Against the Day (35 page)

First dynamite blast Lew had ever
witnessed was at a county fair in Kankakee. There were motorcycle daredevils
snarling round and round half blind from their own exhaust smoke inside a Wall
of Death. There were young women in carnival attire, to view whom in anything
less would cost an extra nickel and into whose fencedoff vicinity kids could
only hope to sneak. There was the Astounding Galvanic Grandpa, who sprouted electric
plumes of many colors from his toetips to his ears while hanging on to a
generator being cranked by some lucky local kid. And there was the attraction
known as the Dynamite Lazarus, where an ordinarylooking workhand in cap and
overalls climbed inside a pine casket painted black, which a crew then solemnly
proceeded to stuff with a shedful of dynamite and attach a piece of
 
vivid orange fuse to that didn’t look
nearly long enough. After they’d nailed down the lid, their foreman flourished
a strikeanywhere match, ignited it dramatically on the seat of his pants, and
lit the fuse, whereupon everybody ran like hell. Somewhere a drummer began a
drumroll that grew louder, roughins overlapping faster and faster as the fuse
burned ever shorter—Lew, in the grandstand, was far enough away to see
the box begin to explode a splitsecond before he heard the blast, time enough
to think maybe nothing would happen after all, and then the front of that
compression wave hit. It was the end of something—if not his innocence,
at least of his faith that things would always happen gradually enough to
afford time to do something about it in. It wasn’t just the loudness, mind, it
was the
shape.

He had run across a homeopathic
doctor or two and was aware of the theory that you could cure an ailment with
very small doses of some specific chemical which, if swallowed full strength,
would produce the same symptoms. Maybe eating Cyclomite had been helping him
build up an immunity to explosions. Or maybe it was dumb luck. But wouldn’t you
know, the minute Lew had brought up with Nate Privett his doubts about the
Kieselguhr Kid—in effect quitting the case—that’s just when
whatever
it was
decided to have a crack at him. He’d left his horse back upstream
and was quietly pissing into a small arroyo when the world turned all inside
out. Lew knew the carnival theory, which was to throw yourself into the middle
of the

blast the second it went off, so that
the shockwave would already be outside of and heading away from you, leaving
you safe inside the vacuum at the center—maybe knocked out for a little,
but all in one piece. But when it came right to
doing
it,
with no choice left but to dive
at the sparks of the tooshort fuse, into that radiant throatway leading to who
knew what, in the faith that there would be something there, and not just Zero
and blackness
. . .
well if there’d
been time to think about it, he might have hesitated, and that would’ve done
him for certain.

Wherever he was when he came to, it
didn’t seem like Colorado anymore, nor these creatures ministering to him your
usual run of trail scum either—more like visitors from elsewhere, and far
away, too. Through it all, as he began now to recall, he had stayed awake, out
of his body, gliding above the scene without a care in the world—whatever
“the world” meant right at the moment—trying to keep it just like that,
nonmental and serene, for as long as possible—till he saw they were about
to give up, pile a few rocks over him and leave him there for the critters, which
is what at last obliged him to make a hasty jump back into his carcass—by
now, he couldn’t help noticing, strangely aglow.

“I say Nigel, he is at least
breathing,
isn’t he?”

“Honestly Neville, however should I
know, isn’t one supposed to hold a mirror or something?”

“Wait! I’ve one in my kit
. . . .
”

“Vain creature!”

So the New Lew’s first sight of the
world reconstituted was his own astonished, hairclogged nostrils, bobbing
around in some fancy oval traveler’s mirror framed by silver lady’s tresses, or
maybe weeds in the water, expensive no doubt, and being rhythmically blurred by
breathing, apparently his own.

“Here.” One of them had produced a
flask. Lew didn’t recognize what was inside, some kind of brandy he guessed,
but he took a long pull anyhow and was soon on his feet. The boys had even
found his horse close by and physically undamaged, though mentally could be a
different story.

“Thanks, fellows, guess I’ll be on my
way.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” cried
Neville.

“Whoever tried to blow you up back
there might want another go,” said Nigel.

Lew had a look at the two of them.
His rescuers did not on first inspection seem to offer much deterrent to
further bombroller interest in his person. Trilby hats, velvet kneebritches,
fringe haircuts, gunbelts adorned with avalanche lilies and wild primrose. The
Oscar Wilde influence, he guessed. Since the famous poet had returned to
England from his excursion to Amer

ica, brimming with enthusiasm for the
West and Leadville in particular, all kinds of flamboyant adventurers had been showing
up in these mountains.

Then again, where else did he have to
go to anymore, now that he’d crossed over what had just been revealed with such
clarity as the terrible American divide, between hunter and prey?

By nightfall they
were among old Anasazi ruins up west
of Dolores Valley someplace.

“Like a Red Indian Stonehenge!”

“Only different!”

They sat in a “mystic triangle” and
lit aromatic candles and some handrolled cigarettes of local
grifa,
and
one of them produced a strange, though not all that strange, deck of cards.

“What are these—they’re
Мех, ain’t they?”

“British, actually. Well, Miss
ColmanSmith is West Indian
. . . .
”

“These
espadas
here I
recognize, and these are
copas,
but what’s with this customer hangin’
upside down with his leg bent in a figure four—”

“It’s the Hanged Man, of course
. . . .
Oh, I say, do you mean you’ve
never
seen a Tarot pack before?”

