Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (36 page)

“I didn’t need to, it was the thing’s given. I quoted her manager on all that instead.”

“Her white manager.”

“Yes! And he was my pincushion”—
Regent’s-
ese for a villain. “Did you even read it before you went storming off to Roy?”

“Twice. I was looking for one hint your little Joy was angry.”

“But she really wasn’t
—
” I floundered at Jim’s smile. “Oh, hell. You think she was putting on an act for me.”

“No, Pam. I
know
she was putting on an act for you.”

“Wouldn’t she have for you, though? For different reasons?”

“Sure. But we’d have both known it, which is fun.”

“I wasn’t down there for fun.”

“Are you sure? Pickaninny docility and all, you did make her sound like somebody I might not mind too much to meet.” Now drolly natty, he adjusted his bow tie. “I think it was ‘face of a Gauguin’ that did it.”

Posted by: Pam

And yes, Panama, speaking of art, the mimsies have seen them here and there. Those T-shirts that revive a famous image of a woman in a polka-dot kerchief rolling up her sleeve and flexing an arm, with a different face and “She Can Do It” replacing my way-back-when’s obsolete “We.” Andy Pond and I have agreed more than once that sometimes it’s just goddam strange to have lived so long.

Lord, I do wish I liked H*ll*ry better. Sent her some money last year, guessing I’d croak before she fucked it up. Quit once she cosponsored a flagburning  amendment. How can anyone not grasp Old Glory does, has, and must stand for the right to torch it if you’re so inclined? Something I never have been, even now. I couldn’t.

I suppose you’ll vote for her too, bikini girl. By 2008 you’ll be old enough to lose your polling-booth cherry and she’ll inevitably run if Potusville hasn’t declared martial law by then. I wish I hadn’t spotted the Evita
hidden in “inevitable,” but that’s what your Gramela gets for too many readings of
I Was Dolly Haze’s Monster
back in Beverly Hills in the Fifties.

Ostensibly scribbled by the perp, that true-crime confession was quite the nonfiction shocker in Ike’s day. Slavered over by the silly for its illicit licentiousness, it was reluctantly savored by the literary for its elusively elucidating prose. Hadn’t glanced at a page in decades until I fumbled forth my sunbleached copy from between
The Producer’s Daughter
and Brother Nicholas’s
The Mou
ntain and the Stream
after your and your dad’s last visit to Washington. Kelquen’s tail drew a mustache on me as I painfully crouched.

Yes, well! Now it’s just you and me, Ard, my pet. Do you suppose a woman president would be worth sticking around for?

Naturally if she were
me
,
the question would answer itself. Pamus, I’d be called. Talkily stalking the West Wing with my mobile bower. Would you like to be one of them, Panama? Special Assistant for Chen-Chen and Patois?

The pills from lunch do seem to be having their standard effect. It’s a pretty woozy hour as a rule here at the Rochambeau. I shouldn’t be posting at all, since Ard knows what I’ve spilled. But on the assumption this is the last day of my life, I don’t honestly care. Or shouldn’t, considering my nonbelief in any hereafter.

Speaking of which, my silly pre–Pearl Harbor roommate on Bank Street could really be extraordinarily silly. Do you know what that divine goose said once, resting her newly showered chin on poor Pam’s collarbone? This, with a nod at my typewriter as I clacked away at some pointless book review: “Do you suppose they’ll ever invent one of those that can contact the afterlife?”

“They have,” I said curtly, pulling the page. “And for God’s sake, go away, Dottie! Or at least put something on. I’m on deadline.”

Posted by: Pam

A sludge-voiced slow-eyed freckled blonde exile from coal country who’d never seen the sea put me on the trail that led me to exasperate Bruce Catton. Mellie Branch was her
Regent’s
name, and she was the tailor’s dummy in Pam’s New Orleans–datelined “Liberty Belles.” A random question over coffee—“Won’t let you work in the mine back home, huh?”—won a cascadingly freckled reply something like, “Oh, no! I’m too young and elfin, you see. But some do.”

It took me three months to make time to find out if Mellie was fibbing about the women she knew who’d put on miners’ helmets to free up their husbands and boyfriends to wear Army ones, since Roy hated blind alleys. Once I got there, it wasn’t easy to ingratiate myself. Riceville doesn’t welcome many strangers, and I was a five foot ten gal from up north whose cheapest overcoat, carefully chosen, and scarf still Hollywoodized me.

At least I knew better than to go around bellowing what I was after. I just loitered wherever I could, waiting as unobtrusively as possible to spot a woman who’d look to my uneducated eyes as if she might work in a coal mine. After a weekend of diner meals I ate in slow motion, practically memorizing the
Knoxville News-Sentinel
,
Viv fit the bill: cinder-crisped hair yanked around without ceremony by a shrewd possum face, hefty in a mackinaw as she ordered coffee. You can scrub and scrub, and later I’d watch her try. After a few months, that dust isn’t on your skin—it’s in it.

