The Threshold (42 page)

“We have come peacefully and unarmed,” Vincent St. John, president of the Telluride Miners’ Union, Local 63, announced when the hush fell after the exploding cartridges had ceased their awesome noise but still ricocheted about in John’s head. “And by order of Judge Stevens of the Seventh District—”

“Gentlemen,” the general interrupted, “your escort.” He nodded again. The gold braid and medals on his coat almost hid its true color. Two columns of bayonets formed a narrow path for the strikers to move singly off the station platform and into the town to Redmen’s Opera House. The townspeople cheered the bayonets. John searched for the faces of his loved ones.

Callie was running free. It was Ma’am’s naptime. Since Callie had paid up the room and board for a while she didn’t kowtow to Mrs. Pakka as she had to Mrs. Stollsteimer. She was showing off her plaid dress to Opal Mae in the alley behind the Sheridan when the fusillade from the Gatling gun down at the depot exploded.

Bram was lifting a crate of empty bottles from the floor to a rack. He dropped the crate at the sound, and breaking glass added to the tension. He pounded his forehead against a wooden strut in the warehouse and wondered how long he could stand to ignore the war raging around him, even with Pa ordering it.

Luella awoke from a dream. She and Lilly and brother Joe had been playing fox and hounds instead of tending to the weeds in the garden when their father rounded the woodshed and discovered them at it. His eyes sparked outrage and his arm rose as if he prepared to orate and the crescendo of the Gatling gun emanated from his lips, “Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty!”

Captain Wells and General Bell walked among the prisoners being fed a thin soup at Redmen’s Opera House while a special train was being prepared. The officers stopped in front of John O’Connell. “Have you no compassion for those children of yours?” Wells asked him. “Haven’t you even considered moving on and establishing a decent home for them?” But he walked off without waiting for an answer. “That man has interesting children, considering their backgrounds. The son is very bright and the daughter very brave. Most of the criminals have stopped returning. Those that persist appear to have families here.”

“Sounds as though we have but one recourse, Captain,” the general said.

“You are not concerned at the unfavorable editorials we’ve suffered in the newspapers?” Wells gazed back at John O’Connell with an uncertain frown.

“No, nor should you be. A few socialist newspapermen will make no difference in the course of the history of this great nation. This is still the United States of America. And we have freedom and right on our side.”

Bram put on his coat and hat and left the bottling works. He watched the guards marching the prisoners back to the depot until he made sure Pa was one of them. The stiffs were not chained this time. They walked with dragging steps.

Bob Meldrum blocked Bram’s way as he moved to step up onto the depot platform. With Bram still on the snow and Meldrum on the platform, the gunman was the taller and Bram about on a level with the man’s smile. It was the kind of smile that was looking for trouble, and Bram’s stomach tensed. But the smile straightened and Bram watched the flicker of recognition in Meldrum’s eyes and then the flash of anger. How would the man know him?

Carefully, Bram opened his coat to show he was unarmed, but Meldrum didn’t glance down to note the absence of a gunbelt. He turned his head aside to spit but kept his gaze locked on Bram’s. The color that had flushed his face with the anger faded. He moved the chaw around in his mouth, blinked, and seemed to relax. He nodded mysteriously and laid a hand on Bram’s shoulder. It was all Bram could do to keep from flinching, keep his gaze steady. His mouth had gone so dry his tongue stuck to his teeth.

“You done real good, boy,” Bob Meldrum said even more mysteriously, “real good.” He patted Bram’s shoulder and turned away. “Just don’t do it again.”

Bram stood listening to the clink of the gunman’s spurs over the sounds of soldiers’ sharp commands and the engine’s bleeding off steam. He’d gone weak with relief but couldn’t imagine what a killer would think he’d been so good at.

Bram rounded the depot to see Pa stumble and a soldier shove him onto one of two cattle cars being loaded with strikers. Bram decided things had gone deep enough. He pushed his hat back on his head, stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and sauntered up to the cattle car.

“You leave that boy be,” Bob Meldrum warned the soldier who tried to stop him. He gave the man a stare gone empty of every expression but watchfulness. “Owed you one,” the killer explained to Bram when the soldier had stepped back, “and that was it. Don’t expect no more.”

