Against the Day (52 page)

fter Webb was buried, and Reef had gone his way, Frank,
fearing for his own safety, had glided back down to Golden on winds of inertia,
considered asking around to see if anybody was looking for him but thought he
knew the answer to that one. Being at the time young and unaware of how to
proceed on anything but nerve, he stayed just long enough to gather up his gear
and get on the electric down to Denver. Over the next year, he went through a
number of disguises, including mustaches, beards, haircuts from some of the
city’s finest hotel barbers, but about all that stuck was a change of hat to
something more narrowbrim and with the deepening color of passage down what
seemed to him was becoming a long, embittered trail.

Soon he began to notice a pattern of
approach—middleranking managers, urban in style with something also of
the look of mine inspectors to them, offering to buy drinks, sliding into some
vacant seat at a card table, eyeing Frank as if he was supposed to know what
they meant. At first he thought it was about Reef, that these customers had
been hired to track his brother down and wanted information. But that rapidly
turned out not to be the case. One way or another, the conversation, when there
was any, came around to matters of employment. Was he working, and who would
that be for, and was he looking to change jobs and so forth. Slowly—not
being much in the intuitive line, as at least a dozen women by then were happy
to remind him—he figured out that these men were repping for the Vibe
Corp. or its dependencies, and so his immediate response was invariably fuck
this, though he was careful never to betray any annoyance. “All fairly jake as
of right now,” he learned to smile with every appearance of sincerity. “You
have a business card? Soon as the need arises I’ll sure be in touch.”

Cautiously, he began to ask around
about Webb’s case. Not much luck. Not

even much of a case anymore. Kept
trying the Miners’ Federation office for a while, but nobody would admit to
knowing anything, and it hadn’t taken Frank long to wear out his welcome.

Strange. You’d think they’d’ve been a
little more forthcoming up on Arapahoe, but seemed like they had their
important chores to run, time flowed along, new troubles every day, too many to
keep up with, was how they saw it.

He was no detective, and had not
spent much time investigating, but from keeping his ears open up and down the
street, he could not escape a suggestion that Vibe Corp., who had spirited away
his kid brother Kit, was also behind Webb Traverse’s murder. This complicated
for him any question of a serious future as a mine engineer, at least in the
U.S. Maybe he’d have to think about going abroad. Every hiring office Frank
walked into this side of the Rockies had heard of him, knew of Scarsdale Vibe’s
amplespirited offers, and wondered why Frank wasn’t, at least a Vibe regional
executive by now. How was Frank supposed to explain? The man might have had my
father wiped away, carelessly as a wet ring on a bar top, and I am reluctant to
accept his charity? Of course they thought they knew the whole story already,
and were stunned at the Christian daring of Scarsdale’s gesture to Frank,
seeing that custom and usage in the mountains at this time would have been to
see him drygulched as swiftly as possible, just in case of Anarchism in the
blood or something like that. The New York industrialist was rising above these
sordid matters of kinship and revenge—why couldn’t Frank? Who could
understand ingratitude like that? And what they could not understand, they were
not about to hire any source of.

It sure soured him on silver and
gold. He found himself after a while avoiding them altogether. He told himself
he was just being practical. He’d seen too much misery from the ups and downs
of both metals, especially after Repeal in ’93. The table of elements was full
of other possibilities, “the weeds of mineralogy,” as one of his professors
used to say, “just sitting there, part of the Creation, waiting for somebody to
figure out how they can be made useful.”

Which was how he began to work with
less glamorous elements, such as zinc, and as a result spending more time in
Lake County than he’d ever expected to.

