Against the Day (51 page)

“There’s married,” she supposed, “and
there’s respectably married. Now we’re on the subject, where’d that thing get
to—oh, there we go
. . . .
”

“Damn, Lake.”

Inside of a
week of the wedding night, Deuce and
Sloat thought they’d go off on a brief tour of the region.

“You don’t mind do you my dove?”

“What—”

“See some more that coffee,” Sloat
growled. Next thing she knew, they were out the door and across the ravine, and
they weren’t back by nightfall or in fact for another week, and when they did
show up again it was in a storm of hoarse, highpitched laughter she could hear
from half a mile away that neither Deuce nor Sloat could control. They came in
and sat there laughing, their eyes, dark from no sleep, drilling into her, not
about to look elsewhere. She didn’t feel frightened so much as sick.

When they quieted down enough, “You
here for a while,” she was able to ask, “or are you just back lookin to change
your socks?” Which started them off again.

From then on, just about every day
had its postnuptial kickup. Sloat had taken up residence, it seemed, and the
question inexorably arose of his interest in the bride. “Go right on ahead
pard,” Deuce offered one night, “she’s all yours. I could use a break about
now.”

“Oh now Deuce, only sidekicks get
sloppy seconds, everbody knows that, and I ain’t your damned sidekick.”

“You turning this down, Sloat? maybe
it ain’t exactly Market Street material, but take a look here, it’s still a
nice package.”

“She starts shiverin if I come
closer’n ten foot of her. Is she afraid of me?”

“Ask her, why don’t you?”

“You afraid of me, missus?”

“Yes.”

“Well that’s somethin I suppose.”

Lake did not pick up right away that
this was Sloat’s notion of loveplay. In fact, by the time she did figure it
out, he’d be long gone.

But until then, oh how bad of a
badgirl was she turning out to be here? Next thing she knew, she was naked and
they were all on a bed upstairs in the Elk Hotel in Colorado Springs.

“Not since ’at Chinese one in Reno,”
Deuce was saying, “remember her?”

“Mmm! that sideways pussy!”

“Be serious,” said Lake.

“Swear, had to get all into kind of a
X shape, here, we’ll show you—”

They kept her naked most of the time.
Sometimes they put a pair of leather side hobbles on her to keep her attached
to the bed, but enough chain so she could move. Not that they had to, she was
always ready to oblige. After she had given in to the notion of being doubled
up on, she found herself going out of her way looking for it, usually one in
her mouth, the other from behind, sometimes in her ass, so she got quickly used
to tasting her own fluids mixed with shit. “Guess this makes me really bad,”
she said in a quiet voice, looking up at Deuce.

Sloat
grabbed a handful of her hair and forced her face back onto her lawfully
wedded’s cock. “That ain’t what makes you really bad, fuckmouth whore, what
makes you really bad is marryin my li’l compadre here.”

“She got her a twofer,” Deuce
laughed. “Badgirl shit pays off.”

She
discovered in herself unsuspected talents for indirectness and flirtation,
because she had to be careful never to make anything seem like a demand, around
these two that could wreck a mood faster than monthly

bleeding. Fact, Deuce and Sloat were
the touchiest badmen she’d ever run across, anything could put them out of the
mood. Streetcars in the street, one of them whistling the wrong tune. Only once
had she been incautious enough to suggest, “Why don’t you boys just leave me
out of it and do each other for a change?” and the shock and outrage in the
place, why you could feel it for days.

Sloat was partial to the color green.
He kept showing up with these peculiar items, nearly always stolen from
someplace, that he wanted her to wear, gauntlets, baby bonnets, men’s bicycle
hose, hats trimmed and plain, didn’t matter long as it was some shade of green.

“Deuce, your partner is really
crazy.”

“Yehp, never could see green, bein a
mauve man myself,” producing a greaseblotched gingham apron checked in
approximately that color. “You mind?”

They took her down to the Four
Corners and put her so one of her knees was in Utah, one in Colorado, one elbow
in Arizona and the other in New Mexico—with the point of insertion
exactly above the mythical crosshairs itself. Then rotated her all four
different ways. Her small features pressed into the dirt, the bloodred dirt.

For a while then
, it settled into a threeparty
household of dubious coziness. The sidekicks appeared unwilling to break up
their partnership just yet, and Lake was not about to let either of them ride
off up the plateau any further than rifle range. Deuce snored, even when he was
awake. Sloat did not think much of bathing, in fact he had a superstitious
horror of the act, believing that if he so much as washed his hands, bad luck
was sure to come his way. Lake sweettalked him into it only once, and that
night at the supper table something hit the roof with a huge bang, causing
Sloat’s soup to splash all over. “There! You see? You think I’m crazy now?”

“Goodness,” said Lake, “it’s a
marmot.”

“
She’s
all right
,” Deuce confessed to his partner, “for bein such a pain in the
ol’ bunghole.”

“It is your penance,
huevón,
”
Sloat going into his comical
Mexican accent.

“Catholic stuff. Nothin I can
understand but thanks anyway.”

“Don’t matter what you understand,
even what you think.
If
you think,
pinche
cabrón.
You slay, you pay.”

“Or get away.” Deuce with a distant
smile, as if pleased at his whole situation. Sloat felt warning signs sure as a
telegrapher getting word of a midnight train bearing down on the depot, full of
dynamiters with mischief in mind.

One day in Telluride, Deuce was
summoned to the offices of the same company rep who’d hired him to take care of
Webb, what seemed now like years ago. “The dynamite outrages continue, Mr.
Kindred.”

Deuce didn’t have to pretend to be
puzzled. “Ol’ Webb wa’n’ the only anarchist in the San Juans, was he?”

