Against the Day (70 page)

Reef was riding a January colt named
Borrasca, on the small side but quick and smart and trained like most horses up
in this country—the terrain being what it was—to let you mount from
whichever side, uphill or down, would let him keep his balance better. They
passed along a valley lined on either side with avalanches waiting to happen.

Like mountains and creeks and other
permanent features of the landscape, every slide in the San Juans had a name,
no matter when it might have run last. Some liked to let go several times a
day, some hardly ever, but they were

all like reservoirs of pure potential
energy, poised up there and waiting their moment. The one Reef was riding under
just now had been named the Bridget McGonigal by a mine owner who’d since
returned back east, after his wife, for her practice of likewise letting go at
completely unpredictable moments.

Reef heard a blast high above,
echoing slope to slope, and his bomber’s ear could tell right away it wasn’t
dynamite, not nearly cleanedged enough— this concussion had more the
ragged blur to it of black powder, so howitzerhappy National Guard amusements
weren’t out of the question, though usually the only reason for a powder charge
was to move a large mass of snow instead of just bore holes into it, and why on
such a gray and uninhabited day would there be any need for that, especially so
far upslope, with the risks of triggering an avalanche . . .

   
Oh,
well now,
shit?

Here she came, the soulsmiting roar,
quick as that, grown to fill the day, the bright cloud risen to the top of what
sky he could still see in that direction, all down here suddenly gone into
twilight, and him and Borrasca, dead in the path. Nothing anywhere close enough
to get behind. Borrasca, being an animal of great common sense, let out with a
hellwiththis type of whinny and began to move out of the area quick as he
could. Figuring the colt would do better without a rider’s weight, Reef kicked
out of the stirrups and rolled off, slipped in the snow, fell, and got up again
just in time to turn and face the great descending wall.

Later he would wonder why he didn’t
head downhill quick as he could and be planning how to try and swim his way up
and out, if he stayed alive that long. Somehow he must have wanted to have a
last look. And what he noticed right away was that the slide now, actually, was
running in a slightly different direction, angling more to his left, and not as
fast as he’d thought at first either. Afterward he calculated that what saved
him was the weather, unusually mild that week, almost like spring, making the
slide just wet and slow enough to’ve formed a snowdam someplace in it, at some
providential snag in the terrain, that steered the whole giant concern away
from him by just enough. Known to happen. Everybody up here had an avalanche
story, covered then uncovered again being a favorite among countless occasions
of miracle
. . . .

The great cloud, now a veil of mercy,
hung between Reef and everything uphill, offering him a few minutes to get out
of the sightlines from up there and hope whoever it was’d be fooled into
thinking they’d got him. He took off at a run, or best he could in this wet
snow, toward where the trail made its switchback, and first thing he saw when
he got safely around the bend was Borrasca, unhurriedly stepping along, already
down on the next stretch of road below, heading on back to the barn at Ouray.
With no way of knowing

how deep the snow was, and no history even as a kid of
practicing any of the

forms of squarehead insanity that went on in wintertime in
these mountains, Reef unlatched his waterproof, folded it into a rough sort of
sled, climbed onto it, grabbed hold of his hat, and trying hard not to scream,
slid up and over the edge, down into the steep white unknown, with some dim
thought of steering so as to cross paths below with Borrasca, praying as much
as he ever did for no hidden rocks to be in the way. Approaching the trail
below, he guessed he might be going a little too fast, and had to put out a
foot, in fact two, finally roll off and over onto his side to brake himself,
and as it was he nearly overshot the roadway and went off the
next
ledge,
which was
really
steep, you might say vertical. But he managed to stop
before the overhang and roll about six or eight feet down a little bank slip
and onto the trail. He lay on his back for a minute looking up into the sky.
Borrasca, coming along, was eyeing him curiously, but not that amazed to see
him.

“Don’t recall sayin I’d be back,”
Reef greeted him, “but nice seein you again howsoever, and let’s go look at how
far she ran out.”

Jake with the colt, who stood there
with his eyes rolling till Reef got aboard, and they resumed their journey.

They made it down to Ouray without
running into any other riders, though somebody could always’ve been watching
through fieldglasses. Reef took the sunny view that as far as the Owners
Association knew (who else could it’ve been?), he was now dead and gone, and
therefore born again, “I say unto you born again,” he murmured to the horse,
who, if you went by his markedly human demeanor, may have known, in the Hindoo
sense, something of what Reef meant.

“
You’re back
in a
hurry.”

   
He
told her what’d happened. “Only one thing to do.”

“Uhhuh. That would be, you leave me
here alone, with winter on the way, and the screaming baby.”

He felt a familiar hollow vibrating
of fear along his centerline, out to his palms and fingers. It was just the way
she was looking at him. Nothing would help here. But he said, “We’ve always
found the way back together. Ain’t we?”

She just kept on with that look.

   
“What’s
different? Baby, sure, but what else?”

“Did I say anythin, Reef?” Damned if
she would raise her voice. Ever. Ever fuckin again, and by then of course she
was that much closer to letting it all run, and there he was just jabbering
right along,

   
“Don’t
want you either one getting hurt, do I, for all I know these boys’s up

on that ridge right now, just waiting for this door here to
open. You want to, please, forget the speech this time? Save it for when next
we meet?”

She didn’t want to, no, actually,
“Willow can take little Jesse awhile, he’ll be safe with her and Holt, but I
don’t know about you, you sorry lummox, you’ll be needin somebody to cover your
back
. . . .
” Well, this after years,
just damn years, of swearing she would never come to it. Cowardly, this
parlorwife pleading. Knowing that he was already, the passing shade of him,
slipped away over the doorsill, with that doomed carcass she loved beer belly
and all only a detail now. Lord, how she, who never prayed, was praying that
whoever it was hadn’t got to the ridge yet, for she wanted at least that scrap
of a chance he could go on being alive, someplace.

