“Or we’re both feverish.”
They set up camp in a clearing, near a small waterfall, and built a cookfire. Night began, as if declared.
“What was that?”
“An elephant,” Fleetwood said. “How long did you say you’d been out here?”
“It sounds kind of close, don’t you think?” When Fleetwood shrugged, “I mean, you’ve had . . . encounters with elephants?”
“Now and then.”
“You have an elephant gun with you?”
“No. You?”
“So, this one charges us, what do we do?”
“Depends how much he’s charging—try to talk him down a little?”
“Anti-Semitic!”
The elephant in the darkness let loose with another fanfare, this time joined by another. In harmony. Whether by way of commentary or not, who knew?
“What, they don’t sleep at night?”
Fleetwood exhaled audibly. “I don’t mean to offend, but . . . if this sort of elephant-related anxiety is at all common among your people, perhaps Africa is not the most promising site for a Zionist settlement.”
Through their feet they could feel percussion on the jungle floor, consistent with an adult elephant approaching at high speed.
“Well, it’s been nice chatting,” said Yitzhak, “and now I think I’ll just—”
“Suggest you stand your ground, actually.”
“And what?”
“Look him straight in the eyes.”
“Stare down some murderous elephant.”
“Ancient wisdom of the bush,” Fleetwood advised, “never run. Run, you’ll get trampled.”
The elephant, standing about twelve feet high, emerged from the perimeter of forest, heading straight for Fleetwood and Yitzhak, his displeasure clear. He had his trunk lifted and curled back, a precaution elephants are known to observe just before using their tusks against some particular target of their spite.
“O.K., to review this—we stand here, maintain eye contact, and you absolutely guarantee me, this elephant will just . . . stop? Turn around, walk away, no hard feelings?”
“Watch.”
The headline in next week’s Bush Gazette would read SAVES JEW FROM INSANE ELEPHANT. Yitzhak was so grateful he passed along a number of investment tips, plus the names of useful banking contacts all over Europe, that eventually would have done quite nicely for Fleetwood had he not by then been pursuing less financial goals. He tried to explain.
“I used to read Dickens as a child. The cruelty didn’t surprise me, but I did wonder at the moments of uncompensated kindness, which I had never observed outside the pages of fiction. In any world I knew, it was a time-honored principle to do nothing for free.”
“Just so,” said Yitzhak. “Trust me. Buy Rand shares.”
“South Africa? But there’s a war going on there.”
“Wars end, there’s fifty thousand Chinese coolies all lined up, sleeping on the docks from Tientsin to Hong Kong, waiting to be shipped into the Transvaal the minute the shooting stops. . . .”
As it happened, it was not too long before the markets of the Earth were being swamped with gold, not only Rand gold but also proceeds from the Australian gold rush then ebulliently in progress—exactly the sort of “unfairly earned” revenue which sent the Vibe patriarch into mouth-foaming episodes of unseemly behavior.
“I don’t understand it. This money is coming from nowhere.”
“But it’s real,” Foley Walker pointed out. “What they’re buying with it is real.”
“I feel myself turning goddamned socialist,” said Scarsdale. “Communist, even. Like you know when you’re coming down with a cold? My mind—or the part of it I use for thinking about business matters—aches.”
“But Mr. V., you hate socialists.”
“I hate these climber sons of bitches worse.”
HE WAS ONLY faintly visible in the dark, at a window on the haunted floor of the house, almost a fixture in the room from some previous era, there for some outdated domestic purpose. It was the one part of the house no one would come near, dedicated to exile, departure, unquiet journeying, reserved for any who could not reside there. He was remembering, declining into a sickbed of remembrance.
In Africa he had known saintly lieutenants who were fated to die young, fugitives from all across the wreck of the Eastern Question, traders in flesh or firearms indifferent to the nature of the goods they handled, who would emerge from the green otherworld after months, their cargo vanished not only from possession but from memory as well, sick, poisoned, too often dying, cursed by shamans, betrayed by magnetic anomalies, racked by Guinea worm and malaria, who, despite all, wished only to return to the embrace of the interior. . . . Fleetwood wanted to be like them. . . . He prayed to become one of them. He went out into country even the local European insane knew was too dangerous, hoping to be invaded by whatever it had to be. . . . Nothing “took.” No one had the bad taste to suggest that it was his money keeping away the spirits whose intercession he sought—that even those agents of mischief somehow knew better than to get too close to unregulated funds whose source lay in criminal acts, however fancifully defined.
