After Webb was buried, and Reef had gone his way, Frank, fearing for his own safety, had glided back down to Golden on winds of inertia, considered asking around to see if anybody was looking for him but thought he knew the answer to that one. Being at the time young and unaware of how to proceed on anything but nerve, he stayed just long enough to gather up his gear and get on the electric down to Denver. Over the next year, he went through a number of disguises, including mustaches, beards, haircuts from some of the city’s finest hotel barbers, but about all that stuck was a change of hat to something more narrow-brim and with the deepening color of passage down what seemed to him was becoming a long, embittered trail.
Soon he began to notice a pattern of approach—middle-ranking managers, urban in style with something also of the look of mine inspectors to them, offering to buy drinks, sliding into some vacant seat at a card table, eyeing Frank as if he was supposed to know what they meant. At first he thought it was about Reef, that these customers had been hired to track his brother down and wanted information. But that rapidly turned out not to be the case. One way or another, the conversation, when there was any, came around to matters of employment. Was he working, and who would that be for, and was he looking to change jobs and so forth. Slowly—not being much in the intuitive line, as at least a dozen women by then were happy to remind him—he figured out that these men were repping for the Vibe Corp. or its dependencies, and so his immediate response was invariably fuck this, though he was careful never to betray any annoyance. “All fairly jake as of right now,” he learned to smile with every appearance of sincerity. “You have a business card? Soon as the need arises I’ll sure be in touch.”
Cautiously, he began to ask around about Webb’s case. Not much luck. Not even much of a case anymore. Kept trying the Miners’ Federation office for a while, but nobody would admit to knowing anything, and it hadn’t taken Frank long to wear out his welcome.
Strange. You’d think they’d’ve been a little more forthcoming up on Arapahoe, but seemed like they had their important chores to run, time flowed along, new troubles every day, too many to keep up with, was how they saw it.
He was no detective, and had not spent much time investigating, but from keeping his ears open up and down the street, he could not escape a suggestion that Vibe Corp., who had spirited away his kid brother Kit, was also behind Webb Traverse’s murder. This complicated for him any question of a serious future as a mine engineer, at least in the U.S. Maybe he’d have to think about going abroad. Every hiring office Frank walked into this side of the Rockies had heard of him, knew of Scarsdale Vibe’s ample-spirited offers, and wondered why Frank wasn’t at least a Vibe regional executive by now. How was Frank supposed to explain? The man might have had my father wiped away, carelessly as a wet ring on a bar top, and I am reluctant to accept his charity? Of course they thought they knew the whole story already, and were stunned at the Christian daring of Scarsdale’s gesture to Frank, seeing that custom and usage in the mountains at this time would have been to see him drygulched as swiftly as possible, just in case of Anarchism in the blood or something like that. The New York industrialist was rising above these sordid matters of kinship and revenge—why couldn’t Frank? Who could understand ingratitude like that? And what they could not understand, they were not about to hire any source of.
It sure soured him on silver and gold. He found himself after a while avoiding them altogether. He told himself he was just being practical. He’d seen too much misery from the ups and downs of both metals, especially after Repeal in ‘93. The table of elements was full of other possibilities, “the weeds of mineralogy,” as one of his professors used to say, “just sitting there, part of the Creation, waiting for somebody to figure out how they can be made useful.”
Which was how he began to work with less glamorous elements, such as zinc, and as a result spending more time in Lake County than he’d ever expected to.
Leadville was well past its glory days, into the post-Repeal era, no longer Haw Tabor’s town, though the widow, already legend, still kept holed up at the Matchless workings with a firearm she had no hesitation in discharging at anybody who came too close, and there lingered some old numinous, center-of-the-world willingness to raise species of hell that hadn’t been invented yet. Interest had shifted from silver over to zinc—there was a God-honest Zinc Rush on, in fact, the best-priced ore to be dug out of there at the moment, surpassing the value of gold and silver combined. Seems some bright engineer had invented a way to reprocess the waste heaps from those old pre-Repeal silver mines, so that some concentrating mills were realizing zinc content as high as 45 percent. The procedure up here with ordinary local zinc blende had been straightforward—first you got the sulfur to go off by roasting the blende to zinc oxide, and then you reduced the oxide to zinc metal. But the slag in Leadville, towering in black heaps all over town, not to mention covering the streets and alleyways, was an exotic and largely unknown mixture of drosses, scums, glances, pyrites, and other compounds of copper, arsenic, antimony, bismuth, and something the miners were calling “Molly-be-damned”—different elements came off at different temperatures, so there were matters of distillation to address. They loomed out there in black mystery above the bright interiors and the faro players and insatiably desired girls, and sometimes shadowy figures could be seen kneeling, reaching out to touch one of these slag piles, reverently as if, like some counter-Christian Eucharist, it represented the body of an otherworldly beloved.
“Little like alchemy,” it seemed to Wren Provenance, a girl anthropologist a year out of Radcliffe College back east, with whom Frank had become unexpectedly entangled.
“Yeahp. Worthless sludge into foldin money.”
“Centuries from now those heaps will still be there, and somebody will happen along and stare up at them and begin to wonder. Maybe take them for structures of some kind, government buildings, temples, maybe. Ancient mysteries.”
