There was an Italian with an accordion. The company began to sing, from the Workers’ Own Songbook, though mostly without the aid of the text, choral selections including Hubert Parry’s recent setting of Blake’s “Jerusalem,” taken not unreasonably as a great anticapitalist anthem disguised as a choir piece, with a slight adjustment to the last line—“In this our green and pleasant land.”
And another which went,
Fierce as the winter’s tempest
Cold as the smoth’ ring snow
On grind the mills of Avarice
High rides the cruel-eyed foe. . . .
Where is the hand of mercy,
Where is the kindly face,
Where in this heedless slaughter
Find we the promis’d place?
Sweated, despised and hearthless,
Scorned ‘neath the banker’s boot,
We freeze by their frost-bound windows—
As they fondle their blood-bought loot—
Love never spared a sinner,
Hate never cured a saint,
Soon is the night of reckoning,
Then let no heart be faint,
Teach us to fly from shelter
Teach us to love the cold,
Life’s for the free and fearless—
Death’s for the bought and sold!
. . . moving from the minor mode it had been in throughout into the major, ending with a Picardy third cadence that, if it did not break Lew’s heart exactly, did leave a fine crack that in time was to prove unmendable. . . .
For something here was striking him as what you’d have to call odd. Nate Privett, everybody else at W.C.I., needless to say most of the Agency’s clients, none had too good of a word to say about the labor unions, let alone Anarchists of any stripe, that’s if they even saw a difference. There was a kind of general assumption around the shop that laboring men and women were all more or less evil, surely misguided, and not quite American, maybe not quite human. But here was this hall full of Americans, no question, even the foreign-born, if you thought about where they had come from and what they must’ve been hoping to find over here and so forth, American in their prayers anyway, and maybe a few hadn’t shaved for a while, but it was hard to see how any fit the bearded, wild-eyed, bomb-rolling Red description too close, in fact give them a good night’s sleep and a square meal or two, and even a veteran detective’d have a hard time telling the difference from regular Americans. Yet here they were expressing the most subversive thoughts, as ordinary folks might discuss crops, or last night’s ball game. Lew understood that this business would not end with him walking out the door tonight and over to the El and on to some next assignment.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN that Austrian Archduke. Look after one royal, everybody starts making assumptions. Anarchists and heads of state being defined these days as natural enemies, Lew by this logic became the natural gumshoe to be taking aim at Anarchists, wherever they happened to pop up in the shooting gallery of day-to-day history. Anarchist-related tickets began landing on his desk with some regularity. He found himself out by factory fences breathing coal-smoke, walking picket lines in various of W.C.I.’s thousand disguises, learning enough of several Slavic tongues to be plausible down in the deadfalls where the desperate malcontents convened, fingerless slaughterhouse veterans, irregulars in the army of sorrow, prophesiers who had seen America as it might be in visions America’s wardens could not tolerate.
Soon, along with dozens of file drawers stuffed with the information he brought back, Lew had moved into his own office, at whose doorsill functionaries of government and industry presently began to appear, having surrendered their hats in the outer office, to ask respectfully for advice which Nate Privett kept a keen eye on the market value of. Of course this provoked some grumbling in the business, mainly from Pinkerton’s, who, having assumed American Anarchism was their own personal cookie jar, wondered how an upstart like White City dared aspire to more than crumbs. The discontent became evident in the White City shop as well, as The Unsleeping Eye began to lure away personnel, soon more of them than Nate could afford to lose. One day he came bounding into Lew’s office surrounded by a nimbus of cheer phony as nickel-a-quart bay rum—“Good news, Agent Basnight, another step up your personal career ladder! How does . . . ‘Regional Director’ sound?”
Lew looked up, poker-faced. “What ‘region’ is it I’m being packed off to, Nate?”
“Lew, you card! Be serious!” W.C.I. had decided to open a Denver office, Nate explained, and with more Anarchists per square foot out there than a man could begin to count, who better than Lew to ramrod the operation?
As if this were a real question, Lew began to recite names of plausible colleagues, all of them with an edge on him in seniority, till Nate’s frown had grown deep enough. “O.K., boss, I get the drift. It’s not up to you, that what you’re about to say?”
“Lew, it’s gold and silver mining out there. Nuggets for the picking up. Favors that you can name your own price.”
Lew reached for a panatela and lit up. After a couple-three slow puffs, “Ever come out of work in this town when the light’s still in the sky and the lamps are just being lit along the big avenues and down by the Lake, and the girls are all out of the offices and shops and heading home, and the steak houses are cranking up for the evening trade, and the plate-glass windows are shining, with the rigs all lined up by the hotels, and—”
“No,” Nate staring impatiently, “not too often, I work too late for that.”
Lew blew a smoke ring, and a few more concentrically. “Well now shit, there, Nate.”
FOR SOME REASON Lew felt uncomfortable telling the Chums of Chance about his transfer. In the short time he’d been riding with them, he’d almost come to feel more at home up in the Inconvenience than he did at the Agency.
