Against the Day (18 page)

And yet the Normal World of Colorado,
how safe was that to be relying on, with death around every corner, when all
could be gone in an uncaught breath, quick as an avalanche? Not as if the Rev
wanted Heaven, he’d have been content with someplace the men didn’t have to be
set on each otherlike dogs in a dogfight for lungdestroying jobs that paid at
best $3blessed.50 a day—there had to be a living wage and some right to
organize, because alone a man was a mule dropping on the edge of life’s
mountain trail, ready to be either squashed flat or kicked into the void.

Turned out the Rev was yet another
casualty of the Rebellion. “So this is how we found our dear lost South again,
maybe not exactly the redemption we had in mind. Instead of the old plantation,
this time it was likely to be a silver camp, and the Negro slaves turned out to
be us. Owners found they could work us the same way, if anything with even less
mercy, they ridiculed and feared us as much as our folks done the slaves a
generation before—the big difference being if we should run away, they
sure ’s hell wouldn’t come chasing after us, no fugitive laws for them, they’d
just say fine, good riddance, there’s always more where they come from that’ll
work cheaper
. . . .
”

“That’s wicked, Rev.”

“Maybe, but we got just what ~what we
deserved.”

The atmosphere in Colorado those days
had become so poisoned that the owners were ready to believe anything about
anybody. They hired what they called “detectives,” who started keeping dossiers
on persons of interest. The practice quickly became commonplace. As
bureaucratic technique went, it wasn’t that much of a radical step even the
first time, and sooner than anybody would’ve thought, it became routine and all
but invisible.

Webb was presently thus recorded,
though what on the face of it was so dangerous about him, really? No more than
a rankandfiler in the Western Federation of Miners—but maybe those anarchistic
bastards were hiding their records. He might be conspiring
in secret.
Midnight
oaths, invisible ink. Wouldn’t be the first or only. And he seemed to move
around a lot, too much for a family man, you’d think, always had money too, not
a lot, but more than you’d expect from somebody working at miners’ wages
. . .
good worker, ain’t like that he kept
getting fired, no, it was always him ’s the one quitting, moving on camp to
camp, and somehow always bringing trouble with him. Well, not always. But how
many times did it take to stop being a coincidence and start being a pattern?

So they started poking. Just little
things. Advisements from the shift boss. Summonses to interviews up at the
office. Humiliation routines over short weight or docked hours. Saloon
ejections and tabs abruptly discontinued. Assignment to less hopeful, even
dangerous rockfaces and tunnels. The kids grew up seeing Webb thrown out of
places, more and more as time went on, often being right there with him, Frank
especially, when it happened. Picking up his hat for him, helping him get
vertical. Long as he knew there was an audience, Webb tried to make it look as
funny as he could.
“
Why
do they do that, Pa?”

 
“Oh
. . .
maybe
some educational point to it. You been keeping score like I asked, on who it is
’t’s doin it?”

“Stores, saloons, eating houses,
mostly.”

“Names, faces?” And they’d tell him
what they could remember. “And you notice how that some are makin up these
fancy excuses, and others are just sayin get the hell out?”

“Yeah but—”

“Well, it’s deservin of your close
attention, children. Varieties of hypocrite, see. Like learning the different
kinds of poison plants out here, some’ll kill the stock, some’ll kill you, but
use em right and some, believe it or not, will cure you instead. Nothing
vegetable or human that ain’t of some use, ’s all I’m sayin. Except mine
owners, maybe, and their gotdamned finks.”

He was trying to pass on what he
thought they should know, when he had a minute, though there was never the
time. “Here. The most precious thing I own.” He took his union card from his
wallet and showed them, one by one. “These words right here”—pointing to
the slogan on the back of the card— “is what it all comes down to, you
won’t hear it in school, maybe the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of
Independence and so forth, but if you learn nothing else, learn this by heart,
what it says here—‘Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the
producer thereof.’ Straight talk. No doubletalking you like the plutes do,
’cause with them what you always have to be listening for is the opposite of
what they say. ‘Freedom,’ then’s the time to watch your back in
particular—start telling you how free you are, somethin’s up, next thing
you know the gates have slammed shut and there’s the Captain givin you them
looks. ‘Reform’? More new snouts at the trough. ‘Compassion’ means the
population of starving, homeless, and dead is about to take another jump. So
forth. Why, you could write a whole foreign phrase book just on what
Republicans have to say.”

Frank had always taken Webb for what
he appeared to be—an honest, dedicated miner, exploited to the last, who
never got but a fraction of what his labor was worth. He had resolved himself
pretty early on to do better, maybe someday get licensed as an engineer, able
to call at least a few more of his own shots, at least not have to work quite
as unremittingly. He could find nothing wrong with this approach, and Webb
couldn’t quite summon up the heart to argue with him.

