Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Why sure, old-timer, just name it. You haven’t seen Bob around anyplace, have you?”

  “My usual Squirrel and sarsaparilla, Dieter, and why yes young and I daresay short-timer, last I saw of your quarrelsome companion, he was heading off toward Bear Creek screamin something about going back to Baggs, Wyoming and startin life anew, though I could have that part a little confused.”

  “No different from the rest of the evening,” Frank guessed.

  “Oh, hell,” Zack reaching himself a towel to wipe off his lip, “just a little teacup social’s all. Now, back in the summer of ‘89, the day Butch and his gang come riding in . . .”

  At the Rodgers Brothers’ livery stable next morning, more horseless riders than Frank had seen in one place outside of downtown Denver at lunchtime jostled after some advantage not clear to him right away, snarling at each other ominously and, wherever they could find room to, pacing about, puffing on cigars old and new. Boys kept arriving from the corral with horses saddled and bridled, producing copies of lengthy rental agreements to be signed, pocketing tips, policing what passed for a queue, and shrugging off abuse from the clerks, who were trying to keep track of it all from behind a long counter inside. The sun was well clear of the peaks by the time Frank obtained his mount, an Indian paint named Mescalero with mischief in his eye, and began his ascent to the Little Hellkite Mine by way of Fir Street, where he encountered Ellmore Disco, heading down to the store in a spiffed-up little trap perched on Timken springs.

  “Gay times at the Cosmopolitan last night, I’m told?”

  “I went in there with Bob Meldrum but lost him in all the confusion.”

  “Likely he’s back up on the job by now. But”—Ellmore did not exactly say “fair warning,” though that was the impression Frank got from his face—“if you see him riding anywhere in ‘at Basin today, you might be mindful of the Sharps rifle he packs, specially its range, adding on, say, a mile or two extra?” “He’s angry at me for something?” puzzled Frank.

  “Wouldn’t be that personal, joven.”

  Off rolled Ellmore Disco, buggy hardware all going like a glockenspiel in a band. Frank ascended the Tomboy Road, the town below, revealed at the switchbacks through aspens in flickering leaf, each time a little more flattened out as it drew slowly away into heated woodsmoke haze, along with the sounds of framers’ hammers and wagon traffic, before the oncoming silence of the Basin. The cicadas were in full racket. Hellkite Road—“Road” being likely a term of local endearment—peeled off to follow the rocky bed of a stream that came flowing down across the trail without the trouble of pipes or culverts.

  The longer he stayed in this town, the less he was finding out. The point of diminishing returns was fast approaching. Yet now, as the trail ascended, as snowlines drew nearer and the wind became sovereign, he found himself waiting for some split-second flare out there at the edges of what he could see, a white horse borne against the sky, a black rush of hair streaming unruly as the smoke that marbles the flames of Perdition.

  Even Frank, who was not what you’d call one of these spiritualists, could tell that it was haunted up here. Despite the day-and-night commercial bustling down below, the wide-open promise of desire unleashed, you only had to climb the hillside for less than an hour to find the brown, slumped skeletons of cabins nobody would occupy again, the abandoned bedsprings from miners’ dormitories left out to rust two and a half miles up into the dark daytime sky . . . the presences that moved quickly as marmots at the edges of the visible. The cold that was not all a function of altitude.

  Long before he sighted the Little Hellkite, Frank could smell it. The smell had come drifting by here and there since he’d arrived in town, but nowhere near as intense as this. He heard metal groaning overhead and looked up to see tram buckets loaded with ore headed down to the Pandora works at the edge of town for processing, the owners having found it too steep up here to put in expensive luxuries like stamp mills. He passed the junction house of the Telluride Power Company, a vivid red against pale mountainslopes logged off long ago, scarred with trail and bristling all over with stumps gone white as grave-markers, the hum of the voltage louder than the cicadas.

  The little Basin swung into view. He trotted on in through the scatter of cabins and sheds, whose boards were all ragged lengths owing to having been dragged up here crossed over mules’ backs, arriving ground down a foot or more shorter than when they’d left the yard in town and bleached in all the sunglare subsequent, till he found the assay office.

