Angle of Repose (34 page)

Oliver said, “Whoa.” His lifted lantern shone on the rounding surface of a log wall, the edge of a hay roof. He put the reins in her hands. “Stay here.” He jumped heavily down. She sat in the high seat listening to the town noise back of her in the street, the sounds of animals moving in some unseen corral. When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been before, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold.

A door opened on lantern light, another lantern bobbed toward her, throwing the shadows of moving legs. The sigh of one of the horses was like the breath of her own relief.

The stable boy unhooked the tugs and led the team away. Oliver helped her down, hauled the bags after her, put the lantern in her hand. “Can you carry this?”

“Of course.”

“Just a little way back to the hotel.”

The street was muddy and rutted, but he steered her down the middle of it, and she understood gratefully that he was avoiding contact with the men on the sidewalk. Where lamplight threw the shadow of a potted palm across the planks and revealed the hatted heads of men sitting inside, a sign said HOTEL. He led her in: a smoky room, an American flag on the wall, half a dozen men in chairs, smoking, others in the bar in the next room, brass spittoons that rounded the light. Diffident, stupid with fatigue, she stood blinking. She heard the talk pause, and felt the eyes on her. She let Oliver take the lantern out of her hand.

Behind the desk that angled across a corner a young man in striped arm garters rose and laid down a newspaper. His eyes photographed Susan in one unblinking look. He said, “Sorry, folks. Full up.”

“I’ve got a reservation,” Oliver said.

The clerk’s full-lidded eyes met Oliver’s in pleasant denial. Smiling his public smile, he looked first at Oliver, then at Susan, then back at Oliver. He spread his hands. “I wish I could. I filled the last room two hours ago.”

With the slightest indulgence, the sagging disappointment in Susan’s muscles could become panic. Where
would
one sleep, in this wild place full of rough men? The stable? A hayloft or manger? Probably there were as few accommodations for horses as for people. She hung onto Oliver, who was looking with hard insistence at the clerk.

“If you did,” he said, “you gave away the room I reserved for my wife and me two days ago. The name is Ward. I put five dollars down.”

At the word “wife,” Susan felt the clerk’s eyes again, like the flick of a moth’s wing against her face. For the first time it occurred to her what the clerk thought she was, and in a chilly passion she said, “Is there no other hotel? I think I should prefer it if there is.”

“Wait,” Oliver said. To the clerk he said, exaggerating the patience of his explanation, “I came through here day before yesterday and reserved a double room from a fellow with a twitch in his face. Do you recognize him?”

“Remple, yeah. But . . .”

“I put five dollars down. I signed the register. Have you got it there? Let me see it.”

“Sure you can see it,” the clerk said, “but I’m telling you, Mr. Ward, we haven’t got a thing open. There has to be some mistake.”

“You bet there has to be.”

Oliver took the register and turned it around. He flipped back a page. Reading past his elbow, Susan saw his name, the familiar signature, with a pencil line drawn through it. “There it is,” Oliver said. “Who crossed it out?”

“I don’t know,” the clerk said. “All I know is we haven’t got one single solitary bed. The best I could do for anybody would be to give you bedroll space in the hall.”

“That’d be fine,” Oliver said. Watching him, Susan saw the fury come up so suddenly into his face that she was afraid he was going to lean over the desk and slap the clerk. The clerk thought so too–she saw his eyes widen. She said again, “Oliver, perhaps there’s another hotel.”

“There isn’t.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” the clerk said. Susan thought he might really be. She did not forgive him for what he had assumed about her, but she thought he might really be sorry. “There’s the boardinghouse,” he said. “I could send the kid down to see if they’ve got a bed.”

“Don’t bother,” Oliver said. “Where is it?”

“Next block up, on the left. Look, Mr. Ward, I can have the kid run up, you folks sit down a minute.”

“Just give me back the five dollars and forget it.”

Surprising her with his promptness, the clerk opened a drawer and got a five-dollar gold piece out of it. He laid it in Oliver’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

Outside, Oliver pushed her with angry haste to the next corner. She stumbled and tripped, holding the lantern out awkwardly to keep it from her skirts. “What do you suppose happened?” she wailed. “What can we do if there isn’t something up here?”