At Massawa, Fleetwood had found a coaster heading south. Debarking at Lourenço Marques, he spent a week in various local cantinhas, gathering information, as he liked to think of it. This required a tidy lakeful of Portuguese colonial-market wine, the rotgut rejectamenta of Bucelas and Dão, among puzzled looks from the locals who by tradition were its devotees.
When it felt to Fleetwood that every bit of American predisposition had been leached away at last, he got on a train for the Transvaal. But in the handful of minutes between Ressano Garcia and Komati Poort, something rearranged itself in his thoughts. The moment he crossed the frontier, he understood what he was supposed to be doing out here—he was headed for Johannesburg to make his own personal fortune, in that hell of chronic phthisis, scabbed veldt, shopkeepers’ avarice, seething rickshaw traffic, desperately too few white women, a town belonging to the unhistoried . . . “like Baku with giraffes,” as he wrote home. The Veldt went on far too long, without a tree in sight, only smokestacks and stamp mills, which pounded in a hellish uproar audible for miles, day and night, sending up an inescapable, vile white dust that either remained in the air for one to breathe or descended to coat housing, clothing, vegetation, skins of all colors. At any given time in the world, there would be enough towns like Johannesburg to keep occupied a certain type of energetic young fortune seeker. It would be necessary to plunge in, from whatever condition of bourgeois stultification, whatever prevailing weather, market narrative, fluctuations in harvests—including Death’s—might have defined his average day, to leap as stoically as possible into the given fever and conduct himself as survival and profit might direct in the way of intoxication, betrayal, brutality, risk (deep descents into the abysses of the gold reef proving minor next to the moral plunges available, indeed beckoning, at every hand), sexual obsession, gambling for epical stakes, seduction into the haunts of the dagga rooker and opium slave. Everyone white was in some way caught up in this, it was a no-limit game, though the Witwatersrand high court provided a locus of public conscience, in practice one could be back on the Lourenço Marques train and into Portuguese jurisdiction in a day and a half, for good if one liked, the money itself gone on ahead, deposited in safety, already seeming to have proceeded from dream, unsoiled as any figures inked in any ledger neatly as you please. . . . Little to prevent one’s turning up one day back at the old local saloon, standing rounds till closing time. “No, not fantastically wealthy, but you know . . . a tickey here, a tickey there, after a while it adds up. . . .”
The Kaffirs called it eGoli, “The City of Gold.” Soon after his arrival at Johannesburg, Fleetwood was well aboard what the smokers of dagga called the Ape Train. There was a story that he had shot a coolie, but the other story was that it was a Kaffir he had caught stealing a diamond, and that he had given the Kaff
ir a choice, to be shot or to step into a mine shaft half a mile deep. He was a thief, after all, though the stone was not so grand as diamonds go, to Fleetwood’s admittedly untrained eye perhaps less than three carats when Amsterdam was done with it. “I did not steal this,” the black man was saying. But did as he was told, and relinquished it into the white man’s hand. Fleetwood gestured him with the Borchardt toward his fate and felt a queer euphoria expanding to fill his body, amazed to see, moreover, that the Kaffir not only recognized the state but was entering it himself. The American stain, after all, would not be eradicated. The two stood for a pulsebeat by the edge of the terrible steep void, and Fleetwood understood too late that he could have made the Kaffir do anything but somehow had come up with nothing better than this.
Though legal pretense would have taken the merciless honed edge from the joy of the deed itself, it scarcely mattered whether or not the Kaffir had stolen the stone, and perhaps had only been waiting for the right moment to take it out of the compound, where the chances were good that within minutes someone else would have stolen it from him, some other Kaffir half a lungful of dagga smoke more capable for the moment, at which point matters would have become far more ugly and painful for him than this relatively humane long descent into the abyss through the blue ground, the side-tunnels whistling by faster and faster—rather pleasant, Fleetwood imagined, for as one fell, it would grow warmer, wouldn’t it—perhaps even feel like being taken back into a dark womb. . . .
