Against the Day (55 page)

“Say, but that HairTrigger Bob, now,
he don’t give too much of a hoot about who lives, who don’t, nothing like ’at
. . . .
”

“Maybe what he don’t understand is
neither do I.”

“Common saloon talk,” Ellmore peering
briefly at Frank as if he just might be another of these junior Romeos.
“Listen, Loomis, now, this is getting me puzzled, I fear. Is Bob likely to
approve of his missus all the way down the hill here? We need a handle on this
fairly quick. You see that Loopy anyplace?”

Frank surfacing from his giant
bowlful of fiery tripe, “This Mrs. Meldrum—she’s troublesome?”

“
Joven,
”
mumbled Ellmore
through his food, “nobody can tell you much about her for certain. Now
trouble,
o’ course
. . .
well there’s
always ’at Bob
. . . .
” His usually
direct gaze was wandering out in the direction of Bear Creek, and his Oriental
mask of a face could not have been tagged just then as undisturbed.

Lupita appeared with a florally
painted bowl of cornmeal masa cradled in the crook of one elbow, swiftly taking
from it and patting handfuls of dough one at a time into perfect paperthin
tortillas she then tossed spinning back into the little kitchen onto a
sheetmetal
comal
salvaged after a memorable windstorm up by Lizard Head
Pass to bake for a minute before being re

moved to a piece of apron held ready
for the purpose, meantime informing Ellmore, “I don’t think she was looking for
you.”

“You see her husband today?”

“I heard he had to go somewhere in a
hurry. You don’t look much like a man in love.”

“In the soup, more like. How you say,
en la sopa.
”

“Of course she’s young,” said Lupita.
“It’s the age when we all do those crazy things.”

“Can’t remember.”

“
Pobrecito.
”
Off she whirled
again, singing just like a bird.

Frank became aware that Ellmore had
been watching him with an interest deeper than sociability could account for.
When he saw Frank looking back, he flashed a disingenuous gold eyetooth. “How’s
that menudo? See some of the old snot runnin’ out there.”

“Didn’t notice,” Frank passing a shirtsleeve
beneath his nose.

“Lip’s already gone too numb to feel
it,” advised Loomis. “Eat here for long, you’ll need to grow a mustache, soak
some of that up.”

“You’ve noticed how the smaller a
chili pepper gets, the hotter it usually is, right? First thing you learn.
Well, these that Loopy’s using are small. I mean
small, joven.
”

“Well Ellmore, how
. . .
how small’s that?”

“What about. . . invisible?”

“Nobody has ever
. . .
seen
these chilies, but folks
here still put them in Mexican recipes? How do they know how many to put?”

The company found the question
stimulating. “You crazy?” hollered Ellmore.
“
one’s
enough to kill ya!”

“Plus everybody ’thin a hundredyards
radius!” added Loomis.

“ ’Cept for Bob, o’ course, he eats
em like peanuts. Says it calms him down.”

By the time
he came creaking back to his rooms
at the Sheridan, after stopping down in the bar for a steak whose volume he
estimated to run above half a cubic foot, Frank had contracted a case of the
Rampaging Meldrumitis, having heard of little else all day. Captain Bulkley
Wells stayed inaccessible as ever, pursuing his busy schedule—in London,
perhaps, visiting his tailor, or off in the Argentine purchasing polo ponies,
or touring, why not, on some other inhabited world altogether. And so far, as
if they were words one did not use in front of the designated innocent, nothing
even remotely to do with Deuce Kindred or Sloat Fresno.

Frank was able to keep his eyes open
long enough to check his bed with a miner’s gad and douse the electric lamp,
but not quite to get both boots off, before drifting into his standard
trailside slumber, less than five minutes of which had passed before his door
was assaulted and the pleasures of oblivion postponed by some godawful thumping
and bellowing. “You gonna get your wifegrabbing, pissyellow, slanteyed ass out
here, or am I gonna have to come in there?” inquired an unhappy voice.

“Sure thing,” yawned Frank, in an
amiable tone he hoped would not betray the briskness with which he was
attending to the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson’s.