“Pyramids of Egypt.”
She nodded. “That shape is common to a lot of the old cultures. Secret wisdom—different details, but the structure underneath is always the same.”
Frank and Wren had met up one Saturday night in Denver in a variety saloon. A Negro spoons-and-banjo act was racketing around up front. She was with some college acquaintances, including a couple of Harvard wisemen who wanted to go visit a Chinese saloon over in the Sons of Heaven section of town. To Frank’s delight, Wren declined. “And don’t forget to try some of that Bear Paw in Octopus Ink, fellas!” He stood waving till the cab disappeared around the corner.
When they were alone, “What I really need to see,” Wren confided, “is the Denver Row, and a house of ill fame. Will you escort me?”
“A what? Oh.” Frank recognizing in her hazel eyes a spark that he should know better by now than to be encouraging, and behind which was an inclination to shadow he could’ve even then been paying more attention to. “And . . . that’s strictly for scientific reasons, o’ course.”
“Anthropological as can be.”
Off they went to Market Street and Jennie Rogers’s House of Mirrors. Wren was immediately surrounded by half a parlorful of girls and gently led upstairs. A little later he happened to look in a doorway, and there she was, not much on, what there was all black, tightly laced, stockings askew, standing in an open polyhedral of mirrors, examining herself from all the angles available. Transformed.
“Interesting turnout, Wren.”
“All that riding and climbing and outdoor activities, my, it’s a relief to be back in stays again.”
The girls were amused.
“Look at this, you’ve got him going now.”
“Mind if we borrow him for a while?”
“Oh,” as he was dragged away, “but I thought we were fixin to—” unable to stop staring, or as he might have put it “gazing,” at the intriguingly gussied-up Wren for as long as he could.
“Don’t worry, Frankie, she’ll be here when you get back,” sai
d Finesse.
“We’ll take good care of her,” Fame assured him with a wicked smile. Which got Wren to detach from her self-admiring long enough to turn and seek the girls’ eyes, with one of those looks of insincere dismay you saw in erotic illustrations from time to time.
When she showed up again she was in yet another scandalous change of underlinen, holding a bourbon bottle by the neck and puffing on the stub of a Havana. A dress cavalry helmet with a gold eagle, braid, and tassels rested at some careless angle among her untended tresses.
“Havin’ fun?”
Her upper lids would not take the trouble to allow much sparkling eyeball to flash his way. She spoke in a high drawl from which the effects of opium, he guessed, couldn’t be ruled out altogether. “Fascinating material . . . volumes. . . . Some of these stockmen, my goodness.” Then, seeming to recognize him, she smiled slowly. “Yes and your name came up.”
“Uh-oh.”
“They said you’re far too sweet.”
“Me? They just never see me in a bad mood, ‘s all. Some kind of red streaks on your stockings there.”
“Lip rouge.” If he was expecting a blush from her, he didn’t get one. Instead she looked boldly back, eye to eye. He noticed the scarlet contours of her own lips were blurred and the kohl around her eyes had run down here and there, as if from tears.
Fame came sashaying in, in some incomprehensible though wicked peignoir, glided up behind, slipped an arm around Wren’s waist, and the girls snuggled together in an undeniably charming tableau.
“Just can’t stay away,” Wren was whispering, “ . . . you’ve simply ruined me for everyday bourgeois sexuality. Whatever am I to do?”
HAVING COME WEST to search for Aztlán, the mythic ancestral home of the Mexican people, which she believed to be located somewhere around the Four Corners, Wren found more than she’d expected to. Maybe too much. She had the look of a trooper back off a long campaign in which more than once matters of life and death had arisen—her own, those of others, eventually a mingling of selves that had her insomniac and, to Frank at least, making no sense beyond occasionally scaring the shit out of him.
He had a passing acquaintance with the Mancos and McElmo country, but not much notion of its ancient past.
“Well, Frank, it’s quite . . . unhappy is the best you could call it.”
“You don’t just mean Mormons, I guess.”
“Hallucinatory country and cruel, not hard to understand that Mormons might have found it congenial enough to want to settle, but this is much older—thirteenth century anyway. There were perhaps tens of thousands of people back then, living all through that region, prosperous and creative, when suddenly, within one generation—overnight as these things go—they fled, in every appearance of panic terror, went up the steepest cliffsides they could find and built as securely as they knew how defenses against . . . well, something.”
“There’s some Ute stories,” Frank recalled, “other tribes is how I always heard it.”
She shrugged. “Incursion from the north—foragers at first, then all-out invasion forces who brought their stock and families with them. Maybe so. But this is something else, beyond that. Here.” She had piles of photographs, Brownie snapshots most of them, taken up and down the canyons, including, carved into the rock, images of creatures unfamiliar to Frank.
“What in the . . . hay-ull?” Painted as well as carved here were people with wings . . . human-looking bodies with snake and lizard heads, above them unreadable apparitions, trailing what might have been fire in what might have been the sky.
“Yes.” He looked over, and whatever it was there in her eyes now, he wished he’d seen it sooner.
“What?”
