Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  You didn’t see as much idle ranging out here as in days of old, there was too much afoot now. Where the telegraph couldn’t be trusted, messages still had to go through. Winchesters, Remingtons, and Savages had to be put into the right hands. Figures of consequence seeking to avoid the Pinkerton-infested Denver & Rio Grande had to be escorted instead over these shelter-less trails.

  It was a relief to be through Fort Garland, out of the flatland and climbing again into broken country. They took their string up the Sangre de Cristos over North La Veta Pass, in a descent of steel light, yellow intensities among the purple towers of cloud—the Spanish Peaks rising ahead of them across the valley, and the snowy thirteeners of the Culebra Range chaining away to the south. And below them, presently, at a turn of the trail, the first rooftops of Walsenburg, sod giving way to shakes, beyond which, embattled and forlorn, lay the coalfields.

  Scarsdale Vibe was addressing the Las Animas-Huerfano Delegation of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A.) gathered in the casino of an exclusive hot-springs resort up near the Continental Divide. Enormous windows revealed and framed mountain scenery like picture postcards hand-tinted by a crew brought in from across the sea and all slightly color-blind. The clientele looked to be mostly U.S. white folks, pretty well-off in a flash sort of way—vacationers from back east and beyond, though an observer might be forgiven if he thought he recognized faces from the big hotel bars in Denver, with a few that might’ve fit in on upper Arapahoe as well.

  The evening was advanced, the ladies had long since retired, and with them any need for euphemism.

  “So of course we use them,” Scarsdale well into what by now was his customary stem-winder, “we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their absurd fate in plain sight. Their foolish music is about to stop, and it is they who will be caught out, awkwardly, most of them tone-deaf and never to be fully aware, few if any with the sense to leave the game early and seek refuge before it is too late. Perhaps there will not, even by then, be refuge.

  “We will buy it all up,” making the expected arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunchgrass and wildflowers, and the coming of the snows is no longer the year’s curse but its promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the tears freezing on a woman’s face worn to dark Indian stupor before its time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch between us and those who would intrude or question?” He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore. “Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.”

  The next day Scarsdale, in his private train The Juggernaut, descended the grades, from the realms of theory to the hard winter realities of Trinidad, to see what was what on the ground, and look the anticapitalist monster in the face. He thought of himself as a man of practice, not theory, and he had never flinched from “the real world,” as he liked to call it.

  Somewhere en route to the Trinidad field, strolling through the cars, Scarsdale opened a door at the end of one carriage and there in the vestibule stood— It was a being, much taller than he was, its face appallingly corroded as if burned around the edges, its features not exactly where they should be. The sort of malignant presence that had brought him before to levels of fear he knew he could not emerge from with his will undamaged. But this time he felt only curiosity. Scarsdale caught the figure’s eye, raised a finger as if to speak, as it moved past him and continued down the aisle of the train car. “Wait,” Scarsdale puzzled, “I wanted to talk to you, smoke a cigar, socialize a little.”

  “Not now, I’ve got something else to do.” The accent was not American, but Scarsdale couldn’t place it. And then the apparition was gone, leaving the tycoon bemused at his own lack of terror, and unable to imagine that this had not been in some way aimed at him, intending, as always, his destruction. Who else could it possibly have been after by this point, at the stage things had come to?

  Foley came blinking in, awakened by something only he heard.

  “Somebody was here on The Juggernaut that wasn’t supposed to be,” Scarsdale greeted him.

  “Been through the place a dozen times,” Foley said.

  “It doesn’t matter, Foley, it’s all in the hands of Jesus isn’t it. Could happen anytime in fact and to tell you the truth, I look forward to being one of the malevolent dead.”

  Foley knew exactly what that meant. On battlefields after the engagement, with cannonballs on the ground everywhere, he had kept company with ghosts by the thousands, all filled with resentments, drifting, or stationed by cemetery gates and abandoned farmhouses where half-mad survivors would be most likely to see them, or not sure, some of them, which side of the barely-visible line they walked. . . . Not the companionship he would have chosen. At first he put Scarsdale’s desire to be among them down to civilian ignorance. Didn’t take him long, however, to see that Scarsdale understood them better than he did.

  AFTER DROPPING THE SHIPMENT off at Walsenburg, Frank and Ewball rode down to Trinidad for a look. There were militiamen all over the place, unhappy-looking young men in stained and ragged uniforms, unshaven, insomniac, finding excuses to roust the strikers, who were Greeks and Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats, Montenegrins and Italians. “Over in Europe,” Ewball explained, “all busy killin each other over some snarled-up politics way beyond any easy understanding. But the minute they get over here, before you can say ‘Howdy,’ they just drop all those ancient hatreds, drop ’em flat, and become brothers-in-arms, ’cause they recognize this right away for just what it is.”