“Well, which one is it? Speak up, I
don’t hear too good, and what I can’t hear makes me very upset.”

“I believe the door’s open,” Frank
shouted. In the instant, it was. There stood a diminutive figure in a black
hat, shirt, and gauntlets, Bob Meldrum unmistakably, with a mustache so wide
Frank could swear its owner had to turn a little sideways to get through the
doorway, and a halo of McBryan’s which, like his fame, preceded him.

“Oh, say. What would that be, now,
some li’l Ladies’ Friend, I’ll bet, oh? and nickelplated too! My, but she’s
considerable pretty.”

“Fact, it’s a .38,” said Frank.
“Police model, though I have filed it down some, maybe a bit too much here and
there, for it won’t always stay cocked just as I’d like. Sure hope that won’t
be a problem?”

“You speak good English, for some
gotdamned opiumsmoking son of a bitch don’t even particularly look Jap.”

“Just ‘Frank’ is O.K. Could be you’ve
got the wrong room?”

“Could be you’re fucking my wife in
here and lying out of your ass?”

“Never been that crazy—maybe
brother Disco’s been misinforming you?”

“Oh, hell, you’re the kid engineer,”
his eyes, to Frank’s relief, beginning to grow less pale.

“Yes, and now, sir, I’ll bet you
would be
. . .
Mr. Meldrum, am I
right?” Trying not too obviously to shout into either of his ears.

 
“True, God help me, too true,” the darkly riggedout
gunslinger collapsing with an emotional sigh onto the settee. “You think it’s
easy being a hardcase in this town, with Butch Cassidy always coming up as a point
of comparison? Hell, what’d he ever do, rode up the valley on some damned trick
animal, pulled a gun, took the ten thousand dollars, rode out again, just like
eatin a cherry pie, but years pass, legends o’ th’ West keep growing, folks
mutter under their mustache when they think you can’t hear, ‘Well, he’s mean
but he sure ain’t no Butch,’ and how to hell you think that makes me feel?
Nothing in here to drink neither, I’ll bet.”

“Suppose we go out anyplace you like,
and you allow me to stand you a drink.”

“Well
seguro,
but how’s about
you point that shinedup li’l ’sucker someplace else for a minute, my reputation
and all?”

“Why, I’d almost forgotten
. . . .
” Feeling none too certain, Frank
pocketed his revolver, expecting an immediate throwdown, but Bob seemed
tranquil, for the moment anyway, going so far as to smile briefly, revealing a
double array of gold dental crowns. Frank pretended to rare back as if
bedazzled, shielding his eyes with a forearm. “Lot of bullion there.”

“They were kind enough up at the mine
to give me a price,” Bob replied.

Bypassing the hotel’s own genteel
establishment, they headed for the Cosmopolitan Saloon and Gambling Club a
short way down the street, where Bob was confident that people had the sense to
leave him to drink in peace. “Now then,” once they were set up with bottle and
glasses, “had a nickel for every son of a bitch wanted to waste Cap’n Wells’s
time I’d be down in Denver highballing my way along Market Street, you take my
meaning, and this whole godforsaken box canyon’d be all just a bad dream.”

“Any chance of talking to him? Is he
in town?”

Bob gave him a long, glittereyed
onceover. “You just say what I think I heard? Wop anarchist sons of bitches
rolling bombs at the man day in day out, stranger shows up askin’ if he’s ‘in
town’? why if I wa’n’t so suspicious, I’d be laughing my ass off. Tell you what
though, here’s the very fella, Merle Rideout—he’s amalgamator up at
Little Hellkite, crazy as a bedbug ’th all them fumes and shit he breathes in
all the time and twice on bullion day, but even so, why he might be willing to
listen to some junior drummer try and talk him out of his job.”

Merle Rideout was on his way down to
one of the parlor houses but not at top speed. He allowed Frank to go into his
pitch.

