Against the Day (36 page)

y the end, Webb Traverse had worked his way up to shift boss
at the Little Hellkite workings. Veikko and his squarehead compadres gave him a
party to celebrate, and as usual it reminded him that drinking potato spirits
all night is not for everyone. Luckily, the snow was still a while off, or
there might’ve been a repeat of last winter when he let some Finns talk him
into putting on a pair of skis, up past Smuggler, by the giant preavalanche
buildup known as the Big Elephant—scared the bejeezus out of him, as it
would’ve anybody in their right mind, all present being mightily relieved when
he fell down safely in the snow without breaking any bones or starting a slide.

It seemed he could get along with
everybody these days except the two women in his own family, the ones that
ought to’ve mattered most, as if with the boys all out in the wind his place
was now out there too, as if the chances of running into each other again
somehow were better out there than in some domestic interior. When he did put
his nose in the door, things would rapidly go sour. Once, Lake took off and
didn’t come back. He waited a day and a night, and finally, just around third
shift, she showed up out of the dark with a bundle of U.S. currency.

“Where you been, miss? Where’d you
get that?”

“Just over to Silverton. Bettin on a
fight.”

“Betting with what?”

“Saved up from doin laundry.”

“And who was fighting again?”

“Fireman Jim Flynn.”

“And who?”

“Andy Malloy?”

“Save it, kid, listen, Andy could
never fight worth beans, no more’n his brother Pat. Fireman and him’d be too
much of a mismatch to ever happen, and maybe you want to try another story?”

“Or do I mean Mexican Pete Everett?”

“Who were you with?”

“Rica Treemorn.”

“The Floradora Girls. Her people know
about this?”

Lake shrugged. “Think what you like.”
Face inclined, eyes turned away as if in some incommunicable sorrow in no way
congruent with the rosy appearance that had probably got him going to begin
with.

“Child of the storm,” nearly a
whisper in the general noise level. A desperate look on his face. As if
possessed by something she had known and feared since before things had names.

“Pa, what ’n the hell’s that mean?”
She wanted to sound more confident, but she was getting scared now, saw him
turning in front of her into somebody else—

“See how long you can stay out in it
alone.
Child of the storm.
Well. Let the goddamned storm protect you.”
What was he talking about? He wouldn’t explain, though it was nothing so
mysterious. Not that long ago, one of their spells up at Leadville, during one
of those Leadville blue northers, with the lightning that never stopped, that
came gusting like the winter wind
. . .
her
young face just so clear to him, the way the fierce light had struck her hair
nearly white, streaming back from her small face as if from that wind, though
the air in the little shack was still. Under the black apocalyptic sky. He had
got something down his spine that he thought meant he was about to be hit by
lightning.

Only understood later it was fear.
Fear of this young female spirit who only yesterday would come wriggling
dirtyfaced into his arms.

“You gone crazy, Pa?”

“Don’t run no shelter for whores
here.” At the top of his voice and almost shaking with the pleasure of knowing
there was nothing he could do to stop this.

Just as happy to oblige. “Shelter?
Who did you ever shelter? you can’t
shelter
your
family, you can’t even
shelter
yourself, you
sorry son of a bitch.”

“Oh! fine, well that’s it—” And
his hand was up and ready in a fist.

May had just got her pipe going, and
had to put it aside and once more haul her weary bones into the rodeo chute.
“Webb, please hold it, now, Lake, you get over there a minute— can’t you
see, she’s done nothin wrong.”

“Stays in Silverton a week, comes
back with a year’s rent, what fertilizer

wagon you think I fell off of here,
wife? Got us a damn Blair Street debutante, looks like.”

He did go after her then, and Mayva
had to pick up a shovel, and finally for different reasons they were both
yelling at Lake to get out of the house. By which point, hell, she was all for
it.

I’m so bad, she kept telling herself
but couldn’t believe it till she was in Silverton again, where a badgirl could
find her own true self, like coming home to her real family. Just a little grid
of streets set in a green flat below the mountain peaks, but for wickedness it
was one of the great metropolises of the fallen earth
. . . .
Jittering Jesus. Sixty or seventy saloons and twenty
parlor houses just on Blair Street alone. Drinking gambling fucking twentyfour
hours a day. Repeal? What repeal? Smoking opium with the Chinaman who came and
did the girls’ laundry. Handled by foreign visitors from far across the sea
with dangerous tastes, as well as domestic American childcorruptors,
wifecripplers, murderers, Republicans, hard to say which of them, her or Rica,
had less sense about who she went upstairs with. Somehow they glided through
the nights as if under supernatural protection. Learned not to let their eyes
meet, because they always started laughing, and some customers got violent
about that. Sometimes they woke up in the little jailhouse and heard the usual
from a sheriff’s wife with an ineradicable frown. It went on till winter began
to make itself felt and the prospect of snow up to the eaves got all the ladies
on the Line to making those seasonal readjustments.

Lake came back to the cabin once to
get some of her things. The place echoed with desertion. Webb was on shift,
Mayva was out running chores. All her brothers were long gone, the one she
missed most being Kit, for they were the two youngest and had shared a kind of
willfulness, a yearning for the undreamtof destiny, or perhaps no more than a
stubborn aversion to settling for the everyday life of others.

She imagined taking a stick of
dynamite, waiting for Webb someday out on some trail. Drop it on him, while
she’d be up safe, cradled in a niche of mountain wall, and him tiny,
unprotected, far below. Put on the cap, light he fuse, and release the stick in
a long, swooping curve, trailing sparks behind, down out of the sunlight into a
well of shadow, and the old sumbitch would be obliterated in a flower of dirt,
stone, and flame and a deep rolling cry of doom.

