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.
“Mildred,——are.”
Mildred jumped. How long had she stood here?
“– called———phone.———answer.” Doris Lowell led her back down the stairs. “Meal———nice. Mustn’t————stairs.” Doris helped her into her chair and the woman who brought her hot meal put the tray across her lap. Doris turned on the television too low for Mildred to hear it, but the vegetables looked soft enough for once. One of them handed Mildred her teeth. “Now,—–——a good girl.”
That wasn’t what they used to call her and Mildred hadn’t been a “girl” since most people around here were born. How long could she go on like this? Her age was unseemly. Mildred didn’t know how to stop being, and feared the alternative. She suspected she was eating some kind of fish, a square of something warm and salty. The buttered mashed potatoes and chocolate pudding were best. She felt so much better. Had she forgotten breakfast?
“——think? All right——stairs. –———worried.”
“I’m just fine, Doris. Don’t fuss.” Mildred removed the painful teeth. She must wash them more often. That ridiculous child on the television was going to have another baby. Illegitimate of course. Doris was still watching her. Doris thought herself old for a few gray hairs, but she could walk, bend, carry without pain. Mildred could remember when Doris moved to town. “You go back to your family.” That’s right, Doris’s family was dead or moved away. “I’ll be just fine.”
“——coffee.” Doris handed her a hot cup. Something was wrong. Mildred usually fixed her own coffee. Heat felt so good in her bones now that she was old. Letty carried pails and pails of water to heat for her baths. Something was still wrong. Doris was still here and the coffee was gone.
Tracy watched the same soap as was on Mildred’s TV while Aletha sketched Charles, who sat on the windowsill watching the lack of activity on Pacific Avenue. After their cemetery excursion she’d left Cree gorging at the Floradora and come home to Charles, depressed and fearful of setting things off by her mere presence, losing Cree to history again. She felt cursed.
“So you come back to lose me in the past,” Tracy said. “Thanks.”
The process of sketching was soothing, the sweep and jerk of the pencil, the shape of the cat taking form. “Kitty, hold your tail still.”
But the tip of Charles’s tail twitched like a worm caught by a shovel edge. His purring increased and softened during dramatic lulls in the soap opera and five-inch whiskers trembled slightly in the light. His front toes tightened and stretched, the claws sounding a thin scritching on the old wooden sill. He made the shabby crib cozy just by being content, being Charles sitting in the window.
Superimposed on the tranquil scene, Aletha kept seeing Cree sitting back on his heels, a dirt smudge on his forehead, looking up at her from the cemetery sod. She was becoming dangerously dependent on him for something to think about.
Charles stiffened. His tail began to swell. He moaned warning in his throat and stared into the room unblinking, owl-eyed. A haziness formed over his head. Aletha thought she saw a shelf with a candle burning in a candlestick, a beer stein on one side of it and a decorated plate standing on edge on the other. She blinked it away and screamed. Tracy came off her bed and Charles soared into the room like a flying squirrel. “Run out the back way, fast!”
Aletha snatched Charles by the hind feet as he fought to scoot under her bed. She carried him twisting and clawing into the kitchen. “Callie girl,” a voice behind her cried, a male voice, young, heartsick. “Callieeee …”
Aletha joined Tracy outside and righted the cat. He was so stiff he could have spent the night in a deep freeze. She looked around the corner of the crib. Pacific Avenue appeared to be the one she knew every day. She ran along the side to the street until she could see the Datsun parked where she’d left it. She fought cat claws to free a hand to open the door and hurled Charles in. He landed on Tracy, who was slipping in on the other side. Then it was a struggle to ex
tricate the keys from her tight jeans pocket, and her heart felt like it was trying to pound its way up her throat. The Datsun tore up Pacific Avenue and headed for Colorado Avenue and out of town. Tracy heaved Charles into the backseat and braced herself against the dash like Cree did. “It was happening again, right?” Tracy shouted as if they were being pursued by the clamor of a hundred bombers. “I left the TV on. Where are we going?”
“If it happens because of me, maybe it won’t when I’m gone, maybe we can outrun it.” Aletha felt the quartz pendant hanging outside her shirt. It was definitely warm. Her hand came away with a faint rusty stain. “But I can’t go anyplace old. It’s old places, buildings—”
“Aletha, everything’s old in Telluride, except new houses, condos. Aren’t you supposed to report to the marshal before leaving town?”
“But the land they’re on is old. We have to get away from Telluride. Someplace … I know, Renata’s. That area is all new, isn’t it?”
“The land is old everywhere. Who knows what was on it? It’s Renata’s day off.”
“Good. Then she’ll be home. We’ll call the marshal’s office from there.” Renata didn’t answer their knock, but she hadn’t locked the door. “Renata? You home? It’s Aletha.” The refrigerator hummed on the kitchen mezzanine above. The heating system clicked and crackled softly. Sun bathed the greenhouse area, and the place had a slight muggy-jungle smell. Aletha released Charles, who plomped up the central stairs with a parting grainy “Waaaaa.”
“Hey, Aletha, come see.” Tracy stood between two cascading house plants at the front wall of windows and pointed to the deck outside that held a round picnic table and several lounges. An aluminum contraption that fanned out toward the angle of the sun contained a naked woman stretched down the middle.