“Every chartomancer’s dream!” and
“Whizzo!” and so forth, including an embarrassingly long examination of Lew’s
face. “Yes, well, dark hair and eyes, that’s usually the Knight of
Swords—”

“What you must do now, Lewis, as
Querent, if you don’t mind, is to ask the cards for the answer to a specific
question.”

“Sure. How many Chinese living in
South Dakota?”

“No, no—something about your
life, that you need to know. Something personal. “

“Like, ‘What in hell’s going on
here,’ would that do it?”

“It might. Let’s inquire, shall we.”
And sure enough, the last card to turn up in the layout, the one these birds
kept saying really mattered, was that Hanged Man again.

Overhead every few seconds, arcs of
light went falling in all directions. It was the Perseid meteor shower, a
seasonal event, but for a while it seemed like that the whole firmament was
coming unstitched. Not to mention Indian ghosts sweeping by all night, as amused
as Indians ever got with the mysteries of the white man.

Next morning the trio rode south,
looking to pick up the train in New Mexico—Neville and Nigel being on the
way back to their native England—and within the week found themselves
aboard a strangely luxurious string of

oversize parlor, dining, and club
cars, even the crew’s caboose turning out to be fancier than the average
Chicago hotel suite. The payback for all this lavish appointment was a rumor,
inescapable as engine soot, of a mysterious plot to blow the train up.
“Probably gonna all have to get out and walk,” opined Mr. Gilmore, the senior
conductor.

“Not a cozy situation, Chief,” Lew
reverting to his former identity, which seemed more and more lately to be off
on an extended vacation, or maybe even world tour. “What’ve we got here, reds?
Wops? some gang of boxblowers?”

Mr. Gilmore produced a handkerchief
the size of a saloon towel to mop off his brow. “You name it, and there’s at
least one story. Only part they all have in common is it’s gonna be a hell of a
blowup. Bigger than dynamite. Whole stretch of Texas, maybe New Mexico, turned
to badlands quick as a maiden’s sigh.”

So they proceeded from one depot to
the next, waiting for the terrible moment, palatial towers of carved stone and
fancy millwork coming up over the edge of the brushland, looming out of
earlymorning thunderstorms, then, presently, shining in the downpours, roads
and shacks, fences and crossroads saloons
.
. .
passing down main streets of towns, attended as they crept in and
through by riders in trail slickers who galloped alongside for miles, small
boys who jumped on and off whenever the train slowed for grades or curves,
elderly humorists who pretended to lie down on the track to catch a snooze only
to roll out of the way cackling at the last minute, lines of drovers at
trackside who just stood and watched the leisurely trundling, no telling what
was on their minds, reflections of clouds in the sky blowing smoothly across
their eyeballs, horses patiently hitched nearby, exchanging looks now and then,
all of whom seemed to be in on the story, which, however, varied. Sometimes
whatever was on the way might resemble a tornado the size of a county, a
nightbringing presence at the horizon, moving across the plain, while for others
it might be lights in the sky, “A second Moon, that you can’t tell how close or
how dangerous
. . . .
” What Lew had
been trying not to think about was the Kieselguhr Kid or somebody who’d decided
to call themselves that, because sometimes it was like he was out there, a
spirit hovering just over the nearest ridgeline, the embodiment of a past
obligation that would not let him go but continued to haunt, to insist.

Lew, bewildered, sat and watched and
mostly just smoked cigars and covertly nibbled at his dwindling Cyclomite
supply, trying to make sense of the alterations proceeding inside his brain,
eyes gleaming with unaccustomed emotional dew.

They arrived in Galveston without
incident but with whatever was nearly

upon them hanging, waiting to
descend. Neville and Nigel booked transatlantic passage on a louchelooking
freighter whose flag neither of them recognized, and spent the rest of the day
attempting to communicate with a Chinese gentleman who they had somehow
convinced themselves was a retailer of opiates.

“Good heavens, Nigel, we nearly
forgot! The others are going to be ever so frightfully upset if we don’t bring
them back some
Wild West souvenirs
,
if not an actual
scalp
or something.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” said Lew.

“Yes, but you’d be perfect!” cried
Neville.

“For what?”

“We’ll bring
you
to England,”
Nigel declared. “That’s what we’ll do.”

“Don’t have a ticket.”

“It’s all right, we’ll stow you
away.”

“Don’t I need a passport?”

“Not for England. Just don’t forget
your
cowboy sombrero.
It is authentic, isn’t it?”

Lew had a close look at them. The
boys were flushed around the eyeballs, their pupils were tiny pinpoints you
could hardly make out, and they were giggling so much you had to ask them to
repeat things more than once.

He ended up down in a cargo hold for
the next two weeks, inside a steamer trunk with a couplethree discreet airholes
bored into it. From time to time, one of the N’s crept down with food stolen
from the mess decks, though Lew didn’t have an appetite.

“This tub’s been rocking around
some,” he stopped vomiting long enough to mention.

“They say there’s some sort of
dreadful storm blowing up from the south,” Nigel said.

Only when they got to England did
they learn of the disastrous hurricane that had struck Galveston the day after
they left—135mileperhour winds, the city underwater, six thousand dead.

“We got out just in time,” said
Nigel.

“Yes what frightfully good luck.”

“Oh, but I say, look at Lewis, he’s
gone all neuræsthenic.”

“Why Lewis, whatever is the matter?”

“Six thousand people,” said Lew, “to
begin with.”

“Happens out in India all the time,”
said Nigel. “It is the world, after all.”

“Yes Lewis, wherever could you have
been living, before that frightful bomb brought you to us?”