The Threshold

by Marlys Millhiser

  When their homes were finished there was room for each man to stretch out and stay up away from the water. Knut portioned each man a bite of sandwich and sent Shorty up the drift with the lamp to signal on the pipe again. “Tell ’em we are fourteen left here.”

  Bram had been numb and unthinking while they worked and planned for their survival, but now as he sat with his back against the wet wall in the smothering black waiting for Shorty and the light, the full weight of dread was upon him. He’d always known things such as this happened in the mines. But he’d never really believed it could happen to him.

  Shorty came slopping down the drift. “They’re comin’ for us, Talse, but they’re clear back at the hoist like you thought.” No signals from the rest of their crew. It could take weeks to reach here if they had to spile as they went in unsure ground. “John O’Connell’s at the other end.” He handed Bram the lamp. “Better go let him know you’re alive.”

  “And don’t steal none of the food,” Knut warned.

  But for once Bram wasn’t hungry. The light danced in his trembling fingers as he made his way to the compressed-air line. He bent to tap it lightly but there was no response. He tapped his signal again, two taps—a pause—and three taps. He put his ear right down to the pipe and John O’Connell’s signal came to him faintly. And then Uncle Henry’s. And some of the others he should have recognized but was too distraught to remember. Kneeling in water, holding the lamp carefully, Bram leaned his forehead against the new wall formed by the caved-in roof and sobbed like Uncle Henry had when he brought news of Aunt Lilly.

  Pa and the others would work night and day to reach them. When the word was passed of miners trapped, hard-rock stiffs from all over the San Juans would be riding the tram buckets to Alta to lend a hand. There’d be hand drilling and machine drilling going on side by side and around the clock, and more men in the tunnels than could be put to good use. But they’d have to timber some as they went and the level above would have to be shored so as not to come down on this one anymore, and who could say what had happened above that in this rabbit warren of a mountain? And who was to say this cave-in was to be the last? Bram had heard stories of more rescuers than rescuees perishing when she caved again.

  The food and candles would last awhile, but not nearly long enough. Water they had in excess and a man could live a long time on water alone. But first he needed air and Bram knew their greatest danger was the buildup of mine gases in this closed-off part of the drift. And then there was still water miraculously working its way through the plug in the passage, as well as dripping through cracks everywhere. How long before it filled up the workings below and stopped draining off, began to fill up their “home” until it drowned them all?

  Bram expected a cruel razzing when he rejoined the others. Everyone must have heard his cowardice. But Gus patted Bram’s knee when he sprawled on the platform and old Sully gave him a wink and a nod. Knut put the lamp in the cap box nailed to the upright beam to hold back the black for all of them. A bohunk walked over and offered Bram a chew off his plug. They were all treating him like the baby he was and Bram was bigger than most of them. The tobacco tasted bitter and hot and made him a little sick.

  “Bohunk” was a general term for a wave of immigrants from Central Europe. Their poverty and foreign ways kept them somewhat segregated. Bram had thought they all looked alike, like Chinamen did, but he studied them now and realized this was not so. None as dark as the Italians nor as light as the Swedes, they ran the gamut in between. They were generally on the short and stocky side but within a few days he would learn their distinct and separate identities well.

  Knut’s carbide gave out and they started on the snuffs, little candle ends that were left of their work candles, while they had more strength to be up and changing them often, saving the long candles till last. The minute one began to flicker, Shorty or Gus would stand ready with another and light it off the last just as it was about to die so they’d have the full use of it. Knut and Sully would take a shift to spell them and Bram would help keep watch. Once they all slept and a candle went out. They carried wooden matches for lighting work candles but with their soaked clothing and the pervasive wet on the air, none would light. Knut felt his way out to the lockers in the station, where he’d seen some matches at the bottom of a metal dinner pail when he’d gathered up the food. He found one that would light, the rest useless.

  Now they had to watch the light closely and it added more tension to the waiting. Sleep would have passed some of the time with less pain, but it was hard to do when worrying that the man assigned the candle would fall asleep. Every few hours Knut sent someone up the drift to tap on the air pipe, so the stiffs would know there was still someone alive to rescue.