“What happened was that somebody crossed a palm with some money,” Oliver said. “Somebody needed a bed and the clerk fixed it. If you hadn’t appeared, he’d have got away with bedding me down in the hall.”

“But where
will
we bed down? Can we go on to Leadville?”

“Not a chance.”

They reached the corner, turned left, found the boardinghouse. A man sitting in his undershirt, drinking coffee, said yes, they had a bed. It wasn’t much for the lady–just curtained off. Oliver looked at her once and took it. The undershirted man picked up his lamp and led them up bare stairs and along a hall whose blue muslin walls waved and crawled with the wind of their movement, to a door that had no key. After she was inside, and sinking down on the bed, Susan saw that the room had no walls, either–only that same blue muslin, called Osnaburg, nailed to a frame that went no more than six feet above the floor. Under the one broad roof every eight-by-ten cubicle in the place shook to the same cold drafts, and glared the same sick blue in the lantern’s light. She could hear the sounds of sleeping all around. It was so cold she could see her breath.

Oliver knelt at the bedside and took her in his arms. His lips were on her cold face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, echoing the clerk. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I think I could sleep anywhere.”

“I wish we were already home.”

“So do I.”

“In this place we can’t even talk.”

“We can talk tomorrow night.”

He kissed her, and she clung to him, tired and tearful. Right at her ear, it seemed, a man cleared his throat. Oliver let her go and blew out the lantern.

 

Too tired to be appalled at this thing called a room, but too tired to be amused by it either, she got out of her dress and crawled into bed in her shift. If she had literally carried sixty pounds all the way from Denver, and had been driven along the road with a club, she could not have ached more. Oliver’s weight sagging into the other side gave her something to cling to and warm herself by. For a while they clung and whispered, then she heard that he was asleep.

But she could not sleep. After a while she rolled away and lay on her back with her scratchy eyelids stretched open. Beside her Oliver breathed evenly. The sounds of communal slumber murmured and sighed through the cloth walls. Someone had a persistent, wracking, helpless cough that went on for minutes, and quit out of pure weakness and lack of breath, and in a little while broke out again. Supporting that sound of debility and failure there were orchestrated snores. For a while a man ground his teeth horribly, only feet away. Later still a voice cried out, cracking with fear or menace, “Fred! God damn you!” She froze, expecting shots or the sounds of struggle, but the crisis tailed off into a sigh, the groaning of springs. Still later there was an unidentifiable noise like a dog biting and snorting at an inaccessible itch.

She lay tensely listening and interpreting, refusing her attention and willing herself to relax, only to find herself in ten seconds tight with alert awareness again. Phantasmal adjustments to the road lurked in her muscles.

It seemed a week since she had awakened in the berth and pulled the curtains to see dawn on the peaks of these mountains. It seemed a month since she had embraced her parents and Bessie and kissed her son’s sleeping face. She felt swallowed and lost; her mind kept bending back to the room where Ollie might now be beginning another fever cycle. She tried to imagine Augusta and Thomas in this crude place, their fastidiousness cheek by jowl with all this coarse humanity, and couldn’t. The very effort made her laugh. For a time she lay phrasing the day’s experience in colorful and humorous fashion, as if for the pages of
Century
, and almost persuaded herself that under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.

And that made her think, with failing nerve, that whatever it was, it was to be her life. It was what she had deliberately chosen. As soon as he was well enough, she would be bringing Ollie out to grow up in it. Wanly she adjusted herself to Oliver’s unresponsive warmth.

It seemed to her that she heard every noise from midnight until near morning–dogs, drunken men in the street, footsteps that came down the hall and, it seemed, stopped before her door, so that she lay listening fearfully for a long time.