“First thunder from the east, darlin.
That’s when the Zuñís say winter’s over, and that’s when I’ll be back
. . . .
”

Jesse was asleep, so Reef just kissed
him real gently on his head before he went out the door.

Which was how
Reef came to take on the guise of
East Coast nerve case Thrapston Cheesely III, learning to look sicker than he
was, to dress like a dude who couldn’t sit a horse on a merrygoround, sneaking
into Denver to take dancing lessons from a certain Madame Aubergine, swearing
her to secrecy under pain of an ancient Ute shaman’s curse. He started using
cologne and the same brand of hair pomade as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and
kept his dynamite, detonator caps, and miscellaneous exploder gear all in a
matched and monogrammed set of alligatorhide luggage given him by the
provocative and voracious Ruperta ChirpingdonGroin, a touring Englishwoman
fascinated by what she took to be contradictions in his character, and not exactly
put off by what signals of danger did find their way through.

“Dear,
dear
Mizziz
ChirpingdonGroin, you mustn’t be too upset with me though I admit I was
naughty
down in the kitchen there with ’at li’l Yup Toy and so forth, but you
simply must forgive me, for what could one undeveloped lotus blossom mean to
one who has spent even a moment in your own company, enchanting,
desirable
Mizziz
ChirpingdonGroin
. . . .
”

Yup Toy herself, waiting by a huge
ice machine among a row of Oriental icegirls in abbreviated sequined getups,
her painted face a porcelain mask in the naphthalight streaming from somewhere
beneath, gazed, sucking at a scarlet fingernail, failing to look inscrutable to
any but the habitually dismissive, such as Ruperta. To others more appreciative
of her virtues, her mind was an open book, and many began to edge away,
anticipating trouble up the

tracks. Down in the unlighted depths
of the great machine, a steam hammer relentlessly slammed away at blocks of raw
ice, vapors rose and blew, a confusion of water in all its phases at once,
through which the icegirls, directed by a headwaiter with a pair of castanets,
glided rollerskating among the tables, delivering galvanized buckets embossed
with the name of this establishment brimming over with the lowtemperature
solid.

Reef joined Ruperta’s loose salon of
neuræsthenics traveling hot spring to spring in search of eternal youth or
fleeing the deadweight of time, finding enough impulsive or inattentive
cardplayers to keep him in Havanas and $3.50aquart Champagne, and Ruperta
surprised enough now and then with silver and lapis Indian trinkets and the odd
bushel of flowers to keep her guessing, she having figured him for a white
savage masquerading as an exquisite. Which did not prevent them from going round
and round on average once a week, memorable uproars that sent everybody running
for the periphery, uncertain as to what distance was safe. In between these
dustups, Reef had long, desultory conversations with his penis, to the effect
that there wasn’t much point missing Stray too much right now, was there, as it
would only blunt the edge of desire, not only for Ruperta but whoever else, Yup
Toy or whoever, might drift by over the course of their travels.

They finally parted company in New
Orleans after a confused and repetitive headache of a night that began at the
establishment of Monsieur Peychaud, where the Sazeracs, though said to’ve been
invented there, were not a patch, it seemed to Reef, on those available at Bob
Stockton’s bar in Denver, though those Absinthe Frappés were another matter.
After taking on fuel, the party moved out into the French Quarter hunting for
modes of intoxication “more exotic,” meaning, if you pushed it, some form of
zombie powder. Ruperta tonight was in a narrow black bengaline costume with a
Medici collar and cuffs of bastard chinchilla. Nothing on underneath except for
stays and stockings, as Reef had had occasion to find out earlier, at their
habitual lateafternoon rendezvous.

It had soon become apparent in this
town that what you could see from the street was not only less than “the whole
story” but in fact not even the picture on the cover. The real life of this
place was secured deep inside the city blocks, behind ornate iron gates and up
tiled passages that might as well’ve run for miles. You could hear faint
strands of music, crazy stuff, banjos and bugling, trombone glissandi, pianos
under the hands of whorehouse professors sounding like they came with keys
between the keys. Voodoo? Voodoo was the least of it, Voodoo was just
everywhere. Invisible sentinels were sure to let you know, the thickest of
necks being susceptible here to monitory

pricklings of the Invisible. The Forbidden. And meantime the
smells of the local cuisine, cheurice sausages, gumbo, crawfish étouffé, and
shrimp boiled in sassafras, proceeding from noplace you could ever see, went on
scrambling what was left of your good sense. Negroes could be observed at every
hand, rollicking in the street. The socalled Italian Troubles, stemming from
the alleged Mafia assassination of the chief of police here being yet fresh in
the civic memory, children were apt to accost strangers, Italian or not, with,
“Who killa da chief?” not to mention “
Va fongoola
your sister.”

They ended up at Maman Tant Gras
Hall, a concert saloon just off Perdido Street in the heart of the brothel
district.

“Yes a no doubt charming
guignette
,”
cried Ruperta, “but my
dears, the music!”

“Dope” Breedlove and his Merry Coons
were the house band here, and everybody was having too good a time to let the
likes of Ruperta get in the way. A few customers even came up and asked her to
dance, which was enough to throw her into a peculiar smirking cataplexy, which
sent them away with puzzled looks, whereupon she turned on Reef in high
indignation, if not allout panic. “Do you intend simply to sit there, while
these grinning darkies humiliate us both?”

“How’s that?” Reef genially enough.
“Look—can you see what those people there are doing? It’s called dancing.
I know you dance, I’ve seen you.”

“This music,” Ruperta muttered, “is
fit only for copulation of the most beastly sort.”