountain, prepared to fight frozen rock, had found instead a
passionate heart, a teeming interiority, mineral water at about 120 to 130
degrees, and a struggle some days to simply get out alive by shift’s end,
although some never did
. . . .

“We are fucking crazy,” Nikos
informed Reef several times each day, shouting over the racket of the drilling.
“Nobody but crazy people would be in here.”

Some of the boys on the shift were
parttime Anarchists interested in furthering their chemical education. Most did
all they could to keep their faces hidden from a daily parade of visitors, few
of whom found it necessary to identify themselves. Engineers, inspectors,
company officials, idly curious inlaws, government police from every
jurisdiction in Europe were known to show up unexpectedly with briefcases,
magnesium flash cameras, and questions ranging from the keenly intrusive to the
stupidly repetitive.

“Any of them you’d like put out of
the way,” Ramiz, the Albanian, offered, “I give you a good price, flat fee, no
extras. Nothing to lose, because I can’t go back.” He was on the run from a
longstanding blood vendetta back home. The ancient code of the region, known as
Kanuni Lekë Dukagjinit, allowed any wronged family one consequencefree rifle
shot, but if the offender was still alive after twentyfour hours, they couldn’t
take any further revenge for as long as he stayed on his own property. “So
nearly every village has a family like mine, sometimes two, locked up in their
houses.”

   
Reef
felt a personal interest. “Well how do folks eat?”

   
“The
women and children are allowed to come and go.”

   
“Was it
you who
. . .
?”

“Not me, I was a baby at the time. It
was my grandfather, he shot a guest of the other family, who was staying with
them one night—something to do with the League of Prizren and the
fighting that was going on back then. Later on, nobody said they could remember
much, not even the man’s name after a while. But in the Kanuni, the rules are
the same for guests as for family.”

By the time Ramiz hit adolescence and
became a legitimate target himself, being cooped up did not hold the same appeal
it might have for a more mature individual. One night, “Maybe I went crazy, I
can’t remember,” he

slipped out a window, up a gulch,
across the hills, and down to the sea, where he found a boat. “Turks. They knew
what was going on all right, but they lived by a different code.”

   
“So
. . .
your grandfather, your father? Still
at home?”

He
shrugged. “I hope so. I’ll never see them again.
Jetokam, jetokam!
Strange
how I am alive! Is this how revenge is taken in America?”

Reef told a version of his own story.
In it, Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno became more like critters of pure evil
than guns for hire, and of course there were no rules about sanctuary on your
own property—in fact, it had taken him this long to catch on, nothing
like Ramiz’s Kanuni at all, though everybody liked to talk about the Code of
the West as if it really existed and you could borrow a copy from the local
library when you needed to check on details.

“Avenging your family is still
allowed I guess, though lately as civilization comes creepin out from back
east, authorities tend to frown more and more on it. They tell you, ‘Don’t take
the law into your own hands.
’ ”

   
“In
whose hands, then?”

   
“Marshal
. . .
sheriff.”

   
“The
police? But that. . . is to remain a child.”

Reef,
who’d been feeling calm enough till then, found that his voice had dried up. He
sat there with a handrolled cigarette stuck smoldering to his lip, and couldn’t
meet the other man’s eyes.

   
“
Më
fal.
I meant
no—”

   
“It’s
O.K. That isn’t why I left.”

   
“You
killed them.”

   
Reef
gave it some thought. “They had powerful friends.”

Among the many superstitions inside
this mountain was a belief that the tunnel was “neutral ground,” exempt not
only from political jurisdictions but from Time itself. The Anarchists and
Socialists on the shift had their own mixed feelings about history. They
suffered from it, and it was also to be their liberator, if they could somehow
survive to see the day. In the showerbaths at the end of the shift, the
suffering could be read on each body, as a document written in insults to flesh
and bone—scars, crookedness, missing parts. They knew each other as more
comfortable men, in the steamrooms of hydropathics, for instance, would not.
Amateur bullet removals and bone settings, cauterizations and brandings, some
souvenirs were public and could be compared, others were private and less
likely to be talked about.

One day Reef happened to notice on
Fulvio what looked like a railroad map executed in scar tissue. “What was that
from, you walk in between a couple of bobcats fucking?”

   
“An
encounter with a Tatzelwurm,” said Fulvio. “Dramatic,
non è vero?
”

   
“New
one on me,” said Reef.

   
“It’s
a snake with paws,” said Gerhardt.

“Four legs and three toes on each
paw, and a big mouth full of very sharp teeth.”

   
“Hibernates
here, inside the mountain.”

   
“Tries
to. But anybody who wakes it up, God help them.”

Men had been known to quit work here,
claiming that the Tatzelwurms were becoming enraged by all the drilling and
explosions.

Reef figured it for some kind of
routine they put the newcomers through, this being the first tunnel job he’d
run into it on. Sort of Alpine tommyknockers, he figured, till he began to
notice long, flowing shapes in unexpected places.

Tunnelers brought pistols in to work
and took shots whenever they thought they saw a Tatzelwurm. Some lit dynamite
sticks and threw them. The creatures only became bolder, or maybe more
indifferent to their fate.

   
“Ain’t
exactly mine rats there.”

“In Europe,” speculated Philippe,
“the mountains are much older than in America. Whatever lives in them has had
more time to evolve toward a more lethal, perhaps less amiable, sort of
creature.”

