Against the Day (39 page)

Actresses pray for light like this.
The electric lampswitch was near her hand, but she made no gesture toward it.

“You kind of see the story here. Is,
it’s all these Utahans in town hollerin at Sage to get married, some Mormon boy
she can’t hardly remember from back when she lived there, Cooper meantime wants
her to ride off on that motor concern that never seems to get ’em more’n a mile
’fore he’s down into the works with her passin him pry bars and things, so
she’s
nobody to go looking to for advice of the heart, meantime your brother has
it in his mind that I’m some li’l private health resort here for whenever he
feels funny. What would you do? You was me. Which last time I checked, you
wa’n’t.”

“Miss Estrella, he always has been a
tough one to figure.”

She waited for more, but that seemed
to be it. “Oh well thank you, that really helps.”

“Not like that he’s squaredancin
through his life,” it seemed to occur to Frank. “Even if it don’t
look
like
hard work—”

“Oh how true, them faro boxes don’t
just rig themselves, do they? What kind of a future do you foresee for ol’
BucktheTiger there?”

“You mean how likely is he
. . .
to be
. . .
a good provider?”

Her laughter, accompanied by a slap
at his foot, still had enough of a saltwater element back of it for even Frank
to pick up. He lay there supine, wanting nothing right now but—say, was
he serious?—to hold her, yes and rest his

head against where that baby was and
just listen, somehow remaining easy enough with that to allow her whenever she
wanted to ~to stop whatever would happen, only it wouldn’t begin, because here
came loud intrusion from the street, Utahans in high frolic stomping up the
stairs, singing pieces of what sounded like some very weird hymn tunes at each
other. “Well now,
shit,
”
declared
Stray, looking quickly down to address her stomach—“You didt’n hear
that—guess we’d better have one these lights on.” In the electric light,
they had a good long look at each other’s face, and though he couldn’t speak
for her, Frank knew that in years to come, it likely could get him past many a
hard mile to remember this couplethree seconds of soultosoul—baby or
howsoever, the С chord in the day’s melody he could always return to
would be this serious young woman sitting down at the end of the bed, and the
look those eyes seemed for a minute there to be giving him.

But then everything saddled up and
proceeded down Mexico way.

At the Casino, back in the back
rooms, with any number of telegraph receivers, both sounders and inkers, of
occasionally nonstorebought design, each attached to a different set of wires
from outside and chattering all day and night with news of horse races at every
known track both sides of the border, prizefights and other contests of
wagering interest, quotations from financial and commodity markets in cities
East and West, there was also a telephone instrument mounted on the wall,
pretty constantly in use. But one day it rang while Reef happened to be right
next to it, and he knew it was for him, and that it was bad news. This was part
of the strangeness of telephones in those early days, before the traffic became
quite such a routine affair. As if overdesigned to include all sorts of extra
features like precognitive alarms.

It was Jimmy Drop on the other end, a
longtime associate of Reef’s, calling from Cortez. Even at this distance, with
everything in between from hungry gophers to idle sharpshooters working against
the signal, Reef could sense Jimmy’s discomfort with the machinery he was
hollering into. “Reef? That you? Where are you?”

“Jimmy, you’re calling me.”

“Well, yeah, yeah but—”

“How’d you know to call me here?”

“You told me Nochecita, before you
left.”

“Was I drunk?”

“Wouldn’t say
not
drunk.” A
pause while a turbulent bath of noise that could have been fragments of speech
or music surged along the lines. “Reef?”

Reef all at once wished he could just
pretend they’d been cut off. He’d rather have skipped whatever Jimmy had to
tell him right now. But he wouldn’t.

“You know Deuce Kindred?”

“Works for the Owners Association in
Telluride. Don’t know how to behave at a poker table. That the one?”

“I’m sorry, Reef. It’s your Pa.”

“Pa—”

“They took him out of town at
gunpoint. No word since.”

“They.”

“Him ’n’ ’at Sloat Fresno, too, ’s
what I heard.”

“One of Bob Meldrum’s oldtime pals.
Number of notches to his credit, so I’m told.”

“More’n there’s states in the Union,
Reef, I’d bring some U.S. Cavalry I was you.”

“Well Jim you ain’t.”

Another pause. “I’ll look in on your
Ma, when I can.”

“Know where they’re headed?”

“Jeshimon.”

Spoken as if Reef shouldn’t have had
the bad manners to make Jimmy say it out loud. And now there was nothing but
his asshole between Reef and the force of gravity. Out here, even when you
didn’t pray much, you prayed not to hear that name too often. Didn’t help that
it was inside a day’s ride from Nochecita.

Frank was sure a trooper for being so
young, deciding to address the practicalities first and save any troubled
feelings till later. “Train, or do we ride there?”

“Just me, Frank.”

“Hell you say.”

“I figured you’d go see to Ma and
Lake.”

“That’s my part in all this, lookin
after the women?”

“All what? Do you know what’s goin on?
I sure’s hell don’t.”

They sat together on the outside
steps, holding their hats and fooling with the brims. Clouds thickened
overhead, now and then lightning pulsed out at the horizon. Wind inhabited and
presently stirred the leaves of the cottonwoods. Behind windowpanes, through
alkali dust, various young women would appear, observe them, shake their heads,
and withdraw to go on with their own version of the day.

