“Buddy, he’s your own brother.”
“They’re going to catch him and shoot him down, don’t you know by now what these got-damn people are like?”
“And if you turn him in, they’ll hang him.”
“Not with a good lawyer.”
“Those sons of bitches don’t work for free.”
“Sometimes they work for conscience.”
“Oh, Buddy.” A lifetime of attending to his rosy expectations and wild-goose schemes in that sigh, but he went right on as if he hadn’t heard it.
“So Buddy turned in our little brother,” Burke told Lew, “and now the best Brad can hope for is stay alive long enough to get the trial moved down to Denver, where our local junta don’t cut that much of a figure, and the papers back east can get to the story. . . .”
LEW LEFT the little rough-milled shed of a printer’s office and headed back down the valley. So far this trip, he had not been shot at, or not for verifiably sure, but the foreboding that he would be had grown, in recent days, almost to a gastric condition. He had learned early on the job to attend to land- and townscapes only out as far as the range of the firearms most likely to be in the hands of possible harmdoers—past that radius all those mountains and sunsets’d have to get along without the admiring eyes of Lew Basnight.
As the evening crept across the valley, and farm stoves were poked up to working heat, and lamps lit indoors whose light soon filled the windowframes, outshining the departing sunlight on the spruce siding around them and draining down among the rows of the vegetable patches, the sawn ends of logs in woodpiles dyed the same intense orange yellow, the bark nearly black, silvered, full of shadows . . . Lew found himself, as usual this time of day, growing a little short-tempered with all this spirit-squeezing, horse-abusing sleuth exercise denying him even this hour, for everybody else a chance at some domestic ease. But the choice was this or Denver, behind his desk, blowing dust off of files too outdated to need to saddle up for anymore.
At the next convenient rise, he paused and regarded the peaceful valley. Maybe he had not yet seen it all, but Lew would be reluctant to wager more than a glass of beer that Chicago, for all its urban frenzy, had much on this country out here. He guessed that every cabin, outbuilding, saloon, and farmhouse in his field of sight concealed stories that were anything but peaceful—horses of immoderate beauty had gone crazy, turned like snakes and taken from their riders chunks of body flesh that would never grow back, wives had introduced husbands to the culinary delights of mushrooms that would turn a silver coin to black, vegetable farmers had shot sheep-herders over some unguarded slide of the eye, sweet little girls had turned overnight into whooping, hollering brides of the multitude, obliging men in the family to take actions not always conducive to public calm, and, as boilerplate to the contract with its fate, the land held the forever unquiet spirits of generations of Utes, Apaches, Anasazi, Navajo, Chirakawa, ignored, betrayed, raped, robbed, and murdered, bearing witness at the speed of the wind, saturating the light, whispering over the faces and in and out the lungs of the white trespassers in a music toneless as cicadas, unforgiving as any grave marked or lost.
When he left Chicago, nobody had come to see him off, not even Nate Privett, who you might’ve expected would’ve been there just to make sure he left. Thinking back over how he’d got to this point in his life, Lew guessed it was close enough to leaving under a cloud.
Not so long ago, he wouldn’t have known how to take sides. In the course of his Anarchist-hunting days in Chicago, Lew had found his way to a convenient insulation, for a while anyhow, from too much sympathy for either victim or perpetrator. How could you walk into the aftermath of a bombing and get anywhere by going all to pieces over the senseless waste of life, the blood and pain? Only slowly would it occur to his ultra-keen detective’s reasoning that these bombs could have been set by anybody, including those who would clearly benefit if “Anarchists,” however loosely defined, could be blamed for it. Neither, in the course of long pursuits down back of the Yards and beyond, was it escaping his attention how desperately miserable were the lives found among the realities of Anarchist communion, though it promised a man his only redemption from a captivity often cruel as the old Negro slavery. Crueler, sometimes. Lew began to find himself entertaining seductive daydreams about picking up some surrogate bomb, a chunk of ice or, better, a frozen pile of horse-droppings, to sling at the next silk hat he saw serenely borne along in the street, the next mounted policeman beating on an unprotected striker.
