The Threshold (16 page)

“But he’s an Alta cat. I’m sure he’s never been to Telluride before. And those buildings weren’t old in his time. What would a cat know anyway?”

“You got a better idea?” They walked around to the back of the lot with Tracy staying five steps behind Aletha. “If I see you disappearing into yesteryear, I’m going to run. Leave you to your own, toots.”

The rear building looked like it might once have been a carriage house. Instead of pigeons, crows peered down at them through holes in the roof. The second building was a shed and a third a barn with leaning stall partitions. Ancient coal dust blackened one stall. A huge weathervane tilted against a corner, a prancing horse atop the crossed direction indicators. Two dilapidated steamer trunks stood open and empty on a dirt floor.

At first Mildred Heisinger was just a shadow silhouetted by sunlight which in turn was bordered by a dark door frame. She stood pointing a cane at them. Her dress hung formless to where her knees bowed painfully outward. But her spine was still straight and her head and neck unbowed. Her shoes were sturdy and laced, with thick-cushioned soles. They looked massive on the end of her tiny frame. Above her rolled anklets the red and blue highways of her blood were mapped across the unnatural white of her skin. “What you doing now, snoop? Going to clean the barn?”

“What year is this?” Tracy asked suspiciously.

“We came here looking for my cat, Miss Heisinger,” Aletha shouted, remembering the old lady’s hearing problem. “I live across the road and my cat ran away.”

“White cat? Big tom?”

“Have you seen him?”

Mildred worked her mouth around the false teeth, up and down, as if trying to shrink them to fit more comfortably in a shrunken face. Finally she poked the cane down into the dirt and used it to help her turn. Her straight shoulders drooped now. “He likes chopped liver and mice. I got plenty of both.”

It seemed to take Mildred forever to cross the short distance to the house. Charles rose from a wicker basket beside the kitchen stove. He arched and stretched and yawned, then rubbed the side of his neck against Mildred’s stick-thin leg. His throaty purr throttled up and down with his breathing.

“This one yours?” Miss Heisinger sat in a chair and Charles jumped on her lap. “Seems to like me better.” They looked up at Aletha with similarly blank expressions and the same color eyes.

“Did you buy him a basket already?”

“Had that a long time. Always a cat or two around here. Always died before I did. Didn’t get another one after the last time because I was sure it’d outlive me and somebody’d shoot it or gas it or whatever they do nowadays. This one just walked in when I opened the door like he owned the place. Not too well housebroken but he likes to watch the television with me.”

Tracy was giving Aletha pleading looks over the old lady’s head.

“He does seem to like it here,” Aletha said. “If you’re fond of him—”

“No, you take him back, snoop.” She pushed Charles into Aletha’s arms much as Callie had. “I’ll probably die tomorrow. You’ll outlive him.”

“You could borrow him for a while to keep you company.”

“Then I’d hurt when you came to take him away. Young people don’t stay in one place anymore.” A lonely look crumpled her features and she glanced away from Charles. “People my age ought to keep to themselves anyway. Things don’t hurt ’em then.”

“I promise I won’t take him until you want me to. He likes you better than he ever did me.”

But Mildred Heisinger went into her parlor, turned on her television, and told them to go away and take their cat with them.

“Kitty, you’d found the perfect home,” Aletha said as they filed through the gate in the wrought-iron fence. Charles wailed and struggled when a car went by. “A Victorian cat and a Victorian lady. It’s a match made in heaven, and I had to blow it.”

“I feel so sorry for her. Hope I never live that long.” Tracy stared back at the house and almost tripped. When they turned him loose at the Pick and Gad, Charles prowled and yowled and refused the fresh can of cat food Aletha put before him. “All you have to do is open that door and he’ll head straight back for her house and they’ll both be happy.”

“She’s so deaf,” Aletha said. “What if she doesn’t hear him at the door? And she’s so stubborn. What if she doesn’t take him back now that she’s refused him?”