Then someone in the next cubicle sat up, yawning and squeaking the bed. He lighted a lamp whose glow shone blue through the cloth wall and threw huge windmill shadows among the rafters. She heard him stamp into his boots. The light rose and moved and receded down the hall. Outside, a rooster crowed some way off, and right underneath her someone split kindling with a quick
thunk thunk thunk.
Exhausted, frazzled, wide awake, she turned in the bed, fighting for covers, and found that Oliver’s eyes were open. He always woke that way, as quietly as if he had been lying there waiting.

“Can’t we get up?” she whispered.

They were on the road to Mosquito Pass by seven. For the first hour she hunched within her blanket with her breath congealing on the wool held across her face. A cold wind searched out the openings in her wrapping, her feet were cold under the buffalo robe. The dropped dung of the horses smoked in the road. As they climbed through the snags of a burned spruce forest, tatters of cloud blew out of the overcast. In all the shadowed places there was snow.

Eventually they climbed through the clouds and into the sun. Looking back, Susan saw South Park filled nearly to the brim with cloud, only the saw-toothed peaks rising above it. Their crowbait horses, one black and one bay, dragged them reluctantly up a steep canyon, stopping every quarter of a mile to blow. They came out onto a plateau and passed through aspens still leafless, with drifts deep among the trunks, then through a scattering of alpine firs that grew runty and gnarled and gave way to brown grass that showed the faintest tint of green on the southward slopes and disappeared under deep snowbanks on the northward ones. The whole high upland glittered with light.

As they had need, they drew aside to let ore wagons pass with their loads of concentrate and matte. The skyline, from any part of this magical plateau, was toothed like the jaw of a shark. The road bent and dipped down through a hanging valley where mosquitoes rose in swarms from the wet grass; when it lifted them again around a corner of bare stone the mosquitoes blew away instantly, and the wind was so cold it made her teeth ache. Her eyes watered with cold and light.

“Still remind you of staging in to New Almaden?” Oliver said.

“I take it back. This is so wild and beautiful. I like it ever so much better.”

“So do I. I could do without the town of Fairplay, though.”

“We survived it.”

“You’re all right, Susie,” he said. “You know that? Most women would go to bed for a week after a night like that.”

“Where?” she said, and giggled. Her voice startled her, brittle as ice in that thin air. “Maybe I
will
go to bed for a week, once we get to a bed.”

“I doubt it. It hasn’t fazed you.”

“I lay awake all last night writing it up for
Century,”
she said. “I intend to be their Western correspondent. At the very least, think of the letters I can write Augusta.” The thought made her laugh again; she put her black mitts to her cheeks, stinging with cold and sun. She supposed she looked as healthy as a child at a skating party. Oddly enough, she
felt
healthy too. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t. Can you imagine her opening a letter describing last night, and reading it aloud to Thomas at breakfast in some grand hotel dining room on Lake Leman or somewhere, with all of civilized Europe looking in the window?”

“Better spare her,” Oliver said. “She thinks you’re enough of a pioneer as it is.” He reached the whip from its socket and touched the horses into activity. “Come on, boys, don’t fall asleep.”

The thin air smelled of stone and snow, the sun came through it and lay warm on her hands and face without warming the air itself. Up, up, up. There was no top to this pass. Oliver said it crested at more than thirteen thousand feet. They were long past all trees, even runted ones. The peaks were close around them, the distance heaved with stony ridges, needles, pyramids in whose shadowed cirques the snow curved smoothly. The horses stopped, pumping for air, and as they rested she saw below a slumping snowbank the shine of beginning melt, and in the very edge between thaw and freeze a clump of cream-colored flowers.

“I’d like to walk a little. Could I?”

“You won’t want to walk far. We’re around twelve thousand right now.”

“Just a little way. I can keep up with you.”

It felt good to use her legs, but she had no wind at all. With a handful of the little alpine flowers in her hand and the whole broken world under her eyes, she puffed on after the democrat, and was glad when it stopped and waited. But when she caught up, Oliver was standing out in front looking closely at the bay horse. The moment she saw the closed expression of his face she knew something was wrong. She looked at the horse, spraddle-legged, dull-eyed, with pumping ribs and flaring nostrils, and heard the breath rattle in its throat.