Against the Day (33 page)

“You open and read his mail?”

“Not like that he has any name or
fixed address—not like that we’re some
damn forwarding service,
is
it?”

“Don’t mean he ain’t got a right to
his privacy.”

“His
. . .
Oh. Well, glory, if this isn’t just rejuvenating, a discussion
about rights of the criminal, takes a man back to the campfires of his youth,
only then it was God didn’t have a name or address.”

The brown jug came out, and Burke
Ponghill grew confessional. The search for the mysterious dynamiter had in its
relentlessness begun to affect families entirely unconnected with the case,
including Ponghill’s own, putting them under unaccustomed pressures either to
turn various black sheep in as likely candidates or to protect them from the
law. The conflict was explicit, between the State and one’s blood loyalties.
The Ponghill residence became a house divided. “It’s moral idiocy, Ma, examine
his skull, the lobes for social feeling just aren’t there.”

“Buddy, he’s your own brother.”

“They’re going to catch him and shoot
him down, don’t you know by now what these gotdamn people are like?”

“And if you turn him in, they’ll hang
him.”

“Not with a good lawyer.”

“
Those
sons of bitches don’t
work for free.”

“Sometimes they work for conscience.”

“Oh, Buddy.” A lifetime of attending
to his rosy expectations and wildgoose schemes in that sigh, but he went right
on as if he hadn’t heard it.

“So Buddy turned in our little
brother,” Burke told Lew, “and now the best Brad can hope for is stay alive
long enough to get the trial moved down to Denver, where our local junta don’t
cut that much of a figure, and the papers back east can get to the story
. . . .
”

Lew left
the little roughmilled shed of a
printer’s office and headed back down the valley. So far this trip, he had not
been shot at, or not for verifiably sure, but the foreboding that he would be
had grown, in recent days, almost to a gastric condition. He had learned early
on the job to attend to land and townscapes only out as far as the range of the
firearms most likely to be in the hands of possible harmdoers—past that
radius all those mountains and sunsets’d have to get along without the admiring
eyes of Lew Basnight.

As the evening crept across the
valley, and farm stoves were poked up to working heat, and lamps lit indoors
whose light soon filled the windowframes, outshining the departing sunlight on
the spruce siding around them and draining down among the rows of the vegetable
patches, the sawn ends of logs in woodpiles dyed the same intense orange
yellow, the bark nearly black, silvered, full of shadows
. . .
Lew found himself, as usual this time of day, growing a
little shorttempered with all this spiritsqueezing,

horseabusing sleuth exercise denying
him even this hour, for everybody else a chance at some domestic ease. But the
choice was this or Denver, behind his desk, blowing dust off of files too
outdated to need to saddle up for anymore.

At the next convenient rise, he
paused and regarded the peaceful valley. Maybe he had not yet seen it all, but
Lew would be reluctant to wager more than a glass of beer that Chicago, for all
its urban frenzy, had much on this country out here. He guessed that every
cabin, outbuilding, saloon, and farmhouse in his field of sight concealed
stories that were anything but peaceful—horses of immoderate beauty had
gone crazy, turned like snakes and taken from their riders chunks of body flesh
that would never grow back, wives had introduced husbands to the culinary
delights of mushrooms that would turn a silver coin to black, vegetable farmers
had shot sheepherders over some unguarded slide of the eye, sweet little girls
had turned overnight into whooping, hollering brides of the multitude, obliging
men in the family to take actions not always conducive to public calm, and, as
boilerplate to the contract with its fate, the land held the forever unquiet
spirits of generations of Utes, Apaches, Anasazi, Navajo, Chirakawa, ignored,
betrayed, raped, robbed, and murdered, bearing witness at the speed of the
wind, saturating the light, whispering over the faces and in and out the lungs
of the white trespassers in a music toneless as cicadas, unforgiving as any
grave marked or lost.

When he left Chicago, nobody had come
to see him off, not even Nate Privett, who you might’ve expected would’ve been
there just to make sure he left. Thinking back over how he’d got to this point
in his life, Lew guessed it was close enough to leaving under a cloud.

