The Threshold (36 page)

In August the state government, now headed by a newly elected pro-business governor, sent one thousand National Guardsmen into Cripple Creek to crush a miners’ strike, and less than a month later, just when Callie hoped to quit work and resume her schooling for the new term, the millworkers around Telluride decided they wanted an eighthour day like the miners had won earlier instead of the twelve-hour shifts they worked. The union called a strike against the Smuggler, the Tomboy, and the Liberty Bell mills. One hundred millworkers walked out and the giant crushers ceased their din. The mines had to shut down and John O’Connell was thrown out of work. The family needed Callie’s wages once more.

Callie decided to visit Aunt Lilly again. Aunt Lilly had given her small gifts of money or candy often, but this time she gave Callie a book. “It was left here by a friend, ever so long ago. I don’t think he’ll return for it, and since you fancy words so much, you can have it.”

Indian Horrors; Or, Massacres by the Red Men
. The colored engravings horrified, titillated, and astonished Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls for endless hours. None of them would ever look at the few ragged red men on Telluride’s streets in the same way again. And while Callie read and reread the savage horrors aloud to the others at night with a blanket over the transom, the town roared outside. It was full of out-of-work men down from the mines. They slept on barroom floors and wherever they could, spending whatever they had on Pacific Avenue in a burst of holiday gaiety, sure that the owners must give in soon.

In a back room of the upper story of the Pick and Gad, Audrey Cranston posed nude against a black velvet draping. She felt cold and highly ridiculous under the sexless scrutiny of the artist. Diamond Tooth Leona had this amazing idea of having the girls painted in oil and hung in the waiting parlor. Leona had in mind not only encouraging business in this manner but speeding it up as well. And at the Pick and Gad, as in most businesses, time was money. Not only could a gentleman get his interest up and have it ready by gazing upon the available lovelies in the paintings, but he could make his choice among them more promptly by observing them all at once.

The artist was some bummer Leona had snatched off the streets when she’d seen the sketches he was trying to sell to buy food. Audrey noticed his brow furrow and his eyes squint as his concentration shifted from the form he painted to the human inside it. And she knew he was about to ask the forbidden but abiding question. “What would it be that could draw someone like yourself to this profession?” He colored slightly. “Or did you come upon some misfortune?”

“I certainly did, mister. Or rather she came upon me.” It set her thinking of Mildred Heisinger again. Death was too good for that woman.

“Nobody’s forcing you to stay,” Leona snapped at her once. “All you had to do was earn enough for a ticket out of here, and you did that long ago.” Which was true, but a ticket to where? Not back to Kansas City, where family and friends would question her about her time out West and surely read the guilt on her face. As a bookkeeper she’d made enough money to live in a spare room with two other women who worked at the same foundry and to dress frugally but respectably, perhaps indulge in some frivolity once a month. She’d worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. Here a Chinese laundryman and Sarah saw to her vastly expanded wardrobe, lodging and food were provided, and there was a party every night. No cleaning, washing, ironing, cooking, baking … Audrey didn’t like the life exactly, but she didn’t quite know how to give it up either.

Just one more week, or one more month, she’d promise herself, until she had some money put by so that life wouldn’t be as grim as it had been in Kansas City. But if Mildred Heisinger had not lured her here, Audrey wouldn’t have thought Kansas City so grim and tedious. And the money seemed to disappear before she could get it together to count. There were always dressmakers’ bills and a backlog from the shops on Colorado Avenue. Audrey could never get ahead enough to feel good about leaving. The disillusioned expression of the hungry artist made her decide to try again. “And what brings a man of such talents as you to a place like this?”

“I came to the San Juans to make my fortune and found instead that my slight frame and uncallused hands made me unfit to those who hire at the mines.”

“You’d rather be a miner than a painter?”

“I’d rather be a man of wealth than almost anything else.” He stepped out from behind his canvas and turned his head from side to side studying her. “Try putting your left arm up and your hand to your brow like this.” He demonstrated a ladylike gesture of distress that made her grin.

He was puny but interesting. And his disappointment in her needled Audrey. The next day, as she returned from mailing a letter full of lies to her parents, she saw Mildred Heisinger. Mildred rode sidesaddle, and for once not gracefully, toward the livery stable. Audrey walked with Leona and a few others from the house, and Leona grabbed her arm. “Mind your manners, now.”

