Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Webb wasn’t quite gone when his killers brought him into town, and for that reason Reef got to Jeshimon in time to keep his father’s carcass from the carrion birds, and then the big decision was whether to ride on after Deuce and Sloat or bring Webb back up to the San Miguel for a decent burial. He would question his own judgment in years to come, wonder in fact if he hadn’t just been trying to avoid an encounter with the killers, whether he hadn’t gotten cowardice mixed in with honoring his father and so forth, and by the time he could stop and think about it, there was nobody to talk it over with.

  Maybe the worst of it was that he actually caught sight of them heading away toward the red-rock country, shadows in the near distance that were all but artifacts of the merciless daylight, the packhorse that had brought Webb wandering free and eventually stopping to browse. As if offended at the loose morality abroad in Jeshimon, Deuce and Sloat were disinclined to further gunplay. Though there was only one of Reef, they decided to run anyway. They galloped away giggling, as if this had been some high-spirited prank and Reef its grumpy old target.

  The buzzards circled, stately and patient. The citizens of Jeshimon looked on with varying degrees of disengagement. Nobody offered to help, of course, until Reef found himself at the base of the tower in question, where a Mexican sidled up to him in the dusk and motioned him around a couple of corners to a roofless ruin crammed with all sorts of hardware gone to rust and dilapidation. “Quieres un cloque,” the man, scarcely older than a boy, kept saying. It didn’t seem to be a question. Reef thought he was trying to say “clock,” but then, peering into the shadows, saw at last what it was—a set of grappling hooks. How they got this far inland, what kind of ship they may have belonged to, sailing what sea, all without meaning here. The rope for it would cost extra. Reef shelled out the pesos without haggling, not too surprised at the existence of the silent market, for enough survivors must always want to scale the forbidden walls, unwilling to leave matters to the mercies of Jeshimon. Through dusk’s reassembly of the broken day therefore, as the first star appeared, Reef found himself in growing desperation swinging iron hooks lariat style, trying not to be in the way when he missed the rim of the tower and they came falling back through the dark to clang in the beaten dust. His attempts soon gathered an audience, mostly of children, from whom ordinarily he would have drawn grace, but his amiability had deserted him. Many of these children kept buzzards for pets, gave them names, found them pleasant company, and might be betting, for all he knew, in their favor and against Reef.

  At last the hooks dug in and held. By now he was tired, not in the best condition to begin climbing, but there was no choice. The Mexican who’d sold him the cloque was right there, growing impatient, as if Reef had rented his contraption by the hour. Maybe he had.

  So he ascended, into night swelling like notes on a church organ. His boot-soles slipped repeatedly on the adobe surface—it was exactly not rough enough to allow him an easy climb. His arms were soon in agony, his leg muscles cramping as well.

  About then he happened to sight Marshal Grimsford heading out here with a small party of deputized townsfolk, and Reef and Webb—that’s how it felt anyway, like his father was still alive and this was their last adventure together—must flee without discussion. He shot a carrion bird, maybe two, among the great unhurried black ascent of the others slung the corpse across his shoulders, no time to think of the mystery of what had been Webb Traverse now a cargo of contraband to be run past authorities gunning for them. Rappelled down the dark, blood-red wall, stole a horse, found another outside of town to pack Webb on, hit the trail south with no sign of pursuit and only a dim idea of how he’d got there.

  DURING THE RIDE back up to Telluride, among tablelands and cañons and red-rock debris, past the stone farmhouses and fruit orchards and Mormon spreads of the McElmo, below ruins haunted by an ancient people whose name no one knew, circular towers and cliffside towns abandoned centuries ago for reasons no one would speak of, Reef was able finally to think it through. If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn’t somebody ought to carry on the family business—you might say, become the Kid?

  It might’ve been the lack of sleep, the sheer relief of getting clear of Jeshimon, but Reef began to feel some new presence inside him, growing, inflating—gravid with what it seemed he must become, he found excuses to leave the trail now and then and set off a stick or two from the case of dynamite he had stolen from the stone powder-house at some mine. Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts. Now and then he creaked around in the saddle, as if seeking agreement or clarification from Webb’s blank eyes or the rictus of what would soon be a skull’s mouth. “Just getting cranked up,” he told Webb. “Expressing myself.” Back in Jeshimon he had thought that he could not bear this, but with each explosion, each night in his bedroll with the damaged and redolent corpse carefully unroped and laid on the ground beside him, he found it was easier, something he looked forward to all the alkaline day, more talk than he’d ever had with Webb alive, whistled over by the ghosts of Aztlán, entering a passage of austerity and discipline, as if undergoing down here in the world Webb’s change of status wherever he was now. . . .

  He had brought with him a dime novel, one of the Chums of Chance series, The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth, and for a while each night he sat in the firelight and read to himself but soon found he was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime story, something to ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death.

