Against the Day (73 page)

“How logical is that?” Ewball
objected. “If we’re going to be sleeping for eternity. I mean . . .” But Frank
was already snoring.

Ewball was still awake an hour later
when they were joined by another northamerican, who introduced himself as
Dwayne Provecho, drunk but not very sleepy, who commenced a monologue, inviting
Ewball’s attention more than once to his knowledge of secret tunnels, there
since the ancient silvermining beneath Guanajuato, that were sure to lead them
out of this place. “End of the world is coming soon, you see. This last time
across, riding out of Tucson, you could hear it in the air, all the way to
Nogales and over the
frontera,
it never quit. Kind of roar, beasts
overhead, bigger than anything you ever ran into, wings moving against the moon
like clouds, suddenly it all goes dark and you’re not sure you want it to pass
too quick, for when the light comes back, who knows what you’ll see up yonder?”

“Real obliged,” Frank opening one eye
to assure him, “but maybe if we could all just get some sleep—”

“Oh—no no no, not a minute to
waste, for it’s the Lord on his return journey, you must see that, he started
to go away, and then he slowed down, like he’d had a thought, and stopped, and
turned, and now he’s coming back for us, can’t you see that light, can’t you
feel that heat radiating from him the closer he gets,” and so forth.

Despite the presence of a
largerthanexpected number of religious bores, as time passed, this Mexican
hoosegow would turn out to be not nearly the hellhole of bordertown legend but
a flexible and now and then even friendly arrangement, due in great measure to
the money that Ewball’s pockets were all at once mysteriously full of. “Where’s
this coming from? Ewb, it’s starting to make me nervous, now
. . . .
”

   
“No
say prayocoopy, compadre!”

“Yeahp o’ course, but somebody keeps
bringin it over here all the time,
somebody you know.
”

   
“Regular
as payday and safe as the Morgan Bank.”

Ewball was trying to strike the
carefree note, but Frank felt less chirpy. “Sure. And when’ll they be wanting
it back?”

   
“Someday,
maybe, after we get out of here, but who’s in any hurry for that?”

   
Tell
the truth, neither one of them. This place was just a dream, so peaceful,

compared to what they’d been brought here down out of,
peaceful as the city above looked from great distances, but never, up close,
managed to sound— no drunken miners or unannounced blasting, the beating
of the stamp mills all night coming through the rock here muted, in polyrhythms
as persuasive to sleep as the constant flow of sea to a crewman bunking below
the waterline—at the edges of sleep’s blessed vegetable patch
. . . .
Down here workaday anxieties were
brushed away, while opportunities for recreation went ever unfolding, in a parade
of subterranean attractions—a cantina complete with music and fandango
girls, a small nickelodeon theater, or actually centavodeón, roulette and faro,
grifa
peddlers and opium joints staffed by elements of the Chinese
community topside, suites of guest rooms luxurious as any in town, with the
underground equivalent of a balcony from which one could view, it seemed for
miles, the smokedarkened walls and ironriveted watchtowers and the brown
corridors, often roofless, of this increasingly cozy captivity, with few of
your usual knifers and drunks and miningtown riffraff—no, given the
national politics at the moment unfolding, the other detainees here seemed more
like, what would you call them, honest working stiffs with a dangerous light in
their eyes. Outspoken professors, rogue
científicos
as well. Nor did
certain hoosegow dynamics, such as those to do with one’s rectal integrity,
even seem to apply here, which did simplify the day for the two northamericans.

Another surprise came when the
turnkey on the night shift proved to be a pleasantlooking young woman in an
untypically squaredaway uniform, named Amparo, or, as she preferred, Sergeant,
Vásquez. A closely connected relation of somebody higher up, Frank imagined.
She was seldom observed smiling, exactly, but then neither was she ever 100
percent jailhouse business. “Look out, now,” muttered Frank, not entirely to
himself.

   
“Oh,
I don’t know,” said Ewball. “I think she likes us.”

   
“Likes
all ’em hidalgos you’re throwing around, s more likely.”

   
“Damn.
You’re really consistent.”

   
“Thanks.
Or do I mean, ‘How’s that?
’ ”

   
“Women.
You ever run into one that no money changed hands?”

“Give
me a month or two, I could probably come up with somethin’ ran under a dollar
somehow.”

What
the Sergeant made clear right away was that they could do anything they had the
payback for, as long as they remembered to ask her about it first. Short of
walk out, of course, though she daily brought down repeated promises of a
speedy resolution to their case.

“Well, would you happen to know what
it is we’re in here for, ’cause nobody’s exactly tellin us?”

“You look just a corker today by the
way, your hair up in that silver concern and all.”

“
Ay,
lisonjeros.
They say
it was something one of you did a long time ago, back on the Other Side.”

   
“But
then why run both of us in?”

   
“Yehp
and which one of us is it?”

She only gazed back at them one at a
time, boldly and not at all illdisposed, the way women will tend to do in the
Capital sometimes.

“Must be me they want,” Frank
guessed. “Can’t be you, Ewball, you’re too young to have any history with the
law.”

   
“Well
I have been party to some bribery activities
.
. . .
”

   
“You
wouldn’t be in here for that.”

   
“Shouldn’t
you be looking more worried, then?”

Frank
awoke very early in the morning from a dream of voyaging by air, high in the
air, in a conveyance whose actual working principles were mysterious to him, to
find the molteneyed Sergeant Vásquez at the door, with a breakfast tray of
chilled papayas and limes, already cut up to avoid any chance of kniferelated
mischief, bolillos freshly baked, sliced, and spread with beans and Chihuahua
cheese and put in some oven till the cheese melted, a kitchen salsa featuring
the energetic local chili known as El Chinganáriz, a pitcherful of mixed orange,
mango, and strawberry juice, and Vera Cruz coffee with heated milk and chunks
of unrefined sugar to go in it.