“Let’s just see what’s what. Just the
one step at a time. That O.K.?”

And Webb’s fate such an unknown in
all this . . .

Another spell of dark, brimrolling
silence. “And I wait around like some pennyante remittance man, till you get
killed, then the job passes to me, that it?”

“See how that mine school’s educating
you, you never used to be so quick.”

But Reef was steadily growing calmer now, almost prayerful.
As if, alongside what was avalanching down onto both brothers’ understanding, a
whole list of things had become far less important.

Telling Stray,
that
was another story.
“Got no secrets from you, darlin’.”

“You’ve ‘got’ to do this, I expect.”

“By now, the thing is
. . .
If Pa’s gone . . .”

“Oh, maybe not.”

“Yeah, maybe not
. . . .
” He was looking not in her eyes but
down there at the baby.

She did notice that. “It’s his
grandbaby. I’d hate if they were never to meet.”

“It just has seemed for a while that
somethin like this was bound to happen.”

She was having a great entertaining
interior conversation with herself it seemed. At length, “You be back?”

“Oh I will. Stray, I promise.”

“Promise. My. Does the Pope know you
said that, it’s a certified miracle.”

The girls were
sorry to see them go, or said they
were, but Cooper? you would have thought it was the end of the world. He came
downstairs and followed Frank and Reef all the way to the depot, on foot, a
stricken look on his face. “You O.K.?” Frank finally figured he should ask.
“Hope you don’t think like that we’re runnin out, or . . .”

Cooper shook his head, downcast. “All
’is drygoods, it’s really burdensome on a man, you know?”

“Just play ’em that ‘Juanita’ every
once in a while,” Reef advised, “they say it works wonders.”

The brothers traveled together as far
as Mortalidad, the stop nearest Jeshimon, then, because of who might or might
not be looking, they said goodbye with little more than the nod you give
somebody who’s just lit your cigar for you. No gazing back out the window, no
forehead creased with solemn thoughts, no out with the pocket flask or sudden
descent into sleep. Nothing that would belong to the observable world.

t was well up into Utah. The country was so red that the
sagebrush appeared to float above it as in a stereopticon view, almost
colorless, pale as cloud, luminous day and night. Out as far as Reef could see,
the desert floor was populated by pillars of rock, worn over centuries by the
unrelenting winds to a kind of postgodhead, as if once long ago having
possessed limbs that they could move, heads they could tilt and swivel to watch
you ride past, faces so sensitive they reacted to each change of weather, each
act of predation around them, however small, these oncewatchful beings, now
past face, past gesture, standing refined at last to simple vertical
attendance.

“Don’t mean they’re not alive, o’
course,” opined somebody in a saloon on the way there.

“You think they’re alive?”

“Been out there at night?

“Not if I could help it.”

Not that he wasn’t warned, but that
didn’t keep it from being the worst town Reef ever rode into. What was wrong
with these people? For miles along the trail, coming and going, every telegraph
pole had a corpse hanging from it, each body in a different stage of pickover
and decay, all the way back to a number of sunbeaten skeletons of some
considerable age. By local custom and usage, as the town clerk would presently
explain, these strungup wrongdoers had been denied any sort of decent burial,
it being cheaper anyway just to leave them for the turkey vultures. When the
townsfolk of Jeshimon ran out of telegraph poles back around 1893, trees being
scarce out here, they turned to fashioning their arrangements out of adobe
brick. Sophisticated world travelers visiting the area were quick to identify
the rude structures with those known in Persia as “Towers of Silence”—no
stairs or

ladders, high and steepsided enough
to discourage mourners from climbing, no matter how athletic or bent on
honoring their dead—living humans had no place up top. Some of the
condemned were brought by wagon to the base of the tower, strung up by pulleys
onto a boom that when it was all over with you could just keep hoisting the
body on up, swing it around, and leave it to hang there by its one foot for the
birds of death who then came down and landed hissing on perches molded for
their convenience out of the red mud of the region.

So Reef passed beneath drifting
enormous wingshadows, down the grim colonnade, which, judging by the numbers,
hadn’t been that much of a deterrent. “No, quite the contrary,” cheerfully
admitted the Reverend Lube Carnal of the Second Lutheran (Missouri Synod)
Church, “we attract evildoers from hundreds of miles around—not to
mention clergy too o’ course, like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll notice there’s
more churches here than saloons, making us unique in the Territory. Kind of
professional challenge, get to their souls before the Governor gets to their
necks.”

“The what?”

“It’s how he likes to be addressed.
Thinks of this as his little state within a state. Whose main business you
could say is the processing of souls.”

“Well how about your bylaws, legal
peculiarities, anythin a newcomer ought to know about?”

“None, sir, bylaws, blue laws, or
inlaws, anything and everything goes here, otherwise the game wouldn’t be
honest. No deadlines in Jeshimon, pack anything anyplace you like, commit sins
of your own choosing or even invention. Just, once the Gov takes notice, don’t
expect sanctuary in any of our churches, or for that matter anything much at
all in the way of parsonical aid. Best we can do is knead you into shape for
the ovens of the Next World.”

Though Jeshimon was known as the
place they brought the ones they didn’t want found too soon, Reef learned from
the Rev that, for a price, certain accommodations could be made. Because this
was technically subornation, it counted, of course, as a sin and if you got
caught at it, why you met an appropriate fate.