They’d all heard Audrey’s threats against the hated procuress, and the rest laughed as they passed, but Leona stayed behind with her. “Think of the lovely clothes you have and the fun and the time to yourself. Don’t make a fuss.”

The Heisinger bitch looked over their heads and guided the horse into the big doorway. “I think I shall take up riding,” they heard her say to the stableman. “In fact, I may purchase an animal of my own.”

“She could have horses and even a carriage,” Leona said thoughtfully. “Hire a bummer from Stringtown to feed them. All those outbuildings behind her house and all.”

The San Juan District Owners’ Association organized by Bulkeley Wells asked the governor of Colorado to send troops to Telluride because the lawless strikers threatened anarchy to the town, not to mention the free-enterprise system. Not only did they refuse to work, but they kept the honest workingman from his toil as well, causing hardship to him and his family.

“What they want is troops so they can reopen the mills with scabs,” John O’Connell assured Simon Doud over a beer at the Senate, “and to be breaking the back of the union.”

“But what can we do against trained soldiers?” Simon Doud was the ruddy-faced man Mildred Heisinger had seen on the train when she’d begun her travels, and again at the New Sheridan Hotel.

“Keep the buggers out of town.” John stared glumly at his beer. No more rye-bright eyes for him. In fact he’d just finished a free supper at the soup kitchen set up by the union at the new Miners’ Union Hospital.

“You mean … do something to the tracks?” Simon Doud looked astonished. He’d worked alongside John O’Connell at the Smuggler Union, mostly mucking, but John had been teaching him the ways of the hammer and drill.

“Well, now, there’s an idea.” John marveled at his new friend’s ability to see solutions so quickly. Even drink didn’t seem to fog the man. “Spit a few fuses under a trestle between here and the Dallas Divide and troop trains would not come a-crawling into this camp. I might just be bringing it up at the meeting tonight.”

“But what’s to preven … stop the foot soldiers and cavalry from unloading and walking into town?”

“Slow them down a mite. Cause hell with the supplying of them. A thousand militia was sent into Cripple Creek. Must take a heap of provisioning.” John finished his beer and rose from the table. He’d put off a trip to Mrs. Pakka’s to visit the wife long enough. They had to talk in the parlor in front of others. She seemed interested only in her medicine and her Bible. Too long since he’d had a woman. Not that he’d want to bother poor Ma’am with that now. If he hurried he’d have time to stop off at the bottling works and see the boy too. He longed for the day his little family lived again under the same roof. He nodded farewell to Doud and turned toward the door.

John froze as two women stepped inside, Floradora she was now and one other. He’d seen her around but this was the first they’d met eye to eye. She was dressed to the teeth, and prettier than ever she’d been back in Ohio or up to Alta either. Lillian froze too. Her smile, set to welcome the whole room, caved in at the corners. Color rose to fire her cheeks. She looked down first, as well she might. He knew women turned to this life, had had business with a few, but this woman he couldn’t fathom. She’d had a good man to see to her and there was nothing so desperate in her life that time could not have fixed.

They stepped around each other, carefully. But the scent of her perfume haunted him as it sickened him all the way to the boardinghouse.

41

Mildred Heisinger didn’t know that Aletha, Renata, Doris Lowell, and the young doctor ringed her bed in the room that was once a dining room. Or that Cree, Tracy, and Charles waited in the parlor.

“Is she dying?” Aletha searched the room for any sign of history overtaking her, listened for any unearthly sound. “Shouldn’t you get her to Montrose to the hospital?”

“It doesn’t make sense to move her.” The doctor prodded with her stethoscope. She made house calls because the local clinic had replaced her with a male doctor and she’d refused to leave town. “I’ll see if I can jack up the clinic for an IV unit.”

Neither the doctor’s prodding nor Aletha’s anxiety disturbed Mildred. Bob Meldrum did. She was riding her new mare up Boomerang Road to practice in privacy when he rode toward her. Bulkeley Wells and the Owners’ Association had hired rough gunmen to help keep order and protect the mines from strikers, and Sheriff Cal Rutan had them deputized. Bob Meldrum was one of them. When she tried to ride past him, he turned his horse around to accompany her. “Ladies shouldn’t ride out alone in these troubled times,” he said. Mildred looked straight ahead, tried to hide her fear. “But then the other hens won’t ride out with you, will they, Millie? No matter which side of Colorado Avenue they live on. Must be lonesome for you.”

