“You’re sure you wouldn’t rather be in town,” said Sister Clementia.
“Let me run up there with a wagon,” Stray said, “and I’ll just take a look.” Only look. But she knew already it was where she had to be. About the time she moved into one of the tents, the governor declared martial law, and soon nearly a thousand troops, infantry, cavalry, and support, under the command of a Colorado Fuel and Iron stooge named John Chase, who styled himself “General,” had set up base camps outside Trinidad and Walsenburg.
STRAY FOUND THE COLONY had maybe 150 tents and nine hundred people living in them, mostly families, except for bachelor neighborhoods like the Greeks, who tended to keep to themselves, and their own language. A family had just moved out, so Stray moved in. Before nightfall she was sitting at the bedside of a feverish, crusty-nosed Montenegrin girl about three, trying to feed her a little soup.
In the morning she and her neighbor Sabine were out taking some bedding over to a tent across the way. Stray looked off at the higher ground and saw gun emplacements every direction.
“Not happy with this,” she muttered. “Wide-open damn field of fire here.”
“Hasn’t anybody shot at us yet,” commented Sabine, which was about when somebody did.
It wasn’t that Stray ever got to thinking of herself as charmed. Whenever she was out in good light, rounds buzzing by but none connecting, she got used to the dirt kicking up in little bursts around her, the fading hum of spent ammo bouncing away. At first she was so jittery she dropped what she was carrying and ran for cover. As the winter went on she got to where she could crisscross the whole patch with her arms full of snow shovels, blankets, live chickens, maybe a gallon and a half of hot coffee in a tin coffeepot balanced on her head, and not spill anything. Sometimes she was almost sure the marksmen who had the high ground were playing with her. She got to know the flirters from the bad shots. When she got back one day from one of these trips, guess who’d turned up.
“Hi, Ma.”
“How the hell’d you get here?”
“Colorado and Southern. Don’t worry, it didn’t cost me a cent. Nice to see you too, Ma.”
“Jesse, this is crazy. You don’t need to be here. Willow and Holt need you back there.”
“Ain’t that much to do. All the big chores me and Holt, and Pascoe and Paloverde, got done way before it even snowed.”
“It’s dangerous here.”
“More reason for somebody to be watchin your back, then.”
“Just like your father. Damn snake-oil salesmen. Never could talk either of you into anything.” She gazed into his face, something she’d found herself doing more and more of as he grew, and when she had the chance. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that you’re the spit of him or nothin, least not all the time, but every so often . . .”
COMPANY SEARCHLIGHTS SET UP on towers began sweeping the tents all night long.
“Ma, this is drivin me crazy. It’s keepin me awake.”
“You used to hate the dark.”
“I was a little kid.”
The Colorado militia were in fact giving light a bad name. Military wisdom had it that putting searchlights on the enemy allowed you to see them, while blinding them to you, giving you an inestimable edge both tactical and psychological. In the tents, darkness in that awful winter was sought like warmth or quiet. It came for many to seem like a form of compassion.
Finally one night Jesse took his repeater and went out exploring. “Just havin a look,” is what he told his mother, who heaven knew had used that line often enough. Sometime after midnight, Stray, who had learned to sleep through all sorts of noise, dreamed she heard the distant crack of a single rifle shot, and woke, into blessed darkness. A little later Jesse tiptoed in and carefully snuggled in next to her, both of them pretending she was asleep. She had taught him never to claim credit for anything if he could help it, which didn’t keep him going around next day with a shiteating grin all over his face that reminded her of Reef when he thought he was getting away with something.
It was the winter everybody ate rabbit stew. The strike relief rolls numbered about twenty thousand men, women, and children. The wind occupied and owned the Trinidad field, and the cold grew more bitter. The storms of early December were the worst anybody could remember. Snow drifted four feet deep in places. Tents collapsed under it. Around the middle of the month, strikebreakers began to show up, shipped in cattle cars from as far away as Pittsburgh, Pa., though many of them were from Mexico, escorted by Guardsmen all the way from the border, promised everything, told nothing.