The visibility today was unlimited, the Lake sparkling with a million highlights, the little electric launches and gondolas, the crowds in the plazas adjoining the mammoth exhibition buildings, the whiteness of the place nearly unbearable. . . . Faint janglings of music ascended from the Midway pavilions, a bass drum thumped like the pulse of some living collective creature down there.
Professor Vanderjuice was along for the day, having completed whatever business had detained him in Chicago. Lew’s detective reflexes warned him of something deeply evasive about this personable academic, which he guessed the boys were aware of, too, though it was their business what to make of it. His presence made it no easier for Lew to impart his news, but he did manage at last to blurt, “Doggone but I’m going to miss this.”
“Still some weeks till the fair closes,” said Randolph.
“I’ll be gone by then. They’re sending me west, fellows, and I guess it’s so long.”
Randolph had a sympathetic look. “At least they tell you where it is you’ll be sent off to. After the closing-day ceremonies here, our future’s all a blank.”
“It may not be quite the West you’re expecting,” Professor Vanderjuice put in. “Back in July my colleague Freddie Turner came out here from Harvard and gave a speech before a bunch of anthro people who were all in town for their convention and of course the Fair. To the effect that the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map but gone, absorbed—a dead duck.”
“To show you what he means,” said Randolph, putting the helm over and causing the Inconvenience to veer inland, bearing northwest, toward the Union Stockyards.
“Yes here,” continued the Professor, nodding down at the Yards as they began to flow by beneath, “here’s where the Trail comes to its end at last, along with the American Cowboy who used to live on it and by it. No matter how virtuous he’s kept his name, how many evildoers he’s managed to get by undamaged, how he’s done by his horses, what girls he has chastely kissed, serenaded by guitar, or gone out and raised hallelujah with, it’s all back there in the traildust now and none of it matters, for down there you’ll find the wet conver
gence and finale of his drought-struck tale and thankless calling, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show stood on its head—spectators invisible and silent, nothing to be commemorated, the only weapons in view being Blitz Instruments and Wackett Punches to knock the animals out with, along with the blades everybody is packing, of course, and the rodeo clowns jabber on in some incomprehensible lingo not to distract the beast but rather to heighten and maintain its attention to the single task at hand, bringing it down to those last few gates, the stunning-devices waiting inside, the butchering and blood just beyond the last chute—and the cowboy with him. Here.” He handed Lew a pair of field-glasses. “That little charabanc down there just making the turn off Forty-seventh?”
As the airship descended closer, Lew watched the open vehicle pull up inside the Halstead Street gate to discharge its passengers, and understood, with some perplexity, that it was an excursion group, in town for a tour among the killing-floors and sausage rooms, an instructive hour of throat-slashing, decapitation, skinning, gutting, and dismemberment—“Say, Mother, come have a look at these poor bastards!” following the stock in their sombre passage from arrival in rail cars, into the smells of shit and chemicals, old fat and tissue diseased, dying, and dead, and a rising background choir of animal terror and shouting in human languages few of them had heard before, till the moving chain brought in stately parade the hook-hung carcasses at last to the chilling-rooms. At the exit the visitors would find a souvenir-shop, where they could purchase stereopticon slides, picture-postcards, and cans of “Top Gourmet Grade” souvenir luncheon meat, known to include fingers and other body parts from incautious workmen.
“Don’t think I’ll give up steaks just yet,” Lew said, “but it does make a man wonder how disconnected those folks down there’d have to be.”
“That’s about it,” the Professor nodded. “The frontier ends and disconnection begins. Cause and effect? How the dickens do I know? I spent my earlier hob-raising years out where you’re headed, Denver and Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs, while there was still a frontier, you always knew where it was and how to get there, and it wasn’t always just between natives and strangers or Anglos and Mexicans or cavalry and Indians. But you could feel it, unmistakeably, like a divide, where you knew you could stand and piss would flow two ways at once.”
But if the Frontier was gone now, did that mean Lew was about to be disconnected, too, from himself? sent off into exile, into some silence beyond silence as retribution for a remote and ancient vice always just about to be remembered, half stunned, in a half dream like a surgeon’s knot taken swiftly in the tissue of time and pulled snug, delivered into the control of potent operatives who did not wish him well?
THE BOYS GAVE Lew a gold-and-enamel Chums of Chance honorary membership pin to be worn beneath his lapel, which, upon being revealed at any branch anyplace in the world, would entitle him to all visitors’ privileges provided for in the C. of C. Charter. Lew in return gave them a miniature spotter’s telescope disguised as a watch fob, also holding a single .22 round which it was able to fire in an emergency. The boys thanked him sincerely enough, but that night after Evening Quarters argued late over the recurring question of introducing firearms aboard the Inconvenience. In the matter of Lew’s gift, the solution was easy enough—keep it unloaded. But the broader issue remained. “As of this moment we are all friends and brothers,” Randolph supposed, “but historically any ship’s armory is a free-standing volume of potential trouble—an attraction to would-be mutineers, and little else. There it sits, waiting its moment, taking up space that might, particularly on an airship, be more usefully assigned.” The other danger was less easy to speak of, and everyone—except possibly Pugnax, whose thoughts were difficult of access—found themselves speaking in euphemisms. For cases were known and whispered through the service, more certain than idle rumors or sky-stories, of extended duty so terrible in its demands on morale that now and then, unable to continue, some unfortunate Chum of Chance had decided to end his life, the overwhelming choice among methods being the “midnight plunge”—simply rolling over the gunwale during a night flight—yet, for those who might prefer less dependence on altitude, any gun on board would present an irresistible appeal.
