by John Sayles
He begins asking in the saloons. He has taken up whiskey, to scour the deep dust out from his craw, and it seems only polite to order at least a small one in each place before asking questions.
“Couple days ago, sure,” says McCormack in the first of the gin mills. “It isn’t like ye could miss her in a crowd. Had a bad cough, though.” The bartender pours Hod two fingers’ worth. “Word has it ye’ve been chased.”
Company spies are rampant in Leadville, and more than one miner has been dumped, bleeding and unconscious, on the railroad platform late at night, a paper with Out of State scrawled on it pinned to his back.
“They got me confused with a Federation man.”
“False witness is a terrible thing,” says McCormack. “Not that I’ve anything against the union.”
There are Federation men in town as well, and the mine dicks, the smart ones, never walk abroad at night unless they’re heeled or in a group.
“I suppose we all look alike to them.” Hod pours the whiskey straight to the back of his throat, still not reconciled to the taste of it.
“I’ve heard they’re hiring again in Blackhawk,” says the bartender. Behind him hangs a painting of naked women being chased by bearded men with goat’s legs. There was an identical one in Skaguay, Hod can’t remember which saloon.
“The thing to keep in mind,” Jeff Smith used to say, “is they’ll never catch up with those females.”
There are a dozen flockie miners taking up the rest of the counter and talking whatever it is they talk, a couple assayers losing at hi-lo and Riggins, who used to be a foreman at the Morning Star before his leg was shattered under an ore car, passed out face-down at his table. No women yet. Hod feels the welcome numbness start at the roof of his mouth. Addie Lee tries to dress in green, to compliment her hair, and wears a scent like nothing else smelled in Leadville.
“Of course, if yer on their list, ye might consider a change of careers,” says McCormack, who the men say worked the hard coal back in Pennsylvania, lowering his voice as he leans in. “Speakin from me own experience.”
Hod drains his glass and wanders back out onto the street, packed with miners now, men speaking in a half-dozen tongues and searching, searching for a fight, a card game, a woman, searching for some proof they are alive and of some consequence on the earth’s shaft-pitted surface. Music spills out from the saloons, from house ensembles and melodeons and groups of soon-to-be-drunken men harmonizing—
Oh show me a camp
Where the gold miners tramp
And the buncos and prostitutes thrive
Where dance halls come first
And the faro banks burst
And every saloon is a dive!
Hod steps into the street to avoid a strutting mucker with blood in his eye. If she is here and he can find her he doesn’t know what he’ll do, no money, no job. There are men, he knows, who live off their women, who set them up in cribs or turn them onto the streets, but he has never considered it. And she never offered.
He looks for Addie Lee in the Saddle Rock and the Cloud City Saloon and in Hyman’s and in Curley Small’s pool hall and behind West Second in Stillborn Alley and even passes by the Crysopolis again to get the same answer, payday girls sitting in the lobby offering to take her place it’s all the same in the dark honey but he continues, throat not so raw now, a swallow or two in each of the saloons and nobody has seen her, not the faro dealers or the sporting women or the men dishing poison behind the bar, and by the time he finds Spanish Mary in the Trail’s End he can’t feel his nose and even the American miners are speaking words he doesn’t understand.
Spanish Mary has one crooked eye and seems always to be looking over your shoulder.
“Sure, I know her. Skinny as a broomstick.”
“She been around tonight?”
If the woman recognizes him she doesn’t let on, neither of her eyes making contact with his as she watches the action in the saloon. “She gone off to Cripple Creek with the others.”
“Others?”
“Fellas get tired of the same old slop buckets, they shift em around. There’s a bunch just come in from the Creek if you’re looking for something new.”
“She just left?”
“The Poontang Special rolled out yesterday.”
“But you said she just got here—”
Spanish Mary shrugs. Down Went Mc Ginty is on the pianola and she absently taps her fingers on the tabletop, a little behind the beat. “Maybe she’ll end up at the Old Homestead, spreadin it for the carriage trade. The cough she got, she sure can’t stay up this high.”
Hod grabs the back of a chair to steady himself. He’s only passed out once, climbing the hill back to his bunk, and woke with his pockets empty and his shoes gone. He feels like if he doesn’t find his girl, his skinny, tubercular whore of a girl, there will be nothing left to tie him to the earth, that the whiskey will float him somewhere else, somewhere darker and less solid than the deepest mine he’s ever crawled into.
Spanish Mary snorts. “Think they getting something new,” she smiles, “when it’s only been relocated.”
He doesn’t quite remember how he gets to the next place, but there he is, standing in the middle of the narrow, unsteady room. There are paintings, mostly of gaudily dressed women, balanced on a strip of wood trim high on one wall and a herd of animal heads—deer, antelope, elk, mountain goat—hung on the opposite. There is a sallow little professor sleep-walking his fingers over the piano keys in one corner and a heat-blasting woodstove, a bar with a dozen Polish muckers swilling beer and, at one of the three faro tables, little Billy Irwin and Niles Manigault losing to the house.
“Behold,” says Niles, “a fellow pugilist has graced our presence.”
Hod knows Irwin as a tough little mick who works at the Maid of Erin mine when he’s not fighting.
