Against the Day (197 page)

   
“You
wanted to be the one,” Frank guessed.

“It’s
worse than ’at.” He gazed deeply at Frank, as if hoping this late in their
history for Frank to show some mindreading skills. “It wasn’t just bringin over
a supply wagon,” he said softly.

“It’s
been more’n enough for me,” Frank said, not wanting too many details.

·
    
·
    
·

Stray had been in
Trinidad
for a while
before she’d heard about the tent colony at Ludlow. It had been there since
late last September, when the strike began. Little by little, flooring got put
in, latrines were dug, a phone line was run to the Union office in Trinidad.
After some shooting in early October between mine guards and the people in the
tents, both sides had begun to store up guns and ammunition. Winter was coming.
The shooting went on.

   
“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, crustynosed 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. “Wideopen 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 snakeoil 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 num

bered 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
educationalist 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 throwdown. “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 BaldwinFelts
“detective” agency had come up with for penetrating, controlling, and thinning
down the size of illdisposed crowds. It had already

been through here, sweeping the colony with machinegun 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 grownups, 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 couplethree miles
into open country and blow apart a mesquite bush.

“With
a rifle it’s too personal,” one of the Guardsmen 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, spoilscarred 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 .30caliber machinegun 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
aircooled BenetMercier, 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.”