The Threshold (34 page)

“Hey, how much to take out this Collins dude?” Maynard’s offer took some translating but a few drunks at the bar swiped some money off the gambling tables, which weren’t busy because of the big debate, and Duffer and Maynard walked out of the Silver Bell jingling.

“We don’t have a gun, you fuzz brain,” Duffer said. “What you going to do, smile this Collins dead?” Maynard just smiled broader. Things were getting so bad old Maynard got high off one beer. “And the fact that we were seen at that dump the night the money turned up missing?” He listened to the jingle in his pockets as they walked back to the boardinghouse. “Wait, I get it. We got the money. Why worry about Collins?” He looked at Maynard with new respect.

Maynard scratched at his dirty neck and unshaven chin. “Sheriff keeps telling us to get a job, right? We got a job. We do it good and we might get us a career. This place is humming with hate, man.”

“Thought you was scared of getting in trouble around here.”

“I been reevaluatin’ the odds, Duffer. There’s another winter coming. You know we been here a year? What other skills we got?”

Aunt Lilly’s front room was a bedroom instead of a parlor. A shelf ledge ran around the room three-fourths of the way up the wall. On it gaily painted plates stood on end between half-burned candles in silver candlesticks and beer steins with pewter lids. Rosy-pink wallpaper stretched from the baseboards to the shelf, pretty ribbon-bows at its border. Bright Indian rugs covered the floor. An iron bedstead with brass knobs filled one corner and had a saggy, stretched cover-spread and six fringed pillows. All three shelves of the bedside table were stuffed with neatly folded towels and washcloths.

Callie stood in the center of the little room and looked her fill. She normally wasn’t allowed in here but she’d found a chance to visit this morning and discovered her aunt was not at home. Callie felt sly and secretive again. A rocking chair was pushed sideways against a window. Curtains hung from an oblong rod that circled out into the room and hid a rack upon which Aunt Lilly hung her wealth of clothes. Her trunk sat at the foot of the bed and it was full too. A commode and tiny coal stove completed the crowded room.

This was certainly an odd bedroom, and odd to be opening directly off the front porch, but what intrigued Callie most were the pictures on the walls, all photographs of Aunt Lilly. In one she sat on a chair in nothing but her petticoats and corset and her hair all down. In another she had her hair properly up but wore only a towel to cover her bosom and private parts.

A sudden knocking at the back door sent Callie scurrying from the forbidden room to answer it. An old Chinaman looked surprised to see her but handed her a package. “This for Miss Floradora. You give please?”

Callie closed the door wishing now she hadn’t answered it. She’d been so guilty and flustered she hadn’t thought. She wasn’t to be seen here. She visited only in the mornings and often awakened her sleepy aunt. Callie put the package on the table and slid the twine off one end to peek under the wrapping paper. More towels, smelling of the laundry. Callie lifted the other end of the wrapping and found washcloths. She drank from the dipper in the water pail beside the dishpan and tried to understand the things she’d seen.

“You’re a swell girl, Floradora, I’ll give you that. Swell girl,” a man’s voice said in the other room, and the front door slammed.

“Let me get some water, John, and I’ll be with you in a moment,” her aunt answered, and giggled in a silly manner. Callie dashed out the back door and hid behind the coal shed. She checked the parts of the alley she could see and started for the rear of the boot shop … and stopped. John?

Callie slid back in behind the coal shed, then around it, zigzagged to the outhouse and then to the wall beside the kitchen window. Aunt Lilly ladled water from the pail into a porcelain basin. Her hat sat on the package on the table. She added something from a bottle, stirred it, and carried it into the front room. Callie slipped into the kitchen and waited. When nothing happened, she tiptoed across to the inside door. It was off the latch. A tiny shove opened it a crack.

All Callie could see was the man. He wasn’t John O’Connell. He wore a shirt, rumpled vest, and garters holding up black socks. Aunt Lilly’s hand washed his private member with a washcloth. Callie had seen Bram’s private member several times when he’d had to relieve himself in the trees and told her to look away, but it had been small and aimed downward. This man’s member was fat and long and it thrust toward the ceiling.

Callie left the crack in the door and hightailed it to the boot shop.

