Against the Day (59 page)

“
That’s
what a brother likes
to hear.”

“Fact is,” Frank said now, “is we
haven’t seen much of each other lately.”

Another, seemed like a minute, passed
before the Doc shook himself like a dog emerging from a mountain stream and
apologized. “Lake, she broke my, just damn broke my heart.”

Well, well. “Had that happen,” said
Frank, though in fact he hadn’t. “Cases like yours,” kindly as he could, “what
I usually tend to prescribe’s Old Gideon, threefinger doses, for as long as it
takes?”

The Doc beamed a little sheepishly.
“Wasn’t looking for sympathy. Not as if she swept through like an act of
nature. Still, if you’re buying . . .”

Back
in 1899, not long after the terrible cyclone that year which devastated the
town, young Willis Turnstone, freshly credentialed from the American School of Osteopathy,
had set out westward from Kirksville Missouri, with a small grip holding a
change of personal linen, an extra shirt, a note of encouragement from Dr. A.
T. Still, and an antiquated Colt’s in whose use he was far from practiced,
arriving at length in Colorado, where one day, riding across the Uncompahgre
Plateau, he was set upon by a small band of pistoleros. “Hold it right there,
miss, let’s have a look at what’s in that attractive valise o’ yours.”

“Not much,” Willis said.

“Hey, what’s this? Packing some
iron
here! Well, well, never let it be said Jimmy Drop and his gang denied a
tender soul a fair shake now, little lady, you just grab a hold of your great
big pistol and we’ll
get to it,
shall we?” The others had cleared a
space which Willis and Jimmy now found themselves

alone at either end of, in classic
throwdown posture. “Go on ahead, don’t be shy, I’ll give you ten seconds
gratis, ’fore I draw. Promise.” Too dazed to share entirely the gang’s spirit
of innocent fun, Willis slowly and inexpertly raised his revolver, trying to
aim it as straight as a shaking pair of hands would allow. After a fair count
of ten, true to his word and fast as a snake, Jimmy went for his own weapon,
had it halfway up to working level before abruptly coming to a dead stop,
frozen into an ungainly crouch. “Oh, pshaw!” the badman screamed, or words to
that effect.

“
¡Ay!
¡Jefe, jefe!
”
cried
his lieutenant Alfonsko, “tell us it ain’ your back again.”

“Damned idiot, o’ course it’s my
back. Oh mother of all misfortune—and worse than last time too.”

“I can fix that,” offered Willis.

“Beg pardon, what in hell business of
any gotdamn punkinroller’d this be, again?”

“I know how to loosen that up for
you. Trust me, I’m an osteopath.”

“It’s O.K., we’re openminded, couple
boys in the outfit are Evangelicals, just watch where you’re putting them
lilywhites now—yaaagghh—I mean, huh?”

“Feel better?”

“Holy Toledo,” straightening up,
carefully but painfree. “Why, it’s a miracle.”

“
¡Gracias
a Dios!
”
screamed
the dutiful Alfonsito.

“Obliged,” Jimmy guessed, sliding his
pistol back in its holster.

“I’ll settle for my life,” proposed
Willis. “Maybe buy you all a drink sometime?”

“Come on, right over that ridge
there.” They repaired to a nearby stockmen’s saloon. “All this damned hard
riding and other saddle activities,” Jimmy explained presently, “the cowboy’s
curse in fact, show me a man’s been any time at all on a horse, I’ll show you a
victim of the fulminatin lumbago. You’ve sure got the magic in your mitts, Doc,
maybe you just discovered your promised land out here.”

Willis, having already been stood an
uncounted number of red whiskeys, put off semiconsciousness for a moment to
consider this career assessment. “You mean I could hang out my shingle in one
of these towns—”

“Well maybe not just any town, you’d
want to check into prior claims, as some of these town croakers once they’re
set up don’t want more competition. Known to get quite violent about it, in
fact.”

“Licensed physicians?” Willis
astonished, “men of healing, violent?”

“And even if you didn’t find a town
right away, why, there’d always be work, I bet.”

