Against the Day (92 page)

“No
way she could’ve heard anything before the mail wagon came in.” They’d go off
laughing.

“She was only a dynamiter’s
daughter,” Mayva was singing in this dream, “but caps went off, where’er she
passed by
. . . .
”

“You do your best,” she cried out at
her mother, “to wreck us, and then you run away, out of reach, behind the wall
of death.”

“You want to come out after us, out
there beside the old dark river, find us, read us off your list of complaints?
Somebody sooner or later’ll be happy enough to he’p you do that. Swear, Lake,
you’ve gone sour in your old age.”

Lake woke up, but so slowly it seemed
for a while that Mayva was really there in the room.

“
You
could wait
for him to come back,” Tace advised. “It happens sometimes.
What you might not want to count on is ever gettin back to that old domestic
bliss.”

“You mean put up with the son of a
bitch again, maybe again and again, ’cause I don’t have that much choice.”

   
“And
Eugene is gettin grumpy with all the extra chores.”

   
“Oh
that case I guess I better pray extra hard.”

And then one day the wind was howling
up in the telegraph wires and Deuce came riding back into Wall o’ Death. Hadn’t
come close—no surprise—to finding out who got Sloat. Only out there
a week or ten days, but it looked like a year’s worth of weariness, head all
hanging down, sort of a pale indoor look to him.

It didn’t end anything, of course.
Sloat would start coming in the window, off the empty night plain, going
“Whoooooo, you little piss ant, how come you never saw it? Was I always
supposed to be the one protectin you?” To which Deuce, if he was not by then
too paralyzed in fear, would reply, “But, well but, I thought that was the
deal, I mean you always said—” and so it would go back and forth till
Lake struggled up into yet another day’s first drift of unpromising light,
muttering, “Person can’t get
no
damned sleep around here
. . . .
”

“
Always
thought
there was
this great secret. The way they looked at each other when they said certain
things in a certain way
. . . .
And
now I’m being let in on it at last.”

   
“Oh,
child,” said Tace Boilster. “You’re sure of that, now.”

   
Lake
gazed at the Sheriff’s wife. At their feet Boilster babies crawled and

stumbled, dropped, picked up and threw things down again.

“Like that all you have to do,” Tace
went on, “is let go, let it bear you up and carry you, and everything’s so
clear because you’re not fighting back anymore, the clouds of anger are out of
your face, you see further and clearer than you ever thought you could. . .

   
“Yes.”

   
“Inspect
your shoes, Mrs. Kindred, it’s gettin deep around here.”

   
“He
can change, Tace.”

   
“And
you’re just the angel o’ damn mercy’s going to change him?”

   
“I
know I can.”

“Sure.” She nodded, beaming, till she
thought the girl was lulled, then snapped, “Into what?”

Lake only angled her head a little
downward, pretending meekness though keeping her eyes onto Tace’s.

“Let me guess. Into somebody
so
much better
’n
he is
right now, that you won’t have to think no more about what he did. Save
yourself all that trouble.”

   
“Why
not?” Lake whispered. “Anythin wrong with wanting that?”

 
“Wanting? Well, wanting
.
. .
if it was me, see, I’d be lookin to change him into somethin
worse.
Weaker, slower, bad enough judgment that I could just do the deed on him
whenever I felt like?”

Lake shook her head. “Tsk.
Lawenforcement wife, too. Well sure, don’t think I haven’t thought about
it—just go find his pistol some night, put it down onto that snorin
little head,” clapping her hands once, “amen. Even with the blood and so forth
to be cleaned up after and your Mr. B. to worry about, sure—but I don’t,
do I?”

Tace thought she might have caught a
look, a shadow moving across the younger woman’s face so fast, proceeding from
some deeper source of sorrow that later she couldn’t swear that she even saw
it. And Lake meanwhile, perhaps after all a touch too cheerfully, was going on,
“But supposing
. . .
what he did
. . .
was a kind of mistake, you know,
just a mistake, Tace, didn’t you ever make one of them?”

“Hires on to kill your Pa, some
mistake.”

Yes, one of the big questions, which
just went on sitting there, and she wouldn’t ask, and Deuce sure wouldn’t bring
it up—namely, how much did Deuce know before he went and did it? Had he
signed up to just be their allpurpose gun? or to go after Webb in particular?

“You think he’s so
good,
”
Tace went on, “just a boy
that’s lost, that it? and you can bring him back, all you need to do’s love him
enough, love your

enemy into some kind of redeemin grace for the both of you?
Applesauce, young lady.”

“Tace, you’d ever been up in those
damn mountains you’d know, it was just so hard, never let up, you worked at
all, that’s who you worked for. Them— that was it. They’d tell you to
trust their judgment, and what choice did you have? Even if it was something
bad, folks took what they could. Deuce was all ready to do it, I wasn’t there
and neither were you, maybe he thought he saw Pa with somethin in his hand,
those were desperate days, miners gettin shot all the time, if you were legally
deputized, they tended to let you off.”

Now, it’s not as if this was a
courtroom and Tace was the judge. No reason Lake should be trying this hard to
convince anybody. Was Webb heeled that day? was it conceivable Webb went for
Deuce first and Deuce only acted in selfdefense?

Knowing Webb was gone was hard
enough, but worse was this queer coldness, this lost trail back to what should
have been unsoiled memories, to her whole childhood brought so brutally to an
end, meantime having to live with somebody she had come to hate everything about,
except when he put his hands onto her, and then. Oh, then.