It was most obvious at the Yards, but there was the Pullman plant, too, and the steel mills and McCormick Reaper, and not only Chicago—he’d bet you could find this same structure of industrial Hells wrapped in public silence everyplace. There was always some Forty-seventh Street, always some legion of invisible on one side of the account book, set opposite a handful on the other who were getting very, if not incalculably, rich at their expense.
The altitude, the scale of the country out here, put a balloonheaded clarity onto vision when directed at mine owners and workers alike, revealing the Plutonic powers as they daily sent their legions of gnomes underground to hollow out as much of that broken domain as they could before the overburden collapsed, often as not on top of their heads, though what did it matter to the Powers, who always had more dwarves waiting, even eagerly, to be sent below. Scabs and Union men, Union and scabs, round and round, changing sides, changing back again, sure didn’t help with what he felt no embarrassment in thinking of as a contest for his soul.
Nevertheless he soldiered along in Denver, getting to know who was who, becoming a regular at Pinhorn’s Manhattan steak house, running tabs at every other bar along Seventeenth Street, making friends among crime reporters who hung out at Tortoni’s up on Arapahoe and Gahan’s saloon across the street from City Hall, paid off enough of his losses at Ed’s Arcade to stay friendly with associates of Ed Chase, the boss of the red-light district, went whole days at a time without thinking much of Chicago or comparing the two cities but was unable somehow to stay cooped up in town for more than a week or two before finding himself back on the Denver & Rio Grande, headed up into mining country. Couldn’t keep away, though each time he went out, it seemed relations between owners and miners had worsened. It got like practically every day out here saw another little Haymarket, dynamite in these hard-rock mountains not being quite the exotic substance it had been in Chicago. Pretty soon he was meeting posse-size units on the trail, armed to the teeth, calling themselves Citizens’ Alliances or Proprietors’ Auxiliaries. They were carrying, some of them, quite-sophisticated firearms, army-issue Krag-Jørgensen rifles, repeating shotguns, field howitzers disassembled and packed along on strings of mules. At first he was able to ride by with no more trouble than a nod and salute off his hatbrim, but each time the atmosphere was a little more tense, and soon they were stopping him and asking what they must have figured were pointed questions. He learned to bring along his Illinois and Colorado licenses after a while, though many of these jaspers couldn’t read too well.
By now he had been slowly pushed out of half his office space by an accumulation of files on Anarchists professional and amateur, labor organizers, bombers, potential bombers, hired guns, and so on—girls he kept hiring to help him out with the typewriting and office-tending lasted on average a month before they ran off, exasperated, to the comforting simplicities of marriage, a parlor house on The Row, schoolteaching, or some other office or shop in town where a person could at least slip off her shoes and have a good chance of finding them again.
Lew had too much trouble even locating jackets on individual cases to be able to stand back and put any of it together, but what he could begin to see was that both sides in this were organized, it wasn’t just unconnected skirmishing, a dynamite blast here and there, a few shots from ambush—it was a war between two full-scale armies, each with its chain of command and long-term strategic aims—civil war again, with the difference now being the railroads, whic
h ran out over all the old boundaries, redefining the nation into exactly the shape and size of the rail network, wherever it might run to.
He had felt it as early as the Pullman strike back in Chicago, federal troops patrolling the streets, the city at the center of twenty or thirty railway lines, radiating with their interconnections out to the rest of the continent. In crazier moments it seemed to Lew that the steel webwork was a living organism, growing by the hour, answering some invisible command. He found himself out lying at suburban tracksides in the deep nighttime hours, between trains, with his ear to the rails, listening for stirrings, quickening, like some anxious father-to-be with his ear to the abdomen of a beloved wife. Since then American geography had gone all peculiar, and what was he supposed to be doing stuck out here in Colorado, between the invisible forces, half the time not knowing who hired him or who might be fixing to do him up. . . .