“This scruffy mine rat, is it?”
“Hands of stone,” winks Niles. “In the land of Gold and Hardships he was legend.”
Hod stares at him and tries to keep his balance.
“He’s the one was bounced at the Ibex today,” says the Irishman. “The story’s all over Leadville.”
“I note that you have finally succumbed to the nectar of the grain,” says Niles, raising his own glass. “May I offer you a libation?”
Hod sits heavily in the empty chair next to the gambler. “I’ve had enough.”
“Yes—extemely discouraging to lose one’s employment. Or are we still pining after that underfed daughter of joy?”
“Ye won’t find any work in this town,” says Billy Irwin. “Unless it’s a potwalloper in some hash house.”
“You left Skaguay.” It is hard for Hod to form the words.
“Shortly after your own retreat. A rather large sporting debt to a person of lethal temperament—”
“Soapy couldn’t fix it?”
“We run that skulkin little rat out of town years ago,” says the fighter.
Manigault’s expression does not change. “Soapy has met his Maker.”
“Bastard still owes me money,” says the little mick.
“Billy here is on a card in Denver this Friday—”
“I’m not fighting,” says Hod.
“Dago Mike Mongone, and I’ll lay the bye flat in less than five rounds—”
“I’m not fighting.”
He has managed not to think too often about Ox Knudsen. Real fighters, if the bout is straight, know what they’re getting into. Like soldiers on a battlefield. But a fella like Ox, all swagger and no sense, sooner or later in Skaguay somebody was bound to—
“Of course not,” says Niles, “Only a desperate man would deign to step into the prize ring.”
The professor is playing Break the News to Mother and Hod wants to cry. He’s not sure exactly where Cripple Creek is, only that it is downhill from here. Everything is downhill from Leadville. Niles jiggles his stack of blues in one hand, studying Hod as if his face is the faro layout and he i
s figuring his next play.
“Only a man with nothing left to his name.”
Hod feels himself falling, falling into the center of the earth, lights beginning to flicker, the man-skip plummeting too fast, and reaches for something to hold on to.
ERRATUM
Here we scribe truth in hot lead.
The phrase makes Milsap smile as he sits at the machine, compositing the front page for the morning edition. It’s what Mr. Clawson always shouts out when he’s giving someone a tour of the paper and stops by the Linotype. The visitors, whether they’re schoolchildren or adults, will have their hands over their ears against the din, but they nod, understanding, and it makes Milsap swell.
“Drew, here,” Mr. Clawson will say, putting a hand lightly on his shoulder, “is an extension of this wonderful machine.”
The left header has been set, in 24-point Clarendon—
NEW OUTRAGE IN EAGLE ROCK
RURAL WOMEN LIVING IN FEAR
—another violation in what seems to be an epidemic throughout the state. Milsap’s fingers fly over the keys, brass and steel rattling into the assembler box and molten metal flowing down to make the slugs. He did it by hand in what they’re already calling the old days, building sentences a letter at a time with a dozen other setters in the room. Mr. Clawson got the Model 1 five years ago and Milsap is the only one left who can look into the machine and savor its intricate beauty, the interplay of belts and blocks, gears and wheels, the way it cycles the matrices back into the distributor, every letter into its distinct channel, drink in the thick, hot-metal smell of it. And he is the only one who can glance at a piece of copy, even something scrawled with hasty hand, and see it in solid block columns before his fingers touch the keyboard, edit the wording on the fly without resorting to awkward hyphens or loose lines for his justification. There are no orphans or widows dangling from Milsap’s paragraphs. He understands better than anybody that words are not sounds made of air but solid objects, with weight and consequence.
Milsap hesitates for a scant second—Mr. Clawson prefers not to separate black and brute on a line break—he adds burly and it squares off nicely. Milsap is hammering out slugs faster than little Davey, his printer’s devil, can supply him, but as he moves down the column the feeling begins to creep on him. It is upsetting, naturally, what has been going on throughout the state this fall, every day another story or two he types in, not to mention what he reads in the Raleigh papers Mr. Clawson lays out in the lunchroom. It is enough to make a white man pick up a gun. But this is different, it’s not anger—it’s that other strange sensation, that feeling where you’re sure you’ve seen it before, read it before, even if it is plain you could not have—
What tips it is that nameless crime is naked, unsheathed of its inverted commas, which Mr. Clawson believes add impact to the phrase without offending delicate sensibilities. The upstate papers, the Caucasian and the News and Observer, leave them off, though, just like they prefer to throw exclamation points on their scareheads, which Mr. Clawson considers vulgar and unnecessary.
None of the other compositors actually read the copy, allowing some very sloppy errors into print. But Milsap has the gift, has had it since he was a boy and could read the McGuffey’s across the room and upside-down, the gift of seeing and understanding a whole block of story at the same time instead of plodding through it word by word. Mr. Clawson says he ought to be an attraction for P. T. Barnum, only Barnum couldn’t pay him enough to give up Milsap. There were other boys growing up who called him freak, and his mother once had Reverend Calhoun from the Pentecostal cast devils out of him, but here, tucked into the metal racket of production, he is indispensible. “Drew practically resides here,” Mr. Clawson is fond of saying. “I’m only a daily visitor.”
