Only when they got to England did they learn of the disastrous hurricane that had struck Galveston the day after they left—135-mile-per-hour winds, the city underwater, six thousand dead.
“We got out just in time,” said Nigel.
“Yes what frightfully good luck.”
“Oh, but I say, look at Lewis, he’s gone all neuræsthenic.”
“Why Lewis, whatever is the matter?”
“Six thousand people,” said Lew, “to begin with.”
“Happens out in India all the time,” said Nigel. “It is the world, after all.”
“Yes Lewis, wherever could you have been living, before that frightful bomb brought you to us?”
By the end, Webb Traverse had worked his way up to shift boss at the Little Hellkite workings. Veikko and his squarehead compadres gave him a party to celebrate, and as usual it reminded him that drinking potato spirits all night is not for everyone. Luckily, the snow was still a while off, or there might’ve been a repeat of last winter when he let some Finns talk him into putting on a pair of skis, up past Smuggler, by the giant pre-avalanche buildup known as the Big Elephant—scared the bejeezus out of him, as it would’ve anybody in their right mind, all present being mightily relieved when he fell down safely in the snow without breaking any bones or starting a slide.
It seemed he could get along with everybody these days except the two women in his own family, the ones that ought to’ve mattered most, as if with the boys all out in the wind his place was now out there too, as if the chances of running into each other again somehow were better out there than in some domestic interior. When he did put his nose in the door, things would rapidly go sour. Once, Lake took off and didn’t come back. He waited a day and a night, and finally, just around third shift, she showed up out of the dark with a bundle of U.S. currency.
“Where you been, miss? Where’d you get that?”
“Just over to Silverton. Bettin on a fight.”
“Betting with what?”
“Saved up from doin laundry.”
“And who was fighting again?”
“Fireman Jim Flynn.”
“And who?”
“Andy Malloy?”
“Save it, kid, listen, Andy could never fight worth beans, no more’n his brother Pat. Fireman and him’d be too much of a mismatch to ever happen, and maybe you want to try another story?”
“Or do I mean Mexican Pete Everett?”
“Who were you with?”
“Rica Treemorn.”
“The Floradora Girls. Her people know about this?”
Lake shrugged. “Think what you like.” Face inclined, eyes turned away as if in some incommunicable sorrow in no way congruent with the rosy appearance that had probably got him going to begin with.
“Child of the storm,” nearly a whisper in the general noise level. A desperate look on his face. As if possessed by something she had known and feared since before things had names.
“Pa, what ‘n the hell’s that mean?” She wanted to sound more confident, but she was getting scared now, saw him turning in front of her into somebody else—
“See how long you can stay out in it alone. Child of the storm. Well. Let the god-damned storm protect you.” What was he talking about? He wouldn’t explain, though it was nothing so mysterious. Not that long ago, one of their spells up at Leadville, during one of those Leadville blue northers, with the lightning that never stopped, that came gusting like the winter wind . . . her young face just so clear to him, the way the fierce light had struck her hair nearly white, streaming back from her small face as if from that wind, though the air in the little shack was still. Under the black apocalyptic sky. He had got something down his spine that he thought meant he was about to be hit by lightning.
Only understood later it was fear. Fear of this young female spirit who only yesterday would come wriggling dirty-faced into his arms.
“You gone crazy, Pa?”
“Don’t run no shelter for whores here.” At the top of his voice and almost shaking with the pleasure of knowing there was nothing he could do to stop this.
Just as happy to oblige. “Shelter? Who did you ever shelter? you can’t shelter your family, you can’t even shelter yourself, you sorry son of a bitch.”
“Oh! fine, well that’s it—” And his hand was up and ready in a fist.
May had just got her pipe going, and had to put it aside and once more haul her weary bones into the rodeo chute. “Webb, please hold it, now, Lake, you get over there a minute— can’t you see, she’s done nothin wrong.”
“Stays in Silverton a week, comes back with a year’s rent, what fertilizer wagon you think I fell off of here, wife? Got us a damn Blair Street debutante, looks like.”
