“Long fuse,” somebody hollered helpfully.
“Easier with a timer!”
“Think about it,” when the remarks had faded some, “like Original Sin, only with exceptions. Being born into this don’t automatically make you innocent. But when you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking who—beg pardon, Lord—who’s taking it and who’s not, that’s when you’re obliged to choose how much you’ll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms.”
It would have been almost like being born again, except that Webb had never been particularly religious, nor had any of his family, an old ridegerunning clan from southern Pennsylvania, close to the Mason-Dixon. The Civil War, which ate up a good part of Webb’s boyhood, split the family as well, so that shortly before it was over, he found himself in the back of a wagon heading west, about the same time other Traverse Irreconcilables were choosing to head for Mexico. But, hell—same thing.
Across the Ohio in a hill town whose name he soon couldn’t remember, there was a dark-haired girl Webb’s age whose name, Teresa, he would never forget. They were out walking the wagon ruts, just beyond a fenceline the hills went rushing away, the sky was clouded over, it might’ve been between rain showers, and young Webb was all ready to unburden his heart, which like the sky was about to reveal something beyond itself. He almost did tell her. They both seemed to see it coming, and later, heading west, he carried with him that silence that had stretched on between them until there was no point anymore. He might have stayed, otherwise, snuck off from the wagons, headed back to her. She might have found a way to come after him, too, but that was a dream, really, he didn’t know, would never know, how she felt.
It took maybe nine or ten years more of westward drift, over the rolling prairie, through the cheatgrass, the sage grouse exploding skyward, the dread silences when skies grow black in the middle of all that country, outracing cyclones and rangefires, switchbacking up the eastern slope of the Rockies through meadows of mule-ear and sneezeweed, on over the great torn crestline, to be delivered at last into these unholy mountains Webb grew to manhood in and had not left since, into whose depths he had ventured after silver and gold, up on whose heights he had struggled, always, for breath.
By that time both his parents were gone, and he was left with not much more than his Uncle Fletcher’s old twelve-cylinder Confederate Colt, whose brasswork he took care to keep shined, for whose sake he’d put up with remarks like “Thing’s bigger’n you are, Webbie,” though he kept practicing whenever he could, and the day did come finally when he found he was hitting more than half of any given row of bean cans with it.
In Leadville, the year the gaslight went in, he saw Mayva Dash, dancing up on top of the bar of Pap Wyman’s Saloon in high boots and jet beads while freightmen, roustabouts, and grease-bearded ten-dayers hollered for every kick and twirl, even to taking their cigars out of their mouths before they did.
“Yes children, strange to tell, your Ma was a saloon girl when first we met.”
“You’re giving em the wrong idea,” she pretended to object. “I always worked for myself.”
“You were paying off that bartender.”
“We all were.”
“Way he saw it, that meant working for him.”
“He tell you that?”
“Not Adolph. But the other one, Ernst?”
“With the real weedy mustache, talked sort of foreign?”
“That’s him.”
“Just lonely. Thought we ‘s all gonna be his concubines, which was a common arrangement, accordin to him, wherever that was he was from.”
The town, only recently founded, was already being turned black with slag, up every alley all the way out into open country you saw it towering in great poisoned mountains. Not a place where you’d expect romance to blossom, but next thing either of them knew, they were hitched and living up East Fifth in Finntown among the waste piles. One night just off shift, Webb heard a tremendous uproar in the narrow alley known as St. Louis Avenue, and there was Veikko Rautavaara, carefully holding a vodka jug in one hand while battling a number of camp guards with the other. For a weedy little customer, Webb could be formidable in these affairs, though by the time he got into it, most of the hard work was done, Veikko bleeding but solid on his feet and the hirelings either flat on the pavement or limping away. When Webb brought him back to the house, Mayva might have raised an eyebrow. “Nice to see this married life ain’t slowing you down, Honey.”
She kept her job at Pap Wyman’s till she was sure Reef was on the way. The kids were all silver-boom babies, up and running just in time for Repeal. “Been dealt a full house here,” Webb liked to say, “Jacks and Queens—’less you count your Ma as the Ace o’ Spades.”
