“You and the rest,” Nate whispered, “you don’t belong here. You go on out of here now, all of you, before it’s too late, and … it’ll be too late pretty soon now.”
He Was so far beneath her Omie found it difficult to care what he said. She gave him a nudge, and he stumbled backward several feet, then laughed. “How do you do that?” he asked. “Tell me how you do that, little girl.”
He moved forward again, and she saw a picture in his head of Nate and herself doing something Omie could not comprehend, but it was an ugly picture, the two of them being so close, so she pushed him further away still, and he fell over, laughing softly, and she understood that he was drunk, and that was what caused his shadow to be so elusive and threatening. When her uncles had gotten drunk on the first night at the cabin, she had seen them glow like fireflies, but Nate was a bad man through and through, without hope of redemption through color. His heartbeat was small and mean, like a toy drum, and he picked himself up and backed slowly away from her, his drumbeat angry, made irregular by hatred and a partially hidden pulse of fear.
When he was gone, Omie considered the thing called fear. She knew that all people felt it sometime, in large or small doses, and behaved according to their color and shadow self. Fear was always dark; the greater the fear, the deeper the darkness, and the deeper the darkness, the more terrible the shapes that could be placed within it: terrifying shapes, without dimension, beyond description. Omie had never known the shapes to come out from herself, but she was aware of them deep inside her: tiny, squiggling things like demons trapped inside a magic bottle. In men like Nate, the demons were larger, more powerful when stirred to wakefulness, as irresistible as the need to eat, the need to empty one’s bowels. The shadow world of fear. She skirted its slowly boiling perimeter, peering inside for answers among the swirling darkness. No golden elk ever sprang from so inhospitable a place.
She looked up once more, searching for the angels with the apples, but the stars were unattended, each one a tiny shard of glass from the shattered ceiling that once had covered all things. Omie shivered. The night was cold; she could smell snow somewhere beyond the horizon.
52
Winter came to the nation before fall had properly taken its leave, and Leo’s train was stranded in western Pennsylvania for two days by unseasonable blizzards, then was dug out and began moving again.
Too tall to be placed inside any kind of rolling stock with a roof, the elk had been securely lashed onto a flatcar, at either end of which rode boxcars crammed with Pinkerton guards. The locomotive was manned by an engineer and a fireman, plus two Pinkertons stationed in the cab to ensure that no robbers attempted to stop the train; another two kept the brakeman company in the caboose.
The weather being as it was, volunteers for guard duty in the open cab could not be found, and the man in charge, Boysie Frazier, established a rotating roster of paired names to make sure that no one froze. The railroad men were replaced at approximately two-hundred-mile intervals for the same reason. The railroad companies whose tracks were used as the train passed across the land were sworn to grant the special duty only to their most trusted and experienced men. It had been Boysie Frazier who suggested to his superiors that only railroad men with established families should be submitted for inclusion, since they would be less likely to risk ruination for their loved ones. It was always possible, reasoned Boysie, that some young and reckless fool might be tempted to cooperate with a bunch of bigger fools who planned to steal the elk somewhere along its journey.
Boysie didn’t actually believe that anyone, professional or amateur, would do any such thing, since an attempt against a body of men as heavily armed as those under his command could only result in obliteration by gunfire. He had made the proposal anyway, since it always impressed the men at the top of the company to know that one of their operatives was using his head to calculate the odds for success. Boysie very much wanted to be promoted into the upper echelon of the Pinkerton ranks, and shrewdly took advantage of the Brannan elk assignment to thrust himself forward. If the delivery took place without incident, he would almost certainly be rewarded with his own office and a substantial raise in pay.
The train progressed slowly toward the midwest, its progress delayed by storms that covered the rails with up to seven feet of snow. The guards took turns at sleeping in the crude wooden bunks, fed the cast-iron stove each car was provided with, and smoked and talked and gambled to pass the time away. This last activity was generally forbidden by the company, but Boysie allowed it, because bored men quickly became disgruntled men, and men in that state never performed their duties to standard.
The boxcars were filled with smoke and easy laughter and the smell of gun oil. Boysie traveled often between the two, by way of the flatcar carrying the elk. Special doorways and windows had been placed in the ends of the boxcars facing the priceless cargo, the better to keep an eye on it at all times, and Boysie passed to and fro through these doors so many times each hour his men began referring to him as “Fresh-air Frazier.” Each time he passed by the elk he checked its hemp and chain moorings to assure himself they remained secure, and then he would stare at the countryside for several minutes, whether it was moving past or stationary. Watching him through the end windows, his men joked about Boysie wanting to be a landscape watercolorist, else why stand out there in the freezing cold, looking at nothing.
At night, lanterns with directional shades were lit and aimed at the elk, to obviate any need for checking by hand through the hours of darkness, but Boysie went outside anyway to stand alongside the golden creature with its nose raised to the wind, antlers already soiled by carbon cinders from the smokestack. Boysie had overseen the elk’s loading back in Pittsburgh, and when the railyard foreman had been about to have it placed on the flatcar with its rump toward the locomotive and its head toward the caboose, Boysie had objected, and made the steam crane operator lift it up again so the elk could face forward, scenting its destination. Boysie’s wife often said he was overly artistic in matters of arrangement, right down to the way table cutlery was placed before him, but Boysie knew he was simply unsatisfied with things being anything less than the way he felt instinctively that they should be. So the elk faced forward, and Boysie went out to keep it company as often as he could, and ignored such comments as he knew were being raised behind his back. He was being careful, that was all.
