It wasn’t exactly a religious experience, but somehow, a little at a time, she had found herself surrendering to her old need to take care of people. Not for compensation, certainly not for thanks. Her first rule became “Don’t thank me.” Her second was “Don’t take the credit for anything that turns out well.” One day she woke up understanding clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there were very few limits on the good it became possible to do.
Stray had been accustomed to search out the real interests that lay behind spoken ones, and think of ways to reconcile them. Though the interests at war in the coal country were clear enough, she had some trouble deciphering Ewball’s own in wanting to head down there. Profit and power for Ewball were not objects of desire, though she would never come to believe that he didn’t want to be leader of something, or have access to resources of one sort or another. But it was invisible, whatever that was, his Anarchist remit. It never occurred to her he might just love getting into trouble.
To her not particularly bitter disappointment, it became rapidly evident that Ewball also took the Anarchist view of love, marriage, childrearing and so forth. “Think of me as an educational resource,” he told her. “Jeez Ewball, I don’t know, it’s basically your dick,” she replied.
Nevertheless, due to feelings of mental ambivalence which were just beginning at that time to be understood, it had one day occurred to Ewball, after an absence measurable in years, to drop in on his family in Denver, having got it into his head that Stray might want to meet his parents, which she didn’t, all that much. One fleece-clouded weekday, with about half an hour’s warning over the telephone, they showed up at his family home.
The Oust residence was still fairly new, big and cross-gabled, with a round tower and a lot of spindlework and shingling, and large enough to accommodate an indeterminate number of Ousts and Oust in-laws at any given time.
Ewball’s mother, Moline Velma Oust, answered the door in person. “Ewball Junior? Well convey your fundament in to the parlor!”
“This is my mother. Ma, Miss Estrella Briggs.”
“You are welcome to our home, Miss Briggs.” The Ousts had been living down in Denver for some while now, Leadville having fallen on dismal times, lots and houses for sale everywhere you looked, and no takers. “Remember that one across the street? Their For Sale sign went up, we took a stopwatch, less than five minutes on the market, gone for ten thousand. These days you couldn’t pay somebody to live in it.” Moline would have taken as her exemplar the Lake County legend Baby Doe Tabor, seeing herself dressed in stylish mourning up at some shafthouse with a rifle across her knees, defending family property, and by extension the glory days of some legendary town, to the bitter end. But so far her husband, Ewball Sr., had shown little interest in being Haw Tabor, that is, dead.
“I see you admiring our new Steinway piano, Miss Briggs. Do you play, by any chance?”
“Not much, song accompaniments mostly.”
“I’m such a devotee of the Schubert lieder myself. . . . Oh, do play us something, won’t you!”
Stray got maybe four bars into a one-step of the day called “I’m Going to Get Myself a Black Salome,” when Moline remembered she had to see to the majolica, which was being dusted today. “Mexican refugees, you know, it’s so difficult sometimes—oh dear, no offense, I hope you’re not one of Ewball’s—that is—”
Having run into this sort of thing once or twice, Stray tried to steer her through it. “‘Ewball is a dear,’” she prompted, “‘but he brings home the most peculiar girls sometimes’?”
Moline, seeming visibly to relax, favored her with a squint and a one-sided smile. “Guess you know the general outline, then. He’s got no sense of money, and there are young ladies of the syndicalist persuasion who just have an instinct for that.”
“Mrs. Oust,” Stray said calmly, “I’m not after anybody’s money, got enough of my own, thanks, fact it’s been me picking up all the saloon tabs lately, and I sure wouldn’t mind you havin a word ’th old Ewb about that, ’cause I figure it must be his upbringing?”
“Well.” Off to that majolica after all. But either she was the kind of good-natured soul who can’t stay upset for long, or she found Stray a refreshing enough change, or she just had the attention span of a chipmunk, because in a couple of minutes she was back with lemonade in a cut-glass pitcher and matching glasses, waving off one of the girls, “’Tá bien, no te preocupes, m’hija.”
“You.” A man of middle age in galluses, holding a fistful of U.S. mail, stood in the doorway red-faced, shaking, and just about to explode.
