Against the Day (198 page)

“I
came over here with that Ewball, but he took off again.” Frank figured he might
as well bring up.

She
gently slid out from under the Italian on her lap. “Buy me one of whatever that
is in your fist and I’ll tell you the whole sordid tale.”

   
“Ewb
did mention somethin about. . .” he took some time wondering how

to put it.

   
“Damn,
I knew it,” she said finally. “I broke his heart, didn’t I? Keep tellin myself,
‘Stray, you got to watch ’at shit,’ then I go ahead and do it anyway.” She
nodded and hoisted her glass.

   
“He
struck me as kind of confused. Broken heart, I wouldn’t know.”

   
“Never
happened to you Frank?”

   
“Oh,
all the time.”

   
“How’s
’at professor lady o’ yours?”

Frank,
without meaning to, went into a long recitation about Wren and Doc Turnstone.
Stray lit a cigarette and squinted at Frank though the smoke. “Now, you’re sure
she didn’t break
. . .
your heart or
nothin.” For a long time, she’d had Frank figured for Reef without the loco
streak, till she saw he wasn’t quite as easy to read after all—going
after Sloat Fresno had been a surprise, as had been his involvement with the
Madero revolution. And now here he was in the coalfields, which were about to
explode. “You plannin to stay here or go back to Denver?” she said.

   
“Any
reason I shouldn’t stay here awhile?”

   
“You
mean aside from war breakin out any minute.”

They sat watching each other till she
shook her head. “No business back in Denver, I guess.”

   
“Reminds
me, how’s my Ma, heard you saw her up there a while back.”

“I really love Mayva, Frank. For
somebody I see once every ten years anyway. You should write to her sometime.”

   
“I
should?”

   
“Never
met Jesse either, did you.”

   
“Bad
uncle too,” Frank angling his head.

“Ain’t what I meant, Frank.” She took
a breath, as if plunging into a room on fire. “We’re livin over at the tents
’ese days if you take it in mind to visit.”

Frank tried to sit still for what
went throbbing through him in a wave or two. Keeping his face composed, “Well
maybe if you’re still there . . .”

   
“Why
shouldn’t—?” she stopped then, the answer being clear enough.

“Figured you knew. They’re fixin to
do away with all ’em tents, and before the week’s out, ’s what I heard.”

   
“Guess
you better visit us soon, then.”

Which is how he found himself
creeping alongside her nun’s shadow in the acidyellow assault of searchlight
beams, through melting and refreezing snow, having thought to salvage from his
saddlebags only a pack of storeboughts and a can of tobacco and as many
cartridges as he could stash about his person for the Krag and the Police
Special with its new spring.

Jesse wasn’t there when they got to
the tent, but Stray wasn’t worried. “Likely out with these Balkan folks he’s
friends with. It’s their Easter or some

thin. They’ve taught him to handle himself at night pretty
good. He’s safe enough. You can sleep over there by the stove. If he comes in
he’s usually pretty quiet.” Frank had had a vague general plan to stay awake
long enough to see how Stray looked underneath that hospital nun’s rig, but
somehow he must’ve been tireder than he thought. He slept till somebody’s
rooster cut loose and the harsh daylight commenced.

He’d just stepped outside to piss
when who should he catch sight of but a face out of the past, a humorless
customer trotting down the hillside in militia uniform, narrowbrim hat,
leggings and campaign shirt, with a high forehead, lidless long eyes and mouth
in a slit, a lizard’s face. Not a nickel’s worth of mercy.

Frank pointed with his head and asked
Kosta, who was across the trench pissing, “Who is that sumbitch? I’ve seen him
someplace.”

“Is fucking Linderfelt. When they
attack tonight, it’ll be him out front, yelling Charge. Linderfelt is the
devil.”

Frank remembered now. “He was in
Juárez, headin up some mercenaries called themselves ‘the American Legion,’
jumped the gun, tried to attack the city before Madero did and later on had a warrant
put out on him for looting. Had to jump back across the border real quick.
Thought he’d’ve been some buzzard’s lunch long ago.”

   
“He’s
a lieutenant in the National Guard now.”

   
“Figures.”

   
“Buzzards
have more sense ’n that anyway.”

The shooting had begun at first
light, and soon grew general, and went on in spasms all day.

The militia were up on Water Tank
Hill with a couple of machine guns. Their riflemen were set in a line along a
ridge up there. There were some strikers in a railroad cut to the east that had
the Guardsmen sort of enfiladed, but the militia were also higher, and on
through the daylight it was a standoff. Thoughts turned to the night ahead.
“Don’t know how gentlemanly they’re gonna be after the sun goes down,” Frank
said.

   
“They
turn into somethin else,” she said.

Jesse came squirming in under the
edge of the tent with a Winchester repeater, all out of breath. “Tried to get
down that railroad cut. Mostly on my belly. Ran out of bullets. Who’s this?”

“This is Frank Traverse. He’s your Pa’s
brother. Just come in town for some of the clambake activities.” The boy headed
for a canteen of water and drank for a while.

   
“She’s
sure been givin me an earful about you, Jesse,” Frank said.

   
Jesse
shrugged, a touch elaborately. “What is that, looks like an old Krag.”

“One of several crates full,” Stray
recalled, “if I’m not mistaken, that I sold him years ago.”

“Sometimes you’ll get attached,”
Frank said quietly. “Nice thing about a Krag, see, is the trapdoor, a real
handy feature when there’s a lot goin on, you just open it up like this,
anytime, throw in your rounds loose, and they all get lined up inside and
pushed one by one through here, feed on up the other side each time you work
the bolt. Here, try it.”