“This world sucks,” Clyde Duffer proclaimed when he met Maynard Bellamy halfway to Pandora. Maynard pulled him behind a rock outcropping. “Have to walk everywhere. It’s cold and crummy and … Sure you can find it again?”

Maynard had swiped a shotgun propped in a corner of the livery stable and some shells from a packing case on a warehouse dock. He’d hidden the gun out here so he wouldn’t have to carry it back and forth through town, but it was night now and there were patches of snow, patches of shadow. The place looked different and he wasn’t sure he could find it either. Then he recognized the shape of the bush in which he’d stuck it. There weren’t any leaves, but the center stalk was thick enough that you had to look twice to see the addition of a shotgun even in daylight. He pulled it out, cracked it open, inserted the shells. He didn’t know when the thing had been cleaned last, whether it would blow up in his face.

Still, it was good to be working again even if the odds for screw-up were pretty high. There’d been no time for planning. Or even being certain Collins would be home. They had to rely on some jerk-off’s description of Pandora at the dinner table at the boardinghouse, trying not to appear interested. And they couldn’t sneak up to it by a circuitous route because every yo-yo in the valley had a big dog he let run loose. So they just walked down the road with the shotgun tucked close to Maynard’s side in hopes it wouldn’t be noticed in the dark. If they got away with this hit, they knew of an all-but-bottomless exploratory hole in the hillside just above Stringtown where they could ditch the weapon. They planned to be back in a bar in Telluride by the time news of the hit, hit town. What the plan needed was careful timing and a better knowledge of the terrain. They were both just too antsy to wait.

At least they knew what Collins looked like. Just that afternoon Duffer had been standing on Colorado Avenue to disassociate himself from Maynard, who was stealing the shotgun. He heard catcalls and threats shouted at Collins as he drove a buggy into town and stopped at a storefront where gold-painted letters announced “The Smuggler-Union Mining Co. Employment Office.”

As they approached Pandora now, the pounding of the mills drowned out the dogs’ warnings. It masked their footsteps as well, and although they saw people moving behind lighted windows, they met no one face-to-face. Arthur Collins’s house was easy to find because it was all lit up, with horses tethered outside that snorted and stomped discomfort at their approach. But again the sounds went unheeded because of the terrible clamor of the mills. A kitchen and a large dining/living-room area were lit up on the first floor. In the dining area people sat at a long table. It looked much like a movie set to Maynard—the costumes, the furniture framed by a square of windowpane.

“That’s got to be him right here,” Duffer said directly into Maynard’s ear. The table stretched away from the window and all the unsuspecting diners were visible except the guy at the head of the table. They could see the back of his head and one arm as it gestured toward the chick on his right.

Maynard looked at Duffer. Duffer looked around behind them and to each side and shrugged. Maynard brought up the shotgun and emptied both barrels through window glass and the back of the man’s chair.

39

“It was weird,” Cree Said, “the talk in the Cosmopolitan. Like the assassination of President McKinley. It happened just a month or two before I got there. Sounded so much like Kennedy. And the cowboys talked about—”

“I know, cows.” Aletha ducked her head against the wind as they walked down Colorado Avenue. The wind was full of grit from the mountain of mill tailings east of town. The mammoth sprinkler system tried to dampen it but the water drops just blew away with the tailing dust.

“No, about grass and sheep and cattle. Cowboys don’t talk ‘cows.’ You know one of the things I missed back then? Buns. Women wore so many clothes you couldn’t tell if they had buns or not.”

“Except at the Pick and Gad when you were changing your twenty. What if you’d picked up a … social disease there?”

“That’s not all that hard to do here.” He didn’t want to talk about that visit to the Pick and Gad. “I think ‘tap her light’ means take it easy. Miners said it a lot. It may have had to do with sticking dynamite in a hole and carefully pounding it in. I suppose you’d better tap it light or die.”

Aletha looked over her shoulder. They expected to be watched, but she didn’t see anyone following. They were on their way out to Lone Tree Cemetery. Cree insisted upon looking up old friends. “Aren’t you worried about going back all of a sudden? You know what happens around me.”

He gestured toward the tailings pile, where dust devils played havoc with the town. “That whole thing wasn’t there. Ended way back up at Pandora. And all this was mills and shacks and houses, and over there, the park was a slum area. Duffer and his crew had to live there.”

