Against the Day (40 page)

At night
from up in the hills, the first
glimpse of Jeshimon was like a religious painting of hell used to scare kids
with in Sunday school. In dense columns from different parts of the scene,
something lurid and vaporous, like smoke, like dust, but not really either of
these, was seen to rise, roll upward, collecting here and there in the sky in
heaps as structured as cloud. When the moon went in behind one of these
patches, its light was said to

take on disturbing
colors,
colors which were to the
preternaturally black skies here what the colors of a sunset are to an ordinary
sky of daytime blue. Nothing any visitor wanted to contemplate for
long—in fact, certain nights the view had been known to drive the more
sensitive back over the ridgeline in search of other lodgings, no matter how
advanced the hour.

In town an ambience of limitless
iniquity reigned, a stifling warmth day and night, not an hour passing without
someone discharging a firearm at someone else, or a public sexual act, often in
a horsetrough among more than two parties, along with random horsewhippings,
buffaloings, robberies at gunpoint, poker pots raked in without the hand being
shown, pissing not only against walls but also upon passersby, sand in the
sugar bowls, turpentine and sulfuric acid in the whiskey, brothels dedicated to
a wide range of preferences, including arnophilia, or an unaccustomed interest
in sheep, some of the ovine nymphs in these establishments being quite
appealing indeed, even to folks who might not wholeheartedly share the taste,
with fleeces dyed in a variety of fashionable colors, including the perennial
favorites aquamarine and mauve, or wearing items of feminine—not to
mention masculine—attire (hats for some reason, being popular) meant to
enhance the animal’s sexual appeal—“though some of the flock,” as the Rev
confessed, “given the level of duplicity prevailing here, do turn out to be
mutton dressed as lamb or, on occasion, goat, for even these are regularly
sought out by a small but reliable fraction of the pilgrims who daily make
their way across the desert to this Lourdes of the licentious
. . . .
But let us not dwell further on
such patently abominable behavior. Time for my rounds, come on along,” invited
the Rev, “and I’ll show you the sights. Ah, here’s the Scalped Indian Saloon.
Shall we irrigate?” It was the first of many pauses in what would develop into
a daylong exercise in transgression. “You know the principle in medicine where
the cure grows right next to the cause. Swamp ague and willow bark, desert
sunburn and aloe cactus, well, the same goes in Jeshimon for sin and
redemption.”

The music in the saloons tended
toward choral partsinging, and there were more reed organs than parlor pianos,
and as many turnedaround collars among the customers as trail bandannas.

“We like to think of Jeshimon as
being under God’s wing,” said the Reverend Lube Carnal.

“But wait a minute, God doesn’t have
wings—”

“The God you’re thinking of, maybe
not. But out here, the one who looks after us, is it’s a kind of winged God,
you see.”

A troop of expressionless men on
matched black Arabians appeared in the street. It was Wes Grimsford, the
Marshal of Jeshimon, and his deputies.

“Notice anything in particular?”
whispered the Rev. Reef didn’t, which got him a look almost of pity. “It pays
to be observant in this town. Observe the star Wes is wearing.” Reef snuck a
look. It was a fivepointed star, nickelplated, like they tended to wear, except
that it was on upside down. “With the two points up—that’s the horns of
the Devil, and signifies that Elderly Gent and his works.”

“And it looked like such a godly town
too,” said Reef.

“Hope you don’t meet the Governor.
Keeps his hat on all the time, you can guess why, and is said to have a tail,
too.”

They all lived in fear of the Governor,
forever to and fro in Jeshimon and apt to arrive anywhere in town without
warning. What impressed a firsttime viewer was not any natural charisma, for he
had none, but rather a keen sense of something wrong in his appearance,
something prehuman in the face, the sloping forehead and cleanshaven upper lip,
which for any reason, or none, would start back into a simian grin which was
suppressed immediately, producing a kind of dangerous smirk that often lingered
for hours, and which, when combined with his glistening stare, was enough to
unnerve the boldest of desperadoes. Though he believed that the power that God
had allowed to find its way to him required a confident swagger, his gait was
neither earned nor, despite years of practice, authentic, having progressed in
fact little beyond an apelike trudge. The reason he styled himself Governor and
not President or King was the matter of executive clemency. The absolute power
of life and death enjoyed by a Governor within his territory had its appeal. He
traveled always with his “clemency secretary,” a cringing weasel named Flagg,
whose job was to review each day’s population of identified malefactors and
point with his groomed little head at those to be summarily put to death, often
by the Governor himself, though, being a notoriously bad shot, he preferred not
to have a crowd around for that. “Clemency” was allowing some to wait a day or
two before they were executed, the number of buzzards and amount of tower space
being finite.

Webb wasn’t quite gone when his
killers brought him into town, and for that reason Reef got to Jeshimon in time
to keep his father’s carcass from the carrion birds, and then the big decision
was whether to ride on after Deuce and Sloat or bring Webb back up to the San
Miguel for a decent burial. He would question his own judgment in years to
come, wonder in fact if he hadn’t just been trying to avoid an encounter with
the killers, whether he hadn’t gotten cowardice mixed in with honoring his
father and so forth, and by the time he could stop and think about it, there
was nobody to talk it over with.

Maybe the worst of it was that he
actually caught sight of them heading away toward the redrock country, shadows
in the near distance that were all

but artifacts of the merciless
daylight, the packhorse that had brought Webb wandering free and eventually
stopping to browse. As if offended at the loose morality abroad in Jeshimon,
Deuce and Sloat were disinclined to further gunplay. Though there was only one
of Reef, they decided to run anyway. They galloped away giggling, as if this
had been some highspirited prank and Reef its grumpy old target.

