Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Linnet, done with her chores, stood, shook out her apron. Frank handed her the bowl of loose peas. “Thanks. Your brother has his work cut out for him.”

  “Well I’ll pass that on.” No, wait—wrong answer, he bet.

  She was shaking her head, lips pursed in a lopsided way. “I’m not worried about either of them, much.”

  He figured he should let it go at that, instead of ask who else she might be worried about. She was watching him as if following along as these thoughts occurred. Over her shoulder, just before she slipped away indoors, she said, “Maybe we’ll peel onions sometime.”

  Next afternoon he was lying in one of the beds reading the Police Gazette or, actually, looking at the pictures, when Stray appeared in the doorway, soft as a house-chime, looked to see if he was awake, nodded, came in, sat on the end of the bed.

  “You . . . weren’t looking for Reef?” he said.

  “No.”

  “‘Cause I think he’s across the street, saw him . . . headin in the Double Jack, about an hour ago?”

  “Frank,” in the twilight through the dusty windowglass, her face just this side of some outburst he knew he would not be able to address, “if he wasn’t your brother, just some customer the wind blew in, would you know what to do about him at all, would you even want to take the trouble . . .?”

  “Hard to say.” Oh. Wrong again.

  She gazed, impatient, a light tremor in arms and neck. “Damn all this, I can sure tell you that much.”

  He tried to make out, against the daylight flowing in off the plain, what he could of her face veiled in its own penumbra, afraid somehow of misreading it, the brow smoothed by the uncertain light to the clarity of a girl’s, the eyes beneath free to claim as little acquaintance with the unchaste, he guessed, as she might need.

  Actresses pray for light like this. The electric lamp-switch was near her hand, but she made no gesture toward it.

  “You kind of see the story here. Is, it’s all these Utahans in town hollerin at Sage to get married, some Mormon boy she can’t hardly remember from back when she lived there, Cooper meantime wants her to ride off on that motor concern that never seems to get ‘em more’n a mile ‘fore he’s down into the works with her passin him pry bars and things, so she’s nobody to go looking to for advice of the heart, meantime your brother has it in his mind that I’m some li’l private health resort here for whenever he feels funny. What would you do? You was me. Which last time I checked, you wa’n’t.”

  “Miss Estrella, he always has been a tough one to figure.”

  She waited for more, but that seemed to be it. “Oh well thank you, that really helps.”

  “Not like that he’s square-dancin through his life,” it seemed to occur to Frank. “Even if it don’t look like hard work—”

  “Oh how true, them faro boxes don’t just rig themselves, do they? What kind of a future do you foresee for ol’ Buck-the-Tiger there?”

  “You mean how likely is he . . . to be . . . a good provider?”

  Her laughter, accompanied by a slap at his foot, still had enough of a saltwater element back of it for even Frank to pick up. He lay there supine, wanting nothing right now but—say, was he serious?—to hold her, yes and rest his head against where that baby was and just listen, somehow remaining easy enough with that to allow her whenever she wanted to to stop whatever would happen, only it wouldn’t begin, because here came loud intrusion from the street, Utahans in high frolic stomping up the stairs, singing pieces of what sounded like some very weird hymn tunes at each other. “Well now, shit,” declared Stray, looking quickly down to address her stomach—“You didt’n hear that—guess we’d better have one these lights on.” In the electric light, they had a good long look at each other’s face, and though he couldn’t speak for her, Frank knew that in years to come, it likely could get him past many a hard mile to remember this couple-three seconds of soul-to-soul—baby or howsoever, the C chord in the day’s melody he could always return to would be this serious young woman sitting down at the end of the bed, and the look those eyes seemed for a minute there to be giving him.

  But then everything saddled up and proceeded down Mexico way.

  At the Casino, back in the back rooms, with any number of telegraph receivers, both sounders and inkers, of occasionally non-store-bought design, each attached to a different set of wires from outside and chattering all day and night with news of horse races at every known track both sides of the border, prize-fights and other contests of wagering interest, quotations from financial and commodity markets in cities East and West, there was also a telephone instrument mounted on the wall, pretty constantly in use. But one day it rang while Reef happened to be right next to it, and he knew it was for him, and that it was bad news. This was part of the strangeness of telephones in those early days, before the traffic became quite such a routine affair. As if overdesigned to include all sorts of extra features like precognitive alarms.

