“¡Ay! ¡Jefe, jefe!” cried his lieutenant Alfonsito, “tell us it ain’ your back again.”
“Damned idiot, o’ course it’s my back. Oh mother of all misfortune—and worse than last time too.”
“I can fix that,” offered Willis.
“Beg pardon, what in hell business of any got-damn punkinroller’d this be, again?”
“I know how to loosen that up for you. Trust me, I’m an osteopath.”
“It’s O.K., we’re open-minded, couple boys in the outfit are Evangelicals, just watch where you’re putting them lilywhites now—yaaagghh—I mean, huh?”
“Feel better?”
“Holy Toledo,” straightening up, carefully but pain-free. “Why, it’s a miracle.”
“¡Gracias a Dios!” screamed the dutiful Alfonsito.
“Obliged,” Jimmy guessed, sliding his pistol back in its holster.
“I’ll settle for my life,” proposed Willis. “Maybe buy you all a drink sometime?”
“Come on, right over that ridge there.” They repaired to a nearby stockmen’s saloon. “All this damned hard riding and other saddle activities,” Jimmy explained presently, “the cowboy’s curse in fact, show me a man’s been any time at all on a horse, I’ll show you a victim of the fulminatin lumbago. You’ve sure got the magic in your mitts, Doc, maybe you just discovered your promised land out here.”
Willis, having already been stood an uncounted number of red whiskeys, put off semi-consciousness for a moment to consider this career assessment. “You mean I could hang out my shingle in one of these towns—”
“Well maybe not just any town, you’d want to check into prior claims, as some of these town croakers once they’re set up don’t want more competition. Known to get quite violent about it, in fact.”
“Licensed physicians?” Willis astonished, “men of healing, violent?”
“And even if you didn’t find a town right away, why, there’d always be work, I bet.”
“How’s that?”
“Circuit ridin’ osteo-whatever-it-is, just keep moving spread to spread, like many a drover’s learned to do, no dishonor in that.”
Which is how life then took a turn for young Willis Turnstone. He had journeyed west having cherished, despite his heretical gifts, little beyond town-dweller dreams—of frequenting a not-too-earnest church, meeting and marrying a presentable girl with a college background, aging into the sort of local “Doc” no one would hesitate to play cards with, on a weekly low-stakes type of basis of course . . . yet one chance meeting with the notorious Jimmy Drop gang among the mind-poisoning vetches and creosote of a dusty high plain was all it took to steer him in a whole ‘nother direction.
Not that the suburban imperative didn’t continue to work its will. He found himself adding conventional medical skills onto his osteopathic ones, sending away back east for medical textbooks, learning to cultivate the local druggists in the towns he drifted through, finding that a couple Saturday nights of losing poker could be worth a semester in pharmacy school. By the time he blew into Telluride and started working at the Miners’ Hospital alongside Dr. Edgar Hadley and Nurse Margaret Perril, he was as doctorly as they came in these parts, though long fallen into the habit of always diagnosing the rarest possible conditions to account for the symptoms his patients reported. Since they either died or got better on their own, and nobody kept count, there was no way to know how effective any of this was, and he was too busy himself ever to make a proper study.
He met Lake up at the Miners’ Hospital, called in to treat a ten-dayer who’d been shot in the shoulder. The first suspect whose name crossed Willis’s mind, Bob Meldrum, had been present but only, he swore, in a tutorial capacity, advising an apprentice regulator on how best to maintain order in the mines. “Use my initiative,” said the eager lad. “Hell no,” Bob replied, “use your .44. Here, like this—whoops.” Too late, the gun had been fired and the miner’s blood diverted from its return to the heart.
Lake was in simple gray and white, her hair covered and her demeanor professional, and the minute Willis saw her he was a goner, though it took him a couple of weeks to realize it in his mind.
They rode out to Trout Lake and picnicked. He showed up at her door with bunches of wildflowers. One night without thinking he told her he wanted them to get married. He met her mother, Mayva, and pounded on her back for a while. One day somebody mentioned that Lake had run off with Deuce Kindred.
