Against the Day (15 page)

She was a sport about the whole
thing, stepped careful around his feelings, read the whole article through, and
though he never saw it again he understood she’d put the magazine away safely
among her possessions. And from then on, like a charge slowly building up on a
condenser plate, it was going to be only a matter of time before she was off to
New York in a great irresistible surge of energy.

In Colorado they found a farm
outbuilding, forgotten years earlier after the farm went under and the
farmhouse burned down, leaving this overgrown shed, which Merle managed to fill
up to the rafters with photographer’s or, if you like, alchemist’s
stuff—containers ranging from bangedup vegetable cans to jugs and bottles
holding liquids or powders of different colors, to gigantic glazed crocks,
fifty gallons and more, that you might be able to lift empty but wouldn’t
necessarily want to, carefully bent glass tubes and copper coils running everyplace,
a small forge over in one corner, an electric generator hooked to an old
bicycle, battery cells dry and wet, electromagnets, burners, an annealing oven,
a workbench littered with lenses, developing tanks, exposure meters, printing
frames, magnesium flashlamps, a gasheated rotary burnishing machine, and other
stuff Merle had almost forgotten he had. Berry vines crept in the crevices, and
spiders adorned the sashwork with webs that when the early daylight was right
could cause you to stand there just stupefied. Most folks who showed up thought
he was running a still, Sheriff’s boys liked to come by at odd hours, and
sometimes, depending how the day was proceeding, Merle would bring out the
heavier science talk, which hypnotized them into going away, disappointed as
always. Other days the visitors were as likely to be polarized the other way,
legally speaking.

“Couldn’t help smellin what you’re
cookin in here. Back over the ridgeline and across the creek, ’s a matter of
fact. It’s ’at there nitro, ain’t it?”

Merle had seen enough backcountry
insanity by now to keep a piece of his eye on the shotgun under the table.
“Almost. In the nitro family. Distant relative, the kind you pay to stay out of
town.”

“Run into it in my work, time to
time.”

“That’d be . . .”

“Sort of mine engineer. Not as well
paid as that, but same idea. Little Hellkite works over by Telluride?”He was on
the abbreviated side, packing no firearms Merle could see, and got around to
introducing himself as Webb Traverse.

Dally came in scowling, some
encounter out in the brush having put her in a mood. “Why Father, I’d no idea
there were guests. Let me go and see to the tea and biscuits. I’ll only be a
moment.”

“But say,” Webb giving her a wary
look, “what was I thinkin here, you must be kind of occupied at the
moment—”

“Bloviating, getting in the quota for
the week. Stick around, I can see you have a legitimate curiosity.” Merle
beaming like a tentmeeting preacher at a promising sinner.

Webb nodded at a jug of storebought
quicksilver on the table. “See a lot of that up at the assay office.”
Carefully, as if expecting a countersign.

“The oldtimers,” Merle as well
feeling his way, “used to believe that if you took away from mercury everything
not essential, the liquidmetal business, the shine, the greasy feel, the
weight, all the things that make it ‘mercury,’ see, you’d be left with this
unearthly pure form of it the cupel ain’t been made that can hold it, somethin
that would make this stuff here seem dull as traprock. Philosophic Mercury, ’s
what they called it, which you won’t find anyplace among the metals of
metallurgy, the elements of the periodic table, the catalogues of industry,
though many say it’s really more of a figure of speech, like the famous
Philosopher’s Stone—supposed to really mean God, or the Secret of
Happiness, or Union with the All, so forth. Chinese talk. But in fact these
things, they’ve been out there all along, real material things, just not easy
to get to, though alchemists keep tryin, it’s what we do.”

“ ‘
Alchemist’ work, that’s what you’re
doin up here? Well but mercury now, there is this one interesting compound I
keep runnin into, fulminate I believe it’s called
. . . .
”

“Basic ingredient of the du Pont
blasting cap, not to mention our everyday wellknown .44 round. There’s also
silver fulminate, not quite the same thing as ‘fulminating silver,’ which’ll
blow up if you touch it with a feather. Fulminating gold, too, if your tastes
happen to be more expensive.”

“Hard to cook up?”

“Basically you take gold and ammonia,
or silver and nitric acid, or mercury ore and fulminic acid, which is just good
old prussic acid, the suicide’s friend, patriarch of the cyanide family with an
oxygen tacked on, and just as poisonous to breathe the fumes of.”

Webb shook his head as if in dismay
at the world and its ironies, but Merle had seen some unguardedhenhouse gleam
in his eye. “You mean to say gold, silver, these shinin and wonderful metals,
basis of all the world’s economies, you go in a laboratory, fool with em a
little, acid and so on, and you get a high explosive that all you got to do’s
sneeze at the wrong time and it’s adiós, muchachos?”

Merle, with a fair idea where this
was going, nodded. “Sort of the
infernal
side to the story, you could
say.”

“Almost makes you think, if there’s a
Philosopher’s Stone, there might not also be—”

“Careful,” said Merle.

Webb peered at him, almost amused.
“Somethin you fellas don’t talk about?”

“Can’t. Or that’s the tradition.”

“Easier that way, I guess.”

“For who?”

Webb may have caught some wariness in
his tone but went ahead. “Case a man ever did get tempted . . .”

“Hmmn. Who says men never do?”

