Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Go specialize in cannibals, huh.”

  “That sounds funnier than it is.”

  Not really wanting to ask, “You want to come up to Telluride with me?”

  Well, technically she was smiling, though it didn’t quite get as far as her eyes. “I guess not, Frank.”

  He had the grace not to look too relieved. “I could’ve used the extra brain muscle was all I meant, for it’s sure a two-faced town, deadfalls everyplace you step, ugliest and longest-runnin poker game in Creation, too much money changing hands too fast, and you never know who to trust.”

  “You weren’t intending to go galloping in waving a pistol and demanding information, I hope.”

  “Why, how do you usually do it?”

  “If it were I? Pretend I’m there on business, use a different name—the men you’re after might have made enemies in town, maybe even among the people they were working for. If you kept your ears open, sooner or later you’d hear something.”

  “What you folks call ‘research,’ right? Hit all the saloons, cribs, card rooms, and parlor houses, hell, I couldn’t keep that up more’n a week before somebody’d be on to me.”

  “Maybe you’re a better actor than you think.”

  “Means staying sober for longer than I’d like.”

  “In that case we’d better get in some drinking, wouldn’t you say?”

  After passengers for Telluride had changed at Ridgway Junction, the little stub train climbed up over Dallas Divide and rolled down again to Placerville and the final haul up the valley of the San Miguel, through sunset and into the uncertainties of night. The high-country darkness, with little to break it but starlight off the flow of some creek or a fugitive lamp or hearth up in a miner’s cabin, soon gave way to an unholy radiance ahead, in the east. It was the wrong color for a fire, and daybreak was out of the question, though the end of the world remained a possibility. It was in fact the famous electric street-lighting of Telluride, first city in the U.S. to be so lit, and Frank recalled that his kid brother, Kit, had worked for a while on the project of bringing the electricity for it up from Ilium Valley.

  The great peaks first sighted yesterday across the Uncompahgre Plateau, snaggletoothing in a long line up over the southern horizon, now announced themselves at every hand, fearsomely backlit, rearing before the gazes of the passengers, who had begun to rubberneck out at the spreading radiance, chattering like a carful of tourists from back east.

  Before long the trail up the valley beside the tracks was all bustling, like streets of a town—ore and supply wagons and strings of mules, the curses of the skinners riddling the evening, often in languages no one in the smoky little car recognized. Beside the tracks at one bend stood a local lunatic, who you could easily swear’d been there for years, screaming at the trains. “To-Hell-you-ride! Goin’ to-Hell-you-ride! Beware, ladies and gents! Inform your conductor! Warn the engineer! ain’t too late to turn back!” As meanwhile the luminosity ahead of them—whose sharp-edged beams now obscured many familiar stars—slowly grew brighter than the oil lamps inside the coach, and they came rolling into the simple narrowed grid of a town that seemed to’ve been shipped in all at the same time and squeezed onto the valley floor.

  Frank got off and walked past a line of drovers who’d come into town just to stand there and wait to see the train, which now sat breathing and cooling, as brake and footplate men came and went with wrenches, crowbars, grease guns, and oilcans.

  Ordinarily the most commonsensical of persons, now in this soulless incandescence he felt rushed in upon from every direction by omens of violence, all directed at him. Beards unknown for weeks to razor-steel, bared yellow eyeteeth, eyes rimmed in the hot flush of some unframable desire . . . Breaking into a sweat of apprehension, Frank understood that he was exactly where he should not be. He took a frantic look back toward the depot, but the train was already backing slowly away down the valley again. Like it or not, he had joined the company of those who follow their hunches directly to bottoms of barrels and ends of lines, up against this wall of thirteen- and fourteen-thousand-foot peaks and a level of hatred between the miners’ union and the mine owners, dangerously high even for Colorado, that you could smell.

  The other smell, which Frank found he had to light a cigar to cover up, was what the town got its name from, silver here being usually found along with telluride ore, and tellurium compounds, as Frank had learned at mine school, being among the most rotten-smelling in nature, worse than the worst boardinghouse fart ever let loose, that worked its way into your clothes, your skin, your spirit, believed here to rise by way of long-deserted drifts and stopes, from the everyday atmosphere of Hell itself.

