Against the Day (34 page)

“Don’t look like no nigger,”
commented one.

“Too tall for a miner,” said another.

“Heeled, too. Think I saw him on a
poster someplace.”

“What do we do? Shoot him? Hang him?”

“Nail his dick to a stump, and, and
then, set him on
fahr
,”
eagerly
accompanied by a quantity of drool visibly soaking the speaker’s hood.

“You all are doing a fine job of
security here,” Lew beamed, riding through them easy as a herd of sheep, “and
I’ll be sure to pass that along to Buck Wells when next I see him.” The name of
the mine manager and cavalry commander at Telluride worked its magic

“Don’t forget my name!” hollered the
drooler, “Clovis Yutts!”

“Shh! Clovis, you hamhead, you ain’t
supposed to tell em your name.”

What in Creation could be going on up
here, Lew couldn’t figure. He had a distinct, sleepwrecking impression that he
ought to just be getting his backside to the trackside, head on down to Denver,
and not come up here again till it was all over. Whatever it was. It sure ’s
hell looked like war, and that must be what was keeping him here, he
calculated, that possibility. Something like wanting to find out which side he
was on without all these doubts
. . . .

Back in Denver
again
, Lew returned late
to his room, discovering from all the way down the hall that the day wasn’t
close to being over yet, for through the transom came drifting the scent of a
burning leaf that stirred in him, as always, mixed feelings. It would be Nate
Privett, with one of his trademark Key West cheroots, way out here from Chicago
on his yearly tour of inspection, though how it could be a year already since
the last visit was beyond Lew.

Downstairs in the Anarchists’ saloon,
they were whooping it up, starting early as usual. Singing in so many different
tempos and keys, like a bunch of Congregationalists, you couldn’t even tell
what the song was. Girls whose audible high notes bore a component of amateur
cheeriness, as if they would rather be dancing than practicing even routine
deception. Boots stomping in strange, unAmerican rhythms. Lew had fallen into
the habit of dropping in for a sociable beer at the end of the day, and little
by little found himself being seduced in a political and maybe also a romantic
way, for there were any number of Anarchist chickadees hanging around who liked
nothing better than to see what was up with these gruff Pinkertonian types.
Today he’d have to pass that up for Nate, a dubious exchange.

Wearily, Lew put on a face and opened
his door. “Well, Nate, good evening. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

“Always another report to go through.
Time is never wasted, Lew, if you remember to bring along something to read.”

“See you found the Valley Tan.”

“Thorough search, only bottle in the
room. When’d you switch to Mormon whiskey?”

“When your checks started coming back
from the bank. That bottle does seem to be down by six fingers or more, since
last I looked.”

“A desperate man will console himself
with anything, Lew.”

“How desperate’s that, Nate?”

“Been reading your last report on the
Kieselguhr Kid ticket. Read it over twice in fact, strongly reminded me of that
legendary Butch Cassidy and his HoleintheWall Gang? though you never brought
those names up, exactly.”

Lew sure had had a long day. Nate
Privett was one of these desk operatives with an irrational belief that
somewhere in the endless heaps of subpoenaed account books, itineraries,
operating logs, and so forth, shining out sudden as a vision, answers would
just reveal themselves, Heaven forfend anybody should actually have to saddle
up and get out there and into country a little more twilit.

“Funny,” trying to keep the annoyance
out of his voice, “but Butch Cassidy situations’ve been growing not that
uncommon here o’ late—mind conveying over that bottle,
thanks—fiendish acts of semiimaginary badmen—maybe even more than
just any one lone Kid here, maybe
multiple conspiracies
of bombers, not
to mention that small army of laughingacademy material ever with us, just
itching to commit acts, or not commit acts but be blamed for ’em anyway, in the
Kid’s name—”

“Lew?”

