Against the Day (54 page)

“Lot of people need to see Ellmore,
son.”

Some believed Ellmore Disco was
Mexican, some said he’d come from even farther away, Finland or someplace like
that. Not overall what you’d call a natty dresser, he concentrated his few
dudish impulses on headgear, tending to fancy black beavers with snakeskin
bands and a pencil roll to the brim, that you had to send to Denver for and then
wait a few months. The only people he was ever documented to’ve shot at were
those who, either by word or deed, disrespected one of his hats, and some of
that behavior had certainly been provoking enough. Once at C. Hall & Co. up
at Leadville, in the days when it was still Leadville, while Ellmore was out
taking a short piss break from a hitherto friendly game of SevenToed Pete, a
frolicsome shift boss had thought to fill his Stetson, trustingly left
unattended, with jellied turtle consommé, never a favorite of Ellmore’s to
begin with. “Well, say!” he declared upon his return, “here’s an awkward
situation!” The miner must have sensed something ominous in this, for he began
to creep toward the exit. Next thing anybody knew, both parties were out the
door, and Chestnut Street had grown lively with detonation. The prankster
escaped into open country at full express velocity, despite a flesh wound in
the caboose and a

couple of holes through the crown of his own hat, which
seemed to’ve been a particular target of Ellmore’s wrath.

Many having witnessed this têteàtête,
at the next hat incident of course Ellmore was now obliged to behave the same
way, if not a little worse. “Yet I’m basically a tranquil fellow,” he continued
to insist, though nobody paid that much heed. To strangers he was Ellmore the
Evil, to friends an engaging enough customer despite these hatrelated spells,
whose unpredictability did nothing to harm his success in business. These days
you’d find E. Disco & Sons to be the thrivingest enterprise between Grand
Junction and the Sangre de Cristos. The store’s secret seemed to be in its wide
range of goods and prices, so that on any one day you were apt to observe
managerial folk in lacquered silk hats milling on the floor with downandouters
in ancient wool widebrims, all shiny with grease and battered from the day,
looking for just about anything—bowlers and deerstalkers, mantillas,
lorgnettes, walking sticks, ear trumpets, spats, drivingcoats, watchchain
ornaments, chemisettes and combinations, Japanese parasols, electrical
bathtubs, patent devices for thunderstormproof mayonnaise, cherrypitting
machines, drill bits and carbide lamps, ladies’ bandoliers rigged out expressly
for .22caliber rounds, not to mention bolts of jaconet, pompadour sateen, tartalan,
dimity, grenadine, crepe lissé, plain, striped, or in Oriental prints direct
from Liberty’s of London.

Frank arrived around midmorning and
found a skylit interior surrounded by a mezzanine, the ironwork painted a light
greenish gray. Ellmore’s office was sort of cantilevered out over a main floor
briskly echoing with shopnoise and giving off odors of fuller’s earth, gun oil,
and local citizenry, who were everywhere.

“The boss has been up to his ears in
Texans all morning,” he was informed.

“See over back of Horse Supplies
there? you’ll find an entrance to the saloon next door, if time starts hanging
heavy.” Frank noticed how this clerk, mild enough in manner, was packing one of
the more giganticsize models of Colt pistol.

“Thanks, maybe I’ll just sit and
breathe and let the altitude do it for me cheap.”

The office, when he finally got
nodded in, was oversupplied with saloon furniture in the Grand Rapids style,
bought for haulaway costs down in Cortez after that notorious night the old
Palace got shot up by the Four Corners Boys. A studio photo said to be of Mrs.
Disco directed a lidded smile at visitors.

Frank was gazing out the window over
the busy main thoroughfare when Ellmore came barreling in.

“Caught me admiring your view.”

“You’re lucky to see it while it’s
boom times, for when these veins give out at last, there’ll be nothing here to
sell
but
the scenery, which means herds of visitors from places that
don’t have any—Texans, for example. That side the street you’re lookin
at’s what we call the Sunny Side, you see those little miners’ shacks over
there? Too narrow for any but the undernourished to stand, let alone turn
around, in—well someday each of those will be going for a million apiece
U.S., maybe two, and up. Laugh if you like, everybody else does, one more
Telluride jocularity, blame it on the altitude. But just wait. You heard it
here first.”