He did go after her then, and Mayva had to pick up a shovel, and finally for different reasons they were both yelling at Lake to get out of the house. By which point, hell, she was all for it.
I’m so bad, she kept telling herself but couldn’t believe it till she was in Silverton again, where a badgirl could find her own true self, like coming home to her real family. Just a little grid of streets set in a green flat below the mountain peaks, but for wickedness it was one of the great metropolises of the fallen earth. . . . Jittering Jesus. Sixty or seventy saloons and twenty parlor houses just on Blair Street alone. Drinking gambling fucking twenty-four hours a day. Repeal? What repeal? Smoking opium with the Chinaman who came and did the girls’ laundry. Handled by foreign visitors from far across the sea with dangerous tastes, as well as domestic American child-corruptors, wife-cripplers, murderers, Republicans, hard to say which of them, her or Rica, had less sense about who she went upstairs with. Somehow they glided through the nights as if under supernatural protection. Learned not to let their eyes meet, because they always started laughing, and some customers got violent about that. Sometimes they woke up in the little jailhouse and heard the usual from a sheriff’s wife with an ineradicable frown. It went on till winter began to make itself felt and the prospect of snow up to the eaves got all the ladies on the Line to making those seasonal readjustments.
Lake came back to the cabin once to get some of her things. The place echoed with desertion. Webb was on shift, Mayva was out running chores. All her brothers were long gone, the one she missed most being Kit, for they were the two youngest and had shared a kind of willfulness, a yearning for the undreamt-of destiny, or perhaps no more than a stubborn aversion to settling for the everyday life of others.
She imagined taking a stick of dynamite, waiting for Webb someday out on some trail. Drop it on him, while she’d be up safe, cradled in a niche of mountain wall, and him tiny, unprotected, far below. Put on the cap, light the fuse, and release the stick in a long, swooping curve, trailing sparks behind, down out of the sunlight into a well of shadow, and the old sumbitch would be obliterated in a flower of dirt, stone, and flame and a deep rolling cry of doom.
MAYVA KNEW SHE’D been there. Maybe her store-bought perfume, maybe something out of place, maybe just that she knew. What was clear to her was that she had to try and save at least one of her children.
“Webb, I’ve got to stick with her. A while longer anyway.”
“Let her go.”
“How can I leave her out there, out in all that?”
“She’s nearly twenty, she can take care of her damn self by now.”
“Sakes, it’s war up here, nobody can do much more’n stay out of the way.”
“She don’t need you, May.”
“It’s you she don’t need.”
They looked at each other, confounded.
“Sure, you go ahead then, too. And that’ll be the whole fuckin poker hand. I’ll just do for myself, ain’t like that I don’t know how. You and that bitch go have a real good time down there.”
“Webb.”
“You’re goin, go.”
“It’ll only be—”
“You decide to come back, don’t send no telegrams, I still got to show my fac
e around here, just surprise me. Or don’t, more likely.” The stamps beating somewhere in the distance. A mule string heehawing away down the hillside. National Guard up by the pass shooting off their cannon to keep the natives in line. Webb was standing in the middle of the place, lines of his face set like stone, patch of sunlight just touching his foot, so still. “So still,” Mayva remembered later, “it wasn’t him at all, really, it was somethin he’d gotten to be and from then on wouldn’t be nothing else, anymore, and I should have known then, oh, daughter, I should have. . . .”
“Nothing you could’ve done.” Lake squeezed her shoulder. “It was already on the way.”
“No. You, me, and him could’ve got back together, Lake, left town, gone someplace those people don’t go, don’t even know about, down out of these god-damned mountains, might’ve found us a patch of land—”
“And he still would’ve found some way to wreck it,” Lake’s face puffy, as if just risen from dreams she could tell no one about, older than her mother was used to seeing it. Emptier.
“I know you say you don’t miss him. But God help you. How can you stay like this? unforgivin and all?”
