Against the Day (16 page)

Webb rode up the valley and then up
over Red Mountain Pass, cicadas going by like prolonged~richochets. Pausing
after a while for water, he ran into a skinner in gauntlets and chaps and a hat
with the brim turned down, with his dog and an unroped train of little burros,
known hereabouts as Rocky Mountain canaries.” The winsome animals, packed with
boxes of dynamite, detonator caps, and fuse, were browsing around eating
wildflowers. Webb felt a shortness of breath and a wandering in his head that
had little to do with the altitude. Glory, could he smell that nitro. No
Chinaman and his opium could be any more intimate than Webb and the delicately
poised chemistry there. He let his horse have some water, but in the unsettling
presence of nasal desire, unwilling to trust his own voice too far, stayed up
in the saddle, straightfaced and yearning. The burropuncher was just as happy
to do no more than nod, preferring to save his voice for his string. After Webb
had gone on, the dog stood and barked for a while, not warning or angry, just
being professional.

Veikko was waiting as they’d arranged
by a waste pile from the old Eclipse Union mine. Webb, who could judge from a
hundred yards away how crazy the Finn was apt to be feeling on a given day,
noticed a twogallon canteen sure to be full of that homebrewed potato spirits
they all tended to go for, hung from the pommel of his saddle. There also
seemed to be flames issuing out of his head, but Webb put that down to some
trick of the light. From the look on his face, Webb could see signs of an
oncoming dynamite headache after hanging around too long snorting nitro fumes.

“You’re late, Brother Traverse.”

“Rather be at a picnic, myself,” said
Webb.

“I’m in a really bad mood.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You are what usually makes it
worse.”

They had some such exchange once or
twice a week. Helped them get along, annoyance, for both of them, working as a
social lubricant.

Veikko was a veteran of the Cour
d’Alene bullpens and the strike in Cripple Creek for an eighthour day. He had
quickly become known to all levels of the law up here, being a particular
favorite of state militia, who liked to see how much pounding he could take.
Finally he’d been picked up in a general sweep and with about two dozen other
union miners sealed in a sidedoor pullman and taken south on the Denver &
Rio Grande across the invisible border into New Mexico. Guardsmen sat up top
with machine guns, and the prisoners had to pretty much piss where they could,
sometimes, in the dark, on each other. In the middle of the night, deep in the
southern San Juans, the train came to a halt, there was metallic thumping
overhead, the door slid open. “End of the line for you all,” called an
unfriendly voice, and few there

were ready to hear it in any but the
worst way. But they were only going to be left to walk, their boots in a
further act of meanness taken away, and told to stay out of Colorado unless
they wanted to leave it next time in a box. It turned out they were near an
Apache reservation, and the Indians were kind enough to take Veikko and a few
others in for a while, not to mention share a bottomless supply of cactus beer.
They thought it was funny that white men should act quite so disagreeably
toward other whites, treating them indeed almost as if they were Indians, some
of them already believing that Colorado, because of its shape, had actually
been created as a reservation for whites. Somebody brought out an old geography
Schoolbook with a map of the state in it, including their own reservation
boundaries, which showed Colorado as a rectangle, seven degrees of longitude
wide by four degrees of latitude high—four straight lines on paper made
up the borders Veikko had been forbidden to cross—not like there were
rivers or ridgelines where the militia might lie in wait to shoot at him the
minute he stepped over—from which he reasoned that, if exile from
Colorado was that abstract, then as long as he stayed off the roads, he could
come back into the state anytime and just keep soldiering on same as before.