  Somehow they kept coming west to these coalfields, and the owners put out stories about sharpshooters from the Balkan War and such, and Greek mountain fighters, Serbs with an appetite for cruelty, Bulgars with a reputation for unspeakable sex, all these alien races coming over here and making miserable the lives of the poor innocent plutes, who were only trying to get by like everybody else. Even if some of these immigrant miners had seen military action over there, why come here, to these godforsaken canyons? It wasn’t for three dollars a day, there was more to be made in the cities, it sure wasn’t to go down into explosions, cave-ins, and lung disease and ch
oose to shorten their lives digging coal so some owner could live high and mighty—so then why come here of all places? The only explanation that made sense to Ewball, who had been acting more and more strangely the closer he got to Trinidad, was that some of them had to be already dead, casualties of the fighting in the Balkans.

  “For the unquiet dead, see, geography ain’t the point, it’s all unfinished business, it’s wherever there’s accounts to be balanced, ’cause the whole history of those Balkan peoples is revenge, back and forth, families against families, and it never ends, so you have this population of Balkan ghosts, shot dead, I don’t know, up some mountain in Bulgaria or someplace, got no idea where they are, where they’re going, all they feel is that unbalance—that something’s wrong and needs to be made right again. And if distance means nothing, then they surface wherever there’s a fight with the same shape to it, same history of back-and-forth killing, and it might be someplace in China we never get to hear about, and again it might be right here a city block away, right down in the depths of the U.S.A.”

  “Ewball, man, that is some bughouse talk.”

  IN TRINIDAD Frank noticed a figure out on the porch of the Columbian Hotel, big, unsmiling, sun-darkened and slouched against the siding watching the traffic in the street with a look of unreachable contempt.

  “Not an hombre I would care to tangle assholes with there,” Frank remarked.

  “Sure about that?”

  “Uh-oh. Ewb, what’s ’at look on your face?”

  “The gentleman happens to be Foley Walker, the devoted sidekick of your old family friend Mr. Scarsdale Vibe.”

  “Well, there’s somethin to think about.” Frank pulled his hatbrim lower and thought about it. “That mean Vibe’s in town, too?”

  “Somebody has to be out ridin that Champagne-and-pheasant circuit, make sure the plutes don’t lose their nerve. Rockefeller couldn’t make it, but old Vibe’s just as happy to as a fly on shit.”

  They found a saloon up the street and went in. Ewball seemed in a state of almost juvenile impatience. “So?” he said finally, “so? you gonna make it two notches or what?”

  “It might have to be three if there’s ’at Foley to get past. Is he really as bad as he looks?”

  “Worse. They say Foley’s a born-again Christer, so he can act as bad as he wants because Jesus is coming and nothin a human can do so bad Jesus won’t forgive it.”

  “But you’d be someplace coverin my back, right?”

  “Why Frank, how thoughtful of you to ask.”

  They checked in at the Toltec Hotel. Frank understood he would eventually be heading up to Ludlow to find Stray, but right now the chance that Vibe might present a clear enough target seemed to take precedence. They decided to track the magnate’s comings and goings.

  Out reconnoitering, they thought once they’d caught a quick glimpse of Mother Jones herself, being hustled on board a train out of town, a comical exercise at the time because she would then turn around and come right back, having friends among the railroad workers all up and down the line, who’d put her aboard or leave her off wherever she liked. What Frank noticed about this white-haired lady was her hell-with-it attitude, a love of mischief she must have kept safe and protected from the years, from the plutes and what their hired apologists called “life,” as if they ever knew what that was—protected like a child, the child she had been. . . .

  A small pack of dogs came whirling down Main Street, as if carried by a miniature tornado. Lately there had been more dogs in town than anybody could remember. As if somebody saw an urgent need to get them out of the canyons, where there was trouble on the way that they really didn’t need to be around for.

  THERE WERE ALWAYS ROOMS in these shootout resorts, small and spare, side rooms, anterooms for their mortal business, where members of the troupe might go to get ready—greenrooms without lines to remember, chapels without God. . . .

  After any number of careful observations, Ewball had determined the best time to go for Scarsdale would be right after lunch. “He eats at the hotel, then him and Foley take a short walk down to the C.F.I. office, where they spend the afternoon seein what new kind of evil they’ll cook up. There’s a foot or two between buildings I can wait back in.”

  “You?”

  So arising the delicate question of who would get to shoot whom. “Well he is yours by all the laws of vengeance, sure,” Ewball said, “that’s if you want him.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Disingenuousness having begun to ooze from and presently saturate Ewball, “Don’t know. Just that Vibe’s likely to be pretty much a sitting duck—the dangerous target’d be Foley. Dependin how much work you’re eager to do.”