Nearly every workday, in neighborhood saloons, eating-houses, and cigar stores, he found he was running across and even getting in conversations with folks, from both the Union and the Owners Associations, who previously had been only names in field reports. The really odd thing he began to notice was that the names of owners’ operatives were also turning up among his files on the mine workers. Some were wanted by authorities in distant states for crimes against owners, and not always trivial offenses either—union outlaws, even Anarchist bombers, yet here they were at the same time on the payroll of the Owners Association. “Strange,” Lew muttered, puffing energetically on a cigar and grinding the mouth end of it to shreds with his teeth, because he was getting a sick feeling, not all from swallowing tobacco juice, that somebody might be playing him for a sap. Who were these birds—dynamiters pretending to work for the owners while they planned more outrages? owners’ stooges infiltrating the W.F.M. to betray their brothers? Were some of them, God help him, both—greedy pikers playing both sides and loyal only to U.S. currency?
“Here’s what you do,” suggested Tansy Wagwheel, whom this job in just a few short weeks would drive screaming down Fifteenth Street and on into the embrace of the Denver County public-school system, “It’s in this wonderful book I keep close to me all the time, A Modern Christian’s Guide to Moral Perplexities. Right here, on page eighty-six, is your answer. Do you have your pencil? Good, write this down—‘Dynamite Them All, and Let Jesus Sort Them Out.’”
“Uh . . .”
“Yes, I know. . . .” The dreamy look on her face could not possibly be for Lew.
“Does it do horse races?” Lew asked after a while.
“Mr. Basnight, you card.”
NEXT TIME LEW got up into the embattled altitudes of the San Juans, he noticed out on the trail that besides the usual strikebreaking vigilantes there were now cavalry units of the Colorado National Guard, in uniform, out ranging the slopes and creeksides. He had thought to obtain, through one of the least trustworthy of his contacts in the Mine Owners Association, a safe-passage document, which he kept in a leather billfold along with his detective licenses. More than once he ran into ragged groups of miners, some with deeply bruised or swelling faces, coatless, hatless, shoeless, being herded toward some borderline by mounted troopers. Or the Captain said some borderline. Lew wondered what he should be doing. This was wrong in so many ways, and bombings might help but would not begin to fix it.
It wasn’t long before one day he found himself surrounded—one minute aspen-filtered shadows, the next a band of Ku Klux Klan night-riders, and here it was still daytime. Seeing these sheet-sporting vigilantes out in the sunlight, their attire displaying all sorts of laundering deficiencies, including cigar burns, food spills, piss blotches, and shit streaks, Lew found, you’d say, a certain de-emphasis of the sinister, pointy hoods or not. “Howdy, fellers!” he called out, friendly enough.
“Don’t look like no nigger,” commented one.
“Too tall for a miner,” said another.
“Heeled, too. Think I saw him on a poster someplace.”
“What do we do? Shoot him? Hang him?”
“Nail his dick to a stump, and, and then, set him on fahr,” eagerly accompanied by a quantity of drool visibly soaking the speaker’s hood.
“You all are doing a fine job of security here,” Lew beamed, riding through them easy as a herd of sheep, “and I’ll be sure to pass that along to Buck Wells when next I see him.” The name of the mine manager and cavalry commander at Telluride worked its magic.
“Don’t forget my name!” hollered the drooler, “Clovis Yutts!”
“Shh! Clovis, you hamhead, you ain’t supposed to tell em your name.”
What in Creation could be going on up here, Lew couldn’t figure. He had a distinct, sleep-wrecking impression that he ought to just be getting his backside to the trackside, head on down to Denver, and not come up here again till it was all over. Whatever it was. It sure ‘s hell looked like war, and that must be what was keeping him here, he calculated, that possibility. Something like wanting to find out which side he was on without all these doubts. . . .
