Against the Day (17 page)

“And he saith unto them, Follow me,
and I will make you fishers of men.”

“And Jesus,” elaborated Moss,
“walking out by some American lake, some reservoir in the
mountains—here’s Billy and his brother Pete, casting quartersticks of
dynamite into the lake, for they are dynamiters—and harvesting whatever
floats to the surface. What does Jesus think of this, and what does he say unto
them? What will he make them fishers of?

“For dynamite is both the miner’s
curse, the outward and audible sign of his enslavement to mineral extraction,
and the American working man’s equalizer, his agent of deliverance, if he would
only dare to use it
. . . .
Every time
a stick goes off in the service of the owners, a blast convertible at the end
of some chain of accountancy to dollar sums no miner ever saw, there will have
to be ~ be a corresponding entry on the other side of God’s ledger, convertible
to human freedom no owner is willing to grant.

“You’ve heard the suggestion that
there are no innocent bourgeoisie. One of those French Anarchists, some say
Emile Henry as he was going to the guillotine, others say Vaillant when they
tried him for bombing the Chamber of Deputies. Answering the question, how can
anyone set off a bomb that will take innocent lives?”

“Long fuse,” somebody hollered
helpfully.

“Easier with a timer!”

“Think about it,” when the remarks
had faded some, “like Original Sin, only with exceptions. Being born into this
don’t automatically make you innocent. But when you reach a point in your life
where you understand who is fucking who—beg pardon, Lord—who’s
taking it and who’s not, that’s when you’re obliged to choose how much you’ll
go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and
sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a
check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated
with the day, from those absolute terms.”

 
It would have been almost like being born again, except that
Webb had never been particularly religious, nor had any of his family, an old
~ridegerunning clan from southern Pennsylvania, close to the MasonDixon. The
Civil War, which ate up a good part of Webb’s boyhood, split the family as
well, so that shortly before it was over, he found himself in the back of a
wagon heading west, about the same time other Traverse Irreconcilables were
choosing to head for Mexico. But, hell—same thing.

Across the Ohio in a hill town whose
name he soon couldn’t remember,there was a darkhaired girl Webb’s age whose
name, Teresa, he would never forget. They were out walking the wagon ruts, just
beyond a fenceline the hills went rushing away, the sky was clouded over, it
might’ve been betweenrain showers, and young Webb was all ready to unburden his
heart, which like the sky was about to reveal something beyond itself. He
almost did tell her. They both seemed to see it coming, and later, heading
west, he carried with him that silence that had stretched on between them until
there was no point anymore. He might have stayed, otherwise, snuck off from the
wagons, headed back to her. She might have found a way to come after him, too,
but that was a dream, really, he didn’t know, would never know, how she felt.

It took maybe nine or ten years more
of westward drift, over the rolling prairie, through the cheatgrass, the sage
grouse exploding skyward, the dread silences when skies grow black in the
middle of all that country, outracing cyclones and rangefires, switchbacking up
the eastern slope of the Rockies through meadows of muleear and sneezeweed, on
over the great torn crestline, to be delivered at last into these unholy
mountains Webb grew to manhood in and had not left since, into whose depths he
had ventured after silver and gold, up on whose heights he had struggled,
always, for breath.

By that time both his parents were
gone, and he was left with not much more than his Uncle Fletcher’s old
twelvecylinder Confederate Colt, whose brasswork he took care to keep shined,
for whose sake he’d put up with remarks like “Thing’s bigger’n you are,
Webbie,” though he kept practicing whenever he could, and the day did come
finally when he found he was hitting more than half of any given row of bean
cans with it.

In Leadville, the year the gaslight
went in, he saw Mayva Dash, dancing up on top of the bar of Pap Wyman’s Saloon
in high boots and jet beads while freightmen, roustabouts, and greasebearded
tendayers hollered for every kick and twirl, even to taking their cigars out of
their mouths before they did.

“Yes children, strange to tell, your
Ma was a saloon girl when first we met.”

