The Threshold (20 page)

“
Them
,” Olina whispered. Two more, then three. Callie finally breathed. Another group, still all marvelously clothed. One turned her face to them. A thin dark smudge showed under each eye; her lips and cheeks were bright.

“They’re painted!” Callie said and Olina said, “Shush!”

More and then more. And not one of them had a husband with her. The miners called to them and they waved back and laughed. One lifted her skirts an inch or so and did a little skip. Right behind that group came two ladies alone and on Callie’s side of the street. They were deep in conversation and took no notice of the miners across the way or the girls in the alley. They were as beautifully dressed as all the rest. One was rather fat, with red hair. The other was Callie’s Aunt Lilly.

22

The Sandals in Telluride’s museum had wedged wooden heels, webbed leather tops, and were toeless and heelless. Streaks of copper-brown remained but most of the color had aged to beige. Aletha even recognized the dart-shaped hole torn out of a sole edge by a department-store escalator. “There’s no way these can be your shoes.” Cree doubled over to stare at them. “They’ve been here for years. You just got to town.”

A typewritten message Scotch-taped to the underside of the glass case’s top announced that the contents, as well as the hanging clothes displayed on the wall behind, had been found in trunks and boxes stored in the historic bordello, the Pick and Gad, and had been worn by the soiled doves who worked there. A smaller note, self-propped like a place card, sat beside Aletha’s shoes and pointed out how these resembled more modern designs, and ended with the cliche of there being nothing truly new under the sun. It didn’t try to explain the obvious differences between Aletha’s sandals and the other shoes in the case. The latter were either black or yellowed white with high button tops and pointed toes that had curled with age to suggest they’d belonged to overgrown pixies. They looked exactly like the shoes worn by the good women on the sunny side.

“I still don’t believe it.” Cree straightened. “The same pair of shoes could not have been on you and in here at the same time.”

Aletha shrugged and walked out of the museum.

“Look, I’ve picked up some books and pamphlets on Telluride’s past. I’ll lend them to you,” Cree said when he’d caught up with her. “This, for instance”—he waved at a two-story building that housed the laundromat in its basement—“used to be the Miners’ Union Hospital. The unions didn’t trust the money withheld from their pay to provide medical care and built their own hospital. Aletha, next time the tear opens, promise me you’ll—”

“I’ll read your fucking books, okay?” She stopped in mid-stride and turned on him. They collided. “But they won’t tell me what happened to Callie. They’ll be full of man stuff. And this world is so boring compared to Callie’s. I’m not sure I can resist if temptation offers.” They walked on in silence, Cree making disapproving noises under his breath.

“You sound just like a spoiled adolescent—” He threw her against the side of the post office and bent over her as if in an embrace. But his head turned to watch a shiny Bronco round the corner and move up the street. “Uh, friends of mine. And you think this world is dull.” He released her so fast she lost her balance and fell against the wall again. “I have to know where they go. See you for dinner.” He took off at a run.

Aletha picked up some steaks and a slab of raw calves’ liver on her way back to the condo. The liver had the consistency of a drowned corpse when she cut it into tiny bits, but Charles relished it. He made snorting noises while he gobbled. Then he purred and rubbed against Aletha as if she were Mildred Heisinger. “Here I thought you wanted a Victorian home with a Victorian lady. Is it just the liver?”

She made a tossed salad and put it in the crisper, poured herself a glass of wine, and settled on the couch with some of the material on Telluride’s history Cree had left on his night table. No mention of Callie, but Aletha tingled with the awareness that she read of Callie’s world.

In prison the boredom had been so intense it numbed. Life was either monotonous or dangerous, each new cellmate a threat until Aletha could psych her out, each work or exercise period a potentially treacherous time even with guards in attendance. Kitchen duty was the worst because of the availability of weapons. But the periods of boredom stretched long between the moments of danger. And sometimes the only grist for her thoughts was rehearsing and planning for the scary times. Despite all her efforts to blot out those relatively few but momentous months in her life, Aletha had to admit it was possible she’d brought along an unsuspected abnormality with her into freedom—a dangerous need for excitement.

