Sometimes he made the mistake of saying this out loud, in Stray’s hearing. She would make a point of looking over at the baby, as if Reef had somehow just put him in danger, and then start in.
“This ain’t puttin flowers on some grave, Reef.”
“No? Thought everybody’s dead was different. O’ course, some do like the flowers, but then there’s others’s partial to blood, or didn’t you know that.”
“There’s a Sheriff to take care of it.”
No. It was something belonged to them, the ones across the Wall, nothing to do with the State or state law, nor especially with any damn Sheriff.
“My job is to prevent the sides from tangling,” one of these Sheriffs tried once to instruct Reef.
“No, Burgess, your job is to see that they keep on killing Union people, without none of us ever getting to pay them back.”
“Reef, now if they’ve broken the law—”
“Oh, eyewash. The law. You’re just some li’l old saloon bum in their palace o’ wealth, Burge. You think if somebody shoots you right here ’n’ now, they’re going to care? Send even flowers to Laureen and them chavalitos? Piece of paper back there goes in a pneumatic tube’s all, next dumb animal comes blinkin out of the chute, pins on that star, and there ain’t even a form to put your name down in, let alone any notices in the newspaper. Call that law, law enforcement if you like, o’ course.”
What he said to Stray was, “This is too precious to leave it to some office full of clowns.”
“Precious. Jesus our Lord and Savior.”
“Don’t have to start crying, Stray.”
“I’m not crying.”
“Your face gets all red.”
“You don’t know what crying looks like.”
“Darlin you must’ve had public execution on your mind for a while now, and I’m sorry, I know all ’at old calico recital, oh, Honey I don’t want ’em hanging you, well I appreciate that, but now tell me, what else besides?”
“What else? You’re feeling lively today, you really want to know what else? Listen to me, side o’ beef—hangin you, I can understand, but they might decide to hang me, too. Is ‘what else.’”
What he did not of course detect in this was the promise Stray knew straight enough she was making here, to stick by his side, even far as the gallows, if their luck should turn that way. But he didn’t want to hear anything like that, hell no, and quickly pretended this was all about her safety. “Darlin, they’re not gonna want to hang you. They’re gonna want to fuck you.”
“Course. Then hang me.”
“No, ‘cause by then you’ll be casting that spell, and nobody’ll want to do nothin but be down at them famous little feet.”
“Oh. You are such a youngster.”
“Don’t be feeling sorry for me.”
“I won’t. Just grow up, Reef.”
“What, and be like you all? Think not.”
What a man gets for opening his heart and sharing his feelings. Reef knew his days in the family dynamite business were numbered now, though there had to be other ways to fight this fight apart from setting off explosions. About all he was sure of was that he had to keep on with it to make this thing right. But it was time, just about time, for Frank to be taking up some of the slack.
“I’m headin up to Denver, see if I can’t just locate that old Frank.”
She understood approximately what he was up to, and for once refrained from making with the remarks, just nodded him out the door, taking care to have Jesse in her arms when she did.
He rode out into the advent of winter, beneath the sheets and hoods of mountain-size night-riders, torn, swept, pausing only to build up a drift or congregate into an avalanche waiting to let go and wipe anything in its path from the Earth. Streams of runoff frozen onto the vertical rock walls looked like leafless groves of white aspen or birch. Sunsets tended to be purple firestorms, with blinding orange streaks running through. The other riders he met were friendly in the way of fellow troopers in the forces of those who would not descend to valleys, to southerly pastures, who would remain, as if there were something up here to be gotten through as a point of honor, some ongoing high-country misadventure, and it had to be here, among these white verticalities, for it would mean nothing anywhere else. Who would fasten their mean shacks to the mountain with steel cable and eyebolts and let the wind roar and be damned. And next morning be out in it picking up pieces of roof and stovepipes and what all hadn’t been blown to Mexico yet.
When these altitudes passed over into the realm of the unearthly, the chances of life struggling through seemed too slim to consider. As the snows deepened in the towns, covering the street windows and then the upstairs, and the winds wheeled in from the north ever more fiercely, nothing here, no building or schemework of streets, seemed any more permanent than a night’s bivouac—by spring all must be ghosts and sorrow, ruins of darkened wood and unheaped stones. Of course, some of that was just what a person’s idea might be of what was possible—come up here from Texas or New Mexico or even Denver, and it looked like that nothing could survive and what were these people even thinking to settle up here.
Reef was riding a January colt named Borrasca, on the small side but quick and smart and trained like most horses up in this country—the terrain being what it was—to let you mount from whichever side, uphill or down, would let him keep his balance better. They passed along a valley lined on either side with avalanches waiting to happen.
Like mountains and creeks and other permanent features of the landscape, every slide in the San Juans had a name, no matter when it might have run last. Some liked to let go several times a day, some hardly ever, but they were all like reservoirs of pure potential energy, poised up there and waiting their moment. The one Reef was riding under just now had been named the Bridget McGonigal by a mine owner who’d since returned back east, after his wife, for her practice of likewise letting go at completely unpredictable moments.