“We were never that important to him, Mamma. He had his almighty damn Union, that’s what he loved. If he loved anything.”
IF IT WAS LOVE, it was less than two-way. With no more respectable family-man dodge to hide behind, Webb sought the embrace of Local 63, which, alarmed at the vehemence of his need, decided there ought to be some distance between him and the Union, and suggested he shift over into the Uncompahgre for a while, to the Torpedo workings. Which is where he ran into Deuce Kindred, who, having departed Grand Junction in some haste, had just hired on at the Torpedo, as if working for wages underground would hide him from some recently exhibited legal interest in his person.
Deuce had been one of these Sickly Youths who was more afraid of the fate all too obviously in store for weaklings in this country than of the physical exertion it would take to toughen up and avoid it. However self-schooled in the ways of Strenuosity, he had still absorbed enough early insult to make inevitable some later re-emission, at a different psychical frequency—a fluorescence of vindictiveness. He thought of it usually as the need to prevail over every challenge that arose regardless of scale, from cutting a deck to working a rock face.
“Rather be workin fathoms,” Deuce muttered.
“No contract system around here,” said Webb, who happened to be single-jacking alongside. “Not since the aught-one strike, and it took some good men dyin to get that.”
“Nothin personal. Seems more like work somehow is all.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of a sepulchral figure in a three-dollar sack suit. Deuce flashed Webb a look.
“What’s this?” Webb said.
“Don’t know. Stares at me funny, and everybody says step careful with him.”
“Him? ‘At’s just ol’ Avery.”
“Company spy’s what they say.”
“Another name for Inspector around here. Don’t worry too much—all ‘em boys act nervous, never more than a step away from going down a shaft. . . . But you know all that, didn’t you say you worked up in Butte?”
“Not me.” A wary look. “Who told you that?”
“Oh, you know, you’re a new fella, there’s all kinds of stories,” Webb laying a reassuring hand on the kid’s shoulder, and not feeling or choosing to ignore Deuce’s flinch. Having succeeded one way or another in driving away his whole family, Webb was joining the company of those who, with their judgment similarly impaired, had allowed themselves to be charmed by Deuce Kindred, to their great consequent sorrow.
Couple-three nights later, he ran into young Kindred down at the Beaver Saloon, playing poker with a tableful of notoriously unprincipled gents. Webb waited till the boy took a break, and stood a couple of short bits.
“How you doin tonight?”
“About even.”
“Night’s young. Wouldn’t want you to be the fish at that table.”
“I ain’t. It’s that little guy there with the specs.”
“The Colonel? Lord, son, he’s up on vacation from Denver ‘cause they don’t let him play down there no more.”
“Didn’t notice that many chips in front of him.”
“He’s rat-holin em. Watch his cigar, he’ll put up a big cloud of smoke, and— there, see that?”
“Huh, what do you know.”
“Your money, o’ course.”
“Thanks, Mr. Traverse.”
“Webb’s O.K.”
“YOU’VE DONE THESE before, Mr. Kindred?”
“If you mean persuading them more into line with the client’s thinking—”
“Say this one time they wanted to take it further.”
“They said that?”
“They said, suppose there was an animal—dog, mule, bites or kicks all the time—what do you do?”
“Me, I’d pass the critter on to somebody can’t tell the difference between that and all broke in.”
“Everybody up here knows the difference,” said the company rep, quietly, though with some impatience.
“You are . . . not fixing to tell me out loud what you want, ‘s that it?”
“Maybe we’re interested in how much you can figure out on your own, Mr. Kindred.”
“Sure, what they call ‘initiative.’ That case there’d have to be some Initiative Fee connected onto it.”
“Oh? Running in the neighborhood of . . .?”
It turned out Deuce knew more than the rep expected about how much the company might be ready to let go of. “Course if you don’t have the spendin authority, we could put him onto the stub instead, leave him off up on Dallas Divide, say, cost of the ticket to Montrose plus my percent, or for a little bit more, clear on out of the state and you’d never see him again. Save you some money, maybe trouble later on—”
“Done right, there isn’t any trouble.”