“These all have the same modus,
dynamite hooked up to a twodollar Ingersoll, same hour, just before dawn
. . .
he even bombs by the moon, just like
Traverse did.”

Deuce shrugged. “Could be an
apprentice of his.”

“My principals feel they must ask you
a question of some delicacy. Please don’t take it the wrong way.” Deuce saw it
coming but stood easy, waiting. “Are you sure you got him, Mr. Kindred?”

“They put him in the miners’
graveyard in Telluride, go dig him up and see.”

“Proper identification might no
longer be feasible.”

“So you’re sayin I just shot some ringer?
first saloon bum I run into? Now the owners want their money back, that it?”

“Did I say that? Oh dear. We knew
you’d be angry.”

Fuckin A John I’m angry, who the fuck
do you think you are—”

Had to hand it to this corporate
stooge, he didn’t seem to care much about who he provoked. “There’s also this
matter of your personal relations with the subject’s daughter—”

Deuce was in screaming midleap, feet
off the floor and hands only inches from the rep’s throat, when he was
surprised by the appearance of a doubleaction .32 from some rig concealed
beneath his target’s storebought suit, not to mention another weapon in the
hands of a confederate whom the momentarily insane Deuce had failed even to
notice. The rep skipped nimbly out of the way and Deuce crashed into a
typewriter cabinet.

“We are not vengeful people
ordinarily,” murmured the rep. “The possibility of a copycat bomber had of
course occurred to us. We will continue to give you the benefit of the doubt
until our inquiries are done. Should it prove, however, that you’ve accepted
payment for work not performed, well. Who knows then what form our resentment
might take.”
Well
,
it could have been the cactus that mysteriously exploded next to his head one
day down in Cortez, or maybe the ace of spades that arrived in the mail soon
after that, but at some point Deuce had to gently start breaking it to Lake
that there just might be some people after him.

She could still exhibit strange
patches of innocence. She imagined it was money he owed, or something shortterm
like that, minor trouble, over before long.

“Who are they, Deuce? Is it something
from back in Butte?”

He couldn’t allow himself to go
slack, especially when her eyes were guileless as this. “Not likely,” he
pretended to explain, “boys up there tend to be fairly thoughtful about takin’
offense—too many insult opportunities, sufficient unto the day and so
forth. No, if you can make it past the city limits, why all’s forgiven in
Butte.”

“Then . . .”

“Listen, I’m pretty sure whoever it
is, it’s the owners up here, that they’re workin for.”

“But—” She frowned. She was
trying to understand, wanted at least to look like she was, but it was
beginning to feel like being in a skip that had just slipped its cable, heading
for the center of the Earth. “Been doin somethin you shouldn’t, Deuce?”

“Maybe. Nothin that wasn’t done on
their orders.”

“A loyal trooper. Why would they send
somebody after you, then?”

He looked at her steadily, widening
his eyes as if asking,
Haven’t you figured this out yet?
“Sometimes,” he
finally said, “they don’t like to leave even the chance open that somebody
might, later on, well say somethin’.”

Soon word came in, unconfirmed but
promissory as the first snow of autumn, that the owners had subbed the job out
to Utahans, some really lethal exDanite posse riders who were finding their
years of retirement not eventful enough. Old boys who liked to pack “Avenging
Angels,” which were typically Civil Warvintage Colts with the barrels sawed off
short. Geezers on furlough from Hell. “Longdistance shooting ain’t on their
list of occupational skills, they don’t mind some closeup work.”

“You scared, Deuce?” Sloat inquired.

“Damn straight I am, if you had the
brains you ’s born with, you’d be too.”

“What do we do? Run away?”

“ ‘
We’?”

“I’m supposed to wait for them to
show up? O.K. if I pack a shotgun or something? Couple of shells for it,
maybe?”

“They’re not looking for you, Sloat.”

“Maybe they’ll think I know where you
went.”

Deuce was too scared himself to take
much account of what was there in Sloat’s eyes staring him flat in the face.
Later it was going to haunt him, for there would come a period where Deuce was
visited by the darkest sorts of suspicions about his old runninmate. If that
rep for example thought to

meet with Deuce, why shouldn’t he’ve done
the same with Sloat, maybe with more fruitful results? Maybe Sloat, so afraid
for his life, had made some kind of deal with the pursuers. “Sure,” Deuce could
hear him confessing, “I wanted to kill the old bastard right away, but
Deuce—I don’t want to go blamin now, but he might’ve lost his nerve some
. . .
don’t know, somehow one morning, we
woke up, over in the Dolores there, and Traverse was gone, and Deuce didn’t
look that upset, and we agreed to tell you folks the old man was dead. But he
wasn’t, understand what I’m saying?”

“I think we grasp your import, Mr.
Fresno.”

In any case
it was all getting too complicated
to last, and the day finally did come when Sloat rode off up the trail headed
vaguely south, the air unnaturally still that day, the dust he raised behind
him refusing to settle, only growing thicker, until it seemed he had
transmogrified into a creature of dust miles long, crawling away, Deuce leaning
on the fence watching the dusty eparture for the better part of an hour, silent
for days after
. . . .

With just the two of them now, Deuce
went into a period of no sleep or too little. Kept waking up all through the
night. Woke once one midnight with no sources of light in the sky, some
malodorous evil heap of slag from the processing of moonchaste silver their
night’s bed, to see close beside him a luminous face suspended above where her
own would have to be, would have to, for this spectre floated high, too high,
off the ground, or where the ground was supposed to be. Nor was it exactly her
face, either. Because it did not reflect light, as from skies or hearthsides,
but emitted its own, was marked by that clear sense of a resource being
recklessly spent, with nothing gotten back—an expression, you’d say, of
sacrifice. Deuce didn’t like that, didn’t want sacrifices, for they were never
in his plans, nor in any cards he knew how to play.