Against the Day (60 page)

“I was down at work that day,” Frank
recalled, “some mucker’s shift, and when I got back they were still at it.
Heard the hollerin a mile away, thought it was Chinamen or somethin.”

It was political, was the thing. If
it had been a miner’s son, even a saloonor storekeeper’s son, Webb might’ve
grumbled some, but there it would have rested in peace. It was the notion of
some little rich snotnose never worked a day in his life creeping in grabbing
the innocent daughter of a working man that got Webb all in a rage.

“It wasn’t even about me personally,”
Lake wasn’t too angry to point out later, she saw it clear enough, “it was your
damned old Union again.” Lucky for everybody there were cooler heads around,
not to mention arms and legs that sort of came gliding in to form a social
barrier and nudge Webb back off the ice, while Lake hung her head in the
pearlgray gloom, feeling mortified, and the boy skated off looking for another
partner.

“
As a Mex, maybe
,”
figured Ellmore Disco. “You’d need the right hat o’ course, and a mustache,
though what with not shaving these last couple days, you’ve got a good start.
We can consult with Loopy about the rest.” They were in the Gallows Frame, and
things were approaching that usual centrifugal Saturdaynight runup to the end
of the world and a subsequent general drunken slumber.

“Ellmore, why are you helping me? I
had you figured for the Mine Owners’ Friend.”

“The one thing no form of business
can really do without,” Ellmore in

structed him, “is good old peace and
quiet. Any disruptive behavior up here over and above the normal Saturdaynight
frolics will tend to discourage the banks down in Denver, not to mention the
daytripping into town of that pigeon population we’ve all of us come so much to
depend on, next thing you know we’re into a slack cycle and well, the less of
that the better ’s all. Now somebody like yourself, harmlessenoughlookin young fellow,
barely steps into town he becomes a focus of attention for far too many bad
actors, why then it’s time, ain’t it, for little E. Disco to start considering
how best to help such a fellow make his exit.”

Playing down the street at the
Railbird Saloon just happened to be Gastón Villa and His Bughouse Bandoleros, a
collection of itinerant musicians in white leather fringe jackets, spangled
“chaps,” and enormous facehiding hats rimmed in
cholo
balls the colors
of the spectrum running in order of wavelength. Gastón’s father had once ridden
the rodeo with some makebelieve
charro
act—and when at last, one
night over by Gunnison, he ran into an audience whose ideas of rejection proved
fatal, his wife packed up all his old costumes and gear for Gastón, kissed him
adios at the depot, and sent him off to become a saxophone player for the band
of a Wild West show. Obliged more than once to leave his instruments in soak to
pay hotel bills, bar tabs, and gambling debts, Gastón was to drift with the
years into a variety of peculiar engagements, including the present one.

“Please, don’t preoccupy yourself,”
he reassured Frank now—“here, you know what this is?” Bringing out a
towering contraption of tarnished and beatup brass covered with valves and
keys, whose upper end flared open like something in a marching band.

“Sure. Where’s the trigger on it
again?”

“It is called the
Galandronome—a military bassoon, once standard issue in French army
bands—my uncle salvaged this one from the Battle of Puebla, you can see a
couple of dents from Mexican bullets here, and here?”

“And the end you blow in,” puzzled
Frank, “wait a minute, now
. . . .
”

“You will learn.”

“But till I do—”

“Caballero, you have been in these
cantinas, the musical taste is not demanding. Nobody in this band was a
musician when they joined up, but everybody was in some kind of trouble. Play
con
entusiasmo,
as loudly as you can, and trust in the good will and bad ear of
the gringo hellraiser.”

Is how Frank became Pancho the
Bassoon Player. Within a day or two, he was actually getting a sound out of the
’sucker, and before long most of “Juanita,” too. With a couple of trumpets
playing harmony, it wasn’t that bad, he supposed. Affecting, sometimes.

Shortly before he left town, Frank
entered a condition a little displaced from what he’d always thought of as his
right mind. Having put it off as long as he could, he visited the miners’
graveyard at the edge of town, found Webb’s grave, stood there and waited. The
place was full of presences, but no more than the valley and the hillsides
around. Being a hardheaded sort, Frank had not been real intensely haunted by
Webb’s ghost. The other ghosts chided Webb about this. “Oh it’s just Frank.
When the moment comes he’ll do the right thing, he’s just always been a little
overly practical, ’s all
. . . .
”

“It’s like we specialized, Pa. Reef
is runnin on nerve, Kit’s gonna figure it all out scientifically, I’m the one
who just has to keep poundin at it day after day, like that fella back east
trying to turn silver to gold.”

“Deuce and Sloat ain’t here in
Telluride, son. And nobody here would tell you if they knew. Fact, they likely
have split up by now.”

“It’s Deuce and Lake I want to find.
Maybe he left her a while back, maybe she’s another fallen woman now and he’s
ridin hard into what he calls his future. He could even be gone across ’at Rio
Bravo.”

“He might want you to think so.”

“He might not stay in the U.S. too
long, for they’d be after him now, his old compadres, tough times, and any
number of youthful hardcases who’ll work cheaper, so he’s yesterday’s
deadweight. Only place for him to go’d be south.”

So ran Frank’s reasoning. Webb, who
knew everything now, saw no point in trying to convince him otherwise. All he
said was, “D’ you hear something?”

Some ghosts go
oooooo.
Webb
had always expressed himself more by way of dynamite. Frank had a vision then,
or whatever you call a vision when you hear instead of see it. . . not the
comforting thunder of mineblasting up in the mountains, but right down here in
town, hammering up and down the valley, causing even the blackandwhite dairy
cows there to take a minute to look up before getting back to serious grazing
. . .
the bonedeep voice of retribution
long in coming.

