“And the gold and silver . . .”
“More of a curse than they know, maybe. Sittin right there in the vault, just waitin for—”
“Don’t say it!”
But Webb rode away with the grand possibility repeating in his mind like a heartbeat—the Anti-Stone. The Anti-Stone. Useful magic that might go one better on the widely admired Mexican principle of politics through chemistry. Not that life wasn’t peculiar enough up in these mountains already, but here was this fast-talking quicksilver wizard in with fresh news that maybe, with luck, it was fixing to get even more so, and the day of commonwealth and promise, temples of Mammon all in smithereens—poor folks on the march, bigger than Coxey’s Army, through the rubble—that much closer. Or he’d turn out as crazy as the present amalgamator at Little Hellkite—soon to be former amalgamator, because next time Webb was up that way, he found “the President” had been replaced, sure enough, by Merle Rideout.
Which was how Merle and Dally, after a long spell of drifting job to job, happened to roll to a stop in San Miguel County for the next couple of years—as it would turn out, some of the worst years in the history of those unhappy mountains. Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that “photography” and “alchemy” were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. And maybe his and Dally’s long road out here was not the result of any idle drift but more of a secret imperative, like the force of gravity, from all the silver he’d been developing out into the pictures he’d been taking over these years—as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice, and he’d been working for it as much as it for him.
July Fourth started hot and grew hotter, early light on the peaks descending, occupying, the few clouds bright and shapely and unpromising of rain, nitro beginning to ooze out of dynamite sticks well before the sun had cleared the ridge. Among stockmen and rodeo riders, today was known as “Cowboy’s Christmas,” but to Webb Traverse it was more like Dynamite’s National Holiday, though you found many of the Catholic faith liked to argue that that ought to be the Fourth of December, feast of St. Barbara, patron saint of artillerymen, gunsmiths, and by not that big of a stretch, dynamiters too.
Everybody today, drovers and barkeeps, office clerks and hardcases, gentle elderly folks and openmouth reckless youth, would be seized sooner or later by the dynamitic mania prevailing. They would take little fractions of a stick, attach cap and fuse, light them up and throw them at each other, drop it in reservoirs and have all-day fish fries, blast picturesque patterns in the landscape that’d be all but gone next day, put it lit into empty beer barrels to be rolled down mountainsides, and take bets on how close to town before it all blew to bits—a perfect day all round for some of that good Propaganda of the Deed stuff, which would just blend right in with all the other percussion.
Webb staggered up out of his bedroll after one of those nights when he did not so much sleep as become intermittently conscious of time. Already warm-up blasts could be heard up and down the valley. Today’s would be a fairly routine job, and Webb was looking forward to a little saloon time at the end of it. Zarzuela was out by the fence waiting, having known Webb long enough to have an idea that whatever the day held in store, it would include explosion, which the colt was used to and even looked forward to.
Webb rode up the valley and then up over Red Mountain Pass, cicadas going by like prolonged ricochets. Pausing after a while for water, he ran into a skinner in gauntlets and chaps and a hat with the brim turned down, with his dog and an unroped train of little burros, known hereabouts as “Rocky Mountain canaries.” The winsome animals, packed with boxes of dynamite, detonator caps, and fuse, were browsing around eating wildflowers. Webb felt a shortness of breath and a wandering in his head that had little to do with the altitude. Glory, could he smell that nitro. No Chinaman and his opium could be any more intimate than Webb and the delicately poised chemistry there. He let his horse have some water, but in the unsettling presence of nasal desire, unwilling to trust his own voice too far, stayed up in the saddle, straight-faced and yearning. The burro-puncher was just as happy to do no more than nod, preferring to save his voice for his string. After Webb had gone on, the dog stood and barked for a while, not warning or angry, just being professional.
Veikko was waiting as they’d arranged by a waste pile from the old Eclipse Union mine. Webb, who could judge from a hundred yards away how crazy the Finn was apt to be feeling on a given day, noticed a two-gallon canteen sure to be full of that home-brewed potato spirits they all tended to go for, hung from the pommel of his saddle. There also seemed to be flames issuing out of his head, but Webb put that down to some trick of the light. From the look on his face, Webb could see signs of an oncoming dynamite headache after hanging around too long snorting nitro fumes.
“You’re late, Brother Traverse.”
“Rather be at a picnic, myself,” said Webb.
“I’m in a really bad mood.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“You are what usually makes it worse.”
They had some such exchange once or twice a week. Helped them get along, annoyance, for both of them, working as a social lubricant.