  “He’s down at Pandora, son.”

  “They told me he was up here.”

  “Then he’s down one of these adits, talking to the tommyknockers, more’n likely.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Nahw, don’t worry, old Merle goes a little crazy in the head sometimes, but come bullion day there’s none can touch him.”

  Well, and who up here in this oxygen-short circus parade wasn’t crazy in some way? Frank had a look down the nearest mine entrance, hearing in the gloom and chill which abruptly wrapped ears, temples, and nape the strike, the ring of mauls and picks from faraway passages, becoming less clear as to location the farther in he went, turning from the day, from all that could be safely illuminated, into the nocturnal counterpart behind his own eye-sockets, past any after-images of a lighted world.

  At first he thought she was one of those supernatural mine creatures the Mexicans call duendes that you were always hearing stories about—though common sense right away suggested more of a girl powder monkey, being that on closer look she was calmly pouring what could only be nitro into holes drilled in these living mountain depths. “Course I didn’t notice him,” Dally snapped back a little later when Merle started in teasing her, “everybody busy just then trying to loosen that seam. Hired powder monkey don’t mean hired fool. What’s supposed to be important anyway? Halfway to hell, stared at by crazy Finns day in and day out as it is, grown men who the minute they get off-shift are headin straight down cliffsides on a couple of wood slats, am I gonna think twice about some Mine-Schooler with his head full of magnets?”

  Dally’s voice was hard to pin down to any one American place, more of a trail voice with turns and drops to it, reminders of towns you thought you’d forgotten or should never’ve rode into, or even promises of ones you might’ve heard about and were fixing to get to someday.

  They were sitting in the amalgamator’s shed, Merle having returned from chores down in the hole. He had his feet up on his desk and seemed in a cheerful mood.

  “Oh I’ll just walk out one morning,” Dally assured them, “and that’ll be the day I cut loose of—” indicating Merle with a shake of bright curls, “and sooner’d sure be better than later.”

  “And you can’t imagine how I’m looking forward.” Merle nodded. “Ain’t about to take no bite out of my heart, hay-ull no—whatever your name is—Hey! you still here, little missy, you mean you ain’t left yet? what’s keeping you?”

  “Must be the coffee up here.” Reaching for the pot with town-wife grace across an iron stove nearly hot enough to break into a glow, just daring the ‘sucker to touch her.

  They had had this same exchange many times, father and daughter, in many forms. “I could be doing what I do anyplace,” he might point out, “down in the safest town you can imagine, the front parlor of the world, instead of up in the damn San Juans like ‘is. Now why do you suppose we’re up here dodging bullets and avalanches and not down to Davenport Iowa or some such doily-draped venue as that?”

  “You’re trying to get me killed?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Is . . . it’s all for my own good?”

  “There you go. This is school, Dally—fact it’s damn college, a bar down the left-hand side of every classroom, the faculty packing shotguns and .44s, the student body either drunk all the time, sexually insane, or suicidally unsafe to be within a mile of, and the grades handed out are but two, survive or don’t. O.K. so far or am I drifting too dee
p into metaphor here?”

  “Tell me when you get to fractions.”

  She found a canvas miner’s cap now, put it on, and headed for the door. “I’ll be down to the company store, least till this shift gets off and everybody comes chargin’ in, awfully nice meeting you Fred.”

  “Frank,” said Frank.

  “Sure, testing your memory’s all.”

  She wasn’t out the door half a minute before Merle, claiming, Frank guessed, some unwritten prerogative of the chemically deranged, looked him directly in the face and asked what he was up to, exactly, here in Telluride.

  Frank considered. “Much easier if I knew how much I couldn’t trust you.”

  “I knew your father, Mr. Traverse. He was a gentleman and a great card-player, knew dynamite inside out, saved my girl once or twice when a charge didn’t go off just right, and sure’s hell didn’t deserve what they did to him.”

  Frank sat weaving on a folding camp chair that seemed about to collapse. “Well, Mr. Rideout.”

  “Merle would be better.” He pushed across a matte-surface photograph of Webb Traverse, hat off, smoldering cigar in his teeth, regarding the lens with a sort of pugnacious glee, as if he’d just figured out exactly how he was going to destroy the camera.