She was plenty guarded, too. Yet if I was a long way from nattering about undergrounds with Raoul Aglion’s plucky little band, I’d also come a long one in my Columbian year. Rheingolding with Gloria, letting GIs down easy on slow-chugging trains: Pam’s third and hardest-won language was American.

I’d never speak it aboriginally, more like ab-derivatively. But I could fake it like a burglar playing plumber, and it was all preparation for getting Viv of Riceville, Tenn., to recommend blueberry over lemon meringue. And next to concede she wouldn’t mind a piece herself.

My main advantage was that being female meant I couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination—not only hers but oddly, salutes bounced off cunt caps or no salutes bounced off cunt caps, mine—be official. Another was the nametag on the striped peppermint blouse behind the counter. If it’d read “Joe” instead of “Jo,” I’d’ve been out a quarter in exchange for a grudging admission that it was a windy day.

Instead, after reglancing at Jo—still the nearest thing in sight to a cop—and visibly wrestling her opinion of me until she’d pinned it for a count of three, Viv finally said, “Well, I guess I could—maybe, maybe—get a couple of us together to gab at you if you want. Can you wait ’til next Sunday?”

I shook my head. “No—that’s not what you
do
.
See what I mean? I need to go down with you, into the mine. Can you fix it?”

“Brother! That ain’t allowed.” And her pie plate was as empty as a Hoover campaign promise. My best guess was I had five seconds tops.

I rolled my eyes and leaned back. “Just look who’s talking, sister. Since when did that stop you?”

Made it.
Viv’s eyes went crafty as we smirked at each other. But then her glance fell on my nails. Unlike the Elizabeth Ardennes tapping away at my Mac, which are as chipped as a summer camp’s Christmas lights, back then they were as saucily redcapped as ten little drummer boys.

“You go down with us, you’d have to stay down all day,” she warned. “Think you can handle that?”

My worst imaginings had had Pam back above ground and catching a Greyhound to the Knoxville train depot before noon. “Deal,” I said instantly. Anything else would’ve made that manicure Viv’s decisive, derisive, and final impression as she thanked me for the pie and rose.

“We don’t bring nobody back up unless his back’s broke,” she said, pleased. “Eat down there, too.”

It took her another day to talk the other wildcats into it and agree on how to sneak me in. The morning after that, stepping out of Riceville’s lone hotel into a dawn chill that bit like a cobalt T. Rex—and decked in a borrowed mackinaw and overalls whose hindering creaks made me imagine I knew how sculptures must feel when they’re still under wraps before the public’s big “Ah”—Pam became the covert center of a cuke-unencumbered huddle that shuffled me into the pit’s elevator cage past a shift boss distracted by Viv’s razzing about his sorry hat and sorrier cob.

If any of the men crowded in with us noticed I was Pamtraband, they kept it to themselves. But they were mostly watching their shoes. Then a bell rang and the cage started its descent so loudly I was petrified.

What in hell had I been thinking? The motor’s ratcheted gloating was at least mostly steady, unlike the runners’ interrupting shrieks of wheels on ungreased metal and the stranger thuds from farther down the abyss each time we unpleasantly paused. Under the cage’s canary-yellow light bulb, the faces packed around me looked like carvings, whittled by a knife that got blunter with distance until I realized my eyes were straining for some way to escape. When the gate opened and my fellow passengers startled me by turning alive again, we were eight hundred feet down.

In spite of knowing there’d been dozens more miners waiting behind us at the pit, I’d stubbornly kept imagining a single tunnel, no longer than Riceville’s lone hotel’s lone hall, with a couple of wheelbarrows’ worth of prop charcoal tipped over at the far end to mark what must, must be my room’s door. Before me stretched the chambers and railed passageways of Appalachia’s answer to the Louvre, and nobody’d seen fit to tell me earlier that down here blackness wasn’t a color but an element.

Not only was electricity’s sole purpose—suddenly grasped at last and for good—to illustrate, not even illuminate, bituminous blackness. What my frost-seared lungs were gulping was the taste of blackness. What I instantly dreaded was the sound of blackness cracking.

I’ve never spent a day in such terror, Panama. I’d do Omaha or even Huertgen over first. They happened outdoors, up where people belong.

“Stick with me awhile, Miz Buchanan,” Viv said. “Then we’ll sort of pass you around.”

To get up to the face on Gallery Eight, which was where my wildcats were working, we had to climb first into shuttle cars that clanked for a century on rails whose gleam got reprolonged at each curve. Then we were shunted onto a siding where wheeled coal gondolas the size of the Cardiff Giant’s coffin were waiting to be loaded and sent back down the track. Past that was another dim labyrinth of darkness headlamps could pierce and darkness they couldn’t, hacked like squares left solid in the mountain’s big crossword puzzle.

