The Threshold (30 page)

“But why the crowd and cops on Pacific?”

“The film-festival types came down from Colorado Avenue when they saw the fog. Thought it was some promotion stunt, I guess. And the cops thought the fog was some kind of public menace. Then it seemed like it dissolved the minute you stepped out of the air.”

“Okay, I want to know what you know about that fog and what you know of the whereabouts of Cree Mackelwain,” the sheriff said. “And I want to know right now, lady.”

“I walked into the fog to find him but the girls at the Pick and Gad said I was a couple of years late.” And Aletha recited faithfully just what had happened, knowing it was useless because it was unbelievable.

“I think you need analysis,” Sheriff Rickard said when she’d finished

And Tracy said, “Aletha, you couldn’t have spent the night on the floor of the Pick and Gad in 1904. You weren’t gone more than an hour and a half.”

34

Callie had thought she was mistaken when she first saw Aletha’s husband at Lone Tree Cemetery. But then she noticed his bright blue shoes and his height. She’d felt so good at being with the family again and so guilty at feeling good on such a sad occasion. Pa and Mr. Torkelson were heroes for going into the fiery portal to save others first. Pa had come out with burns and Mr. Torkelson had died. The O’Connells sat up front in the little church with Mrs. Torkelson, while many had to stand outside. No one but Callie and Bram even seemed to notice Aletha’s husband. Callie wished he hadn’t been there. He’d become a harbinger of bad things. And Aletha too.

On the way back to town Bram slouched along. He hated to be out where people would look at him, and never had Callie seen so many people in one place. “People always looked at you, even before the cave-in,” she told him as they walked behind their parents. “And you’re still you. Still Brambaugh O’Connell inside.”

“But you aren’t the same inside, Callie girl. You’ve changed since you’ve come to Telluride. You used to love everyone and everything.”

“I still love you. I just hate cleaning things and I hate to not have us all live together in the same house.”

“You hate not having us all live together in the same house,” he corrected, and looked down at her from such a great height she wondered if he could still be growing for all his sickness. “You didn’t used to hate.”

“I don’t hate you, Bram.” And she took his hand that used to be warm and dry and strong. Now it was cold and damp and flaccid. She couldn’t tell him that she’d turned sly and secretive.

The thing Cree Mackelwain found the most unusual about the Cosmopolitan Saloon and Gambling Club was the total absence of females. Not that they were forgotten. They sat astride horses, perched on stools, lounged in sunlight, and generally displayed their naked selves from paintings and photographs all over the walls. But there was not so much as a barmaid or scrubwoman in the saloon area. This was a man’s world and a man didn’t have to remove his hat or guard his tongue or hit the spittoon if he didn’t want to. Although there were a good number of cowboys in and out, this was certainly different from the cowboy bars his ex-wife had dragged him to in Wyoming. Instead of across the back windows of pickups, men wore their guns around their waists hidden by suit jackets. Cree had subscribed to the scholarly theory that the wearing of six-guns was largely a Hollywood myth. But not so in Telluride at the beginning of the century.

Willy Selby was the proprietor. He left the dining room to the chef and the headwaiter and spent his time behind the bar in the saloon. Raucous behavior ended and hats came off at the door to the dining room. Cree’s one free meal came at midday, when he was sent back to the kitchen to eat on a stool. The first day, a cook asked him if he wanted his beefsteak whole or ground. He ordered it whole and could see why the option had been offered. It had the flavor and texture of rawhide. Fried steak and fried potatoes and water was it for twenty-four hours. But the portions were generous and he swiped a piece of brown wrapping paper from a wastebin to wrap the last of the meat in and slipped it into his coat pocket. Willy expected him to work from eight in the morning until ten at night, and for this he would pay a dollar a day, but not until the end of the week. “More than I paid the nigger. He only got seventy-five cents.”

Cree was responsible solely for the saloon and the bathroom leading off it, and with the long hours given over to it, the work was not that difficult. It was more the demeaning nature of the job that depressed him. Once he knelt down to polish the brass footrail on the bar or to pry up the scuddy gunk around the spittoons, these short men talked about him as if he was a kid or a moron.

“Where’d ya suppose he got shoes like thayet?”

“One more bend-over and he’s gonna bust them britches clean open.”

