Against the Day (19 page)

or years after, there were tales told in Colorado of the
amazing, worldreversing night of Fourth of July Eve 1899. Next day’d be full of
rodeos, marching bands, and dynamite explosions—but that night there was
manmade lightning, horses gone crazy for miles out into the prairie,
electricity flooding up through the iron of their shoes, shoes that when they
finally came off and got saved to use for cowboyquoits, including important
picnic tourneys from Fruita to Cheyenne Wells, why they would fly directly and
stick on to the spike in the ground, or to anything else nearby made of iron or
steel, that’s when they weren’t collecting souvenirs on their way through the
air—gunmen’s guns came right up out of their holsters and buck knives out
from under pants legs, keys to traveling ladies’ hotel rooms and office safes,
miners’ tags, fencenails, hairpins, all seeking the magnetic memory of that
longago visit. Veterans of the Rebellion fixing to march in parades were unable
to get to sleep, metallic elements had so got to humming through their
bloodmaps. Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby
were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by
through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers’
offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they
were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed. Young Kit Traverse happened
to be in on the highvoltage experiment that had caused it all, working as a
matter of fact that summer in Colorado Springs, for Dr. Tesla himself. By now
Kit thought of himself as a Vectorist, having arrived at that mathematical
persuasion not by any abstract route but, as most had up till then, by way of
the Electricity, and its practical introduction, during his own early years, at
an increasingly hectic clip, into lives previously innocent of it.

In those days, he was a roving
electrical apprentice—“Could call me a
circuit
rider, I guess”—journeying
one mountain valley to the next, looking to keep from ever going down into
another mine, taking any job that happened to be open, long as it was
something, anything, to do with electricity. Electricity was all the go then in
southwest Colorado, nearly every stream intersecting sooner or later with some
small private electrical plant for running mine or factory machinery or
lighting up towns—basically a turbine generator located underneath a
waterfall, which given the altitudes out here could be pretty near anyplace a
fellow might want to look. Kit was big enough for his age, and foremen were
willing to go along with whatever age he filled in on the forms, when there
were forms at all.

Something, some devotedness or need
that in those days among less credentialed working stiffs was finding its
expression in union loyalty, disposed slightly older kid engineering students,
out here usually for the summer from back east, Cornell, Yale, so forth, to
help Kit out, to lend him books he needed, Maxwell’s
Treatise on Electricity
and Magnetism
of 1873, Heaviside’s more recent
Electromagnetic Theory
(1893),
and so forth. Once Kit had the knack of the notation, which didn’t take long,
he was off to the races.

It could have been a religion, for
all he knew—here was the god of Current, bearing light, promising death
to the falsely observant, here were Scripture and commandments and liturgy, all
in this priestly Vectorial language whose texts he had to get his head around
as they came, study when he ought to be sleeping, by miners’ candles or coaloil
light and often enough by the actual incandescence from the same electrical
mystery he was studying, growing hitormiss into an understanding, out of his
hankering in the course of a day’s work just to
see
in some way—directly,
without equations, the way Faraday had, according to the folklore
anyway—what was going on inside the circuits he was obliged to work with.
Which seemed fair enough. After a while, now and then, he found it was him
explaining things to the collegiate hotshots—not everything, of course,
they knew everything—but maybe a detail here and there, manipulating
vector symbols that stood for unseen—though easily enough and sometimes
dangerously felt—electrical events being a chore not too different when
you came to it from situating the wheelcases under the falls, getting the
turbines leveled and solidly supported, tweaking the shapes of their blades,
wrestling together the penstocks, suction pipes and wheelcases and so forth,
all or most of it sweat and sore muscles and arguing with foremen, struggling
up and down the terrain finding purchases and setting up tackle, not to mention
when necessary some bricklaying, carpentry, riveting, and welding—going
without sleep and being yelled at, but none of it too mysterious until one
night out west of Rico someplace a window opened for him into the Invisible,
and a voice, or something like a voice, whispered unto him, saying, “Water
falls, electricity flows—one flow becomes another, and thence into light.
So is altitude transformed, continuously, to light.” Words to that effect,
well, maybe not words exactly
. . . .
And
he found himself staring into the ordinarily blinding glow of a lamp filament,
which he found instead unaccountably lambent, like light through the crack of a
door left open, inviting him into a friendly house. With the stream in question
roaring in sovereign descent just a few feet away. It had not been a dream, nor
the sort of illumination he would someday learn that Hamilton had experienced
at Brougham Bridge in Ireland in 1845—but it represented a jump from one
place to another with who knew what perilous æther opening between and beneath.
He saw it. The vectorial expressions in the books, surface integrals and
potential functions and such, would henceforth figure as clumsier repetitions
of the truth he now possessed in his personal interior, certain and unshakable.

