Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  They lived up near the Tomboy mine, in a cabin uptrail from the mine tailings, but kept to themselves, not that too many even got to see them together, which no doubt encouraged a lot of romantic gas, even from those who hated Bob from hat to spurs but had seen her at least, fatally, once, out on some one or other of those destinationless rides. Bob these days, besides working as Buck Wells’s representative on Earth, was also day guard at Tomboy, up before first light and out into the Basin, his eyes—some recalled them as “dark,” while others said they changed to pale gray just before he intended to shoot his man—sharper than usual to make up for his allegedly bad hearing, sweeping ever to and fro, vanning everything down to pebble size and below, tuned for trouble of all kinds, which maybe unavoidably would have to include that La Blanca. Many reckless and basically thickheaded boys around town liked to imagine they knew what she was after, which in their dreams always took some form of relief from her deaf runt of a cabinmate, who didn’t, besides, look all that tough, fourteen or whatever many notches it was supposed to be on his pistol. Hell, anybody can cut a notch, cheaper than cheap talk, ain’t it?

  “Say, but that Hair-Trigger Bob, now, he don’t give too much of a hoot about who lives, who don’t, nothing like ‘at. . . .”

  “Maybe what he don’t understand is neither do I.”

  “Common saloon talk,” Ellmore peering briefly at Frank as if he just might be another of these junior Romeos. “Listen, Loomis, now, this is getting me puzzled, I fear. Is Bob likely to approve of his missus all the way down the hill here? We need a handle on this fairly quick. You see that Loopy anyplace?”

  Frank surfacing from his giant bowlful of fiery tripe, “This Mrs. Meldrum—she’s troublesome?”

  “Joven,” mumbled Ellmore through his food, “nobody can tell you much about her for certain. Now trouble, o’ course . . . well there’s always ‘at Bob. . . .” His usually direct gaze was wandering out in the direction of Bear Creek, and his Oriental mask of a face could not have been tagged just then as undisturbed.

  Lupita appeared with a florally painted bowl of cornmeal masa cradled in the crook of one elbow, swiftly taking from it and patting handfuls of dough one at a time into perfect paper-thin tortillas she then tossed spinning back into the little kitchen onto a sheet-metal comal salvaged after a memorable windstorm up by Lizard Head Pass to bake for a minute before being removed to a piece of apron held ready for the purpose, meantime informing Ellmore, “I don’t think she was looking for you.”

  “You see her husband today?”

  “I heard he had to go somewhere in a hurry. You don’t look much like a man in love.”

  “In the soup, more like. How you say, en la sopa.”

  “Of course she’s young,” said Lupita. “It’s the age when we all do those crazy things.”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “Pobrecito.” Off she whirled again, singing just like a bird.

  Frank became aware that Ellmore had been watching him with an interest deeper than sociability could account for. When he saw Frank looking back, he flashed a disingenuous gold eyetooth. “How’s that menudo? See some of the old snot runnin’ out there.”

  “Didn’t notice,” Frank passing a shirtsleeve beneath his nose.

  “Lip’s already gone too numb to feel it,” advised Loomis. “Eat here for long, you’ll need to grow a mustache, soak some of that up.”

  “You’ve noticed how the smaller a chili pepper gets, the hotter it usually is, right? First thing you learn. Well, these that Loopy’s using are small. I mean small, joven.”

  “Well Ellmore, how . . . how small’s that?”

  “What about . . . invisible?”

  “Nobody has ever . . . seen these chilies, but folks here still put them in Mexican recipes? How do they know how many to put?”

  The company found the question stimulating. “You crazy?” hollered Ellmore. “One’s enough to kill ya!”

  “Plus everybody ‘thin a hundred-yards radius!” added Loomis.

  “’Cept for Bob, o’ course, he eats em like peanuts. Says it calms him down.”