  “You want to go after Vibe? and me take Foley? well you have my blessin Ewb, and no hard feelins, no matter what people say afterwards.”

  “How’s that, Frank?”

  “Oh, you know, psychological talk and that.” Frank noticed that Ewball’s smile was no longer what you’d call amiable. “A way of gettin back at your Pa, and so forth. Back-east thoughts, horseshit of course.”

  Ewball considered for a minute. “Here,” finding a silver quarter. “We’ll flip for it, how’s that.”

  TWO FACING ROWS of storefronts receded steeply down the packed-earth street. Where the buildings ended, nothing could be seen above the surface of the street, no horizon, no countryside, no winter sky, only an intense radiance filling the gap, a halo or glory out of which anything might emerge, into which anything might be taken, a portal of silver transfiguration, as if being displayed from the viewpoint of (let us imagine) a fallen gunfighter.

  Frank decided to borrow a .44 Peacemaker from Ewball instead of depending on his Smith & Wesson, which needed a new extractor spring. All those years ago, when he and Reef had let Mayva keep Webb’s old Confederate Colt, Frank had thought to take with him the cartridges that were still in it. They had rattled around in and out of saddlebags, duster pockets, satchels, and cartridge belts, and Frank never used them, not even for Sloat Fresno, telling himself they were really only to remember Webb by. Not that he was fooling himself—they were for Deuce someday, of course. But unless the little reptile returned to the scene of the crime, how likely was it that Frank would ever get to use them?

  Scarsdale Vibe would have to do—second choice, but no point trying to explain that to Ewb, who had these strange theoretical branches of Anarchist principle he was very reluctant to climb down off of. Frank stood in the tight little alleyway, between a photographer’s and a feed-and-seed, with Ewball across the street, and waited for the imperial tycoon who’d turned thumbs down on Webb Traverse ten years ago.

  They passed the mouth of the alley so quick Frank almost missed them. He stepped out behind them and said, “Vibe.” The two men turned, Foley bringing out what Frank needed a minute to recognize as one of those German Parabellums, and being given that minute was enough to tip Frank that something was up. Ewball was sauntering across the street, using a passing wagon for cover part of the way, Ewb’s left hand almost prayerfully supporting the barrel of his own weapon.

  Even in a town full of murderous Anarchists who hated him worse than Rockefeller, Scarsdale had seen no need to walk around these streets heeled. In his accustomed tone of command, at exactly the moment he should not have adopted it, he now barked, “Well you see them as clearly as I do, Foley. Take care of it.” In reply, smoothly as if it were another long-practiced personal chore, Foley stepped away swiveling, lined up the Luger’s muzzle with his employer’s heart, and chambered the first round. Scarsdale Vibe peered back, as if only curious. “Lord, Foley . . .”

  “Jesus is Lord,” cried Foley, and pulled the trigger, proceeding to empty all eight rounds into what, after the first, was a signed deal. As if come to his ancestral home after long and restless journeying, what had been Scarsdale Vibe settled facedown into the dirtied snow and ice of the street, into the smell of horses and horse droppings, to rest.

  Foley stood
looking awhile at the corpse, as citizens went running, some for the marshal, some for safety. “Oh and another thing,” he pretended to address it, his demeanor oddly gay.

  Frank, having counted off the full clip, nodded. “Well, sir.”

  “Hope you fellows don’t mind, but it’s payday today, and I’ve been in line years ahead of you.”

  There was a squad of militia coming up the street, and Frank and Ewball, having re-concealed their revolvers under their coats, found little trouble in blending in with the nervous townsfolk of Trinidad. Foley waited, in patient good humor, watching Scarsdale’s blood, nearly black in this midwinter light, slowly flow out into a liquid frame around him.

  “JUST TOO EMBARRASSING,” muttered Ewball. “How am I gonna hold my damn head up?”

  “You wanted to be the one,” Frank guessed.

  “It’s worse than ’at.” He gazed deeply at Frank, as if hoping this late in their history for Frank to show some mind-reading skills. “It wasn’t just bringin over a supply wagon,” he said softly.

  “It’s been more’n enough for me,” Frank said, not wanting too many details.

  STRAY HAD BEEN IN TRINIDAD for a while before she’d heard about the tent colony at Ludlow. It had been there since late last September, when the strike began. Little by little, flooring got put in, latrines were dug, a phone line was run to the Union office in Trinidad. After some shooting in early October between mine guards and the people in the tents, both sides had begun to store up guns and ammunition. Winter was coming. The shooting went on.