“Man of vision.”

“Hell, Anarchists ain’t the only ones
with ideas about the future.” Ellmore Disco did not appear to be of either
Mexican or Finnish descent, at least not when, as now, he was
smiling—more like musichall Chinese, maybe, the way his eyes retreated
into protective pouches, leaving the observer with a ruinous С major (“or
as they say in this town, ‘A miner
’ ”)
octave
on some abandoned upright, interrupted by a matched pair of winking gold
canines that seemed longer and more sabershaped than necessary, even for eating
in miningtown steak houses.

He gestured now with a coffee cup
that seemed a constant companion and, so rapidly it could’ve been spoken in a
single breath, announced, “As to an interview with Cap’n Wells—I am in
sympathy, sir, though far from being the Cap’n’s social secretary, yet I know
it’s a common enough visitor’s desire, for the fame of Bulkley Wells has
reached around the globe, or damn near, this week for example a delegation in
all the way from Tokyo, Japan, under orders from the Emperor himself, if ya
don’t meet with the Captain, boys, why don’t bother coming back, basically, ’n’
then o’ course it’s out with that wackyzacky they all pack for committin their
harikari with, you can imagine how old Cal Rutan would enjoy an incident like
’at in
his
county. But it’s how desperate some folks’ll get, and not
always foreigners neither, so what I must know from you now, is how unhappy are
you
likely to become, sir, if, heaven
forfend, you should somehow fail to see the Cap’n this trip.”

After making sure Ellmore was done,
Frank said, “Busy gent, I expect.”

“You’d be needing the good offices of
brother Meldrum, not to mention assorted of
his
pardners to get past
. . . .
You mentioned mine work—what
kind do you do, any blasting ever come into it for instance?”

“Some maybe. “

They exchanged a cool, solid look
then. Ellmore nodded, as if something had just occurred to him. “Nothing up on
ground level though.”

“First time I’ve been taken for a
bomber.”

“What’s this here, indignation?”

“Not in particular. Kind of
nattering, in its way.”

“Engineer can’t plead he don’t know
one end of a dynamite stick from the other, you can appreciate.”

“Sets any number of dogs to barking.
Sure. Should’ve just said pastry chef or something.”

Ellmore spread his hands as if in
innocence.

Frank swatted away an imaginary fly.
“To be straight with you sir, gold’s not much in my line, fact is I’m more of a
zinc man, but—”

“Zinc, well that case, no offense but
why ain’t you up in Lake County, then?”

“Thanks, Leadville’s a regular stop
on my circuit ride, but this week, well
 
what I’ve got’s a new system for concentrating gold ore—”

“Only speaking for Tomboy and the
Smuggler o’ course, but they’re content ’th what they got. Stamp it down to
mush, run it over some quicksilver on a plate, they say it works good.”

“Amalgamation process. Traditional,
pays off nicely enough. Sure. But now this setup of mine—”

“My guess is Cap’n Wells’ll ask how
much will it cost, and then say no anyway. But you go have a word with Bob,
who’s not that hard to find, though approachin’ him can be fraught with danger,
and no time of day sad to say’s any better than another
. . . .
Oh look here, it’s lunchtime now. Come down to Lupita’s,
where the menudo can’t be beat, she soaks em tripes in tequila overnight, is
her secret,” pausing by a gigantic elkantler hat rack with hats occupying every
point, to select a gray sombrero with a band of silver medallions inlaid with
lapis and jasper, Zuñi work by the look of it. “One of her secrets anyway.
We’ll pick up my boy Loomis on the way,” who turned out to be the .44packing
clerk who had greeted Frank earlier.

They exited out the back, into
Pacific Street, threading their way among ox and mule teams, pianobox buggies
and threespring phaetons, buckboards and big transfer wagons carrying loads
between the train depot and the mines and shops, riders in dusters stiff and
spectral with lowland alkali, Chinese pulling handcarts piled high with
laundry—Ellmore waving, pointing his finger humorously pistollike and
occasionally grabbing hold of somebody to transact a moment’s business. Seemed
everybody knew him. Most were careful to compliment him on his choice of hat.