The buzzards circled, stately and
patient. The citizens of Jeshimon looked on with varying degrees of
disengagement. Nobody offered to help, of course, until Reef found himself at
the base of the tower in question, where a Mexican sidled up to him in the dusk
and motioned him around a couple of corners to a roofless ruin crammed with all
sorts of hardware gone to rust and dilapidation.
“
Quieres un cloque,
”
the man, scarcely older than
a boy, kept saying. It didn’t seem to be a question. Reef thought he was trying
to say “clock,” but then, peering into the shadows, saw at last what it
was—a set of grappling hooks. How they got this far inland, what kind of
ship they may have belonged to, sailing what sea, all without meaning here. The
rope for it
 
would cost extra. Reef
shelled out the pesos without haggling, not too surprised at the existence of
the silent market, for enough survivors must always want to scale the forbidden
walls, unwilling to leave matters to the mercies of Jeshimon. Through dusk’s
reassembly of the broken day therefore, as the first star appeared, Reef found
himself in growing desperation swinging iron hooks lariat style, trying not to
be in the way when he missed the rim of the tower and they came falling back
through the dark to clang in the beaten dust. His attempts soon gathered an
audience, mostly of children, from whom ordinarily he would have drawn grace,
but his amiability had deserted him. Many of these children kept buzzards for
pets, gave them names, found them pleasant company, and might be betting, for
all he knew, in their favor and against Reef.

At last the hooks dug in and held. By
now he was tired, not in the best condition to begin climbing, but there was no
choice. The Mexican who’d sold him the
cloque
was right there, growing
impatient, as if Reef had rented his contraption by the hour. Maybe he had.

So he ascended, into night swelling
like notes on a church organ. His bootsoles slipped repeatedly on the adobe
surface—it was exactly not rough enough to allow him an easy climb. His
arms were soon in agony, his leg muscles cramping as well.

About then he happened to sight
Marshal Grimsford heading out here with a small party of deputized townsfolk,
and Reef and Webb—that’s how it felt anyway, like his father was still
alive and this was their last adventure together—must flee without
discussion. He shot a carrion bird, maybe two,

among the great unhurried black
ascent of the others slung the corpse across his shoulders, no time to think of
the mystery of what had been Webb Traverse now a cargo of contraband to be run
past authorities gunning for them. Rappelled down the dark, bloodred wall,
stole a horse, found another outside of town to pack Webb on, hit the trail
south with no sign of pursuit and only a dim idea of how he’d got there.

During the ride
back up to Telluride, among
tablelands and cañons and redrock debris, past the stone farmhouses and fruit
orchards and Mormon spreads of the McElmo, below ruins haunted by an ancient
people whose name no one knew, circular towers and cliffside towns abandoned
centuries ago for reasons no one would speak of, Reef was able finally to think
it through. If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn’t
somebody ought to carry on the family business—you might say, become the
Kid?

It might’ve been the lack of sleep,
the sheer relief of getting clear of Jeshimon, but Reef began to feel some new
presence inside him, growing, inflating—gravid with what it seemed he
must become, he found excuses to leave the trail now and then and set off a
stick or two from the case of dynamite he had stolen from the stone powderhouse
at some mine. Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in
the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who
was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts. Now and then he creaked
around in the saddle, as if seeking agreement or clarification from Webb’s blank
eyes or the rictus of what would soon be a skull’s mouth. “Just getting cranked
up,” he told Webb. “Expressing myself.” Back in Jeshimon he had thought that he
could not bear this, but with each explosion, each night in his bedroll with
the damaged and redolent corpse carefully unroped and laid on the ground beside
him, he found it was easier, something he looked forward to all the alkaline
day, more talk than he’d ever had with Webb alive, whistled over by the ghosts
of Aztlán, entering a passage of austerity and discipline, as if undergoing
down here in the world Webb’s change of status wherever he was now
. . . .

He had brought with him a dime novel,
one of the Chums of Chance series,
The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the
Earth
,
and for a
while each night he sat in the firelight and read to himself but soon found he
was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime story, something to
ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death.

Reef had had the book for years. He’d
come across it, already dogeared,

scribbled in, torn and stained from a
number of sources, including blood, while languishing in the county lockup at
Socorro, New Mexico, on a charge of running a game of chance without a license.
The cover showed an athletic young man (it seemed to be the fearless Lindsay
Noseworth) hanging off a ballast line of an ascending airship of futuristic
design, trading shots with a bestially rendered gang of Eskimos below. Reef
began to read, and soon, whatever “soon” meant, became aware that he was reading
in the dark, lightsout having occurred sometime, near as he could tell, between
the North Cape and Franz Josef Land. As soon as he noticed the absence of
light, of course, he could no longer see to read and, reluctantly, having
marked his place, turned in for the night without considering any of this too
odd. For the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in
Socorro and at the Pole. Cellmates came and went, the Sheriff looked in from
time to time, perplexed.

At odd moments, now, he found himself
looking at the sky, as if trying to locate somewhere in it the great airship.
As if those boys might be agents of a kind of
extrahuman justice,
who
could shepherd Webb through whatever waited for him, even pass on to Reef wise
advice, though he might not always be able to make sense of it. And sometimes
in the sky, when the light was funny enough, he thought he saw something
familiar. Never lasting more than a couple of watch ticks, but persistent.
“It’s them, Pa,” he nodded back over his shoulder. “They’re watching us, all
right. And tonight I’ll read you some more of that story. You’ll see.”

Riding out of Cortez in the morning,
he checked the high end of the Sleeping Ute and saw cloud on the peak. “Be
rainin later in the day, Pa.”

“Is that Reef? Where am I? Reef, I
don’t know where the hell I am—”

“Steady, Pa. We’re outside of Cortez,
headin up to Telluride, be there pretty soon—”