Veikko was a veteran of the Cour d’Alene bullpens and the strike in Cripple Creek for an eight-hour day. He had quickly become known to all levels of the law up here, being a particular favorite of state militia, who liked to see how much pounding he could take. Finally he’d been picked up in a general sweep and with about two dozen other union miners sealed in a side-door pullman and taken south on the Denver & Rio Grande across the invisible border into New Mexico. Guardsmen sat up top with machine guns, and the prisoners had to pretty much piss where they could, sometimes, in the dark, on each other. In the middle of the night, deep in the southern San Juans, the train came to a halt, there was metallic thumping overhead, the door slid open. “End of the line for you all,” called an unfriendly voice, and few there were ready to hear it in any but the worst way. But they were only going to be left to walk, their boots in a further act of meanness taken away, and told to stay out of Colorado unless they wanted to leave it next time in a box. It turned out they were near an Apache reservation, and the Indians were kind enough to take Veikko and a few others in for a while, not to mention share a bottomless supply of cactus beer. They thought it was funny that white men should act quite so disagreeably toward other whites, treating them indeed almost as if they were Indians, some of them already believing that Colorado, because of its shape, had actually been created as a reservation for whites. Somebody brought out an old geography schoolbook with a map of the state in it, including their own reservation boundaries, which showed Colorado as a rectangle, seven degrees of longitude wide by four degrees of latitude high—four straight lines on paper made up the borders Veikko had been forbidden to cross—not like there were rivers or ridgelines where the militia might lie in wait to shoot at him the minute he stepped over—from which he reasoned that, if exile from Colorado was that abstract, then as long as he stayed off the roads, he could come back into the state anytime and just keep soldiering on same as before.
Mostly with Veikko you had your choice of two topics, techniques of detonation or Veikko’s distant country and its beleaguered constitution, Webb never having seen him raise a glass, for example, that wasn’t dedicated to the fall of the Russian Tsar and his evil viceroy General Bobrikoff. But sometimes Veikko went on and got philosophical. He’d never seen much difference between the Tsar’s regime and American capitalism. To struggle against one, he figured, was to struggle against the other. Sort of this world-wide outlook. “Was a little worse for us, maybe, coming to U.S.A. after hearing so much about ‘land of the free.”’ Thinking he’d escaped something, only to find life out here just as mean and cold, same wealth without conscience, same poor people in misery, army and police free as wolves to commit cruelties on behalf of the bosses, bosses ready to do anything to protect what they had stol
en. The main difference he could see was that the Russian aristocracy, after centuries of believing in nothing but its own entitlement, had grown weak, neuræsthenic. “But American aristocracy is not even a century old, in peak of fighting condition, strong from efforts it took to acquire its wealth, more of a challenge. Good enemy.”
“You think they’re too strong for the workers?”
At which Veikko’s eyes would grow pale and illuminated from within, his voice issuing from an abundant and unkempt beard which suggested even on his calmest days an insane fanaticism. “We are their strength, without us they are impotent, we are they,” and so forth. Webb had learned that if you stayed quiet and just waited, these spells passed, and pretty soon the Finn would be back to his usual self, stolid as ever, reaching sociably for the vodka.
At the moment, however, Webb noticed that Veikko had been sitting reading over and over to himself a withered postcard from Finland, a troubled look on his face, a slow flush gathering around his eyes.
“Look. These aren’t real stamps here,” Veikko said. “They are pictures of stamps. The Russians no longer allow Finnish stamps, we have to use Russian ones. These postmarks? They’re not real either. Pictures of postmarks. This one, August fourteen, 1900, was the last day we could use our own stamps for overseas mail.”
“So this is a postcard with a picture of what a postcard used to look like before the Russians. That’s what ‘Minneskort’ means?”
“Memory card. A memory of a memory.” It was a card from his sister back in Finland. “Nothing in particular. They censor everything. Nothing that would get anybody in trouble. Family news. My crazy family.” He gestured toward Webb with the vodka canteen.
“I’ll wait.”
“I won’t.”
Veikko, being the sort of blaster who likes to watch it happen, had brought along an oak magneto box and a big spool of wire, whereas Webb, more circumspect and preferring to be well out of the area, tended to go for the two-dollar Ingersoll or time-delay method. Their target was a railroad bridge across a little canyon, on a spur between the main line and Relámpagos, a mining town up northeast of Silverton. Fairly straightforward, four wood trestles of different heights holding up some iron Fink trusses. Webb and Veikko got into the usual argument about whether to blast the ‘sucker now or wait till a train came. “You know how owners are,” Veikko said, “lazy sons of bitches can’t be bothered to saddle up, they take trains wherever they go. We blow train, maybe get a couple of them with it.”
“I ain’t about to sit out here all day waitin for some train that likely won’t be runnin anyhow, it bein a three-day holiday.”
“Aitisi nai poroja,” replied Veikko, a pleasantry long grown routine, meaning, “Your mother fucks reindeer.”
The tricky patch, it had seemed to Webb for a while now, came in choosing the targets, it being hard enough just to find time to think any of it through, under the daily burdens of duty and hard labor and, more often than you’d think, grief. Lord knew that owners and mine managers deserved to be blown up, except that they had learned to keep extra protection around them—not that going after their property, like factories or mines, was that much better of an idea, for, given the nature of corporate greed, those places would usually be working three shifts, with the folks most likely to end up dying being miners, including children working as nippers and swampers—the same folks who die when the army comes charging in. Not that any owner ever cared rat shit about the lives of workers, of course, except to define them as Innocent Victims in whose name uniformed goons could then go out and hunt down the Monsters That Did the Deed.