Mostly with Veikko you had your
choice of two topics, techniques of detonation or Veikko’s distant country and
its beleaguered constitution, Webb never having seen him raise a glass, for
example, that wasn’t dedicated to the fall of the Russian Tsar and his evil
viceroy General Bobrikoff. But sometimes Veikko went on and got philosophical.
He’d never seen much difference between the Tsar’s regime and American
capitalism. To struggle against one, he figured, was to struggle against the
other. Sort of this worldwide outlook. “Was a little worse for us, maybe,
coming to U.S.A. after hearing so much about ‘land of the free.
’ ”
Thinking he’d escaped something, only
to find life out here just as mean and cold, same wealth without conscience,
same poor people in misery, army and police free as wolves to commit cruelties
on behalf of the bosses, bosses ready to do anything to protect what they had
stolen. The main difference he could see was that the Russian aristocracy,
after centuries of believing in nothing but its own entitlement, had grown
weak, neuræsthenic. “But American aristocracy is not even a century old, in peak
of fighting condition, strong from efforts it took to acquire its wealth, more
of a challenge. Good enemy.”

“You think they’re too strong for the
workers?”

At which Veikko’s eyes would grow
pale and illuminated from within, his voice issuing from an abundant and
unkempt beard which suggested even on his calmest days an insane fanaticism.
“We are their strength, without us they are impotent, we are they,” and so
forth. Webb had learned that if you stayed quiet and just waited, these spells
passed, and pretty soon the Finn would be back to his usual self, stolid as
ever, reaching sociably for the vodka.

At the moment, however, Webb noticed
that Veikko had been sitting reading over and over to himself a withered
postcard from Finland, a troubled look on his face, a slow flush gathering
around his eyes.

“Look. These aren’t real stamps
here,” Veikko said. “They are pictures of stamps. The Russians no longer allow
Finnish stamps, we have to use Russian ones. These postmarks? They’re not real
either. Pictures of postmarks. This one, August fourteen, 1900, was the last
day we could use our own stamps for overseas mail.”

“So this is a postcard with a picture
of what a postcard used to look like before the Russians. That’s what
‘
Minneskort
’
means?”

“Memory card. A memory of a memory.”
It was a card from his sister back in Finland. “Nothing in particular. They
censor everything. Nothing that would get anybody in trouble. Family news. My
crazy family.” He gestured toward Webb with the vodka canteen.

“I’ll wait.”

“I won’t.”

Veikko, being the sort of blaster who
likes to watch it happen, had brought along an oak magneto box and a big spool
of wire, whereas Webb, more circumspect and preferring to be well out of the
area, tended to go for the twodollar Ingersoll or timedelay method. Their
target was a railroad bridge across a little canyon, on a spur between the main
line and Relámpagos, a mining town up northeast of Silverton. Fairly
straightforward, four wood trestles of different heights holding up some iron
Fink trusses. Webb and Veikko got into the usual argument about whether to
blast the ’sucker now or wait till a train came. “You know how owners are,”
Veikko said, “lazy sons of bitches can’t be bothered to saddle up, they take
trains wherever they go. We blow train, maybe get a couple of them with it.”

“I ain’t about to sit out here all
day waitin for some train that likely won’t be runnin anyhow, it bein a
threeday holiday.”

“
Aitisi
nai poroja,
”
replied
Veikko, a pleasantry long grown routine, meaning, “Your mother fucks reindeer.”

The tricky patch, it had seemed to
Webb for a while now, came in choosing the targets, it being hard enough just
to find time to think any of it through, under the daily burdens of duty and
hard labor and, more often than you’d think, grief. Lord knew that owners and
mine managers deserved to be blown up, except that they had learned to keep
extra protection around them—not that going after their property, like
factories or mines, was that much better of an idea, for, given the nature of
corporate greed, those placeswould usually be working three shifts, with the
folks most likely to end up dying being miners, including children working as
nippers and swampers—the same folks who die when the army comes charging
in. Not that any owner ever cared rat shit about the lives of workers, of
course, except to define them as Innocent Victims in whose name uniformed goons
could then go out and hunt down the Monsters That Did the Deed.

And even worse, the sort of thing
that can get a true bomber mighty irritated, some of these explosions, the more
deadly of them, in fact, were really set off to begin with not by Anarchists
but by the owners themselves. Imagine that. Here was nitro, the medium of
truth, being used by these criminal bastards to tell their lies with. Damn. The
first time Webb saw hard proof of this going on, he felt like a kid about to
cry. That the world should know so little about what was good for it.

