Against the Day (50 page)

“Teasing you, Ma?”

What was it
, exactly, that had started in to
ringing so inside Lake, tolling, bone deep, invisible in the night. . . was it
the way his face that morning, even with the smoke in the room, had slowly
emerged into clarity? Like an old memory, older than herself, something that’d
happened before, that she knew now she’d have to go through again
. . . .
And the way he was looking at
her—a
knowing look,
worse than the most cocksure goodfornothing
that ever came her way, the assumptions being made, not just by him either, but
by something
outside them.
Had to be the altitude.

As for Deuce, of course he “knew” who
she was—she
had the man’s face
,
for Christ’s sake. Deuce was an abbreviated customer,
hardly much taller than she—in a fair fight she might’ve even taken him,
but the fight was not fair. Would never be. His edge, so he believed, came from
the poisoned halo of murder for hire, the pure badness of everything he did
when he wasn’t with her. Women could protest from now till piss flowed uphill,
but the truth was, there wasn’t one didn’t secretly love a killer.

And it might turn out, to Lake’s own
surprise as much as anybody’s, that she was one of these passionate young women
who believed as the Mexican señoritas like to say that without love one cannot
live. That any entrance of it into her life would be like unexpected laughter
or finding religion, a gift from the beyond that she must not allow to just
exit again and pretend it was gone forever. Unfortunately, “it” had now arrived
in the form of Deuce Kindred, for whom her loathing would come to be
inseparable from her passion.

Complicating matters but not keeping
her awake nights was young Willis Turnstone, the doctor over at the Miner’s
Hospital she’d met when she was working there before they put her on steady at
the eating house. Willis was pretty direct, and it didn’t take more than one
walk through the wildflowers before he’d declared his intentions.

“Can’t say I love you, Willis,”
figuring she owed him just as direct of an answer. For she’d met Deuce by then,
and it was just a simple case of the true article and its allbutinvisible
shadow, and she didn’t have to wait too many heartbeats to tell the difference.

“You are a mighty desirable length of
calico, how come you’re not married already?” was how Deuce got around to
popping the question.

“Thought I’d take my time, I guess.”

“Time is something you’re given,” he
philosophized, “you don’t take it.”

It was not quite a reproof, and
likewise short of a plea, but she must have caught something. “The way it is
right now—nothin could make it better. But what about when we’re old?”

“Unless we could beat it. Never get
old.”

She’d hadn’t seen his eyes like this.
“Hope that ain’t Billy the Kid talk.”

“No. Crazier.” He was that close to
just handing it all over to her. His soles ached, his fingers throbbed, his
heartbeat was audible down the street and around a couple of corners, and she
was gazing at him with no little alarm, trying to hang on to her own composure,
expecting she didn’t know what. They were both so easily ridden in on by these
unannounced passions. Their eyes grew feral, neck muscles went out of control,
they became indifferent to where they were, even who was around.

Deuce, in his unguarded state, could
feel his heart melting and his penis bloodcrazy for her, both at the same time
. . . .
Handicapped by his ignorance of
human emotion, he would come to desire Lake beyond any limits he could have
imagined. He would beg, actually beg, selfstyled professional badman and all,
beg her to marry him. Even respecting her wish that they not fuck until after
the wedding.

“It didn’t matter to me before.
That’s just it. Now it does. Lake? I’ll change, I swear.”

“I’m not saying start goin to church.
Just think about who you hire on with. Don’t have to be any ‘better’ than
that.” Some would’ve said she knew even then what he’d done. Could not have
helped knowing, God sakes.

One day Mayva had swapped her shift
with Oleander Prudge, who, though far too young to be acting as the conscience
of Telluride, lost no time in going after Lake.

“They’re saying Deuce Kindred’s the
one shot your father.”

Not loud enough to stop conversation
in the Nonpareil, but there it was at last. “Who’s sayin that?” Maybe a pulse
in her neck leapt into visibility, but she was not about to swoon.

“No secrets in this town, Lake,
there’s too much goin on, no time to cover up and not many who care, when you
come right to it.”

“Has my Mamma heard any of this
talk?”

“Well let’s hope not.”

“It ain’t true.”

“Hmp. Ask your beau.”

“Maybe I’ll just do that.” Lake
slammed a plate down so hard that the stack of hotcakes on it, each glistening
with bacon grease, went toppling, rudely surprising a singlejacker, who
snatched his hand away screaming.

“Wasn’t that hot, Arvin,” Lake
scowled, “but here, let me kiss it, make it better.”

“You’re dishonoring your father’s
memory,” Oleander’s snoot well in the air by now, “what you’re doing.”

Reassembling the stack on the plate,
Lake gazed boldly back. “How I feel about Mister Kindred,” trying for some
schoolteacher’s enunciation—“not that it’s your concern, and how I felt
about Webb Traverse are two different things.”

“They can’t be.”

“You’ve had this happen to you? You
even know what you’re talking about?”

Was there close attention from up and
down the counter? Thinking back, it would seem to Lake that everybody had been
in on this from the minute the news reached town, with her and Mayva, poor
geese, the last to know.

Later they glared
at each other, up insomniac in the
newsawn wood and paint smells of the room they shared.

“I don’t want you seeing him no more.
He comes in range of me, ever, I’ll shoot him my damn self.”

“Ma, it’s this town, people like
Oleander Prudge, don’t care what they say, long as it hurts somebody.”

“I can’t show my face, Lake. You’re
making sorry fools out of all of us. This has got to stop.”

“I can’t.”

“You better.”

“He asked me to marry him, Ma.”

Not news Mayva had been waiting to
hear. “Well. Then you sure got your choice.”