“You’re giving em the wrong idea,”
she pretended to object. “1 always worked for myself.”

“You were paying off that bartender.”

“We all were.”

“Way he saw it, that meant working
for him.”

“He tell you that?”

“Not Adolph. But the other one,
Ernst?”

“With the real weedy mustache, talked
sort of foreign?”

“That’s him.”

“Just lonely. Thought we ’s all gonna
be his concubines, which was a common arrangement, accordin to him, wherever
that was he was from.”

The town, only recently founded, was
already being turned black with slag, up every alley all the way out into open
country you saw it towering in greatpoisoned mountains. Not a place where you’d
expect romance to blossom, but next thing either of them knew, they were
hitched and living up East Fifth in Finntown among the waste piles. One night
just off shift, Webb heard a tremendous uproar in the narrow alley known as St.
Louis Avenue, and there was Veikko Rautavaara, carefully holding a vodka jug in
one hand while battling a number of camp guards with the other. For a weedy
little customer, Webb could be formidable in these affairs, though by the time
he got into it, most of the hard work was done, Veikko bleeding but solid on
his feet and the hirelings either flat on the pavement or limping away. When
Webb brought him back to the house, Mayva might have raised an eyebrow. “Nice
to see this married life ain’t slowing you down. Honey.”

She kept her job at Pap Wyman’s till
she was sure Reef was on the way. The kids were all silverboom babies, up and
running just in time for Repeal. “Been dealt a full house here,” Webb liked to
say, “Jacks and Queens—’less you count your Ma as the Ace o’ Spades.”

“Death card,” she’d mutter, “thanks a
lot.”

“But Dearest,” Webb in all innocence,
“I meant it as a compliment!”

They had maybe a year or two where it
wasn’t too desperate. Webb took them all to Denver and bought Mayva a fancy
briar pipe to replace the beatup old corncob she usually smoked. They ate ice
cream at a soda fountain. They went to Colorado Springs and stayed at the
Antlers Hotel and took the cog railway up Pike’s Peak.

Though maybe for a couple of years
off and on with the railroad Webb might’ve seen some ray of daylight, he always
ended up back down some hole in some mountain, mucking, timbering, whatever he
could get. Leadville, thinking itself God’s own beneficiary when the old lode
was rediscovered in ’92, got pretty much done in by Repeal, and Creede the
same, suckerpunched right after the big weeklong wingding on the occasion of
Bob Ford’s funeral. The railroad towns, Durango, Grand Junction, Montrose, and
them, were pretty stodgy by comparison, what Webb mostly remembered being the
sunlight. Telluride was in the nature of an outing to a depraved amusement
resort, whose electric lighting at night in its extreme and unmerciful
whiteness produced a dreamsilvered rogues’ district of nonstop poker games,
erotic practices in backlot shanties, Chinese opium dens most of the Chinese in
town had the sense to stay away from, mad foreigners screaming in tongues apt
to come skiing down the slopes in the dark with demolition in mind.

After 1893, after the whole nation,
one way or another, had been put through a tiresome moral exercise over repeal
of the Silver Act, ending with the Gold Standard reclaiming its ancient
tyranny, it was slow times for awhile, and Webb and the family moved around a
lot, down to Huerfano County for a while to dig coal, while Ed Farr was still
sheriff, before he got shot by train robbers over near Cimarrón, and Webb would
come home lackfaced and unrecognizable enough that the kids either fell down
laughing or ran away screaming. Later, in Montrose, they all lived in some
little parttent, partshed on the lot out back of a boarding house that was
hardly more than a shack itself, Lake helping with chores, Reef and Frank
bringing potato sacks from the wagon, sometimes pulling thirdshift scullery
duty or, as the gold camps began to pick up some of the slack, back down into
one or another of those mountainside workings, Reef, before he got out of the
house for good, working a spell same shift as his father, picking up the loose
ore and loading it on to the cars and pushing them to the hoist, over and over.
He got to hate it pretty quick, and Webb, seeing his point, never held it
against him. When Webb and the boys were on different shifts, Mayva had nothing
but roundtheclock work, cooking Cornish pasties by the dozens for them to take
down in the hole—she’d learned from the Cornish wives in Jacktown to put
apple slices in along with the meat and potatoes. Then something else hot to
feed each of them again when they come back up, hungrier than bears.

