Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Mayva pulled her old green canvas club satchel out from under the bed and started putting things in it. Carefully, like any other chore. Her briar pipe and tobacco pouch, baby tintypes of all the kids, an extra shirtwaist, a shawl, a beat-up little Bible. Didn’t take long. Her whole life, and no more than this to show. Well. She looked up at last, her face full of an incalculable sorrow. “Same as if you killed your father too. Not one Goddamned bit of difference.”

  “What did you say?”

  Mayva took her bag and went to the door. “You’ll reap what you sow.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “You don’t care.”

  “The train won’t be in till tomorrow.”

  “Then I’ll wait till it comes. I won’t spend another night in this room with you. I’ll sleep down there to the depot. And everbody can look. Look at the damn fool old woman.”

  And she was gone, and Lake sat there with her legs trembling but not a thought in her head, and didn’t go after her, and though next day she heard the whistle and the racket when the train pulled in, and then later when it backed away down the valley, she didn’t ever see her mother again.

  “THIS . . . IS . . . DISGUSTING,” Sloat shaking his head, “I mean I’m fixin to lose my damn lunch in a minute.”

  “Can’t help it. You think I can help any of this?” Deuce risked throwing his runninmate a quick look, appealing for some understanding anyway.

  No dice. “Got-damn fool. This is all your story that you’re tellin yourself—listen, nobody gives a hair on a mine rat’s ass if you marry her or not, but if you fuck up and do that deed, what’s gonna happen once she learns the true facts of the case? if she don’t know it already. How you fixin to find even a minute’s sleep, her knowing it was you did her Daddy in?”

  “Guess I live with that.”

  “Not for long you don’t. You want to fuck her, fuck her, just don’t tell her nothin.”

  Sloat could not figure out what had happened to his partner. You’d’ve thought it was the first man he ever killed. Was it possible, even with those miners’ lives as cheap as jug whiskey and as easily disappeared down the gullet of days, that Deuce was being haunted by what he did, and that marrying Lake looked like some chance at putting that one ghost to rest, some way, God help him, of making it up to her?

  THE SNOWS LENGTHENED down the peaks, and soon the white-throated swift had taken wing, the shooting and headbreaking in town got worse, the military occupation began in November, and then deeper in the winter, in January, martial law was declared—the scabs came to work in relative peace, business was slow for a while in town but picked up, and Oleander Prudge made her debut as a nymph du pave, miners who thought they knew what was what coming away bewildered, shaking their heads. Despite her turnout, prim to the point of invisibility, her perpetual scowl, and her tendency to lecture her clients on points of personal grooming, somehow she quickly developed a following and before long was working out of a parlor house, from her own room, a corner room at that, with a lengthy view down the valley.

  Lake and Deuce were married over on the other side of the mountains in a prairie church whose steeple was visible for miles, at first nearly the color of the gray sky in which it figured as little more than a geometric episode, till at closer range the straight lines began to break up, soon slipping every which way, like lines of a face seen too close, haggard from the assaults of more winters than anybody still living in the area remembered the full count of, weathered beyond sorrowful, smelling like generations of mummified rodents, built of Engelmann spruce and receptive to sound as the inside of a parlor piano. Though scarcely any music ever came this way, the stray mouth-harpist or whistling drifter who did pass through the crooked doors found himself elevated into more grace than the acoustics of his way would have granted him so far.

  The officiating presence, a Swede migrated west from the Dakota country, wore gray robes heavy with dust, face indistinct as if shadowed beneath a hood, not so much reciting the well-known words as singing them, in a harmonic-minor drone this congenial soundbox smoothed into dark psalm. The bride wore a simple dress of pale blue albatross cloth, fine as a nun’s veil. Sloat was best man. At the big moment, he dropped the ring. Had to go on his knees in the dim light to look for where it might’ve rolled. “Well, how you doin down there?” Deuce called out after a while.

  “Better not get too close,” Sloat muttered.

  When the deed was done, as his wife was bringing out a glass bowlful of wedding punch and some cups, the preacher produced an accordion and, as if unable not to, played them a thunderous country waltz from österbybruk, where he and the missus both came from.