Cheerfulness, once taken as a condition of life on the Inconvenience, was in fact being progressively revealed to the boys as a precarious commodity, these days. They seemed held here, as if under some unconfided spell. Autumn deepened among the desolate city blocks, an edge appeared to the hum of life here, invisible sometimes and furtive as worn boot-heels vanishing round the corners of the stately arcades where the boys resorted, in great shabby rooms, among the smells of stale animal fat and ammonia on the floor, with glass-roofed steam-tables offering three choices of sandwich, lamb, ham, or beef, all heavy on the fat and gristle, stale odors, frown-lined women slapping together meat and bread, a shaken spoon that smacked the flour-heavy gravy on like plaster, eyes cast downward all day long, behind them in front of the mirror rising a pyramid of cheap miniature bottles, known hereabouts as “Mickeys,” holding three choices of wine, red, white, and muscatel.
When not reeling about quite as uncontrollably as drunkards, the boys would gather to dine on these horrible wet-and-dry sandwiches, drinking the low-priced wine and noting with clogged humor how swiftly each seemed to fatten before the gazes of the others. “Hang it, fellows,” Randolph expostulated, “we’ve got to try to pull out of this!” They began to imagine, jointly and severally, some rescuer entering the crew spaces, moving among them, weighing, choosing, a creature of fantasy to bring them back each to his innocence, to lead him out of his unreliable body and his unique loss of courage, so many years in the making—though, much as he enjoyed unanimous admiration from the crew, it had not turned out to be Lew Basnight. He had moved on, as had so many in their lives, and they continued in a fragmented reverie which, they had learned, often announced some change in the works.
And sure enough, one morning the boys found, wedged casually between two strands of mooring cable, as always unconnected with any action they might’ve been contemplating, orders silently delivered in the night.
“Bear east is pretty much all it says,” Randolph in quiet consternation. “East by south.”
Lindsay pulled out charts. Speculation began to fill the day. Once it had been enough to know the winds, and how they blew at each season of the year, to get a rough idea of where they might be headed. Presently, as the Inconvenience began to acquire its own sources of internal power, there would be other global streamings to be taken into account—electromagnetic lines of force, Æther-storm warnings, movements of population and capital. Not the ballooning profession as the boys had learned it.
LATER, after closing day, as autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, as the ill-famed Hawk, miles aloft, invisibly rehearsed its Arctic repertoire of swift descent, merciless assault, rapture of souls—the abandoned structures of the Fair would come to house the jobless and hungry who had always been there, even at the height of the season of miracle just concluded. The Colorado Silver Mining Camp, like the other former exhibits, was occupied now by drifters, squatters, mothers with nursing infants, hell-raisers hired for the run of the Fair, now, their market value having vanished, returned to the consolations of drink, dogs and cats who preferred the company of their own species, some who still bore memories of Pugnax and his conversation, and excursions they had been out on. All moving in closer to the fires of Fair debris, once the substance of wonder, as the temperature headed down.
Not long after Erlys had gone off with Zombini the Mysterious, Merle Rideout dreamed he was in a great museum, a composite of all possible museums, among statues, pictures, crockery, folk-amulets, antiquated machinery, stuffed birds and animals, obsolete musical instruments, and whole corridors of stuff he would not get to see. He was there with a small party of people he didn’t know, but in the dream was supposed to know. Abruptly, in front of a display of Japanese weapons, an official person in ragged
plainclothes, unshaven, mistrusting and bitterly humorless, who may or may not have been a museum guard, grabbed hold of him on suspicion of having stolen some small art object, and demanded that he empty out his pockets, including a bulging and dilapidated old cowhide wallet, which the “guard” indicated was to be emptied, too. A crowd had gathered around, including the familiar-unfamiliar group he’d come here with, all silently staring. The wallet was itself a sort of museum, on a smaller scale—a museum of his life, overstuffed with old ticket stubs, receipts, notes to himself, names and addresses of half- or sometimes totally forgotten folks from his past. In the midst of all this biographical litter, a miniature portrait of her appeared. He woke up, understanding at once that the whole purpose of the dream was to remind him, with diabolical roundaboutness, of Erlys Mills.
Her name was never far from the discourse of the day. Since about the minute she could talk, Dally had been good for all kinds of interesting questions.
“And, so, what first attracted you to her?”
“Didn’t run away screaming when I told her how I felt.”
“Love at first sight, something like that?”
“Figured there was no point trying to hide it. Minute and a half longer, she’d’ve figured it out anyway.”
“And . . .”
Against the Day Page 7