“This music,” Ruperta muttered, “is fit only for copulation of the most beastly sort.”
He shrugged. “Seen you do that, too.”
“My God you’re vile. What can I have been thinking? For the first time, my eyes are open and you are truly revealed to me—you and your whole insane country, which actually tore itself apart for five years over this race of jungle throwbacks. Algernon, get us out of here, please, and quickly.”
“See you back at the hotel?”
“Ah, unlikely, I think. Your traps, such as they are, will be somewhere down in the lobby.” And easy as that, she was gone.
Reef lit a hemp-and-tobacco cigarette and reviewed his situation, while around him infectious melodies and rhythms went on refashioning the night. After a bit, shrugging, he approached a smiling young woman in an amazing plumed hat and asked her to dance. He could see the once-over she was giving him, but it was still more attention in a second and a half than he’d ever had from Ruperta.
When “Dope” and his crew took a break, Reef asked him, “What was that everybody at your table was drinking? Can I get you one?”
“Ramos gin fizz. Get yourself one, too.”
The bartender shook them up at length in a long silver shaker, to some slow internal syncopation. When Reef brought the drinks back, the table was deep in a discussion of Anarchist theory.
“Your own Benjamin Tucker wrote of the Land League,” a young man was saying in an unmistakably Irish voice, “in such glowing terms—the closest the world has ever come to perfect Anarchist organization.”
“Were the phrase not self-contradictory,” commented “Dope” Breedlove.
“Yet I’ve noticed the same thing when your band plays—the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain.”
“Sure,” agreed “Dope,” “but you can’t call that organization.”
“What do you call it?”
“Jass.”
The Irishman introduced himself to Reef as Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, a traveling insurrectionist—though not, he was quick to add, a Fenian, an approach that was fine as far as it went, though, it seemed to him, coming as he did from a Land League family, his father and uncles on both sides having been founding members, not nearly far enough.
“The folks who invented boycotting,” Reef seemed to recall.
“And a lovely technique it is, if you’re out in the countryside, Sligo and Tipperary and whatnot. Drives the bloody Brits mental, besides now and then getting them to stop their hateful savagery. But in the cities, now . . .” After a short silence, Wolfe Tone appeared chirpily to rouse himself—”Thank heaven at any rate for this great and good U.S.A., and all her profusion of pennies, nickels, and dimes ever flowing, for without them we’d freeze and fail like the potato in a season of deep frost.” He was just back from a tour of American cities to raise money for the League, having been especially impressed with the miners’ struggle in Colorado.
“I was hoping while I was there I’d somehow get to meet the great Wild West bomb-chucker known as the Kieselguhr Kid, but sadly he’d not been heard from for some time.”
Reef, not quite knowing how to reply but understanding that a shifty eye right now would be a bad idea, sat silently looking the Irishman in the face, where he thought for a moment he could detect the dawning of a certain light. Soon, however, Wolfe Tone appeared to sink back into his preferred state, a black broodfulness, which Reef eventually would come to recognize as a metaphorical device whose tenor always somewhere included lethal hardware in the dark of night.
“These white folks sure is moody,” observed “Dope” Breedlove.
“And you fellows do smile a lot,” Wolfe Tone shot back. “I can’t believe anyone can stay that happy.”
“Tonight,” said “Dope,” “it’s because we just finished an engagement over on Rampart at the Red Onion,” a brief eye-roll at this byword of peril throughout the musical brotherhood, “and we’re all still alive to tell the tale. Besides not wishing to disappoint the many Caucasian music-lovers who come in here expecting that certain dental gleam. Oh yes suh, I loves them po’k chops!” he added in a louder voice, having sensed the owner, now in earshot, on the prowl trying to get the Merry Coons back to work.
When the band had resumed playing, “Took you at first for another damned English idiot like the crowd you came in here with,” said Wolfe Tone O’Rooney.
“She’s booted me out,” Reef confided.