Cree Mackelwain had parked Aletha’s Datsun behind an abandoned building down at the Loop and hiked the old tram route up to Alta, telling himself the whole way that he was stupid, inept, unarmed, and a coward anyway. All he had going for him was anger, and anger tends to poop out pretty fast when you’re climbing a couple of miles at a steep incline at that elevation. Whoever had shot at him could be a coward too, but he had a weapon. And he probably had food and a coat and company. Cree had a light jacket that was too hot on the way up and not hot enough when night fell on the ghost town. The Cessna had reached the Montrose airport with no problem and now sat complete with bullet holes for someone to report to the police so they could come and ask him more questions.

When Dutch Massey was slaughtered and the investigation had turned up evidence of the drug trade, Cree had come under suspicion. He still was. He wasn’t interested in talking to the police again—he didn’t know anything then and he didn’t know anything now. Well, he’d known Dutch to supply a few bindles now and then out at the rigs when Cree had been roughnecking. But Cree hadn’t questioned, until it was all over, how their business could have grown so fast, how his partner always had so much cash on hand (and as it turned out, he didn’t know the half of that), or how and why Dutch took so many vacations. Dutch had handled the paperwork, Cree some of the flying and much of the personnel management.

“Maybe things just seemed so good at the time I didn’t want to question much.” Right now he couldn’t say. All he could say was he’d just spent one of the coldest, hungriest, and most stupid nights of his life. There were three of them and they were still working over the town when he’d arrived. Eventually they took lanterns and went into the mine. They had a four-wheeled Bronco that looked brand new parked off in the trees. Cree thought about the big sack of groceries in it all night long, but if they found anything missing they’d start hunting him. And the memory of Dutch’s body plastered around the office, some of him sticking by his own blood to the walls, kept Cree and his hunger in line. They’d used an automatic weapon and enough ammunition to stop a regiment.

All of Dutch’s property and most of Cree’s had been confiscated by either the courts or the IRS because it was held in joint ownership. Cree got away with one plane and his car. It was in his car he found the folder. He came across it one morning while looking for a whisk broom under the front seat. Dutch had hidden it there when he knew there was trouble, which proved Dutch Massey was no professional and no genius either. “Just dumb luck I found it instead of the narcs.”

“Well, old buddy,” Dutch had written, “if you’re reading this it probably means the worst happened and I didn’t get a chance to remove it. Which also means I’m probably in jail or had to leave the country. Anyway, I just want you to know I haven’t left my partner high and dry.” Dutch went on to inform Cree where he’d buried some “cash deposits” and that the key taped to the folder was to a condominium in Telluride, Colorado, that Dutch had bought in his mother’s name and had been using for several years. His mother had died the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

And then Dutch had explained to Cree about the cache in the ghost town of Alta.

18

Several days passed before Bram could keep any Water down. Even though he could hear the stiffs working their way toward him, most of his hope had gone out with the candle. In the darkness sound intensified, perhaps because his eyes could no longer focus his attention elsewhere. The dripping water, the snoring sounds of sleep, the groan as a man turned over, and the clump of his boots on the platform kept Bram awake and abraded his nerves. One moment he felt weak and listless and wanted only to die, and the next he felt angry and sure he could not withstand one more irritation. That it would send him screaming in madness up the drift to bash at the wall until he bled to death.

They were all weakening sooner than they should because of the sickness the food had brought on. He knew they couldn’t last until help arrived. No songs now, no jokes or stories. Just the dripping, snoring, coughing—none of it in unison but all in a senseless off-rhythm that made his body want to twitch and jerk in accompanying spasms.

“Water’s risin’,” Shorty announced after a trip to the end of the workings.

So that was how it was to end. Drowning. One of the things Bram had enjoyed about the cold, damp, exhausting work in the stopes was the anticipation of the warm, dry comfort of home after tally and the pleasure of having earned it. Now he longed for the comfort and loved ones there and could not imagine how he’d ever chosen to leave it for work in the dank earth. His tears were silent and private in the dark, but scalding hot on his skin.

Knut gave up trying to find encouraging things to say and only spoke when he decided it was time to send someone to tap a signal to the stiffs. Gus, the stalwart Swede, took over the morale boosting and would periodically swear that he heard the shots coming closer. The water was dripping less. The air was freshening up a bit. “Soon tings ben hunky-dory, you vill see.”