“Howdy, Pa.”
Introducing Stray did not deflect the elder Oust from his furious intention. “Ewball, what the hell,” waving the wad of correspondence.
“Now Father,” appealed Moline, “how many sons write home as regularly as our own here?”
“That’s just it. Pinhead!” he spat. As a stamp collector of average obsessiveness, his unhappiness with his son had grown from bewilderment into an all but homicidal rage. It seemed that young Ewball had been using postage stamps from the 1901 Pan-American Issue, commemorating the Exposition of that name in Buffalo, New York, where the Anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated President McKinley. These stamps bore engraved vignettes of the latest in modern transportation, trains, boats, and so forth, and by mistake, some of the one-cent, two-cent, and four-cent denominations had been printed with these center designs upside down. One thousand Fast Lake Navigation, 158 Fast Express, and 206 Automobile inverts had been sold before the errors were caught, and before stamp-collector demand had driven their prices quite through the roof, Ewball, sensitive to the Anarchistic symbolism, had bought up and hoarded as many as he could find to mail his letters with.
“Even right side up,” shouted Ewball Senior, “any nincompoop knows enough to keep stamps in mint condition—uncanceled, original gum intact! for chrissakes—otherwise the secondary-market value goes all to hell. Every time you mailed one of these letters here you wasted hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.”
“Exactly my point, sir. Inversion symbolizes undoing. Here are three machines, false idols of the capitalist faith, literally overthrown—along with an indirect reference of course to the gunning down of Mark Hanna’s miserable stooge, that resolute enemy of human progress—”
“I voted for McKinley, damn it!”
“As long as you are truly penitent, the people in their wisdom will forgive you.”
“Rrrrr!” Oust Senior threw the letters in the air, dropped to all fours and charged screaming at Ewball, into whose ankle he unhesitatingly sank his teeth. Ewball, in considerable pain, sought with his other foot to step repeatedly on his father’s head, the two men filling the air of the parlor meanwhile with language unfit for the sensitive reader, let alone those ladies present, who gathering their skirts and moving cautiously, were attempting to pull the disputants apart, when all at once the curious Œdipal spectacle was interrupted by a loud gunshot.
A woman in a simple dress of dark gray henrietta, calm and solid, holding a Remington target pistol, had entered the room. Gunsmoke rose toward the ceiling, from which still descended the last of a fine shower of plaster, lighted by the window behind to surround her briefly in a bright cloud. Stray, looking upward, noticed there were several patches of damaged ceiling along with the one just created. The Ousts, father and son, had abandoned their struggle and risen to their feet, somewhat apologetic, less to each other than to this matronly referee who had just called a halt to their recreation.
“Thought I’d look in.” She slid the ten-inch barrel of the weapon beneath the band of the white muslin apron she was wearing.
“As always, Mrs. Traverse,” said Ma Oust, “we are in your debt. Please don’t worry about the ceiling, we were planning to have it redone anyway.”
“Ran out of the B.B. caps, had to use a .22 short.”
“Quite unobjectionable, I’m sure. And as you’re here, perhaps yo
u wouldn’t mind seeing to our house-guest, Miss Briggs. She might rather enjoy the Chinese Room, don’t you think? Estrella, dear, anything you need, Mrs. Traverse is a miracle-working saint, and this house would be simply chaos without her.”
When they were alone, Mayva said, “We only met but that once in Durango.”
“Reef and I always meant to come see you in Telluride soon as the baby was born, but one thing and another . . .”
“I sure heard enough about you over the years, Estrella. Always figured Reef’s future’d be with one of them girlies that tread a bit closer to the Abyss . . . but here you are, a young lady showin nothin but class.”
“Guess you must miss him.”
“Yeahp but you never know who’ll show up. How’s my grandbaby?”
“Here, look.” Stray had snaps of Jesse she always carried in her purse.
“Oh the little heartbreaker. If he don’t just favor Webb.”
“You can keep these—”
“Oh, no, that’s—”
“I always have extras.”
“Well I’m obliged. But how can he be this grown-up already?”
“Don’t remind me.”