Word one day
was out on the electricians’
grapevine that the renowned Dr. Nikola Tesla was on his way out to Colorado
Springs, to set up an experimental station. Kit’s sidekick Jack Gigg was unable
to sit still. He kept running in and out of Kit’s vicinity. “Hey Kit, ain’t you
ready yet, come on, Kit, we’ll camp out up there, there’s got to be plenty of
jobs just waiting for a couple of old hands like us.”

“Jack, we’re seventeen.”

“Is what I’m sayin. Pike’s Peak or
Bust!”

Kit remembered visiting Colorado
Springs as a youngster. Streetcars and a sevenstory building. Violent red
sunsets behind Pike’s Peak. The cograilway car with its roof the same color.
The station at the summit and the spidery observation deck on top of it, that
Frank got so nervous about climbing up on he was kidded mercilessly about it
forever after.

They found the Tesla operation set up
about a mile out of town, near the Union Printers’ Home. They were greeted by a
blunt individual with some way of the Cañon City alumnus about him, who
introduced himself as Foley Walker. Kit and Jack assumed he was in charge of
hiring. Later they found out he was special assistant to famed financier
Scarsdale Vibe, and out here to keep an eye on how the money, much of it Mr.
Vibe’s, was being spent.

Next day, on his way to the mess
tent, Kit was accosted by Foley. “You are crazy, as I see it,” this deputy of
Wealth suggested, “to get out of the house, and be doing somethin besides the
swamping, am I close?”

Kind of a line you used on girls, it
occurred to Kit—tried it himself, never

worked. “I’ve been out of the house,”
he muttered, “as you call it, for a few years now.”

“Nothin’ personal,” said Foley. “Only
wonderin if you’ve heard of Mr. Vibe’s Lieutenants of Industry Scholarship
Program.”

“Sure. Last barrelhouse I was in,
’at’s all they talked about.”

Foley patiently explained that the
Program was always scouting around for kids with potential engineering talent
to finance through college.

“School of Mines, something like
that?” Kit interested despite himself.

“Even better,” said Foley. “How does
Yale College sound to you?”

“Like ‘Mr. Merriwell, we really need
this touchdown,
’ ”
said Kit in a
passable backeast voice.

“Seriously.”

“Tuition? Room and board?”

“All included.”

“Automobile? Champagne deliveries day
or night? Sweater with a big
Y
on it?”

“I can do that,” said Foley.

“Horsefeathers. Only Scarsdale Vibe
his mighty self can do that, mister.”

“I am he.”

“You’re not ‘he.’ I read the papers
and look at the magazines, you ain’t even ‘him.
’ ”

“If I may elucidate.” Foley once
again was obliged to tell his Civil War Substitute story, a chore growing, with
the years, ever more wearying. During the Rebellion, shortly after Antietam,
just as he was beginning his sophomore year at New Haven, Scarsdale Vibe,
having turned the right age for it, had received a notice of conscription.
Following the standard practice, his father had purchased for him a substitute
to serve in his place, assuming that upon obtaining a properly executed receipt
for the three hundred dollars, why that would be that. Imagine everyone’s
surprise when, a couple of decades later, Foley appeared early one day in the
outer offices of the Vibe Corporation, claiming to’ve been this very substitute
conscriptee and producing documents to back it up. “I’m a busy man,” Scarsdale
might have said, or “How much does he want, and will he take a check?” Instead,
curious, he decided to have a look personally.