Lupita’s was on a patch of hardpan
tucked in between Pacific and the San Miguel River, up here more like Creek,
with a collection of plank tables and long benches painted a sky blue not
observed anywhere else in town, and set beneath a rusted shed roof held up by
aspen poles. Cooking aromas began a

half mile before you got there.
Gigantic chicharrones were piled like hides at a trading post.
Ristras
of
dangerously dark purple chilies hung all about. At night they were said to glow
in the dark. Clerks and cashiers, birds of the night but newly risen, stockmen
from down the valley, Mexican laborers streaked with brickdust, skinners
waiting for the train sat alongside Negro newsboys and wives in their best
hats, all indiscriminately filling the benches, grabbing and gobbling like
miners in a mess hall, or standing waiting either for a seat or for one of the
kids working in the kitchen to fill their lunch pails or paper sacks with
chicken tortas, venison tamales, Lupita’s widelyknown brain tacos, bottles of
homebrewed beer, sixtydegree wedges of peach pie, so forth, to take along with
them.

Frank, expecting more of a motherly
figure, was surprised at the arrival of the taqueria’s fair eponym, a miniature
tornado of goldaccented black and white, whirling in out of nowhere, pausing
long enough to bestow Ellmore a kiss on the brow, which he scarcely had time to
lift his hat for, and, just before vanishing again into the unstable weather of
the kitchen in the back, singing over her shoulder, it seemed mischievously,
“
Por poco te faltó La Blanca.
”

“Oh, hayull,” Ellmore with the onset
of a worried look, “there goes the rest of
my
day, what’s going on I
don’t know about, Loomis, that’d bring
her
down into town?”

“La Blanca,” it turned out, was a
local name for “HairTrigger Bob” Meldrum’s wife—folks agreed it should be
“wife,” given the dark history of Bob’s displeasure—named for a white
horse of supernatural demeanor she was always seen to ride, usually sticking to
trails up in Savage Basin and the high passes more invisible than not and known
best to such as the infamous HoleintheWall Gang, keeping scrupulously her
distance, lips so bloodless in that windy transparency they seemed to
disappear, leaving her blackfringed eyes the only feature you’d recall after
she’d gone by. According to visitors, Texans and so forth, horses didn’t even
belong up on slopes like those, for the grades were too drastic, too sudden,
too many thousandfoot chasms and the like, no way usually to switchback across
what would often turn into plain damn faces of
cliffs,
obliging you to
just get the deed done, straight down or straight up, praying for no ice
patches, and a horse mountainwise enough to judge the desperate declivity,
Indianpony blood being in such cases a clear preference. She inhabited this
geometry of fear so effortlessly that Bob might almost’ve found her once upon a
time in a storykingdom of glass mountains every bit as peculiar as the San
Juans, and trailside poets speculated that with all her solitary
ranging—black cape billowing, hat down on her back, and the light of
Heaven on her hair, flowered silk neckerchiefs Bob

bought for her up in Montrose
guttering like cold flames, in blizzards or springavalanche weather or the
popcorn snows of August—she was riding out a homesickness too passionate
for these realms of ordinary silver and gold to know much about, much less
measure up to.

They lived up near the Tomboy mine,
in a cabin uptrail from the mine tailings, but kept to themselves, not that too
many even got to see them together, which no doubt encouraged a lot of romantic
gas, even from those who hated Bob from hat to spurs but had seen her at least,
fatally, once, out on some one or other of those destinationless rides. Bob
these days, besides working as Buck Wells’s representative on Earth, was also
day guard at Tomboy, up before first light and out into the Basin, his
eyes—some recalled them as “dark,” while others said they changed to pale
gray just before he intended to shoot his man—sharper than usual to make
up for his allegedly bad hearing, sweeping ever to and fro, vanning everything
down to pebble size and below, tuned for trouble of all kinds, which maybe
unavoidably would have to include that La Blanca. Many reckless and basically
thickheaded boys around town liked to imagine they knew what she was after,
which in their dreams always took some form of relief from her deaf runt of a
cabinmate, who didn’t, besides, look all that tough, fourteen or whatever many
notches it was supposed to be on his pistol. Hell, anybody can cut a notch,
cheaper than cheap talk, ain’t it?