When next it came Bram’s turn to signal on the pipe he had to crawl on his hands and knees up the drift. The rescue efforts sounded fainter than they had the day before. He had to sit and rest a long time to clear his head enough to start back. It seemed the harder he breathed the less satisfaction he drew from the air. When he reached the platform, again on hands and knees, the water was up over his wrists.

His waterlogged clothing chafed against his skin and seemed to soften the flesh beneath. It felt to Bram as if there was no longer any connecting tissue between his skin and his flesh, nor between his flesh and his bones. The different layers would slide about independently when he rolled over. He came to picture his insides as a glass of Ma’am’s slippery, clear, red-berry jelly. Tossing about became agony, lying still impossible.

The cold drips from the roof kept his topside frozen while whatever part of him contacted the platform warmed up. He was always half hot and half cold and his teeth took to chattering uncontrollably. He would hold on to his lower jaw for a while to keep it still and give it a rest. And when he did he heard teeth chattering all around him with that echolike emptiness sound makes in the drifts.

The water stopped its rising for a time as it filled up a stope lower in the workings. Bram realized that Knut wasn’t sending anyone to signal anymore. He was going to mention it but lost track of his thoughts and forgot. It was Gus Lundberg, the strongest, most fearless, most hopeful of them all who broke first. He started an endless angry moaning and crawled over Bram’s legs, making him cry out in pain. The moan grew to an unearthly intensity Bram would not have had the strength to produce. It sounded as if the Swede was bashing himself back and forth against either wall as he stumbled up the drift.

Bram called after him listlessly but his throat seemed clogged with itself. The ringing in his ears finally drowned out the Swede. Gus didn’t return. Bram could tell when the water rose again because the bohunks came over to crowd onto his platform, theirs being lower. There was no room to turn over now, and breathing had become a gasping.

Sometime after that, it could have been hours or days as jumbled as his mind had become, he realized the water was lifting him off the platform. Someone insisted he wade up the drift to higher ground. Bram saw the love in Ma’am’s eyes as she walked beside him and the pride in Pa’s as he offered him a hand. Even in delirium, Bram could not bear to think of his little Callie girl. That would have been the final agony.

Callie tried not to think of Bram, but the reminders were endless. His cot in the sitting room, his spare pants on the peg, his hunting rifle under Pa’s on the wall, the piece of his old shirt she used as a dustrag. Callie and Luella threw themselves into cooking and baking for miners who’d come to help in the digging out. They carried loaves of bread and covered dishes and desserts up to the cookhouse to help Heinrich Mueller. There was always a crowd just come off the digging that had to be fed. They’d stop at the boardinghouse on the way back to pick up washing from the visiting rescuers, who were stacked like cordwood in the rooms and hallways. Anything to keep busy, exhaust themselves enough to sleep.

Alta began to hurt for supplies and the call went out on the camp’s one telephone in the manager’s office. Donations of food and blankets came up the tram from Ophir, Telluride, Rico, Placerville, Pandora, San Miguel, Ouray, and great hunks of beef and mutton from the ranches and farms around. A doctor from the hospital in Telluride stood ready to take the train and ride the tram up when word came that rescue was close.

Wicker body baskets were stacked in the snowshed entrance to bring up the dead and the basket cases—those alive but not enough to stand up in the hoist bucket. John O’Connell had to look away every time he passed them going to and from the digging out. He worked so desperately that sometimes he came home with his arms draped over the shoulders of other men, his feet dragging out behind. They’d sprawl him across Bram’s cot and help Luella remove his boots. He wouldn’t eat until he woke and didn’t want to pause long for that, but Luella would force food on him. “No sense in losing you both,” or, “Our Bram will have a better chance if you can hammer steel with fed muscles.”

The outside world knew from the signals how many of the twenty-two men on Talse’s crew had survived the cave-in and who they were. There were widow’s weeds going about Alta already, even though no bodies had come up yet. A twelve-year-old powder monkey had perished. He’d been sent to Talse’s crew with an order. When Callie’d heard Bram was one who signaled, she dared to hope. But as time passed a heavy pain grew in her chest and she knew the meaning of the term “heartsick.”