“It is also a good argument for
Hell,” added Gerhardt, “for some primordial plasm of hate and punishment at the
center of the Earth which takes on different forms, the closer it can be
projected to the surface. Here under the Alps, it happens to become visible as
the Tatzelwurm.”

“It is comforting to imagine this as
an outward and visible manifestation of something else,” chuckled one of the
Austrians, puffing on a cigar stub. “But sometimes a Tatzelwurm is only a
Tatzelwurm.”

“The really disturbing thing,” Fulvio
with a shiver, “is when you see one and it looks up and sees that you are
watching it. Sometimes it will run, but if it doesn’t, then prepare to be
attacked. It helps if you don’t look at its face too long. Even in the dark,
you will know where it is, because it will be screaming—a high whistling
scream that like the winter cold will creep in to occupy your bones.”

“Once you have had the encounter,”
Gerhardt agreed, “it is with you forever. This is why I believe they are sent
to us, to some of us in particular, for a purpose.”

   
“What’s
that?” Reef said.

   
“To
tell us that we shouldn’t be doing this.”

   
“Tunneling?”

   
“Putting
railroads.”

   
“But
we’re not,” Reef pointed out. “The people who are paying us are. Do
they
ever
see the Tatzelwurm?”

   
“It
visits them in their dreams.”

   
“And
it looks like us,” added Flaco.

Reef should have
known
what was coming
when the favogn blew in. All of a sudden, casehardened veterans of hotwater
inundations, explosions, and gallery collapses became languorous and feeble
under the assault of this warm, dry and unrelenting wind, barely able to lift a
tin cup, let alone a drill. The favogn was supposed to come from the Sahara
Desert, like the scirocco, though there were endless debates over this. The
wind was alive. Talk of dynamic compression and adiabatic gradients didn’t
carry as much weight as the certainty of its conscious intent.

For
years now, the tunnelinprogress here had been a regular stop for leisured
balneomaniacs of the era, traveling spa to spa, all over Europe and beyond,
habitués of mineral waters, seekers after compounds of elements not even
discovered yet, some of them rumored to provide therapeutic rays not yet
assigned letters of any alphabet, though known and discussed among spa
cognoscenti from BadenBaden to Wagga Wagga.

One
day a party of these visitors showed up, about half a dozen of them, having
groped their way through Moazagotl clouds and so forth. All more or less
lethargic from the wind. Except—“Oh, come look at these funny little men
with their big mustaches, running about in their underwear setting off
dynamite, it’s simply too amusing!”

   
Reef
was dismayed to recognize the voice of Ruperta ChirpingdonGroin. Judas Priest
and how far and fast did he have to run before he was looking up his own ass
again and reliving the same mistakes, no doubt deed for deed? Edging closer, a
familiar old feeling vibrating from penis to brain, he carefully had a look.

Oh,
boy. Desirable as ever, maybe more so, and as for income level, well that ice
twinkling in the subterranean dusk looked real enough, and he’d bet her turnout
there was straight from Paris, too. A couple of the other drillers stood
gaping, unable to shut their mouths, stroking themselves without shame. This
gallantry had been claiming her attention for a while, when she happened to
look over at last and recognize Reef.

“Wot,
you again. Why haven’t you yours out as well, or have I grown so unattractive?”

“Must’ve
forgot what to do with it,” Reef beamed, “waitin for you to remind me.”

“I’m
not sure after New Orleans that I should even be speaking with you.”

A
young Italian gentleman of university age, wearing what appeared to be a hunting
suit modified for mountain activities, crept forward.
“
Macchè, gioia mia
—is some difficulty with this
troglodita?
”

“
Càlmati,
Rodolfo.” Ruperta
adjusted her grip on the modish ebony alpenstock she was carrying, just
impatiently enough for her companion to notice and be warned.
“
Tutto va bene. Un amico di pochi anni
fa.
” The
youth, directing a short and vicious glare at Reef,
stepped back and pretended to resume an interest in hydraulic drilling.

“Good
to see you maintainin ’em standards,” Reef nodded. “Wouldn’t do to get déclassé
or nothin.”

“We’re
in Domodossola for a night or two. The Hôtel de la Ville et Poste, I’m sure you
know it.”

She
had been amusing herself by waiting for Rodolfo to fall asleep and then getting
decked out in scarlet lustracellulose, draping on some Ambroid jewelry, and
joining the girls who loitered by the end of the tunnel, often finding herself
late at night on hands and knees up on Calvary Hill being penetrated by a small
queue of tunnel hands, often two at a time, who cursed her in unknown
tongues—as she seemed eager to let Reef know about the first chance she
got. “Large, workroughened hands,” she murmured, “bruising me, scratching me,
and I do try to keep my skin ever so soft and smooth, here, feel here
. . .
remember . . .” Reef, who always
knew what she was up to—Ruperta after all was not very complicated when
it came to fucking, one of her major advantages if you really wanted to
know—obliged by seizing her with careful brutality, pushing her face
among some pillows, and tearing some rather highpriced underlinen, and despite
the presence of young Rodolfo in a nearby room, they then doublejacked their
way to a mutual explosion memorable only till the next time it happened, which
was to be presently.

The
watershed moment, however, came in the course of one of the long postcoital
monologues Ruperta somehow found necessary and which Reef had come to find sort
of relaxing. He was almost ready to fall asleep when the name of Scarsdale Vibe
entered the stream of idle chatter, and he reached for another cigarette.