“Death card,” she’d mutter, “thanks a lot.”
“But Dearest,” Webb in all innocence, “I meant it as a compliment!”
They had maybe a year or two where it wasn’t too desperate. Webb took them all to Denver and bought Mayva a fancy briar pipe to replace the beat-up old corncob she usually smoked. They ate ice cream at a soda fountain. They went to Colorado Springs and stayed at the Antlers Hotel and took the cog railway up Pike’s Peak.
Though maybe for a couple of years off and on with the railroad Webb might’ve seen some ray of daylight, he always ended up back down some hole in some mountain, mucking, timbering, whatever he could get. Leadville, thinking itself God’s own beneficiary when the old lode was rediscovered in ‘92, got pretty much done in by Repeal, and Creede the same, sucker-punched right after the big week-long wingding on the occasion of Bob Ford’s funeral. The railroad towns, Durango, Grand Junction, Montrose, and them, were pretty stodgy by comparison, what Webb mostly remembered being the sunlight. Telluride was in the nature of an outing to a depraved amusement resort, whose electric lighting at night in its extreme and unmerciful whiteness produced a dream-silvered rogues’ district of nonstop poker games, erotic practices in back-lot shanties, Chinese opium dens most of the Chinese in town had the sense to stay away from, mad foreigners screaming in tongues apt to come skiing down the slopes in the dark with demolition in mind.
After 1893, after the whole nation, one way or another, had been put through a tiresome moral exercise over repeal of the Silver Act, ending with the Gold Standard reclaiming its ancient tyranny, it was slow times for a while, and Webb and the family moved around a lot, down to Huerfano County for a while to dig coal, while Ed Farr was still sheriff, before he got shot by train robbers over near Cimarron, and Webb would come home black-faced and unrecognizable enough that the kids either fell down laughing or ran away screaming. Later, in Montrose, they all lived in some little part-tent, part-shed on the lot out back of a boarding house that was hardly more than a shack itself, Lake helping with chores, Reef and Frank bringing potato sacks from the wagon, sometimes pulling third-shift scullery duty or, as the gold camps began to pick up some of the slack, back down into one or another of those mountainside workings, Reef, before he got out of the house for good, working a spell same shift as his father, picking up the loose ore and loading it on to the cars and pushing them to the hoist, over and over. He got to hate it pretty quick, and Webb, seeing his point, never held it against him. When Webb and the boys were on different shifts, Mayva had nothing but round-the-clock work, cooking Cornish pasties by the dozens for them to take down in the hole—she’d learned from the Cornish wives in Jacktown to put apple slices in along with the meat and potatoes. Then something else hot to feed each of them again when they come back up, hungrier than bears.
By the time Webb had worked his way from hoistman through singlejacker to assistant foreman, he was intimate with the deepest arcana of dynamite. Or acted like he was. Even on his own time, he loved to play with that miserable stuff,
it drove Mayva just damn crazy, but nothing she ever said had any effect, he was always out in some high meadow or back of some waste dump, crouched down behind a rock with that fox’s gleam in his eye, trembling, waiting for one of his old explosions. When he thought they were the right age, he brought the children into it one by one, each taking to it different. No way to tell from just watching of course who might grow up into a decent bomber. Fact, Webb wasn’t sure he wanted to let any of them all the way in.
Reef didn’t say much, but his eyes got a squint into them that when you saw it, you learned to take care. Frank was more curious, in a kid-engineer kind of way, trying to blow up every form of terrain he could talk Webb around to, just to see if there was a general rule to any of it. When it came little Kit’s turn, he already had it in his mind from a carnival show down at Olathe, where he’d seen a dynamited carny jump up out of the blast good as new, that you could blow up anybody over and over and the worst they’d ever get’d be comically inconvenienced, so after one lesson he was set to run out and dynamite schoolteachers, shift bosses, storekeepers, anybody happened to offend him on a particular day, and it took extra vigilance all around to keep him out of Webb’s string of personal blasting sheds. Lake, bless her heart, did not make faces, or plug her ears, or sigh in boredom, or anything else the boys had assumed she’d do. She picked up the process right away, first time touching off a fine high-radius concussion, creating several tons of traprock . . . maybe smiling some to herself, the way she had begun to do.