Which so desolated the Doc that Jimmy Drop offered to go after the couple on his behalf. “‘Sucker used to ride with us, not for long, nobody liked him, mean little brush snake. You want him out of the way, I’ll see to it personal.”
“Oh, Jim no I couldn’t ask you to do that. . . .”
“No need to ask, Doc, forever in your debt.”
“Forever’s how long she would likely end up moping about it, and then where would I be?”
Jimmy’s eyes narrowed uneasily. “They get like that, huh?”
“Just wouldn’t want the possibility.”
“Yehp . . . well yehp I can see that. . . .”
Course, the Doc would never get used to losing out. Lake was nowhere near the kind of girl he thought he was looking to settle down with, she was all his plans flying out the window, a chance to “choose wrong” early enough in life to do him some good. Now she’d gone off with a specimen too loathsome even for the Jimmy Drop gang. If she was not to be the great lost love of his life, she could’ve perhaps been the great unlistened-to commentator upon it.
“She what? Went off with who?” Maybe repeating himself a couple times, because the news had just sent him spinning.
“That’s right,” the Doc shaking his head slowly, “I still can’t get a handle on it myself.”
“This sure don’t help,” said Frank, “really. Who else knows?”
The keen squint he got was not so much pitying as scientifically curious.
Frank felt coming down over him, like an illness, the dry-skinned feverishness of shame. “No idea where they went to?”
“If I knew, would it be wise to tell you?”
“You have feelings for my sister and all, so don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . when I find her, I will kill the bitch. O.K.? Him, goes without saying, but her—that fucking—I can’t even say her name. How natural is it, that that could even happen, Doc?”
“Don’t know. You mean, is it a well-known mental condition or something?” He looked around for his copy of Puckpool.
“Damn. Maybe I’ll go out, kill somebody just for practice.”
“You’re going to have to calm down, Frank. Here,” scribbling, “ . . . you can take this over to the drugstore—”
“Thanks all the same. Maybe what I need to do is talk to Jimmy Drop.”
“I know he and Kindred rode together briefly, long time back, but how likely is it they’d still be in touch?”
“Does not, make no, fuckin, sense.” Frank staring deep into his hat, beginning to exhibit classic signs of melancholia and then some. “Sure they fought a lot, her and Pa, mostly when I was away at Golden, but this is like—Why didn’t she just go ahead and shoot him down, she hated him that much? That would’ve made more sense.”
The Doc poured himself another tridigital dose and sociably waved the bottle at Frank.
“Better not. Need to think.”
“Unlike sound or light or one of them, news travels at queer velocities and not usually even in straight lines,” offered the Doc.
Frank squinted up at the ceiling. “What . . . doesthatmean?”
Doc Turnstone shrugged. “Jimmy is usually down to the Busted Flush this time of the evening.”
Though it was far too late for any of this old news to matter to anybody but Frank, it didn’t keep him from skulking along through the insomniac town with his hat low on his eyebrows, convinced that everybody he saw was in on the story and smirking at him with contempt or, worse, pity—poor foolish Frank, last to know.
Jim
my Drop—very short Arapahoe Street haircut glossed down with bartender’s hair wax, mustache trained in the Chinese style, trademark monocle effortlessly in place—was in the back room of the Busted Flush with some of his associates, playing a complicated game with an evil-looking packer’s knife, whose point and blade-edge were to be brought into use whenever the matter of forfeits arose. Judging from the color of his shirt, Alfonsito appeared to be having the least luck tonight, much to the amusement of the others.
“Recognized you right off,” Jimmy said when they were settled behind a labelless bottle of bourbon. “You and your brother got the same nose, except for Reef’s was broke a couple times, o’ course. I am proud to say I was there on both occasions.”
“Wasn’t you did it, I hope.”
“No, no, just the usual professors, showing us poor ignoramuses the finer points of poker etiquette.”
“Like don’t play partners,” Frank smiling quickly with one side of his mouth, aware of ways Jimmy might grow exercised but right now not caring much.
“Oh, he told you that one.” The monocle twinkled. “Heard he went back east. Sounded like all the way back east.”
“You’d know better’n me.”