  Bram lay watching the mica crystals glitter in the candlelight and pretended they were winking stars. The red iron stains in the wall made him think of blood and the green and blue and purple flashes of the copper ores brought to mind Mildred Heisinger. Time dragged slower every hour. The bohunks sang songs and mimed bawdy stories that were funny for a while. Gus told a long story that Bram lost track of but he took comfort in the Swede’s beautiful singsong. The tommyknockers were perfectly still now and Sully said it was because the wee people had given up hope for them. The food began to look funny but didn’t smell yet. Knut ordered them to eat it all so it wouldn’t have to be thrown out. Within half an hour they were every one retching violently.

  Bram felt it was his insides having the cave-in this time and that his rib cage must be creaking and wrenching like the timbers in the stull had. The sickness lasted long past the time any of them had anything to heave but his guts. The stench added yet another unwelcome odor to the still, putrefying air.

  “Any woman even had known better than to save the food past its spoil time,” Knut blamed himself disgustedly, and leaned out over the platform to gag. “I never knowed nothing about food.” When they all lay helpless and sweating and Gus had managed to hold himself up long enough to light the next-to-last candle off the previous one, a heavy shot from the rescue teams caused a concussion that jolted the platforms and put out the light. There was no way to light another now. “They’re shootin’ that heavy, must be hitting big blocks of solid rock,” Shorty bemoaned the obvious. “Don’t look good for us, no sir.”

  Brambaugh O’Connell turned into the eternal darkness to choke on sour juices ripped up from his stomach. Inside himself, he cried out for Ma’am.

  17

  Next to the alley across the street stood a false-fronted saloon lit to the rafters. It took Aletha a moment to recognize it as the building that was still there but boarded up and moved way back on the lot. A sign announced it as the Belmond, and through its storefront windows she could see a great many black-coated men with little round hats. In fact, it looked like every guy in there had bought his clothes off the same rack. There was a lot of noise coming from the place—shouting, jeering, the rumble of men’s voices, the light ring of women laughing.

  A couple stepped out of the Belmond. She wore gray from head to toe, but the way she let the man snuggle her neck and the way she tried to hurry him along made Aletha think she must work in the district. The couple had just crossed the alley when they disappeared, the Belmond went dark and moved back on its lot, the dumpster stood where the Pabst-Milwaukee Bottling Works had been, and the ankle-deep mud turned into the flat baked-hard alley again.

  “How’d you do that?” Herm said from behind the screen door. “Just appear out of nowhere like that?”

  Aletha and Tracy nearly knocked the dishwasher over in their haste to get inside, and Aletha welcomed the familiar odors of cooked cauliflower and detergent. She handed him the rolled-up paper a boy in knickers had shoved at her instead of the flashlight. Herm held it to the light. “‘Dr. Miles’s number one hundred and fifty specific mixture. Guaranteed a sure cure for gonorrhea and gleet. This preparation is prepared according to the formula and will be found a positive cure. It is perfectly
safe and harmless as it contains no poisonous ingredients. Prepared by Bartholomew Holder, Apothecary.’” Herm looked up. “What’s gleet?”

  “I went out to find you,” Tracy said to Aletha, “to see if I could spend the night in your car too, but being around you is more excitement than the frail Ledbetter heart can stand.”

  “What about your boyfriend? Your apartment?”

  “We couldn’t come up with the rent and got kicked out. He skipped, left me owing.” She shrugged matter-of-factly but she was still trembling from their time excursion and looked anything but casual. “He never wanted me, just liked being waited on and getting his rocks off whenever he felt like it.”

  “Cree’s got my car,” Aletha said, “but we have the keys to his condo.”

  “I think your Cree could use a housekeeper,” Tracy remarked when they entered the condominium at the Pick and Gad.

  “Help me put enough of it back together so it’s livable for tonight at least.” The place had obviously been ransacked but Aletha refused to answer Tracy’s questions about it. After they’d restored some order and showered, Aletha made tuna-salad sandwiches and coffee.