“Like Cripple Creek all over again,” those who remembered pointed out. Back then, ten years ago, the scabs had been Slavs and Italians, some of whom had stayed on and joined the Union, and this time around they’d become the ones who were on strike.
“And while of course it behooves a man to break the head of any Mexican kept in blind ignorance who’s been shipped in to steal your job,” preached the Reverend Moss Gatlin, who, never one to forgo a good fight, had been here since the strike was called, “we must also understand how eminently practical in the long term is Christian forbearance, if by it we may thus further the dumb scab’s education, just as your own insulted heads at Cripple and the San Juans once got beaten into them the lesson that a job however obtained is sacred, even a scab’s job, for it carries the ironclad obligation to resist from then on the forces of ownership and the mills of evil, with whatever means are available unto you all.” Older these days, using a cane, still limping lopsidedly forward into the battle, he held regular Sunday services out at the tents as well as delivering midnight sermons in friendly saloons.
Through January the mood among the militiamen grew sharply uglier, as if somebody knew what was on the way. Women were raped, kids teasing soldiers were grabbed and beaten. Any miner caught in the open was fair game for vagging, arrest, assault, and worse. In Trinidad, cavalry of the state militia charged a band of women who were marching in support of the strike. Several, some only girls, were slashed with sabers. Some went to jail. Through God’s mercy, or dumb luck, none were killed.
One day Jesse came back to the tent cloaked in a strange distant elation, nothing that made his mother happy, for it reminded her of too many crazy gun artists out of her past when they thought they’d found that final throw-down. “I saw the Death Special, Ma.” This was a rumored and widely feared armored motorcar, with two Colt machine guns on it, mounted fore and aft, that the Baldwin-Felts “detective” agency had come up with for penetrating, controlling, and thinning down the size of ill-disposed crowds. It had already been through here, sweeping the colony with machine-gun fire, slashing up the canvas tents and killing some strikers.
Jesse and his friend Dunn, out exploring, found a couple of Guardsmen in a galvanized shed, working on the Death Special’s engine. They were big, blond, and forthright and acted friendly enough, but could not conceal a contempt for the people this vehicle was designed to shoot down. Dunn thought he knew how to hustle grown-ups, and had a pocket usually full of coins to prove it. But Jesse could see they thought they knew all about Dunn and him and where they’d come from—one look at these red faces and bulging eyes and he understood that if it should come down to it, he would not be able to save his life, or his mother’s or Dunn’s, by appealing to anything these grownups might feel for kids, even kids of their own. . . . Pretending to have a friendly chat with potential targets of their Death Special was a level of evil neither boy had quite suspected in adults till now.
As it turned out, there was a whole fleet of Death Specials, improved versions of the original model, which had been little more than an open touring car with steel plate on the sides. As for this one here, the two mechanics wouldn’t get to see any action in it, that’d be for officers, but now and then, for functional checkout purposes, they were allowed to drive a couple-three miles into open country and blow apart a mesquite bush.
“With a rifle it’s too personal,” one of the Guards
men said, “when you’re sightin ’em in one by one, gives you a minute to get to know them ’fore you do your deed, but this ’sucker—time it takes to get your finger off of the trigger it’s already fired ten or twenty rounds, so there’s no question of careful aiming, you just pick out what they call a zone you want to tear up, even shut your eyes if you want, don’t matter, it’s all done for you.”
Though they couldn’t help bragging about the machinery they were working on, it seemed peculiar to the boys how they also kept talking about the Death Special as if it were a poor little victim at the mercy of some vast and dangerous mob. “Even if they surrounded it, shot out the tires, we could hold out inside till help showed up.”
“Or plow a path right through ’em and out the other side,” added the other one, “and escape that way.”
“You with those tent people, son?” his friend asked abruptly.
Men had been calling Jesse “son” all his life, and it was more or less always insulting. Only one man had the right to call him that, but where the hell was he? Jesse would have to be real careful here about showing how much he didn’t like it. “Nah,” he said, easy enough, before Dunn could put in anything. “Town.”