Mayva knew she’d
been there. Maybe her storebought
perfume, maybe something out of place, maybe just that she knew. What was clear
to her was that she had to try and save at least one of her children.

“Webb, I’ve got to stick with her. A
while longer anyway.”

“Let her go.”

“How can I leave her out there, out
in all that?”

“She’s nearly twenty, she can take
care of her damn self by now.”

“Sakes, it’s war up here, nobody can
do much more’n stay out of the way.”

“She don’t need you, May.”

“It’s you she don’t need.”

They looked at each other,
confounded.

“Sure, you go ahead then, too. And
that’ll be the whole fuckin poker hand. I’ll just do for myself, ain’t like that
I don’t know how. You and that bitch go have a real good time down there.”

“Webb.”

“You’re goin, go.”

“It’ll only be—”

“You decide to come back, don’t send
no telegrams, I still got to show my face around here, just surprise me. Or
don’t, more likely.” The stamps beating somewhere in the distance. A mule
string heehawing away down the hillside. National Guard up by the pass shooting
off their cannon to keep the natives in line. Webb was standing in the middle
of the place, lines of his face set like stone, patch of sunlight just touching
his foot, so still. “So still,” Mayva remembered later, “it wasn’t him at all,
really, it was somethin he’d gotten to be and from then on wouldn’t be nothing
else, anymore, and I should have known then, oh, daughter, I should have
. . . .
”

“Nothing you could’ve done.” Lake
squeezed her shoulder. “It was already on the way.”

“No. You, me, and him could’ve got
back together, Lake, left town, gone someplace those people don’t go, don’t
even know about, down out of these goddamned mountains, might’ve found us a
patch of land—”

“And he still would’ve found some way
to wreck it,” Lake’s face puffy, as if just risen from dreams she could tell no
one about, older than her mother was used to seeing it. Emptier.

“I know you say you don’t miss him.
But God help you. How can you stay like this? unforgivin and all?”

“We were never that important to him,
Mamma. He had his almighty damn Union, that’s what he loved. If he loved
anything.”

If it was love
,
it was less than twoway. With no more respectable familyman dodge to hide
behind, Webb sought the embrace of Local 63, which,

alarmed at the vehemence of his need,
decided there ought to be some distance between him and the Union, and
suggested he shift over into the Uncompahgre for a while, to the Torpedo
workings. Which is where he ran into Deuce Kindred, who, having departed Grand
Junction in some haste, had just hired on at the Torpedo, as if working for
wages underground would hide him from some recently exhibited legal interest in
his person.

Deuce had been one of these Sickly
Youths who was more afraid of the fate all too obviously in store for weaklings
in this country than of the physical exertion it would take to toughen up and
avoid it. However selfschooled in the ways of Strenuosity, he had still
absorbed enough early insult to make inevitable some later reemission, at a
different psychical frequency—a fluorescence of vindictiveness. He
thought of it usually as the need to prevail over every challenge that arose
regardless
of scale,
from cutting a deck to working a rock face.

“Rather be workin fathoms,” Deuce
muttered.

“No contract system around here,”
said Webb, who happened to be singlejacking alongside. “Not since the aughtone
strike, and it took some good men dyin to get that.”

“Nothin personal. Seems more like
work somehow is all.”

They were interrupted by the arrival
of a sepulchral figure in a threedollar sack suit. Deuce flashed Webb a look.

“What’s this?” Webb said.

“Don’t know. Stares at me funny, and
everybody says step careful with him.”

“Him? ’At’s just ol’ Avery.”

“Company spy’s what they say.”

“Another name for Inspector around
here. Don’t worry too much—all ’em boys act nervous, never more than a
step away from going down a shaft
. . . .
But
you know all that, didn’t you say you worked up in Butte?”

“Not me.” A wary look. “Who told you
that?”

“Oh, you know, you’re a new fella,
there’s all kinds of stories,” Webb laying a reassuring hand on the kid’s
shoulder, and not feeling or choosing to ignore Deuce’s flinch. Having succeeded
one way or another in driving away his whole family, Webb was joining the
company of those who, with their judgment similarly impaired, had allowed
themselves to be charmed by Deuce Kindred, to their great consequent sorrow.

Couplethree nights later, he ran into
young Kindred down at the Beaver Saloon, playing poker with a tableful of
notoriously unprincipled gents. Webb waited till the boy took a break, and
stood a couple of short bits.

“How you doin tonight?”

“About even.”

“Night’s young. Wouldn’t want you to
be the fish at that table.”

“I ain’t. It’s that little guy there
with the specs.”

“The Colonel? Lord, son, he’s up on
vacation from Denver ’cause they don’t let him play down there no more.”

“Didn’t notice that many chips in
front of him.”

“He’s ratholin em. Watch his cigar,
he’ll put up a big cloud of smoke, and— there, see that?”

“Huh, what do you know.”

“Your money, o’ course.”

“Thanks, Mr. Traverse.”

“Webb’s O.K.”“
You’ve done these
before, Mr. Kindred?”

“If you mean persuading them more
into line with the client’s thinking—”

“Say this one time they wanted to
take it further.”

“They said that?”

“They said, suppose there was an
animal—dog, mule, bites or kicks all the time—what do you do?”

“Me, I’d pass the critter on to
somebody can’t tell the difference between that and all broke in.”

“Everybody up here knows the
difference,” said the company rep, quietly, though with some impatience.

“You are
. . .
not fixing to tell me out loud what you want, ’s that it?”

“Maybe we’re interested in how much you
can figure out on your own, Mr. Kindred.”

“Sure, what they call ‘initiative.’
That case there’d have to be some Initiative Fee connected onto it.”