Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “No.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “Not with me anymore.”

  “Come on, Stray. Bet you an ice-cream cone.” He told her about running into Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, and how Wolfe had seen Reef in New Orleans. “So we know he got that far anyhow.”

  “Sakes. Three years, doesn’t mean he’s still alive, does it?”

  “I feel like that he is, don’t you?”

  “Oh, ‘feel’—listen, last I knew they were trying to kill him, hell I saw them, Frank. Come down off that mountain like they’s chasin old Geronimo or somethin. Too many to count. Could’ve had it out, I suppose, found a little Derringer for the baby, showed him real quick how to sight the bastards in, but they just rode on through, me and Jesse wa’n’ worth their time, ‘fore the dust settled they’re over the next ridge and it might as well been the edge of the world, ’cause they never showed again. But there we waited. Don’t know—every day Jesse woke up thinkin he’d see his Pop, you could tell that plain enough, and then the day, and the days, went on, and there was all these other things to do. We still kept waitin, both of us. There’s ’ese women like to wait, you know, love to even, I’ve run into a few. They get it confused with good works or somethin. More likely enjoyin the peace and quiet. It sure ain’t for me.”

  “Well. What’s ’at young Jesse up to these days?”

  “Walkin, talkin, fears no man whatever his size, be drivin a rig next time I turn around. Willow and Holt, they have this little place up in northern New Mexico, he’s pretty much in there with them when I’m on the road.” Watching his eyes, as if for the shape his disapproval would take.

  But Frank was too busy beaming like an uncle. “Be nice to see him before he gets too fast for me anyhow.”

  “Too late for that. Already playin with the dynamite, too.” Adding, before Frank could, “Yeahp, just like his daddy.”

  LATER, OUTSIDE, back from a stroll by the dusty green river, Frank saw, coming quickly behind them along the sidewalk, almost like a mirage in the blaring of heat and light, two local reps out from some metropolis of the bad, faces or at least gaits he might have run across before. “If these are friends of yours . . .”

  “Oh, my. That’d be old Hatch, and his saddle pal of the day.” She didn’t turn around to look, but had reached casually beneath her duster and come out with a little over-and-under. Twirling the parasol for, he guessed, distraction. “Well,” Frank checking his own outfit, “I was hoping for more caliber there, but happy to see you’re heeled, and say—let’s figure on one apiece, how’s that? They don’t look too professional.”

  “Nice to see you out in public again, Miss Estrella. This here your beau?”

  “This yours, Hatch?”

  “Wasn’t looking for no round and round,” advised the other one, “just being neighborly.”

  “Six hundred long empty miles to Austin,” Hatch added, “sometimes good neighbors is all you can count on.” Nobody packing anything Frank could see, but this was town.

  “Well, neighbors,” her voice maintaining a smooth contralto, “you’re a long way from the old neighborhood, hate to see you come all this distance for nothin.”

  “Be easy to fix that, I would guess.”

  “Sure, if it was anythin but simple damn thievery.”

  “Oh? Somebody around here’s a damn thief?” inquired Hatch in what he must have been told was a menacing voice. Frank, who’d been watching the men’s feet, took a short off-angle step so as to have speedier access to his Police Special. Coat buttons meantime were being undone, hatbrims realigned for the angle of the sun, amid a noticeable drop-off in pedestrian traffic around the little group.

  Though having been obliged not long ago to gun Sloat Fresno into the Beyond, and not yet given up on the hope of doing the same for his partner, Frank still harbored too many doubts about triggerplay to be out looking to repeat it with just anybody—still, there was no denying he’d lost a whole ensemble of hesitancies back down the trail, and Hatch here, though enjoying perhaps even less acquaintance with the homicidal, might have detected this edge, raising the interesting question of how eager he might be to back up his sidekick.