Reef heard a blast high above, echoing slope to slope, and his bomber’s ear could tell right away it wasn’t dynamite, not nearly clean-edged enough—this concussion had more the ragged blur to it of black powder, so howitzer-happy National Guard amusements weren’t out of the question, though usually the only reason for a powder charge was to move a large mass of snow instead of just bore holes into it, and why on such a gray and uninhabited day would there be any need for that, especially so far upslope, with the risks of triggering an avalanche . . .
Oh, well now, shit?
Here she came, the soul-smiting roar, quick as that, grown to fill the day, the bright cloud risen to the top of what sky he could still see in that direction, all down here suddenly gone into twilight, and him and Borrasca, dead in the path. Nothing anywhere close enough to get behind. Borrasca, being an animal of great common sense, let out with a hell-with-this type of whinny and began to move out of the area quick as he could. Figuring the colt would do better without a rider’s weight, Reef kicked out of the stirrups and rolled off, slipped in the snow, fell, and got up again just in time to turn and face the great descending wall.
Later he would wonder why he didn’t head downhill quick as he could and be planning how to try and swim his way up and out, if he stayed alive that long. Somehow he must have wanted to have a last look. And what he noticed right away was that the slide now, actually, was running in a slightly different direction, angling more to his left, and not as fast as he’d thought at first either. Afterward he calculated that what saved him was the weather, unusually mild that week, almost like spring, making the slide just wet and slow enough to’ve formed a snow-dam someplace in it, at some providential snag in the terrain, that steered the whole giant concern away from him by just enough. Known to happen. Everybody up here had an avalanche story, covered then uncovered again being a favorite among countless occasions of miracle. . . .
The great cloud, now a veil of mercy, hung between Reef and everything uphill, offering him a few minutes to get ou
t of the sightlines from up there and hope whoever it was’d be fooled into thinking they’d got him. He took off at a run, or best he could in this wet snow, toward where the trail made its switchback, and first thing he saw when he got safely around the bend was Borrasca, unhurriedly stepping along, already down on the next stretch of road below, heading on back to the barn at Ouray. With no way of knowing how deep the snow was, and no history even as a kid of practicing any of the forms of squarehead insanity that went on in wintertime in these mountains, Reef unlatched his waterproof, folded it into a rough sort of sled, climbed onto it, grabbed hold of his hat, and trying hard not to scream, slid up and over the edge, down into the steep white unknown, with some dim thought of steering so as to cross paths below with Borrasca, praying as much as he ever did for no hidden rocks to be in the way. Approaching the trail below, he guessed he might be going a little too fast, and had to put out a foot, in fact two, finally roll off and over onto his side to brake himself, and as it was he nearly overshot the roadway and went off the next ledge, which was really steep, you might say vertical. But he managed to stop before the overhang and roll about six or eight feet down a little bank slip and onto the trail. He lay on his back for a minute looking up into the sky. Borrasca, coming along, was eyeing him curiously, but not that amazed to see him.
“Don’t recall sayin I’d be back,” Reef greeted him, “but nice seein you again howsoever, and let’s go look at how far she ran out.”
Jake with the colt, who stood there with his eyes rolling till Reef got aboard, and they resumed their journey.
They made it down to Ouray without running into any other riders, though somebody could always’ve been watching through field-glasses. Reef took the sunny view that as far as the Owners Association knew (who else could it’ve been?), he was now dead and gone, and therefore born again, “I say unto you born again,” he murmured to the horse, who, if you went by his markedly human demeanor, may have known, in the Hindoo sense, something of what Reef meant.
“YOU’RE BACK in a hurry.”
He told her what’d happened. “Only one thing to do.”
“Uh-huh. That would be, you leave me here alone, with winter on the way, and the screaming baby.”
He felt a familiar hollow vibrating of fear along his centerline, out to his palms and fingers. It was just the way she was looking at him. Nothing would help here. But he said, “We’ve always found the way back together. Ain’t we?”
She just kept on with that look.
“What’s different? Baby, sure, but what else?”
“Did I say anythin, Reef?” Damned if she would raise her voice. Ever. Ever fuckin again, and by then of course she was that much closer to letting it all run, and there he was just jabbering right along,
“Don’t want you either one getting hurt, do I, for all I know these boys’s up on that ridge right now, just waiting for this door here to open. You want to, please, forget the speech this time? Save it for when next we meet?”
She didn’t want to, no, actually, “Willow can take little Jesse awhile, he’ll be safe with her and Holt, but I don’t know about you, you sorry lummox, you’ll be needin somebody to cover your back. . . .” Well, this after years, just damn years, of swearing she would never come to it. Cowardly, this parlor-wife pleading. Knowing that he was already, the passing shade of him, slipped away over the doorsill, with that doomed carcass she loved beer belly and all only a detail now. Lord, how she, who never prayed, was praying that whoever it was hadn’t got to the ridge yet, for she wanted at least that scrap of a chance he could go on being alive, someplace.
“First thunder from the east, darlin. That’s when the Zuñis say winter’s over, and that’s when I’ll be back. . . .”
Jesse was asleep, so Reef just kissed him real gently on his head before he went out the door.