There were hazards in Callie’s world, too, and not all in the mines or on the line. In the early years of the century Telluride had a war. The miners formed a union to protect themselves from the insensibilities of a management working for indifferent and unaccountable absentee owners in the money capitals of the East and Europe. The management formed an “Alliance” against the threat of ignorant and greedy labor to run things to suit itself, and against the very idea of organized labor—a threat not only to democracy but to the ability of the industry to make enough profit to warrant investment and provide jobs in the first place. Wringing golden glitter from the cold hard Rockies was as expensive as it was inefficient.

It all sounded a little like Republicans and Democrats, more like liberals and conservatives, and mostly like two distinct classes of people, each determined not to understand the problems of the other.

“Who was W. J. Barney?” Aletha asked Cree over steak and salad that evening, hoping to get him off guard.

“Barney … ahhh … some mine foreman who disappeared mysteriously at the time of the troubles. He turned up dead after a long while. The Alliance blamed it on the union. Put his skull in a store window to prove a point. The identification hung on his red hair, I think.”

“And who were the guys in the Bronco you didn’t want me to see, so you plastered me to the side of the post office?”

“I didn’t want
them
to see
you
. My guess is they were the ones who strip-searched this apartment.”

“Why not report them to the town marshal?”

“Because I can’t prove it was them, and besides, nothing—”

“Besides, nothing was taken.” The piece of juicy steak went dry as wool and she spit it out. “Cree, are you a dealer?”

“Christ, first you call me a narc and now I’m a dealer.” But an unfamiliar flush stained his face.

“And I was even beginning to like you.” She dropped her fork and stood. “It’s like I never learn.” She scooped Charles up off the couch. “Come on, kitty, we’ll go spend the night in the car. You, McCree, ought to get along special with Tracy. She likes her toots.”

Charles did his rigor-mortis routine. He had a real thing about being carried. He also had bad breath and made an effort to wail his protest right in her face before he tried to climb her head. Aletha pulled him down, clamped him to her chest, and marched toward the door. She marched headfirst into Cree Mackelwain.

“You belong on the stage.”

Aletha swung at him and lost the cat. She knew better than to take on somebody his size without being sneaky, but it was too late to call her fist home. It bounced off the arm he held up in mock terror.

“You do have a real flair for the dramatic.” He moved to block her path as she tried to step around him to the door. “If you’ll just stand still, I will tell you my big secret. I may have involved you in something by being around you.”

“Why,” Aletha asked later when they sat over coffee, “do you suppose so many innocent lives get messed up because of cocaine? I mean … people who don’t even use it or sell it? Pretty soon it’ll be the whole world.”

“Most people live totally unaffected by it. You and I just happen to have been unlucky in our associations. I do think you and Tracy better disassociate yourselves from me until this is over or they leave town.”

“But the coincidence is a little much. Almost as if time had planned it all. Or once Callie and I met, this whole thing started coming together. We sort of set time’s plan in motion.”

“You’re being a flake again. Time is not somebody who plans things. Time is an ‘it’ to or in which things happen. Life is full of coincidence.”

But the next morning when Aletha cleaned rooms at the New Sheridan Hotel, she mulled over all the instances in which her life had touched with Callie’s, trying to discover a pattern. These thoughts helped her through several vicious chemical attacks on bathrooms and endless pushpulling with the vacuum.

She’d stepped out onto the balcony hallway on second to deposit some dirty linens when an older couple passed her on their way to the staircase. Aletha could have been a potted plant for all the notice they took of her. The woman dripped ashes from her cigarette waving in the air as she upbraided her companion for dressing too formally for the day’s excursion, for walking too slowly, and for drinking too much the night before. He winced and dug his cane into the carpet with each step, his expression one of weary endurance.

Aletha had just turned back into the room to retrieve the vacuum when the woman’s scratchy diatribe ended in a gasp. Aletha wondered if she’d sucked the cigarette down her throat or if he’d summoned the energy to hit her over the head with his cane. When she looked out, the couple stood on the landing, stiff, motionless. She leaned forward. He took her elbow.