Sometimes, as he paced the flatcar at night, he pictured how the elk must appear to farmers near the tracks who happened to glance out their windows as the train rolled past. First would come the snorting engine, the blackness of its bulk slicing through a field of white behind the arrow-headed snowblade, and then the illuminated elk, gliding by on its clanging bed of wheels, a fantastic beast from another time, frozen now among mortal men. Boysie was sure that somewhere inside him there lived a poet, but detective work was far more rewarding than setting down words, and he did not regret that the poet must lie curled up and drowsing within him, since the detective was able to affect the real world in ways no poet could.
Levon came out to the cabin despite snow on the trail high as his horse’s belly in places, to tell Lodi the train had started out from Pittsburgh. A conference was called to try and formulate the plan that thus far had eluded them.
“A week, that’s all we’ve got,” Lodi said, “unless the weather helps us out.”
“Bad weather’s a problem for us too,” Clay said. “What slows the train down slows us down just the same. How far would we get on horseback in the middle of a snowstorm?”
“Weighed down by gold,” put in Drew.
“The gold,” said Lodi. “Does anyone have even the beginning of an idea on how to lift it off the train and take it away with us? I haven’t.”
The Dugans looked at each other.
Zoe said, “I have been thinking.”
“I’m listening,” said Lodi.
“What I have to say will no doubt offend a man such as yourself, whose trade is
robbery for profit. The fact is, I now intend that we should make our escape with nothing but ourselves.”
“I don’t believe I’m catching your drift.”
“I mean to say, the purpose of the robbery is to take the elk from my husband, not to retain it for ourselves.”
“Not retain it? And do what with it instead?”
Zoe told him, and Lodi laughed out loud.
“It’s not funny,” Clay said.
“You want to take something like that, a thing made of gold … and do that to it? You Dugans, you’re crazy. Pardon me, ma’am, I guess I just don’t understand.”
“I expected that you would not,” said Zoe. “Are you no longer interested in helping me?”
“I generally take chances for profit, ma’am, the old-fashioned kind of stealing. This notion of yours is just … I guess I’d have to call it childish. It makes no kind of sense to me at all.”
“It’s a gesture,” Zoe said, “and as such, it has great significance.”
“To you, maybe, not to me. No, ma’am, if I’d known ahead of time what it was you planned on doing, I never would have bothered trying to figure a way to get the job done.”
“But you have said yourself that taking such an object with us is impossible. If we do what I’ve suggested, our problems are halved. We need only to capture the elk, without worrying how we might make off with it.”
“But ma’am, it’s … it’s a damn fool thing to do in the first place. No one ever robbed a train just to go and do that with the thing that was taken, no one at all.”
“Then we will be the first.”
“Nothing wrong with being first,” said Drew.
“History,” said Clay. “It’ll make history.”
“The world already has a few thousand years’ worth of that,” Lodi said. “Me, I prefer something I can use.”
“Sure would be a story, though,” said Levon. “Folks’d sit up and take notice, a thing like that happened in the newspaper.”
Lodi shook his head. “Fame generally goes right along with fortune, and it’s the second part I like.”
“Maybe you need time for getting used to the idea,” Clay suggested.
Lodi shook his head. “You people are going to have to go through with this half-robbery on your own. I won’t risk my neck, or Nate’s or Levon’s, on something so wild.”
“That’s your final word?”
“It is. Just two men against that kind of outfit? They’ll gun you down like buffalo.”
“Not just two men,” said Zoe. “I shall be there, and Miss Torrey has offered her assistance also.”
“Is that right. Well, you ladies are both crazy, and I don’t apologize for using the word.” He looked at Clay and Drew, and said, “Men that would let you go along on something like this are no men at all. And that doesn’t mean I changed my mind. Go ahead and kill yourselves if you want.”
After this unpromising confrontation, Clay took Drew and Zoe outside to assess their chances of success without Lodi and his men.
“He won’t change his mind,” said Drew. “I know him well enough to tell you that, flat out. It’s us and only us in this now.”
“But we still don’t have a single thing you could call a plan,” Clay said, “and Zoe, I appreciate what you said in there about taking part, but that won’t happen. It’s Drew and me, and unless we can win Levon over to our side, or find another couple of men someplace, Lodi’s right—it can’t be done.”
“Clay, as my brother, I’ll listen to anything and everything you have to say, but as your sister, I can tell you now that you’d better stop fooling yourself. I have my own mind, and I make my own decisions, thank you.”
“Then I’m backing out of the whole deal. Drew, did Fay say to you that she’d be willing to come along and hold a gun?”
“She did.”
“And you didn’t tell her no? What’s the matter with you! What’s the matter with both of you, and Fay too! This is a train robbery we’re planning, not a visit to the store. Nossir, I won’t take part if there’s women along. I mean no offense by that, but … hell, if you can’t see how stupid it is, I give up. I’ve got boneheads for family, seems like.”