Which left precious few targets
except for the railroad. Fair enough, to Webb’s way of thinking, for the
railroad had always been the enemy, going back generations. Farmers, stockmen,
buffalohunting Indians, tracklaying Chinamen, passengers in train wrecks,
whoever you were out here, sooner or later you had some bad history with the
railroad. He had worked as a section hand just enough over the years to at
least know where to spot the charges so they’d do the most good.

They took cord and bundled the sticks
together. Webb was far more partial to gelatin, which let you shape the charge
some and direct the blast better, but that made sense only in the cooler
weather. Keeping an eye out for snakes, they worked their way along the wash,
placing the charges in the shade when they could and piling rocks and dirt
around. The day was quiet, windless. A redtail hawk hung up there and seemed to
be looking at them, which would put them in the same category as field rodents.
Which in turn would put the hawk in the same category as a mine manager
. . . .
Webb shook his head irritably. He
did not much admire himself when he drifted off this way. It was always minute
to minute, step to step, and he had seen too many good brothers and sisters end
up in the dirt or in the fathomless dark at the bottom of some shaft as the
price of inattention. Fact, if he’d known what it cost, the total cost, spread
over a lifetime, he wondered sometimes if he would’ve ever signed on.

Webb’s trajectory toward the
communion of toil which had claimed his life had begun right out in the middle
of Cripple Creek, blooming in those days like a flower of poisonous delight
among its spoil heaps, cribs, parlor houses and gambling saloons. It was a time
in Cripple and Victor, Leadville and Creede, when men were finding their way to
the unblastable seams of their own secret natures, learning the true names of
desire, which spoken, so they

dreamed, would open the way through
the mountains to all that had been denied them. In the broken and
soonenoughinterrupted dreams close to dawn in particular, Webb would find
himself standing at some divide, facing west into a great flow of promise,
something like wind, something like light, free of the damaged hopes and
pestilent smoke east of here—sacrificial smoke, maybe, but not ascending
to Heaven, only high enough to be breathed in, to sicken and cut short countless
lives, to change the color of the daylight and deny to walkers of the night the
stars they remembered from younger times. He would wake to the day and its
dread. The trail back to that high place and the luminous promise did not run
by way of Cripple, though Cripple would have to serve, hopes corroded to
fragments—overnight whiskey, daughters of slaves, rigged faro games, the
ladies who work on the line.

One night in Shorty’s Billiard
Saloon, some poolplayer had propelled his cue ball on the break perhaps too
forcefully and with scarcely any draw onto it into the triangle of shiny balls,
which happened to be made of some newly patented variety of celluloid. Upon
being struck, the first ball exploded, iniiating a chain of similar explosions
across the table. Mistaking these for gunshots, several among the clientele
drew their pistols and began, with some absence of thought, to contribute in
their own ways to the commotion. “Nice break,” somebody was heard to say before
the noise got too loud. Webb, frozen in terror, delayed diving for cover until
it was all over, realizing after a while that he had been standing in a roomful
of flying lead without being hit once. How could this be? He found himself in
the street wandering hatless and confused, colliding presently with the
Reverend Moss Gatlin, who was stumbling down a long flight of wood stairs from
a sojourn up at Fleurette’s Cloudtop Retreat, not exactly at the moment looking
for uninstructed souls, which didn’t keep Webb, in a torrent of speech, from
telling the Rev all about his miraculous escape. “Brother, we are stripes and
solids on the pool table of earthly existence,” the Rev explained, “and God and
his angels are the sharpers who keep us ever in motion.” Instead of dismissing
this for the offhanded preacherly drivel it almost certainly was, Webb, in what
you’d have to call a state of heightened receptivity, stood there as if
professionally sapped for another quarter of an hour after the Rev had moved
on, ignored by the pernicious bustle of Myers Street, and the following Sunday
could be observed in the back room of the faro establishment where Reverend
Gatlin preached his ministry, listening as if much, maybe all, depended on it,
to the sermon, which happened to take as its text Matthew 4:18 and 19, “And
Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and
Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.