“ ’Cause I won’t believe any of this
spiteful talk? Ma?”

“You know better. I been crazy the
way you’re crazy now, hell, crazier, and it’s over faster’n you can blow your
nose, and someday you’re gonna wake up, and then oh, you poor girl—”

“Oh. So that’s what happened to you
and Pa.” She regretted it before it was even out of her mouth, but this was a
wagon headed down a grade they could neither of them stop.

Mayva pulled her old green canvas
club satchel out from under the bed and started putting things in it.
Carefully, like any other chore. Her briar pipe and tobacco pouch, baby
tintypes of all the kids, an extra shirtwaist, a shawl, a beatup little Bible.
Didn’t take long. Her whole life, and no more than this to show. Well. She
looked up at last, her face full of an incalculable sorrow. “Same as if you
killed your father too. Not one Goddamned bit of difference.”

“
What
did you say?”

Mayva took her bag and went to the
door. “You’ll reap what you sow.”

“Where’re you going?”

“You don’t care.”

“The train won’t be in till
tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll wait till it comes. I
won’t spend another night in this room with you. I’ll sleep down there to the
depot. And everbody can look. Look at the damn fool old woman.”

And she was gone, and Lake sat there
with her legs trembling but not a thought in her head, and didn’t go after her,
and though next day she heard the whistle and the racket when the train pulled
in, and then later when it backed away down the valley, she didn’t ever see her
mother again.

“
This
. . .
is
. . .
disgusting
,” Sloat
shaking his head, “I mean I’m fixin to lose my damn lunch in a minute.”

“Can’t help it. You think I can help
any of this?” Deuce risked throwing his runninmate a quick look, appealing for
some understanding anyway.

No dice. “Gotdamn fool. This is all
your story that you’re tellin yourself— listen, nobody gives a hair on a
mine rat’s ass if you marry her or not, but if you fuck up and do that deed, what’s
gonna happen once she learns the true facts of the case? if she don’t know it
already. How you fixin to find even a minute’s sleep, her knowing it was you
did her Daddy in?”

“Guess I live with that.”

“Not for long you don’t. You want to
fuck her, fuck her, just
don’t tell her nothin.
”

Sloat could not figure out what had
happened to his partner. You’d’ve thought it was the first man he ever killed.
Was it possible, even with those miners’ lives as cheap as jug whiskey and as
easily disappeared down the gullet

of days, that Deuce was being haunted
by what he did, and that marrying Lake looked like some chance at putting that
one ghost to rest, some way, God help him, of
making it up
to her?

The snows
lengthened
down the
peaks, and soon the whitethroated swift had taken wing, the shooting and
headbreaking in town got worse, the military occupation began in November, and
then deeper in the winter, in January, martial law was declared—the scabs
came to work in relative peace, business was slow for a while in town but
picked up, and Oleander Prudge made her debut as a nymph du pave, miners who
thought they knew what was what coming away bewildered, shaking their heads.
Despite her turnout, prim to the point of invisibility, her perpetual scowl,
and her tendency to lecture her clients on points of personal grooming, somehow
she quickly developed a following and before long was working out of a parlor
house, from her own room, a corner room at that, with a lengthy view down the
valley.

Lake and Deuce were married over on
the other side of the mountains in a prairie church whose steeple was visible
for miles, at first nearly the color of the gray sky in which it figured as
little more than a geometric episode, till at closer range the straight lines
began to break up, soon slipping every which way, like lines of a face seen too
close, haggard from the assaults of more winters than anybody still living in
the area remembered the full count of, weathered beyond sorrowful, smelling
like generations of mummified rodents, built of Engelmann spruce and receptive
to sound as the inside of a parlor piano. Though scarcely any music ever came
this way, the stray mouthharpist or whistling drifter who did pass through the
crooked doors found himself elevated into more grace than the acoustics of his
way would have granted him so far.

The officiating presence, a Swede
migrated west from the Dakota country, wore gray robes heavy with dust, face
indistinct as if shadowed beneath a hood, not so much reciting the wellknown
words as singing them, in a harmonicminor drone this congenial soundbox
smoothed into dark psalm. The bride wore a simple dress of pale blue albatross
cloth, fine as a nun’s veil. Sloat was best man. At the big moment, he dropped
the ring. Had to go on his knees in the dim light to look for where it might’ve
rolled. “Well, how you doin down there?” Deuce called out after a while.

“Better not get too close,” Sloat
muttered.

When the deed was done, as his wife
was bringing out a glass bowlful of wedding punch and some cups, the preacher
produced an accordion and, as

if unable not to, played them a
thunderous country waltz from Osterbybruk, where he and the missus both came
from.

“What’s in this?” Sloat was curious
to know.

“Everclear alcohol,” replied the
preacher with an earnest face. “Hundred twenty proof? Some peach juice
. . .
certain Scandinavian ingredients.”

“How’s that?”

“Swedish aphrodisiac.”

“Such as, um
. . .
?”

“Its name?
Ja,
I could tell,
you—but in Jemtland dialect it’s almost the same as ‘your mother’s vagina,’
so unless you say it exactly right, there’s always the chance of a
misunderstanding with any Swedish folks might be in earshot. Trying to save you
trouble down the line, sure.”

She was a
virgin bride. At the moment of
surrendering, she found herself wishing only to become the wind. To feel
herself refined to an edge, an invisible edge of unknown length, to enter the
realm of air forever in motion over the broken land. Child of the storm.

They woke up
in the middle of the night. She
moved spooned in his embrace, feeling no need to turn to exchange a look,
communicating by way of her unexpectedly articulate ass.

“Damn. We’re really married, ain’t
we.”