   
“He
wants to sell you one,” Stray said.

“I’m happy with my Winchester
thanks,” Jesse said. “But sure, long as I’m not wasting anybody’s ammo.” He
took the Krag and aimed out the tentflap at a distant group of horsemen, maybe
uniformed cavalry but no uniform Frank knew of, sighting in, breathing
carefully, pretending to squeeze off a round—“Bam!” and chamber a new
one. Not much Frank could teach him.

Later Frank was tending to the
firearms and Stray was kneeling next to him. “I wanted to say,” Frank said.

   
“Oh
you been sayin it, don’t worry.”

He gave her a closer look, just to
make sure of her face. “Fine time to be gettin around to this.”

“Somethin goin on over there I should
know about?” Jesse called across the tent.

“The minute it’s dark enough,” said
Frank, “just before all the lights come on, that’s when we move. Head north,
get to that wide draw that’s up there.”

   
“Run
away?” Jesse glared.

   
“Damn
straight,” Frank said.

   
“Cowards
run away.”

“Some do. Sometimes they’re just not
brave enough to run. You been out there. How many cowards about to go runn’
into that?”

   
“You
think—”

“I think we can make it to that
arroyo. Then it’s just keepin ahead of Linderfelt.”

   
“You
want to just check outside that flap for us?” said Stray.

The boy took a careful look outside.
“Reckon two minutes before them lights’ll be on.”

   
“Now’d
be a real good time,” Frank said. “Nothin much else to do here.”

“Dunn,” Jesse remembered.

“Where’d he get to?” Stray gathering
up a pistol and some ammunition, looking around for her hat.

   
“Right
here,” said Dunn, from behind the stove.

They all went out under the sides of
the tent. A small band of horsemen was galloping past, a forward propulsion of
muscle and hide, and hooves like

massed weapons. The bunch might’ve been state militia,
Baldwins, sheriff’s posse, Ku Klux Klan or any of the volunteer ranger groups.
It was getting too dark out to tell. They were carrying torches. Rising with
the flame was thick black smoke. As if the purpose was not to cast light but
blackness.

The
gunfire was unremitting now. Rifle smoke from the Guardsmen’s positions rose in
the cold air. It didn’t help much to know where they were, because soon enough
they would be here, in one of their pitiless charges, which came only in the
dark, and when they were sure of their victims.

Jesse
ran and was nearly to safety when a ragged shape rose up in his path and a hand
gripped his arm and the cold metal snout of a service .45 was pressed to his
head. “Where we going so fast, li’l dago?”

   
“Let
go my arm,” Jesse said.

“You’re
the tent kid used to come around the shop.” The gun muzzle stayed where it was.
Jesse tried to think of ways he could come out of this with only pain, maybe
something cut or broken that would only cost him some time for it to heal.

   
“You
been shootin at us today, ain’t you son?”

   
“You been
shootin at me,” said Jesse.

He
got a long redeyed look. The gun came away, and Jesse tensed up for what he was
afraid was coming next. “I’m really fuckin tired. I’m hungry. Ain’t none of us
been paid since we come down this miserable place.”

   
“Sure
know how that feels.”

   
They
stood as if listening to the shooting all around the junction.

“Get your anarchist ass out of here,”
the trooper said at last, “and if you people pray, pray I don’t see it in the
daylight.”

   
“Thank
you, sir,” Jesse saw no harm in replying.

“Name’s
Brice.” But by that time Jesse was running too fast to answer with his own.

They took shelter
with hundreds of others, at least
for a few minutes, in the wide arroyo north of town, waiting for some letup in
the shooting to get someplace safe. But the militia were trying to take the
steel bridge over the arroyo, which would cut off any more escape to the
westward. The searchlights swept in and out of the draw, throwing black shadows
you could feel, like a breeze, as they went by. Now and then one of the kids
went climbing up to see what was going on back at the tents, and had to be
yelled at.

   
Frank
felt a hand at his shoulder and thought at first it was Stray’s. But when he
looked, he could only just make her out, through the blowing needles of spring
snow, sheltering Jesse with her body. No one else was near

him. Just as likely to’ve been the hand of some dead striker,
reaching back through the mortal curtain to try and find something of Earth to
touch, anything, and that happened to be Frank. Maybe even Webb’s own hand.
Webb and all that he had tried to make of his life, and all that had been
taken, and all the paths his children had gone off on
. . . .
Frank woke after a few seconds, found he’d been drooling
down his shirt. This would not do.

Stray and the boy were both about the
same height, Frank noticed for the first time. Jesse was asleep on his feet.
Half a mile away, the tents were all being set on fire, one by one, by the
heroes of Linderfelt’s Company B. An impure reddish light leapt and shifted in
the sky and the troopers made sounds of animal triumph. Shots kept ripping
across the perilous night. Sometimes they connected, and strikers, and children
and their mothers, and even troopers and camp guards, took bullets or fought flames,
and fell in battle. But it happened, each casualty, one by one, in light that
history would be blind to. The only accounts would be the militia’s.

Stray opened her eyes and saw Frank
looking at her. She looked back, and they were both too tired to pretend it
wasn’t desire, even here in the middle of hell.

   
“When
we get a minute,” she began, then seemed to lose the thought.

Frank
sensed the bright awful chance they really might never even get to touch again.
Last thing he needed to consider right now. “Just get you and him back to your
sister’s place safe, O.K.?” he said finally. “It’s the one thing you got to
worry about right now, all the rest can wait.”