By the time Webb had worked his way
from hoistman through singlejacker to assistant foreman, he was intimate with
the deepest arcana of dynamite. Or acted like he was. Even on his own time, he
loved to play with that miserable stuff, it drove Mayva just damn crazy, but
nothing she ever said had any effect, he was always out in some high meadow or
back of some waste dump, crouched down behind a rock with that fox’s gleam in
his eye, trembling, waiting for one of his old explosions. When he thought they
were the right age, he brought the children into it one by one, each taking to
it different. No way to tell from just watching of course who might grow up
into a decent bomber. Fact, Webb wasn’t sure he wanted to let any of them all
the way in.

Reef didn’t say much, but his eyes
got a squint into them that when you saw it, you learned to take care. Frank
was more curious, in a kidengineer kind of way, trying to blow up every form of
terrain he could talk Webb around to, just to see if there was a general rule
to any of it. When it came little Kit’s turn, he already had it in his mind
from a carnival show down at Olathe, where he’d seen a dynamited carny jump up
out of the blast good as new, hat you could blow up anybody over and over and
the worst they’d ever get’d be comically inconvenienced, so after one lesson he
was set to run out and dynamite schoolteachers, shift bosses, storekeepers,
anybody happened to offend him on a particular day, and it took extra vigilance
all around to keep him out of Webb’s string of personal blasting sheds. Lake,
bless herheart, did not make faces, or plug her ears, or sigh in boredom, or
anything else the boys had assumed she’d do. She picked up the process right
away, first time touching off a fine highradius concussion, creating several
tons of traprock
. . .
maybe smiling
some to herself, the way she had begun to do.

The question of where his loyalties
should—as against “did”—lie had been gnawing at Webb a good part of
his life since Shorty’s Billiard Saloon in Cripple, one he never was able to
get sorted out, really. If there’d only been the simple luxury of time, maybe
to do nothing but put his feet up on some wood porchrail, roll a cigarette,
gaze at the hills, let the breezes slide over him—sure—but as it
was, he never saw a minute that didn’t belong to somebody else. Any discussion
of deeper topics such as what to keep hammering at, what to let go, how much he
owed who, had to be done on the run, with people he hoped were not going to
fink him out.

“Not so sure sometimes I wouldn’t be
better off without all these family obligations,” he admitted once to Reverend
Moss, who, though lacking the authority to remit the sins of his flock of
dynamiters, made up for that with a bottomless appetite for listening to
complaints. “Just to be workin solo,” Webb muttered, “some room to move.”

“Maybe not.” And the Rev set out his
theory and practice of resistance to power. “You live any kind of a covert life
at all, and they are going to come after you. They hate loners. They can smell
it. Best disguise is no disguise. You must belong to this everyday
world—be in it, be of it. A man like you, with a wife,
children—last ones they tend to suspect, too much to lose, no one
 
could be that hard of a hardcase, they
think, no one is willing to risk losing that.”

“Well, they’d be right, I’m not.”

He shrugged. “Then better be no more
than what you seem.”

“But I can’t just—”

The Rev, who hardly ever so much as
smiled, was close to it now. “No, you can’t.” He nodded. “And God bless you for
it, class brother.”

“Mind telling me when I’m supposed to
sleep?”

“Sleep? is when you sleep. That all
you’re worried about?”

“Only that I wouldn’t want it out
where anybody can get to me—I’d sure need a safe bedroll someplace.”

“Someplace secret. But there’s ’at
word again—you can’t be having too many them secrets, can you, if you’re
trying to look normal.”