The Threshold (41 page)

Maynard still lay on the gun, unmoving. The lighted area around him, the gaping stationmaster, Duffer straining toward Cree’s outstretched hands, and the top half of Cree Mackelwain narrowed till they disappeared in darkness. Duffer had been about six inches from grabbing onto Cree. They gave a last mighty yank and Aletha ended up on her fanny with Cree’s empty shoe in her hand.

“Shit, I almost had him. I was going to kill that bastard,” he yelled from out of the pitch dark … and then, “Are we home? I can’t see a thing.”

“You didn’t bring Duffer along, did you?” Aletha asked.

“The last I saw was the look on his face when he realized I was getting away. Probably better than killing him. Renata?” And when she answered, he called out for Tracy. “We didn’t leave Tracy behind, did we?”

“I’m over here. But you stay over there.” And the smell of warm urine cut through the mustiness.

“Where are we now,” Renata asked, “in limbo?”

“Probably in an ancient, closed-up, abandoned train depot,” Cree answered close to Aletha, and she shoved his shoe at him.

“How’d you do it, Aletha,” Renata said dryly, sounding more like herself, “grab Toto and click your heels together three times?”

They wandered into cobwebs, tripped on debris, assured each other their eyes would adjust soon and they’d find a way out before time switched them back to a murderous Duffer. Then Tracy found an open space between boards and Cree helped her pound out a window hole.

It was still dark outside and wood smoke still hung heavy on the air, but the lights of a much smaller Telluride winked around them. Cree and Tracy went to Mildred Heisinger’s, she to gather Charles and go back to the crib and he to collect Renata’s jeep and get Aletha out of town as fast as possible. When he returned he was breathless. “Mrs. Lowell was out at the gate talking to the doctor. They hadn’t missed us. Seems it’s still Thursday. They claim we all left the old lady’s house not more than two hours ago.”

47

Unable to solve the disappearance of the four disturbing vagrants and with John O’Connell and the others deported once more, Bulkeley Wells decided to lift the curfew. Even the residents down at Mrs. Pakka’s boardinghouse could hear the rejoicing in the streets when the saloons and Pacific Avenue opened for business again. A ball was to be held at the Sheridan and a group of Shakespearean actors brought in to entertain the town. Bram emerged from the bottling works to find two men awaiting him on the dock—Thomas Sullivan and Shorty Miller. Bram hadn’t seen them since their hospital days in Denver. They too had regained strength and flesh since then, but both had aged a good bit.

“Sure but you’ve come back fit, lad.” Sully had to stretch up to embrace him. “Good to see you.”

Bram couldn’t forget Shorty’s calling him a bastard at that awful time in their lives. But when Shorty stuck out his hand, Bram shook it. They slapped each other on the back. There is an undeniable bond forged between those who almost die together but don’t.

“Got us a message from your pa,” Sully said. “He’s in Ouray. Said to tell you not to be losing your temper and acting the fool. Just take care of the family for him till he gets back. Things’ll be right between the union and Telluride soon. Ain’t that what he said now, Shorty?”

“That and one more thing, Sully.” Shorty showed all the extra spaces between his teeth.

“Oh, that’s right. You go on home, boy, and clean up, have your supper, and then meet us at Van Atta’s by seven o’clock.”

“Van Atta’s? I don’t need clothes, Sully.”

“Now, don’t argue, Bram. You just mind your pa.”

Audrey couldn’t believe it when Diamond Tooth Leona told her who Bob Meldrum might bring to the party that night at the Pick and Gad. “And I want your word you’ll behave yourself. Anybody knows how mean that man can get, it ought to be you, Audrey. Say one wrong thing to her ladyship and he could kill you.”

While Leona and the girls fussed about with frills, Sarah and a raggedy group hired from Stringtown for the occasion strung streamers, inflated balloons, and arranged platters of fancy candies and sandwiches. Wagons delivered cases of champagne to the back door and a small ensemble set up in a corner to practice playing together for the first time. Telluride’s tenderloin had been raucous a good part of the day but when the Pick and Gad opened its doors for a preannounced party, one and all cordially invited, the mountain valley seemed to explode. There was standing room only in the champagne parlor, the waiting parlor, the dining room, and even the kitchen.