They were in the Chinese Room by now, fussing with drapes, coverlets, and dresser scarves in various “Chinese” motifs. “Ewball and Frank, they’ve rode together off and on, I take it.”
“We were all down in Mexico a while back. Frank got a little banged up but nothin serious.”
Mayva looked up awkwardly, hopeful. “I know that’s where he was when he took care of that one killer the owners hired. Do you know if he might’ve found the other one down there too?”
“Not so far’s I know. This was more like a battle we got mixed up in. Frank fell off a horse. Took some time to mend.”
She nodded. “He’s the patient one in the family.” She looked Stray in the eyes. “I know it’s all any of us can do.”
Stray put her hand on Mayva’s. “Somebody’ll get that Deuce Kindred someday, and Mr. Vibe too, it wouldn’t surprise me. People that bad have a way of bringin it to themselves sooner or later.”
Mayva took Stray’s arm and they went down to the kitchen. “You can imagine how happy I was havin to go to work here, in a millionaire’s mansion. Ran into ’em all on the train when they ’s movin down from Leadville. Started playin with the little ones. Forgot how much I missed that. Next thing I knew, there ’s old Moline pourin her heart out. Everthin about Denver had her worryin, big-city vices, schools for the children, low-altitude cookin, and she somehow got it into her head I was jake with all that. Turns out she’s good people, good enough, just a little flighty now and then. He’s all right too, I suppose, for a plute.”
Too fast almost to register, the years had taken Mayva from a high-strung girl with foreign-looking eyes to this calm dumpling of a housekeeper in a prosperous home that might as well be halfway back east, set upwind from the sparks and soot of the trains, where she kept portraits and knickknacks dusted, knew how much everything cost, what time to the minute each of the Oust kids would wake (all but the one maybe, the one with the destiny), and where each of the family was likely to’ve gone when they weren’t in the house . . . her once spellbinding eyes brought back, as field-creatures are reenfolded at the end of day, into orbits grown pillow-soft, on watch within, guarding a thousand secrets of these old Territories never set down, and of how inevitable, right from the minute the first easterners showed up, would be the betrayal of everyday life out here, so hard-won, into the suburban penance the newcomers had long acceded to. The children in her care never saw past the kind and forever bustling old gal, never imagined her back in Leadville raising all those species of hell. . . .
“We lived up in a cabin above the snowline, brought home a little piñon that Christmas for a tree, shot a ptarmigan for a turkey. Storm outside, baby blue electricity running down the stovepipe. Little Reef loved ’em thunder-gusts, waving his arms, hollering ‘Ah! Ah!’ every time one came booming down. Later on with blasting in the mines, he’d get this little frown, like, ‘Where’s the lightning, where’s the rain?’ Just the dearest thing.”
Mayva brought out the baby tintypes, Reef in a christening dress, maybe a sailor hat, all that usual decking-out, for he was a sweet baby, his mother said, though by the time he was three or four, Stray couldn’t help noticing, he was already halfway to the face he was always going to have, that lopsided hammered-on look, like he’d already made up his mind to it, even as a kid.
“Do you think he’ll be back?” Mayva said.
The kitchen was dim and cool. The afternoon was quiet for a minute, no father and son going round and round, midday chores all seen to, Moline taking a nap someplace. Stray gathered the older woman into her arms, and Mayva with a great dry-eyed sigh rested her forehead on Stray’s shoulder. They kept like that, silent, till somewhere in the house there was a series of thumps and some bellowing and the day started up again.
Despite warnings from the U.S. State Department to all gringos to get their backsides across the border immediately, Frank stayed in Chihuahua. While his bones were knitting and he’d been attending to his romantic and, it could be argued, spiritual life, the Madero Revolution had moved on, specifically south to the Capital, where it lost no time in lapsing into some urban professionals’ fantasy of liberal democracy. Old allies were ignored when not disowned, denounced, or thrown in the hoosegow. In Chihuahua especially there was a good deal of grumbling—actually more like rage—among the people who knew what it had cost them to put Francisco Madero in the Presidential Palace, who now saw the dreams they had come down out of the Sierra Madre to fight for being disregarded and flat-out betrayed. Soon there were large groups of armed folks gathering in the towns with banners and signs, some reading LAND AND JUSTICE, some LAND AND LIBERTY, some just LAND, but always the word someplace—¡TIERRA! Little rebellions began, ex-Maderistas picking up their old Mausers again, and soon there were almost too many to keep track of. Many were rebelling in the name of disaffected ex-minister Emilio Vázquez, so after a while any new uprisings got automatically labeled “Vazquista,” though Vázquez himself had fled to Texas and by now was more of a figurehead.