Milsap finishes the page and stands slowly. Sometimes he is at the machine for so many hours without a break that the blood rushes from his head when he gets up. Once he even fell over.
Davey looks puzzled to see him step away before the paper is all set.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and heads for Mr. Clawson’s office.
He passes Stokely Burns, preparing the line block for a cartoon for the editorial page, the negative photograph of the drawing clipped up on his lamp shade. Milsap likes to decipher the images from the negative—
“I see a lot of clear,” he says, pausing to cock his head and examine it.
The clear will become pure black when printed, and anything opaque will be white.
“If we keep running these nigger pictures,” Stokely says without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, “we gonna run out of ink.” Stokely’s greatest skill is burning a long ash on his cigarette but never dropping any onto the gel plate.
“He’s a big one.” Milsap can see it now, the negative reversing in his mind to show a huge black negro complete with plaid pants, vest and coat, bow tie, top hat, walking cane, sparkling diamond stickpin, lit cigar, spats and enormous black shoes, one of which is pressing on the splayed body of a tiny, underfed white man.
NEGRO DOMINATION reads the caption beneath. HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?
“Is this ours?”
“The Journal sent it over. We run it tomorrow.” Without looking Stokely flicks an inch of cigarette ash into his wastebasket.
Mr. Clawson’s door is open and a poker game is in progress. There is Mr. Stedman and Mr. Parmelee who used to be the chief of police and Mr. Walker Taylor whose father was mayor once and is a colonel in the State Guard, sitting around the editor’s desk with cards in their hands, chewing over the important questions of the day. Milsap waits in the doorway, crossing his arms to hide his hands under his armpits. There are dozens of little burns from the hot lead on each, pocked up as bad as his face from the smallpox when he was eight, and away from the machine they draw attention. Mr. Clawson is studying his cards and doesn’t see him right off.
“Most of em, whether they admit it or not, would be pretty damn happy if we just stepped in and took over the whole shebang.”
“The people are crying out for Christian guidance, for responsible hands at the tiller—gimme two—”
This is the quietest part of the floor, but living in the machinery has taken away Milsap’s hearing and he has to strain to make out what they’re saying.
“A few of the you-know-whos might put up a fight. The ones that got big ideas in their heads. But push come to shove, I don’t think they’ll find a whole lot of support, not even from their own people—drawing one—”
“There’s a financial side to all of this, of course. A nickel.”
“Of course—”
“See you. No way we can hold our heads up out in the world if we just let nature take its course. We’ve got to be firm.”
The sudden wave of rape and terror in the state has pushed the Cuban situation off the front pages, but Milsap has been following that story, too, reading everything he can find in Wilmington. Victory, if the enemy is engaged, is less of a question than the fate of the natives once they are liberated.
“I’ll fold. The thing is, some people can deal with free will and some can’t. Poor witless bastards don’t know if they’re coming or going. I think it’s nothing short of our Christian duty to take over the reins.”
“The timing will be tricky, of course. Some people will need to be brought along.”
“The first thing I think we need to do,” says Milsap, forgetting that he has not been invited into the conversation, “is to get this Teller Amendment repealed.”
The men look up at him through the smoke in the room, a bit surprised. Mr. Clawson squints as if trying to make out who he is.
“Something wrong with the machine?”
“No sir. I just—”
“Then to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”
“I was setting the front page and—”
“What’s the Teller Amendment?” asks Mr. Stedman.
“It’s the one that says if we boot the Spaniards out we c
an’t keep the island,” Milsap explains. “You were talking about Cuba, and—”
The men all laugh, even Mr. Clawson who had seemed annoyed before.
“I’m afraid the conflict we were discussing is much closer to home,” he says. He indicates Milsap and addresses the others. “Drew here is the reigning mechanical genius of the Messenger. The content of our publication, however,” he adds, smiling, but his eyes going cold as he looks back to Milsap, “is not within his purview.”
“Our lead story, Mr. Clawson, the nameless crime—”
“Yes?”
“I’ve read it before. In the News and Observer, over a month ago.”
The smile remains fixed. The eyes remain cold.
“And what of it? We frequently reprint items of public interest—”
“The headline says New Outrage. If the story is that old, how can we say—”
“Do you believe our average reader is as diligent as you in perusing the upstate dailies?”
“No, but—”
“If they have not read the story before,” Mr. Clawson says with an edge in his voice, “the story, and the outrage caused by it, is new to them—is it not?”
The card players are chuckling.
“Yes, but—”
“But what?”
“In the original story the crime was in Zebulon. This version says it was Eagle Rock.”
Mr. Clawson sighs and then exchanges a strange kind of smile with the seated men. “Were you at the scene of the violation, Drew?”
“Mr. Clawson, I only know what I read in the papers—”
“And that, gentlemen,” interrupts the editor, “may well be the salvation of our fair city.”
The men laugh again and Milsap wishes he had just let it slide.
“I thank you for your concern for our—our veracity, Drew, but we have a public duty to fulfill. We mustn’t let mere facts stand in the way of larger truths.”