  “You’re maybe not his spit,” Merle gently, “but I do study faces, part of the business, and you’re close.”

  “And who’ve you mentioned this to?”

  “Nobody. No need to, looks like.”

  “What’s this Sunday-morning voice?”

  “Just wouldn’t count on notching up Buck Wells, if that’s what this is about. He’s far too troubled of a soul. Might be he’ll even do the deed on himself ‘fore you ever get there.”

  “And good riddance too, but why should I want to wish the man harm?”

  “Reports that you seem eager for a visit.”

  “Though standin direly in need, I’m sure, of having his Harvard-educated ass blown sky-high, Captain Wells is not right at the top of my list, fallin you see into a higher class of folk, for down here at saddle-tramp level he’s of less interest than the actual trigger operatives hired to murder my Pa, heaven forfend a Harvard man should get his lilywhites soiled ‘th that kind of work and all.”

  “Hope you’re not thinkin’ it was—”

  “I know pretty much who. So does everybody in this close-knit li’l community, it seems. It’s their whereabouts at present, is how Buck would come into this.”

  “Throw down on him, have him tell you what he knows.”

  “There you go, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Whatever you do think of, best do it soon.” Small Chinese children had also been known to look at Frank this way, though maybe not quite so troubled. “Word is around, Frank. Boys want you gone.”

  That was quick. He’d been hoping for another day or two at least. “What is it, somethin tattooed on my head? Is there anybody in this damn county I am fooling? Damn.”

  “Easy now.” From a drawer in a cabinet against the wall, Merle took more gelatin-silver prints. “Maybe these’ll be some help.” One showed a pair of what looked like drovers in town for the Fourth of July, one of them appearing to force the other to eat a giant firecracker, all lit and throwing bright sparks, flying, dying, filling the unmeasurable fragment of time the shutter was open, to the amusement of others in the background looking on from the porch of a saloon.

  “You’re not telling me—”

  “Here, this one’s a little clearer.”

  It was out in front of this exact same amalgamator’s office. This time Deuce and Sloat were not smiling, and the light was more proper to autumn, you could see dark clouds in the sky overhead, and nothing was casting shadows. The two men were posed as if for some ceremonial purpose. For the gray day, the exposure was a little longer, and you’d expect one at least to have moved and blurred the image, but no, they had stood rigid, almost defiant, allowing the collodion mixture its due measure of light, to record the two killers with unrelenting fidelity, as if set in front of some slow emulsion of an earlier day, eyes, Frank, bending close, noticed now, rendered with that same curious crazed radiance which once was an artifact of having to blink a couple of hundred times during the exposure, but in this more modern form due to something authentically ghostly, for which these emulsions were acting as agents, revealing what no other record up till then could’ve.

  “Who took these?”

  “Kind of amateur hobby of mine,” said Merle. “All this silver and gold around up here, acids and salts and so forth, and I just like to fool with the different possibilities.”

  “Mean little skunk, isn’t he?”

  “He was always after Bob Meldrum to take him on as a protégé. Even Bob, who keeps rattlesnakes for house pets, couldn’t stand the kid more’n five minutes.”

  As if Bob’s name was some password, Dally was in the door like a small explosion, her attention all focused onto Frank. “Boots on? Hair combed? Might be departure time for you, about now.”

  “What’s up, Dahlia?” said Merle.

  “Bob and Rudie, up by the shaft house, and the wrong one is smiling.”

  “They’re after me? But last night that Bob, he seemed so friendly.”

  “Here you go—” Merle rolling his desk out of the way and opening a trapdoor which up to that point had been invisible. “Our own alternate means of egress. Some tunnelin’ down there, ought to let you out by the ore station. If you get lucky, you can catch an empty bucket down to town.”

  “My horse.”

  “Rodgers’s keeps a little barn over t’ the Tomboy, just tie the reins over the saddlehorn, set him loose—they all find their way back. Might want these prints, I have negatives. Oh, and here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “What it looks like.”

  “Some kind of . . . meat sandwich. . . . What’s it for?”