That came later, in the dreams, along with the unavoidable face of the dead man, dust-whitened, looming close. As if looking out through holes in a mask, the eyes moved and gleamed, shockingly alive in flesh that might as well have been artificial. Seemed to be whispering advice. Warning that there was some grave imbalance in the structure of the world, which would have to be corrected.
Then each time Fleetwood would be not so much overcome by remorse as bedazzled at having been shown the secret backlands of wealth, and how sooner or later it depended on some act of murder, seldom limited to once. He learned to wait for this revelation, though sometimes he woke too soon.
It comforted him to imagine that on the karmic ledger the Kaffir and the Jew balanced out. But in fact, as Fleetwood was informed in these lucid dreams close to dawn, all the gold in the Transvaal could not buy the remission of a single minute of whatever waited for him. He laughed angrily. “Purgatory? A higher law? Kaffir next of kin, chasing me across the world? Be serious.”
Pygmies at the Club stared at him with unspoken loathing. Chinese in the street cursed him, and, knowing only a few words, he still thought he could recognize “kill,” “mother,” and “fuck.” Word was about that Alden Vormance was getting up a party to go north and recover a meteorite. There would be no gold, no diamonds, no women, no dream-inducing smoke, no coolies or blacks, though possibly the odd Eskimo. And the purity, the geometry, the cold.
Taking quick looks behind him on the trail, Lew Basnight was apt to see things that weren’t necessarily there. Mounted figure in a black duster and hat, always still, turned sidewise in the hard, sunlit distance, horse bent to the barren ground. No real beam of attention, if anything a withdrawal into its own lopsided star-shaped silhouette, as if that were all it had ever aspired to. It did not take long to convince himself that the presence behind him now, always just out of eyeball range, belonged to one and the same subject, the notorious dynamiter of the San Juans known as the Kieselguhr Kid.
The Kid happened to be of prime interest to White City Investigations. Just around the time Lew was stepping off the train at the Union Station in Denver, and the troubles up in the Coeur d’Alene were starting to bleed over everywhere in the mining country, where already hardly a day passed without an unscheduled dynamite blast in it someplace, the philosophy among larger, city-based detective agencies like Pinkerton’s and Thiel’s began to change, being as they now found themselves with far too much work on their hands. On the theory that they could look at their unsolved cases the way a banker might at instruments of debt, they began selling off to less-established and accordingly hungrier outfits like White City their higher-risk tickets, including that of the long-sought Kieselguhr Kid.
It was the only name anybody seemed to know him by, “Kieselguhr” being a kind of fine clay, used to soak up nitroglycerine and stabilize it into dynamite. The Kid’s family had supposedly come over as refugees from Germany shortly after the reaction of 1849, settling at first near San Antonio, which the Kid-to-be, having developed a restlessness for higher ground, soon left, and then after a spell in the Sangre de Cristos, so it went, heading west again, the San Juans his dream, though not for the silver-mine money, nor the trouble he could get into, both of those, he was old enough by then to appreciate, easy enough to come by. No, it was for something else. Different tellers of the tale had different thoughts on what.
“Don’t carry pistols, don’t own a shotgun nor a rifle—no, his trade-mark, what you’ll find him packing in those tooled holsters, is always these twin sticks of dynamite, with a dozen more—”
“Couple dozen, in big bandoliers across his chest.”
“Easy fellow to recognize, then.”
“You’d think so, but no two eyewitnesses have ever agreed. It’s like all that blasting rattles it loose from everybody’s memory.”
“But say, couldn’t even a slow hand just gun him before he could get a fuse lit?”
“Wouldn’t bet on it. Got this clever wind-proof kind of striker rig on to each holster, like a safety match, so all’s he has to do’s draw, and the ‘sucker’s all lit and ready to throw.”