  For really it was the sidekick who presented the problem. Restless type. Fair hair, hat back on his head so the big brim sort of haloed his face, shiny eyes and low-set, pointed ears like an elf’s. Frank understood this was to be his playfellow—Stray meantime having slowly drifted into a pose that only the more heedless of their safety would’ve read as demure. The daylight had somehow thickened, as before a tempest on the prairie. Nobody was saying much, so Frank figured the verbal part of this was done, and the practical matter nearly upon them. The elfin sidekick was whistling softly through his teeth the popular favorite “Daisy, Daisy,” which since Doc Holliday’s celebrated rejoinder to Frank McLaury at the O.K. Corral had been sort of telegraphic code among gun-handlers for Boot Hill. Frank gazed brightly, all but sympathetically, into the eyes of his target, waiting for a fateful tell.

  Out of nowhere, “Well, hi everbody,” a cheerful voice broke in, “whatch-y’all doin?” It was Ewball Oust, pretending not to be a cold, bleak-eyed Anarchist who’d left all operational doubt miles back in the romantic mists of youth, whenever that was.

  “Damn,” breathed the pointy-eared gent, in a long, unrequited sigh. Everybody at their own pace went about relocating their everyday selves.

  “So nice runnin into you again,” Hatch as if preparing to kiss Stray’s hand, “and don’t you be a stranger, now.”

  “Next time,” nodded the sidekick with a poignant smile at Ewball. “Maybe in church. What church y’all go to?” he seemed to want to know, in an oily voice.

  “Me?” Ewball laughed, far exceeding the humor of the moment. “I’m Mexican Orthodox. How about you? Amigo?”

  Whereupon the sidekick was observed to take a hesitant step or two backward. Stray and Hatch over his hat crown exchanging a look.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Ewball.

  “You’re right on time,” said Frank.

  “MY KEEPER,” Frank introduced Ewball to Stray. They had given up looking for a decent saloon in El Paso and were sitting in a cantina across the river. “Worries about me all the time.”

  “You part of this deal?” her eyes more sparkling, it seemed to Frank, than business talk quite required.

  Ewball shifted his eyes a couple-three times back and forth between her and Frank before shrugging. “Pretty much Frank’s.” Waiting a second before adding, “This time around. I just happened to be in town for a teetotalers’ convention.”

  “She’s got the goods, Ewb,” said Frank, “and we’re figurin out a rendezvous point. Seems like that that Dwayne was straight-shootin on this one after all.”

  “Be lookin for the imminent return of the baby Jesus any day now.” Ewball finished his glass of tequila, took Frank’s beer to chase it with, rose and took Stray’s hand. “Been a pleasure, Miss Briggs. You children behave, now. Eyes of Texas are upon you.”

  “Where you fixin to be later?” Frank said.

  “Usually, midnight will find me in Rosie’s Cantina.”

  “South side of town, as I recall,” said Stray, “just outside the city limits.”

  “Happy they’re still in business, gay little establishment, used to be at least one presentable dancin girl?”

  “That’s the place. The L.&O.L. makes noises, but not so much since ’em seventeen mounted cowboys started runnin their patrol.”

  After Ewball left, she just sat looking at Frank for a while.

  “Expectin you to be more, don’t know, froze up by now. Way men will get sometimes?”

  “Me? Same warm, easy fellow here.”

  “Heard that you found that Sloat Fresno.”

  “Luck.”

  “And that didn’t—”

  “Estrella, maybe there’s kids out there one notch makes ’em a hardcase, but us older gentlemen are not always that eager for a career in firearms ac
tivity.”

  “You looked more’n ready to do Hatch’s friend back there.”

  “Oh, but they wa’n that serious. Sloat was somethin somebody would’ve had to do.”

  She might have hesitated. “Had to. ’Cause . . . what, ’cause Reef didn’t do it?”

  “Reef is somewhere doin what he’s doin, ’s all, I just happened that time to walk in onto Sloat. And no luck with Deuce anyplace, so old Sloat may end up bein my one and only.”

  “You’ve been on this awhile now, Frank.”

  He shrugged. “My Pa is still dead.”