  It was Jimmy Drop on the other end, a longtime associate of Reef’s, calling from Cortez. Even at this distance, with everything in between from hungry gophers to idle sharpshooters working against the signal, Reef could sense Jimmy’s discomfort with the machinery he was hollering into. “Reef? That you? Where are you?”

  “Jimmy, you’re calling me.”

  “Well, yeah, yeah but—”

  “How’d you know to call me here?”

  “You told me Nochecita, before you left.”

  “Was I drunk?”

  “Wouldn’t say not drunk.” A pause while a turbulent bath of noise that could have been fragments of speech or music surged along the lines. “Reef?”

  Reef all at once wished he could just pretend they’d been cut off. He’d rather have skipped whatever Jimmy had to tell him right now. But he wouldn’t.

  “You know Deuce Kindred?”

  “Works for the Owners Association in Telluride. Don’t know how to behave at a poker table. That the one?”

  “I’m sorry, Reef. It’s your Pa.”

  “Pa—”

  “They took him out of town at gunpoint. No word since.”

  “They.”

  “Him ‘n’ ‘at Sloat Fresno, too, ‘s what I heard.”

  “One of Bob Meldrum’s old-time pals. Number of notches to his credit, so I’m told.”

  “More’n there’s states in the Union, Reef, I’d bring some U.S. Cavalry I was you.”

  “Well Jim you ain’t.”

  Another pause. “I’ll look in on your Ma, when I can.”

  “Know where they’re headed?”

  “Jeshimon.”

  Spoken as if Reef shouldn’t have had the bad manners to make Jimmy say it out loud. And now there was nothing but his asshole between Reef and the force of gravity. Out here, even when you didn’t pray much, you prayed not to hear that name too often. Didn’t help that it was inside a day’s ride from Nochecita.

  Frank was sure a trooper for being so young, deciding to address the practicalities first and save any troubled feelings till later. “Train, or do we ride there?”

  “Just me, Frank.”

  “Hell you say.”

  “I figured you’d go see to Ma and Lake.”

  “That’s my part in all this, lookin after the women?”

  “All what? Do you know what’s goin on? I sure’s hell don’t.”

  They sat together on the outside steps, holding their hats and fooling with the brims. Clouds thickened overhead, now and then lightning pulsed out at the horizon. Wind inhabited and presently stirred the leaves of the cotton-woods. Behind windowpanes, through alkali dust, various young women would appear, observe them, shake their heads, and withdraw to go on with their own version of the day.

  “Let’s just see what’s what. Just the one step at a time. That O.K.?”

  And Webb’s fate such an unknown in all this . . .

  Another spell of dark, brimrolling silence. “And I wait around like some penny-ante remittance man, till you get ki
lled, then the job passes to me, that it?”

  “See how that mine school’s educating you, you never used to be so quick.” But Reef was steadily growing calmer now, almost prayerful. As if, alongside what was avalanching down onto both brothers’ understanding, a whole list of things had become far less important.

  TELLING STRAY, THAT was another story. “Got no secrets from you, darlin’.”

  “You’ve ‘got’ to do this, I expect.”

  “By now, the thing is . . . If Pa’s gone . . .”

  “Oh, maybe not.”

  “Yeah, maybe not. . . .” He was looking not in her eyes but down there at the baby.

  She did notice that. “It’s his grandbaby. I’d hate if they were never to meet.”

  “It just has seemed for a while that somethin like this was bound to happen.”

  She was having a great entertaining interior conversation with herself it seemed. At length, “You be back?”

  “Oh I will. Stray, I promise.”

  “Promise. My. Does the Pope know you said that, it’s a certified miracle.”

  THE GIRLS WERE sorry to see them go, or said they were, but Cooper? you would have thought it was the end of the world. He came downstairs and followed Frank and Reef all the way to the depot, on foot, a stricken look on his face. “You O.K.?” Frank finally figured he should ask. “Hope you don’t think like that we’re runnin out, or . . .”

