The Threshold

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Callie, fetch the milk.” Bram stepped around his aunt. “We’ll have a party.”

  Callie ran to the spring behind the cabin, pushed aside two wooden planks, and drew out a small covered pail. Fresh milk was a luxury of summer, canned milk being the staple here. Bram had mugs and cookies waiting in front of the step. Lilly hadn’t moved. They sat at her feet.

  “Best cookies I ever ate.”

  “I could make them out of wood shavings and you’d say that, Mr. Brambaugh.” But Lilly finally took her hand from beneath her chin to mess his hair. “You two are the only fun that ever happens in this place.”

  The cookies tasted of sweet and cinnamon and oatmeal. The milk smeared buttery slime on Callie’s tongue. Mary Jane coughed and hacked across the strange stillness.

  “Only thing ever happens around here is people get killed.” Lilly’s pretty face screwed into a pout. She didn’t resemble her sister, Luella, except for certain expressions in her eyes. Lilly was the younger and had been married only a year. “I hope this will settle her down,” Luella had said when she’d heard of the marriage to Uncle Henry. “She’s always been so silly and flighty.”

  Aunt Lilly had become so settled that her light step had turned into a waddle, the lightness in her laughter had deepened to irony, and Uncle Henry had gone alone to Telluride this day. “Must be wonderful to be a man,” she said, “have all that freedom.”

  That afternoon Callie and Bram walked into the little lakes not far from Alta, watched the ducks take off and land, skipped stones across the water. In places there were dams built up to trap water for ore processing, and before winter the O’Connells would catch fish from behind them to salt down in five-gallon crockery jars.

  Bram had grown so pale since working in the mine his dark eyes stood out large and liquid. But his shirt was fuller, threatening to tear between the shoulders. Callie took his hand to jump across a section of bog and he let her hold it for a while. It was warm and bony and strong and she wished the day would not have to end.

  “Why does Aunt Lilly call you Mr. Brambaugh?” She reverted to her little-sister voice.

  “Because that’s what was written on the note pinned to me. ‘His name is Brambaugh. Please find a loving home for the babe.’” Would Callie never tire of this story? Bram wondered. “Look away. I’m going to swim.”

  “Why can’t girls swim, Mr. Brambaugh?” Callie turned around and sat to take off her shoes and stockings.

  “Because their behind part is so big they’d sink.” Bram was trying to see the face of the woman who had left him on the step of Ma’am’s schoolhouse in Ohio. Luella had told him the woman was probably very poor and couldn’t keep him, had wanted to do the best thing for him because she loved him. But he couldn’t see her. Ma’am’s face kept getting in the way.

  Callie hiked up her skirt and petticoat and waded in, hissing at the cold, stumbling on the greasy rocks. Long curls bounced on her shoulders. She looked at him then, her eyes growing soft and serious. “I love you and Charles best in all the world.”

  “Callie, you love everybody and everything.” Bram slid out farther so she wouldn’t spy his nakedness through the water.

  In Telluride, Luella had almost finished her shopping before the long ride home. Her packages, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, held cloth, buttons, thread, and lace for Callie’s school dress, material for a shirt for Bram, a whole chicken picked and ready for the pot, a bag of sticky candies. She needed only to visit the drugstore, buy fresh fruit, and she’d be ready to meet John. She averted her eyes as she passed a saloon with its doors open to the streets, but heard the rumble of men’s voices, the flappety-click of a gambling wheel. Luella had seen few ladies on Colorado Avenue this afternoon. They seemed to scurry between stores and not linger on this street where vice and commerce mixed willy-nilly.

  At the drugstore Luella purchased two large bottles of Wyeth’s Wine of Coca, a prepared tonic she’d found indispensable for the treatment of sluggishness during her monthlies, the family’s various aches and colds in winter, John’s exhaustion after too long on the hammer, and just a general restorer when energies flagged. The clock on the wall told her she had time for a quick Coca-Cola at the marble soda fountain. It was a chance to get off her feet. The drink was cool, refreshing, exhilarating. In fact before she had it half-finished Luella felt better able to cope with John. His possible condition after some hours on the town had been a worry to her.