“How’s that?”

“Circuit ridin’ osteowhateveritis,
just keep moving spread to spread, like many a drover’s learned to do, no
dishonor in that.”

Which is how life then took a turn for
young Willis Turnstone. He had journeyed west having cherished, despite his
heretical gifts, little beyond towndweller dreams—of frequenting a
nottooearnest church, meeting and marrying a presentable girl with a college
background, aging into the sort of local “Doc” no one would hesitate to play
cards with, on a weekly lowstakes type of basis of course
. . .
yet one chance meeting with the
notorious Jimmy Drop gang among the mindpoisoning vetches and creosote of a
dusty high plain was all it took to steer him in a whole ’nother direction.

Not that the suburban imperative
didn’t continue to work its will. He found himself adding conventional medical
skills onto his osteopathic ones, sending away back east for medical textbooks,
learning to cultivate the local druggists in the towns he drifted through,
finding that a couple Saturday nights of losing poker could be worth a semester
in pharmacy school. By the time he blew into Telluride and started working at
the Miners’ Hospital alongside Dr. Edgar Hadley and Nurse Margaret Perril, he
was as doctorly as they came in these parts, though long fallen into the habit
of always diagnosing the rarest possible conditions to account for the symptoms
his patients reported. Since they either died or got better on their own, and
nobody kept count, there was no way to know how effective any of this was, and
he was too busy himself ever to make a proper study.

He met Lake up at the Miners’
Hospital, called in to treat a tendayer who’d been shot in the shoulder. The
first suspect whose name crossed Willis’s mind, Bob Meldrum, had been present
but only, he swore, in a tutorial capacity, advising an apprentice regulator on
how best to maintain order in the mines. “Use my initiative,” said the eager
lad. “Hell no,” Bob replied, “use your .44. Here, like this—whoops.” Too
late, the gun had been fired and the miner’s blood diverted from its return to
the heart.

Lake was in simple gray and white,
her hair covered and her demeanor professional, and the minute Willis saw her
he was a goner, though it took him a couple of weeks to realize it in his mind.

They rode out to Trout Lake and
picnicked. He showed up at her door with bunches of wildflowers. One night
without thinking he told her he wanted them to get married. He met her mother,
Mayva, and pounded on her back for a while. One day somebody mentioned that
Lake had run off with Deuce Kindred.

Which so desolated the Doc that Jimmy
Drop offered to go after the couple on his behalf. “ ’Sucker used to ride with
us, not for long, nobody liked him, mean little brush snake. You want him out
of the way, I’ll see to it personal.”

“Oh, Jim no I couldn’t ask you to do
that
. . . .
”

“No need to ask, Doc, forever in your
debt.”

“Forever’s how long she would likely
end up moping about it, and then where would I be?”

Jimmy’s eyes narrowed uneasily. “They
get like that, huh?”

“Just wouldn’t want the possibility.”

“Yehp
. . .
well yehp I can see that
.
. . .
”

Course, the Doc would never get used
to losing out. Lake was nowhere |near the kind of girl he thought he was
looking to settle down with, she was all his plans flying out the window, a
chance to “choose wrong” early enough in life to do him some good. Now she’d
gone off with a specimen too loathsome even for the Jimmy Drop gang. If she was
not to be the great lost love of his life, she could’ve perhaps been the great
unlistenedto commentator upon it.

“She what? Went off with who?” Maybe
repeating himself a couple times, because the news had just sent him spinning.

“That’s right,” the Doc shaking his
head slowly, “I still can’t get a handle on it myself.”

“This sure don’t help,” said Frank,
“really. Who else knows?”

The keen squint he got was not so
much pitying as scientifically curious.

Frank felt coming down over him, like
an illness, the dryskinned feverishness of shame. “No idea where they went to?”

“If I knew, would it be wise to tell
you?”

“You have feelings for my sister and
all, so don’t take this the wrong way, but. . . when I find her, I will kill
the bitch. O.K.? Him, goes without saying, but her—that
fucking
—I
can’t even say her name. How natural is it, that that could even
happen,
Doc?”