“We don’t know. Some of us suspect, but it’s too terrible. Not to mention . . .” She found, stared at, reluctantly handed over one of the plates.
“Old bones.”
“Human bones. And if you look carefully, the longer ones have been deliberately broken . . . broken into. As if for the marrow inside.”
“Cannibals, cannibal Indians?”
She shrugged, her face showing the onset of a sorrow he knew he couldn’t help much with. “Nobody knows. Harvard professors, you’d expect more . . . but all they do is theorize and argue. The people who fled to the cliffs might even have done this to themselves. Out of fear. Something frightened them so much that this might’ve been the only way they knew to keep it from them.”
“It wanted them to—”
“They may never have known what it . . . ‘wanted.’ Not really.”
“And you—” It was all he could do not to reach for her, gather her into some kind of perimeter. But the moisture in her eyes was shining like steel, not dew, and nothing about her trembled.
“I was out there for a year. Too long. After a while it seeps into you. Somebody else now is writing up the report, career expectations will be a factor. I’m just one of the hired hands that dug in the dirt, climbed those red rocks and benches and carried the gear, got infected with the insanity of the place, and they know enough now not to pay any attention to hysterical girl graduates. It all has to be dated more closely than it is anyway. Whoever the people were, they only lasted a few years up in those cliffs. After that, nobody knows. Maybe they kept going. If they were the same ones who made the exodus southward from Aztlán and became the Aztecs, that might have something to do with those human sacrifices the Aztecs became famous for.”
ONE NIGHT THEY WERE on Seventeenth Street again. Bartenders were busy with slings, sours, highballs, and fizzes. Republicans and Democrats got into political discussions which proceeded inevitably to fisticuffs. Wren was obliged to remove a real-estate agent’s hand from her bosom with a steak fork.
At the Albany the bar mirror was legendary, 110 feet long, an animated mural of Denver’s nighttime history. “Like readin the paper,” said Booth Virbling, a crime reporter of Frank’s acquaintance.
“Except for Booth here’s stuff, which tends to be more back in the toilet area,” Frank explained. “First time I seen you outside of Gahan’s, what’s up?”
“City politics the way it is, sure to be a flagrant atrocity any minute. Oh and somebody’s been around looking for you.”
“I owe em money?”
A cautionary glance at Wren.
“She knows everything, Booth, what is it?”
“One of Bulkley Wells’s people.”
“All the way down from Telluride just to visit?”
“You weren’t fixin to go up there, I hope.”
“Pretty dangerous town these days is it, Booth?”
“Your brother thought so.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Somebody did, out by Glenwood Springs. Reef was flush, but downhearted. All I heard.” He spotted a principal witness in last year’s notorious Ice Saw murder trial and went over to have a chat.
“What was that about?” Wren said.
Long habits of holding back information, especially from young women one was currently sparking, usually kicked in about this point. Once, out in the Uncompahgre Plateau, Frank, riding back from Gunnison or someplace, spotted a single storm cloud, dark and compact, miles away, and knew despite the prevailing sunlight and immensity of sky that no matter how he changed his direction now, he was going to cross paths with that cloud, and sure enough, less than an hour later it all grew dark as midnight, and there he was getting soaked and frozen and being momentarily deafened by lightning bolts that hit blasting all around, leaning along his horse’s neck to reassure him that everything was just peachy, though being a range horse the critter had seen far worse and was presently trying to reassure Frank. Tonight in the Albany, Frank could see that Wren had arrived exactly here after unnumbered miles and Stations of the Cross—in the light off the great mirror her face was a queerly unshadowed celestial blue, that of a searcher, it seemed to Frank, who had come as far as she must to ask what he would be least willing to answer. He understood that there were
such presences abroad in the world, and that although one may live an entire life without intersecting one, if it should happen, it became a solemn obligation to speak when spoken to.
He exhaled at length, looked her flat in the eye. “Wouldn’t be my job customarily, see, it’s for Reef to do, but there’s been no word for a while, and well, Glenwood Springs, maybe he’s been chased off of this and he’s back to dealing faro someplace, showing hurdy girls the sagebrush in the moonlight, no argument, but there’s just a point where it moves on to the next in line, and then if I don’t do it either, then somebody’ll have to go fetch Kit back out of that East Coast collegekid life he’s all involved in, you’d know better’n me, but I’d really rather see Kit spared that trouble, for he’s a good youngster but a bad shot, and in the real likely event they got him first, why, that’d be one more crime to square, see, and the job likely wouldn’t ever get done.”
She was gazing at him more directly than usual. “Where are they likely to be, then? Your gunmen.”
“Best I’ve been able to learn is it’s a pair of seminotorious gunnies named Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, who likely hired on with the Mine Owners Association up in Telluride. And now according to old Booth, somebody from up there says they want to see me. Connection, you think?”
“Of course that’s where you’re headed.”
“It’s the last place I saw my Ma and my sister. Maybe they’re still up there. I ought to have a look in anyway.”
“It’s a son and brother’s job. Speaking anthropologically.”
“How about you, were you fixin to go back down the McElmo?”
She frowned. “Not much future there. The place to be now, I’m told, is the South Pacific islands.”
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