The Threshold (29 page)

He asked a woman where he could find the Cosmopolitan and she directed him two blocks down, where a handwritten sign on the glass door read,
Closed until after the funeral
.

Where much of the Colorado Avenue Cree had known consisted of vacant lots, this Colorado Avenue was crowded on both sides with commercial buildings, many of brick, two-story, with people hanging out of apartment windows above. Cree was the only person on the street without a hat. Even the kids wore hats here. A woman at an open window next to an elaborate sign of
The Knights of Pythias
pointed him out to the man next to her. Cree felt like the bum they probably thought he was and walked on quickly with an unreasonable sense of shame and embarrassment. Of course it didn’t help that he still had swellings, cuts, and bruises on his face. And he still limped to protect a tenderness in his groin where one of Duffer’s little helpers had kicked him repeatedly.

At six-foot-five and surrounded by generally short stocky miners, Cree could see above the crowd. Not that there weren’t a few other tall men. He noticed one in particular as he overtook the head of the slow procession. A huge blunt-featured guy, wearing a black Stetson instead of the small-brimmed, rounded hats of most of the men. When his glance settled on Cree over the heads around them, one eye didn’t move but stared straight down the road. Big Bill Haywood, a labor legend whom Cree had seen in pictures, would someday become so discouraged he would end up dying alone and disillusioned in the Soviet Union.

Haywood wore a black armband and a sprig from an evergreen branch in his lapel, as did all the marchers behind him. In front walked the families—the women with their grief hidden by veils, trying to keep their backs fashionably straight under a load of despair. Five wooden wagons with flat beds extending a couple of feet out over the metal-rimmed wheels and draped in black cloth lumbered ahead of them. Horses jangled their harness, impatient with the morbid pace. People sniffed and coughed. Shoes shuffled on frozen ruts worn thin of snow. Cree realized why all these sounds seemed so loud. The eternal mills stood silent. Suddenly three men broke ranks, ran to the fourth wagon, and pulled the driver off the seat. One took his place, while the others pounded him to the ground.

“He weren’t union,” someone shouted in explanation, and coffins—narrow, wooden, plain, black—jiggled and shifted as the new driver hurried the team to catch up. By the time the first wagon turned into Lone Tree Cemetery the marchers filled the road clear to town. One giant pine stood almost in the cemetery’s center. It would be long dead in Cree’s time, like those who lay beneath it. Four or five private graves had been excavated, as well as the big trench, and piles of earth and rock sat beside them, their snow covers melting into mud. Crows, dozens of them, scampered black against the snow, cawed their irritable laughter at this human intrusion.

Cree wanted to stamp his freezing feet but feared attracting attention during the graveside services held for all in front of the mass grave. It didn’t look more than three or four feet deep and seemed shallow even for this rocky soil, considering the dead and most of the mourners had made their livings as hard-rock miners. Both a priest and a Protestant clergyman officiated and caskets were lowered into the trench while others were carried off to family plots.

Big Bill Haywood took the sprig of evergreen from his lapel, tossed it into the open pit, and stared after it solemnly. “Tap ’er light,” he said softly, and turned away. One by one men filed by and each tossed in his sprig. As Cree turned to go he noticed Callie O’Connell standing in a group of mourners near a family plot, staring at him wideeyed. The last time he’d been to Lone Tree Cemetery he’d taken Aletha to see Callie’s gravestone.

The gaunt woman at Callie’s side fidgeted with Callie’s hat. Her movements were jerky and nervous. The man on the other side of Callie held his derby in his hand. His balding head was bowed and an angry red puckered the skin of one cheek and ear. He didn’t even look up when Cree approached and said to Callie, “If you see Aletha would you tell her I’m looking for her?”

Cree had joined the miners filing out the gate, passing men still wearing their sprigs and filing in, before he recognized the tall figure standing behind Callie. The boy named Bram. The once-magnificent kid looked as if he’d been attacked by cancer. Cree wondered if he’d warned him from a cave-in only to have him fall victim to disease. The ravaged face and shell-shocked expression would haunt Cree for a long while.

Gone was the giant mound of mill tailings extending out from the head of the canyon. Exploratory drilling and dredging marred the valley instead. Across the river there was a grouping of low shanties, some no more than wooden packing crates. Stringtown. “Nice coat.” Duffer fell into step beside Cree. “You want to tell me what’s happened?”