Faces he thought he knew turned out
to be others, or not there at all. Saloon girls tried to engage him in
metaphysical discussions, like did the dead walk, and so forth. Up on the Ophir
road one night, Frank thought he saw his sister, heading down into the valley,
keeping her face carefully averted, the way Lake was known to, as for some
sorrow she would be forever unwilling to explain, if anybody should ask. He
came to believe it must have been a wraith.

Frank came along with Merle to see
Dally off at the station. “Like to ride with yon, far as Denver anyway, but
some of these boys have other ideas. So listen now—my brother Kit is back
east going to college at Yale, which is in New Haven, Connecticut? not much
further from New York than Montrose is from here, so you be sure and get in
touch if you can, he’s a nice kid, little

dreamy till you get his attention,
but the scrape ain’t been invented he can’t help you out of, just don’t
hesitate, hear me?”

“Thanks Frank, to be worryin about
me, with all you’ve got to worry about yourself right now.”

“Maybe ’cause you and Kit are two of
a kind.”

“Hell, that case I ain’t going near
him.”

Along the platform Dally was getting
looks from those accomplished in the parental arts, many indeed putting in with
strenuous objection. “Allowing a child to journey without adult supervision across
twothirds of a continent to a nexus of known depravity such as New York City
would surely bring prosecution in many if not most courtrooms of the
land—”

“Let alone judgment in the dock of
Christian Morality, certain and pitiless, by That Which all temporal powers,
judges included, must one day bow to—”

“Lady,” observed the impertinent snip
under discussion, “if I can get through the average Saturday night in
Telluride, there’s nothing back east’ll present much of a problem.”

Merle beamed, as close as he ever got
to fatherly pride. “You take care now, Dahlia.” Everybody else was aboard, the
train about to make its backward departure, as if it couldn’t bear to lose
sight of Telluride till the last minute.

“So long, Pa.”

They had been in and out of each other’s
arms so often, she had no uneasiness with goodbye
abrazos.
Merle, who
had a sense of the bets on the table here, knew he better not spook her now.
Neither of them had ever had much interest in breaking each other’s heart. In
theory they both knew she had to move on, though all he wanted right now was to
wait, even just another day. But he knew that feeling, and he guessed it would
pass.

engo que
get
el
fuck out of
aquí
”
Kit reckoned. First thing up in the morning, last thing
before climbing into bed at night, he found himself repeating it, like a
prayer. Yale’s charm had not only worn away at last but also was revealing now
the toxic layers beneath, as Kit came to understand how little the place was
about studying and learning, much less finding a transcendent world in
imaginaries or vectors—though sometimes, to be sure, he’d caught hints of
some Kabbalah or unverbalized knowledge being transferred as if mind to mind,
not because of so much as in spite of Yale. To do with the invisible new waves
especially, latent in the Maxwell Field Equations years before Hertz found
them—Shunkichi Kimura, who had studied with Gibbs here, had returned to
Japan, joined the Naval Staff college faculty, and codeveloped wireless
telegraphy in time for the war with Russia. Vectors and wireless telegraphy, a
silent connection.

Gibbs had died at the end of April,
and amid the general despondency in the math department, Kit realized it was
the last straw, revealing Yale to be no more really than a sort of highhat
technical school for learning to be a Yale Man, if not indeed a factory for
turning out Yale Men, gentlemen but no scholars except inadvertently, and that
was about it.

’Fax was no help with this. Kit
wouldn’t have known how to begin to bring the subject up, even though ’Fax
offered him more than enough openings.

“All the time you’ve been here, and
you haven’t joined any clubs.”

“Too busy.”

“Busy?” They looked at one another at
some interplanetary range. “I say Kit, I mean you might as well be a Jew, you
know.”

This did not clarify anything. Jews
at Yale at that time were an exotic species.

Early in his hitch at Yale, Kit had
been at a track meet one day and seen a boy in his class being greeted by a
party of older men dressed in what Kit recognized by now as very expensive town
suits. They all stood and chatted, smiling and easy, paying no attention to the
young athletes in plain sight all across the deep green field who ran, jumped,
swiveled, and launched, entering unsuspected reaches of pain and body damage,
striving toward the day’s offers of simulated immortality. Kit thought, I will
never look like this fellow, talk like that, be wanted in that way. At first it
produced a terrible feeling of exclusion, a piercing conviction that because of
where and to whom he had been born, some world of visible privilege would
forever be denied him. There would arrive a point where, returned to his right
mind again, he could ask, reasonably, why did I want
that
so much?
though until then it had felt for months like his life had gone into eclipse.

He began to keep an eye out for this
peculiar traffic, on the campus, in town, at ceremonies and socials, soon
recognizing a purposeful twostep of college boys and older men whose story of
success the boys wished to reenact. He supposed that was it.

In classes, Gibbs, before working
through a problem, had been fond of saying, “We shall pretend to know nothing
about this solution from Nature.” Generations of students, Kit among them, had
taken that to heart, in all its metaphysical promise. Though Vectorism offered
a gateway into regions the operatives of Wall Street were unlikely ever to
understand, let alone penetrate, there nonetheless, set closely everyway Kit
looked, were Vibe sentinels, eyes in leafy ambuscade, as if Kit were a species
of investment, clues to whose future performance could be gathered only through
minutetominute surveillance, shift an eyelid and they might miss out on
something essential. Worse, as if the plan all along had been to drive him so
far inside his head he’d lose the way back. Being the sort of mathematician he
was, Kit found himself with contradictory allegiances, knowing that he must not
turn by much from the mechanics of the given world, yet at the same time
remaining aware that there was no role for his destiny as a Vectorist within
any set of Vibe goals he could imagine, any more than the magnate could imagine
Gibbs’s grand system, or the higher promise.