Everyone, even hired killers, knew of her. “My name is Miss Mildred Heisinger.”

“You sit too stiff for the horse, Millie. You need to relax into her gait so’s you don’t jar your delicate little ass so bad.”

On the shady side of town where Mildred lived, crude language and rude manners were common. She’d refused to acknowledge such behavior. Hired killer or no, Mildred hadn’t the least intention of changing that stance now. With a hissing disapproval on the intake of her breath and a determined rise to her chin, Mildred jerked at the mare’s reins to turn back toward town. The mare turned but then reared, almost dislodging her rider from the awkward sidesaddle. And when the horse came down on four feet, she refused to move. Instead she spread her hind legs and with a rumbling that began in mid-stomach she expelled blasts of foul wind and great plops of excrement onto the road.

Mildred was so embarrassed she forgot herself and looked up into the face of the dangerous man next to her. When he caught her expression he began to laugh in loud reverberating rounds. It was late November, with somber skies and little snow, chilly, bleak. A stand of aspen lined each side of the road, and the raw barren branches reared above his head like the antlers of a gigantic stag. After a siege of coughing he was able to control his mirth and it left his eyes almost instantly, the wintry emptiness of the killer returning. “Maybe I’ll just have to teach you a few things about horseflesh, Millie. Teach you to ride like Mrs. Bulkeley Wells herself.”

“Mrs. Bulkeley Wells herself,” Mildred mumbled.

“Well, I’m going to go call the clinic about that IV. Surely they can’t refuse the oldest living resident of Telluride.” The doctor left the room.

“Look, I don’t think I should stay in town too long,” Aletha said. “Maybe I should go back to your place, Renata. Have Mrs. Lowell call if she needs me. Something might happen.”

“I can’t wait for something to happen. And I want to be right here with you if it does.”

“She’s talking again, Aletha. She might be coming out of it.” Doris Lowell tucked the covers under Mildred’s chin. “She might ask for you again soon.”

But Mildred was watching Mrs. Bulkeley Wells ride by the train window as she came into town from yet another trip. Grace Livermore Wells rode with such ease in her dashing riding costume. She and the horse flowed together at a terrifying speed that left the train and the other mounted ladies behind. A picture in motion Mildred would never forget. That was before Bob Meldrum taught Mildred to ride almost as well. Before she acquired her first mare. Leona, the madam at the Pick and Gad, had helped her buy that first horse.

Leona pushed her way past a protesting Letty right into the parlor. “We’re going to have us a talk, Miss Nose-in-the-air. One businesswoman to another, and right now.” Her hair was about the shade of the skin of an orange. “Overheard you telling the stableman at Anderson’s the other day you wanted your own horse.” The creature settled herself on Mildred’s nicest settee. She didn’t seem to notice the fact that Mildred remained standing, an obvious indication of lack of welcome to most people. “Now, you could do better for yourself, and I happen to know how far you’re in to that old bastard Barada. What you need is some advice on the type of girl needed here. The kind that’ll pay and that’ll stay.”

Mildred had had no recourse but to listen. The advice had been profitable.

Aletha stood alone at Mildred’s bedside. Doris Lowell had stepped into the bathroom and Renata into the parlor to talk to Cree and Tracy. The doctor had driven to the clinic for the IV unit. Aletha still watched the corners nervously and didn’t realize Mildred’s eyes were open until she had the feeling of being watched.

“Hi, Miss Heisinger. It’s me, snoop. How you feeling?”

“Callie O’Connell,” Mildred said distinctly.

“Oh great, now you’re going to tell me about Callie when I’m a lot more worried about Aletha Kingman.”

“They put her on the train and sent her away. Herded the women and children into boxcars like cattle. Bulkeley Wells and the Alliance and the militia. Found skeletons in the mountains for years afterward when the snow melted.”

“Oh, surely they didn’t send women and children out in cattle cars in winter.” Aletha looked to Doris Lowell standing in the bathroom doorway. “Sounds like
Dr. Zhivago
.”