“This case, frankly, it’s a bitch,
and growing more difficult every day. I’m workin’ it all alone out here, and
there’s times I wouldn’t even mind if The Unsleepin Eye with all its corporate
resources just took the whole damn ticket back again—”

“Whoa, whoa just a minute, Lew, not
how it works, and besides, the clients are still payin
in,
you see,
every month—oh, they’re happy, I tell you, no reason not to just keep
going along, exactly the way we—” He stopped, as if aware of having been
indiscreet.

“Ah! So
that’s
it.” Making
believe he had just figured it all out. “Why, you buzzards.”

“Well. . . no need to . . .”

“All this time out here, so far, far
from the lights of Michigan Avenue, and never once suspecting
. . .
why it was just some damn opiumpipe
special’s all it ever was—”

“Sure wouldn’t want any hard
feelings, Lew—”

“I’m smiling, ain’t I?”

“See, back in Chicago we’re only as
good as our credibility, which is what Regional OperativeinCharge Lew
Basnight’s been giving us here, what with the kind of respect you enjoy in the
business—”

“Oh, your mother’s ass, Nate. Your
own, for that matter. No hard feelings.”

“Now, Lew—”

“Good luck, Nate.”

Next night in Walker’s on Arapahoe,
inhaling one twentyfivecent pony of bourbon after another, wedged in with five
other fast drinkers, which was as many as the vestpocket establishment would
hold, he understood in an allbutreligious way that this was supposed to have
happened years ago, that he or whatever was living his life had been taking
their sweet time with it, that he could have been working for the right side
years before this, and now it might be too late, already past the point where
anybody stood a chance against the juggernaut that had rolled down on the
country and flat stolen it.

Later he made it back to the
Anarchists’ saloon, and there, as he’d half expected, was this customer giving
him one of those unfinishedbusiness looks. Probably not the Kieselguhr Kid, but
Lew by now being in an experimental frame of mind decided to go ahead on the
assumption that he was. “Buy you a beer?”

“Depends if you’ve come to your
senses yet.”

“Let’s say I have.”

“Pretty soon, then, everybody’ll
know, and it’ll be run Anarchist run for you, Brother Basnight.”

“Mind if I ask something? Not that
I’m about to just yet, but you must’ve set off a stick or two of dynamite in a
what they call purposeful way. Any regrets about that?”

“Only if there was innocent lives
caught into it. But none ever was, not by me.”

“But if ‘there are no innocent bourgeoisie,’
as many Anarchist folks believe—”

“You follow the topic, I see. Well. I
might not know a bourgeoisie ’f one ran up and bit me, for there’s not been a
hell of a lot of them back where I’ve been, more like you’d call ’em peasantry
and proletariat. Mostly, doing my work, it comes down to remembering to be
careful.”

“Your work.” Lew wrote himself a
lengthy note on his shirt cuff, then, looking up again guilelessly, “Well what
about me? me or somebody in the same line, getting hurt?”

“You think you’re
innocent
?
Hell, man, you’re working
for them—you’d’ve killed me if it ever came up.”

“I’d’ve brought you in.”

“Maybe, but it wouldn’t’ve been
alive.”

“Getting me confused with Pat
Garrett, Wyatt Earp, hardcases of the frontier never cared nor maybe knew which
side they were on. Not having had that luxury, I wouldn’t’ve done you in then
any more than now, when I know better.”

“That’s sure a relief. Here, you’re
dry. Herman, give this screamin Red threat to society another of them.”

Little by little the place filled up
and turned into a hoedown of sorts, and the Kid, or whoever he was, sort of
faded into the mobility, and Lew didn’t see him again for a while.

Back in Chicago
, Nate, in his own paper homeland
again, kept wasting Agency money rattling off one telegram after another.
Figuring nothing had changed, regional office on the job, all serene. But now
there might as well be hired roughnecks with wirecutters up on every pole in
the thousand miles between them, for all Nate was ever going to find out from Lew
anymore.