The question of where his loyalties should—as against “did”—lie had been gnawing at Webb a good part of his life since Shorty’s Billiard Saloon in Cripple, one he never was able to get sorted out, really. If there’d only been the simple luxury of time, maybe to do nothing but put his feet up on some wood porchrail, roll a cigarette, gaze at the hills, let the breezes slide over him—sure—but as it was, he never saw a minute that didn’t belong to somebody else. Any discussion of deeper topics such as what to keep hammering at, what to let go, how much he owed who, had to be done on the run, with people he hoped were not going to fink him out.
“Not so sure sometimes I wouldn’t be better off without all these family obligations,” he admitted once to Reverend Moss, who, though lacking the authority to remit the sins of his flock of dynamiters, made up for that with a bottomless appetite for listening to complaints. “Just to be workin solo,” Webb muttered, “some room to move.”
“Maybe not.” And the Rev set out his theory and practice of resistance to power. “You live any kind of a covert life at all, and they are going to come after you. They hate loners. They can smell it. Best disguise is no disguise. You must belong to this everyday world—be in it, be of it. A man like you, with a wife, children—last ones they tend to suspect, too much to lose, no one could be that hard of a hardcase, they think, no one is willing to risk losing that.”
“Well, they’d be right, I’m not.”
He shrugged. “Then better be no more than what you seem.”
“But I can’t just—”
The Rev, who hardly ever so much as smiled, was close to it now. “No, you can’t.” He nodded. “And God bless you for it, class brother.”
“Mind telling me when I’m supposed to sleep?”
“Sleep? is when you sleep. That all you’re worried about?”
“Only that I wouldn’t want it out where anybody can get to me—I’d sure need a safe bedroll someplace.”
“Someplace secret. But there’s ‘at word again—you can’t be having too many them secrets, can you, if you’re trying to look normal.”
And yet the Normal World of Colorado, how safe was that to be relying on, with death around every corner, when all could be gone in an uncaught breath, quick as an avalanche? Not as if the Rev wanted Heaven, he’d have been content with someplace the men didn’t have to be set on each other like dogs in a dogfight for lung-destroying jobs that paid at best $3-blessed-.50 a day—there had to be a living wage and some right to organize, because alone a man was a mule dropping on the edge of life’s mountain trail, ready to be either squashed flat or kicked into the void.
Turned out the Rev was yet another casualty of the Rebellion. “So this is how we found our dear lost South again, maybe not exactly the redemption we had in mind. Instead of the old plantation, this time it was likely to be a silver camp, and the Negro slaves turned out to be us. Owners found they could work us the same way, if anything with even less mercy, they ridiculed and feared us as much as our folks done the slaves a generation before—the big difference being if we should run away, they sure ‘s hell wouldn’t come chasing after us, no fugitive laws for them, they’d just say fine, good riddance, there’s always more where they come from that’ll work cheaper. . . .”
“That’s wicked, Rev.”
“Maybe, but we got just what we deserved.”
The atmosphere in Colorado those days had become so poisoned that the owners were ready to believe anything about anybody. They hired what they called “detectives,” who started keeping dossiers on persons of interest. The practice quickly became commonplace. As bureaucratic technique went, it wasn’t that much of a radical step even the first time, and sooner than anybody would’ve thought, it became routine and all but invisible.
Webb was presently thus recorded, though what on the face of it was so dangerous about him, really? No more than a rank-and-filer in the Western Federation of Miners—but maybe those anarchistic bastards were hiding their records. He might be conspiring in secret. Midnight oaths, invisible ink. Wouldn’t be the first or only. And he seemed to move around a lot, too much for a family man, you’d think, always had money too, not a lot, but more than you’d expect from somebody working at miners’ wages . . . good worker, ain’t like that he kept getting fired, no, it was always him ‘s the one quitting, moving on camp to camp, and somehow always bringing trouble with him. Well, not always. But how many times did it take to stop being a coincidence and start being a pattern?
