Against the Day (57 page)

She found a canvas miner’s cap now,
put it on, and headed for the door. “I’ll be down to the company store, least
till this shift gets off and everybody comes chargin’ in, awfully nice meeting
you Fred.”

“Frank,” said Frank.

“Sure, testing your memory’s all.”

She wasn’t out the door half a minute
before Merle, claiming, Frank guessed, some unwritten prerogative of the
chemically deranged, looked him directly in the face and asked what he was up
to, exactly, here in Telluride.

Frank considered. “Much easier if I
knew how much I couldn’t trust you.”

“I knew your father, Mr. Traverse. He
was a gentleman and a great cardplayer, knew dynamite inside out, saved my girl
once or twice when a charge didn’t go off just right, and sure’s hell didn’t
deserve what they did to him.”

Frank sat weaving on a folding camp
chair that seemed about to collapse. “Well, Mr. Rideout.”

“Merle would be better.” He pushed
across a mattesurface photograph of Webb Traverse, hat off, smoldering cigar in
his teeth, regarding the lens with a sort of pugnacious glee, as if he’d just
figured out exactly how he was going to destroy the camera.

“You’re maybe not his spit,” Merle
gently, “but I do study faces, part of the business, and you’re close.”

“And who’ve you mentioned this to?”

“Nobody. No need to, looks like.”

“What’s this Sundaymorning voice?”

“Just wouldn’t count on notching up
Buck Wells, if that’s what this is about. He’s far too troubled of a soul.
Might be he’ll even do the deed on himself ’fore you ever get there.”

“And good riddance too, but why
should I want to wish the man harm?”

“Reports that you seem eager for a
visit.”

“Though standin direly in need, I’m
sure, of having his Harvardeducated ass blown skyhigh, Captain Wells is not
right at the top of my list, fallin you see into a higher class of folk, for
down here at saddletramp level he’s of less interest than the actual trigger
operatives hired to murder my Pa, heaven forfend a Harvard man should get his
lilywhites soiled ’th that kind of work and all.”

“Hope you’re not thinkin’ it
was—”

“I know pretty much who. So does
everybody in this closeknit li’l community, it seems. It’s their whereabouts at
present, is how Buck would come into this.”

“Throw down on him, have him tell you
what he knows.”

“There you go, why didn’t I think of
that?”

“Whatever you do think of, best do it
soon.” Small Chinese children had also been known to look at Frank this way,
though maybe not quite so troubled. “Word is around, Frank. Boys want you
gone.”

That was quick. He’d been hoping for
another day or two at least. “What is it, somethin tattooed on my head? Is
there anybody in this damn county I
am
fooling?
Damn.
”

“Easy now.” From a drawer in a
cabinet against the wall, Merle took more gelatinsilver prints. “Maybe these’ll
be some help.” One showed a pair of what looked like drovers in town for the
Fourth of July, one of them appearing to force the other to eat a giant
firecracker, all lit and throwing bright sparks, flying, dying, filling the
unmeasurable fragment of time the shutter was open, to the amusement of others
in the background looking on from the porch of a saloon.

“You’re not telling me—”

“Here, this one’s a little clearer.”

It was out in front of this exact
same amalgamator’s office. This time Deuce and Sloat were not smiling, and the
light was more proper to autumn, you could see dark clouds in the sky overhead,
and nothing was casting shadows. The two men were posed as if for some
ceremonial purpose. For the gray day, the exposure was a little longer, and
you’d expect one at least to have moved and blurred the image, but no, they had
stood rigid, almost defiant, allowing the collodion mixture its due measure of
light, to record the two killers with unrelenting fidelity, as if set in front
of some slow emulsion of an earlier day, eyes, Frank, bending close, noticed
now, rendered with that same curious crazed radiance which once was an artifact
of having to blink a couple of hundred times during the exposure, but in this
more modern form due to something authentically ghostly, for which these
emulsions were acting as agents, revealing what no other record up till then
could’ve.

“Who took these?”

“Kind of amateur hobby of mine,” said
Merle. “All this silver and gold around up here, acids and salts and so forth,
and I just like to fool with the different possibilities.”