“Oh, that’s only Audrey, she—” Aletha reached them in time to see the problem was not Audrey. In fact Audrey was gone and the staircase descended to the lobby, ended in a splash of dusty sunlight worthy of a religious experience. The carpet became a narrowed runner of a different color where it met the absence of the wall. It wasn’t the same lobby. It had a double door with glass windows. And when the door opened a man in floppy trousers stood looking up at them.

“Good Lord, madam, your skirt,” he said to the woman with the cigarette, and doused his cigar in a white vaselike thing filled with sand. The sweet-sour smell of barnyard wafted up from the open door below, and creaking sounds. It was fascinating how these history people all looked so normal, even with their funny clothes, crooked and sometimes yellowed teeth. Aletha could see this one’s stiff collar working as he tried to force a swallow with his head tilted back to stare up at them. His necktie was a short wide thing tied more like a lady’s scarf with the two ends spread side by side instead of one overlapping the other.

The hole closed as the man below blinked and fled out the door. The nude Audrey traipsed dramatically across the forbidding backdrop of her painting. “That was a supernatural experience.” The woman flipped her cigarette into a pot of phony ferns and turned on her heel. “I’m going back to the room. I think it gave me the shits.”

“I suspect whatever we thought we just saw is best forgotten,” the man with the cane said, eyeing Audrey and the wall and avoiding Aletha’s eyes. “Enough trouble in this life the way it is.”

Cree helped Aletha pack her suitcase. Tracy Ledbetter was moving her belongings into the vacated crib and Cree had talked her into taking in Aletha and Charles until he was convinced those around him would be in no danger. “I think I’m going to miss you,” he said to Charles, but then smiled at Aletha. They carried everything down to the Datsun and came back for Charles.

“It seems like there’s more and more happening, like it’s speeding up.” Aletha opened the door and entered first. Charles stood in the middle of the room, his tail puffed to twice its normal size. Part of the tiled Jacuzzi had faded into dim light. Next to it a deep bathtub sat up on molded ankles and slender human feet instead of the usual antique animal paws. Steam twirled up from it. A woman stood wrapped in a towel, a load of hair pinned up on top of her head, one strand escaping to curl down over an ear, promising to get wet. She was slender, straight, pale. What showed around the towel was flawless. Aletha could hear the change in Cree’s breathing.

Shadows moved across the small mirror beside the bather’s head. Wrought-iron curlicues painted white formed its frame and provided fastening to the wall. Aletha had seen its like in an entry hall filled with such mirrors. She’d seen the tub before, too. And the pale green eyes that stared at her now in startled outrage.

“Mildred?” Aletha couldn’t believe it. “Mildred Heisinger?”

23

Another little something hardened up in Callie after her forbidden excursion on the street. Everyone had allowed her to believe her Aunt Lilly was dead, yet the world expected strict honesty and openness from Callie O’Connell. That excursion after three o’clock was never discovered and she was sent on a legal one early the next morning. This time with Elsie Biggs. They were to carry a valise up to the hospital and not dawdle along the way. Mr. Macintosh, whose boots Callie had collected with Olina, had succumbed to a mysterious stomach ailment during the night after a sumptuous dinner party he’d thrown for friends in the hotel dining room.

“If it was such a grand dinner, why didn’t we have to stay up and work?” Callie asked as they trudged along Fir Street.

“There weren’t any ladies present.” You had to lean into Elsie to even hear her soft speech. One of the ways she wasn’t like Olina was her teeth. Not wide and even, they were bad and often pained her. But Elsie Biggs rarely smiled. Her family put her out to work because they wanted her to learn responsibility and not grow into foolish ways. They lived in Pandora at the head of the canyon. Her father worked in the Smuggler-Union stamp mill there. Her mother came to see her once a week. But Pandora was only a mile or two from Telluride. John O’Connell had sent word through Mr. McCall, when Mr. McCall came from Alta on his long day, that he’d be down to see Callie over the July Fourth holiday.

The hospital blocked the end of Fir Street. A wide covered porch spread on two sides with wooden steps at one end, and giant brick chimneys reared up on two ends of the building. Great snow patches on the mountain looming behind and above the hospital put a cold wet smell on the breeze.