Reef, on the other hand, had seen pretty
early through that amiable pose of workingstiff family man and down into the
anger behind it, which he was no stranger to himself, wishing, as the insults
multiplied, wishing desperately, for the ability to destroy, purely through the
force of his desire, to point or stare furiously enough at any of these owners’
creatures to make them go up in bright, preferably loud, bursts of flame.
Somehow he convinced himself that Webb possessed, if not exactly this power of
instant justice, at least a secret life, in which, when night fell, he could
put on, say, a trick hat and duster which would make him invisible, and take to
the trails, grim and focused, to do the people’s work, if not God’s, the two
forces according to Reverend Gatlin having the same voice. Or even some
supernormal power, such as multiplying himself so he could be in several places
at once
. . . .
But Reef couldn’t
figure a way to bring any of it up with Webb. He would have begged to work as
his father’s apprentice and sidekick, any kind of drudgery necessary, but Webb
was immune—sometimes, indeed, pretty harshly so. “Don’tbeg, you hear me?
Don’t any of you ever, fucking, beg, me or nobody, for nothin.” A timely
cussword to drive in the lesson being part of Webb’s theory of education. But
standing even more in the way of Reef ever getting to be his Pop’s midnight
compadre was his own reluctance to trigger one of those towering conniption
fits allowed as a privilege to fathers only, which he could recognize sometimes
as a form of bad playacting, deployed for convenience, but, knowing the true
depths of Webb’s rage, was still not about to put himself in the way of. So he
settled instead for what confidences might accidentally leak through now and
then.

“There is a master list,” Webb
announced one day, “in Washington, D.C., of everybody they think is up to no
good, maintained by the U.S. Secret Service.”

“Thought those boys ’s there to keep
the President from gettin shot,” Reef said.

“By law, that and go after
counterfeiters. But there’s no law says they can’t loan their agents out to
anybody who needs well, say a secret type of individual. So these federal
gumshoes’re really all over the place, and noplace thicker on the slopes than
Colorado.”

“Come on, Pop, where are we, Russia?”

“Say, open up em peepers ’fore you
walk over a cliff someplace.”

It was more than the usual teasing
around. Webb was worried, and Reef guessed it was about being on that list.
When Webb didn’t smile, which more and more got to be days on end, he looked
years older. Of course, when he did smile, the pointed ears, nose, and chin,
the furrows from here to there, the cheerily snarled eyebrows, all revealed a
foxlike charm that extended to confidences kept safe, advice offered, rounds
stood without hesitation. But always, Reef noted, that part withheld that you
felt you couldn’t get to. The other Webb who rode by night, invisible. He
wanted to say, don’t it get you crazy, Pop, don’t you want to just kill some of
em, and keep on killing, and how can everybody out here just allow em to get
away with what they do? He started hanging around with known recreational
blasters his age and a little older, whose ideas of amusement included
loitering out by the tailings, drinking jug whiskey, and tossing among
themselves a lit stick of dynamite, timing it all so as not to be too close
when it went off.

Alarmed, Mayva brought up the
practice with Webb, who only shrugged. “Just good old dynamite rounders, every
sheriff has at least a dozen in his county. Reef knows enough to be careful
with the stuff, I trust him.”

“Just to set my own mind at rest,
though—”

“Sure, I’ll have a word if you like.”

He caught up with Reef out by one of
the lesser avalanche sites near Ouray, just sitting there as if he was waiting
for something. “Hear you and Otis and them’ve discovered HoldintheBag. Fun
ain’t it?”

“So far.” Reef’s grin was so fake
even Webb could see it.

“And it don’t scare you, son?”

“No. Some. Not enough, maybe,” with
one of those insane adolescent laughs at his own stumbling tongue.

“It scares
me.
”

“Oh, sure it does.” He looked at his
father, waiting for the rest of the joke. Webb understood that regardless of
how seriously Reef might someday come to take the subject, he himself would
never find a way to take dynamite as lightly as his son did. He gazed at Reef
in almost unconcealed envy, failing completely to recognize the darker thing,
the desire, the desperate need to create a radius of annihilation that, if it
could not include the ones who deserved it, might as well include himself.

Webb was no professor, he could only
doggedly repeat to his kids the same old lessons, point to the same obvious
injustices, hope some of it managed to sprout, and just continue with his own
work all dummied up, pokerfaced and unaccompanied, letting his anger build a head
of pressure till it was ready to do some useful work. If dynamite was what it
took, well, so be it—and if it took growing into a stranger to those kids
and looking like some kind of screaming fool whenever he did show up at home,
and then someday sooner or later losing them, their clean young gazes, their
love and trust, the unquestioning way they spoke his name, all that there is to
break a father’s heart, well, children grow up, and that would have to be
reckoned into the price, too, along with jail time, bullpens, beatings,
lockouts, and the rest. The way it happens. Webb would have to set aside his
feelings, not just the sentimental baby stuff but the terrible real ballooning
of emptiness at the core of his body when he paused to consider all that losing
them would mean. When he did get to pause. Good kids, too. All he knew how to
do was smash around the place, helpless, and risk them thinking it was aimed at
them, no counting on Mayva to get him out of it, being she was the target, too,
often as not, and no way he knew of to tell any of them otherwise. Not that
they’d believe it if he did. Not, after too short a while, not anymore.

“
We
ready?”

Veikko shrugged, reaching for the
plunger handle on the magneto box.

“Let’s do ’er.”

Four closely set blasts, cracks in
the fabric of air and time, merciless, bonestrumming. Breathing seemed beside
the point. Rising dirtyellow clouds full of wood splinters, no wind to blow
them anyplace. Track and trusswork went sagging into the dustchoked arroyo.

Webb and Veikko watched across a
meadow of larkspur and Indian paintbrush, and behind them a little creek rushed
down the hillside. “Seen worse,” Webb nodded after a while.

“Was beautiful! what do you want, end
of the world?”

“Sufficient unto the day,” Webb
shrugged. “Course.”

Veikko was pouring vodka. “Happy
Fourth of July, Webb. “