The militiaman looked around at the bleak, spoil-scarred country that ran on way too long. “Town? Which town would that be, son? Trinidad?”
“Pueblo. Come down on the train, me and my pardner,” indicating Dunn, who had still not closed his mouth all the way.
“That so,” the other one said. “I lived in Pueblo awhile. Where do you all go to school?”
“Central, where else?”
“You boys’re playin some serious hooky, ain’t you?”
“I won’t tell nobody if you don’t,” Jesse shrugged.
Before he left, he stole two .30-caliber machine-gun rounds, one for him and one for his Ma, believing that as long as these particular ones couldn’t be fired, he and Stray would be safe from harm.
FRANK WAS IN AGUILAR, on the rail line between Walsenburg and Trinidad, in the 29 Luglio Saloon—named for the date back in 1900 when an Anarchist named Bresci assassinated King Umberto of Italy—to see about a perhaps imaginary machine gun, said to be an air-cooled Benet-Mercier, still in its shipping case, fallen somehow off a supply wagon in Pueblo. Most of the customers in here were Italian, and everybody at the moment was drinking grappa and beer, discussing the situation just up the canyon at the Empire mine, which like everywhere else in this frozen and strikebound countryside was fairly miserable, not to mention dangerous. Across the room a drunken Calabrese timber man lay unconscious in the lap of a drably turned out yet appealing, in fact familiar young woman, in a tableau which suggested to several in the room, though not to Frank, the famous sculpture the Pietà, by Michelangelo. Noticing Frank’s prolonged stare, the barroom Madonna called out, “Sorry, Frank, you’ll have to wait in line, but hell, the evening’s young.”
“Heard you were here in the zone, Stray, just didn’t recognize you in that rig.”
“Not too handy in the saddle, but around these parts it helps to look like a Sister of Charity.”
“You mean they’re not as likely—”
“Oh hell they’ll shoot soon as look at you. But this gray color here blends in better, so you’re less of a target.”
“I came over here with that Ewball, but he took off again.” Frank figured he might as well bring up.
She gently slid out from under the Italian on her lap. “Buy me one of whatever that is in your fist and I’ll tell you the whole sordid tale.”
“Ewb did mention somethin about . . .” he took some time wondering how to put it.
“Damn, I knew it,” she said finally. “I broke his heart, didn’t I? Keep tellin myself, ‘Stray, you got to watch ’at shit,’ then I go ahead and do it anyway.” She nodded and hoisted her glass.
“He struck me as kind of confused. Broken heart, I wouldn’t know.”
“Never happened to you Frank?”
“Oh, all the time.”
“How’s ’at professor lady o’ yours?”
Frank, without meaning to, went into a long recitation about Wren and Doc Turnstone. Stray lit a cigarette and squinted at Frank though the smoke. “Now, you’re sure she didn’t break . . . your heart or nothin.” For a long time, she’d had Frank figured for Reef without the loco streak, till she saw he wasn’t quite as easy to read after all—going after Sloat Fresno had been a surprise, as had been his involvement with the Madero revolution. And now here he was in the coalfields, which were about to explode. “You plannin to stay here or go back to Denver?” she said.
“Any reason I shouldn’t stay here awhile?”
“You mean aside from war breakin out any minute.”
They sat watching each other till she shook her head. “No business back in Denver, I guess.”
“Reminds me, how’s my Ma, heard you saw her up there a while back.”
“I really love Mayva, Frank. For somebody I see once every ten years anyway. You should write to her sometime.”
“I should?”
“Never met Jesse either, did you.”
“Bad uncle too,” Frank angling his head.
“Ain’t what I meant, Frank.” She took a breath, as if plunging into a room on fire. “We’re livin over at the tents ’ese days if you take it in mind to visit.”
Frank tried to sit still for what went throbbing through him in a wave or two. Keeping his face composed, “Well maybe if you’re still there . . .”
“Why shouldn’t—?” she stopped then, the answer being clear enough.