“Them big hands of his never done a man’s work, I can tell ya.”

Cree learned not to bristle when they called him “boy.” They called each other boy a lot too. But “Steeplehead” began to grate. In the long leisurely hours of polishing and sweeping and waiting for some yo-yo to step away from his crushed cigar butt long enough for Cree to pick it up, he’d daydream that Aletha would come for him and just before stepping back through the tear with her he’d turn around and flip off Willy and the boys at the gambling tables.

He’d never realized how beguiling the thought of stealing could become. He had nothing but scraps saved from his lone meal and a dead man’s coat, while stacks of gold and silver coins worth ten and twenty dollars apiece sat on the tables along the walls.

One of his duties was to keep the round stove in the corner stoked with coal, and at least he was warm during the days. But nights were long and cold. Cree stayed away from Stringtown, where all the other bums lodged, and found a boxcar with some loose hay down at the tracks instead. The hay and the heavy coat probably kept him from freezing the first night but they didn’t help his disposition much, nor his skin, already itching from the bandages around his middle. He saved the scraps from his meal to eat in the night when hunger attacked the little sleep he managed. He fantasized about the Jacuzzi and the queen-size bed in the modern Pick and Gad. Things looked up the second night when Willy presented him with a knitted wool cap and scarf. “Told the wife about you. Said you was a proud man and might not take ’em. Belonged to her brother.”

Cree took them. That night he removed his wet shoes and socks and wrapped the scarf around his feet. The wool was as scratchy as the hay and his bandages. He put the cap and scarf in his pocket when he went to work. He could easily carry all his possessions. “Don’t even have a toothbrush.”

“What’d you say, Steeplehead?” Willy leaned over the bar to peer at Cree on his hands and knees by a spittoon.

“I said I don’t even have a toothbrush.”

“What do you want a brush for your teeth for?”

“Think I’ll moon all of you instead.”

“Talks to hisself,” Willy explained to a customer, and Cree tried to decide whether he’d hug Aletha if he ever saw her again or throttle her.

He was just getting used to being dirty when payday came around and he bought himself a bath at a bathhouse in the rear of a saloon, a tall narrow building on Colorado Avenue that would still be around in his day. He’d thought it leaned from age but it was fairly new now and seemed to have been built that way. It had round wooden tubs like hot tubs but with much less water and heat. It was after ten and most of the business was in the saloon, so Cree had a tub to himself. He unwrapped dirty bandages from around his rib cage and finally took a decent breath. A heavy set man replaced him at ten every evening at the Cosmopolitan. By the mess that greeted Cree in the mornings, he guessed the guy served more as bouncer than scrubman.

After his bath, Cree went to a barbershop, where he had a shave and his hair cut too short. This all totaled seventy-five cents and would have been worth that in dollars if he’d had them. Next he visited Van Atta’s, “The Up-to-Date Outfitter,” to look for a pair of boots. Rows upon racks of almost identical suits for men and shelves of derby hats like he’d seen in the funeral procession were offered for rent. Someday this place would sell skis, but now a miner could come down off the mountain dirty, clean up at the bathhouse, rent a full suit of dress clothes at Van Atta’s, and be respectable for a night on the town. In the morning—having drunk, gambled, and whored away a month’s pay—he could return the suit and collect the deposit to buy breakfast or rent a blanket and thin mattress in an unheated room and sleep off his excesses or rent a horse to get him to work.

Van Atta’s sold clothing as well as rented, and must have stayed open most of the night, as did the rest of the town. Cree bought a pair of something called “Lumberman’s Pacs” for $2.10 and two pairs of socks for fifteen cents. The pacs, as the salesman proudly repeated over and over had “… ten-inch legs of oil-grain leather with oil-pac leather uppers and double soles sewn and inserted with round cone-headed Hungarian nails.” But Cree bought them because they were big enough to fit over two pairs of heavy socks. Since he’d worked a short week his grooming and shopping spree left him with $1.85 for the next week.

Although he smelled better he still was uneasy about stopping in at the Senate to delay his frigid night in the boxcar, but a bartender served him a five-cent mug of warm beer and told him to help himself to the free sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs on the bar. “Only what you can eat here,” he warned, sizing Cree up accurately. “You’re not to fill your pockets.”

