BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (12 page)

"The cards move faster and another shill
loses a game the mark would of won." Zimmerman leans toward the
table and puts a hand over each of our almost-empty cups. He twists
them clockwise, reverses them, and then moves them quickly forward
and back like pistons. "Pretty soon the mark can't wait to play.
And that's when the monte dealer works his magic."

I can't see the yellowing teeth behind
Zimmerman's closed lips, but his eyes momentarily flash the
singular focus of a predator.

"You like to gamble, Owen?"

"Not particularly," I say. "It doesn't make
much sense to go against the odds."

Zimmerman stands and pivots toward the cask
with our cups in his hands. His sudden change of position startles
me and I instinctively grip the pistol in my lap as he fills the
cups halfway. He slides a cup to me across the table and smiles so
his teeth emerge.

"What if you don't know the odds?"

"Then I try to push them in my favor or avoid
the game."

"You couldn't avoid the game tonight," he
says, gesturing with his head toward the gun, "so I guess you tried
to improve the odds."

I don't reply, but my stomach tightens as I
admit to myself that he's right.

"Maybe Gig was more of a gambler than you or
me," Zimmerman says as he takes a sip and settles back onto his
stool. "Not with cards," he adds. "Like you, Gig only wanted to
play when the odds was in his favor. So when he wasn't running a
straight game of faro for the house, he learned how to deal
blackjack with marked cards. And he taught himself monte, which
don't require any sense for odds at all. You just need three cards,
good hands, and a hundred hours of practice dealing alone.

"For Gig, cards was just a way to make a few
dollars so he could get by from day to day. It wasn't a way to get
rich, and that was the kind of gambling he was interested in.
Looking for gold was how you struck it, and that's why he left
Turner's and used up his grubstake prospecting in the hills near
Cripple Creek. When he knowed he had to work for wages again, he
went back to the saloon.

"By January of '95 he was dealing a steady
game of faro at Turner's and a game of monte at the dance hall that
was better than most. Didn't cost him much to bunk at a boarding
house and eat leftover meals at Turner's, so he was starting to
save up a little grubstake. Maybe two or three hundred dollars by
mid-winter. When it got to be enough, Gig would go prospecting
again. Never mind that he already gone bust at Cripple Creek.

"Sometime that winter a bookseller come
through Colorado Springs and stopped at the mining taverns in
Colorado City. One of his books was just published by a Seattle
company and Gig bought a copy as soon as he seen the cover. It was
only about eighty pages, plenty of pictures. I still remember that
book because he mailed it to me a week later, after he read it
forward and back three times. That book changed both our lives.

"It was called Guide to the Yukon Gold
Fields, and it was by a man named Veazie Wilson. He made it over
the Chilkoot Pass in '94, traveled two thousand miles down the
Yukon to the Bering Sea, and come back by steamer from St. Michael
before the port iced over that fall. Then he wrote his book and
died just as it got printed. It says that on the first page."

Zimmerman shakes his head as if the author's
death was still a recent surprise.

"You read that book and Wilson made most
things on the Inside look easy – the pass, the lakes, the rapids,
the long tramps through the brush – and then back Outside he's dead
of fever at thirty. It ain't what you expect.

"Anyway, Wilson said that the best place to
prospect in the Yukon was at Circle City, a new camp on the
northern Yukon up near the Arctic Circle. The richest diggings was
back in the hills on Birch Creek, where miners was getting as much
to the shovel as anyone still working Miller Creek at Forty Mile.
Circle was a hundred and seventy miles downriver from Forty Mile,
so it was easier to reach for steamers that was bringing in
supplies and grub from the coast.

"And Circle was on American territory, so you
had no Canadian customs, no royalties to the government, no mounted
police. If there was a dispute, miners held an open meeting, heared
both sides, and reached a verdict. Anyone guilty got fined on the
spot. Them that stole was sent downriver on a raft. Maybe strung up
for a serious crime. That was the kind of justice that miners from
the California and Colorado camps knowed and expected. So after the
prospects at Birch Creek proved out, Circle City was the place that
miners headed Inside was going, back in '95. Gig was sold on being
one of 'em."