“Figured you knew. They’re fixin to do away with all ’em tents, and before the week’s out, ’s what I heard.”
“Guess you better visit us soon, then.”
Which is how he found himself creeping alongside her nun’s shadow in the acid-yellow assault of searchlight beams, through melting and refreezing snow, having thought to salvage from his saddlebags only a pack of store-boughts and a can of tobacco and as many cartridges as he could stash about his person for the Krag and the Police Special with its new spring.
Jesse wasn’t there when they got to the tent, but Stray wasn’t worried. “Likely out with these Balkan folks he’s friends with. It’s their Easter or somethin. They’ve taught him to handle himself at night pretty good. He’s safe enough. You can sleep over there by the stove. If he comes in he’s usually pretty quiet.” Frank had had a vague general plan to stay awake long enough to see how Stray looked underneath that hospital nun’s rig, but somehow he must’ve been tireder than he thought. He slept till somebody’s rooster cut loose and the harsh daylight commenced.
He’d just stepped outside to piss when who should he catch sight of but a face out of the past, a humorless customer trotting down the hillside in militia uniform, narrow-brim hat, leggings and campaign shirt, with a high forehead, lidless long eyes and mouth in a slit, a lizard’s face. Not a nickel’s worth of mercy.
Frank pointed with his head and asked Kosta, who was across the trench pissing, “Who is that sumbitch? I’ve seen him someplace.”
“Is fucking Linderfelt. When they attack tonight, it’ll be him out front, yelling Charge. Linderfelt is the devil.”
Frank remembered now. “He was in Juárez, headin up some mercenaries called themselves ‘the American Legion,’ jumped the gun, tried to attack the city before Madero did and later on had a warrant put out on him for looting. Had to jump back across the border real quick. Thought he’d’ve been some buzzard’s lunch long ago.”
“He’s a lieutenant in the National Guard now.”
“Figures.”
“Buzzards have more sense ’n that anyway.”
The shooting had begun at first light, and soon grew general, and went on in spasms all day.
The militia were up on Water Tank Hill with a couple of machine guns. Their riflemen were set in a line along a ridge up there. There were some strikers in a railroad cut to the east that had the Guardsmen sort of enfil
aded, but the militia were also higher, and on through the daylight it was a standoff. Thoughts turned to the night ahead. “Don’t know how gentlemanly they’re gonna be after the sun goes down,” Frank said.
“They turn into somethin else,” she said.
Jesse came squirming in under the edge of the tent with a Winchester repeater, all out of breath. “Tried to get down that railroad cut. Mostly on my belly. Ran out of bullets. Who’s this?”
“This is Frank Traverse. He’s your Pa’s brother. Just come in town for some of the clambake activities.” The boy headed for a canteen of water and drank for a while.
“She’s sure been givin me an earful about you, Jesse,” Frank said.
Jesse shrugged, a touch elaborately. “What is that, looks like an old Krag.”
“One of several crates full,” Stray recalled, “if I’m not mistaken, that I sold him years ago.”
“Sometimes you’ll get attached,” Frank said quietly. “Nice thing about a Krag, see, is the trapdoor, a real handy feature when there’s a lot goin on, you just open it up like this, anytime, throw in your rounds loose, and they all get lined up inside and pushed one by one through here, feed on up the other side each time you work the bolt. Here, try it.”
“He wants to sell you one,” Stray said.
“I’m happy with my Winchester thanks,” Jesse said. “But sure, long as I’m not wasting anybody’s ammo.” He took the Krag and aimed out the tentflap at a distant group of horsemen, maybe uniformed cavalry but no uniform Frank knew of, sighting in, breathing carefully, pretending to squeeze off a round—“Bam!” and chamber a new one. Not much Frank could teach him.
Later Frank was tending to the firearms and Stray was kneeling next to him. “I wanted to say,” Frank said.
“Oh you been sayin it, don’t worry.”
He gave her a closer look, just to make sure of her face. “Fine time to be gettin around to this.”
“Somethin goin on over there I should know about?” Jesse called across the tent.
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