Leadville was well past its glory
days, into the postRepeal era, no longer Haw Tabor’s town, though the widow,
already legend, still kept holed up at the Matchless workings with a firearm
she had no hesitation in discharging at anybody who came too close, and there
lingered some old numinous, centeroftheworld willingness to raise species of
hell that hadn’t been invented yet. Interest had shifted from silver over to
zinc—there was a Godhonest Zinc Rush on, in fact, the bestpriced ore to
be dug out of there at the moment, surpassing the value of gold and silver
combined. Seems some bright engi

neer had invented a way to reprocess
the waste heaps from those old preRepeal silver mines, so that some
concentrating mills were realizing zinc content as high as 45 percent. The
procedure up here with ordinary local zinc blende had been
straightforward—first you got the sulfur to go off by roasting the blende
to zinc oxide, and then you reduced the oxide to zinc metal. But the slag in
Leadville, towering in black heaps all over town, not to mention covering the
streets and alleyways, was an exotic and largely unknown mixture of drosses,
scums, glances, pyrites, and other compounds of copper, arsenic, antimony,
bismuth, and something the miners were calling “Mollybedamned”—different
elements came off at different temperatures, so there were matters of
distillation to address. They loomed out there in black mystery above the
bright interiors and the faro players and insatiably desired girls, and
sometimes shadowy figures could be seen kneeling, reaching out to touch one of
these slag piles, reverently as if, like some counterChristian Eucharist, it
represented the body of an otherworldly beloved.

“Little like alchemy,” it seemed to
Wren Provenance, a girl anthropologist a year out of Radcliffe College back
east, with whom Frank had become unexpectedly entangled.

“Yeahp. Worthless sludge into foldin
money.”

“Centuries from now those heaps will
still be there, and somebody will happen along and stare up at them and begin
to wonder. Maybe take them for structures of some kind, government buildings,
temples, maybe. Ancient mysteries.”

“Pyramids of Egypt.”

 
She nodded. “That shape is common to a lot of the old
cultures. Secret wisdom—different details, but the structure underneath
is always the same.”

Frank and Wren had met up one
Saturday night in Denver in a variety saloon. A Negro spoonsandbanjo act was
racketing around up front. She was with some college acquaintances, including a
couple of Harvard wisemen who wanted to go visit a Chinese saloon over in the
Sons of Heaven section of town. To Frank’s delight, Wren declined. “And don’t
forget to try some of that Bear Paw in Octopus Ink, fellas!” He stood waving
till the cab disappeared around the corner.

When they were alone, “What I really
need to see,” Wren confided, “is the Denver Row, and a house of ill fame. Will
you escort me?”

“A what? Oh.” Frank recognizing in
her hazel eyes a spark that he should know better by now than to be
encouraging, and behind which was an inclination to shadow he could’ve even
then been paying more attention to.“And
. .
.
that’s strictly for scientific reasons, o’ course.”

“Anthropological as can be.”

Off they went to Market Street and
Jennie Rogers’s House of Mirrors. Wren was immediately surrounded by half a
parlorful of girls and gently led upstairs. A little later he happened to look
in a doorway, and there she was, not much on, what there was all black, tightly
laced, stockings askew, standing in an open polyhedral of mirrors, examining
herself from all the angles available. Transformed.

“Interesting turnout, Wren.”

“All that riding and climbing and
outdoor activities, my, it’s a relief to be back in stays again.”

The girls were amused.

“Look at this, you’ve got him going
now.”

“Mind if we borrow him for a while?”

“Oh,” as he was dragged away, “but I
thought we were fixin to—” unable to stop staring, or as he might have
put it “gazing,” at the intriguingly gussiedup Wren for as long as he could.

“Don’t worry, Frankie, she’ll be here
when you get back,” said Finesse.

“We’ll take good care of her,” Fame
assured him with a wicked smile. Which got Wren to detach from her selfadmiring
long enough to turn and seek the girls’ eyes, with one of those looks of
insincere dismay you saw in erotic illustrations from time to time.

When she showed up again she was in
yet another scandalous change of underlinen, holding a bourbon bottle by the
neck and puffing on the stub of a Havana. A dress cavalry helmet with a gold
eagle, braid, and tassels rested at some careless angle among her untended
tresses.