I try to visualize the location of the mining
camps that Zimmerman has mentioned, remembering that the Yukon
flows northwest toward the Arctic Circle, then turns southwest and
runs twice as far to the Bering Sea. So Circle City must be near
the Yukon's northernmost reach. And Forty Mile is upstream, but
south? Closer to Dawson? Undermined by the whiskey, I map it hazily
onto the sinuous river in my mind's eye.

On impulse, I lift the pistol from my lap and
lay it flat on the table, fingers over the trigger and the barrel
toward Zimmerman.

"Any chance you're carrying a knife?"

Wincing as if I'd kicked him, he reaches into
the breast pocket of his vest and pulls out a folding stag-handled
knife that he lays on the table with a sigh.

"My daddy gave me this knife the day I turned
eighteen," he says. "Got my initials engraved on the blade."

"Open it up."

He squints at me and releases the catch; the
gleaming blade snaps open. It's long and looks well tended. I slide
the gun out of the way and gesture toward the pockmarked table
surface between us.

"Go ahead," I say. "Carve the river."

His eyes light up and he almost laughs but
nods instead. I keep my hand on the grip but ease the pistol back
to my lap as Zimmerman inverts the knife above the table. He slowly
advances it toward me, checks my countenance to make sure I'm not
reacting poorly, and then drives the knife point firmly into the
wood where my side of the table meets the wall.

He pulls the upright blade toward himself at
a forty-five degree angle, then reflects it back when he's halfway
across so it finishes where his side of the table meets the wall.
He waves the blade dismissively toward the symmetric triangle
defined by his etched line.

"Gulf of Alaska."

With more enthusiasm, he retraces the side of
the triangle nearest him.

"Aleutian Islands."

He taps the knife point into the middle of
the side nearest me.

"Coast Range. Mountains and glaciers coming
right down to the water, and reaching up to the clouds. But Wilson
got across them, and his book said how to do it. You needed grub, a
tent, stove, furs, and a sled if the lakes on the far side was
still frozen. Wood and tools to build a boat if the ice was out.
But the best place to get your outfit together was where they
already knowed what it took to get Inside.

"That's where Gig went and told me to go as
soon as I could follow." He stabs the etched line on my side with
something like affection, a few inches from its juncture with the
wall. "Juneau."

Chapter 12

The orange coals in the stove show no signs
of cooling, and Zimmerman undoes his collar button, acknowledging
the growing warmth in the cabin.

"Juneau," I say, plucking the knife from its
target and laying it at arm's length on the scarred table. "That's
not exactly a day's ride from Colorado on the train."

"No it ain't. But it's an easy steamboat
trip, if you can get to San Francisco. Maybe four days from there
to Port Townsend, where you catch the boat out of Seattle. Then
three more days to Juneau. It cost about fifty dollars before the
stampede, so Gig could manage it. He caught a train west and was on
the San Francisco docks by the end of January '95. Made it to
Juneau a few weeks later.

"Treadwell was the biggest gold mining
operation in the world back then. On Douglas Island, just across
the channel from Juneau. Four wide tunnels went hundreds of feet
below the water, fed ore to stamp mills running day and night. But
before Treadwell sunk his shafts, Joe Juneau found gold at Silver
Bow Basin, a thousand feet up the mountainside. Placer mining at
Silver Bow is what got that town built, and they was still working
the creeks and gulches in the mid-nineties.

"Wilson's book said the Juneau outfitters
knowed what it took to reach the Yukon camps, so Gig went to visit
a couple, and all he heared was that he needed an outfit for a full
year. That's a thousand pounds of grub – flour, bacon, beans, oats,
sugar, dried fruit – and a thousand pounds of gear. Stove, tent,
mining tools... down to pitch and nails for building a boat. Maybe
he had a couple hundred dollars left, and it was going to cost
three times that much. And that don't count what you pay the
Indians at Dyea to pack your outfit – which you got to do unless
you want to make forty trips over Chilkoot Pass and down to the
lakes yourself.