Here in Chihuahua the collection of drifters, road agents, mountain fighters and bitter-end Magonistas that Frank had been running with at the time of the Casas Grandes battle were still around, most of them. Madero was far away now, bewitched by his new power into a more genteel version of Porfirio Díaz. Sooner or later that would have to be dealt with. La revolución efectiva was yet to come. Toward the end of the year word came north from Morelos that Emiliano Zapata had raised an army down there and begun a serious insurrection against the government. Some of Frank’s old compadres immediately headed for Morelos, but anybody who liked shooting at federales could still find plenty of that right here in Chihuahua.
Before long Frank found himself down in Jiménez in southern Chihuahua, attached to an irregular unit fighting on behalf of Pascual Orozco, once a major force in the Madero Revolution in Chihuahua, nowadays also in open revolt against the government. Frank had joined up in Casas Grandes, where a former Magonista named José Inés Salazar was raising a small army. In February they combined with troops led by the former lieutenant governor of the state, Braulio Hernández, who had just taken the silver-mining town of Santa Eulalia. By early March the combined forces controlled Ciudad Juárez and were threatening the city of Chihuahua. The governor panicked and fled—Pancho Villa, still loyal to the Madero government, tried to attack the city but was beaten back by Pascual Orozco, who’d finally made his move after months of indecision. Salazar and Hernández recognized Orozco as commander in chief of what was now a two-thousand-man army, and Orozco declared himself governor of the state.
Within weeks this army had quadrupled, and new insurgencies, now calling themselves Orozquista, were reported from all around the country. A march on Mexico City seemed imminent. Madero’s war minister, former fencing coach José González Salas, was put in co
mmand of the campaign against Orozco. By the middle of March, he was in Torreón with six thousand troops, about 150 miles down the Mexican Central line from the rebel headquarters at Jiménez, and the skirmishing had begun.
FRANK NOTICED how immoderately, and at what length, El Espinero had laughed when he’d heard Frank was headed down to Jiménez. Frank was used to this and had learned to wait to see what it meant. It turned out that the country around Jiménez had been famous since the days of Cortés for its meteorites, including those found at San Gregorio and La Concepción, and a gigantic one known as the Chupaderos, whose fragments, weighing in all perhaps fifty tons, had been taken away to the Capital in 1893. Meteorite hunters combed this area all the time, and kept finding new ones. It was like there was a god of meteorites who had singled out Jiménez for special attention. Frank found he was using his own off-duty time to ride out into the Bolsón de Mapimí and have a look around. He remembered the giant crystal of Iceland spar El Espinero had showed him years before, which had led him to Sloat Fresno. It could have been out here that he saw it, maybe even someplace close by, Frank had never made a map and couldn’t remember now.
He found and picked up the strangest-looking damn rock he’d seen in a while, black and pitted all over, smooth in some places and rough in others. Small enough to keep in a saddlebag. He was not supposed to be sensitive to such things, but every time he touched the thing, even lightly, he began to hear a sort of voice.
“What are you doing here?” it seemed it was saying.
“You’re sure a long way from home to be askin that.”
ONE PRONG of the government attack was headed straight up the Mexican Central Railway. “Perfect conditions for the máquina loca,” it seemed to General Salazar, this being the technical term for a locomotive loaded with dynamite and deployed at high speed against the enemy. “Find that gringo.” Frank, often sought out for his engineering skills, was summoned to the General’s tent. “Doctor Pancho, if you wouldn’t mind reporting to Don Emilio Campas, he’ll be taking some people south, and we may need your advice.”
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