“Mine disaster. Funeral.” Cree stepped up his pace.

“I know that. Listen, Mackelwain, you help us get back and all else is forgotten. You can keep the stuff and the money and we won’t touch a hair on you, okay?” He hunched into his rumpled tan jacket, his ears red with the cold. “What do we do?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t be here, would I?” Cree looked over his shoulder to find the other two right behind them. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Man I work for decided your partner had something belonged to him. Sent us after you when he couldn’t find it on Massey. Sort of wanted to make an example to others, you know? Hey, you help us out and you won’t end up like Dutch Massey. The chick who showed up in Alta with your girlfriend said Kingman caused this. Where’s Kingman?”

“She didn’t follow us into the past, Duffer. You’re on your own.” Cree turned into the Cosmopolitan Saloon. Right now all Cree wanted was to survive. Just in case Aletha happened to turn up at the right place at the right year. Because merely surviving was all he had left.

33

Aletha stood in the kitchen of the Pick and Gad. Bob Meldrum had taken her around to the back door. “Got to get her off the street for tonight, Leona,” he said now, and stripped off Aletha’s new-old coat so fast half the buttons came with it. She stood exposed in jeans and grungy sweatshirt. “This a woman or a boy?”

“It’s a woman,” Leona yelled, and circled Aletha. She had a darkened front tooth. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Aletha Kingman.”

“Well, Aletha Kingman, you can stay the night. Looks like someone’s hit you in the mouth already.”

Aletha would have expected the occupants of this place to be running around in nightgowns or underclothes like in the movies, but they were dressed from neck to floor. Perhaps because of the chilly drafts that seemed to flow from all directions in this house. A plump woman stood in a doorway, playing cards fanned out in her hand. Another peered over her shoulder.

The kitchen had one brick wall and a cook stove. The rest was wooden and oiled and polished, and layered with the smells of stale cooking in spite of the drafts. The proportions seemed wrong—ceiling too high—room, furniture, doorways too small. Even the handle of a broom leaning against the brick wall seemed shorter than normal. Heavy boots sounded on the floor above them, voices raised in hilarity. The clank of spurs descending a staircase. Leona and her women exchanged glances and watched Meldrum. Three men entered the kitchen. They spread out and stopped.

“Deputy Meldrum,” said the one in the middle, and continued to pull on gloves with gauntlets. He was so handsome he didn’t look real. And he knew it. He wore a uniform, a gun at his belt, and jodhpurs tucked into polished boots that reached to his knees. He wasn’t as tall as Cree but he was a lot taller than Meldrum. “Just looking over the premises to be sure everything is locked up for the curfew,” he said with a good-humored smirk.

“As you say, Captain Wells.”

“And who is this Diana in tight pants?” Captain Wells peered down his nose at Aletha, huge eyes more amused than curious. “The latest act at the dance hall?” He started past her then backed up for another look, squinted as if he recognized her and was trying to remember where he’d seen her.

“Got caught breaking curfew. Could hardly take her to jail or Redmen’s,” Meldrum said.

Could this be the Bulkeley Wells old Mildred Heisinger said would grow bald and shoot himself in California? Hard to visualize him as anything but perfection in jodhpurs. But then, look what would happen to Mildred. If anything would cure Aletha of an addiction to dangerous historical entertainments, it was this out-of-place feeling, that she was an impostor among real people because this was their world, not hers.

“Interesting gamine, Leona. You could do worse. And now I’m going to skulk out the back door.” But Captain Wells left straight and proud and laughing.

“You know full well, Bob Meldrum, I couldn’t turn him and his friends away,” Leona answered his glacial stare.

He stood unblinking as if forming a judgment or making a decision. “Where’s Audrey?”

“She ain’t here,” Leona said. Meldrum grabbed her elbow and twisted. Some place in her arm popped and she gasped. “Upstairs, you son of a bitch.”

“Don’t swear, Leona,” Bob Meldrum warned, and crossed to the hallway through which Captain Wells and company had entered.

“Get me Sarah,” Leona said in a half-choked voice as the two women led her from the room. Aletha stood listening to Meldrum’s measured tread on the stairs and what sounded like a door being kicked in. She decided this was no place for her and grabbed her coat off the floor. She was free to run out into the cold fog and get shot by the militia. A woman screamed upstairs and Aletha went for the door.