Bram stepped into the cattle car and sat on the floor next to Pa. “You should be with your Ma’am and sister, not here,” Pa whispered, and then hugged him. “But sure and I’m glad to see you. Things is turning out all wrong somewheres.”

“You know we’re bound to win yet,” Vincent St. John said. “We have the opinion of the country in our favor and we’ve got the right on our side.”

And the other side has the army, the governor, and the wealth, Bram thought, and most of the citizens of Telluride. And the strange, tall Cree predicted the union would not win this battle. He’d been horribly accurate thus far. Bram didn’t know how the strikers could ignore the odds against them. He did know the next man to shove John O’Connell around would answer for it.

The door of the cattle car slammed shut. The engine hooted its intent to depart. The car jerked, things squeaked and ground, and the floor shook. Their guards sat on barrels, rifles aimed at the ceiling with the butts resting on their thighs. The car smelled of cattle even though the slatted sides provided cold drafts to blow grit into their eyes and strips of light and bandit shadows across the guards’ faces. There were seven guards, few of them much older than Bram. One stared at him and Bram read his fear, toyed with the idea of affecting a Bob Meldrum expression, but looked away instead. That boy had the rifle.

There was right and there was wrong. Ma’am had taught him that. And she was good, therefore right. But since his visit to the Pick and Gad, Bram was having trouble with what he knew to be right and what he saw. And what he’d done. “Pa, did you tell Shorty and Sully to take me out on the town?”

“That I did.” Pa turned to study Bram. “Don’t suppose they explained anything. Just put you in the soup and watched to see if you could swim to the kettle’s edge. Did you not enjoy yourself, son?” A soldier lowered his rifle and ordered them silent. Bram was glad he didn’t have to answer.

As the train climbed out of Placerville, the drafts grew colder, the shadowed strips darker, the light strips sharper. And when it passed through snowdrift tunnels the car darkened to night. There was coughing and spitting, groaning and creaking of the wooden parts of the car against metal holdings, the clang of metal on metal as the car ahead jerked their car to follow.

The incline steepened and Pa swayed into him. The guards had to set their feet to keep their barrels from sliding. Bram could understand Greek and Latin and the parsing of sentences, could cipher numbers and chart the planes of the earth or of his hand. But books and teachers did not explain these stiffs sitting on the floor with him, nor the soldiers on their barrels, nor the women at the Gold Belt Saloon and Dance Hall and the Pick and Gad.

When the train reached the top of the Dallas Divide it entered long snow tunnels that had been plowed through drifts, and the fumes from the engine seeped through the slats. Even the guards wept and coughed. When they emerged, dusty smoke writhed among the light strips. The train slowed and Bram could hear shouts from the car ahead. A guard rolled back the side door, Bram thought in order to dispel the fumes. The young soldier who’d regarded him with fear looked uncertain now, distressed. But he rose with his fellows and lowered his rifle to aim into the car. His captain turned to the strikers. “On your feet, all of you.”

Bram saw a man in the snow through the doorway.

“But we’re nowhere near to Ridgway,” Vincent St. John shouted.

“Out you go, redneck.” The end of a rifle barrel prodded St. John toward the opening, and the captain pushed him out. And then the next man. And another. When they came for John O’Connell, Bram heard himself roar.

49

“There has to be some connection between Aletha and Callie or Aletha and something in Callie’s world,” Renata said. They’d zapped frozen gourmet dinners in her microwave and stuffed themselves with the salt-laden, gummy fare. Now they sat in the hot tub to soak away the grime of another time and to luxuriate in its decadence. “When you first saw Callie, did you touch her?” she asked Aletha. Having accepted the fact of the impossible, Renata acted like there must be some logic to its explanation. “Did you exchange anything?”

“Not the first time. I touched her hand when she handed Charles to me. I did leave my sketchbook, but I didn’t hand it to her.”

“I can see where you’re headed, Renata, but it doesn’t follow,” Cree said. “Because what would have made it happen the first time, before any connection was made?” The dark outside turned the window next to them into a flat mirror partially clouded with steam. It made the images reflected patchy.

