Against the Day (41 page)

“No. That’s not where this is.
Everthin is unhitched. Nothin stays the same. Somethin has happened to my eyes
. . . .
”

“It’s O.K.”

“Hell it is.”

They stood
huddled
together in Lone
Tree Cemetery, the miners’ graveyard at the end of town, Mayva, Lake, Frank,
and Reef, beneath the great peaks and behind them the long, descending trace of
Bridal Veil Falls whispering raggedly into the cold sunlight. Webb’s life and
work had come to this.

Frank was up from Golden, just here
overnight. He stayed close to Mayva,

not saying much, figuring what he had
to contribute was just, however temporarily, to be the living opposite of what
lay all around them.

“I just wish I was with him,” Mayva
said, very low, almost without breath.

“But you’re not,” Frank pointed out,
“and maybe there’s a reason for that.”

“Oh, children. I surely wouldn’t want
to be neither of them that did it. God will see it right, even if God is so
awful slow sometimes. Takes his
goddamned
sweet time. And maybe if he’s
slow enough, somebody down here will have the chance before he gets around to
it
. . . .
”

She was so quiet, not about to put on
the kind of show you saw these Mexican widows going in for. What tears did come
were so alarming in their suddenness and silence—just there all on
Mayva’s face, as if they were symptoms of a condition no doctor’d have the
heart to name. If those hired triggers had been anyplace near, the force of her
unvoiced rage could have fried them where they stood. Just greasy ashes by the
trailside.

“Thought the Union would’ve sent
flowers at least.”

“Not them.” It is just the meanest
kind of disrespect, Reef thought, and fuck all these people. He happened at
some point to look up the hillside and saw what he was pretty sure were
elements of the Jimmy Drop gang up along the Tomboy Road with their hats off,
maybe observing a moment of silence but knowing them more likely bickering
about something considerably less important than life and death.

“Just as well, Ma, that it’s only us
and not about to be one of these funerals where half the town turns out for a
parade and a picnic
. . . .
He’s out
of all ’at now. He’ll be all right. And Frank and me will get the ones that did
it.” Reef wished he could have sounded different. More confident. His sister,
who’d just seemed to be drifting through it smoothly as if she was on wheels,
wheels on track set down in the nights by crews nobody ever saw, her face
behind the veil just a marble mask, now flashed him her usual
don’tbelieveitforaminute stare, and if it wasn’t for Mayva being there, he sure
would’ve felt like calling her on it. Seeing ’s how little she’d cared for Webb
when he was alive.

Which didn’t mean she wasn’t shaken,
and shamed, by the force of her mother’s grief. Lake was back from Silverton,
and for good, even Reef could see that. She wore a shapely black dress that
must have set many a Blair Street lowlife’s pulses to throbbing but was now
dedicated to memorializing her father. And he’d bet everything on the table
that this would be the last time she was fixing to wear it. She saw him
staring. “Least you two’re wearing black hats,” she said, “that’s somethin.”

“You can do the mourning,” Reef said,
“me and Frank will what Joe Hill calls organize. There’s this other business to
be done. Idea is to keep you and Kit clear of it, and the less you all know,
the better.”

“How about Mamma, and the less she
knows?”

“Don’t want her to be worrying.”

“Thoughtful of you. Don’t it occur to
either of you she might want her children alive, instead of out looking for
trouble?”

“We’re alive.”

“How long before she’ll see you or
Frank again? You’re off into that old world o’ family vengeance, it has its
claim on you now, you’re both out lost in country you don’t know how to get
back in from. What do you think it’s like for her, that kind of ‘business’?
Might just as well be dead already, the both of you. Damn fools.”

He didn’t know yet what was behind
that passionate speech, nobody did, not quite yet.

Back at the
grimly daylit parlor of the house,
“Here,” Мауvа said to Reef. “You better have this.” It
was Webb’s old twelveshot Confederate Colt.

“Don’t feel right,” Reef handing it
on to Frank. “Yours if you want it, Francis.”

“Well but I already have my .38
Special and all.”

“But that’s only five shots, and the
way you shoot, half those are wasted, hell, you’ll need at least twelve,
Francis, just to get sighted in.”

“Well if it’s too heavy for you to
handle, Reefer, I can sure understand, no shame in that.”

“But I do know it always made you
nervous,” Reef said, taking it back.

This went on for a while. Mayva
watched, puffing on her old pipe, her eyes switching back and forth between
them as if in motherly despair. She knew they wanted her to squint at them
through the smoke and shake her head the way she always had,
What am I
supposed to do with these
two
?
When they heard the train coming up the valley, Frank took his hat and left the
gun on the kitchen table. He and Reef had a fast, silent look, just long enough
to make sure what they both knew, that it was really Mayva’s and would stay
with her. And sure enough, a couple of months later Lake heard shots from the
town dump and had a look, and there was her mother, striking fear into the
hearts of rats who’d left the mines after Repeal—at least making them
wonder if life up here on the surface was worth it.

Back in Nochecita
, back from burying Webb at
Telluride, blowing up a few company outbuildings on the way back just for
drill, equipment sheds reduced to sawdust, electric power junctions that filled
the skies with green disaster, Reef found Stray in a peculiarly serene state.
The Mormons and

Christers had all left town, the baby was imminent, Reef was
sensible enough to understand that right now all he needed to do was keep
silent and let whatever’d been under way without him just keep on like that.

