Against the Day (56 page)

Frank
decided to squat down by the end of the bar till the air cleared. He kept an
ear out for Bob but in the uproar couldn’t be too sure of anybody’s voice. The
loss of clarity and scale in the room was producing, for many, strange optical
illusions, common among them that of a vast landscape swept by an unyielding
fog. It became possible to believe one had been spirited, in the swift cascade
of lightflashes, to some distant geography where creatures as yet unknown
thrashed about, howling affrightedly, in the dark. Older customers in whose
hearts the battles of the Rebellion yet persisted heard in these more temperate
detonations of flashpowder the fieldpieces of ancient campaigns better
forgotten. Even Frank, who was usually immune to all degrees of the phantasmal,
found that he could no longer orient himself with certainty.

When the smoke had finally thinned
out enough to begin to see through, Frank noticed Merle Rideout in conversation
with one of the Japanese trade delegation.

“Over here,” the visitor was saying,
“the American West—it is a spiritual territory! in which we seek to study
the secrets of your—national soul!”

“Ha! Ha!” Merle slapped his knee.
“You fellows, I swear. What ‘national soul’? We don’t have any ‘national soul’!
’F you think any different, why you’re just packing out pyrites, brother.”

“An edge of
steel—mathematically without width, deadlier than any katana, sheathed in
the precision of the American face—where mercy is unknown, against which
Heaven has sealed its borders! Do not—feign ignorance of

this! It is not a—valid use of
my time!” Glaring, he joined his companions and stalked out.

Frank nodded after him. “He seems
upset. You don’t think he’d do anything
. . .
.
”

“Not likely,” Merle said. “Looks like
just some li’l laundry runner, don’t he? Fact, he’s sidekicks with famous
international spy Baron Akashi, who’s what they call a ‘roving military
attaché’—circuitrides the different capital cities of Europe, keeping the
Russian students over there all cranked up against the Tsar. Well, it turns out
we got a antiTsarist crowd of our own, right up here in San Miguel County, and
we call em the Finns. Is who’s running their native Finland these days, is that
same allpowerful Tsar of Russia. And make no mistake, they just hate his ass.
Making them naturally of great professional interest to our pal there. Not that
they don’t also show more than average tradedelegation interest in the doings
up at Little Hellkite, especially chemical, on or about bullion day.”

“Maybe they’re planning a hoist?”

“More like what folks call
‘industrial spying.’ What they
seem
to be looking for is my amalgamation
process. But that could be just a cover story. Couldn’t it.” He took off his
hat, slapped a dent into the top of it, replaced it. “Well. See you up at the
mine tomorrow, then?” and was gone before Frank could say, “Sure.”

Slowly, the disorder had begun to
abate. Broken glass, splintered wood, and the contents of overturned cuspidors
presented inconvenience everywhere as cardplayers crawled through the debris
trying to reassemble full decks. Favoring their injuries, wiping their eyes,
and blowing their noses on their sleeves, drinkers and gamblers went lurching
out the doors and into the street, where rented horses had already been
skillfully unhitching themselves and proceeding back to the corral, sighing now
and then. Sportive ladies up from riverside cribs and parlor houses alike stood
in twos and threes observing the scene, clucking like church wives. The
Japanese visitors had vanished, and inside the Cosmopolitan, Dieter was back on
duty behind the bar as if none of this had happened. Frank got warily to his
feet and was just about to have a look into what bottles might’ve survived when
Zack stepped nimbly up next to him, with an inquiring grimace.

“Why sure, oldtimer, just name it.
You haven’t seen Bob around anyplace, have you?”

“My usual Squirrel and sarsaparilla,
Dieter, and why yes young and I daresay shorttimer, last I saw of your
quarrelsome companion, he was heading off toward Bear Creek screamin something
about going back to Baggs,

Wyoming and startin life anew, though
I could have that part a little confused.”

“No different from the rest of the
evening,” Frank guessed.

“Oh, hell,” Zack reaching himself a
towel to wipe off his lip, “just a little teacup social’s all. Now, back in the
summer of ’89, the day Butch and his gang come riding in . . .”

t the Rodgers Brothers’ livery stable next morning, more
horseless riders than Frank had seen in one place outside of downtown Denver at
lunchtime jostled after some advantage not clear to him right away, snarling at
each other ominously and, wherever they could find room to, pacing about,
puffing on cigars old and new. Boys kept arriving from the corral with horses
saddled and bridled, producing copies of lengthy rental agreements to be
signed, pocketing tips, policing what passed for a queue, and shrugging off abuse
from the clerks, who were trying to keep track of it all from behind a long
counter inside. The sun was well clear of the peaks by the time Frank obtained
his mount, an Indian paint named Mescalero with mischief in his eye, and began
his ascent to the Little Hellkite Mine by way of Fir Street, where he
encountered Ellmore Disco, heading down to the store in a spiffedup little trap
perched on Timken springs.

“Gay times at the Cosmopolitan last
night, I’m told?”

“I went in there with Bob Meldrum but
lost him in all the confusion.”

“Likely he’s back up on the job by
now. But”—Ellmore did not exactly say “fair warning,” though that was the
impression Frank got from his face—“if you see him riding anywhere in ’at
Basin today, you might be mindful of the Sharps rifle he packs, specially its
range, adding on, say, a mile or two extra?”

“He’s angry at me for something?”
puzzled Frank.