At Van Atta’s Sully and Shorty rented Bram a suit of clothes and outfitted themselves as well. “Shorty and me just got paid at the Maggie Breen, up out of Ouray, and the evening’s on us.”

“Your pa said as how he figures your education’s been suffering with him gone so much.”

“Shorty and me ain’t union so we thought to get work here.”

“It’s not like we’re scabs … just that we don’t happen to see eye to eye with John about certain things. Exceptin’ your education.”

Bram walked down the street between them feeling ridiculous in the suit and hat. He knew what they were up to and couldn’t believe Pa would condone such an evening for him. But then again … His two companions were short men and walked with their hands in their pockets, their hats pushed back, and jaunty swaggers. Bram walked stiffly. His coat sleeves were too short. He felt like a bear someone had dressed up to make fun of. He wanted to claim his rights to manhood and leave the embarrassments of boyhood behind, but then again, the transition could be the most embarrassing of all. Bram dreaded embarrassment more than most proud people because of the torture he’d endured from his schoolmates when he was a scarecrow with no hair.

He stood to the bar at the Cosmopolitan Saloon and downed a beer with them. Beer didn’t bother Bram much after sampling the product at the bottling works for several years, but the pictures of naked ladies on the walls around him did. Next they stopped at the Brunswick, then at the Senate. Bram began to relax a little. At the Silver Bell he even bought a round. But the next stop was the Gold Belt Saloon and Dance Hall, and what the ladies did there, alive and moving, was worse than anything hanging on a saloon wall. He sat on a wooden folding chair at the back of the room. Sully and Shorty craned forward to see better. Bram’s vision was excellent and he cringed backward, but he watched.

Five not very pretty ladies pranced about in what he assumed was a dance, to the accompaniment of a fiddler and a piano player and a man shouting a story no one could hear over the hooting and stomping of the audience. The bright lights made the dancers’ bodies look creamy and smooth and their faces clownish with the exaggeration of applied color.

“Plump and pretty,” Shorty yelled into his ear, and spit tobacco juice at the floor. The middle of the five was more than plump and the cheeks of her backside flopped and jerked with every step. Her smile was fixed no matter what the insults directed at her from the audience, as if she had not escorted her body to the stage. All the ladies wore their hair down and all wore the same costume, a costume similar to those favored by schoolgirls at poetry recitations—wreaths of paper laurel leaves on their heads, draped Grecian gowns. But these gowns were transparent. It was horrible and impossible to look away, to ignore the swelling ache of himself in his rented trousers.

“They were ugly,” Bram complained, but he stuck his hands in his pockets and tilted back his hat as they left the Gold Belt. Is this what Pa did on his off days in town? Why would those ladies want to make such undignified spectacles of themselves?

“Didn’t notice you sittin’ there with your hands over your eyes.”

“Now, you’re not to be making fun of the boy, Shorty. If he likes ’em pretty, I sure know where there’s some pretty ones, don’t you?”

Audrey watched Mildred Heisinger and Bob Meldrum in the champagne parlor. She sipped champagne and he drank from the bottle. As the evening progressed Mildred relaxed her stiffness and Meldrum got slowly but definitely drunk. He introduced her proudly and then gave anyone so much as brushing against her a chilling glance. The next time Audrey noticed them Mildred was being entertained by some actors from a traveling troupe that had performed on Colorado Avenue earlier. Meldrum played poker nearby and kept looking over at Mildred’s rapture.

Audrey couldn’t understand the attraction between them. Mildred’s throat and shoulders were bared daringly in a ball gown that drew much attention and put the resident finery to shame. There were no bruises on the perfect skin. Later Audrey found Meldrum sitting alone in a corner of the kitchen, still swigging from the bottle. He grabbed her skirt and pulled her down on his lap. She’d thought to be free of him tonight. “What’s the matter, your fancy lady run out on you?”

“She’s still in there, beautiful and fine as ever. She doesn’t swear like you trollops. Plays the piano and reads poetry. I run out on her.” He wiped a tear off his cheek with the thumb of the hand that held the bottle and spilled champagne down his vest. “She’s too good for me, Audrey.”

“Oh yeah, she’s a real sweetheart, teaching little girls how to work Pacific Avenue.”

“What? You know I can’t hear.”

“I said she seems to like you a lot, Bob.”

“Millie deserves someone fine and young and innocent like she is. Never has any fun, poor girl.”