  BY THE TIME he came creaking back to his rooms at the Sheridan, after stopping down in the bar for a steak whose volume he estimated to run above half a cubic foot, Frank had contracted a case of the Rampaging Meldrumitis, having heard of little else all day. Captain Bulkley Wells stayed inaccessible as ever, pursuing his busy schedule—in London, perhaps, visiting his tailor, or off in the Argentine purchasing polo ponies, or touring, why not, on some other inhabited world altogether. And so far, as if they were words one did not use in front of the designated innocent, nothing even remotely to do with Deuce Kindred or Sloat Fresno.

  Frank was able to keep his eyes open long enough to check his bed with a miner’s gad and douse the electric lamp, but not quite to get both boots off, before drifting into his standard trailside slumber, less than five minutes of which had passed before his door was assaulted and the pleasures of oblivion postponed by some god-awful thumping and bellowing. “You gonna get your wife-grabbing, piss-yellow, slant-eyed ass out here, or am I gonna have to come in there?” inquired an unhappy voice.

  “Sure thing,” yawned Frank, in an amiable tone he hoped would not betray the briskness with which he was attending to the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson’s.

  “Well, which one is it? Speak up, I don’t hear too good, and what I can’t hear makes me very upset.”

  “I believe the door’s open,” Frank shouted. In the instant, it was. There stood a diminutive figure in a black hat, shirt, and gauntlets, Bob Meldrum unmistakably, with a mustache so wide Frank could swear its owner had to turn a little sideways to get through the doorway, and a halo of McBryan’s which, like his fame, preceded him.

  “Oh, say. What would that be, now, some li’l Ladies’ Friend, I’ll bet, oh? and nickel-plated too! My, but she’s considerable pretty.”

  “Fact, it’s a .38,” said Frank. “Police model, though I have filed it down some, maybe a bit too much here and there, for it won’t always stay cocked just as I’d like. Sure hope that won’t be a problem?”

  “You speak good English, for some got-damned opium-smoking son of a bitch don’t even particularly look Jap.”

  “Just ‘Frank’ is O.K. Could be you’ve got the wrong room?”

  “Could be you’re fucking my wife in here and lying out of your ass?”

  “Never been that crazy—maybe brother Disco’s been misinforming you?”

  “Oh, hell, you’re the kid engineer,” his eyes, to Frank’s relief, beginning to grow less pale.

  “Yes, and now, sir, I’ll bet you would be . . . Mr. Meldrum, am I right?” Trying not too obviously to shout into either of his ears.

  “True, God help me, too true,” the darkly rigged-out gunslinger collapsing with an emotional sigh onto the settee. “You think it’s easy being a hardcase in this town, with Butch Cassidy always coming up as a point of comparison? Hell, what’d he ever do, rode up the valley on some damned trick animal, pulled a gun, took the ten thousand dollars, rode out again, just like eatin a cherry pie, but years pass, legends o’ th’ West keep growing, folks mutter under their mustache when they think you can’t hear, ‘Well, he’s mean but he sure ain’t no Butch,’ and how to hell you think that makes me feel? Nothing in here to drink neither, I’ll bet.”

  “Suppose we go out anyplace you like, and you allow me to stand you a drink.”

  “Well seguro, but how’s about you point that shined-up li’l ‘sucker someplace else for a minute, my reputation and all?”

  “Why, I’d almost forgotten. . . .” Feeling none too certain, Frank pocketed his revolver, expecting an immediate throwdown, but Bob seemed tranquil, for the moment anyway, going so far as to smile briefly, revealing a double array of gold dental crowns. Frank pretended to rare back as if bedazzled, shielding his eyes with a forearm. “Lot of bullion there.”

  “They were kind enough up at the mine to give me a price,” Bob replied.
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  Bypassing the hotel’s own genteel establishment, they headed for the Cosmopolitan Saloon and Gambling Club a short way down the street, where Bob was confident that people had the sense to leave him to drink in peace. “Now then,” once they were set up with bottle and glasses, “had a nickel for every son of a bitch wanted to waste Cap’n Wells’s time I’d be down in Denver highballing my way along Market Street, you take my meaning, and this whole godforsaken box canyon’d be all just a bad dream.”

  “Any chance of talking to him? Is he in town?”