“You
boys sure eat good,” commented Dwayne Provecho, choosing that moment to pop his
head in the door and exhibit a string of drool running off his chin and down
his shirt.

“Sure
Dwayne, you want to dig right in there.” Frank noticed the Sarge giving him the
eyeball heliograph from out in the corridor. “Be back
. . . .
”

“Maybe you don’t want to get too
friendly,” she advised. “That one goes in the shadow of the
paredón.
”

   
“Why,
what’d he do?”

She
let it wait for a minute. “Running errands north of the border. Working for
some
. . .
dangerous people. You know
of”—lowering her voice and fixing him with a gaze beneath which
selfdelusion became impossible— “P.L.M.?”

Uhoh.
“Let’s see, that’s those Flores Magón brothers,
¿verdad?. . .
and that
Camilo Arriaga too, local fellow if I’m not mistaken
. . .
?”

“Camilo? he’s a
potosino.
And
el señor Provecho’s employers—they might consider the Flores Magón a bit
too
. . .
you say,
delicate
?”

“Well but look at him in there.
Porkin away—ain’t that pretty cheerful for a man’s about to be lined up
against the wall?”

“There are two schools of thought.
Some would like to release him, follow him, keep a record, see what they can
learn. Others only want to remove a troublesome element, the sooner the
better.”

“Well but there’s people in here tons
more of a threat than old Dwayne,
muñeca,
some in for fifty years so
far, why’s time all of a sudden so important? Something
big in the works,
maybe?”

“Your eyes,” as she was in the habit
of whispering when they were alone, “I never see eyes like this.”

Oh well. “Sergeant now you tellin me
you never had time to gaze in a gringo’s eyes before?”

She kept silent, doing that thing with
her own unreadable blackirised eyes that reliably set him to wondering. She had
warned him today, that was the limit of her commission—and when finally
Dwayne did get around to blurting all, Frank wasn’t too surprised.

Dwayne smelled like tequilaandbeer
caldereros
y sus macheteros
in unknown amounts, though Frank wasn’t sure how much had
actually got inside of him—there was too much clarity around his eyes,
which had grown incandescent. “Here on a mission,” was how he described it,
“specifically to offer you some contract employment, it being widely believed,
down here as back the other side, that you, sorry if I’m bein too direct, ’re
none other than that Kieselguhr Kid of Wild West legend.”

“Heck of an assumption, Dwayne, seems
like that you’d somehow know better, man been up and down the territory and so
forth.”

   
“You’re
. . .just a mine engineer and that’s all.”

“Yehp but there’s plenty know their
way around the dangerous substances ’t’s on your mind who’d be happy for the
action, too, so when you get out of here, what you need to do’s you pick out
any mine in the Veta Madre, head for the first cantina downtrail of it, and
you’ll be up to your ears in qualified demolition folks before you figure out
who’s buying the next round.”

“With half of ’m, brother, depending
for their jobs on this ol’ Porfiriato here keepin on forever, and all’s I’ve
got to do is guess wrong just once about that.”

   
“Maybe
you just did.”

   
“Then
I’m at your mercy, ain’t I?”

“I wonder if you’d be this jocular
with the real Kieselguhr Kid
. . .
wouldn’t
you be showin more respect, hell I don’t know, some fear, even?”

   
“Kid,
if I may so address you, I’m afraid all the time.”

“What I meant was, there must be some
room there in your mind for the chance you got the wrong fella?”

   
“Federales’ve
got photos, I’ve seen ’m.”

   
“Nobody
ever looks like their ‘mug,’ you ought to know that by now.”

“Also talked to Brother Disco up in
Telluride. He predicted you’d be down here, and whose company you’d be in,
too.”

   
“Ellmore
thinks I’m the Kid?”

“Ellmore says it’s the only reason
Bob Meldrum didn’t just drill you the first time he laid eyes on you.”

   
“I
frightened
HairTrigger Bob?”

“More like professional courtesy,”
opined Dwayne Provecho with a certain practiced avuncularity. “And just to show
you all’s on the up and up, tonight we break out of here.”

   
“Just
when I was gettin to like it. Why don’t you go on ahead by yourself.”

“Because everybody here thinks you’re
the Kieselguhr Kid and they’re expectin a breakout.”

   
“But
I’m not.”

“But someday some local badass who
thinks you are will be unable to resist plungin his
cuchillo
into your
heart, just for the glory it’ll bring him.”

“Tactfully put,” said Ewball, joining
the conversation, “though it really is time we were on the trail, Frank.”

   
“You
too? Thought your people ’s gonna buy our way out.”

   
“So
did I for a while.”

   
“Uhoh.”

Carrying
darklanterns
, they
entered a smoothwalled, vaulted corridor. Shadows bobbed, white shapes emerged
ahead. “Oh boy,” Ewball said.

“Ain’t fixin’ to be sick, are you?”
asked thoughtful Dwayne. “Fellas, meet the
momias.
”

There were about thirty of them,
hanging on pegs, in two long rows it was going to be necessary to pass between.
The bodies were concealed by sheets—only the heads were left uncovered,
angled downward, faces in different states of mummification, some in the
lanternlight without expression, others twisted in terrible agony. They all
seemed to be waiting for something, with a supernatural patience, their feet a
few inches above the floor, thin and distracted, keeping dignity and distance,
serenely believing themselves in, but not inescapably of, Mexico.