Thick slices of bread with hunks of chewy beef or sausages, dripping with butter and ketchup, sat on the bar. He took one of each and a couple of eggs to an out-of-the-way corner and felt like a rich man. The Senate, unlike the Cosmopolitan, had a piano player and women. Tobacco smoke swirled among the limbs of the naked statuette swimming above the tables. The pervasive odor here and in this whole sector of town was that of malt liquor. It had soaked into walls and floors and clothes and hair and wood and brick. It distilled into the air and oozed out onto the street, where it hung above the planked sidewalks like a sign and choked the alleyways behind. It was the best advertising a bar could have.

Cree sat back full and content, wiggled his toes in his new dry boots, and watched a fight brewing at a gaming table toward the center of the room. It was a big table with many men sitting around it, and two of them were insisting that unions weren’t just for foreigners and that the fire at the Smuggler proved the working classes had to organize to protect their very lives. Others claimed otherwise and the shouting grew over the scraping back of chairs on the wooden floor.

Cree started when a man walking by him almost fell over his outstretched legs. “You union or are you not?”

“I’m just a poor man down on his luck, came in to get a beer so he could eat a free sandwich.”

“Awww”—the man shook his head like Mr. Pangrazia at the hospital—“tha’s not right in this plenteous country.” He handed Cree a coin. “Go have yourself a woman.” Then he turned into the room and socked the first guy to come at him.

Cree pulled in his legs and tried to look small. No chairs were hurled at the mirror and bottles behind the bar. There were some crunches and one man fell against a table, knocking over stacks of coins; then the bartender and two bouncers helped several gentlemen out the door and it was over. The two men who started the fight were still at their table when the room settled down. Those standing at the bar merely held their drinks up out of the way. Neither the piano player nor the gamblers around the edges had even paused. Hard to believe the horrors that would befall this town over that very argument. He’d seen better fights over a football score in Wyoming bars. Not one gun had been lifted from a gunbelt.

In the back rooms the suits didn’t look rented, and complete dinners were being served. The gambling was quieter, the stacks of coins higher, and the women more relaxed. Cree felt shabby here and returned to the front room. He read his new coin. It was worth twenty dollars. He put it away quickly. Nobody would believe he hadn’t snagged that off a gambling table. Before heading for his freezing boxcar, Cree climbed snowdrifts off the alley in back of the Senate to stare at the crib Aletha and Tracy would live in someday, in the dim hope of making contact with Aletha. This was the third night he’d done this, and tonight a town marshal approached him carrying a sawed-off pool cue for a nightstick and kept whacking it into his glove. “You want to give Floradora some business, boy, that’s between you and her. You want to make her scared every night like she’s been complaining of, and it’s gonna be between you and me.”

Cree slunk off. Even worse, Sheriff Rutan stopped in to the Cosmopolitan the next day to throw back a shot of rye and check up on him.

“He don’t make trouble. Don’t get drunk,” Willy praised him. “Gets to work on time and don’t lean on his broom too much. Real dependable fella.”

“Glad to hear that, Willy, glad to hear it.” The sheriff bent over Cree, who was on his knees shaking down the ashes in the stove. “Looks like your other employer hasn’t paid up yet. Or is this a good place for spying?” When Cree didn’t answer, he said, “You seen your three friends lately? I hear they could be stealing food and who knows what-all. See to it I don’t hear that about you, Mr. McCree Ronald Mackelwain.”

35

Clyde Duffer spread cold hands to the tiny fire. He sat in a crate. They’d arranged three tipped-over crates in a triangle, leaving a space in the middle open to the sky for fires. It was not the Hilton. And it was snowing again. He hadn’t seen so much snow since a television special on the Yukon. It crunched like broken glass as Maynard slid the other two crates apart enough to crawl into the triangle. Maynard had a package wrapped in butcher paper.

“What’d you do, roll a baglady?” Duffer asked him.

“Slipped into a few places and snatched the freebies off the bars. Got more beer joints in this damn place than houses. Garbage in the alleys is frozen so stiff you can’t tell what it is. Have to fight the dogs for it.” Maynard blew on his hands and presented Duffer with a pickle the size of an erection. “Got some sausages too. Figure if we held them over the flames—”