Not so long ago, he wouldn’t have
known how to take sides. In the course of his Anarchisthunting days in Chicago,
Lew had found his way to a convenient insulation, for a while anyhow, from too
much sympathy for either victim or perpetrator. How could you walk into the aftermath
of a bombing and get anywhere by going all to pieces over the senseless waste
of life, the blood and pain? Only slowly would it occur to his ultrakeen
detective’s reasoning that these bombs could have been set by anybody,
including those who
 
would clearly
benefit if “Anarchists,” however loosely defined, could be blamed for it.
Neither, in the course of long pursuits down back of the Yards and beyond, was
it escaping his attention how desperately miserable were the lives found among
the realities of Anarchist communion, though it promised a man his only
redemption from a captivity often cruel as the old Negro slaver). Crueler,
sometimes. Lew began to find himself entertaining seductive daydreams about
picking up some surrogate bomb, a chunk of ice

or, better, a frozen pile of horsedroppings, to sling at the
next silk hat he saw serenely borne along in the street, the next mounted
policeman beating on an unprotected striker.

It was most obvious at the Yards, but
there was the Pullman plant, too, and the steel mills and McCormick Reaper, and
not only Chicago—he’d bet you could find this same structure of
industrial Hells wrapped in public silence everyplace. There was always some
Fortyseventh Street, always some legion of invisible on one side of the account
book, set opposite a handful on the other who were getting very, if not
incalculably, rich at their expense.

The altitude, the scale of the
country out here, put a balloonheaded clarity onto vision when directed at mine
owners and workers alike, revealing the Plutonic powers as they daily sent
their legions of gnomes underground to hollow out as much of that broken domain
as they could before the overburden collapsed, often as not on top of their
heads, though what did it matter to the Powers, who always had more dwarves
waiting, even eagerly, to be sent below. Scabs and Union men, Union and scabs,
round and round, changing sides, changing back again, sure didn’t help with
what he felt no embarrassment in thinking of as a contest for his soul.

Nevertheless he soldiered along in
Denver, getting to know who was who, becoming a regular at Pinhorn’s Manhattan
steak house, running tabs at every other bar along Seventeenth Street, making
friends among crime reporters who hung out at Tortoni’s up on Arapahoe and
Gahan’s saloon across the street from City Hall, paid off enough of his losses
at Ed’s Arcade to stay friendly with associates of Ed Chase, the boss of the
redlight district, went whole days at a time without thinking much of Chicago
or comparing the two cities but was unable somehow to stay cooped up in town
for more than a week or two before finding himself back on the Denver & Rio
Grande, headed up into mining country. Couldn’t keep away, though each time he
went out, it seemed relations between owners and miners had worsened. It got
like practically every day out here saw another little Haymarket, dynamite in
these hardrock mountains not being quite the exotic substance it had been in
Chicago. Pretty soon he was meeting possesize units on the trail, armed to the
teeth, calling themselves Citizens’ Alliances or Proprietors’ Auxiliaries. They
were carrying, some of them, quitesophisticated firearms, armyissue
KragJørgensen rifles, repeating shotguns, field howitzers disassembled and
packed along on strings of mules. At first he was able to ride by with no more
trouble than a nod and salute off his hatbrim, but each time the atmosphere was
a little more tense, and soon they were stopping him and asking what they must
have figured were pointed questions. He

learned to bring along his Illinois and Colorado licenses
after a while, though many of these jaspers couldn’t read too well.

By now he had been slowly pushed out
of half his office space by an accumulation of files on Anarchists professional
and amateur, labor organizers, bombers, potential bombers, hired guns, and so
on—girls he kept hiring to help him out with the typewriting and
officetending lasted on average a month before they ran off, exasperated, to
the comforting simplicities of marriage, a parlor house on The Row,
schoolteaching, or some other office or shop in town where a person could at
least slip off her shoes and have a good chance of finding them again.