“Fast fuses, too. Some boys down the Uncompahgre found out about that just last August, nothin left to bury but spurs and belt buckles. Even old Butch Cassidy and them’ll begin to coo like a barn full of pigeons whenever the Kid’s in the county.”
Of course, nobody ever’d been sure about who was in Butch Cassidy’s gang either. No shortage of legendary deeds up here, but eyewitnesses could never swear beyond a doubt who in each case, exactly, had done which, and, more than fear of retaliation—it was as if physical appearance actually shifted, causing not only aliases to be inconsistently assigned but identity itself to change. Did something, something essential, happen to human personality above a certain removal from sea level? Many quoted Dr. Lombroso’s observation about how lowland folks tended to be placid and law-abiding while mountain country bred revolutionaries and outlaws. That was over in Italy, of course. Theorizers about the recently discovered subconscious mind, reluctant to leave out any variable that might seem helpful, couldn’t avoid the altitude, and the barometric pressure that went with it. This was spirit, after all.
Right at the moment Lew was out in the field, in Lodazal, Colorado, chatting with Burke Ponghill, the editor of Lodazal Weekly Tidings, the newspaper of record for a town which as yet was little more than a wishful real-estate venture. It was young Ponghill’s job to fill empty pages with phantom stories, in hopes that readers far away would be intrigued enough to come and visit, and maybe even settle.
“But so far all we’ve really got’s a mining town that ain’t built yet.”
“Silver? Gold?”
“Well, ore anyway . . . containing this metallic element that ain’t exactly been—”
“Discovered?”
“Maybe discovered, but not quite refined out?”
“Useful for . . .?”
“Applications yet to be devised?”
“Well, say, sounds good to me. Where could a fellow get a room for the night?”
“Hot bath? home-cooked meal?”
“There you go.” The wind swept through the brittlebush, and both men lit cigars. Lew tried not to succumb to the weariness of the trail.
“The voice in these letters,” Ponghill tapping the pile of loose sheets in front of him, “far from belongin to some crazy passionate South European or semieducated Peter specialist, it suggests instead an hombre who knows full well that something has happened to
him, but for the life of him he just can’t figure what—you know that feeling?—sure, who don’t?—and he’s tryin to work ‘at through, here on paper, how it was done to him, and better yet who did it. But by damn, look at his targets. You notice he always identifies them by name and address, without getting all general as some of the bombers do, none of that ‘Wall Street,’ or ‘Mine Owners Association’—no, see, these evildoers’re all clearly indicted, one by one.”
“‘Evildoers’?”
“He ain’t in it for no fun, Mr. Basnight, nor the thrill of the blast, nope, got us a man of principle here. Somewhat removed from the workaday world . . . not to mention lack of exposure to the fair sex, all that civilizing influence they’re known for. . . .”
“Too much time alone, jizzmatic juices backin up, putting pressure onto the brain— oh but hell, wouldn’t that qualify half of these mountains? Fact, it’s kind of a naïve theory, isn’t it Mr. Ponghill, not your own, I hope?”
“A lady of my acquaintance. She feels like that if he’d get out more—”
“Now you mention it, every day back down to the Denver office, we do see letters for this bird, all but a couple of em from women, strange but true, and most of those proposing marriage. Now and then there’s a fellow will pop the question, too, but that goes in a different file.”
“You open and read his mail?”
“Not like that he has any name or fixed address—not like that we’re some damn forwarding service, is it?”
“Don’t mean he ain’t got a right to his privacy.”
“His . . . Oh. Well, glory, if this isn’t just rejuvenating, a discussion about rights of the criminal, takes a man back to the campfires of his youth, only then it was God didn’t have a name or address.”
The brown jug came out, and Burke Ponghill grew confessional. The search for the mysterious dynamiter had in its relentlessness begun to affect families entirely unconnected with the case, including Ponghill’s own, putting them under unaccustomed pressures either to turn various black sheep in as likely candidates or to protect them from the law. The conflict was explicit, between the State and one’s blood loyalties. The Ponghill residence became a house divided. “It’s moral idiocy, Ma, examine his skull, the lobes for social feeling just aren’t there.”
Against the Day Page 22