Clay was not prepared for their laughter.
“What?” he said. “What’s so damn funny?”
“The thing is,” Drew said, “Omie told us we’ll all be there, including her.”
“Omie? No!”
“You know she sees things ahead of time. You’ve heard the stories. How can you say it won’t happen that way?”
“Zoe, you told me the predictions are sometimes off the mark by a number of years. It doesn’t matter what Omie says, a plan has to be made … consciously, by making decisions, not listening to what a girl says will happen.”
Even as he said this, Clay was aware of his own hypocrisy; he had fallen in with the plan to rob Brannan’s train without conscious choice, had simply accepted his place among the robbers-to-be after Omie told him he would be there. He should not have done it, but he had, and he could see in the faces of his brother and sister that Omie had shared with them the conversation she had had with Clay. It seemed that Omie was running things without even trying, and that was about as foolish as a situation could get.
Clay frowned at them both and marched away to cool himself among the trees. It was all a mess, a foolish mess, this notion of taking the golden elk. He should have said so from the start, and not gone along with everyone. Lodi was the smart one, backing out the minute he learned what Zoe intended to do once the elk was in her hands. But Clay couldn’t do that himself, not now, even if his head was pulling him in another direction from his heart. Family was family, and he had thrown in his lot with Drew and Zoe, come what may. He was a fool to have done it, maybe, but he could not turn away from them. The glow inside himself that had come with the miracle of meeting them both in the same day had given way since then to a sense of obligation, of duty, the kind of thing he had attempted to master when he married Sophie Stunce and gave her a child. It had been a failure then, and he did not want it to be a failure this time. The Dugans would not separate again, ever, even if the thing that held them together was a wildcat scheme with no hope of succeeding.
He began to grow cold, out on his own, surrounded by snow and pines, and so Clay walked toward the cabin again. He was still some distance from it when he met Drew, following Clay’s tracks, and when he saw his brother, Drew said, his face shining, “Omie’s got it, Clay! She’s got the plan, and it’s like nothing you ever heard before.”
Clay stopped and stared at his brother, and wondered what could be causing the terrible sensation of dread that suddenly emerged within himself.
From the moment Levon had come to the cabin from Carbondale with news of the train, Omie found it difficult to think of anything else. She pictured it making its way across the frozen fields of the east, then the open plains beyond the Missouri. Levon had said the elk was carried on a railroad flat-car for all the world to see, and Omie saw it skimming along as described, her very own elk of gold.
The trouble was, no one knew how to take the elk away from Leo. Mama had wanted the man called Lodi to take it for her, since he was very good at such things, but he had not liked what Zoe intended doing afterward, and said he wanted no part in the taking. That made everyone sad and irritable, and their feelings swirled around the cabin in jagged waves that made Omie go outside to escape them. Omie was not so sad as the rest, because she had seen that there would indeed be a robbery, with both her uncles taking part, so it was clear that a plan would be found in time. The elk was coming closer every day, but before it reached the high mountain passes of Colorado, the means to take it would surely be known.
The train would have to come along the spur line between Leadville and Glory Hole. Omie remembered that line well, having passed along it with Zoe when they left Elk House to begin their voyage across the ocean, and again when they came back, and a third time when Leo told them both to
go away forever. Scenery along the Glory Hole spur was among the most spectacular in the world, and in the same newspaper Levon had brought to the cabin with details of the train’s coming, there was an editorial piece, which Zoe read aloud, describing how the golden elk and the public interest in its owner (Omie had scoffed at that description of Leo) would soon draw many people from the east, wealthy travelers who would want to journey along the spur just to gasp at the majesty of its surroundings. Levon had expressed doubt that folks would come all that way just to look at a stretch of country; “They’d have better things to do, most likely.”
Recalling the thirty-odd miles of track that twisted and turned and snaked its way higher and higher toward Glory Hole, Omie found herself wanting to think of nothing else, so she stooped and took herself beneath the low boughs of a spruce and went on her knees to its trunk. There was no snow beneath the tree, it hung so low, and she squatted on her heels in the dimness there, breathing the faint odor of sap mixed with the smell of burning wood from the cabin’s stovepipe chimney. It was the perfect place in which to close her eyes, the better to concentrate on what she knew was something important.
Now she was an eagle, soaring many miles to the east, and below her wings she saw the Glory Hole spur, a serpentine scrawl meandering among the peaks and valleys, two fine parallel lines. There were no trains below her as Omie flew along the track. She saw in passing that sometimes the rails disappeared beneath banks of snow, but the snow was not deep, certainly nothing that a locomotive could not push aside and trample through with its mighty wheels.
But there was one place where the tracks could not be seen at all, and Omie recalled why that was so: they ran inside a long wooden shed that covered the line completely for almost three miles. Railroad men had built the snow shed to protect the rails from inundation along a section of the line that became blocked by drifts up to twenty feet deep every winter, which hampered the coal trains bringing fuel to the many furnaces of Glory Hole. Leo had insisted they build the three-mile shed, so his mining and smelting operations could continue without interruption all year round.