  “Two girls I know rent one of the old cribs in behind the Senate and Silver Bell. They’re leaving town and I’ve got my name in for that crib.”

  “Can you afford it?” Aletha sat on the tiled edge of the empty Jacuzzi and cupped her hands around her hot coffee mug. “Without a roommate?”

  “No and I had considered you as a roommate, but if I lived with you in a crib I’d probably have a steady stream of long-dead miners at the door, money in hand and their flies open.”

  “I’d pay my share and I even have wheels to take us places.” Aletha hurried to refill Tracy’s coffee cup. “Please?”

  “Look, I like you. It’s just you scare the hell out of me.” Tracy took a small packet from her purse. “There’s some high-rollers in town this week. Got this as a tip. Want a toot?”

  “Do you know what they cut that stuff with?” And while Tracy snorted a line through a plastic straw, Aletha told how she’d landed in a federal prison.

  “You shouldn’t go around talking about that kind of past.” Tracy sounded as if she’d developed a sinus condition and cleared it, all in the space of a sentence. “Nobody would suspect it of you, and what people don’t know about you makes them feel better. About you, I mean.”

  Aletha felt uncomfortable and began to babble on about Callie’s cat and how she lost him. And about meeting Jesse and Carl.

  Tracy pointed the straw at her. “Life before this time mess started happening must seem pretty dull, even considering prison, huh? I think you get high on the danger of it. I think you’re getting addicted to that high. It’s becoming your toot.” She leaned back, her pupils dilating. “What bothers me is, what are we going to tell Barry? We have to warn him. He could step out the back door of the Senate some night and meet face to face with Wild Bill Hickok or something.”

  Cree and the Datsun had not returned by morning. Aletha worried even though he’d told her he might not be back. Whoever searched the condo was not a nice sort of person and Cree’d had blood in his eye when he left. She should have checked in with Renata, but she talked Tracy into helping her search for Charles instead.

  “You’re looking in the wrong places,” Tracy said. “You got to put yourself in his place. I can remember how I felt in his time last night. Shit scared. He’s probably hiding in some building, not roaming the alleys. Not out getting high on danger like you would be. Now, there’s some old buildings,” she said when they stood outside the Pick and Gad, and pointed across the empty lots where the Big Swede and the Monte Carlo had stood last night, to the rotting outbuildings behind Mildred Heisinger’s house.

  “But he’s an Alta cat. I’m sure he’s never been to Telluride before. And those buildings weren’t old in his time. What would a cat know anyway?”

  “You got a better idea?” They walked around to the back of the lot with Tracy staying five steps behind Aletha. “If I see you disappearing into yesteryear, I’m going to run. Leave you to your own, toots.”

  The rear building looked like it might once have been a carriage house. Instead of pigeons, crows peered down at them through holes in the roof. The second building was a shed and a third a barn with leaning stall partitions. Ancient coal dust blackened one stall. A huge weathervane tilted against a corner, a prancing horse atop the crossed direction indicators. Two dilapidated steamer trunks stood open and empty on a dirt floor.

  At first Mildred Heisinger was just a shadow silhouetted by sunlight which in turn was bordered by a dark door frame. She stood pointing a cane at them. Her dress hung formless to where her knees bowed painfully outward. But her spine was still straight and her head and neck unbowed. Her shoes were sturdy and laced, with thick-cushioned soles. They looked massive on the end of her tiny frame. Above her rolled anklets the red and blue highways of her blood were mapped across the unnatural white of her skin. “What you doing now, snoop? Going to clean the barn?”

  “What year is this?” Tracy asked suspiciously.

  “We came here looking for my cat, Miss Heisinger,” Aletha shouted, remembering the old lady’s hearing problem. “I live across the road and my cat ran away.”

  “White cat? Big tom?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  Mildred worked her mouth around the false teeth, up and down, as if trying to shrink them to fit more comfortably in a shrunken face. Finally she poked the cane down into the dirt and used it to help her turn. Her straight shoulders drooped now. “He likes chopped liver and mice. I got plenty of both.”