“Mean little skunk, isn’t he?”

“He was always after Bob Meldrum to
take him on as a protégé. Even Bob, who keeps rattlesnakes for house pets,
couldn’t stand the kid more’n five minutes.”

As if Bob’s name was some password,
Dally was in the door like a small explosion, her attention all focused onto
Frank. “Boots on? Hair combed? Might be departure time for you, about now. “

“What’s up, Dahlia?” said Merle.

“Bob and Rudie, up by the shaft
house, and the wrong one is smiling.”

“They’re after me? But last night
that Bob, he seemed so friendly.”

“Here you go—” Merle rolling
his desk out of the way and opening a trapdoor which up to that point had been
invisible. “Our own alternate means of egress. Some tunnelin’ down there, ought
to let you out by the ore station. If you get lucky, you can catch an empty
bucket down to town.”

“My horse.”

“Rodgers’s keeps a little barn over
t’ the Tomboy, just tie the reins over the saddlehorn, set him loose—they
all find their way back. Might want these prints, I have negatives. Oh, and
here.”

“What’s this?”

“What it looks like.”

“Some kind of. . . meat sandwich
. . . .
What’s it for?”

“Maybe you’ll find out.”

“Maybe I’ll eat it.”

“Maybe not. Dahlia, you better see
him to town.”

Down in the tunnel, Frank became
aware of a curious swarming, half seen, half heard. Dally stopped and bent an ear.
“Oboy. They’re steamed.” She called out in some peculiar, chimingly percussive
language. From out of the dark tunnel, though Frank could oddly not tell the
direction, came a reply. “You got that sandwich, Frank?”

They left it in the middle of the
tunnel and took off running. “Why’d we—”

“Are you crazy? Don’t you know who
they are?”

They broke out into dusk almost
balanced by electric light brighter than a full moon, circles of otherworld
blindness up on tall poles along the road up to the ridgeline.

“Hurry, shift’s almost changin, we’re
about to be stampeded over by that whole herd o’ squareheads—” They
climbed in an ore bucket, into iron

shadows and an uncleansable telluric
smell. “Worse’n a Texas shithouse in here, ain’t it?” she said cheerfully. Frank
muttered, about to pass out. A bell rang somewhere and the bucket shuddered
into motion. Though they were keeping their heads low, Frank felt it the exact
moment they cleared the edge and the valley dropped away, leaving them high
above the lights of the town with nothing but the deep, invisible air below.
Just then, back at the mine, the shift whistle began to shriek, sliding
downward in pitch as they went hurtling away down into the dark gulf. The girl
whooped back at it with delight. “To Hell you ride! Hey, Frank!”

Back down into town, actually, would
not have been his first choice. He would much rather’ve kept on uphill, over
the pass, down again to the Silverton road, maybe turned off for Durango and
with luck picked up the train, or else just rode on till he was somehow into
the Sangre de Cristos, where he knew he at least had a chance. Ride through the
ghost bison, on into those big dunes, and let the spirits there protect him.

Soon they could hear the pounding of
stamps, muffled at first like the percussion section of a distant marching
band, fifes and cornets surely about to join in at any minute, practicing for
some undeclared national holiday that didn’t necessarily ever have to arrive,
growing louder, sensed yet hidden, like so much else in these mountains. At
some point the racket of the mill was overtaken by the racket from town, and
then Frank remembered it was Saturday night.

Pandemonium did not begin to amount
to a patch on what seemed to be approaching them instead of they it, swelling
to surround them, a valleywide symphony of gunshots, screaming, blaring on
musical instruments, freightwagon traffic, coloratura laughter from the
pavement nymphs, glass breaking,
 
Chinese gongs being bashed, horses, horsehardware jingling, swingingdoor
hinges creaking as Frank and Dally presently arrived at the Gallows Frame
Saloon, about halfway down Colorado Street.

“Are you sure they’ll let you in
here?” Frank as mildly as he could.