  THAT EVENING AT SUPPER in the hotel, through the window, he watched a troop of state Guardsmen on their way down Mainstreet heading down the valley west of town. Before them, on foot, stumbled a small collection of dirty men in ragged clothes. Even in the beaten dirt, there was a measured intention to the massed hoofbeats that made Frank wonder about local opportunities for refuge, though other diners were taking it pretty nonchalant. It seemed this was a vagging bee, in which the troopers went after any out-of-work miners unlucky enough to be visible and ran them in for “vagrancy.”

  “Sure enough military in town now.”

  “And with old Hair-Trigger Bob out there on the prowl, hell he’s a one-man army already.”

  “Would that,” Frank pretended to inquire, “be the famous gunfighter Bob Meldrum? here in Telluride?”

  The men squinted at him, though in a friendly enough way, maybe because Frank’s failure to shave that morning was just able to dispel any impression of excessive greenness.

  “That’s him, joven. Terrible times in these mountains, and nothing about to ease off neither, any day soon. Bob’s just in his heaven, up here.”

  The others joined in. “He’s pretty deaf, but you don’t necessarily want to be yelling at him, nor try to guess which ear’d be better to aim for.”

  “Few things in life more dangerous than a deaf gunhand, ‘cause he’ll tend ever to err on the side of triggerplay, y’see, just in case he might’ve missed something specially provoking you might’ve said. . . .”

  “Time he got Joe Lambert up at Tomboy in the stamp mill? Perfect Meldrum conditions, stamps all going like the hammers of Hell, nobody could hear nothing to begin with. ‘Hands up’? Oh sure, thanks, Bob.”

  “Ask me, he hears just fine—only the way a snake does, through his skin.”

  “Hope you’ve brought something weightier than a pistol along, young fellow.”

  “All raggin’ aside, son, I hope whatever your business, you at least know the man to see in Telluride.”

  “Ellmore Disco is the name I got,” said Frank.

  “That’s him. You scheduled your appointment well ahead, I trust.”

  “Appointment . . .”

  “Looky here, another one thought he’d waltz right in.”

  “Lot of people need to see Ellmore, son.”

  Some believed Ellmore Disco was Mexican, some said he’d come from even farther away, Finland or someplace like that. Not overall what you’d call a natty dresser, he concentrated his few dudish impulses on headgear, tending to fancy black beavers with snakeskin bands and a pencil roll to the brim, that you had to send to Denver for and then wait a few months. The only people he was ever documented to’ve shot at were those who, either by word or deed, disrespected one of his hats, and some of that behavior had certainly been provoking enough. Once at C. Hall & Co. up at Leadville, in the days when it was still Leadville, while Ellmore was out taking a short piss break from a hitherto friendly game of Seven-Toed Pete, a frolicsome shift boss had thought to fill his Stetson, trustingly left unattended, with jellied turtle consommé, never a favorite of Ellmore’s to begin with. “Well, say!” he declared upon his return, “here’s an awkward situation!” The miner must have sensed something ominous in this, for he began to creep toward the exit. Next thing anybody knew, both parties
were out the door, and Chestnut Street had grown lively with detonation. The prankster escaped into open country at full express velocity, despite a flesh wound in the caboose and a couple of holes through the crown of his own hat, which seemed to’ve been a particular target of Ellmore’s wrath.

  Many having witnessed this tête-à-tête, at the next hat incident of course Ellmore was now obliged to behave the same way, if not a little worse. “Yet I’m basically a tranquil fellow,” he continued to insist, though nobody paid that much heed. To strangers he was Ellmore the Evil, to friends an engaging enough customer despite these hat-related spells, whose unpredictability did nothing to harm his success in business. These days you’d find E. Disco & Sons to be the thrivingest enterprise between Grand Junction and the Sangre de Cristos. The store’s secret seemed to be in its wide range of goods and prices, so that on any one day you were apt to observe managerial folk in lacquered silk hats milling on the floor with down-and-outers in ancient wool widebrims, all shiny with grease and battered from the day, looking for just about anything—bowlers and deerstalkers, mantillas, lorgnettes, walking sticks, ear trumpets, spats, driving-coats, watch-chain ornaments, chemisettes and combinations, Japanese parasols, electrical bathtubs, patent devices for thunderstorm-proof mayonnaise, cherry-pitting machines, drill bits and carbide lamps, ladies’ bandoliers rigged out expressly for .22-caliber rounds, not to mention bolts of jaconet, pompadour sateen, tartalan, dimity, grenadine, crepe lissé, plain, striped, or in Oriental prints direct from Liberty’s of London.