“And although Aletha always seems to be around somewhere when things happen, Callie often isn’t.” Cree had his arms over the edge of the tub. Puffs of hair in his armpits looked like dark holes in the distortion of Aletha’s black-window mirror. “She wasn’t around when we stepped out of that old lady’s house into a snowy yesteryear and she wasn’t up at Alta when the mine turned into the real thing and I ended up in 1901 for a month.”

“But it’s always Callie’s world or someplace Aletha goes that once had a connection to Callie.” Renata sat up and her nipples hardened and contracted in the relatively colder air. “And if we’re to believe Aletha, nothing like this ever happened to her until she came into some kind of connection with Callie.”

“Telluride and Alta have connections to a lot of people,” Cree insisted. “Not just to Callie.” A cut and swollen lip made his mouth look off center.

“What if the connection hasn’t been made yet?” Renata sat up farther, evidently startled by her own idea, and Aletha could hear the change in Cree’s breathing. “These little time warps or whatever,” Renata said, “do not always happen in sequence. You go back one time and it’s one year and the next time it’s before that maybe. So why assume the connection had to be made the first time Callie and Aletha met? Could be the last time they met or one in the middle.”

“It may not have happened yet.” Cree’s eyes were thoughtful on Renata’s chest. “Sounds pretty improbable.”

“Improbable? The fact these time … holes happen at all is preposterous, but given they do anyway, there has to be some kind of explanation.”

“I think we should look for a preposterous one,” Aletha said.

Cree reached over to muss her hair. “It’s the goofy way she reacts to stress. She’s been through a lot more of these experiences than you have, Renata.”

“Well, if it never happens again, you smug smart-asses,” Aletha said, “we’ll know little old Aletha figured out the preposterous and did just the right thing. The problem just may no longer exist. I left my pendant at the train depot.”

They both watched her, waiting for further revelation. Finally Renata said, “That’s it? You left your pendant in the depot?”

“That old souvenir rock?”

“My little piece of Telluride. You said the one constant about all this was me. Well, if I remember right, that little piece of Telluride was hanging around my neck or in my pocket every time except once, and then it was sitting on the TV up against the front door when the fog came up to the crib on Pacific Avenue.”

“What the hell is she talking about?”

Cree wiped sweat from his forehead. “Oh, one of those corny quartz fragments on a chain they sell around town,” he explained. “Aletha, you don’t really think a cheap souvenir could cause all this?”

“We’ll find out when I go into town tomorrow to have my tooth capped.”

“No way are you going into town tomorrow,” Cree said.

“But if it was the pendant, nothing will happen. That’ll be the test. Besides, if you think I’m going around looking like this forever, forget it.” She summoned the nerve to sit up above the froth. “The pendant leaves a little stained spot on my chest when it gets hot. Right here.”

“So, as far as we know, the only things displaced in time were the sketchpad, the sandals, and the cat,” Renata continued as if Aletha’s interruption and her chest were of no consequence. “And those goons we left in the depot.”

“And my pendant.”

“And my running shoes,” Cree said, “and the boots and clothes I brought back with me.”

“And the really mysterious thing is that the sketchbook and my sandals were already here in town and old. Also fairly new when I brought them here with me. They existed then and now both. So my theory is that Callie’s dead in Lone Tree Cemetery and alive at the same time right now living her life on the other side of the oval. And for a while there had to be two pairs of sandals and two sketchbooks … but I can’t figure out how.”

“Are you positive she’s sane?” Renata asked Cree.

“Well, one of her is. I’ve never figured out the other one. Of course, we’ve known each other less than a month, but then, I’ve lost a month.”

“Seems like years,” Aletha said unkindly.

Renata climbed to the tiles, exposing the rest of her gorgeous inches. “I’m getting nervous being around either one of you. Turn off the tub when you come up. Both guestrooms are made up but you can make your own arrangements.”

“One thing, Renata,” Cree fairly sighed at the view, “what did you and Dutch Massey have going?”

“A little coke, a lot of sex. I didn’t know he was dealing until after he was dead and it all came out in the papers.” She shrugged into a towel and cut off the view. “I’ve since sworn off both.”

“I’ll bet,” Aletha said when she and Cree were alone. “The coke maybe, but she’s dying for you to sneak into the mistress bedroom tonight.”