Against the Day (88 page)

ever quite meet Frank’s eyes, respond when he spoke, or
recognize him in any but the most muted and shifty ways. He wondered if he
could be his own ghost, and haunting these rooms and corridors, as if the
nearly negligible fraction of his life spent here had remained here, somehow
still proceeding, just past visibility—Stray, Cooper and Sage, Linnet,
Reef as the careless young rounder he’d been, all were just “over there,” just
like living in the world, changed from whoever they used to be, reluctantly allowing
in more and more of the spiritbattering events of everyday, moved on, some of
them, into colder places and harder times, bust, adrift, drawn west by those
Pacific promises, victims of their own bad judgment. . . but Frank understood
he was not to be any part of it.

Sometimes when he asked, one of the
newcomers would try to tell him where Stray was, but he couldn’t understand
them, the words didn’t fall into any kind of sense. The town abruptly became an
unreadable map to him. Since Mexico he had been sorely conscious of borderlands
and lines crossable and forbidden, and the day often as not seemed set to the
side of what he thought was his real life.

He kept thinking he saw her, Stray
with her hair down and her baby in her arms, out in town running chores or
riding away, always away from him, toward the hills. Yet later, say three or
four in the afternoon, when everybody but Stray and the little one, or their
shadows, would have cleared out—when, alone, he could return to the empty
rooms, he knew that before too long, from the other side of whatever it was
separating them, he would begin to hear her “getting ready for supper.” Frank
stood at the flimsy kitchen door, with the paperedover glass, when the light
came through, and listened, breathed, waited. He wondered if Stray, over on
“her side,” alone during the deepening sadness of these daytime hours, might’ve
begun to hear in other parts of the house routine sounds of his own
presence—footsteps, water running or draining—as if from some phantom
rooms amputated from the rest of the building and occupied, like it or not, by
the dead? . . .

Frank couldn’t stand it for more than
three nights, though by the time he left, it seemed like weeks. On the way out
the street door, at the last minute, he ran into Linnet Dawes, who needed a
minute or two to remember Frank. She was still a local belle, still teaching
school, but had picked up a kind of glaze, as if parttiming now in more adult
areas.

“Let me guess who you’re looking
for,” Linnet said, coolly it seemed to Frank.

   
“Reef.”

“Oh. Well your brother, he came by
last year sometime, maybe the year before, to pick up Mrs. Traverse”—even
Frank could detect some sarcasm—

“and little Jesse, but they didn’t
stay here more than another night. Thought I heard something about New Mexico,
but neither of them was confiding in me, exactly.”

“It’s strange, I keep thinking I see
Estrella here and there around town, just imaginin, I guess
. . . .
” Oh, was she flashing him a look
here. “What? I pronounce somethin wrong?”

“That young lady,” shaking her head,
“created more damned drama around here. Who needed an opera house when
she
was
performing? You start off thinking she’s like one of these Oriental wise folks,
far above all the pettiness and small potatoes, gazing down on the rest of
us—instead, imagine our surprise to find out at last how largescale of an
egotist we’ve been dealing with, in fact so much of one that nobody ever took
all of it in. Big mistake, poor suckers, all of us.”

   
“So
is that her I keep seein? Or ain’t it—sorry,
isn’t
it?”

“You are not that same ’cute
mineschool boy I remember, looks like you’ve been through some educational
activities, so maybe I don’t have to be too tender about your feelings. Your
brother left the country, more to the point he left his wife and child.
Estrella’s doing a good job with that little Jesse, credit where credit’s due,
didn’t hurt any that her sister and her sister’s husband were usually within a
day or two’s ride of her. It’s a small ranch outside Fickle Creek, New Mexico.
She’s there sometimes.”

   
“For
somebody you don’t like, you’re sure keepin a close eye.”

“Just professional reflexes. Your
nephew is an engaging little customer, you’ll see.”

   
“If
I’m down that way.”

   
She
nodded, one side of her smile higher than the other. “Sure. Say hello.”

He hit the pass
at the summit just about as Saturday
night was settling in down in Fickle Creek, you could hear the gunshots and
whoopdedo from up here easy. From the toll station here, through icepoints
falling, steeped in a cold, neutral green light far below, he could see a
little city laid out around a plaza. Frank took a glass of red whiskey and
bought a pocketful of cigars and started down.

He found a ramshackle old hotel a
block square, the Hotel Noctámbulo, where insomnia prevailed. In each room,
somebody was staying up working at some impossible midnight project—a mad
inventor, a gambler with a system, a preacher with an only partlycommunicable
vision. Doors were left unlocked, strangers acted for the most part like
neighbors, everybody free to roam each others’ units. No matter how deep in the
morning darkness,

Frank found he could always walk in
in search of a smoke and conversation. Down in the courtyard, a festive crowd
came and went all night. Everybody chiseled smokes.

Strange motorcycles, many of them
homemade, went roaring raggedly into and out of town. Cowboy poets might allege
how the noise “echoed off the steep mountainside” and on down the valley, but
right on the spot, why it was too exotic a sound to carry much of any message,
at least for no more than a few, though certain taverns on the way in, and even
some going out, of town had already offered hospitality to the bands of riders.

Frank found he couldn’t sleep, and
headed down to the nearest saloon. Out in front, where once only horses had
been tied, now stood Silent Gray Fellows and Indian Vtwins, modified expressly
for these mountains, with heavyduty clutches, belts, chains, or gearboxes. All
up and down Main Street in these motor saloons mingled trickriding artists up
from the prairie carnival circuits for a little change of ventilation, and
peachfuzz desperados singing the harmony to Joe Hill’s “Pie in the Sky” for
ancient flatout labor nihilists on whose palms the love lines, life lines,
girdles of Venus and such had been years overmapped, into jagged white
inscriptions no carnival Gypsy would dare to read, by wood fires, rock walls,
barbwire unspooling too fast, bayonets in the bullpens of the Coeur d’Alene
. . . .
Motorized elements of the notorious
Four Corners Gang, based up in Cortez, bought double shots of Taos Lightning
for earnest hobbyists from as far away as Kansas, detached not all against
their wills from some club tour or other, out and up through the night talking
clutches and crankcases till the sun was in the window.