“Need someplace to stay? Maybe not as high-class as you’re used to—”
“Neither was that Hotel St. Charles, come to think of it.” Wolfe Tone was flopping at the Deux Espèces, a Louisiana-style road ranch deep in the red-light district, filled with desperados of one kind and another who were waiting, most of them, for ships to take them out of the country.
“This is Flaco, with whom you may find you share a passion.”
“He means for chemistry,” said Flaco, with a knowing scowl.
Reef flashed a look at the Irishman, who gestured at himself in wounded innocence.
“There’s a kind of a community,” said Flaco, “and all the boys get to know each other after a while.”
“I’m more like an apprentice,” Reef guessed.
“Right now everybody’s talking about Europe. All the Powers are planning how best to move their troops around, and you’d naturally think the railroad, but there’s these mountains everyplace, slowing everything down, so that means tunnels. Suddenly now all over Europe there’s tunnels big and small got to be blasted. Ever do any tunnel work?”
“Some,” said Reef. “Maybe.”
“He’s—” began Wolfe Tone.
“Yes, Brother O’Rooney. I’m . . .?”
“Not political the way we are, Flaco.”
“Don’t know,” said Reef. “Then again, neither do you. Have to think about that.”
“All of us,” said Wolfe Tone O’Rooney. With the same light in his eyes as last night, when the subject of the Kieselguhr Kid came up.
It was an old deception by now, natural as swallowing spit. Inside himself somewhere, he shrugged. Resisted thinking back to Stray and Jesse.
“WE LOOK AT the world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with less. And we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life under it resembles Death. If dying is deliverance into a condition of total non-freedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to address the problem of the State is with counter-Death, also known as Chemistry,” said Flaco.
He was a survivor of Anarchist struggles in a number of places both sides of the Atlantic, notably Barcelona in the ‘90’s. Provoked by the bombing of the Teatro Lyceo during a performance of Rossini’s opera William Tell, the police had rounded up not just Anarchists but anybody who might be in any way opposed to the regime, or even thinking about being. Thousands were arrested and sent “up the mountain” to the fortress of Montjuich which crouched thuglike over the city as if having just assaulted it, and when the dungeons there were full, prisoners were kept chained in warships converted to prison ships, lying at anchor down in the harbor.
“Fucking Spanish police,” Flaco said. “In Cataluña they are an occupying army. Any of the prisoners of ‘93 who weren’t Anarchists before going into Montjuich arrived rapidly at the heart of the matter. It was like finding an old religion again, one we’d almost forgotten. The State is evil, its divine right proceeds from Hell, Hell is where we all went. Some came out of Montjuich broken, dying, without working genitals, intimidated into silence. Whips and white-hot irons are certainly effective for that. But all of us, even those who had voted and paid our taxes like good bourgeoisie, came out hating the State. I include in that obscene word the Church, the latifundios, the banks and corporations, of course.”
EVERYBODY AT THE DEUX ESPÈCES was waiting for his own particular outlaw-friendly ship, of which there were several out on the sea-lanes at any given moment . . . as if there had
once been a joyous mythical time of American Anarchism, now facing its last days after the Anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated McKinley—everywhere it was run, Anarchist, run, the nation allowing itself to lapse into another cycle of Red Scare delusion as it had done back in the ‘70s in reaction to the Paris Commune. But as if, too, there might exist a place of refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, someplace all the Anarchists could escape to, now with the danger so overwhelming, a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, some group of green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far from the sea-lanes to be of use as a coaling station, lacking nitrate sources, fuel deposits, desirable ores either precious or practical, and so left forever immune to the bad luck and worse judgment infesting the politics of the Continents—a place promised them, not by God, which’d be asking too much of the average Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include, somewhere, at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next.