  A large woman in black with a white lacy dust cap bustled in, made a hurried purchase, and gave Luella a curious glance as she passed. “I’ll be going out the back way, Mr. Holder.”

  “Right you are, Mrs. Stollsteimer.” The druggist nodded and turned to Luella. “You might want to do the same, missus. It’s three o’clock and the girls from the line’ll be up on the street to do their shopping. Most of the ladies make themselves scarce this time of the day.”

  “Oh … ohmygoodness!” Luella grabbed her packages and guzzled the last of her drink before she ran from the store.

  “And what do you make of that now, huh?” John O’Connell stood in front of the Senate Saloon and Gambling Establishment, newly reopened. He pointed to the Silver Bell on the corner. “It looks to be more like the new Silver Bell than the old that burnt, does it not? Yet she’s drawn the new building gone old and saggy.”

  “Beats me how a woman could draw so good to begin with,” said an unsteady miner on John’s right.

  “Why’d she leave out all the hitching posts, I wonder,” said the miner on John’s left. The three had found themselves marching together in Haskell Gibson’s funeral procession, and with the help of a few drinks had become fast friends.

  “Maybe she wasn’t done drawing yet.” They stood swaying, shaking their heads, looking back and forth between the paper and the reality. The Silver Bell, the Senate, and McPherson’s Boardinghouse had stood in a row until recently when an angry patron set fire to the Silver Bell and a whirly little wind came up to spread it along to the other two buildings. The Senate had reopened in the lower half of what had been the boardinghouse, the upper story gone, and fresh bright bricks ringed its top like a crown. That left a small vacant lot between the two rebuilt structures, which this artistic lady had dutifully included. But she’d filled it up with weeds when in fact it was burned clean of everything except the new building debris of its neighbors.

  “Has me flimflammed,” John said when the three had returned to the interior and stood to the bar. “Gives a man the need of a bracer, is what it does. Make it a Bright Eye this time, Mr. Jessup,” he told the bartender. While Mr. Jessup poured a tiny packet of white powder into a shot of rye for him, John opened the lady’s book one last time. “Lay you odds you’ll not be knowing what that is.”

  “Ain’t a trolley,” said one of his companions, “nor a train engine. Not a buggy. Not a wagon.”

  The bartender craned around to stare at the Chevy Citation parked in front of a building they’d never seen. “Wonder what you’d pull it with. No place to hook anything up. Couldn’t haul much in it.”

  When John O’Connell left the Senate with the lady’s book under his arm, his eyes were indeed bright.

  4

  Aletha Kingman put away the cigar box and tried to concentrate on something more important than Callie. She’d come to Telluride to rest her nerves after a harrowing year and to find a temporary job to tide her over through the winter.

  Every third person in the world, it seemed, wanted to while away some time—ski, have shelter and minimal support in Telluride, Colorado—until they got themselves together. Pay was low, living costs extravagant. Aletha groaned and rolled over in the bed. Her feet and legs ached from her job search. She picked up the phone and called her mother in San Diego, collect.

  “Is it because you were in prison?” Helen asked when she’d heard Aletha’s troubles. “That conviction was reversed. You just tell them that.”

  “Nobody’s asked about a criminal record, Mo
m. I haven’t even gotten to the application-form stage. There is no work and there’s going to be some sort of jazz festival held here soon and there won’t be a room in town available. Including this one.”

  “I was hoping things would go right for you after … everything.” Helen’s sigh came tired across the miles. “I’ll sell the Monks’ Brewery sign and wire you the proceeds. Stay with it, honey.”

  When she’d hung up Aletha slugged the pillow in frustration. A little college, a little travel—her mother and Bertie had gone along with it all. But Helen’s encouragement was sounding thin and Aletha couldn’t blame her. There was no such thing as a “little” prison.

  The phone rang at her end and startled her. “Aletha … ah … Kingman? This is Barry down at the Senate. I just now found out I got a waitress and two subs down with the flu and we open in an hour. Can you get over here?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Yeah, listen, Aletha, we don’t do uniforms. Wear your own stuff but dress it up a little, you know? No pants or Nikes, huh? We are a class establishment.” He laughed as if the whole phone call were a joke on her. But he wasn’t laughing when she arrived at the Senate teetering on high-heeled sandals and wearing her “little-piece-of-Telluride” pendant on the outside of her blouse to dress it up. “Bartender just called in sick. Can’t get ahold of the busboy. We’ll all have to take turns at the bar,” he said to the two waitresses and one waiter marshaled before him. “Aletha, you start there.”