  Frank arrived around midmorning and found a skylit interior surrounded by a mezzanine, the ironwork painted a light greenish gray. Ellmore’s office was sort of cantilevered out over a main floor briskly echoing with shop-noise and giving off odors of fuller’s earth, gun oil, and local citizenry, who were everywhere.

  “The boss has been up to his ears in Texans all morning,” he was informed. “See over back of Horse Supplies there? you’ll find an entrance to the saloon next door, if time starts hanging heavy.” Frank noticed how this clerk, mild enough in manner, was packing one of the more gigantic-size models of Colt pistol.

  “Thanks, maybe I’ll just sit and breathe and let the altitude do it for me cheap.”

  The office, when he finally got nodded in, was oversupplied with saloon furniture in the Grand Rapids style, bought for haul-away costs down in Cortez after that notorious night the old Palace got shot up by the Four Corners Boys. A studio photo said to be of Mrs. Disco directed a lidded smile at visitors.

  Frank was gazing out the window over the busy main thoroughfare when Ellmore came barreling in.

  “Caught me admiring your view.”

  “You’re lucky to see it while it’s boom times, for when these veins give out at last, there’ll be nothing here to sell but the scenery, which means herds of visitors from places that don’t have any—Texans, for example. That side the street you’re lookin at’s what we call the Sunny Side, you see those little miners’ shacks over there? Too narrow for any but the undernourished to stand, let alone turn around, in—well someday each of those will be going for a million apiece U.S., maybe two, and up. Laugh if you like, everybody else does, one more Telluride jocularity, blame it on the altitude. But just wait. You heard it here first.”

  “Man of vision.”

  “Hell, Anarchists ain’t the only ones with ideas about the future.” Ellmore Disco did not appear to be of either Mexican or Finnish descent, at least not when, as now, he was smiling—more like music-hall Chinese, maybe, the way his eyes retreated into protective pouches, leaving the observer with a ruinous C major (“or as they say in this town, ‘A miner’”) octave on some abandoned upright, interrupted by a matched pair of winking gold canines that seemed longer and more saber-shaped than necessary, even for eating in mining-town steak houses.

  He gestured now with a coffee cup that seemed a constant companion and, so rapidly it could’ve been spoken in a single breath, announced, “As to an interview with Cap’n Wells—I am in sympathy, sir, though far from being the Cap’n’s social secretary, yet I know it’s a common enough visitor’s desire, for the fame of Bulkley Wells has reached around the globe, or damn near, this week for example a delegation in all the way from Tokyo, Japan, under orders from the Emperor himself, if ya don’t meet with the Captain, boys, why don’t bother coming back, basically, ‘n’ then o’ course it’s out with that wackyzacky they all pack for committin their hari-kari with, you can imagine how old Cal Rutan would enjoy an incident like ‘at in his county. But it’s how desperate some folks’ll get, and not always foreigners neither, so what I must know from you now, is how unhappy are you likely to become, sir, if, heaven forfend, you should somehow fail to see the Cap’n this trip.”

  After making sure Ellmore was done, Frank said, “Busy gent, I expect.”

  “You’d be needing the good offices of brother Meldrum, not to mention assorted of his pardners to get past. . . . You mentioned mine work—what kind do you do, any blasting ever come into it for instance?”

  “Some maybe.”

  They exchanged a cool, solid look then. Ellmore nodded, as if something had just occurred to him. “Nothing up on ground level though.”

  “First time I’ve been taken for a bomber.”

  “What’s this here, indignation?”

  “Not in particular. Kind of flattering, in its way.”

  “Engineer can’t plead he don’t know one end of a dynamite stick from the other, you can appreciate.”

  “Sets any number of dogs to barking. Sure. Should’ve just said pastry chef or something.”

  Ellmore spread his hands as if in innocence.

  Frank swatted away an imaginary fly. “To be straight with you sir, gold’s not much in my line, fact is I’m more of a zinc man, but—”

  “Zinc, well that case, no offense but why ain’t you up in Lake County, then?”

  “Thanks, Leadville’s a regular stop on my circuit ride, but this week, well what I’ve got’s a new system for concentrating gold ore—”

  “Only speaking for Tomboy and the Smuggler o’ course, but they’re content ‘th what they got. Stamp it down to mush, run it over some quicksilver on a plate, they say it works good.”