Wolfe Tone O’Rooney was headed to Mexico, where he hoped to track down a consignment of “agricultural implements,” seemingly vanished in transit, intended for League-connected elements he didn’t describe too closely. Flaco was looking in the paper every morning for word of the tramp steamer Despedida, bound for the Mediterranean, where her ports of call likely would include Genoa, as good a place as any to start looking for tunnel work. He had convinced Reef to come along. They tended to congregate at a café down near Maman Tant Gras where “Dope” Breedlove and his fellow jass musicians came by in the early mornings after staying up all night playing in the smoke and river mists that came in the doors and windows. . . . They sat among the early market smells and ate beignets and drank chicory coffee and argued about Bakunin and Kropotkin, remaining for the most part, Reef noticed, easygoing no matter what disagreement might arise, because it was important not to draw attention. It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air.
One afternoon Reef walked in on Wolfe Tone O’Rooney slicing a potato in half and looking as guilty as if he were assembling a bomb. “Mysterious and multifold is the Way of the Potato,” declared Wolfe Tone. He pressed the freshly exposed surface against a document that was on the table, and came away with a perfectly copied ink stamp, which he then transferred to a passport he seemed to be in the process of forging.
“Your ship’s in,” guessed Reef.
Wolfe flourished the document. “Eusebio Gómez, a sus órdenes.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE Wolfe sailed, he, Reef, and Flaco stood down by the river, drinking local beer out of bottles and watching the fall of night, “weightless as a widow’s veil,” observed the young Irishman, “and isn’t it the curse of the drifter, this desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don’t you see, for we’re only passing through, we’re already ghosts.”
Frank was to spend months that seemed like years traipsing to no purpose around an empty shadowmap, a dime novel of Old Mexico, featuring gringo evildoers in exile, sudden deaths, a government that had already fallen but did not yet know it, a revolution that would never begin though thousands were already dying and suffering in its name.
He met up with Ewball Oust one night in a saloon somewhere along the—one does not want to say accursed, exactly, but at least defectively blessed—circuit of engagements booked for Gastón Villa and His Bughouse Bandoleros. For the Bandoleros the border somehow was asymptotic—they might approach as closely as they wished, but never cross. As if his father’s charro act had placed an interdiction on the bloodline, Gastón understood that to enter old Mexico would require of him something like a gift of grace for which he doubted his soul was eligible.
Ewball was a young fellow from Lake County, on the way down to the Veta Madre. The family, rolling in Leadville money, had agreed to remit him two hundred dollars a month, American not pesos, to stay down there and try to get by on his skills in mine engineering. If he survived the drinking water and the bandits, why, he might be allowed someday to return to the States, even to enjoy some marginal future in Business.
“More of a metallurgist that a mine engineer,” Ewball confessed.
Frank had done some business in Leadville with a Toplady Oust, he believed.
“Uncle Top. Conceived in a choir loft during a rendition of ‘Rock of Ages.’ You’re not that fellow with the magnets, are you?”
“I was. Lately obliged to seek a new line of work.”
Ewball eyed the Galandronome, started to say something, thought better of it. “You know the Patio method?”
“Heard of it. Mexican silver process. What us gringos’d call heap amalgamation. Said to be a little on the slow side.”
“Usually a hundred-percent recovery takes about a month. My family runs a couple of mines down in Guanajuato, they’re sending me down to have a look, say they want to modernize, see if they can speed things up.”
“Introduce em Mexes to the joys of the Washoe process, they going to go along with that?”
“They’ve been used to taking their time, Patio style’s traditional around Guanajuato—quicksilver’s cheap, ores tend to be free-milling, not much reason to change except for the time factor. So I figure what it is is, is that my folks just want me out of the country.”
He sounded more bewildered than angry, but Frank reckoned that could change. “Maybe they want a faster return on investment,” he said carefully. “It’s understandable.”
“You know the country down there?”
“No but it has been on my mind lately, and I’ll tell you why, ‘cause you’ll appreciate the metallurgy.” He started to tell Ewball about argentaurum, but Ewball was way ahead of him.
“Sounds to me like what you’re really interested in is that Iceland spar,” Ewball said.
Frank shrugged, as if it would be embarrassing to admit how much.
“Espato is what they call it down there. Sometimes you hear espanto, which is something either horrifying or amazing, depending.”
“Like looking at somebody through a pure enough specimen and seeing not just the man but his ghost alongside him?”