When the baby was born, a boy, Jesse,
Reef stood drinks all around at the Double Jack, and somebody said, “No more
hellraisin for you, Reef, time to start bein careful,” and he found himself
turning back to that in the night watches that followed, wondering if it was
strictly true.

Careful? Made sense up to a point.
Maybe more sense down someplace like Denver than up here. You could step
careful as a damn goat up here and they’d still gun you down, careful didn’t
buy you a minute extra on your time allotted. So as long as being in the Union
you were good as dead anyway, there was the wider duty, out in the world at
large, to attend to.

Webb was more than he’d ever seemed
to be, had to’ve been or they wouldn’t have had him killed. Reef might not be
able to pull off successfully the guise of a respectable wifeandkids working
stiff the way Webb had. Meant he’d either have to level with Stray or pretend
to be up to his old rounder ways so she’d think when he disappeared for days at
a time that it was ramblin and gamblin and nothing serious.

One of those cases where you couldn’t
just fold. God, across the table of Fate, was picking His nose, scratching His
ear, laying on tells with a prodigal hand, it had to mean something, and a
faulty guess would be better than none. But Reef would find his way. One more
or less clumsy step at a time as he always did, Reef would see his way slowly
into it, why the life of his father was taken, why the owners could not allow
it to go on, not up there, not in this country harrowed by crimes in the name
of gold, swept over by unquiet spirits from the Coeur d’Alene and Cripple and
Telluride who came in the rain and the blinding northers and lightningglazed
mountain faces, came forlornly to stare, all those used and imperiled and run
into exile, Webb’s dead, Webb’s casualties, Webb’s own losers he could never
have abandoned
. . . .

And Webb’s ghost, meantime, Webb’s
busy ghost, went bustling to and fro doing what he could to keep things
hopping.

ome at last!” cried Neville, “home from innocent, all but
oppressively wholesome America!”

   
“Back
to the delights of Evil!” Nigel added, with every appearance of relief.

Lew had learned by now to keep a
straight face around talk like this. In his work—his former job—he
had managed a runin or two with what you’d have to call Evil, in noonlit upper
stories as likely as down some desperate arroyos at the end of day, and he was
pretty certain neither of these boys had ever been close enough even to get
goosebumps off of it, for all the time they spent, or if you like wasted, out
looking for it. On the rare occasions they might actually find the article, he
guessed, they would have little clue about what to do besides spin around and
around, trying to see what it was that had sunk its pearly whites—or in
Evil’s case, mossy greens—into their more or less ambushed keesters.

The T.W.I.T., or True Worshippers of
the Ineffable Tetractys, were headquartered in London at Chunxton Crescent, in
that ambiguous stretch north of Hyde Park known then as Tyburnia, in a mansion
attributed to Sir John Soane, which during its latest tenancy, dating roughly
from the departure of Madam Blavatsky from the material plane, had become a
resort for all manner of sandaled pilgrims, tweedsmocked visionaries, and
devotees of the nut cutlet. At this most curious of moments in the history of
spiritual inquiry, in keen competition with the Theosophical Society and its
postBlavatskian fragments, as well as the Society for Psychical Research, the
Order of the Golden Dawn, and other arrangements for seekers of certitude, of
whom there seemed an everincreasing supply as the century had rushed to its end
and through some unthinkable zero and on out the other side, the

T.W.I.T. had chosen to follow a
secret neoPythagorean way of knowledge, based upon the sacred
Tetractys,

1

2
   
3

4
   
5
   
6

7
   
8
   
9
   
10,

by which their ancient predecessors had sworn their deepest
oath. The idea, as nearly as Neville and Nigel could explain it, was to look at
the array of numbers as occupying not two dimensions but three, set in a
regular tetrahedron—and then four dimensions, and so on, until you found
yourself getting strange, which was taken to be a sign of impending
enlightenment.

At the moment the boys, who planned
to sponsor Lew for induction into the Order, were being kind enough as well to
offer wardrobe advice.

“What’s it matter,” Lew wanted to
know, “if everybody’ll have on the same, what you call ‘postulant’ outfits
anyhow?”

“Nevertheless,” said Neville, “the
cowboy boots are fatally inappropriate, Lewis—here at Chunxton Crescent
it’s barefoot or begone.”

“What—not even socks?”

“Not even if that tartan were authentic,”
Nigel looking pointedly at what Lew at the moment had on his feet.

They had brought him tonight to the
T.W.I.T. sanctuary, faced in Caen stone which at twilight somehow leached all
color from the immediate surroundings, set back behind iron fencework in almost
a miniature park, in which masses of shadow which might or might not have had
counterparts in the animal kingdom moved with a sinister impatience. “Nice
little hacienda,” Lew nodded.

Inside, somebody was playing a duet
on syrinx and lyre. Lew thought he knew the tune, but then it went off in some
direction he couldn’t follow. Englishfolk, not obviously exotic, were down on
the carpeting in poses reminding Lew of contortionists at the teninone. People
strolled around in peculiar outfits or often next to nothing at all. Faces well
known from the illustrated press went drifting by. Light was subject to strange
modifications not all accounted for by the smoke in the air, as bright
presences appeared from nowhere into full view and then as abruptly vanished
from it. Humans reincarnated as cats, dogs, and mice crept about or slept by
the fire. Stone pillars loomed in the further reaches of the place, with the
impression of steps descending into subterranean mystery.