  Cooper shook his head, downcast. “All ‘is drygoods, it’s really burdensome on a man, you know?”

  “Just play ‘em that ‘Juanita’ every once in a while,” Reef advised, “they say it works wonders.”

  The brothers traveled together as far as Mortalidad, the stop nearest Jeshimon, then, because of who might or might not be looking, they said goodbye with little more than the nod you give somebody who’s just lit your cigar for you. No gazing back out the window, no forehead creased with solemn thoughts, no out with the pocket flask or sudden descent into sleep. Nothing that would belong to the observable world.

  It was well up into Utah. The country was so red that the sagebrush appeared to float above it as in a stereopticon view, almost colorless, pale as cloud, luminous day and night. Out as far as Reef could see, the desert floor was populated by pillars of rock, worn over centuries by the unrelenting winds to a kind of post-godhead, as if once long ago having possessed limbs that they could move, heads they could tilt and swivel to watch you ride past, faces so sensitive they reacted to each change of weather, each act of predation around them, however small, these once-watchful beings, now past face, past gesture, standing refined at last to simple vertical attendance.

  “Don’t mean they’re not alive, o’ course,” opined somebody in a saloon on the way there.

  “You think they’re alive?”

  “Been out there at night?”

  “Not if I could help it.”

  Not that he wasn’t warned, but that didn’t keep it from being the worst town Reef ever rode into. What was wrong with these people? For miles along the trail, coming and going, every telegraph pole had a corpse hanging from it, each body in a different stage of pickover and decay, all the way back to a number of sun-beaten skeletons of some considerable age. By local custom and usage, as the town clerk would presently explain, these strung-up wrongdoers had been denied any sort of decent burial, it being cheaper anyway just to leave them for the turkey vultures. When the townsfolk of Jeshimon ran out of telegraph poles back around 1893, trees being scarce out here, they turned to fashioning their arrangements out of adobe brick. Sophisticated world travelers visiting the area were quick to identify the rude structures with those known in Persia as “Towers of Silence”—no stairs or ladders, high and steep-sided enough to discourage mourners from climbing, no matter how athletic or bent on honoring their dead—living humans had no place up top. Some of the condemned were brought by wagon to the base of the tower, strung up by pulleys onto a boom that when it was all over with you could just keep hoisting the body on up, swing it around, and leave it to hang there by its one foot for the birds of death who then came down and landed hissing on perches molded for their convenience out of the red mud of the region.

  So Reef passed beneath drifting enormous wing-shadows, down the grim colonnade, which, judging by the numbers, hadn’t been that much of a deterrent. “No, quite the contrary,” cheerfully admitted the Reverend Lube Carnal of the Second Lutheran (Missouri Synod) Church, “we attract evildoers from hundreds of miles around—not to mention clergy too o’ course, like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll notice there’s more churches here than saloons, making us unique in the Territory. Kind of professional challenge, get to their souls before the Governor gets to their necks.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s how he likes to be addressed. Thinks of this as his little state within a state. Whose main business you could say is the processing of souls.”

  “Well how about your bylaws, legal peculiarities, anythin a newcomer ought to know about?”

  “None, sir, bylaws, blue laws, or in-laws, anything and everything goes here, otherwise the game wouldn’t be honest. No deadlines in Jeshimon, pack anything anyplace you like, commit sins of your own choosing or even invention. Just, once the Gov takes notice, don’t expect sanctuary in any of our churches, or for that matter anything much at all in the way of parsonical aid. Best we can do is knead you into shape for the ovens of the Next World.”

  Though Jeshimon was known as the place they brought the ones they didn’t want found too soon, Reef learned from the Rev that, for a price, certain accommodations could be made. Because this was technically subornation, it counted, of course, as a sin and if you got caught at it, why you met an appropriate fate.

  AT NIGHT from up in the hills, the first glimpse of Jeshimon was like a religious painting of hell used to scare kids with in Sunday school. In dense columns from different parts of the scene, something lurid and vaporous, like smoke, like dust, but not really either of these, was seen to rise, roll upward, collecting here and there in the sky in heaps as structured as cloud. When the moon went in behind one of these patches, its light was said to take on disturbing colors, colors which were to the preternaturally black skies here what the colors of a sunset are to an ordinary sky of daytime blue. Nothing any visitor wanted to contemplate for long—in fact, certain nights the view had been known to drive the more sensitive back over the ridgeline in search of other lodgings, no matter how advanced the hour.

