Against the Day (69 page)

and them, well and good, but that’s
what folk had for Capital, back in early times out here—not tools on
credit, nor seed money courtesy of some banker, just their own common fund of
fear that came with no more than a look across the day arising. It put a shade
onto things that parlor life would just never touch, so whenever she or Reef pulled
up and got out, when it wasn’t, mind, simple getting away in a hurry, it was
that one of them had heard about a place, some place, one more nexttolast
place, that hadn’t been taken in yet, where you could go live for a time on the
edge of that old daytoday question, at least till the Saturday nights got quiet
enough to hear the bell of the town clock ring you the hours before some Sunday
it’d be too dreary to want to sober up for
.
. . .
So in time you had this population of kind of roving ambassadors from
places like that that were still free, who wherever they came to rest would be
a little sovereign piece of that faraway territory, and they’d have sanctuary
about the size of their shadow.

First thing Reef looked for in a new
place was the sporting crowd. Though he said it gave him no pleasure to take
what he called “sheep to the shed,” Stray did see him maybe once or twice
consent to anyway, usually around the time he or she’d be getting ready to
leave town. “Give us enough for a couple of hours in the dining car,” as he
often put it, “don’t we owe ourselves that at least?” Wherever they headed for
had to be someplace where you didn’t know from one card to the next who’d be
likely to pull out a pistol or a dirk. Where you didn’t yet keep such implements
away in the drawer of some Chicagobuilt office desk, but always close to your
person.

Did he ever say what? Say, “Please?”
No, it was more like, “All the boys’ll be up in Butte now”—big
sigh—“drinking them Sean O’Farrells without me,” or “Thought I’d go subdue
the wild burro once more by the banks of Uncompahgre,” with Stray always
welcome to come along and so forth. But weren’t there just as often reasons of
her own not to? Times she just didn’t want to go through that old walk to the
depot to see him off, add them little few sniffles of hers to the weeping
already on that platform, no thank you, no.

They had lived down in horse barns,
army “A” tents with the old bloodstains onto them, city hotels with canopy
beds, woke up in back rooms of deadfalls where the bars had toothmarks end to
end. Sometimes it smelled like dust and animals, sometimes like machine oil
getting overheated, not too much of the garden flowers or home cooking. But
nowadays they were living in a nice little cabin up above the Uncompahgre.
Jesse lay at ease among feather pillows and borrowed grandmothers’ quilting in
a dynamite crate—perfect for a baby because there were no nails to be
sticking him, nails being known to attract electricity, of which there was
plenty up on this stormy mountainside, so it was all wood pegs and glue holding
the baby’s box

together. Watching Jesse, Stray had a look on her face, a
smile more than ready for the stoveglow of the old partnership to pick up
again, as if about to say, “Well, looks like here’s where we stop riding the
rails for a little,” except that Reef would more than likely reply, “Why,
sweetheart, you can see he’s just itchin to get some wind in his face, ain’t
you Slick,” picking the baby up and cowboydancing him facedown through the air
fast enough for his fine hair to blow back off his brow, “He’s a road baby,
ain’t you Jesse, just a road baby!” So his parents kept silent, even with this
undeniable miracle in the room, each thinking their own milesapart personal
thoughts.

It had never been
Reef’s intention to be part of any
outlaw dynasty. “Thought I was entitled to a regular human life like everybody
else,” was how he put it. It gave him some difficult days, for he was never to
forgive whatever it had been dealt him the hand he got. All set to do the one
thing, and without warning it was taken away, and there was the other thing had
to be done instead, whether he wanted to or didn’t, there it was
. . . .

Pretending to be out there with his
roundertype antics worked pretty good for a time, just enough to keep Stray
annoyed, not enough to bring her out after him, or worse, try to hire somebody
to do it for her.

But finally one day, less than a year
into it, he tried something a little too close to home, and she came around a
bend in the trail on her way to visit with her sister Willow, and there was
Reef running some fuse—nothing major, a stick or two, just enough to blow
a junction box belonging to a generating plant that supplied one of the
workings up by Ophir—just a stupid grin, and his thumb up his ass. She
sat there, with Jesse in a papoose rig peeking around from behind her, with her
arms folded, waiting for something, which he figured out after a while was an
explanation from him. And then, like it or not, he’d have to be straight with
her.

“And when was it again you were gonna
share this with me? When they’ve got the noose all around your neck?”

   
He
pretended to lose his temper. “No damn business of yours, Stray.”

   
“My
dear, it’s me.”

   
“I
know, that’s the problem.”

   
“This
must be how a Kid talks to his Woman.”

It wasn’t only the pursuit, all the
deathpacking law, Pinkerton and public, at his back, plus the unknown and
invisible others he hadn’t found out about yet, none of those so much as the
sworn opponent unreachably within, never to be appeased, believing
unconditionally, poor fish, in the class war to come, commonwealth of toil that
is to be, as the song went, “I smell it in the

wind,” he liked to mutter to himself, “I’m like a damn
Christer and his deliverance with that. Brethren, the day is coming. Clear and
no denying it.”

Most of the time anyhow. Sometimes he
was just after the explosion, it was like telling them in a voice too loud to
ignore to fuck off. And sometimes it was so he wouldn’t feel nagging at him the
unfinished business with Deuce and Sloat, wherever they were these days. If
Capital’s own books showed a balance in clear favor of damnation, if these
plutes were undeniably evil hombres, then how much more so were those who took
care of their problems for them, in no matter what ignorance of why, not all of
their faces on the wanted bills, in that darkly textured style that was more
about the kind of remembering, the unholy longing going on out here, than of
any reallife badman likeness
. . . .

Yes
, well Stray and him, they could talk
about it. Some. Say they could, and they couldn’t.