It was about then that what Lew came
to regard as his Shameful Habit began. He was in the pleasant little desert
oasis of Los Fatzos, handling explosives most of the day, must have had his
gloves off (though some were never to buy that story), P.E.T.N. as best he
could recall—well, maybe something a little more experimental, for he’d
been visiting widelyrespected mad scientist Dr. Oyswharf, a possible unwitting
supply source for Kieselguhr Kidrelated bomb outrages, recently rumored to be working
on different mixtures of nitro compounds and polymethylenes. Lethally tricky
stuff. Somehow the afternoon just drifted on into the dinner hour, and Lew
must’ve forgot to wash his hands, because next thing he knew, he was
experiencing the hotel dining room in a range of colors, not to mention
cultural references, which had not been there when he came in. The wallpaper in
particular presented not a repeating pattern at all but a single view, in the
French “panoramic” style, of a land very far away indeed, perhaps not even on
our planet as currently understood, in which beings who resembled—though
not compellingly—humans went about their lives—
in motion,
understand—beneath
the gigantic looming of a nocturnal city full of towers, domes, and spidery
catwalks, themselves edged by an eerie illumination proceeding not entirely
from municipal sources.

Presently Lew’s “food” arrived, and
immediately caught his attention—the details of his “steak,” the closer
he looked at that, seeming to suggest not the animal origins a fellow might
reasonably expect so much as the further

realms of crystallography, each
section he made with his knife in fact revealing new vistas, among the
intricately disposed axes and polyhedra, into the hivelike activities of a race
of very small though perfectly visible inhabitants who as they seethed and
bustled about, to all appearances unaware of his scrutiny, sang miniature
though harmonically complex little choruses in tiny, speededup voices whose
every word chimed out with evermorepolycrystalline luminosities of
meaning—

Yes we’re Beavers of the Brain, Just
as busy as you please Though we’re frequently reported To behave like little
bees Keep that Bulldog in your pocket Do not bother to complain Or you might
get
into trouble
With the Beavers of the Brain
. . . .

Exactly, puzzled Lew, aand now what
about—
“
Everything all right,
Mr. В.?” Curly the waiter standing over Lew with an anxious
and, it appeared to Lew, ominous look. It was Curly, of course, but in some
more profound sense it was not. “You were looking at your food funny.”

“Well that’s ’cause it
is
funny,”
Lew replied reasonably, or so he thought, until noticing everybody in the room
now all frantically trying to get out the door at the same time. Was it
something he’d said? done? Perhaps he should inquire
. . . .

“He’s insane!” screamed a woman.
“Emmett, now don’t let him near me!”

Lew came to in the town pokey, in the
company of one or two regulars who were conferring together indignantly while
casting that judgmental alcoholic eye Lew’s way. Soon as the Marshal had had a
look in and deemed him streetsafe, Lew was back out at the Doctor’s lab,
looking you’d say a little sheepish. “About that— I forget its
name—”

“Sure. Being more or less
cyclopropane plus dynamite,” grinned the Doc, mischievously it seemed to Lew,
“no reason we shouldn’t call it ‘Cyclomite,’ eh? go ahead, free samples today,
take as much ’s you like, it’s pretty stable, so if it was blasting work you
wanted it for, you’d have to use detonator caps, DuPont number sixes seem to
work as good as any. Though
you
might also want some plasticerator for
it, some say it helps with the
. . .
allover
effect.” He did not quite add, “Easier on the old choppers as well,” but Lew
somehow sensed that was coming, so he shook his head vigorously no, grabbed the
goods, muttered his thanks, and left as quick as he could.

“And have your ticker looked at now
and then,” the Doc called after him.

Lew paused. “How’s that?”

“A croaker could explain it to you
maybe, but there’s a strange chemical relation between these nitro explosives
and the human heart.”

From then on, whenever a dynamite
blast went off, even far away out of earshot, something concurrent was
triggered somewhere in Lew’s consciousness
.
. .
after a while even if one was only
about
to go off. Anywhere.
Soon he was pursuing a Cyclomite habit, you’d have to say energetically.