  “I don’t know how to mix drinks.”

  Barry’s striped sport shirt opened halfway down the front to show a silver chain and the dark curly hair tight to his chest. “Look, all you do is if a guy orders a martini, ask him what’s in it and then make one.” He tied a white dish towel around her waist. “Next time somebody orders a martini, you’ll know.”

  Barry returned with a pan of ice to fit in one of the deep metal-lined cavities and a plate of lemon and orange slices and lime wedges. “Not to worry. Regulars come in first. Mostly drink beer.” He turned the wooden “Closed” sign around to “Open” and pulled back the glass door so customers could use the swinging ones. “Just don’t pour it over ice.”

  The first customer was obliging enough to order a beer, but as more arrived and word of her inexperience spread, the orders grew a trifle exotic. She found a menu to determine the price of drinks and discovered that although the tone of the Senate was one of informality, the entrees ran to things like Boeuf Wellington, pheasant, and shrimp-stuffed sole, with prices to match. The menu also advertised “Elegant Intoxicants.” Aletha started throwing in extra fruit.

  A golden nude statuette hung from a central chandelier in a sort of swimming position over green-felted gambling tables around which drinkers loitered in captains’ chairs. Victorian love seats grouped in corners and a potbellied stove hunkered along the far wall. Dusty stuffed critters and modern paintings of Victorian-era females hung amid old mining implements and a roulette wheel. “Notice any big rips in the scenery lately?” Cree Mackelwain settled on the last vacant stool at the bar. “Thought you were unemployed.”

  “No. And today I was unemployed. Tonight I’m working. Tomorrow I’m unemployed. And please don’t order anything fancier than a beer.”

  “I’ll have a beer. Plain Michelob.”

  “And I’ll have an Amaretto Alexander, please, on the rocks with a twist,” the guy on the next stool said.

  Aletha ignored him and bent close to Cree with her hand cupped around one side of her mouth. “I’m sorry about last night. Please don’t mention what I said.”

  “You’re about as convincing an ex-con as I would be a ballerina,” he whispered.

  “Hey, fella, you got something going with my barkeep?” Barry grinned and slid behind the bar to untie Aletha’s dish-towel apron. “Go out and earn yourself some tips. Tracy’ll show you around.”

  In the various back rooms small tables sported linens and wine goblets. Deep florid wallpapers muted the light. Cree was gone when Aletha went out to the bar to order cocktails for her first customers. About nine-thirty he showed up at one of her tables with a woman he introduced as Renata Winslow. Renata had a tan like Aletha had not seen since the Caribbean, a model-slender figure, a luxury of dark hair that fell and swept in all the right directions, and only a perfect and simple way with clothes and make-up. Aletha resented her instantly.

  “Aletha tears up scenery,” Cree said by way of introduction. “Renata helps find people jobs.”

  Renata smiled perfectly too. She handed Aletha a business card, Renata’s Helpers. Quick Substitute Workers for All Kinds of Work. When Your Staff Can’t Make It, Call Renata. Qualified Personnel Only.

  “You don’t find rooms for your ‘qualified personnel,’ do you?”

  “I’ll ask if any of my helpers has need of a roommate.”

  “There’s lots of beds where I’m staying at the Pick and Gad.” Cree looked over his shoulder as if to see if anyone was listening. “But then, it’s a whorehouse.” They laughed at her and she served them bread, salad, shrimp-stuffed sole, wine, and coffee. Where Callie had dimples, Cree Mackelwain had deep vertical creases, and Renata Winslow reached across the table to trace one with a finger.

  Aletha did not call on Miss Winslow the next day because she was offered another evening at the Senate. But she did the day after and got work cleaning bathrooms and changing sheets at the Tomboy Inn. “Where can I reach you? With the jazz festival in town, there’ll be work.”