“Room an’ pillar,” Viv explained. “See, all that’s coal too. It’s what’s really holding the rest of this up.”

Not only was my voice a squeak, it was the dumbest question in the history of the industry. “Is it safe?”

“Haw. Hey, Tess! Miz Buchanan wants to know. ‘Is it safe?’”

“Why, sure,” Tess said with equanimity as she slumberlumbered along. “Right up to the ver’ second the whole danged works comes crashin’ down on our heads to kill us all without warnin’ or a prayer of rescue, mine work is safer’n golf.”

“There now. You see?” Viv asked. “You one of them lady golfers, Miz Buchanan?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I just only wish people didn’t keep laughin’ an’ makin’ merry so darn loud all the time down here,” said Tess. “Y’know that jimmies my concentration something fierce.”

“Now that’s a point of view. The singin’ is what gets to me. Naw, Miz Buchanan—we’re just teasin’ you a little. You go right ahead and sing if you want.”

Posted by: Pam

By midmorning I was almost used to how faces could be extinguished as they swiveled. Or no less unexpectedly bloom whole and real, snowwoman-eyed in a lamp’s beam and apparently bodiless: held up only by will and grime. Since I was working too even if it didn’t look like it to the men who’d learned by now I was an interloper, I’d started prodding my brain to find words to convey the quality of cold this deep underground: cold that wasn’t weather, had never known breeze or seasons, hadn’t even been air or experienced noise and motion until it was forced to exist as something other than earth. “Cold unaware it has a rival for humanity’s affections,” the printed version read, more archly than I’d like.

What kept getting harder to remember was that the coal I watched broken up into chunks once it had been extracted, then shoveled into barrows to crash into gondolas for the long sluice down the rails that ended with its unimaginable rise to unimaginable daylight, was the
point
.
It seemed insane that nothing more than a few billion idiots’ need for fuel up on the surface explained this vast underground effort. The how and the what of it kept killing the why. A year ere I saw Anzio, it was Pam’s introduction to the nature of combat.

Of course the cuke-encumbered miners just hated having the wildcats down there, not only from superstition—“We’re supposed to be bad luck,” Josie said. “Cain’t say what that makes you, Miz B.”—but for the implied reproach. In a vital industry, they were exempt from the draft. Their fool friends Dave and Steve had enlisted anyway, leaving them to share these bowels with Dave or Steve’s uncoupled ball and chain.

Willing to wink patriotically otherwise at the law, management drew the line only at women handling explosives. Viv told me that would’ve provoked a mass walkout, war or no war. I so desperately wanted the image for “To the Ends of the Earth” that I described unidentified “hands” planting a charge, not outright misleading my readers but letting them picture Babe packing dynamite in the plug Josie’d just bored before Viv twisted the detonator. I wouldn’t do it today, but I wouldn’t need to.

As promised, Pam got passed on from crew to crew, gritting my teeth at every wave of a gloved hand or wobble of a headlamp that sent me between two pillars past light-scarred curved rails, barrows’ oncoming trundles, or an acetylene torch’s gassy blue flute solo. Even the rattle of pneumatic drills and hungry gondolas on their way back from the shaft’s base didn’t drown out the dim and, to me, unpredictable blasts when a charge got set off in some other gallery.

Since they couldn’t leave their own jobs to lead me to my next underground heroine, my heart was always in my throat until I spotted an identifiably female strand of cinder-crisped hair straying from a hard hat, an upper loll of overalled but recognizably female bosom above a billowing belly and under a pivoting two-by-four in the gang detailed to roof and timber a passageway between two galleries, a bulge of unmistakably female hip bent over a jackhammer at the face, or an irrevocably female crook-toothed grin at the controls above a rolling caravan of coal-crammed bins. Nothing else proved to me that I too could exist down here.

Then ego stole back in. Even as I crouched, clutched stanchions, or measured my vocal volume for “Babe, can you talk during this?” or “Tell me about yourself, Tess,” the fear I’d now managed to squelch thanks only to their nearness was thrilling me at how I could function. Trust me, there’s nothing like your first day down a coal mine to trigger narcissism’s inner shrieks. It helps one hell of a lot when you know going in it’ll be your only one.

Came noon at last. Since the cars shuttled us back to the big, higher-ceilinged chamber at the shaft’s base for lunch break, Pam’s flooding sense of reprieve (the elevator cage wasn’t moving, but it was
there
; it could be scrambled onto and its button smacked in a jiffy as everyone else died horrible deaths) was doubtless one culprit in turning me Pamidiot. Another was my small picnic hamper from Riceville’s lone hotel, as out of place among their scuffed and scoured lunchpails as were its contents—biscuits, cold fried chicken, thermos, frayed but clean cloth napkin—among slablike ham sandwiches on bread less white than gray. Just as bad, while I should’ve been and was grateful the wildcats ate as a group, once we were sharing two benches I couldn’t shake a feeling I’d convoked them.