  Reef had had the book for years. He’d come across it, already dog-eared, scribbled in, torn and stained from a number of sources, including blood, while languishing in the county lockup at Socorro, New Mexico, on a charge of running a game of chance without a license. The cover showed an athletic young man (it seemed to be the fearless Lindsay Noseworth) hanging off a ballast line of an ascending airship of futuristic design, trading shots with a bestially rendered gang of Eskimos below. Reef began to read, and soon, whatever “soon” meant, became aware that he was reading in the dark, lights-out having occurred sometime, near as he could tell, between the North Cape and Franz Josef Land. As soon as he noticed the absence of light, of course, he could no longer see to read and, reluctantly, having marked his place, turned in for the night without considering any of this too odd. For the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in Socorro and at the Pole. Cellmates came and went, the Sheriff looked in from time to time, perplexed.

  At odd moments, now, he found himself looking at the sky, as if trying to locate somewhere in it the great airship. As if those boys might be agents of a kind of extrahuman justice, who could shepherd Webb through whatever waited for him, even pass on to Reef wise advice, though he might not always be able to make sense of it. And sometimes in the sky, when the light was funny enough, he thought he saw something familiar. Never lasting more than a couple of watch ticks, but persistent. “It’s them, Pa,” he nodded back over his shoulder. “They’re watching us, all right. And tonight I’ll read you some more of that story. You’ll see.”

  Riding out of Cortez in the morning, he checked the high end of the Sleeping Ute and saw cloud on the peak. “Be rainin later in the day, Pa.”

  “Is that Reef? Where am I? Reef, I don’t know where the hell I am—”

  “Steady, Pa. We’re outside of Cortez, headin up to Telluride, be there pretty soon—”

  “No. That’s not where this is. Everthin is unhitched. Nothin stays the same. Somethin has happened to my eyes. . . .”

  “It’s O.K.”

  “Hell it is.”

  THEY STOOD HUDDLED together in Lone Tree Cemetery, the miners’ graveyard at the end of town, Mayva, Lake, Frank, and Reef, beneath the great peaks and behind them the long, descending trace of Bridal Veil Falls whispering raggedly into the cold sunlight. Webb’s life an
d work had come to this.

  Frank was up from Golden, just here overnight. He stayed close to Mayva, not saying much, figuring what he had to contribute was just, however temporarily, to be the living opposite of what lay all around them.

  “I just wish I was with him,” Mayva said, very low, almost without breath.

  “But you’re not,” Frank pointed out, “and maybe there’s a reason for that.”

  “Oh, children. I surely wouldn’t want to be neither of them that did it. God will see it right, even if God is so awful slow sometimes. Takes his goddamned sweet time. And maybe if he’s slow enough, somebody down here will have the chance before he gets around to it. . . .”

  She was so quiet, not about to put on the kind of show you saw these Mexican widows going in for. What tears did come were so alarming in their suddenness and silence—just there all on Mayva’s face, as if they were symptoms of a condition no doctor’d have the heart to name. If those hired triggers had been anyplace near, the force of her unvoiced rage could have fried them where they stood. Just greasy ashes by the trailside.

  “Thought the Union would’ve sent flowers at least.”

  “Not them.” It is just the meanest kind of disrespect, Reef thought, and fuck all these people. He happened at some point to look up the hillside and saw what he was pretty sure were elements of the Jimmy Drop gang up along the Tomboy Road with their hats off, maybe observing a moment of silence but knowing them more likely bickering about something considerably less important than life and death.

  “Just as well, Ma, that it’s only us and not about to be one of these funerals where half the town turns out for a parade and a picnic. . . . He’s out of all ‘at now. He’ll be all right. And Frank and me will get the ones that did it.” Reef wished he could have sounded different. More confident. His sister, who’d just seemed to be drifting through it smoothly as if she was on wheels, wheels on track set down in the nights by crews nobody ever saw, her face behind the veil just a marble mask, now flashed him her usual don’t-believe-it-for-a-minute stare, and if it wasn’t for Mayva being there, he sure would’ve felt like calling her on it. Seeing ‘s how little she’d cared for Webb when he was alive.

  Which didn’t mean she wasn’t shaken, and shamed, by the force of her mother’s grief. Lake was back from Silverton, and for good, even Reef could see that. She wore a shapely black dress that must have set many a Blair Street lowlife’s pulses to throbbing but was now dedicated to memorializing her father. And he’d bet everything on the table that this would be the last time she was fixing to wear it. She saw him staring. “Least you two’re wearing black hats,” she said, “that’s somethin.”

  “You can do the mourning,” Reef said, “me and Frank will what Joe Hill calls organize. There’s this other business to be done. Idea is to keep you and Kit clear of it, and the less you all know, the better.”

  “How about Mamma, and the less she knows?”

  “Don’t want her to be worrying.”

  “Thoughtful of you. Don’t it occur to either of you she might want her children alive, instead of out looking for trouble?”

  “We’re alive.”

  “How long before she’ll see you or Frank again? You’re off into that old world o’ family vengeance, it has its claim on you now, you’re both out lost in country you don’t know how to get back in from. What do you think it’s like for her, that kind of ‘business’? Might just as well be dead already, the both of you. Damn fools.”