It wasn’t just Webb he had to look
after anymore. The San Juan range was a battleground now, Union miners, scabs,
militia, owners’ hired guns, all shooting at each other and now and then
hitting somebody for a oneway passage into that dark country where they all
collected. They wanted his attention, them and the ones who’d died at the other
places, the Coeur d’Alene, Cripple Creek, even back east at Homestead, points
in between, all kept making themselves known. They were Reef’s dead now, all
right, and did they make a grand opera of coming around to remind him. Damn. He
could no more run out on them than on some houseful of little orphan children
put into his care unexpectedly. These dead, these white riders of the
borderline, nervelessly at work already as agents on behalf of invisible forces
over there, could still, like children, keep an innocence all their
own—the innocence of the early afterlife, of tenderfeet needing
protection from the insults of that unmarked otherworld trail so unforgiving.
They trusted him so—as if he knew any better than they did—to see
them along
. . .
trusted the bond
between them, and he could no more subvert their faith than question his own
. . . .

Sometimes he made the mistake of
saying this out loud, in Stray’s hearing. She would make a point of looking
over at the baby, as if Reef had somehow just put him in danger, and then start
in.

   
“This
ain’t puttin flowers on some grave, Reef.”

“No? Thought everybody’s dead was
different. O’ course, some do like the flowers, but then there’s others’s
partial to blood, or didn’t you know that.”

   
“There’s
a Sheriff to take care of it.”

   
No.
It was something belonged to them, the ones across the Wall, nothing to do with
the State or state law, nor especially with any damn Sheriff.

“My job is to prevent the sides from
tangling,” one of these Sheriffs tried once to instruct Reef.

“No, Burgess, your job is to see that
they keep on killing Union people, without none of us ever getting to pay them
back.”

   
“Reef,
now if they’ve broken the law—”

“Oh, eyewash. The law. You’re just
some li’l old saloon bum in their palace o’ wealth, Burge. You think if
somebody shoots you right here ’n’ now, they’re going to care? Send even
flowers to Laureen and them
chavalitos
?
Piece of paper back there goes in a pneumatic tube’s all, next
dumb animal comes blinkin out of the chute, pins on that star, and there ain’t
even a form to put your name down in, let alone any notices in the newspaper.
Call that law, law enforcement if you like, o’ course.”

What he said to Stray was, “This is
too precious to leave it to some office full of clowns.”

   
“Precious.
Jesus our Lord and Savior.”

   
“Don’t
have to start crying, Stray.”

   
“I’m
not crying.”

   
“Your
face gets all red.”

   
“You
don’t know what crying looks like.”

“Darlin you must’ve had public
execution on your mind for a while now, and I’m sorry, I know all ’at old
calico recital, oh, Honey I don’t want ’em hanging you, well I appreciate that,
but now tell me, what else besides?”

“What else? You’re feeling lively
today, you really want to know what else? Listen to me, side o’
beef—hangin you, I can understand, but they might decide to
hang me,
too.
Is ‘what else.
’ ”

What he did not of course detect in
this was the promise Stray knew straight enough she was making here, to stick
by his side, even far as the gallows, if their luck should turn that way. But
he didn’t want to hear anything like that, hell no, and quickly pretended this
was all about her safety. “Darlin, they’re not gonna want to hang you. They’re
gonna want to fuck you.”

   
“Course.
Then
hang me.”

“No, ’cause by then you’ll be casting
that spell, and nobody’ll want to do nothin but be down at them famous little
feet.”

   
“Oh.
You are such a youngster.”

   
“Don’t
be feeling sorry for me.”

   
“I
won’t. Just grow up, Reef.”

   
“What,
and be like you all? Think not.”

   
What
a man gets for opening his heart and sharing his feelings. Reef knew

his days in the family dynamite business were numbered now,
though there had to be other ways to fight this fight apart from setting off
explosions. About all he was sure of was that he had to keep on with it to make
this thing right. But it was time, just about time, for Frank to be taking up
some of the slack.

   
“I’m
headin up to Denver, see if I can’t just locate that old Frank.”

She understood approximately what he
was up to, and for once refrained from making with the remarks, just nodded him
out the door, taking care to have Jesse in her arms when she did.

He rode out into the advent of
winter, beneath the sheets and hoods of mountainsize nightriders, torn, swept,
pausing only to build up a drift or congregate into an avalanche waiting to let
go and wipe anything in its path from the Earth. Streams of runoff frozen onto
the vertical rock walls looked like leafless groves of white aspen or birch.
Sunsets tended to be purple firestorms, with blinding orange streaks running
through. The other riders he met were friendly in the way of fellow troopers in
the forces of those who would not descend to valleys, to southerly pastures,
who would remain, as if there were something up here to be gotten through as a
point of honor, some ongoing highcountry misadventure, and it had to be here,
among these white verticalities, for it would mean nothing anywhere else. Who
would fasten their mean shacks to the mountain with steel cable and eyebolts
and let the wind roar and be damned. And next morning be out in it picking up
pieces of roof and stovepipes and what all hadn’t been blown to Mexico yet.

When these altitudes passed over into
the realm of the unearthly, the chances of life struggling through seemed too
slim to consider. As the snows deepened in the towns, covering the street
windows and then the upstairs, and the winds wheeled in from the north ever
more fiercely, nothing here, no building or schemework of streets, seemed any
more permanent than a night’s bivouac—by spring all must be ghosts and
sorrow, ruins of darkened wood and unheaped stones. Of course, some of that was
just what a person’s idea might be of what was possible—come up here from
Texas or New Mexico or even Denver, and it looked like that nothing could
survive and what were these people even thinking to settle up here.