“Damn, he’s a mean one,” one of Leona’s girls said behind her, and reached around to close the door. “Don’t go out there, honey. Sarah’ll fix you something to eat after she sees to Leona. You can sleep here by the stove.”

Sarah didn’t appear pleased at the prospect. She had been prepared for bed, but she puttered around the stove in her heavy housecoat, her hair all pushed up into a net cap. She fed Aletha some tasty but greasy soup, milk, and bread at the kitchen table while several of the girls gathered around to watch. Aletha was a little too worried to be hungry but ate most of what she was given under Sarah’s grouchy stare. Sarah had pits and bumps all over her face. No one but Aletha even raised her eyes when Bob Meldrum came down the stairs and strode through the kitchen and out the back door.

Sarah gave her a couple of rough blankets and a pillow and told her to sleep on the floor. It wasn’t bedtime by Aletha’s internal clock and when all was quiet in the house she slipped down the hall, past a staircase illuminated by a light left on in the upstairs hall. She felt around on the wall inside an open door to her left looking for a light switch. What she found was a round knob that turned clockwise, but a chandelier sprang to light on a crowded room with a small bar, silvery heating stove, piano, couches and chairs and tables in conversation groups, fringy lampshades.

There was another sitting room across the hall that had no bar or piano, but this one was cozier and the walls were crowded with paintings of nude women in various poses. The one of Audrey held center stage between two long windows dressed in velvet. It looked like the one hanging in the New Sheridan but the dark background colors were richer, Audrey’s skin lighter. The contrast in the dim light made the woman seem about to fly out into the room.

Aletha didn’t think she’d slept until she became aware of people standing over her, some fully dressed, others in warm robes. One of them was Audrey. She wore a long braid over her shoulder and a bruised look, not of the skin but of the expression. “It’s her. I seen her at the Senate, back by the kitchen. She and another one carrying trays of dishes, their skirts way up to their knees. I thought they was ghosts, but here’s this one in the flesh.” Audrey hunkered down and pinched Aletha’s cheek, bringing with her the scent of stale underarms.

“Must be foreign, the way she’s dressed, and her hair,” another said. “You a heathen, miss?”

“I’m a person. And I’m sick of being treated like a stray animal.” Aletha pushed herself off the floor and the young relics backed up. “And I come from the 1980’s.”

“Oh well, that explains everything. She’s a loon.”

“My father says the world will come to an end by 1925.”

“Your father’s a loon too.”

“So Miss Not-so-fancy Pants, what are you doing here in 1904?”

“I’m looking for a man named Cree Mackelwain.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Ain’t that the very tall gent was here a couple years ago? Had dents in his cheeks. Sort of a bummer but he had the whitest teeth.”

Aletha backed toward the door, feeling really afloat now if there wasn’t even to be a familiar Cree in this world. “What happened to him?”

“Moved on, I guess.”

“Thanks for the food and the floor.” Aletha slipped out the kitchen door to sunlight on snow. Cree had made it from Alta to Telluride, but Aletha was here in the wrong year. If the time tear wasn’t going to find her, perhaps she could find it. She didn’t want to end up as one of Leona’s girls. She headed back toward the crib because that’s where time had caught her up. But the streets were lined with cribs and she had to count back from the Silver Bell to be sure she had the right one.

“Who are you really?” Audrey had thrown a shawl over her robe and followed. “Where do you come from? Callie said she knew you.” Audrey stared beyond Aletha, covering her mouth with her hand, and Aletha turned at the sound of applause and cheering. All the cribs but three were gone and Pacific Avenue was closed off at the north edge with crowds behind the ropes and the sheriff’s and the marshal’s cars flashing lights on either end.

“Stunning visuals,” a man said, and stepped over the rope to pump Aletha’s hand. She turned back to find Audrey gone.

“You want to take a bow?” the sheriff of San Miguel County asked Aletha, “and then tell me what the shit is going on?”

“Aletha, did you find him?” Tracy dived under the rope and practically dived into Aletha’s arms. “What happened to the fog?” Minutes later in the sheriff’s office she confided, “I told them the whole business about your time trips. They don’t believe it. Well, would you?”