  In fact, Frank, who by day you wouldn’t think got too carried away by his imagination, was plagued at night by variations on one recurring dream about Webb. He stands before a door that will not open—wood sometimes, iron, but always the same door, set into a wall, maybe in the anonymous middle of some city block, unattended, no one in control of who enters and who can’t, a blank door hardly different from the wall it is set into, silent, inert, no handle or knob, no lock or keyhole, fitting so tightly into its wall that not even a knifeblade can be slipped between them. . . . He could wait across the street, keep vigil all night and day and night again, praying though not in the usual way, exactly, for the unmarked hour when at last the quality of shadow at the edges of the door might slowly begin to change, the geometry deepen and shift, and unasked-for as that, the route to some so-far-undreamable interior lie open, a way in whose way back out lies too far ahead in the dream to worry about. The sky is always bleak and cloudless, with late-afternoon light draining away. Through the clairvoyance of dreams, Frank is certain—can actually see—his father, just the other side of the closed door, refusing to acknowledge Frank’s increasingly desperate pounding. Pleading, even, by the end, crying. “Pa, did you ever think I was good for anything? don’t you want me with you? On your side?” Understanding that “side” also means the side of the wall Webb is on, and hoping that this double sense will be enough, smart or powerful enough, like a password in an old tale, to gain him entrance. But though he tries to stop it, his crying at some point will steepen from sorrow into hoarse rage, heedless assault on the dumb solidity before him. Reef and Kit are usually around someplace, too, though how close depends on how much silence lies among them all. And Lake, she’s never there. Frank wants to ask where she is, but because his motives are recognizably impure, whenever he tries to, or it even looks like he’s about to ask, his brothers turn away, and that more often than not is what he would wake from, into the borderlands of the early night, having by now come to understand that it had been prelude and étude to whatever waited deeper in.

  IT HAD RAINED in the night, and some of the ocotillo fences had sprouted some green. Stray had just got word that the Krags were delivered safely and en route to their invisible destiny.

  “Time to get back to what we were doin I guess,” she said.

  “I’m back and forth a lot,” Frank said. “Ain’t out of the question is it we’ll maybe do this again. Like you say, sit still long enough in El Paso.”

  “You know when I saw you in that little tearoom I thought it was Reef for a second. Sorrowful, ain’t it? All this time.”

  “Stranger things,” Frank with a small lopsided smile. “Have faith.”

  “I always figured me for the one that wouldn’t stick.” They looked out across the river. In the early light, Juárez was all pink and red. “Every time he stood by me, that one big night down in Cortez, Leadville all the time, o’ course, Rock Springs when they come after us with those repeating shotguns . . . him always there like that, between me and them, making sure I got out—I wouldn’t deny none of it, couldn’t, but is it too forward of a gal to in fact mention returning the favor once or twice, and not with some little Ladies’ Friend neither? Creede? whoo-ee. . . . For a while there, we were unbeatable. . . .

  “By the time Jesse showed up, though, maybe it was beginnin to soak in, we’re too old for it, no mess that getting out of it meant any hope of getting out for good anymore—at best just for some breathin time till the next one jumped us, maybe. And meantime the inches, it’s always inches ain’t it, kept gettin shorter, all narrowin down, sometimes had to schedule a week ahead just to pick m’nose.”

  Frank was gazing at her, the face men got in dance halls sometimes, almost a smile.

  “Not like that I was ever some lady,” she tentatively dropped a hook, “got used to certain comforts I didn’t want to give up—where’d I ever see any of that? hell I was twenty before I owned a mirror I could sit and look into. There was a mistake, I give the thing right away, went back to saloon mirrors and shop windows, where there was still some mercy to the light.”

  “Oh, make up another one, I saw you when you were twenty.” If she hadn’t known better she might have taken his gaze for resentful. Finally, “Stray, the first time I saw you, I knew I’d never see anybody that beautiful again, and I never did, until you walked in that li’l doily joint the other day.”

  “What I get for fishin.”

  “That mean the deal’s off?”

  “Frank—”

  “Hey. I love him too.”