So they started poking. Just little things. Advisements from the shift boss. Summonses to interviews up at the office. Humiliation routines over short weight or docked hours. Saloon ejections and tabs abruptly discontinued. Assignment to less hopeful, even dangerous rockfaces and tunnels. The kids grew up seeing Webb thrown out of places, more and more as time went on, often being right there with him, Frank especially, when it happened. Picking up his hat for him, helping him get vertical. Long as he knew there was an audience, Webb tried to make it look as funny as he could.
“Why do they do that, Pa?”
“Oh . . . maybe some educational point to it. You been keeping score like I asked, on who it is ‘t’s doin it?”
“Stores, saloons, eating houses, mostly.”
“Names, faces?” And they’d tell him what they could remember. “And you notice how that some are makin up these fancy excuses, and others are just sayin get the hell out?”
“Yeah but—”
“Well, it’s deservin of your close attention, children. Varieties of hypocrite, see. Like learning the different kinds of poison plants out here, some’ll kill the stock, some’ll kill you, but use em right and some, believe it or not, will cure you instead. Nothing vegetable or human that ain’t of some use, ‘s all I’m sayin. Except mine owners, maybe, and their got-damned finks.”
He was trying to pass on what he thought they should know, when he had a minute, though there was never the time. “Here. The most precious thing I own.” He took his union card from his wallet and showed them, one by one. “These words right here”—pointing to the slogan on the back of the card—“is what it all comes down to, you won’t hear it in school, maybe the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence and so forth, but if you learn nothing else, learn this by heart, what it says here—‘Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof.’ Straight talk. No double-talking you like the plutes do, ‘cause with them what you always have to be listening for is the opposite of w
hat they say. ‘Freedom,’ then’s the time to watch your back in particular—start telling you how free you are, somethin’s up, next thing you know the gates have slammed shut and there’s the Captain givin you them looks. ‘Reform’? More new snouts at the trough. ‘Compassion’ means the population of starving, homeless, and dead is about to take another jump. So forth. Why, you could write a whole foreign phrase book just on what Republicans have to say.”
Frank had always taken Webb for what he appeared to be—an honest, dedicated miner, exploited to the last, who never got but a fraction of what his labor was worth. He had resolved himself pretty early on to do better, maybe someday get licensed as an engineer, able to call at least a few more of his own shots, at least not have to work quite as unremittingly. He could find nothing wrong with this approach, and Webb couldn’t quite summon up the heart to argue with him.
Reef, on the other hand, had seen pretty early through that amiable pose of working-stiff family man and down into the anger behind it, which he was no stranger to himself, wishing, as the insults multiplied, wishing desperately, for the ability to destroy, purely through the force of his desire, to point or stare furiously enough at any of these owners’ creatures to make them go up in bright, preferably loud, bursts of flame. Somehow he convinced himself that Webb possessed, if not exactly this power of instant justice, at least a secret life, in which, when night fell, he could put on, say, a trick hat and duster which would make him invisible, and take to the trails, grim and focused, to do the people’s work, if not God’s, the two forces according to Reverend Gatlin having the same voice. Or even some supernormal power, such as multiplying himself so he could be in several places at once. . . . But Reef couldn’t figure a way to bring any of it up with Webb. He would have begged to work as his father’s apprentice and sidekick, any kind of drudgery necessary, but Webb was immune—sometimes, indeed, pretty harshly so. “Don’t beg, you hear me? Don’t any of you ever, fucking, beg, me or nobody, for nothin.” A timely cussword to drive in the lesson being part of Webb’s theory of education. But standing even more in the way of Reef ever getting to be his Pop’s midnight compadre was his own reluctance to trigger one of those towering conniption fits allowed as a privilege to fathers only, which he could recognize sometimes as a form of bad playacting, deployed for convenience, but, knowing the true depths of Webb’s rage, was still not about to put himself in the way of. So he settled instead for what confidences might accidentally leak through now and then.
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