Foley was ordinaryenough looking, not
having yet taken on the more menacing aspect that the years in their peculiar
mercy would provide him—what might’ve been exceptional was his idea of
social or phatic conversation. “Took a Reb bullet for you, sir,” was the first
thing out of his mouth. “Pleased to meet you, of course.”

“A bullet. Where?”

“
Cold Harbor.”

“Yes, but where?”

Foley tapped his head beside the left
temple. “Pretty spent by the time it got to me—didn’t make it all the way
through, and nobody has ever known how to get it out. They used to stand around
like I wasn’t there, discussing the Brain and Its Mysteries. If a fellow could
keep his ears open, why it was like going to medical school on the cheap. Fact
is, guided only by what I remember of those bedside conferences, I did go on to
perform a few minor head surgeries in my time.”

“So it’s still in there?”

“Minié ball, judging from everybody
else’s wounds around that time.”

“Giving you any trouble?”

His smile, in its satisfaction, struck
even Scarsdale as terrible. “Wouldn’t call it trouble. You’d be amazed what I
get to see.”

“And
. . .
hear?”

“Call em communications from far, far
away.”

“Is your army pension taking care of
this? Anything you need that you’re not getting?”

Foley watched Scarsdale’s hands
getting ready to reach, for either a pistol or a checkbook. “You know what the
Indians out west believe? That if you save the life of another, he becomes your
responsibility forever.”

“That’s all right. I can take care of
myself. I have all the bodyguards I need.”

“Isn’t exactly your
physical
wellbeing
I’m instructed to look after.”

“Oh. Of course, those voices you
hear. Well, what are they saying to you, Mr. Walker?”

“You mean lately? A lot of talk about
some kerosene company out in Cleveland. Fact, not a day goes by there isn’t
something. You’d know better’n me. ‘The Standard Oil’? Supposed to be
‘expanding their capital,’ whatever that means. Voices say now’d be a good time
to buy in?”

“Everything all right in here, Mr.
Vibe?”

“Fine, Bruno, just fine, thanks.
Let’s indulge this gentleman, shall we. Let’s just buy a hundred shares of this
kerosene stock, if it exists, and see what happens.”

“Voices say five hundred’d be
better.”

“Had your breakfast yet, Mr. Walker?
show him the company mess hall, Bruno, if you’d be so kind.”

Foley Walker’s advice that day
provided critical acceleration in the growth of the legendary Vibe fortune. He
polished off a side of bacon and the day’s output of the Company henhouse up on
the H.Q.’s roof, plus a loaf of bread and ten gallons of coffee, give or take a
cup, before Bruno, expecting never to lay eyes on him again, was able to usher
him into the street puffing on one of a fistful of Scarsdale’s secondbest
Havanas. A week later, after a frantic search of various opium joints and
concert saloons, he was located and hired on as an “investigative consultant,”
and thenceforward Scarsdale grew increasingly reluctant to make any move of a
business nature without him, expanding that definition, in the course of time,
to include the outcomes of boxing matches, baseball games, and especially horse
races, as to which Foley’s advice was seldom in error.

The Twin Vibes, as they soon came to
be known, were sighted together often at Monmouth Park and Sheepshead Bay as
well as tracks farther afield, togged out in matching sport ensembles of a
certain canaryandindigo check, screaming and waving fistfuls of betting
slips—when they were not careering at excessive speeds up and down the
avenues of Manhattan in a maroon phæton whose brass and nickelwork were kept
rubbed to a blinding shine, side by side in their pale dusters, appearing to
the unwary spectator as ineluctable as any other Apocalyptic Riders.