  “Maybe you’ll find out.”

  “Maybe I’ll eat it.”

  “Maybe not. Dahlia, you better see him to town.”

  Down in the tunnel, Frank became aware of a curious swarming, half seen, half heard. Dally stopped and bent an ear. “Oboy. They’re steamed.” She called out in some peculiar, chimingly percussive language. From out of the dark tunnel, though Frank could oddly not tell the direction, came a reply. “You got that sandwich, Frank?”

  They left it in the middle of the tunnel and took off running. “Why’d we—”

  “Are you crazy? Don’t you know who they are?”

  They broke out into dusk almost balanced by electric light brighter than a full moon, circles of otherworld blindness up on tall poles along the road up to the ridgeline.

  “Hurry, shift’s almost changin, we’re about to be stampeded over by that whole herd o’ squareheads—” They climbed in an ore bucket, into iron shadows and an uncleansable telluric smell. “Worse’n a Texas shithouse in here, ain’t it?” she said cheerfully. Frank muttered, about to pass out. A bell rang somewhere and the bucket shuddered into motion. Though they were keeping their heads low, Frank felt it the exact moment they cleared the edge and the valley dropped away, leaving them high above the lights of the town with nothing but the deep, invisible air below. Just then, back at the mine, the shift whistle began to shriek, sliding downward in pitch as they went hurtling away down into the dark gulf. The girl whooped back at it with delight. “To Hell you ride! Hey, Frank!”

  Back down into town, actually, would not have been his first choice. He would much rather’ve kept on uphill, over the pass, down again to the Silverton road, maybe turned off for Durango and with luck picked up the train, or else just rode on till he was somehow into the Sangre de Cristos, where he knew he at least had a chance. Ride through the ghost bison, on into those big dunes, and let the spirits there protect him.

  Soon they could hear the pounding of stamps, muffled at first like the percussion section of a distant marching band, fifes and cornets surely about to join in at any minute, practic
ing for some undeclared national holiday that didn’t necessarily ever have to arrive, growing louder, sensed yet hidden, like so much else in these mountains. At some point the racket of the mill was overtaken by the racket from town, and then Frank remembered it was Saturday night.

  Pandemonium did not begin to amount to a patch on what seemed to be approaching them instead of they it, swelling to surround them, a valley-wide symphony of gunshots, screaming, blaring on musical instruments, freight-wagon traffic, coloratura laughter from the pavement nymphs, glass breaking, Chinese gongs being bashed, horses, horse-hardware jingling, swinging-door hinges creaking as Frank and Dally presently arrived at the Gallows Frame Saloon, about halfway down Colorado Street.

  “Are you sure they’ll let you in here?” Frank as mildly as he could.

  The girl laughed, once and not for long. “Look around you, Frank. Find me one face in here cares about who does what.” She led him down the length of the bar lined with ten-dayers, fathom miners, and remittance men, through the tobacco smoke, amid card and dice tables a-bustle with challenge, insult, and imprecation. Somebody was playing on the piano some tune that would’ve been a march, except for some peculiar rhythmic hesitations that made Frank, who usually chose to avoid dancing, unexpectedly wish he knew how.

  She noticed, of course. “That’s ‘ragtime.’ You never heard rag? why even ask. Where were you from again? Never mind, I couldn’t pr’nounce it.”

  She was holding her arms out in a certain way, and he guessed he was stuck, though it didn’t turn out that bad, for Frank was a damn buck-and-wing artist next to some of the miners the girls in here were dancing with, especially the Finns. “Stomp around like they ‘s wearing skis,” Dally said. After a while Frank noticed one or two that were wearing skis, and it wasn’t even winter.

  “Oh there’s Charlie, stay right here, I’ll be back.” All right with Frank, who, having begun wondering when Bob and Rudie would make their appearance, needed to put in a little time next to some Circassian walnut. He was halfway through his first beer of the evening when Dally appeared again. “Talked to Charlie Fong Ding, who does all the laundry for the parlor house girls. There’s a vacancy at the Silver Orchid, I know the place, it’s safe, there’s an escape tunnel—”