  “What’s in this?” Sloat was curious to know.

  “Everclear alcohol,” replied the preacher with an earnest face. “Hundred twenty proof? Some peach juice . . . certain Scandinavian ingredients.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Swedish aphrodisiac.”

  “Such as, um . . .?”

  “Its name? Ja, I could tell, you—but in Jämtland dialect it’s almost the same as ‘your moth-er’s vagina,’ so unless you say it exactly right, there’s always the chance of a misunderstanding with any Swedish folks might be in earshot. Trying to save you trouble down the line, sure.”

  SHE WAS A virgin bride. At the moment of surrendering, she found herself wishing only to become the wind. To feel herself refined to an edge, an invisible edge of unknown length, to enter the realm of air forever in motion over the broken land. Child of the storm.

  THEY WOKE UP in the middle of the night. She moved spooned in his embrace, feeling no need to turn to exchange a look, communicating by way of her unexpectedly articulate ass.

  “Damn. We’re really married, ain’t we.”

  “There’s married,” she supposed, “and there’s respectably married. Now we’re on the subject, where’d that thing get to—oh, there we go. . . .”

  “Damn, Lake.”

  INSIDE OF A week of the wedding night, Deuce and Sloat thought they’d go off on a brief tour of the region.

  “You don’t mind do you my dove?”

  “What—”

  “See some more that coffee,” Sloat growled. Next thing she knew, they were out the door and across the ravine, and they weren’t back by nightfall or in fact for another week, and when they did show up again it was in a storm of hoarse, high-pitched laughter she could hear from half a mile away that neither Deuce nor Sloat could control. They came in and sat there laughing, their eyes, dark from no sleep, drilling into her, not about to look elsewhere. She didn’t feel frightened so much as sick.

  When they quieted down enough, “You here for a while,” she was able to ask, “or are you just back lookin to change your socks?” Which started them off again.

  From then on, just about every day had its post-nuptial kick-up. Sloat had taken up residence, it seemed, and the question inexorably arose of his interest in the bride. “Go right on ahead pard,” Deuce offered one night, “she’s all yours. I could use a break about now.”

  “Oh now Deuce, only sidekicks get sloppy seconds, everbody knows that, and I ain’t your damned sidekick.”

  “You turning this down, Sloat? maybe it ain’t exactly Market Street material, but take a look here, it’s still a nice package.”

  “She starts shiverin if I come closer’n ten foot of her. Is she afraid of me?”

  “Ask her, why don’t you?”

  “You afraid of me, missus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well that’s somethin I suppose.”

  Lake did not pick up right away that this was Sloat’s notion of love-play. In fact, by the time she did figure it out, he’d be long gone.

  But until then, oh how bad of a badgirl was she turning out to be here? Next thing she knew, she was naked and they were all on a bed upstairs in the Elk Hotel in Colorado Springs.

  “Not since ‘at Chinese one in Reno,” Deuce was saying, “remember her?”

&nb
sp; “Mmm! that sideways pussy!”

  “Be serious,” said Lake.

  “Swear, had to get all into kind of a X shape, here, we’ll show you—”

  They kept her naked most of the time. Sometimes they put a pair of leather side hobbles on her to keep her attached to the bed, but enough chain so she could move. Not that they had to, she was always ready to oblige. After she had given in to the notion of being doubled up on, she found herself going out of her way looking for it, usually one in her mouth, the other from behind, sometimes in her ass, so she got quickly used to tasting her own fluids mixed with shit. “Guess this makes me really bad,” she said in a quiet voice, looking up at Deuce.

  Sloat grabbed a handful of her hair and forced her face back onto her lawfully wedded’s cock. “That ain’t what makes you really bad, fuckmouth whore, what makes you really bad is marryin my li’l compadre here.”

  “She got her a twofer,” Deuce laughed. “Badgirl shit pays off.”

  She discovered in herself unsuspected talents for indirectness and flirtation, because she had to be careful never to make anything seem like a demand, around these two that could wreck a mood faster than monthly bleeding. Fact, Deuce and Sloat were the touchiest badmen she’d ever run across, anything could put them out of the mood. Streetcars in the street, one of them whistling the wrong tune. Only once had she been incautious enough to suggest, “Why don’t you boys just leave me out of it and do each other for a change?” and the shock and outrage in the place, why you could feel it for days.