And even worse, the sort of thing that can get a true bomber mighty irritated, some of these explosions, the more deadly of them, in fact, were really set off to begin with not by Anarchists but by the owners themselves. Imagine that. Here was nitro, the medium of truth, being used by these criminal bastards to tell their lies with. Damn. The first time Webb saw hard proof of this going on, he felt like a kid about to cry. That the world should know so little about what was good for it.
Which left precious few targets except for the railroad. Fair enough, to Webb’s way of thinking, for the railroad had always been the enemy, going back generations. Farmers, stockmen, buffalo-hunting Indians, track-laying Chinamen, passengers in train wrecks, whoever you were out here, sooner or later you had some bad history with the railroad. He had worked as a section hand just enough over the years to at least know where to spot the charges so they’d do the most good.
They took cord and bundled the sticks together. Webb was far more partial to gelatin, which let you shape the charge some and direct the blast better, but that made sense only in the cooler weather. Keeping an eye out for snakes, they worked their way along the wash, placing the charges in the shade when they could and piling rocks and dirt around. The day was quiet, windless. A redtail hawk hung up there and seemed to be looking at them, which would put them in the same category as field rodents. Which in turn would put the hawk in the same category as a mine manager. . . . Webb shook his head irritably. He did not much admire himself when he drifted off this way. It was always minute to minute, step to step, and he had seen too many good brothers and sisters end up in the dirt or in the fathomless dark at the bottom of some shaft as the price of inattention. Fact, if he’d known what it cost, the total cost, spread over a lifetime, he wondered sometimes if he would’ve ever signed on.
Webb’s trajectory toward the communion of toil which had claimed his life had begun right out in the middle of Cripple Creek, blooming in those days like a flower of poisonous delight among its spoil heaps, cribs, parlor houses and gambling saloons. It was a time in Cripple and Victor, Leadville and Creede, when men were finding their way to the unblastable seams of their own secret natures, learning the true names of desire, which spoken, so they dreamed, would open the way through the mountains to all that had been denied them. In the broken and soon-enough-interrupted dreams close to dawn in particular, Webb would find himself standing at some divide, facing west into a great flow of promise, something like wind, something like light, free of the damaged hopes and pestilent smoke east of here—sacrificial smoke, maybe, but not ascending to Heaven, only high enough to be breathed in, to sicken and cut short countless lives, to change the color of the daylight and deny to walkers of the night the stars they remembered from younger times. He would wake to the day and its dread. The trail back to that high place and the luminous promise did not run by way of Cripple, though Cripple would have to serve, hopes corroded to fragments—overnight whiskey, daughters of slaves, rigged faro games, the ladies who work on the line.
One night in Shorty’s Billiard Saloon, some poolplayer had propelled his cue ball on the break perhaps too forcefully and with scarcely any draw onto it into the triangle of shiny balls, which happened to be made of some newly patented variety of celluloid. Upon being struck, the first ball exploded, initiating a chain of similar explosions across the table. Mistaking these for gunshots, several among the clientele drew their pistols and began, with some absence of thought, to contribute in their own ways to the commotion. “Nice break,” somebody was heard to say before the noise got too loud. Webb, frozen in terror, delayed diving for cover until it was all over, realizing after a while that he had been standing in a roomful of flying lead without being hit once. How could this be? He found himself in the street wandering hatless and confused, colliding presently with the Reverend Moss Gatlin, who was stumbling down a long flight of wood stairs from a sojourn up at Fleurette’s Cloudtop Retreat, not exactly at the moment looking for uninstructed souls, which didn’t keep Webb, in a torrent of speech, from telling the Rev all about his miraculous escape. “Brother, we are stripes and solids on the pool table of earthly existence,” the Rev explained, “and God and his angels are the sharpers who keep us ever in motion.” Instead of dismissing this for the offhanded preacherly drivel it almost certainly was, Webb, in what you’d have to call a state of heightened receptivity, stood
there as if professionally sapped for another quarter of an hour after the Rev had moved on, ignored by the pernicious bustle of Myers Street, and the following Sunday could be observed in the back room of the faro establishment where Reverend Gatlin preached his ministry, listening as if much, maybe all, depended on it, to the sermon, which happened to take as its text Matthew 4:18 and 19, “And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.
“And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
“And Jesus,” elaborated Moss, “walking out by some American lake, some reservoir in the mountains—here’s Billy and his brother Pete, casting quarter-sticks of dynamite into the lake, for they are dynamiters—and harvesting whatever floats to the surface. What does Jesus think of this, and what does he say unto them? What will he make them fishers of?
“For dynamite is both the miner’s curse, the outward and audible sign of his enslavement to mineral extraction, and the American working man’s equalizer, his agent of deliverance, if he would only dare to use it. . . . Every time a stick goes off in the service of the owners, a blast convertible at the end of some chain of accountancy to dollar sums no miner ever saw, there will have to be a corresponding entry on the other side of God’s ledger, convertible to human freedom no owner is willing to grant.
“You’ve heard the suggestion that there are no innocent bourgeoisie. One of those French Anarchists, some say Emile Henry as he was going to the guillotine, others say Vaillant when they tried him for bombing the Chamber of Deputies. Answering the question, how can anyone set off a bomb that will take innocent lives?”
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