WHICH WAS HOW Reef came to take on the guise of East Coast nerve case Thrapston Cheesely III, learning to look sicker than he was, to dress like a dude who couldn’t sit a horse on a merry-go-round, sneaking into Denver to take dancing lessons from a certain Madame Aubergine, swearing her to secrecy under pain of an ancient Ute shaman’s curse. He started using cologne and the same brand of hair pomade as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and kept his dynamite, detonator caps, and miscellaneous exploder gear all in a matched and monogrammed set of alligator-hide luggage given him by the provocative and voracious Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, a touring Englishwoman fascinated by what she took to be contradictions in his character, and not exactly put off by what signals of danger did find their way through.
“Dear, dear Mizziz Chirpingdon-Groin, you mustn’t be too upset with me though I admit I was naughty down in the kitchen there with ‘at li’l Yup Toy and so forth, but you simply must forgive me, for what could one undeveloped lotus blossom mean to one who has spent even a moment in your own company, enchanting, desirable Mizziz Chirpingdon-Groin. . . .”
Yup Toy herself, waiting by a huge ice machine among a row of Oriental ice-girls in abbreviated sequined getups, her painted face a porcelain mask in the naphtha-light streaming from somewhere beneath, gazed, sucking at a scarlet fingernail, failing to look inscrutable to any but the habitually dismissive, such as Ruperta. To others more appreciative of her virtues, her mind was an open book, and many began to edge away, anticipating trouble up the tracks. Down in the unlighted depths of the great machine, a steam hammer relentlessly slammed away at blocks of raw ice, vapors rose and blew, a confusion of water in all its phases at once, through which the ice-girls, directed by a headwaiter with a pair of castanets, glided roller-skating among the tables, delivering galvanized buckets embossed with the name of this establishment brimming over with the low-temperature solid.
Reef joined Ruperta’s loose salon of neuræsthenics traveling hot spring to spring in search of eternal youth or fleeing the deadweight of time, finding enough impulsive or inattentive cardplayers to keep him in Havanas and $3.50-a-quart Champagne, and Ruperta surprised enough now and then with silver and lapis Indian trinkets and the odd bushel of flowers to keep her guessing, she having figured him for a white savage masquerading as an exquisite. Which did not prevent them from going round and round on average once a week, memorable uproars that sent everybody running for the periphery, uncertain as to what distance was safe. In between these dustups, Reef had long, desultory conversations with his penis, to the effect that there wasn’t much point missing Stray too much right now, was there, as it would only blunt the edge of desire, not only for Ruperta but whoever else, Yup Toy or whoever, might drift by over the course of their travels.
They finally parted company in New Orleans after a confused and repetitive headache of a night that began at the establishment of Monsieur Peychaud, where the Sazeracs, though said to’ve been invented there, were not a patch, it seemed to Reef, on those available at Bob Stockton’s bar in Denver, though those Absinthe Frappés were another matter. After taking on fuel, the party moved out into the French Quarter hunting for modes of intoxication “more exotic,” meaning, if you pushed it, some form of zombie powder. Ruperta tonight was in a narrow black bengaline costume with a Medici collar and cuffs of bastard chinchilla. Nothing on underneath except for stays and stockings, as Reef had had occasion to find out earlier, at their habitual late-afternoon rendezvous.
It had soon become apparent in this town that what you could see from the street was not only less than “the whole story” but in fact not even the picture on the cover. The real life of this place was secured deep inside the city blocks, behind ornate iron gates and up tiled passages that might as well’ve run for miles. You could hear faint strands of music, crazy stuff, banjos and bugling, trombone glissandi, pianos under the hands of whorehouse professors sounding like they came with keys between the keys. Voodoo? Voodoo was the least of it, Voodoo was just everywhere. Invisible sentinels were sure to let you know, the thickest of necks being susceptible here to monitory pricklings of the Invisible. The Forbidden. And meantime the smells of the
local cuisine, cheurice sausages, gumbo, crawfish étouffé, and shrimp boiled in sassafras, proceeding from noplace you could ever see, went on scrambling what was left of your good sense. Negroes could be observed at every hand, rollicking in the street. The so-called Italian Troubles, stemming from the alleged Mafia assassination of the chief of police here being yet fresh in the civic memory, children were apt to accost strangers, Italian or not, with, “Who kill-a da chief?” not to mention “Va fongool-a your sister.”
They ended up at Maman Tant Gras Hall, a concert saloon just off Perdido Street in the heart of the brothel district.
“Yes a no doubt charming guignette,” cried Ruperta, “but my dears, the music!”
“Dope” Breedlove and his Merry Coons were the house band here, and everybody was having too good a time to let the likes of Ruperta get in the way. A few customers even came up and asked her to dance, which was enough to throw her into a peculiar smirking cataplexy, which sent them away with puzzled looks, whereupon she turned on Reef in high indignation, if not all-out panic. “Do you intend simply to sit there, while these grinning darkies humiliate us both?”
“How’s that?” Reef genially enough. “Look—can you see what those people there are doing? It’s called dancing. I know you dance, I’ve seen you.”
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