  Sloat was partial to the color green. He kept showing up with these peculiar items, nearly always stolen from someplace, that he wanted her to wear, gauntlets, baby bonnets, men’s bicycle hose, hats trimmed and plain, didn’t matter long as it was some shade of green.

  “Deuce, your partner is really crazy.”

  “Yehp, never could see green, bein a mauve man myself,” producing a grease-blotched gingham apron checked in approximately that color. “You mind?”

  They took her down to the Four Corners and put her so one of her knees was in Utah, one in Colorado, one elbow in Arizona and the other in New Mexico—with the point of insertion exactly above the mythical crosshairs itself. Then rotated her all four different ways. Her small features pressed into the dirt, the blood-red dirt.

  FOR A WHILE THEN, it settled into a three-party household of dubious coziness. The sidekicks appeared unwilling to break up their partnership just yet, and Lake was not about to let either of them ride off up the plateau any further than rifle range. Deuce snored, even when he was awake. Sloat did not think much of bathing, in fact he had a superstitious horror of the act, believing that if he so much as washed his hands, bad luck was sure to come his way. Lake sweet-talked him into it only once, and that night at the supper table something hit the roof with a huge bang, causing Sloat’s soup to splash all over. “There! You see? You think I’m crazy now?”

  “Goodness,” said Lake, “it’s a marmot.”

  “SHE’S ALL RIGHT,” Deuce confessed to his partner, “for bein such a pain in the ol’ bunghole.”

  “It is your penance, huevón,” Sloat going into his comical Mexican accent.

  “Catholic stuff. Nothin I can understand but thanks anyway.”

  “Don’t matter what you understand, even what you think. If you think, pinche cabrón. You slay, you pay.”

  “Or get away.” Deuce with a distant smile, as if pleased at his whole situation. Sloat felt warning signs sure as a telegrapher getting word of a midnight train bearing down on the depot, full of dynamiters with mischief in mind.

  One day in Telluride, Deuce was summoned to the offices of the same company rep who’d hired him to take care of Webb, what seemed now like years ago. “The dynamite outrages continue, Mr. Kindred.”

  Deuce didn’t have to pretend to be puzzled. “Ol’ Webb wa’n’ the only anarchist in the San Juans, was he?”

  “These all have the same modus, dynamite hooked up to a two-dollar Ingersoll, same hour, just before dawn . . . he even bombs by the moon, just like Traverse did.”

  Deuce shrugged. “Could be an apprentice of his.”

  “My principals feel they must ask you a question of some delicacy. Please don’t take it the wrong way.” Deuce saw it coming but stood easy, waiting. “Are you sure you got him, Mr. Kindred?”

  “They put him in the miners’ graveyard in Telluride, go dig him up and see.”

  “Proper identification might no longer be feasible.”

  “So you’re sayin I just shot some ringer? first saloon bum I run into? Now the owners want their money back, that it?”

  “Did I say that? Oh dear. We knew you’d be angry.”

  “Fuckin A John I’m angry, who the fuck do you think you are—”

  Had to hand it to this corporate stooge, he didn’t seem to care much about who he provoked. “There’s also this matter of your personal relations with the subject’s daughter—”

  Deuce was in screaming mid-leap, feet off the floor and hands only inches from the rep’s throat, when he was surprised by the appearance of a double-action .32 from some rig concealed beneath his target’s store-bought suit, not to mention another weapon in the hands of a confederate whom the momentarily insane Deuce had failed even to notice. The rep skipped nimbly out of the way and Deuce crashed into a typewriter cabinet.

  “We are not vengeful people ordinarily,” murmured the rep. “The possibility of a copy-cat bomber had of course occurred to us. We will continue to give you the benefit of the doubt until our inquiries are done. Should it prove, however, that you’ve accepted payment for work not performed, well. Who knows then what form our resentment might take.”