“Wouldn’t know.” A moment of
reflection, then, as if unable not to pursue the thought, “But if the one’s a
figure of speech for God and salvation and all that good stuff, why then the
other—”

“All right. But do everybody a favor,
say ‘AntiStone.’ It has another name, but we’d just get into trouble sayin it
out loud. Sure, there’s probably as many lost souls out lookin for that as
regular alchemists. You think of the power you stand to gain, why the payoff’s
way too hard to resist.”

“You’re resistin, ain’t you?”

“Am I.”

“Nothin personal.” Webb let his eyes
slide around the little shed.

“This is temporary,” Merle explained,
“the mansion’s got mice and our agents are out looking for a new one.”

“And if a nightshirt for a elephant
cost two cents,” Dally put in, “we couldn’t buy a baby bonnet for a piss ant.”

“You know your way around
quicksilver? Ever done any amalgamator work?”

“Time to time,” Merle said carefully.
“Leadville, couple other places, fun while it lasts, not sure it’s much of a
career.”

“Little Hellkite they’re lookin for
an amalgamator, seein ’s how with the altitude and breathin in those fumes, the
current one’s got it into his head he’s the President.”

“Oh. Of. . .?”

“Put it this way, he has this nipper
with a harmonica foll’n him around everwhere playin ‘Hail to the Chief.’ Out of
tune. Goes off into long speeches nobody can understand, declared war on the
state of Colorado last week.Needs to be replaced and quick, but nobody wants to
use force, bein that these cases are said to have superhuman powers.”

“How true. That’d be up by Telluride,
you say.”

“Dandy little town, churches,
schools, wholesome environment for the young lady.”

Dally snorted. “Hell with electric
lights is more like it, and school ain’t exctly my glass of beer either,
mister, if I wanted to waste my time I’d be lookin more for powdermonkey work,
wouldn’t I.”

“Sure they can fix you up with that,”
said Webb. “But no need to mention my name around the Little Hellkite, O.K.? I
ain’t exactly no miner of the month up there right now.”

“Sure thing,” said Merle, “long as
the alchemy part of it don’t come up either.”

The two men looked at each other,
each pretty sure who the other was. “Mine engineers take a dim view,” Merle
pretended to explain, “oldtime superstition from back in the Dark Ages, nowhere
near’s scientific as modernday metallurgy.” He paused, as if to catch his
breath. “But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in
to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange,
eh? What do you make of that?”

Webb nodded agreeably. “Maybe
capitalism
decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt
was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother? Had their own magic,
doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor
people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement
purposes.”

“And the gold and silver . . .”

“More of a curse than they know,
maybe. Sittin right there in the vault, just waitin for—”

“Don’t say it!”

But Webb rode away with the grand
possibility repeating in his mind like a heartbeat—the AntiStone. The
AntiStone. Useful magic that might go one better on the widely admired Mexican
principle of politics through chemistry. Not that life wasn’t peculiar enough
up in these mountains already, but here was this fasttalking quicksilver wizard
in with fresh news that maybe, with luck, it was fixing to get even more so,
and the day of commonwealth and promise, temples of Mammon all in
smithereens—poor folks on the march, bigger than Coxey’s Army, through
the rubble—that much closer. Or he’d turn out as crazy as the present
amalgamator at Little Hellkite—soon to be former amalgamator, because
next time Webb was up that way, he found “the President” had been replaced,
sure enough, by Merle Rideout.Which was how Merle and Dally, after a long spell
of drifting job to job, happened to roll to a stop in San Miguel County for the
next couple of years—as it would turn out, some of the worst years in the
history of those unhappy mountains. Lately Merle had been visited by a strange
feeling that “photography” and “alchemy” were just two ways of getting at the
same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. And maybe
his and Dally’s long road out here was not the result of any idle drift but
more of a secret imperative, like the force of gravity, from all the silver
he’d been developing out into the pictures he’d been taking over these
years—as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice, and he’d been
working for it as much as it for him.

uly Fourth started hot and grew
hotter, early light on the peaks descending, occupying, the few clouds bright
and shapely and unpromising of rain, nitro beginning to ooze out of dynamite
sticks well before the sun had cleared the ridge. Among stockmen and rodeo
riders, today was known as “Cowboy’s Christmas,” but to Webb Traverse it was
more like Dynamite’s National Holiday, though you found many of the Catholic
faith liked to argue that that ought to be the Fourth of December, feast of St.
Barbara, patron saint of artillerymen, gunsmiths, and by not that big of a
stretch, dynamiters too.

Everybody today, drovers and barkeeps,
office clerks and hardcases, gentle elderly folks and openmouth reckless youth,
would be seized sooner or later by the dynamitic mania prevailing. They would
take little fractions of a stick, attach cap and fuse, light them up and throw
them at each other, drop it in reservoirs and have allday fish fries, blast
picturesque patterns in the landscape that’d be all but gone next day, put it
lit into empty beer barrels to be rolled down mountainsides, and take bets on
how close to town before it all blew to bits—a perfect day all round for
some of that good Propaganda of the
 
Deed stuff, which would just blend right in with all the other
percussion.

Webb staggered up out of his bedroll
after one of those nights when he did not so much sleep as become intermittently
conscious of time. Already warmup blasts could be heard up and down the valley.
Today’s would be a fairly routine job, and Webb was looking forward to a little
saloon time at the end of it. Zarzuela was out by the fence waiting, having
known Webb long enough to have an idea that whatever the day held in store, it
would include explosion, which the colt was used to and even looked forward to.