  It seemed to take Mildred forever to cross the short distance to the house. Charles rose from a wicker basket beside the kitchen stove. He arched and stretched and yawned, then rubbed the side of his neck against Mildred’s stick-thin leg. His throaty purr throttled up and down with his breathing.

  “This one yours?” Miss Heisinger sat in a chair and Charles jumped on her lap. “Seems to like me better.” They looked up at Aletha with similarly blank expressions and the same color eyes.

  “Did you buy him a basket already?”

  “Had that a long time. Always a cat or two around here. Always died before I did. Didn’t get another one after the last time because I was sure it’d outlive me and somebody’d shoot it or gas it or whatever they do nowadays. This one just walked in when I opened the door like he owned the place. Not too well housebroken but he likes to watch the television with me.”

  Tracy was giving Aletha pleading looks over the old lady’s head.

  “He does seem to like it here,” Aletha said. “If you’re fond of him—”

  “No, you take him back, snoop.” She pushed Charles into Aletha’s arms much as Callie had. “I’ll probably die tomorrow. You’ll outlive him.”

  “You could borrow him for a while to keep you company.”

  “Then I’d hurt when you came to take him away. Young people don’t stay in one place anymore.” A lonely look crumpled her features and she glanced away from Charles. “People my age ought to keep to themselves anyway. Things don’t hurt ’em then.”

  “I promise I won’t take him until you want me to. He likes you better than he ever did me.”

  But Mildred Heisinger went into her parlor, turned on her television, and told them to go away and take their cat with them.

  “Kitty, you’d found the perfect home,” Aletha said as they filed through the gate in the wrought-iron fence. Charles wailed and struggled when a car went by. “A Victorian cat and a Victorian lady. It’s a match made in heaven, and I had to blow it.”

  “I feel so sorry for her. Hope I never live that long.” Tracy stared back at the house and almost tripped. When they turned him loose at the Pick and Gad, Charles prowled and yowled and refused the fresh can of cat food Aletha put before him. “All you have to do is open that door and he’ll head straight back for her house and they’ll both be happy.”

  “She’s
so deaf,” Aletha said. “What if she doesn’t hear him at the door? And she’s so stubborn. What if she doesn’t take him back now that she’s refused him?”

  Cree Mackelwain had parked Aletha’s Datsun behind an abandoned building down at the Loop and hiked the old tram route up to Alta, telling himself the whole way that he was stupid, inept, unarmed, and a coward anyway. All he had going for him was anger, and anger tends to poop out pretty fast when you’re climbing a couple of miles at a steep incline at that elevation. Whoever had shot at him could be a coward too, but he had a weapon. And he probably had food and a coat and company. Cree had a light jacket that was too hot on the way up and not hot enough when night fell on the ghost town. The Cessna had reached the Montrose airport with no problem and now sat complete with bullet holes for someone to report to the police so they could come and ask him more questions.

  When Dutch Massey was slaughtered and the investigation had turned up evidence of the drug trade, Cree had come under suspicion. He still was. He wasn’t interested in talking to the police again—he didn’t know anything then and he didn’t know anything now. Well, he’d known Dutch to supply a few bindles now and then out at the rigs when Cree had been roughnecking. But Cree hadn’t questioned, until it was all over, how their business could have grown so fast, how his partner always had so much cash on hand (and as it turned out, he didn’t know the half of that), or how and why Dutch took so many vacations. Dutch had handled the paperwork, Cree some of the flying and much of the personnel management.

  “Maybe things just seemed so good at the time I didn’t want to question much.” Right now he couldn’t say. All he could say was he’d just spent one of the coldest, hungriest, and most stupid nights of his life. There were three of them and they were still working over the town when he’d arrived. Eventually they took lanterns and went into the mine. They had a four-wheeled Bronco that looked brand new parked off in the trees. Cree thought about the big sack of groceries in it all night long, but if they found anything missing they’d start hunting him. And the memory of Dutch’s body plastered around the office, some of him sticking by his own blood to the walls, kept Cree and his hunger in line. They’d used an automatic weapon and enough ammunition to stop a regiment.