Against the Day (53 page)

“I was out there for a year. Too
long. After a while it seeps into you. Somebody else now is writing up the
report, career expectations will be a factor. I’m just one of the hired hands
that dug in the dirt, climbed those red rocks and benches and carried the gear,
got infected with the insanity of the place, and they know enough now not to
pay any attention to hysterical girl graduates. It all has to be dated more
closely than it is anyway. Whoever the people were, they only lasted a few
years up in those cliffs. After that, nobody knows. Maybe they kept going. If
they were the same ones who made the exodus southward from Aztlán and became
the Aztecs, that might have something to do with those human sacrifices the
Aztecs became famous for.”
One night they were
on Seventeenth Street again. Bartenders were
busy with slings, sours, highballs, and fizzes. Republicans and Democrats got
into political discussions which proceeded inevitably to fisticuffs. Wren was
obliged to remove a realestate agent’s hand from her bosom with a steak fork.

At the Albany the bar mirror was
legendary, 110 feet long, an animated mural of Denver’s nighttime history.
“Like readin the paper,” said Booth Virbling, a crime reporter of Frank’s
acquaintance.

“Except for Booth here’s stuff, which
tends to be more back in the toilet area,” Frank explained. “First time I seen
you outside of Gahan’s, what’s up?”

“City politics the way it is, sure to
be a flagrant atrocity any minute. Oh and somebody’s been around looking for
you.”

“I owe em money?”

A cautionary glance at Wren.

“She knows everything, Booth, what is
it?”

“One of Bulkley Wells’s people.”

“All the way down from Telluride just
to visit?”

“You weren’t fixin to go up there, I
hope.”

“Pretty dangerous town these days is
it, Booth?”

“Your brother thought so.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Somebody did, out by Glenwood
Springs. Reef was flush, but downhearted. All I heard.” He spotted a principal
witness in last year’s notorious Ice Saw murder trial and went over to have a
chat.

“What was that about?” Wren said.

Long habits of holding back
information, especially from young women one was currently sparking, usually
kicked in about this point. Once, out in the Uncompahgre Plateau, Frank, riding
back from Gunnison or someplace, spotted a single storm cloud, dark and
compact, miles away, and knew despite the prevailing sunlight and immensity of
sky that no matter how he changed his direction now, he was going to cross
paths with that cloud, and sure enough, less than an hour later it all grew
dark as midnight, and there he was getting soaked and frozen and being
momentarily deafened by lightning bolts that hit blasting all around, leaning
along his horse’s neck to reassure him that everything was just peachy, though
being a range horse the critter had seen far worse and was presently trying to
reassure Frank. Tonight in the Albany, Frank could see that Wren had arrived
exactly here after unnumbered miles and Stations of the Cross—in the
light off the great mirror her face was a queerly unshadowed celestial blue,
that of a searcher, it seemed to Frank, who had come as far as she must to ask
what he would be least willing to answer. He understood that there were such
presences abroad in the world, and that although one may live an entire life
without intersecting one, if it should happen, it became a solemn obligation to
speak when spoken to.

He exhaled at length, looked her flat
in the eye. “Wouldn’t be my job customarily, see, it’s for Reef to do, but
there’s been no word for a while, and well, Glenwood Springs, maybe he’s been
chased off of this and he’s back to dealing faro someplace, showing hurdy girls
the sagebrush in the moonlight, no argument, but there’s just a point where it
moves on to the next in line, and then if I don’t do it either, then
somebody’ll have to go fetch Kit back out of that East Coast collegekid life
he’s all involved in, you’d know better’n

me, but I’d really rather see Kit
spared that trouble, for he’s a good youngster but a bad shot, and in the real likely
event they got him first, why, that’d be one more crime to square, see, and the
job likely wouldn’t ever get done.”

She was gazing at him more directly
than usual. “Where are they likely to be, then? Your gunmen.”

“Best I’ve been able to learn is it’s
a pair of seminotorious gunnies named Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, who
likely hired on with the Mine Owners Association up in Telluride. And now
according to old Booth, somebody from up there says they want to see me.
Connection, you think?”

“Of course that’s where you’re
headed.”

“It’s the last place I saw my Ma and
my sister. Maybe they’re still up there. I ought to have a look in anyway.”

“It’s a son and brother’s job.
Speaking anthropologically.”

“How about you, were you fixin to go
back down the McElmo?”

She frowned. “Not much future there.
The place to be now, I’m told, is the South Pacific islands.”

“Go specialize in cannibals, huh.”

“That sounds funnier than it is.”

Not really wanting to ask, “You want
to come up to Telluride with me?”

Well, technically she was smiling,
though it didn’t quite get as far as her eyes. “I guess not, Frank.”

He had the grace not to look too
relieved. “I could’ve used the extra brain muscle was all I meant, for it’s
sure a twofaced town, deadfalls everyplace you step, ugliest and longestrunnin
poker game in Creation, too much money changing hands too fast, and you never
know who to trust.”

“You weren’t intending to go
galloping in waving a pistol and demanding information, I hope.”

“Why, how do you usually do it?”

“If it were I? Pretend I’m there on
business, use a different name—the men you’re after might have made
enemies in town, maybe even among the people they were working for. If you kept
your ears open, sooner or later you’d hear something.”

“What you folks call ‘research,’
right? Hit all the saloons, cribs, card rooms, and parlor houses, hell, I
couldn’t keep that up more’n a week before somebody’d be on to me.”