The girl laughed, once and not for
long. “Look around you, Frank. Find me one face in here cares about who does
what.” She led him down the length of the bar lined with tendayers, fathom
miners, and remittance men, through the tobacco smoke, amid card and dice
tables abustle with challenge, insult, and imprecation. Somebody was playing on
the piano some tune that would’ve been a march, except for some peculiar
rhythmic hesitations that made Frank, who usually chose to avoid dancing,
unexpectedly wish he knew how.

She noticed, of course. “That’s
‘ragtime.’ You never heard rag? why even ask. Where were you from again? Never
mind, I couldn’t pr’nounce it.”

She was holding her arms out in a
certain way, and he guessed he was stuck, though it didn’t turn out that bad,
for Frank was a damn buckandwing artist next to some of the miners the girls in
here were dancing with, especially the Finns. “Stomp around like they ’s
wearing skis,” Dally said. After a while Frank noticed one or two that
were
wearing
skis, and it wasn’t even winter.

“Oh there’s Charlie, stay right here,
I’ll be back.” All right with Frank, who, having begun wondering when Bob and
Rudie would make their appearance, needed to put in a little time next to some
Circassian walnut. He was halfway through his first beer of the evening when
Dally appeared again. “Talked to Charlie Fong Ding, who does all the laundry
for the parlor house girls. There’s a vacancy at the Silver Orchid, I know the
place, it’s safe, there’s an escape tunnel—”

“You know the place?”

“Hah, lookit this, he’s shocked.
Charlie wanted to put money on it. Could’ve ate for a week bettin against your
character.”

“The Silver Orchid, Dally?”

“All my Pa’s fault.” At some point
Merle had decided they must address the sensitive matter of sexual congress or,
often as not, it being a mining town, sexual congregation. Through the good
offices of California Peg, the
sousmaîtresse
of the Silver Orchid, where
he had been a steady patron, Merle arranged for a program of study, brief and
clandestine, “offering occasion to be sure,” as Merle put it, “for Grundyesque
screaming, but no worse when one thinks about it than giving a child a small
glass of diluted wine at mealtimes so that she may grow up with some sense of
the difference between wine with dinner and wine
for
dinner. You’re old
enough anyhow,” he’d been telling her for years now, “and it sure ’s heck beats
hearing it from me, sooner or later you’ll be hitching up with the perfect
young gent, and knowing the story now’ll save you both untold worlds of
heartache—”

“Not to mention sparing
you
a
lot of work,” she pointed out.

“You’ll see men at their best and
worst, dear,” Peg added, “and all in between, which is where you’ll find most
of them, but never, ever put money on the needs of men getting too complicated,
least any more than, oh, say, the rules of blackjack.”

So Dally, a girl of great good sense
to begin with, came to pick up in and about Popcorn Alley a range of useful
information. She discovered that liprouge for cracked lips made an interesting
alternative to ear wax. For a month’s wages from up at the mine, she acquired,
from a hurdy girl at the Pick and Gad, a .22caliber revolver, which she wore in
plain sight mainly on account of she didn’t own one dress or skirt to hide it
under, but also for its

simple presence, not as
overwhelmingly obvious on her slight form as a fullsize weapon would’ve been,
yet leaving no one in doubt as to her ability to draw, aim, and fire it, which
she practiced at devoutly whenever she got the chance, out in back of various
spoil heaps, eventually able to win a little spare change from wagering with
wouldbe crack shots among the miners. “Annie Oakley!” the Finns took to yelling
when she came in sight, tossing small coins in the air in hopes she’d drill one
for them, which now and then she was happy to do, providing many a future returnee
to Finland with a lucky amulet to see him through the days of civil war and
White Terror, sacking and massacre that lay beyond that—a promise that
now and then odds might be beaten and the counterfactual manifest itself in
that wintry world awaiting them.

Erotic refinement was not among the
allurements of the Telluride row— for that, she gathered, you’d have to
go down to Denver—but at least she came out of the elementary course at
the Silver Orchid immune to, if not real comfortable with, the usual rude
surprises which have blighted the marriage state for so many and, best of all,
as Peg confided, without “Love,” as defined by the heartsick and tumescent
generations of cowpoke Casanovas out here, getting too mixed up in matters,
which could easily have put her off of it altogether. “Love,” whatever that
turned out to be, would occupy a whole different piece of range.