Lew had too much trouble even
locating jackets on individual cases to be able to stand back and put any of it
together, but what he could begin to see was that both sides in this were
organized, it wasn’t just unconnected skirmishing, a dynamite blast here and
there, a few shots from ambush—it was a war between two fullscale armies,
each with its chain of command and longterm strategic aims—civil war
again, with the difference now being the railroads, which ran out over all the
old boundaries, redefining the nation into exactly the shape and size of the
rail network, wherever it might run to.

He had felt it as early as the
Pullman strike back in Chicago, federal troops patrolling the streets, the city
at the center of twenty or thirty railway lines, radiating with their
interconnections out to the rest of the continent. In crazier moments it seemed
to Lew that the steel webwork was a living organism, growing by the hour,
answering some invisible command. He found himself out lying at suburban
tracksides in the deep nighttime hours, between trains, with his ear to the
rails, listening for stirrings, quickening, like some anxious fathertobe with
his ear to the abdomen of a beloved wife. Since then American geography had
gone all peculiar, and what was he supposed to be doing stuck out here in
Colorado, between the invisible forces, half the time not knowing who hired him
or who might be fixing to do him up
. . . .

Nearly every workday, in neighborhood
saloons, eatinghouses, and cigar stores, he found he was running across and
even getting in conversations with folks, from both the Union and the Owners
Associations, who previously had been only names in field reports. The really
odd thing he began to notice was that the names of owners’ operatives were also
turning up among his files on the mine workers. Some were wanted by authorities
in distant states for crimes against owners, and not always trivial offenses
either—union outlaws, even Anarchist bombers, yet here they were at the
same time on the payroll of the Owners Association. “Strange,” Lew muttered,
puffing energetically on a cigar and grinding the mouth end of it to shreds
with his

teeth, because he was getting a sick
feeling, not all from swallowing tobacco juice, that somebody might be playing
him for a sap. Who were these birds—dynamiters pretending to work for the
owners while they planned more outrages? owners’ stooges infiltrating the
W.F.M. to betray their brothers? Were some of them, God help him,
both—greedy pikers playing both sides and loyal only to U.S. currency?

“Here’s what you do,” suggested Tansy
Wagwheel, whom this job in just a few short weeks would drive screaming down
Fifteenth Street and on into the embrace of the Denver County publicschool
system, “It’s in this wonderful book I keep close to me all the time,
A
Modern Christian’s Guide to Moral Perplexities.
Right here, on page
eightysix, is your answer. Do you have your pencil? Good, write this
down—‘Dynamite Them All, and Let Jesus Sort Them Out.
’ ”

“Uh . . .”

“Yes, I know
. . . .
” The dreamy look on her face could not possibly be for
Lew.

“Does it do horse races?” Lew asked after
a while.

“Mr. Basnight, you card.”

Next time Lew
got up into the embattled altitudes
of the San Juans, he noticed out on the trail that besides the usual
strikebreaking vigilantes there were now cavalry units of the Colorado National
Guard, in uniform, out ranging the slopes and creeksides. He had thought to
obtain, through one of the least trustworthy of his contacts in the Mine Owners
Association, a safepassage document, which he kept in a leather billfold along
with his detective licenses. More than once he ran into ragged groups of
miners, some with deeply bruised or swelling faces, coatless, hatless,
shoeless, being herded toward some borderline by mounted troopers. Or the
Captain said some borderline. Lew wondered what he should be doing. This was
wrong in so many ways, and bombings might help but would not begin to fix it.

It wasn’t long before one day he
found himself surrounded—one minute aspenfiltered shadows, the next a
band of Ku Klux Klan nightriders, and here it was still daytime. Seeing these
sheetsporting vigilantes out in the sunlight, their attire displaying all sorts
of laundering deficiencies, including cigar burns, food spills, piss blotches,
and shit streaks, Lew found, you’d say, a certain deemphasis of the sinister,
pointy hoods or not. “Howdy, fellers!” he called out, friendly enough.