“Maybe you’re a better actor than you
think.”

“Means staying sober for longer than
I’d like.”

“In that case we’d better get in some
drinking, wouldn’t you say?”

fter passengers for Telluride had changed at Ridgway
Junction, the little stub train climbed up over Dallas Divide and rolled down
again to Placerville and the final haul up the valley of the San Miguel,
through sunset and into the uncertainties of night. The highcountry darkness,
with little to break it but starlight off the flow of some creek or a fugitive
lamp or hearth up in a miner’s cabin, soon gave way to an unholy radiance
ahead, in the east. It was the wrong color for a fire, and daybreak was out of
the question, though the end of the world remained a possibility. It was in
fact the famous electric streetlighting of Telluride, first city in the U.S. to
be so lit, and Frank recalled that his kid brother, Kit, had worked for a while
on the project of bringing the electricity for it up from Ilium Valley.

The great peaks first sighted
yesterday across the Uncompahgre Plateau, snaggletoothing in a long line up
over the southern horizon, now announced themselves at every hand, fearsomely
backlit, rearing before the gazes of the passengers, who had begun to
rubberneck out at the spreading radiance, chattering like a earful of tourists
from back east.

Before long the trail up the valley
beside the tracks was all bustling, like streets of a town—ore and supply
wagons and strings of mules, the curses of the skinners riddling the evening,
often in languages no one in the smoky little car recognized. Beside the tracks
at one bend stood a local lunatic, who you could easily swear’d been there for
years, screaming at the trains. “ToHellyouride! Goin’ toHellyouride! Beware,
ladies and gents! Inform your conductor! Warn the engineer! ain’t too late to
turn back!” As meanwhile the luminosity ahead of them—whose sharpedged
beams now obscured many familiar stars—slowly grew brighter than the oil
lamps inside the coach, and they came rolling into the simple narrowed grid of
a town that

seemed to’ve been shipped in all at
the same time and squeezed onto the valley floor.

Frank got off and walked past a line
of drovers who’d come into town just to stand there and wait to see the train,
which now sat breathing and cooling, as brake and footplate men came and went
with wrenches, crowbars, grease guns, and oilcans.

Ordinarily the most commonsensical of
persons, now in this soulless incandescence he felt rushed in upon from every
direction by omens of violence, all directed at him. Beards unknown for weeks
to razorsteel, bared yellow eyeteeth, eyes rimmed in the hot flush of some
unframable desire
. . .
Breaking into
a sweat of apprehension, Frank understood that he was exactly where he should
not be. He took a frantic look back toward the depot, but the train was already
backing slowly away down the valley again. Like it or not, he had joined the
company of those who follow their hunches directly to bottoms of barrels and
ends of lines, up against this wall of thirteenand fourteenthousandfoot peaks
and a level of hatred between the miners’ union and the mine owners, dangerously
high even for Colorado, that you could smell.

The other smell, which Frank found he
had to light a cigar to cover up, was what the town got its name from, silver
here being usually found along with telluride ore, and tellurium compounds, as
Frank had learned at mine school, being among the most rottensmelling in
nature, worse than the worst boardinghouse fart ever let loose, that worked its
way into your clothes, your skin, your spirit, believed here to rise by way of
longdeserted drifts and stopes, from the everyday atmosphere of Hell itself.

That evening at
supper
in the hotel,
through the window, he watched a troop of state Guardsmen on their way down
Mainstreet heading down the valley west of town. Before them, on foot, stumbled
a small collection of dirty men in ragged clothes. Even in the beaten dirt,
there was a measured intention to the massed hoofbeats that made Frank wonder
about local opportunities for refuge, though other diners were taking it pretty
nonchalant. It seemed this was a vagging bee, in which the troopers went after
any outofwork miners unlucky enough to be visible and ran them in for
“vagrancy.”

“Sure enough military in town now.”

“And with old HairTrigger Bob out
there on the prowl, hell he’s a oneman army already.”

“Would that,” Frank pretended to
inquire, “be the famous gunfighter Bob Meldrum? here in Telluride?”

The men squinted at him, though in a
friendly enough way, maybe because Frank’s failure to shave that morning was
just able to dispel any impression of excessive greenness.

“That’s him,
joven.
Terrible
times in these mountains, and nothing about to ease off neither, any day soon.
Bob’s just in his heaven, up here.”

The others joined in. “He’s pretty
deaf, but you don’t necessarily want to be yelling at him, nor try to guess
which ear’d be better to aim for.”

“Few things in life more dangerous
than a deaf gunhand, ’cause he’ll tend ever to err on the side of triggerplay,
y’see, just in case he might’ve missed something specially provoking you
might’ve said
. . . .
”

“Time he got Joe Lambert up at Tomboy
in the stamp mill? Perfect Meldrum conditions, stamps all going like the
hammers of Hell, nobody could hear nothing to begin with. ‘Hands up’? Oh sure,
thanks, Bob.”

“Ask me, he hears just
fine—only the way a snake does, through his skin.”

“Hope you’ve brought something
weightier than a pistol along, young fellow.”

“All raggin’ aside, son, I hope
whatever your business, you at least know the man to see in Telluride.”

“Ellmore Disco is the name I got,”
said Frank.

“That’s him. You scheduled your
appointment well ahead, I trust.”

“Appointment. . .”

“Looky here, another one thought he’d
waltz right in.”