“Wouldn’t be that personal,
joven.
”

Off rolled Ellmore Disco, buggy
hardware all going like a glockenspiel in a band. Frank ascended the Tomboy
Road, the town below, revealed at the switchbacks through aspens in flickering
leaf, each time a little more flattened out as it drew slowly away into heated
woodsmoke haze, along with the sounds of framers’ hammers and wagon traffic,
before the oncoming silence

of the Basin. The cicadas were in
full racket. Hellkite Road—“Road” being likely a term of local
endearment—peeled off to follow the rocky bed of a stream that came
flowing down across the trail without the trouble of pipes or culverts.

The longer he stayed in this town,
the less he was finding out. The point of diminishing returns was fast
approaching. Yet now, as the trail ascended, as snowlines drew nearer and the
wind became sovereign, he found himself waiting for some splitsecond flare out
there at the edges of what he could see, a white horse borne against the sky, a
black rush of hair streaming unruly as the smoke that marbles the flames of
Perdition.

Even Frank, who was not what you’d
call one of these spiritualists, could tell that it was haunted up here.
Despite the dayandnight commercial bustling down below, the wideopen promise of
desire unleashed, you only had to climb the hillside for less than an hour to
find the brown, slumped skeletons of cabins nobody would occupy again, the
abandoned bedsprings from miners’ dormitories left out to rust two and a half
miles up into the dark daytime sky
. . .
the
presences that moved quickly as marmots at the edges of the visible. The cold
that was not all a function of altitude.

Long before he sighted the Little
Hellkite, Frank could smell it. The smell had come drifting by here and there
since he’d arrived in town, but nowhere near as intense as this. He heard metal
groaning overhead and looked up to see tram buckets loaded with ore headed down
to the Pandora works at the edge of town for processing, the owners having
found it too steep up here to put in expensive luxuries like stamp mills. He
passed the junction house of the Telluride Power Company, a vivid red against
pale mountainslopes logged off long ago, scarred with trail and bristling all
over with stumps gone white as gravemarkers, the hum of the voltage louder than
the cicadas.

The little Basin swung into view. He
trotted on in through the scatter of cabins and sheds, whose boards were all
ragged lengths owing to having been dragged up here crossed over mules’ backs,
arriving ground down a foot or more shorter than when they’d left the yard in
town and bleached in all the sunglare subsequent, till he found the assay
office.

“He’s down at Pandora, son.”

“They told me he was up here.”

“Then he’s down one of these adits,
talking to the tommyknockers, more’n likely.”

“Uhoh.”

“Nahw, don’t worry, old Merle goes a
little crazy in the head sometimes, but come bullion day there’s none can touch
him.”

Well, and who up here in this
oxygenshort circus parade
wasn’t
crazy in

some way? Frank had a look down the
nearest mine entrance, hearing in the gloom and chill which abruptly wrapped
ears, temples, and nape the strike, the ring of mauls and picks from faraway
passages, becoming less clear as to location the farther in he went, turning
from the day, from all that could be safely illuminated, into the nocturnal
counterpart behind his own eyesockets, past any afterimages of a lighted world.

At first he thought she was one of
those supernatural mine creatures the Mexicans call
duendes
that you
were always hearing stories about—though common sense right away
suggested more of a girl powder monkey, being that on closer look she was
calmly pouring what could only be nitro into holes drilled in these living
mountain depths. “Course I didn’t notice him,” Dally snapped back a little
later when Merle started in teasing her, “everybody busy just then trying to
loosen that seam. Hired powder monkey don’t mean hired fool. What’s supposed to
be important anyway? Halfway to hell, stared at by crazy Finns day in and day
out as it is, grown men who the minute they get offshift are headin straight
down cliffsides on a couple of wood slats, am I gonna think twice about some
MineSchooler with his head full of magnets?”

Dally’s voice was hard to pin down to
any one American place, more of a trail voice with turns and drops to it,
reminders of towns you thought you’d forgotten or should never’ve rode into, or
even promises of ones you might’ve heard about and were fixing to get to
someday.

They were sitting in the
amalgamator’s shed, Merle having returned from chores down in the hole. He had
his feet up on his desk and seemed in a cheerful mood.

“Oh I’ll just walk out one morning,”
Dally assured them, “and that’ll be the day I cut loose of—” indicating
Merle with a shake of bright curls, “and sooner’d sure be better than later.”

“And you can’t imagine how I’m
looking forward.” Merle nodded. “Ain’t about to take no bite out of
my
heart,
hayull no—whatever your name is— Hey! you
still here,
little
missy, you mean you ain’t left yet? what’s keeping you?”

“Must be the coffee up here.”
Reaching for the pot with townwife grace across an iron stove nearly hot enough
to break into a glow, just daring the ’sucker to touch her.

They had had this same exchange many
times, father and daughter, in many forms. “I could be doing what I do
anyplace,” he might point out, “down in the safest town you can imagine, the
front parlor of the world, instead of up in the damn San Juans like ’is. Now
why do you suppose we’re up

here dodging bullets and avalanches
and not down to Davenport Iowa or some such doilydraped venue as that?”

“You’re trying to get me killed?”

“Guess again.”

“Is
. . .
it’s all for my own good?”

“There you go. This is school,
Dally—fact it’s damn college, a bar down the lefthand side of every
classroom, the faculty packing shotguns and .44s, the student body either drunk
all the time, sexually insane, or suicidally unsafe to be within a mile of, and
the grades handed out are but two, survive or don’t. O.K. so far or am I
drifting too deep into metaphor here?”

“Tell me when you get to fractions.”