Ewball regarded Frank with some curiosity. “Plenty occasions for goose bumps down in those drifts as it is. Espantoso, hombre.”
“I mean, calcite is an interesting mineral, but basically I could use some work.”
“Sure, they’re always hiring. Come on along.”
“Hate to leave my instrument,” taking up the Galandronome, “just when I learned— Here, listen to this.” It was a Mexican-sounding tune, in some underlying march time but with those peculiar south-of-the-border hesitations and off beats to it. A couple of the Bandoleros wandered over with guitars and began strumming chords, and after a while Paco the trumpet player took over the solo from Frank.
Ewball was amused. “There’s parts of Mexico they’d take you straight to the hoosegow for just whistlin that.”
“‘La Cucaracha’? It’s somebody’s girlfriend, likes to smoke that grifa stuff, what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s General Huerta,” Ewball informed him, “brutal heart, bloody mind, and even if he prefers killing his own people you might not want to be crossing his path, ‘cause he’ll sure settle for a whistling gringo. You won’t get the blindfold and you sure’s hell won’t get no free cigarette.”
SO, IRON ON IRON and headlong as fate, Frank and Ewball were borne into the Bajío on the eve of a turn in history. They crossed the border at El Paso, came in to Guanajuato by train, Torreón, Zacatecas, León, and changing finally at Silao, by then sleepless, apprehensive, field-shirts stained as if ominously with the juice of local strawberries. All along the passage through the mesquite, beneath the soaring hawks of the Sierra Madre, arroyos, piles of ore tailings, cottonwood
s, through black fields, where tlachiqueros brought sheepskins slung across their backs full of fresh maguey juice to be fermented, and campesinos in white lined the right-of-way, some packing weapons, some watching empty-handed the train’s simple passage, “expressionless,” as gringos liked to say, beneath their hatbrims, waiting, for a feast day to dawn, a decisive message to arrive from the Capital, or Christ to return, or depart, for good.
At the Guanajuato station, the northamericans, puffing on Vera Cruz puros, descended from the coach into an afternoon rainstorm, loping to shelter beneath an ungalvanized shed roof that was being so battered by the downpour that no one under it could hear or talk. Where the roof had rusted through, water descended almost wrathfully. “Couple pesos’ worth of zinc could’ve squared this away, ‘s the thing,” Frank commented, and Ewball, unable to hear him, shrugged.
They were approached by purveyors of chewing gum, sunglasses, straw hats, fire opals, and shockingly young women, by children offering to carry their gear and shine their boots, by hopefully loitering hotel trap-drivers with thoughts on where they should sleep tonight, all of whom they were able to refuse with a politely wagging finger.
The old stone city smelled of livestock, well-water, sewage, sulfur and other by-products of the mining and smelting of silver. . . . They could hear sounds from all invisible parts of the city—voices, ore mills, the bells of the churches striking the hours. Sounds echoed off the stone buildings, and the narrow streets amplified them.
Frank went to work at Empresas Oustianas, S.A., and caught on to the amalgamation work easy enough. He and Ewball had soon settled in to the cantina life, the only uncomfortable part being what Frank imagined were strange looks he would get every now and then, as if people thought they recognized him, though it could’ve been all the pulque or the absence of sleep. When he did sleep, he dreamed short, intense dreams nearly always about Deuce Kindred. “I ain’t here,” Deuce kept saying. “I am miles and miles away, you poor fool. No, don’t go in that callejón. You won’t find me. Don’t go up that subida, no point to it. No point to your life, come to that. Mexico’s the perfect place for you to be. Another fucked-up gringo.” But as dream followed dream, here was the odd thing, it was the same intricate path, leading uphill, cobbled alleys at first, giving way to packed earth, twisting, now and then briefly acquiring roofs and becoming narrow passages—and stairways among dilapidated dwellings, many of them abandoned, small, gray, dusty, crumbled, stacked roof to doorsill up the steep mountainside. Frank woke each time convinced there was an actual counterpart somewhere in this daylit city.
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