BACK IN DENVER AGAIN, Lew returned late to his room, discovering from all the way down the hall that the day wasn’t close to being over yet, for through the transom came drifting the scent of a burning leaf that stirred in him, as always, mixed feelings. It would be Nate Privett, with one of his trademark Key West cheroots, way out here from Chicago on his yearly tour of inspection, though how it could be a year already since the last visit was beyond Lew.
Downstairs in the Anarchists’ saloon, they were whooping it up, starting early as usual. Singing in so many different tempos and keys, like a bunch of Congregationalists, you couldn’t even tell what the song was. Girls whose audible high notes bore a component of amateur cheeriness, as if they would rather be dancing than practicing even routine deception. Boots stomping in strange, un-American rhythms. Lew had fallen into the habit of dropping in for a sociable beer at the end of the day, and little by little found himself being seduced in a political and maybe also a romantic way, for there were any number of Anarchist chickadees hanging around who liked nothing better than to see what was up with these gruff Pinkertonian types. Today he’d have to pass that up for Nate, a dubious exchange.
Wearily, Lew put on a face and opened his door. “Well, Nate, good evening. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”
“Always another report to go through. Time is never wasted, Lew, if you remember to bring along something to read.”
“See you found the Valley Tan.”
“Thorough search, only bottle in the room. When’d you switch to Mormon whiskey?”
“When your checks started coming back from the bank. That bottle does seem to be down by six fingers or more, since last I looked.”
“A desperate man will console himself with anything, Lew.”
“How desperate’s that, Nate?”
“Been reading your last report on the Kieselguhr Kid ticket. Read it over twice in fact, strongly reminded me of that legendary Butch Cassidy and his Hole-in-the-Wall Gang? though you never brought those names up, exactly.”
Lew sure had had a long day. Nate Privett was one of these desk operatives with an irrational belief that somewhere in the endless heaps of subpoenaed account books, itineraries, operating logs, and so forth, shining out sudden as a vision, answers would just reveal themselves, Heaven forfend anybody should actually have to saddle up and get out there and into country a little more twilit.
“Funny,” trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice, “but Butch Cassidy situations’ve been growing not that uncommon here o’ late—mind conveying over that bottle, thanks—fiendish acts of semi-imaginary badmen—maybe even more than just any one lone Kid here, maybe multiple conspiracies of bombers, not to mention that small army of laughing-academy material ever with us, just itching to commit acts, or not commit acts but be blamed for ‘em anyway, in the Kid’s name—”
“Lew?”
“This case, frankly, it’s a bitch, and growing more difficult every
day. I’m workin’ it all alone out here, and there’s times I wouldn’t even mind if The Unsleepin Eye with all its corporate resources just took the whole damn ticket back again—”
“Whoa, whoa just a minute, Lew, not how it works, and besides, the clients are still payin in, you see, every month—oh, they’re happy, I tell you, no reason not to just keep going along, exactly the way we—” He stopped, as if aware of having been indiscreet.
“Ah! So that’s it.” Making believe he had just figured it all out. “Why, you buzzards.”
“Well . . . no need to . . .”
“All this time out here, so far, far from the lights of Michigan Avenue, and never once suspecting . . . why it was just some damn opium-pipe special’s all it ever was—”
“Sure wouldn’t want any hard feelings, Lew—”
“I’m smiling, ain’t I?”
“See, back in Chicago we’re only as good as our credibility, which is what Regional Operative-in-Charge Lew Basnight’s been giving us here, what with the kind of respect you enjoy in the business—”
“Oh, your mother’s ass, Nate. Your own, for that matter. No hard feelings.”
“Now, Lew—”
“Good luck, Nate.”
Next night in Walker’s on Arapahoe, inhaling one twenty-five-cent pony of bourbon after another, wedged in with five other fast drinkers, which was as many as the vest-pocket establishment would hold, he understood in an all-but-religious way that this was supposed to have happened years ago, that he or whatever was living his life had been taking their sweet time with it, that he could have been working for the right side years before this, and now it might be too late, already past the point where anybody stood a chance against the juggernaut that had rolled down on the country and flat stolen it.
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