Deuce could appreciate that. “I’m listenin.”
“Nerve and initiative, Mr. Kindred, two separate things.” They settled on a sum.
DEUCE’S SIDEKICK, Sloat Fresno, was about twice his size and thought that Deuce was his sidekick. It wasn’t the first time they’d made themselves useful to the Owners Association. Mine security, sort of thing. They’d picked up a reputation for being steady, for not talking to people they didn’t know. In saloon engagements they tended to fight back to back, each thinking he was protecting the other, which made them that much harder to go after.
They got together first in Cripple Creek during the earlier troubles, 1895 or thereabouts. Sloat had just begun a career as a wanted man for practicing to flagrant excess what in those days was known as “copping the borax”—enlisting in the Army, collecting the bonus, deserting, showing up at another post, enlisting, collecting the bonus, deserting again, all through the occupied West, eventually becoming for the military as much of an annoyance as Geronimo himself, with unflattering likenesses tacked up in dayrooms from Fort Bliss to the Coeur d’Alenes. The strike in Cripple may have looked to Sloat like some harebrained chance to reingratiate himself with the forces of law and order. It must’ve worked, because from then on he and Deuce were considered reliable enough for steady work and even train fare sometimes to vicinities aswarm with anarchistic heads yet unbroken.
“Just keep back of me now, li’l buddy, watch careful back there, ‘cause if they ever get me, what’ll become o’ you?” sorts of remarks Deuce had learned to ignore, though sometimes just barely. With particular reference to Webb Traverse, “You do the old men, just leave the younger meat to the Big S., he’ll have it all dressed out with no fuss ‘fore y’even know it.” Though Sloat was frankly in it for the feelings of passionate alertness that grew in him while he was inflicting damage (though not necessarily pain, for hell, any ordinary day is pain ain’t it), Deuce for his part had found sport, and eventually respect, in the field of mental domination, being known to intimidate whole posses withou
t taking his hands out of his pockets. . . . Some called it hypnotism, whatever—folks said that until you had seen those two snake’s eyes lit up so bright in the shadow of his hatbrim, zeroing in on you alone, why, you had not yet run into a really dedicated badman.
But the difference between Deuce and the common gunhand was, was that for Deuce it always got emotional somehow. If it wasn’t to begin with, before the end of the assignment there’d always be something he could find either contemptible or desirable enough to prod him through it. He envied the more professional shootists of the time, even Sloat with his enlisted-man’s approach, dreading the day he might have to walk out there in cold blood, with nothing else to crank him up.
Deuce came to imagine himself as “on assignment,” for the owners, a sort of undercover “detective” keeping an eye on agitators, including Webb Traverse. Webb half-consciously imagined he’d found a replacement son, and Deuce did nothing to tell him any different. Knowing there was seldom a clear moment in these matters when the deceiver thinks his task is accomplished, any more than the deceived stops worrying how solid the friendship is, Deuce eased snakewise into the subject of Union activities, to see how far he could get while pretending every appearance of openness—something he thought he knew how to do by now, this sympathetic-young-man performance.
Webb had got into the practice of dropping by the Torpedo boarding-house, usually around 4:00 A.M. when the night shift came off, and they talked late into the night, beneath the unnatural, hard moonlight of electric lamps up and down the trails and pipelines and out from the dormitory windows, to the coming and going of the third-shifters. Shadows blacker somehow than they ought to be. Two of them sitting there drinking red liquor like it was sadness medicine. Stupid. Thinking he saw something wistful on Deuce’s face, though it could’ve been end-of-shift exhaustion, Webb said, “Too bad my daughter’s flown the nest, I could’ve introduced you two.”
No he couldn’t. What was he thinking anyway? She was gone. Bitch was gone. . . .
“Thanks. Single life ain’t that bad . . .” Deuce trailed off, as if it was something he didn’t want to get into.
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