“Guess these days it’d be you that’s lookin for Deuce. Wish I could help, but by now they might—he might be anyplace.”
“You can say ‘they.’”
“You know, I hate to gossip. Gossipin ought to be a felony, heavy penalties up to and includin the gallows for repeat offenders.”
“But?”
“I only seen your sister but once, up by Leadville. Kind of a young lady by then, maybe ten or eleven? It was that one winter they built that big Ice Palace up there, up above Seventh Street.”
“Remember it. Hard to believe it was really there.” Three acres on a hilltop, arc-lights, towers of ice ninety feet high, biggest rink in Creation, replacement ice-blocks shipped in every day, ballroom, café, more popular than the Opera House while it lasted, but doomed to melt away when spring came.
“Reef was just out of the chute,” Jimmy recalled, “but not really, I think we worked our first job together that spring. Your sister got hold of a pair of ice skates and was spending most of her time up at that Ice Palace. Like every other kid in Leadville. One day she was teachin the Dutch Waltz to some kid from town, management kid, not much older than she was, and Webb Traverse come in saw it and just pitched a fit. Ten years now, and I’ve known it noisier, but I still remember that go-round. Your Pa really wanted to kill somebody. It wasn’t just that old hands-off-my-daughter business, we all know that one. This was home-for-the-insane carryin-on.”
“I was down at work that day,” Frank recalled, “some mucker’s shift, and when I got back they were still at it. Heard the hollerin a mile away, thought it was Chinamen or somethin.”
It was political, was the thing. If it had been a miner’s son, even a saloon- or store-keeper’s son, Webb might’ve grumbled some, but there it would have rested in peace. It was the notion of some little rich snot-nose never worked a day in his life creeping in grabbing the innocent daughter of a working man that got Webb all in a rage.
“It wasn’t even about me personally,” Lake wasn’t too angry to point out later, she saw it clear enough, “it was your damned old Union again.” Lucky for everybody there were cooler heads around, not to mention arms and legs that sort of came gliding in to form a social barrier and nudge Webb back off the ice, while Lake hung her head in the pearl-gray gloom, feeling mortified, and the boy skated off looking for another partner.
“AS A MEX, MAYBE,” figured Ellmore Disco. “You’d need the right hat o’ course, and a mustache, though what with not shaving these last couple days, you’ve got a good start. We can consult with Loopy about the rest.” They were in the Gallows Frame, and things were approaching that usual centrifugal Saturday-night run-up to the end of the world and a subsequent general drunken slumber.
“Ellmore, why are you helping me? I had you figured for the Mine Owners’ Friend.”
“The one thing no form of business can really do without,” Ellmore instructed him, “is good old peace and quiet. Any disruptive behavior up here over and above the normal Saturday-night frolics will tend to discourage the banks down in Denver, not to mention the day-tripping into town of that pigeon population we’ve all of us come so much to depend on, next thing you know we’re into a slack cycle and well, the less of that the better ‘s all. Now somebody like yourself, harmless-enough-lookin young fellow, barely steps into town he becomes a focus of attention for far too many bad actors, why then it’s time, ain’t it, for little E. Disco to start considering how best to help such a fellow make his exit.”
Playing down the street at the Railbird Saloon just happened to be Gastón Villa and His Bughouse Bandoleros, a collection of itinerant musicians in white leather fringe jackets, spangled “chaps,” and enormous face-hiding hats rimmed in cholo balls the colors of the spectrum running in order of wavelength. Gastón’s father had once ridden the rodeo with some make-believe charro act—and when at last, one night over by Gunnison, he ran into an audience whose ideas of rejection proved fatal, his wife packed up all his old costumes and gear for Gastón, kissed him adios at the depot, and sent him off to become a saxophone player for the band of a Wild West show. Obliged more than once to leave his instruments in soak to pay hotel bills, bar tabs, and gambling debts, Gastón was to drift with the years into a variety of peculiar engagements, including the present one.
“Please, don’t preoccupy yourself,” he reassured Frank now—“here, you know what this is?” Bringing out a towering contraption of tarnished and beat-up brass covered with valves and keys, whose upper end flared open like something in a marching band.