"So Gig knowed he needed a bigger grubstake,
and the best way to get it was dealing cards. Straight if he had
to, crooked if he got a chance. To see which way the wind was
blowing, he played a hand or two of faro at the biggest dance halls
and taverns, then decided to set up shop at the Magnet Saloon. The
owner was an accountant from Kansas named Pratt who got in hot
water before he left the states, and somehow Gig must of realized
he liked to slant the numbers. Maybe he heared it at one of the
other saloons. Gig introduced himself and made his pitch in Pratt's
office. Showed him how he could deal blackjack straight, then start
pushing cards when the time was right. Or let a mark win a few
hands – even double his money with a round or two of monte. Then
lose it all at once.

"Pratt agreed to stake Gig for a trial run
and pay him a third of the house take. Told Gig if he took too many
chances he'd be cut loose and end up in jail. Pratt would claim he
knowed nothing about it. So Gig had to go slow and be careful.
Still, with miners leaving Treadwell and Silver Bow on their way
back to California, and others getting outfitted in Juneau and
heading for the Yukon camps, there was plenty of men with full
pockets looking for a little entertainment.

"Gig was making it pay off from the start. In
his first week at the Magnet, he took a month's wages from a
Treadwell miner who was trying to get back to Montana. Poor feller
needed to save enough money so his girl would marry him, and maybe
he thought gambling was a shortcut.

"Pratt kept an eye on Gig and liked the way
things was going. He was a decent judge of human weakness, so he
started bringing prospects to Gig's table. Some of 'em was worn-out
men just looking for relief from a winter of hard-rock mining
underground. Others was in town for grub after a couple months back
on the creeks above Silver Bow, and happy to spread some dust
around. Maybe one or two had struck rich ground and was ready for a
spree. For different reasons, they was all willing to lighten their
pokes, and Gig and Pratt helped 'em do it.

"After a month or so, Gig found the right mix
of faro, blackjack, and monte, and Pratt knowed when to wash away
the taste of losing with a free round of whiskey for the table. Gig
doubled his worth, saved another two or three hundred dollars. He
was still thinking about getting to Circle City, but was tempted to
see how long he could keep things afloat at the Magnet Saloon
before some posse of upright citizens decided they seen enough and
ran him out. And there was a chance Pratt would turn on him if he
thought the game was getting risky.

"Those ideas was in the back of his head one
night when Pratt brought a couple of Swedish miners to Gig's table.
I never met 'em but Gig told me what they was like. Arnold Ruud was
over six feet tall, thick in every direction and as friendly as he
was big. He had a full beard and golden hair like a bear. Ruud was
the only miner I ever heared about who could climb Chilkoot Pass
with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back, like the Indian
packers done.

"Erik Lindfors was tall and pulled tight like
a hawk, with straight dark hair and no whiskers. Winters in Alaska,
your breath froze and turned your beard into a cake of ice, so most
fellers kept their faces clean, even the Swedes. But Gig said
Lindfors always looked more like a Russian. He didn't talk much,
but he did enough thinking for both of 'em, and he had his sights
set on the Yukon.

"Them two Swedes had been hydraulic mining at
Silver Bow during the summer, then went down to California when
things iced up. Now they was headed Inside, with an outfit they
bought in Seattle and was going to top off in Juneau.

"They walked into the Magnet with a few
hundred dollars, and Pratt found 'em seats at the table where Gig
was dealing faro. Straight game with three or four other fellers,
and the house wasn't taking much. But standing nearby and watching
was one of Gig's monte shills named the Molasses Kid, and the Kid
could read the table as well as Gig.

"When Lindfors recognized Joe Ellis at the
bar and headed over to talk to him, the Molasses Kid took the chair
as soon as Lindfors got up. Lindfors knowed that Ellis been
prospecting that summer along the Stewart River in the upper Yukon,
and he wanted to learn whatever Ellis would tell him about it.

"Gig got to the end of the faro deck and the
Kid started hounding him about a hand of monte between games. For
some reason the game was new to Ruud. Maybe the Swedes hadn't spent
time in the Colorado camps or met any con men yet. Ruud was smart
enough to understand three-card monte right off, but not smart
enough to wonder why the Kid kept losing track of the red queen
when Ruud knowed exactly where it was.