And I can never leave him, she wrote
in the little school copybook she used for a diary, no matter what he does to
me, I have to stay, it’s part of the deal. Can’t run
. . .
sometimes like I’m trying to wake up and can’t. . . and I
already knew didn’t I, long before we married, who he was, what it was he did,
and yet I went ahead and married him. I didn’t know, but I knew
. . .
maybe from the first time I caught
him looking at me, there was that brighteyed excuse for a smile, like we were
wellknown figures of public life and each of us was supposed to know who the
other was, and not lift a finger, either one, even with all we knew. Some deal
we made. With the empty spaces always in between how I ought to be feeling and
what I was really up to, it was sneaking away to Silverton all over again, and
nobody saw it, they thought it was just grieving for Pa or trying to keep busy,
they told me time would pass and I’d get back to daily life
. . .
but I think I’m dreaming and can’t
wake up
. . . .

Wish it could be Denver. . . be a
saloon girl
. . . .
She crossed out the words, but went
on daydreaming about it, whole dime novels full of lurid goingson. Chandeliers
and Champagne. Men whose faces were never too clear. Pain that felt just so
good, imagined in detail. Girl intimates who lay around in fancy linen sharing
laudanum on long slow winter nights. A loneliness nothing could touch. An
embrace of distant, empty rooms, kept clean by the wind forever blowing
through. A highmountain sunlit spareness, a house framed in absolute
rectilinear purity, dry, bleached, silent but for the wind. And her

young face, remembered by a hundred nogoods all through the
San Juans for its clean delicacy, unshielded before the days and what they were
doing to it.

Once it was clear
to him that she knew, and to her
that he knew she knew and so forth, once they found themselves passed somehow
through that fatal gate they’d both been so afraid of, opened as if by
invisible guardians and shut again behind them, and she went on as always and
didn’t give any sign of fixing to shoot him or anything like that, Deuce must
have felt easier about surrendering his hardcase ways in favor of helpless,
unmanly pleading, couldn’t stop offering his explanations, not that she was
that interested, less so as time went on. “They told me he was a Union
dynamiter. Was I supposed to ask him if they were right? They said they had
proof, a whole secret life nobody ever saw. Course I believed it. Anarchist, no
conscience at all. Women, children, innocent mine workers, didn’t matter. They
said—”

“I can’t help you out, Deuce, I never
knew that much of what he was up to. Talk to a lawyer, why don’t you.” Was this
her own voice?

But even in her silences, he thought
he heard something. “It was to save lives, that’s how they saw it. I was only
their instrument—”

   
“Oh—there’s
’at whinin again.”

“Lake
. . .
please forgive me
. . .
.
” Down on his knees again with another display of the eyeball
hydraulics, which was not as becoming in a man, she had discovered, as tales of
romance in the ladies’ magazines would lead you to think. Fact there were times
it could be downright repellent.

“Maybe my mind was wandering those
fateful moments, but I never heard that Swede say love honor
and
forgive.
Get up, Deuce, it
ain’t working.” She had chores to do anyhow—there was no way around that.

But the
really
strange thing
was, that with all there was to send them off down forever separate tracks, he
continued to desire her, as much—no, more than ever now—and she
finally started paying attention as she felt it turning to power for her,
flowing out of the invisible unknowability of men like bank interest into some
account in her name she hadn’t known was there, growing with the days—she
learned how easily she could ignore his heated eyes across the room, slide away
from his hands, choose her own moments and try not to smirk too much at how
grateful he was, and not be assaulted for any of it, nor even screamed at. What
was not so clear was if and when he’d wake from this obviously shortterm opium
dream, or how far it might be safe to push before he did wake up, maybe even
too quickly for her

to get to a safe distance away
. . .
skillful stepping, at least a sensitive touch, would be
needed—she could not afford to relax, when any unguarded word,
eyemovement, routine flash of jealousy, might trip the latch and send him back
to good old Deuce, blind crazy out of the chute and looking for blood at long
last.

After what had
added up to years of dodging, false
uttering, and hard riding to escape it, Deuce was relentlessly being delivered
into his own life, and what a dismal prospect it was turning out to be.

Out there doing what each day
demanded, he understood on one of them whose date he didn’t record that the
Furies were no longer in pursuit, Utahan or any other kind, that some statute
of limitations had run and he was “free,” though it felt like anything but.

Him and Lake, they had both wanted
children, but as the days lengthened out, wheeled, the seasons repeated, and no
little ones appeared, they came to fear that this was because of what lay
poisonously between them, and that unless they could do something about it, no
new life would ever be possible. They went out in the middle of the night to a
distant riverfront hovel, Lake down on the dirt floor while a Sioux shaman with
a look of incurable melancholy sang, shaking articles of feather and bone above
her belly, Deuce forcing himself to sit clenched in a multiple
humiliation—another man, an Indian, his own failure. They spent
unreasonable sums on patent medicines that ranged from ineffective to
dangerous, sending Lake more than once to Happy Jack La Foam for an antidote.
They went to herbalists, homeopathists, and magnetists, most of whom ended up
recommending prayer, which different sorts of Christer in the neighborhood were
always happy to offer advice about the exact wording of. Their local reputation
solidified, after a while the whispers stopped, and there was only smalltown
condescension to worry about.

“You can’t let these other women get
you down, child,” said Tace. “You don’t owe them one damn thing, sure ’s hell
not children. You live your life and hope they’ll be busy enough with theirs
not to be putting in so much with yours.”

   
“But—”