“Sure. Where’s the trigger on it again?”
“It is called the Galandronome—a military bassoon, once standard issue in French army bands—my uncle salvaged this one from the Battle of Puebla, you can see a couple of dents from Mexican bullets here, and here?”
“And the end you blow in,” puzzled Frank, “wait a minute, now. . . .”
“You will learn.”
“But till I do—”
“Caballero, you have been in these cantinas, the musical taste is not demanding. Nobody in this band was a musician when they joined up, but everybody was in some kind of trouble. Play con entusiasmo, as loudly as you can, and trust in the good will and bad ear of the gringo hellraiser.”
Is how Frank became Pancho the Bassoon Player. Within a day or two, he was actually getting a sound out of the ‘sucker, and before long most of “Juanita,” too. With a couple of trumpets playing harmony, it wasn’t that bad, he supposed. Affecting, sometimes.
Shortly before he left town, Frank entered a condition a little displaced from what he’d always thought of as his right mind. Having put it off as long as he could, he visited the miners’ graveyard at the edge of town, found Webb’s grave, stood there and waited. The place was full of presences, but no more than the valley and the hillsides around. Being a hardheaded sort, Frank had not been real intensely haunted by Webb’s ghost. The other ghosts chided Webb about this. “Oh it’s just Frank. When the moment comes he’ll do the right thing, he’s just always been a little overly practical, ‘s all. . . .”
“It’s like we specialized, Pa. Reef is runnin on nerve, Kit’s gonna figure it all out scientifically, I’m the one who just has to keep poundin at it day after day, like that fella back east trying to turn silver to gold.”
“Deuce and Sloat ain’t here in Telluride, son. And nobody here would tell you if they knew. Fact, they likely have split up by now.”
“It’s Deuce and Lake I want to find. Maybe he left her a while back, maybe she’s another fallen woman now and he’s ridin hard into what he calls his future. He could even be gone across ‘at Río Bravo.”
“He might want you to think so.”
“He might not stay in the U.S. too long, for they’d be after him now, his old comp
adres, tough times, and any number of youthful hardcases who’ll work cheaper, so he’s yesterday’s deadweight. Only place for him to go’d be south.”
So ran Frank’s reasoning. Webb, who knew everything now, saw no point in trying to convince him otherwise. All he said was, “D’ you hear something?”
Some ghosts go oo-oo-oo. Webb had always expressed himself more by way of dynamite. Frank had a vision then, or whatever you call a vision when you hear instead of see it . . . not the comforting thunder of mine-blasting up in the mountains, but right down here in town, hammering up and down the valley, causing even the black-and-white dairy cows there to take a minute to look up before getting back to serious grazing . . . the bone-deep voice of retribution long in coming.
Faces he thought he knew turned out to be others, or not there at all. Saloon girls tried to engage him in metaphysical discussions, like did the dead walk, and so forth. Up on the Ophir road one night, Frank thought he saw his sister, heading down into the valley, keeping her face carefully averted, the way Lake was known to, as for some sorrow she would be forever unwilling to explain, if anybody should ask. He came to believe it must have been a wraith.
Frank came along with Merle to see Dally off at the station. “Like to ride with you, far as Denver anyway, but some of these boys have other ideas. So listen now—my brother Kit is back east going to college at Yale, which is in New Haven, Connecticut? not much further from New York than Montrose is from here, so you be sure and get in touch if you can, he’s a nice kid, little dreamy till you get his attention, but the scrape ain’t been invented he can’t help you out of, just don’t hesitate, hear me?”
“Thanks Frank, to be worryin about me, with all you’ve got to worry about yourself right now.”
“Maybe ‘cause you and Kit are two of a kind.”
“Hell, that case I ain’t going near him.”
Along the platform Dally was getting looks from those accomplished in the parental arts, many indeed putting in with strenuous objection. “Allowing a child to journey without adult supervision across two-thirds of a continent to a nexus of known depravity such as New York City would surely bring prosecution in many if not most courtrooms of the land—”
Against the Day Page 41