“. . . And you no doubt heard of Mr.
Edison’s scheme down in Dolores using static electricity, though sad to say
none too successfully—but now, my approach is different, uses
magnetism.
Back east in New Jersey, they’ve been pulling pyrites out of zinc blende
with a Wetherill’s magnet, supposed to be the strongest going—my rig’s a
variation on that, just a little sweetheart of a unit, and don’t it have that
Wetherill’s all beat. And with the kind of electric current you can generate up
in these parts—”

Merle was regarding Frank with a
kindly enough expression, but one not inclined to be taken in. “Magnetic ore
separation, yes indeed, fine for the lesscritical mountainside audiences maybe,
but having been around at least a magnet or two, I’m cautious is all. Tell you
what though. Come on up the mine you get a chance, we’ll talk. Tomorrow’d be
good.”

A silence abruptly fell, leaving for
the moment only the electricity’s hum. A group of men in enormous brandnew
beaver sombreros had just entered the Cosmopolitan, chirping and singing in
some foreign tongue. Each carried a pocket Kodak with its shutter ingeniously
connected to a small magnesium flashlight, so as to synchronize the two.
Shotglasses halted halfway to mouths, the Negro shoeshine boy quit popping his
rag, the Hieronymus wheel stopped short, and the ball took a bounce and then
hung there in midair, just as if everything in the scene were trying its best
to accommodate a photograph or two. Approaching Dieter the barkeep, the
visitors, bowing one by one, began to gesture at various of the bottles stacked
down at one end of the bar. Dieter, intimate with concoctions nobody’d even
named yet, nodding in reply, reached, poured, and mixed, as conversation in the
room resumed, folks having recognized the “Japanese trade delegation” Ellmore
had mentioned to Frank earlier in the day, out now for a look at the nighttime
sights of Telluride. Frank stopped staring just in time to observe Bob’s eyes
gone pale as summer sky above a ridgeline, and issuing from his ears twin jets
of steam superheated enough to threaten the careful roll of his hatbrim. Unable
to think of anything the irascible shootist might want to hear from him at the
moment, Frank went to look instead into the possibilities of taking cover,
noticing how others were doing the same.

“Well, Bob, which one of ’m d’you
figure it is?” called out one of the regulars here, in an apparent belief that
his advanced years would protect him from the wages of impertinence.

“Evenin Zack,” screamed Bob,
“frustratin as hell, ain’t it, all these lookalikes, man hardly knows where to
start shootin!”

“Say, and I sure don’t see no Mizzus
M. noplace, do you?” cried the heedless Zack, “maybe the one you’re lookin for
is
otherwise engaged
—
yeeeh
heeh
heeh!”

“Course I could shoot you first, just
to get sighted in,” Bob supposed.

“Aw now, Bob—”

Fascinated, the Sons of Nippon had
begun to gather about Bob in a semicircle, popping out to full length the
bellows of their cameras, taking tentative aim, some even attempting to climb
up on the billiard table to improve the angle of view, causing perplexity among
those attempting to play on its surface. “Kid,” neither of Bob’s lips being
seen to move, “that li’l
contraption
o’ yours I was admiring earlier?
d’you happen to have it handy, ’cause I may soon require your assistance, in a
backwatching way, for this is making me begin to itch somewhat fierce, is the
problem here?”

“I can talk a little of their lingo,”
Merle volunteered.

“Can you say, ‘I intend to kill all
you sons of bitches one by one just so I don’t make no mistakes,’ something
along those lines?”

“Let’s see, um
. . .
Sumimasen,
folks, this here’s
Bobusan desu!
”
Everybody bowed to Bob, who
found himself hesitantly bowing back.
“
Gonnusuringaa,
”
Merle added,
“
mottomo
abunai desu!
”

“
Aa!
”

“
Anna
koto!
”

All at once, magnesium flashlights
were exploding everywhere, each producing a column of thick white smoke whose
orderly cylindrical ascent was immediately disarranged by attempts of
customers, in some panic, to seek exit, the unexpected combination of brightness
and opacity thus quickly spreading to fill every part of the saloon. Those who
in their flight did not stumble over or into furniture soon collided with
others, who felt obliged to collide back, and with interest. Peevishness grew
general. Solid objects were soon moving through the fulgurescence invisibly and
at high speed, with profanity being uttered at every hand, much of it in
Japanese.