  “Amalgamation process. Traditional, pays off nicely enough. Sure. But now this set-up of mine—”

  “My guess is Cap’n Wells’ll ask how much will it cost, and then say no anyway. But you go have a word with Bob, who’s not that hard to find, though approachin’ him can be fraught with danger, and no time of day sad to say’s any better than another. . . . Oh look here, it’s lunchtime now. Come down to Lupita’s, where the menudo can’t be beat, she soaks em tripes in tequila overnight, is her secret,” pausing by a gigantic elk-antler hat rack with hats occupying every point, to select a gray sombrero with a band of silver medallions inlaid with lapis and jasper, Zuñi work by the look of it. “One of her secrets anyway. We’ll pick up my boy Loomis on the way,” who turned out to be the .44-packing clerk who had greeted Frank earlier.

  They exited out the back, into Pacific Street, threading their way among ox and mule teams, piano-box buggies and three-spring phaetons, buck-boards and big transfer wagons carrying loads between the train depot and the mines and shops, riders in dusters stiff and spectral with lowland alkali, Chinese pulling handcarts piled high with laundry—Ellmore waving, pointing his finger humorously pistol-like and occasionally grabbing hold of somebody to transact a moment’s business. Seemed everybody knew him. Most were careful to compliment him on his choice of hat.

  Lupita’s was on a patch of hardpan tucked in between Pacific and the San Miguel River, up here more like Creek, with a collection of plank tables and long benches painted a sky blue not observed anywhere else in town, and set beneath a rusted shed roof held up by aspen poles. Cooking aromas began a half mile before you got there. Gigantic chicharrones were piled like hides at a trading post. Ristras of dangerously dark purple chilies hung all about. At night they were
said to glow in the dark. Clerks and cashiers, birds of the night but newly risen, stockmen from down the valley, Mexican laborers streaked with brickdust, skinners waiting for the train sat alongside Negro newsboys and wives in their best hats, all indiscriminately filling the benches, grabbing and gobbling like miners in a mess hall, or standing waiting either for a seat or for one of the kids working in the kitchen to fill their lunch pails or paper sacks with chicken tortas, venison tamales, Lupita’s widely-known brain tacos, bottles of home-brewed beer, sixty-degree wedges of peach pie, so forth, to take along with them.

  Frank, expecting more of a motherly figure, was surprised at the arrival of the taquería’s fair eponym, a miniature tornado of gold-accented black and white, whirling in out of nowhere, pausing long enough to bestow Ellmore a kiss on the brow, which he scarcely had time to lift his hat for, and, just before vanishing again into the unstable weather of the kitchen in the back, singing over her shoulder, it seemed mischievously, “Por poco te faltó La Blanca.”

  “Oh, hay-ull,” Ellmore with the onset of a worried look, “there goes the rest of my day, what’s going on I don’t know about, Loomis, that’d bring her down into town?”

  “La Blanca,” it turned out, was a local name for “Hair-Trigger Bob” Meldrum’s wife—folks agreed it should be “wife,” given the dark history of Bob’s displeasure—named for a white horse of supernatural demeanor she was always seen to ride, usually sticking to trails up in Savage Basin and the high passes more invisible than not and known best to such as the infamous Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, keeping scrupulously her distance, lips so bloodless in that windy transparency they seemed to disappear, leaving her black-fringed eyes the only feature you’d recall after she’d gone by. According to visitors, Texans and so forth, horses didn’t even belong up on slopes like those, for the grades were too drastic, too sudden, too many thousand-foot chasms and the like, no way usually to switchback across what would often turn into plain damn faces of cliffs, obliging you to just get the deed done, straight down or straight up, praying for no ice patches, and a horse mountain-wise enough to judge the desperate declivity, Indian-pony blood being in such cases a clear preference. She inhabited this geometry of fear so effortlessly that Bob might almost’ve found her once upon a time in a story-kingdom of glass mountains every bit as peculiar as the San Juans, and trailside poets speculated that with all her solitary ranging—black cape billowing, hat down on her back, and the light of Heaven on her hair, flowered silk neckerchiefs Bob bought for her up in Montrose guttering like cold flames, in blizzards or spring-avalanche weather or the popcorn snows of August—she was riding out a homesickness too passionate for these realms of ordinary silver and gold to know much about, much less measure up to.