  Bob gave him a long, glitter-eyed once-over. “You just say what I think I heard? Wop anarchist sons of bitches rolling bombs at the man day in day out, stranger shows up askin’ if he’s ‘in town’? why if I wa’n’t so suspicious, I’d be laughing my ass off. Tell you what though, here’s the very fella, Merle Rideout—he’s amalgamator up at Little Hellkite, crazy as a bedbug ‘th all them fumes and shit he breathes in all the time and twice on bullion day, but even so, why he might be willing to listen to some junior drummer try and talk him out of his job.”

  Merle Rideout was on his way down to one of the parlor houses but not at top speed. He allowed Frank to go into his pitch.

  “ . . . And you no doubt heard of Mr. Edison’s scheme down in Dolores using static electricity, though sad to say none too successfully—but now, my approach is different, uses magnetism. Back east in New Jersey, they’ve been pulling pyrites out of zinc blende with a Wetherill’s magnet, supposed to be the strongest going—my rig’s a variation on that, just a little sweetheart of a unit, and don’t it have that Wetherill’s all beat. And with the kind of electric current you can generate up in these parts—”

  Merle was regarding Frank with a kindly enough expression, but one not inclined to be taken in. “Magnetic ore separation, yes indeed, fine for the less-critical mountainside audiences maybe, but having been around at least a magnet or two, I’m cautious is all. Tell you what though. Come on up the mine you get a chance, we’ll talk. Tomorrow’d be good.”

  A silence abruptly fell, leaving for the moment only the electricity’s hum. A group of men in enormous brand-new beaver sombreros had just entered the Cosmopolitan, chirping and singing in some foreign tongue. Each carried a pocket Kodak with its shutter ingeniously connected to a small magnesium flashlight, so as to synchronize the two. Shot-glasses halted halfway to mouths, the Negro shoeshine boy quit popping his rag, the Hieronymus wheel stopped short, and the ball took a bounce and then hung there in midair, just as if everything in the scene were trying its best to accommodate a photograph or two. Approaching Dieter the barkeep, the visitors, bowing one by one, began to gesture at various of the bottles stacked down at one end of the bar. Dieter, intimate with concoctions nobody’d even named yet, nodding in reply, reached, poured, and mixed, as conversation in the room resumed, folks having recognized the “Japanese trade delegation” Ellmore had mentioned to Frank earlier in the day, out now for a look at the nighttime sights of Telluride. Frank stopped staring just in time to observe Bob’s eyes gone pale as summer sky above a ridgeline, and issuing from his ears twin jets of steam superheated enough to threaten the careful roll of his hat-brim. Unable to think of anything the irascible shootist might want to hear from him at the moment, Frank went to look instead into the possibilities of taking cover, noticing how others were doing the same.

  “Well, Bob, which one of ‘m d’you figure it is?” called out one of the regulars here, in an apparent belief that his advanced years would protect him from the wages of impertinence.

  “Evenin Zack,” screamed Bob, “frustratin as hell, ain’t it, all these look-alikes, man hardly knows where to start shootin!”

  “Say, and I sure don’t see no Mizzus M. noplace, do you?” cried the heedless Zack, “maybe the one you’re lookin for is otherwise engaged—yeeeh-heeh-heeh!”

  “Course I could shoot you first, just to get sighted in,” Bob supposed.

  “Aw now, Bob—”

  Fascinated, the Sons of Nippon had begun to gather about Bob in a semicircle, popping out to full length the bellows of their cameras, taking tentative aim, some even attempting to climb up on the billiard table to improve the angle of view, causing perplexity among those attempting to play on its surface. “Kid,” neither of Bob’s lips being seen to move, “that li’l contraption o’ yours I was admiring earlier? d’you happen to have it handy, ‘cause I may soon require your assistance, in a back-watching way, for this is making me begin to itch somewhat fierce, is the problem here?”

  “I can talk a little of their lingo,” Merle volunteered.

  “Can you say, ‘I intend to kill all you sons of bitches one by one just so I don’t make no mistakes,’ something along those lines?”

