Against the Day (195 page)

“Not me,” chirped Dr. Zhao. “And your
fiancé had to go make a house call. Oh! You must mean this patient here!”

“Howdy Wren. Mind if I don’t get up
right away?” All these needles must’ve been doing something to Frank.
Ordinarily a man would be heartbroken if not totally crushed to meet an old
flame again calling another man “Honey,” and a doctor, too. But what was
kicking in instead was some strange townbusybody reflex that set Frank to
going, well, well, Wren and the Doc, wonder how that’ll turn out, so forth.

   
“Frank,
I hope you’re not. . .”

He had always appreciated this
bluestocking awkwardness about her
. . .
as
if jealousy were something that only characters in books knew how to deal with,
and when one met with it out in the world, why, one was quite at a loss
. . . .
“Tell me,” he said somewhat
drowsily, “how’d you two lovebirds meet?”

“Got to go brew up some Chinese
herbs,”
 
muttered Dr. Zhao. “I’m
leaving this door open. Better behave!”

“I got back to the States,” Wren
said, “reported in to the hospital for some insurance checkup that Harvard was
insisting on, Willis happened to be on duty, we were about to pass in the
corridor, took one look at each other, and . . .”

“
¡Epa!
”
Frank suggested. He’d heard about
the phenomenon but never observed it in action.

Wren shrugged, exactly like a
helpless feminine victim of Fate. “Willis is good,” she said. “A good man.
You’ll see. He knows your friend Estrella, too. They’re involved in some
mysterious project down in the coalfields.”

All right, now she was talking. The
plutes it seemed, curse their souls if they had any, were at it again, this
time in southern Colorado, where it was coal and not gold that men went down
underground to risk their lives and health for, and the miners tended to come
from AustriaHungary and the Balkans more than Cornwall and Finland. Since last
September the mine workers’ union had been out on strike against Rockefeller’s
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company—since November the Trinidad field had been
under a

state of martial law. Both sides had
plenty of rifles, and the state National Guard also had machine guns. The
shooting and skirmishing had been nearly constant, when weather
permitted—storms that winter had been fierce and deadly, even for
Colorado. Families evicted from company housing had been living all winter in
tent colonies outside Ludlow and Walsenburg. Stray had gone down there at the
beginning of the strike and moved into one of the tents around December,
against the advice of everybody who cared about her.

   
“Which
is a sizable number of folks,” said Doc Turnstone.

   
“You
mind tellin me what she’s doin down there?”

“There’s a sort of informal plexus of
people working as best they can to help the strikers out. Food, medicine,
ammunition, doctoring. Everything’s voluntary. Nobody makes a profit or gets
paid, not even credit or thankyous.”

   
“Sounds
like Mexico all over again.”

   
“You’ve
had enough of that for a while, I guess.”

   
“Hell
no. Now you boys’ve got this leg workin so good.”

“There does just happen to be a small
convoy heading over to Walsenburg, and they’re shorthanded.”

   
“I’m
on the way.”

   
“Old
associate of yours will be there too. Ewball Oust?”

   
“Well.
Sure is my week, ain’t it?”

They met up
, as arranged, in Pagosa Springs.
“How’s ’at leg doin?” said Ewball.

“Still kicks up when there’s a
norther headin in.” Frank nodded vaguely in the direction of Ewball’s penis.
“How’s ’at third leg, or shouldn’t I be askin.”

If Ewball had been hoping the subject
of Stray wouldn’t arise, he gave no sign. “Oh,” pretending to inspect a barrel
hitch on one of the loads, “one more big mistake on my ticket I guess. Just
never should’ve interfered the way I did.”

   
“ ‘
Seemed like a good idea at the time.
’ ”

“There you go. But now she’s all
yours, pardner.” Ewball gave it a hoofstep or two, then added, “She always
was.”

“News to me, Ewb.” But who, outside
of Stray herself, would know any better than Ewb here? it started Frank
thinking, anyway.

Keeping a wary eye out for mine
guards, Ku Kluxers, company detectives, and other assorted vermin, they took
the little convoy, mules and wagons, up

over Wolf Creek Pass, down into the
San Luis Valley. Nights were generally sleepless, for there were sure to be
riders out scouting for them, though moonlight was on the wane.

“Another thing you should know,”
Ewball thoughtfully stirring the grounds in the coffeepot with his stolen
Signal Corps thermometer he liked to use to get the temperature just right.

   
Frank
snorted. “Never, gol, durn, ends.”

   
“Your
mother. She’s in Denver, and working for mine—”

“Well if ’at don’t take the cake.”
The usual reply would’ve been more like, “Thought your mother worked on the
Denver Row,” but this was well beyond trailside pleasantries.

   
“—and
her and Stray had a nice long confabulation, too, seemed like.”

   
“You
took Estrella home to meet your folks.”

   
“She
didn’t even want to, I should’ve known better.”

“Should’ve been watchin your back
Ewb, it’s that Bourgeois Fever creepin up on you.”

“All in the past now. Yes quite,
quite ended. And another thing about Stray— Did I ever tell you—”

   
“Ewb.”

And
with no time intervening, the sun was up again and the coffee in the pot frozen
from the long night.

It
was a nervous passage across the San Luis Basin. In the distance, riders whose
hats, dusters, and mounts blended with the terrain would now and then appear,
proceeding at top speed across the treeless plain, each headed in a slightly
different direction, the less thoughtful wearing dark clothes that stood out
against the ashen country, for anybody at even a little elevation sooner or
later would find it just too hard to resist considering these riders as rifle
targets. As would the more adventuresome among the horsemen themselves, willing
to gamble on the wind, the accuracy of the rifleman’s sights and size of the
load, or just that the high ground was too far away—against the payoff of
that wellknown lift of spirit when you’re shot at and missed.

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 Pinkertoninfested Denver
& Rio Grande had to be escorted instead over these shelterless 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.

carsdale Vibe was addressing the Las AnimasHuerfano Delegation
of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A~) gathered in the casino of
an exclusive hotsprings resort up near the Continental Divide. Enormous windows
revealed and framed mountain scenery like picture postcards handtinted by a
crew brought in from across the sea and all slightly colorblind. The clientele
looked to be mostly U.S. white folks, pretty welloff 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
stemwinder, “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 tonedeaf 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 horsethief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our
nets of perfect tenacre mesh, leveled and varmintproofed, 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 vaca

tion bungalows, will dwell in topdollar 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 eugenicallychosen
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 eighthour 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.