A pale individual in a black cape
entered silently and sat down at the far end of the bar. As the barkeep set
bottle and glass before him, crossing wrists in the usual way so as to put the
bottle to the customer’s right, this gent suddenly gave out with a
bloodfreezing scream, shielded his eyes with his cape, and rared back so
violently he fell off of the barstool and lay on the floor, kicking up the
sawdust.

   
“What
’n the world?”

“Oh, that’s ’at there Zoltan, drives
a Werner, climbed every hill over in his native Hungary and now he’s off on a
world tour lookin for fresh challenges. He’s won trophies ain’t been named yet,
fears no mountain whatever its size, but show him anything looks like a letter
X,
why he goes all like he is there.”

“Don’t care much for saloon mirrors
neither, ’s why he sits all the way down to the end like that
. . . .
”

   
“Does
this happen every time he comes in?” Frank wondered. “Why not

just. . . put the bottle down first, then bring the glass,
then—”

   
“Heard
that suggestion a number of times, and real obliged, but it ain’t

exactly Denver here, not much the boys can depend upon for
entertainment, and ol’ Zolly’s turned out to be a real addition. One night to
the next,

we make do.”

Around the middle of the third shift,
Frank went for some breakfast at the flapjack emporium up the street, where it
didn’t take him long to understand that Stray had been
right upstairs all
along,
with some motor outlaw whose widelyrecognized blue Excelsior was
parked outside, and, well, the contentment in her face when she did step back
down again into this pocketsize eating house, her bearing, her
hair
,
for Lord sakes, was enough
to divide a fellow into two, one saying, calmly, would you just look at her,
how can any man begrudge and so forth, and the other wounded enough to soak a
whole restaurant tablecloth with the snot and tears of it, never mind who was
watching. As she glided on down, the attractively costumed waiter girls (more
of them, really, than the size of the room and the time of night could quite
account for) kept throwing her
certain glances
. . . .

Oh and look now here come lover boy
himself, the regionally famous Vang Feeley, looking almost too legendary, it
seemed to Frank, to have much of a carnal side left to him—his motoring
outfit black, spare, undamageable. He walked without a word right past Frank,
whose attitude was not much improved when he realized he’d been gazing, it
seemed, for what must already be a long time, at the crotch of Vang’s pants,
well that general direction
. . . .
Whoaoh.
Such behavior might lie beneath the notice of Vang himself, but not of these
pitiless, amused waitergals crowding the area, their remarks directed more and
more, Frank couldn’t help imagining, at himself, which by the time this eased
off, why Vang had actually been outside for a while, consulting with Zoltan,
who had recovered from his fit hours ago, over bikehardware questions such as
the silencer bypass situation, as, given the complexities in Vang’s life right
then, when the multiple outcomes of the night were apt to narrow to one in only
clockseconds, engine performance could mean everything.

Stray had lingered to finish half a
cup of coffee, smiling around lazily at everybody, including Frank, whom she
didn’t recognize if she saw him at all, and when she was done, she reached to
set her cup in with the dishes waiting to be got to, and with one hand loosely
in a pocket of her duster, strolled admirably out the door to swing aboard
behind and around damned old Vang, in the same motion bringing along and
distributing duster and skirts in a routine as elaborate as any curtsey of
Grandmother’s day, lifting them, in fact, and to the delight of onlookers, high
enough so as not to catch fire from the vehicle’s exhaust. And joining the line
of other wellwishers atten

tive as any string of trainwatching
cowboys down to the depot, Frank was out there too, to wave her adios.

When he got back to Denver, it was
still Ed Chase’s town, and Frank began to fall back into the old habits of
squandering time and money, until one night, making his way along Arapahoe
somewhere between Tortoni’s and Bill Jones’s, where he heard he’d been declared
an honorary Negro, though this turned out to be somebody’s idea of a practical
joke, Frank ran into the Reverend Moss Gatlin driving a strangelooking
horseless trolley car, with a miniature steeple and working church bells on the
back end, and over the front window, where the destination sign usually was,
the lightedup words
anarchist heaven
.
Moss was busy picking up every vagrant, anklebiter, opium fiend, downandouter,
brakebeam stiff, in fact any citizen looking even a little helpless—and
loading them on board his A.H. Express. Frank must have qualified, because the
Rev caught sight of him right away and tipped his hat. “Evenin, Frank,” as if
they’d only seen each other yesterday. He pulled on a lever and the conveyance
slowed enough for Frank to swing aboard.

   
“Any
faces you ever forgot?” Frank marveled.

“Couple wives maybe,” said Moss
Gatlin. “Now Frank, I never got to tell you how terrible that was about your
Pa. You seen much of the subhuman pustules that done it?”

“Workin on it,” said Frank, who since
the halfsecond of otherworldliness down in Coahuila had found nobody really to
talk to about it.

   
“Heard
a story or two, though I wouldn’t say word was around.”

“Now you mention it, one or two of
the newspaper gang lately have been flashing these funny looks, like they were
about to say somethin?”

“Hope you ain’t having too many of
those second thoughts that stop a fellow just as dead as if it was him down in
the sawdust.”

   
“No
thoughts,” Frank shrugged, “second, third, whatever. It’s done, ain’t it.”

   
“How’d
your Ma take the news?”