“And if we suddenly went back? Duffer’s still there.”

“Probably hung him. Criminals didn’t get far with the old law-and-order boys.”

Cree had been gone less than a week and she didn’t know him any longer. Her obsession had become his. It was depressing. “You once offered to fly me out of here, anywhere I wanted to go. Let’s do it.”

“Too late. Neither one of us can afford to get in any deeper with the law-and-order boys of today. With their computerized network they’d probably have every airport in the country waiting for my bullet-pocked Cessna. They’ve got our numbers down good now.”

Aletha looked over her shoulder again. He was still talking and living the old days when they reached the cemetery. He started out around Callie’s grave and began digging turf with his fingernails. Aletha just watched and worried. “Hey, whatever happened already has. What’s the use?”

Cree wiped dirt across his forehead, sat back on his heels. “I’m going crazy, huh? Like you.”

He brushed his hands on the grass and stood, staring down at the mess he’d made of the sod, then shook his head. His lips moved in conversation with himself. Finally he took Aletha’s hand and they started toward the road, pausing at a long rectangular strip of concrete with names gouged into it along the top and bottom. “Fire at the Smuggler. I attended the burial.” They hadn’t gone ten feet before he stopped again at a group of headstones displaying the name Pangrazia. “I was in the hospital with Eugenio. He lost a leg when a wagonload of ore ran over him. Looks like he lived a few more years. But the son he was so proud of died young, about the time of the troubles.”

“Cree—”

“I can’t help it.”

“I know.” You didn’t need things going bump in the night to be haunted. To one side of the gate in a sort of aisle stretched single graves in a crowded jumble. The small, slightly raised headstones were identical, with metal plaques on their surfaces. It looked like the area might once have been a road inside the fence that someone decided to put to use. One of the stones slanted to catch her eye had
Lennard Pheeney
—
1902
written on its little plaque.

“Probably not the same Pheeney, but it would raise some interesting questions, wouldn’t it?” Cree said, and then wandered among the haphazard assortment of stones. “Planted this close, they must have been digging into old graves while trying to bury the new.” He slid his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “Wonder what I’d do if I came across one that read
McCree Ronald Mackelwain
.”

Mildred Heisinger could not remember what had prompted her to climb the stairs to the cupola. She hadn’t climbed stairs unaided for years. But here she was trembling and dizzy and alone at the top, clinging to the newel post, wondering how she was ever to get down. That was the trouble with getting old, you’d set out to do something and then forget what it was before you got to it. Like when she’d planned to have the house painted. She was sure she’d made arrangements to have it done, or had she just thought so? That was during the time all those ragged hippies were in town and Mildred thought she might hire one or two to do the job cheap. Now, according to Doris Lowell, those hippies had grown up and were running the town. And the last time Mildred had ventured outside, the house still needed painting.

That snoop hadn’t washed the window up here. Mildred’s sight was fuzzy even with the heavy eyeglasses, but with the smudgy window glass as well, she almost thought she saw an apparition of the Big Swede. “Can’t be. I burned it to the ground with my own hand.”

Mildred had just climbed the stairs all warm from her bath, tired from her journey, looking forward to the hot bricks Letty had wrapped and placed at the foot of the bed, when she heard shouting and hooting and her name being called from outside. She hurriedly switched off the light bulb, and when her eyes adjusted she saw the lights on the second floor of the Big Swede and people standing on the outside landing and stairs. There were both men and women making shockingly lewd gestures at her house. One, whom Mildred recognized as having been garnered on a trip to California, turned her back, raised her skirts, and bent over, wiggling her bloomered fanny in Mildred’s direction, causing raucous laughter from the others. Mildred kept the curtains drawn after that. But on occasion she would part them enough to peek at the doings on the second floor of the infamous Big Swede. Sometimes, when the evenings were warm, women would entertain gentlemen there without pulling shades, and Mildred would see things that troubled her sleep.

That was in the days when she slept up here in the room off the cupola and the bedroom she now used was a formal dining room. Now Mildred was old, confused, and clinging to the newel post. The Big Swede was no more. She could see right through it to the trees grown up to border the street, and the hazy outlines of the Pick and Gad through them.