  WELL, it could have been the cactus that mysteriously exploded next to his head one day down in Cortez, or maybe the ace of spades that arrived in the mail soon after that, but at some point Deuce had to gently start breaking it to Lake that there just might be some people after him.

  She could still exhibit strange patches of innocence. She imagined it was money he owed, or something short-term like that, minor trouble, over before long.

  “Who are they, Deuce? Is it something from back in Butte?”

  He couldn’t allow himself to go slack, especially when her eyes were guileless as this. “Not likely,” he pretended to explain, “boys up there tend to be fairly thoughtful about takin’ offense—too many insult opportunities, sufficient unto the day and so forth. No, if you can make it past the city limits, why all’s forgiven in Butte.”

  “Then . . .”

  “Listen, I’m pretty sure whoever it is, it’s the owners up here, that they’re workin for.”

  “But—” She frowned. She was trying to understand, wanted at least to look like she was, but it was beginning to feel like being in a skip that had just slipped its cable, heading for the center of the Earth. “Been doin somethin you shouldn’t, Deuce?”

  “Maybe. Nothin that wasn’t done on their orders.”

  “A loyal trooper. Why would they send somebody after you, then?”

  He looked at her steadily, widening his eyes as if asking, Haven’t you figured this out yet? “Sometimes,” he finally said, “they don’t like to leave even the chance open that somebody might, later on, well say somethin’.”

  Soon word came in, unconfirmed but promissory as the first snow of autumn, that the owners had subbed the job out to Utahans, some really lethal ex-Danite posse riders who were finding their years of retirement not eventful enough. Old boys who liked to pack “Avenging Angels,” which were typically Civil War-vintage Colts with the barrels sawed off short. Geezers on furlough from Hell. “Long-distance shooting ain’t on their list of occupational skills, they don’t mind some close-up work.”

  “You scared, Deuce?” Sloat inquired.

  “Damn straight I am, if you had the brains you ‘s born with, you’d be too.”

  “What do we do? Run away?”

  “‘We’?”

  “I’m supposed
to wait for them to show up? O.K. if I pack a shotgun or something? Couple of shells for it, maybe?”

  “They’re not looking for you, Sloat.”

  “Maybe they’ll think I know where you went.”

  Deuce was too scared himself to take much account of what was there in Sloat’s eyes staring him flat in the face. Later it was going to haunt him, for there would come a period where Deuce was visited by the darkest sorts of suspicions about his old runninmate. If that rep for example thought to meet with Deuce, why shouldn’t he’ve done the same with Sloat, maybe with more fruitful results? Maybe Sloat, so afraid for his life, had made some kind of deal with the pursuers. “Sure,” Deuce could hear him confessing, “I wanted to kill the old bastard right away, but Deuce—I don’t want to go blamin now, but he might’ve lost his nerve some . . . don’t know, somehow one morning, we woke up, over in the Dolores there, and Traverse was gone, and Deuce didn’t look that upset, and we agreed to tell you folks the old man was dead. But he wasn’t, understand what I’m saying?”

  “I think we grasp your import, Mr. Fresno.”

  IN ANY CASE it was all getting too complicated to last, and the day finally did come when Sloat rode off up the trail headed vaguely south, the air unnaturally still that day, the dust he raised behind him refusing to settle, only growing thicker, until it seemed he had transmogrified into a creature of dust miles long, crawling away, Deuce leaning on the fence watching the dusty departure for the better part of an hour, silent for days after. . . .

  With just the two of them now, Deuce went into a period of no sleep or too little. Kept waking up all through the night. Woke once one midnight with no sources of light in the sky, some malodorous evil heap of slag from the processing of moon-chaste silver their night’s bed, to see close beside him a luminous face suspended above where her own would have to be, would have to, for this spectre floated high, too high, off the ground, or where the ground was supposed to be. Nor was it exactly her face, either. Because it did not reflect light, as from skies or hearthsides, but emitted its own, was marked by that clear sense of a resource being recklessly spent, with nothing gotten back—an expression, you’d say, of sacrifice. Deuce didn’t like that, didn’t want sacrifices, for they were never in his plans, nor in any cards he knew how to play.