  “I’ll call you.” Aletha spent her first night out of the New Sheridan at Tracy’s one-room apartment because Tracy’s boyfriend was on a fishing trip. The next day she wore a bright orange vest and helped direct day visitors to the concert into the parking lot at the edge of town. Then she spent a long night, mostly awake trying to sleep, in her car on a side street. It was still better than prison.

  “You slept in your car?” Renata said the next morning, and surprised her by adding, “Cree does have extra room. Oh, if you think you’re up to it, there’s work at the car wash today and the Senate tonight. I mentioned you, and Barry said to give you first chance.”

  Aletha was feeling worn when she arrived at the Senate after the car wash. She’d changed in the laundromat’s bathroom.

  “Haven’t found a room yet, huh? I’ve been asking around.” Tracy Ledbetter invariably wore dark skirts of flimsy, silky material that showed the panty seams in her panty hose and every gracious contour of her buttocks and hips. She topped these with thin lacy sweaters that revealed less than they promised. She sported the fried-hair hairstyle that brushed out all over, and dark purple lipstick. In sunlight she would look like a caricature of something but in the Senate’s dim interior and against the dark wallpaper the whole effect worked somehow. An occasional lapse in her carefully controlled speech would produce things like “New Joizey.” “It was a real shock to find almost everybody out here talked like Jane Pauley or Johnny Carson,” she confided the night Aletha had stayed with her. “Coming into the country has been a real experience.”

  With the influx of visitors for the jazz concert, the Senate had a busy evening and only one busboy. So after closing time Aletha and Tracy were still carrying dirty dishes back to the kitchen. Aletha had volunteered for this extra duty to put off the time when she’d be forced to retire to her cold car. She was slightly ahead of Tracy, each of them carrying a heavy tray, when she entered a back room and was about to swing around toward the kitchen doorway when it happened again.

  There was no smell of sulfur this time. Aletha could almost see the crack in the decor as a metal cabinet and a freezer parted and then disappeared and the oval widened outward. The bright light from the kitchen didn’t penetrate the oval but glistened on the blurry edge of it to make it look aflame. Two women sat behind a table, facing her. The light from a wall sconce glinted on their hair and on golden flowers in deep red wallpaper. One of the women dropped her spoon and soup broth splattered on the bodice of her dress. Her empty
hand remained in place. Her mouth hung open as if still expecting some soup. The other woman lifted a finger to point at Aletha, and Aletha stared into Callie’s eyes once again.

  She had no trouble recognizing the girl even though Callie had grown. The rich chestnut hair was drawn back at the temples now and tied with a bow at the crown. The rest of it tumbled down her back. Callie’s cheeks were not so plump. “Aletha? Miss Heisinger took your book,” she said all in a rush. “How is Charles? Do you still have him?”

  Tracy gasped and dropped her tray. There was the sound of dishes and glassware breaking, the clatter of silverware. Aletha ignored the wet splatter across her shoes and legs. “Callie, what are you doing here?”

  But the oval closed like the pupil-slit in a cat’s eye. The freezer and cabinet moved in to sit innocently against the wall. And Herm the dishwasher stood in the doorway, arms folded, looking from the floor to Tracy and back again. “Nice.”

  Tracy took Aletha’s tray and disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with a plastic garbage can and knelt to pick up greasy shards. “She was talking to you, this Callie.” Her pallor made the dark lipstick look black. “Who’s Charles?”

  Aletha’s legs stopped shaking when her knees hit the floor. She began separating whole dishes from the gooey junk. “I’ve seen Callie once before. I don’t know who Charles is.”

  “Either the old Senate has suddenly become haunted or this was a trick, done with film or something. All kinds of practical jokers around here.” Tracy threw broken plates at the garbage pail with a vengeance. “Thought you were a friend. Let you stay at my place. Never thought you’d stoop to a joke like that, scare a person to—”

  “Some joke.” Barry stood above them, kicked a broken wine goblet with his toe. “Aletha, that Mackelwain guy’s out there. Wants to talk to you.”

  Her skirt, hose, and shoes were still spattered when she faced Cree across his beer. “You look like twenty years after the end of the world,” he said, and when that got no response added, “Renata tells me you spent the night in your car.”