  He didn’t know yet what was behind that passionate speech, nobody did, not quite yet.

  BACK AT THE grimly daylit parlor of the house, “Here,” Mayva said to Reef. “You better have this.” It was Webb’s old twelve-shot Confederate Colt.

  “Don’t feel right,” Reef handing it on to Frank. “Yours if you want it, Francis.”

  “Well but I already have my .38 Special and all.”

  “But that’s only five shots, and the way you shoot, half those are wasted, hell, you’ll need at least twelve, Francis, just to get sighted in.”

  “Well if it’s too heavy for you to handle, Reefer, I can sure understand, no shame in that.”

  “But I do know it always made you nervous,” Reef said, taking it back.

  This went on for a while. Mayva watched, puffing on her old pipe, her eyes switching back and forth between them as if in motherly despair. She knew they wanted her to squint at them through the smoke and shake her head the way she always had, What am I supposed to do with these two? When they heard the train coming up the valley, Frank took his hat and left the gun on the kitchen table. He and Reef had a fast, silent look, just long enough to make sure what they both knew, that it was really Mayva’s and would stay with her. And sure enough, a couple of months later Lake heard shots from the town dump and had a look, and there was her mother, striking fear into the hearts of rats who’d left the mines after Repeal—at least making them wonder if life up here on the surface was worth it.

  BACK IN NOCHECITA, back from burying Webb at Telluride, blowing up a few company outbuildings on the way back just for drill, equipment sheds reduced to sawdust, electric power junctions that filled the skies with green disaster, Reef found Stray in a peculiarly serene state. The Mormons and Christers had all left town, the baby was imminent, Reef was sensible enough to understand that right now all he needed to do was keep silent and let whatever’d been under way without him just keep on like that.

  When the baby was born, a boy, Jesse, Reef stood drinks all around at the Double Jack, and somebody said, “No more hellraisin for you, Reef, time to start bein careful,” and he found himself turning back to that in the night watches that followed, wondering if it was strictly true.

  Careful? Made sense up to a point. Maybe more sense down someplace like Denver than up here. You could step careful as a damn goat up here and they’d still gun you down, careful didn’t buy you a minute extra on your time allotted. So as long as being in the Union you were good as dead anyway, there was the wider duty, out in the world at large, to attend to.

  Webb was more than he’d ever seemed to be, had to’ve been or they wouldn’t have had him killed. Reef might not be able to pull off successfully the guise of a respectable wife-and-kids working stiff the way Webb had. Meant he’d either have to level with Stray or pretend to be up to his old rounder ways so she’d think when he disappeared for days at a time that it was ramblin and gamblin and nothing serious.

  One of those cases where you couldn’t just fold. God, across the table of Fate, was picking His nose, scratching His ear, laying on tells with a prodigal hand, it had to mean something, and a faulty guess would be better than none. But Reef would find his way. One more or less clumsy step at a time as he always did, Reef would see his way slowly into it, why the life of his father was taken, why the owners could not allow it to go on, not up there, not in this country harrowed by crimes in the name of gold, swept over by unquiet spirits from the Coeur d’Alene and Cripple and Telluride who came in the rain and the blinding northers and lightning-glazed mountain faces, came forlornly to stare, all those used and imperiled and run into exile, Webb’s dead, Webb’s casualties, Webb’s own losers he could never have abandoned. . . .

  And Webb’s ghost, meantime, Webb’s busy ghost, went bustling to and fro doing what he could to keep things hopping.

  Home at last!” cried Neville, “home from innocent, all but oppressively wholesome America!”

  “Back to the delights of Evil!” Nigel added, with every appearance of relief.

  Lew had learned by now to keep a straight face around talk like this. In his work—his former job—he had managed a run-in or two with what you’d have to call Evil, in noonlit upper stories as likely as down some desperate arroyos at the end of day, and he was pretty certain neither of these boys had ever been close enough even to get goosebumps off of it, for all the time they spent, or if you like wasted, out looking for it. On the rare occasions they might actually find the article, he guessed, they
would have little clue about what to do besides spin around and around, trying to see what it was that had sunk its pearly whites—or in Evil’s case, mossy greens—into their more or less ambushed keesters.

  The T.W.I.T., or True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys, were headquartered in London at Chunxton Crescent, in that ambiguous stretch north of Hyde Park known then as Tyburnia, in a mansion attributed to Sir John Soane, which during its latest tenancy, dating roughly from the departure of Madam Blavatsky from the material plane, had become a resort for all manner of sandaled pilgrims, tweed-smocked visionaries, and devotees of the nut cutlet. At this most curious of moments in the history of spiritual inquiry, in keen competition with the Theosophical Society and its post-Blavatskian fragments, as well as the Society for Psychical Research, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and other arrangements for seekers of certitude, of whom there seemed an ever-increasing supply as the century had rushed to its end and through some unthinkable zero and on out the other side, the T.W.I.T. had chosen to follow a secret neo-Pythagorean way of knowledge, based upon the sacred Tetractys,