  In town an ambience of limitless iniquity reigned, a stifling warmth day and night, not an hour passing without someone discharging a firearm at someone else, or a public sexual act, often in a horse-trough among more than two parties, along with random horsewhippings, buffaloings, robberies at gunpoint, poker pots raked in without the hand being shown, pissing not only against walls but also upon passersby, sand in the sugar bowls, turpentine and sulfuric acid in the whiskey, brothels dedicated to a wide range of preferences, including arnophilia, or an unaccustomed interest in sheep, some of the ovine nymphs in these establishments being quite appealing indeed, even to folks who might not wholeheartedly share the taste, with fleeces dyed in a variety of fashionable colors, including the perennial favorites aquamarine and mauve, or wearing items of feminine—not to mention masculine—attire (hats for some reason, being popular) meant to enhance the animal’s sexual appeal—“though some of the flock,” as the Rev confessed, “given the level of duplicity prevailing here, do turn out to be mutton dressed as lamb or, on occasion, goat, for even these are regularly sought out by a small but reliable fraction of the pilgrims who daily make their way across the desert to this Lourdes of the licentious. . . . But let us not dwell further on such patently abominable behavior. Time for my rounds, come on along,” invited the Rev, “and I’ll show you the sights. Ah, here’s the Scalped Indian Saloon. Shall we irrigate?” It was the first of many pauses in what would develop into a daylong exercise in transgression. “You know the principle in medicine where the
cure grows right next to the cause. Swamp ague and willow bark, desert sunburn and aloe cactus, well, the same goes in Jeshimon for sin and redemption.”

  The music in the saloons tended toward choral part-singing, and there were more reed organs than parlor pianos, and as many turned-around collars among the customers as trail bandannas.

  “We like to think of Jeshimon as being under God’s wing,” said the Reverend Lube Carnal.

  “But wait a minute, God doesn’t have wings—”

  “The God you’re thinking of, maybe not. But out here, the one who looks after us, is it’s a kind of winged God, you see.”

  A troop of expressionless men on matched black Arabians appeared in the street. It was Wes Grimsford, the Marshal of Jeshimon, and his deputies. “Notice anything in particular?” whispered the Rev. Reef didn’t, which got him a look almost of pity. “It pays to be observant in this town. Observe the star Wes is wearing.” Reef snuck a look. It was a five-pointed star, nickel-plated, like they tended to wear, except that it was on upside down. “With the two points up—that’s the horns of the Devil, and signifies that Elderly Gent and his works.”

  “And it looked like such a godly town too,” said Reef.

  “Hope you don’t meet the Governor. Keeps his hat on all the time, you can guess why, and is said to have a tail, too.”

  They all lived in fear of the Governor, forever to and fro in Jeshimon and apt to arrive anywhere in town without warning. What impressed a first-time viewer was not any natural charisma, for he had none, but rather a keen sense of something wrong in his appearance, something pre-human in the face, the sloping forehead and clean-shaven upper lip, which for any reason, or none, would start back into a simian grin which was suppressed immediately, producing a kind of dangerous smirk that often lingered for hours, and which, when combined with his glistening stare, was enough to unnerve the boldest of desperadoes. Though he believed that the power that God had allowed to find its way to him required a confident swagger, his gait was neither earned nor, despite years of practice, authentic, having progressed in fact little beyond an apelike trudge. The reason he styled himself Governor and not President or King was the matter of executive clemency. The absolute power of life and death enjoyed by a Governor within his territory had its appeal. He traveled always with his “clemency secretary,” a cringing weasel named Flagg, whose job was to review each day’s population of identified malefactors and point with his groomed little head at those to be summarily put to death, often by the Governor himself, though, being a notoriously bad shot, he preferred not to have a crowd around for that. “Clemency” was allowing some to wait a day or two before they were executed, the number of buzzards and amount of tower space being finite.