  “Let’s see, um . . . Sumimasen, folks, this here’s Bobusan desu!” Everybody bowed to Bob, who found himself hesitantly bowing back. “Gonnusuringaa,” Merle added, “mottomo abunai desu!”

  “Aa!”

  “Anna koto!”

  All at once, magnesium flash-lights were exploding everywhere, each producing a column of thick white smoke whose orderly cylindrical ascent was immediately disarranged by attempts of customers, in some panic, to seek exit, the unexpected combination of brightness and opacity thus quickly spreading to fill every part of the saloon. Those who in their flight did not stumble over or into furniture soon collided with others, who felt obliged to collide back, and with interest. Peevishness grew general. Solid objects were soon moving through the fulgurescence invisibly and at high speed, with profanity being uttered at every hand, much of it in Japanese.

  Frank decided to squat down by the end of the bar till the air cleared. He kept an ear out for Bob but in the uproar couldn’t be too sure of anybody’s voice. The loss of clarity and scale in the room was producing, for many, strange optical illusions, common among them that of a vast landscape swept by an unyielding fog. It became possible to believe one had been spirited, in the swift cascade of light-flashes, to some distant geography where creatures as yet unknown thrashed about, howling affrightedly, in the dark. Older customers in whose hearts the battles of the Rebellion yet persisted heard in these more temperate detonations of flashpowder the field-pieces of ancient campaigns better forgotten. Even Frank, who was usually immune to all degrees of the phantasmal, found that he could no longer orient himself with certainty.

  When the smoke had finally thinned out enough to begin to see through, Frank noticed Merle Rideout in conversation with one of the Japanese trade delegation.

  “Over here,” the visitor was saying, “the American West—it is a spiritual territory! in which we seek to study the secrets of your—national soul!”

  “Ha! Ha!” Merle slapped his knee. “You fellows, I swear. What ‘national soul’? We don’t have any ‘national soul’! ‘F you think any different, why you’re just packing out pyrites, brother.”

  “An edge of steel—mathematically without width, deadlier than any katana, sheathed in the precision of the American face—where mercy is unknown, against which Heaven has sealed its borders! Do not—feign ignorance of this! It is not a—valid use of my time!” Glaring, he joined his companions and stalked out.

  Frank nodded after him. “He seems upset. You don’t think he’d do anything. . . .”

  “Not likely,” Merle said. “Looks like just some li’l laundry runner, don’t he? Fact, he’s sidekicks with famous international spy Baron Akashi, who’s what they call a ‘roving military attaché’—circuit-rides the different capital cities of Europe, keeping the Russian students over there all cranked up against the Tsar. Well, it turns out we got a anti-Tsarist crowd of our own, right up here in San Miguel County, and we call em the Finns. Is who’s running their native Finland these days, is that same all-powerful Tsar of Russia. And make no mistake, they just hate his ass. Making them naturally of great professional interest to our pal there. Not that they don’t also show more than average trade-delegation interest in the doings up at Little Hellkite, esp
ecially chemical, on or about bullion day.”

  “Maybe they’re planning a hoist?”

  “More like what folks call ‘industrial spying.’ What they seem to be looking for is my amalgamation process. But that could be just a cover story. Couldn’t it.” He took off his hat, slapped a dent into the top of it, replaced it. “Well. See you up at the mine tomorrow, then?” and was gone before Frank could say, “Sure.”

  Slowly, the disorder had begun to abate. Broken glass, splintered wood, and the contents of overturned cuspidors presented inconvenience everywhere as cardplayers crawled through the debris trying to reassemble full decks. Favoring their injuries, wiping their eyes, and blowing their noses on their sleeves, drinkers and gamblers went lurching out the doors and into the street, where rented horses had already been skillfully unhitching themselves and proceeding back to the corral, sighing now and then. Sportive ladies up from riverside cribs and parlor houses alike stood in twos and threes observing the scene, clucking like church wives. The Japanese visitors had vanished, and inside the Cosmopolitan, Dieter was back on duty behind the bar as if none of this had happened. Frank got warily to his feet and was just about to have a look into what bottles might’ve survived when Zack stepped nimbly up next to him, with an inquiring grimace.