“Havin’ fun?”

Her upper lids would not take the
trouble to allow much sparkling eyeball to flash his way. She spoke in a high
drawl from which the effects of opium, he guessed, couldn’t be ruled out
altogether. “Fascinating material
. . .
volumes
. . . .
Some of these stockmen, my
goodness.” Then, seeming to recognize him, she smiled slowly. “Yes and your
name came up.”

“Uhoh.”

“They said you’re far too sweet.”

“Me? They just never see me in a bad
mood, ’s all. Some kind of red streaks on your stockings there.”

“Lip rouge.” If he was expecting a
blush from her, he didn’t get one. Instead she looked boldly back, eye to eye.
He noticed the scarlet contours of her own lips were blurred and the kohl
around her eyes had run down here and there, as if from tears.

Fame came sashaying in, in some
incomprehensible though wicked peignoir,

glided up behind, slipped an arm
around Wren’s waist, and the girls snuggled together in an undeniably charming
tableau.

“Just can’t stay away,” Wren was
whispering, “. . . you’ve simply ruined me for everyday bourgeois sexuality.
Whatever am I to do?”

Having come west
to search for Aztlán, the mythic
ancestral home of the Mexican people, which she believed to be located
somewhere around the Four Corners, Wren found more than she’d expected to.
Maybe too much. She had the look of a trooper back off a long campaign in which
more than once matters of life and death had arisen—her own, those of
others, eventually a mingling of selves that had her insomniac and, to Frank at
least, making no sense beyond occasionally scaring the shit out of him.

He had a passing acquaintance with
the Mancos and McElmo country, but not much notion of its ancient past.

“Well, Frank, it’s quite
. . .
unhappy is the best you could call
it.”

“You don’t just mean Mormons, I
guess.”

“Hallucinatory country and cruel, not
hard to understand that Mormons might have found it congenial enough to want to
settle, but this is much older—thirteenth century anyway. There were
perhaps tens of thousands of people back then, living all through that region,
prosperous and creative, when suddenly, within one generation—overnight
as these things go—they fled, in every appearance of panic terror, went
up the steepest cliffsides they could find and built as securely as they knew
how defenses against. . . well, something.”

“There’s some Ute stories,” Frank
recalled, “other tribes is how I always heard it.”

She shrugged. “Incursion from the
north—foragers at first, then allout invasion forces who brought their
stock and families with them. Maybe so. But this is something else, beyond
that. Here.” She had piles of photographs, Brownie snapshots most of them,
taken up and down the canyons, including, carved into the rock, images of
creatures unfamiliar to Frank.

“What in the
. . .
hayull?” Painted as well as carved here were people with
wings
. . .
humanlooking bodies with
snake and lizard heads, above them unreadable apparitions, trailing what might
have been fire in what might have been the sky.

“Yes.” He looked over, and whatever
it was there in her eyes now, he wished he’d seen it sooner.

“What?”

“We don’t know. Some of us suspect,
but it’s too terrible. Not to mention . . .” She found, stared at, reluctantly
handed over one of the plates.

“Old bones.”

“Human bones. And if you look
carefully, the longer ones have been deliberately broken
. . .
broken into. As if for the marrow inside.”

“Cannibals, cannibal Indians?”

She shrugged, her face showing the
onset of a sorrow he knew he couldn’t help much with. “Nobody knows. Harvard
professors, you’d expect more
. . .
but
all they do is theorize and argue. The people who fled to the cliffs might even
have done this to themselves. Out of fear. Something frightened them so much
that this might’ve been the only way they knew to keep it from them.”

“It wanted them to—”

“They may never have known what it. .
. ‘wanted.’ Not really.”

“And you—” It was all he could
do not to reach for her, gather her into some kind of perimeter. But the
moisture in her eyes was shining like steel, not dew, and nothing about her
trembled.