  It hadn’t been all fishing, of course. She got sometimes to feeling too close to an edge, a due date, the fear of living on borrowed time. Because for all her winters got through and returns to valley and creekside in the spring, for all the day-and-night hard riding through the artemisia setting off sage grouse like thunderclaps to right and left, with the once-perfect rhythms of the horse beneath her gone faltering and mortal, yet she couldn’t see her luck as other than purchased in the worn unlucky coin of all those girls who hadn’t kept coming back, who’d gone down before their time, Dixies and Fans and Mignonettes, too fair to be alone, too crazy for town, ending their days too soon in barrelhouses, in shelters dug not quite deep enough into the unyielding freeze of the hillside, for the sake of boys too stupefied with their own love of exploding into the dark, with girl-size hands clasped, too tight to pry loose, around a locket, holding a picture of a mother, of a child, left back the other side of a watershed, birth names lost as well behind aliases taken for reasons of commerce or plain safety, out in some blighted corner too far from God’s notice to matter much what she had done or would have to do to outride those onto whose list of chores the right to judge had found its way it seemed . . . Stray was here, and they were gone, and Reef was God knew where—Frank’s wishful family look-alike, Jesse’s father and Webb’s uncertain avenger and her own sad story, her dream, recurring, bad, broken, never come true.

  What with card games in the changing rooms and the platoons of ladies who gathered each shift’s end at the tunnel entrances in their respective countries, it wasn’t like either Reef or Flaco was squirreling much away, though there was no shortage of work. “It’s a seller’s market,” they kept hearing as they went gypsying from one European tunnel to the next, “you boys can write your own ticket.” The Austrian Alps in particular were just hopping. Everybody expected war between Austria and Italy to break out any minute, over old territorial claims Reef wasn’t sure he’d ever understand, and even if the countries remained at peace, Austria still wanted to be able to move massive forces south whenever it took a mind to. Within the period 1901-6, on the new Karawankenbahn alone, forty-seven tunnels were driven through the mountains, with similar blasting opportunities in the Tauern and Wochein ranges.

  At the Simplon a massive tunnel project had been under way since 1898 to connect train lines between Brigue in Switzerland and Domodossola in Italy, replacing a nine-hour trip by horse-drawn diligence. Reef and Flaco arrived in time for some epic difficulties. On the Swiss side, hot springs had driven everybody out and stopped work—an iron door was keeping in a great reservoir of very hot water three hundred yards long. All effort was redirected to the approach being made at the same time from the Italian side, where the hot-water springs were only slightly less bothersome. Since two parallel galleries were being driven through the mountain, it was often necessary to cros
s over from one to the other and work back for short stretches in the opposite direction. It did not help to be one of those folks who became nervous in tight places.

  Two-foot drills got worn down to three inches faster than poolchalk and needed changing dozens of times a day. The noise was hellish, the air wet and hot and stifling when it wasn’t full of stone dust, which the new Brandt drills, mounted on tripods like Hotchkiss machine guns, being faster, were supposed to be cutting down on. But there weren’t enough of them for everybody, and Reef usually found himself single-jacking or augering with a breastplate rig holding the butt end of the drill against his body.

  Old-timers on the crew—Nikos, Fulvio, Gerhardt, the opera singer, the Albanian—when they first penetrated the mountain, prepared to fight frozen rock, had found instead a passionate heart, a teeming interiority, mineral water at about 120 to 130 degrees, and a struggle some days to simply get out alive by shift’s end, although some never did. . . .

  “We are fucking crazy,” Nikos informed Reef several times each day, shouting over the racket of the drilling. “Nobody but crazy people would be in here.”

  Some of the boys on the shift were part-time Anarchists interested in furthering their chemical education. Most did all they could to keep their faces hidden from a daily parade of visitors, few of whom found it necessary to identify themselves. Engineers, inspectors, company officials, idly curious inlaws, government police from every jurisdiction in Europe were known to show up unexpectedly with briefcases, magnesium flash cameras, and questions ranging from the keenly intrusive to the stupidly repetitive.

  “Any of them you’d like put out of the way,” Ramiz, the Albanian, offered, “I give you a good price, flat fee, no extras. Nothing to lose, because I can’t go back.” He was on the run from a long-standing blood vendetta back home. The ancient code of the region, known as Kanuni Lekë Dukagjinit, allowed any wronged family one consequence-free rifle shot, but if the offender was still alive after twenty-four hours, they couldn’t take any further revenge for as long as he stayed on his own property. “So nearly every village has a family like mine, sometimes two, locked up in their houses.”