“That poor girl deserves a lot, all right.”

“She deserves something like him.” Meldrum pointed the bottle at a big kid standing in front of them. The kid had just accepted a puff off a cigar from the man next to him and was coughing up a storm, much to his friend’s delight and derision.

“You gotta help me, Audrey.”

“I’d like to, Bob, but I have a date in a minute and—”

“Not that.” He wiped away another tear and took a swig. “Get him for Millie. Here.” He let go of Audrey to reach into his pocket, and dumped her on the floor. He held out a large gold coin. “Where’d you go?”

She reached up and took the coin. “You mean you want me to—”

“Yeah.” He nodded and stood to get a better look at the kid. “Yeah, he’s just the ticket. Can you do it for me, Audrey?”

“Long as you don’t change your mind when you sober up and come after me for it, I can try.” She had to repeat it for him and he actually reached a hand down to help her up.

“You shouldn’t sit on the floor in that pretty dress. Millie never would.” He looked the kid over again and handed her another coin. “You try real hard.”

“Sure, Bob, anything you say.”

“Then maybe I’ll feel like I can even touch her.” The drunken eyes misted over, more confused than dangerous now. “I’m counting on you, Audrey,” he said, and stumbled out the back door with his bottle.

48

In Telluride, the revelry was not to last. In Montrose, Judge Stevens of the District Court issued an injunction against the Citizens’ Alliance and Troop A restraining them from interfering with the return of the deported miners to their families. In Denver, Big Bill Haywood announced that the strikers would have to be returned to their homes by force because Telluride did not abide by the laws of the land. In Ouray, the miners’ union local armed fifty volunteers who offered to escort the exiles back over Imogene Pass.

So Bulkeley Wells and the Citizens’ Alliance asked Governor Peabody to return the militia to Telluride. On March 24, Peabody placed San Miguel County once again under martial law and ordered Brigadier General Sherman Bell, commander of the. National Guard and adjutant general of the state of Colorado, to Telluride with three hundred troops from the Cripple Creek garrison. Bell had charged San Juan Hill beside Teddy Roosevelt and had been a mine manager in Cripple Creek before the labor wars began. Now he set up headquarters in the lobby of the New Sheridan Hotel. Then he sat back to see what the rednecks proposed to do about it.

Charles Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, was arrested in Ouray on charges of desecrating the flag. He and others had been handing out handbills with slogans printed across the white stripes on “Old Glory.” Sheriff Cal Rutan persuaded the sheriff in Ouray to bring Moyer to Telluride and release him, whereupon General Bell arrested him and had him confined to a room in the New Sheridan. Bell then telegraphed to Governor Peabody in Denver, “Take all money on the proposition that the Stars and Stripes are waving over Fort Telluride and there is no one but Moyer in jail.”

Bulkeley Wells and the Mine Owners’ Association issued a statement to the press, “We do not propose to enter into negotiations of any nature with the Western Federation of Miners. We do not recognize a union in Telluride. There is no strike in Telluride.”

Big Bill Haywood persuaded the exiled miners to test Judge Stevens’s injunction that would permit them to return home. On April 8, seventy-eight of them boarded the train for Telluride. John O’Connell was among them.

When John stepped off the train he met absolute silence. The horses of the militia officers seemed turned to stone. Not a dog barked. Even the wind that blew a flag here, a pennant there, the corner of a neck scarf, or the skirt of a greatcoat did so quietly. For a moment John thought he must be dreaming for so many people to be standing so still.

There were over a thousand waiting for John and his friends at the depot and along the tracks and stacked back up into the town: the three hundred men of the National Guard, the sixty men of Wells’s Troop A, the proud young boys of the High School Cadets with their empty training rifles, hundreds of nonuniformed citizens with pistols and rifles at the ready, Cal Rutan and his band of deadly deputies.

Brigadier General Sherman Bell nodded his head. The Gatling gun thundered into the silence, echoes ricoheted off the valley walls, horses danced in sudden release from their statue-stance, and John O’Connell put his arms over his face thinking he was to die. His last thought before he did not die was to wonder at the expressions on faces of friends with whom he’d shared a glass. They regarded him with the same stoniness as did the soldiers, and John marveled that his life could mean so little to them and so much to him. But he lowered his arms to find himself alive, and those who stood with him.