“Don’t know. You mean, is it a
wellknown mental condition or something?” He looked around for his copy of
Puckpool.

“Damn. Maybe I’ll go out, kill
somebody just for practice.”

“You’re going to have to calm down,
Frank. Here,” scribbling, “. . . you can take this over to the
drugstore—”

“Thanks all the same. Maybe what I
need to do is talk to Jimmy Drop.”

“I know he and Kindred rode together
briefly, long time back, but how likely is it they’d still be in touch?”

“Does not, make no, fuckin, sense.”
Frank staring deep into his hat, beginning to exhibit classic signs of
melancholia and then some. “Sure they fought a lot, her and Pa, mostly when I
was away at Golden, but this is like—Why didn’t
she
just
go ahead and shoot him down, she
hated him that much? That would’ve made more sense.”

The Doc poured himself another
tridigital dose and sociably waved the bottle at Frank.

“Better not. Need to think.”

“Unlike sound or light or one of
them, news travels at queer velocities and not usually even in straight lines,”
offered the Doc.

Frank squinted up at the ceiling.
“What. . . doesthat
mean
?”

Doc Turnstone shrugged. “Jimmy is
usually down to the Busted Flush this time of the evening.”

Though it was far too late for any of
this old news to matter to anybody but Frank, it didn’t keep him from skulking
along through the insomniac town with his hat low on his eyebrows, convinced
that everybody he saw was in on the story and smirking at him with contempt or,
worse, pity—poor foolish Frank, last to know.

Jimmy Drop—very short Arapahoe
Street haircut glossed down with bartender’s hair wax, mustache trained in the
Chinese style, trademark monocle effortlessly in place—was in the back
room of the Busted Flush with some of his associates, playing a complicated
game with an evillooking packer’s knife, whose point and bladeedge were to be
brought into use whenever the matter of forfeits arose. Judging from the color
of his shirt, Alfonsito appeared to be having the least luck tonight, much to
the amusement of the others.

“Recognized you right off,” Jimmy
said when they were settled behind a labelless bottle of bourbon. “You and your
brother got the same nose, except for Reef’s was broke a couple times, o’
course. I am proud to say I was there on both occasions.”

“Wasn’t you did it, I hope.”

“No, no, just the usual professors,
showing us poor ignoramuses the finer points of poker etiquette.”

“Like don’t play partners,” Frank
smiling quickly with one side of his mouth, aware of ways Jimmy might grow
exercised but right now not caring much.

“Oh, he told you that one.” The
monocle twinkled. “Heard he went back east. Sounded like
all the way
back
east.”

“You’d know better’n me.”

“Guess these days it’d be you that’s
lookin for Deuce. Wish I could help, but by now they might—he might be
anyplace.”

“You can say ‘they.
’ ”

“You know, I hate to gossip. Gossipin
ought to be a felony, heavy penalties up to and includin the gallows for repeat
offenders.”

“But?”

“1 only seen your sister but once, up
by Leadville. Kind of a young lady by

then, maybe ten or eleven? It was
that one winter they built that big Ice Palace up there, up above Seventh
Street.”

“Remember it. Hard to believe it was
really there.” Three acres on a hilltop, arclights, towers of ice ninety feet
high, biggest rink in Creation, replacement iceblocks shipped in every day,
ballroom, café, more popular than the Opera House while it lasted, but doomed
to melt away when spring came.

“Reef was just out of the chute,”
Jimmy recalled, “but not really, I think we worked our first job together that
spring. Your sister got hold of a pair of ice skates and was spending most of
her time up at that Ice Palace. Like every other kid in Leadville. One day she
was teachin the Dutch Waltz to some kid from town, management kid, not much
older than she was, and Webb Traverse come in saw it and just pitched a fit.
Ten years now, and I’ve known it noisier, but I still remember
that
goround.
Your Pa really wanted to kill somebody. It wasn’t just that old
handsoffmydaughter business, we all know that one. This was homefortheinsane
carryinon.”