The Threshold (31 page)

“Lenny getting the gun?”

“Grabbing firewood off wood piles. Hey, Lenny and me go out and practically get wasted for blankets, clothes, and stuff—how come you don’t go out?”

“I’m the planner and you’re the gofers. How come no gun?”

“Everybody and his brother’s carrying a gun out there, Duffer. It’s like war, not the real world. Liable to get shot trying to nab one. What would you plan if we had one? A holdup? Hey, they got money falling off poker tables instead of chips in those joints, but it’s all change. And every guy in the place watching you grab it is wearing a gun. Odds are grueling, man.”

“Maybe I’m planning on visiting a joint and seeing for myself.” Duffer’s pickle was frozen already, crunched worse than the snow. “Secret-like.”

“You’d stand out a mile. Not dressed for staying more than long enough to steal some food and run. I mean, they wear three-piece suits in them places, and hats yet. Besides, Duffer, I don’t think they go in for long court trials and stuff here. Liable to get hung if they even suspect you.”

“You put away a few souls in your day, never bothered you. Never had anything pinned on you either. What makes this place so different?”

“That’s just it. In my day odds are I don’t have trouble. Odds are different here. And I don’t even know what they are yet.” Maynard stuck a sausage on a sharpened stick and held it over the fire. He had a scarf tied over his head like an old woman’s babushka and a floppy hat over that. With the seedy coat he’d yanked off a fallen drunk, Maynard looked the perfect picture of a hobo.

How had they come to this? Duffer had the gnawing urge to kill slowly and lovingly whoever was responsible for their predicament. But if you got right down to it, how could Mackelwain’s girlfriend have pulled off something like this? Duffer’s frustration was such that he’d eradicate somebody pretty soon anyway. He had to look like he was doing something. Maynard and Lenny just stuck to him now out of habit, fear of the unknown, and the dumb hope he could do something. The only reason Duffer hadn’t killed Mackelwain out of spite before this was that he couldn’t be positive the jerk wasn’t their only ticket home.

Cree was more concerned about how to break his twenty-dollar gold piece without coming under suspicion of having stolen it than he was about Duffer and his boys. And he worried about freezing to death as every night the mountain town grew more frigid. Most of the saloons on Colorado Avenue encouraged their customers to visit the attached dining rooms when hungry, but down in the tenderloin every bar had free treats for the price of a beer. He made the rounds so as not to make himself too unwelcome at any one place and thereby managed another meal every day.

It was at the Silver Bell one night that he saw Bulkeley Wells, Arthur Collins, and two other dandies out slumming in this working-class bar. Bulkeley Wells Cree knew by his picture in the history books and Arthur Collins by the talk of the men standing next to him. Wells seemed truly above any of the mutterings either of discontent or of admiration that whisked around the place at his entrance, but Collins was clearly uncomfortable. Cree looked with interest at Collins, the man history had slated for assassination in a little less than a year. He held himself aloof while Wells joked with hard-rock miners, thumping them on the back. Just once, briefly, his eyes chanced to meet Cree’s over the heads of others and Cree could feel the impact. Whatever the man turned his hand to, the power of his charm would turn others with him. Cree was again reminded of how much he wanted Aletha to come for him before this town tore itself apart.

The next time he saw Bulkeley Wells was in the Cosmopolitan. Wells sat at a table in the dining room with Collins, Sheriff Cal Rutan, and a stooped white-haired man. Cree was on his way back to the saloon from his meal of creamed chicken over mashed potatoes. They were dining on roast duck.

“Mr. McCree Mackelwain”—the sheriff gestured with a half-gnawed bone—“come over here.” Rutan asked Wells, “This your man?”

“No man of mine. Any of your doing, Homer?”

“Never saw him before,” the elderly gentleman answered. “You a union man, boy?”

“No sir, I’m unaligned.”

“Talks funny,” the sheriff explained. “Thinks he’s educated. Says he’s from Cheyenne. I wired up there and they never heard of him.” People were discussing Cree as if he weren’t present again.

“McCree … odd Christian name. His mother’s maiden name, I’ll wager.” Wells looked at Cree more closely. “I see intelligence behind those eyes, Cal, and the smolder of violence.”

“Meek as a kitten for as big as he is.” The sheriff dismissed Cree with a wave of his hand. “It’s why, I want to know.”

“There’s only one way to be sure of him, Cal,” Wells said with a softness Cree could just hear as he reached the door to the saloon.

That night Cree started for his boxcar early and hungry because he’d run out of nickels for beer until payday. It was one of those clear nights when a full moon blue-tinted the snow heaped everywhere and sound snapped on rarefied air. A frozen burro lay on its side at the end of Spruce Street like a tipped-over statue. It had been there last night too and Cree wondered when someone would think to cart it off. Three or four men stood on the tracks stomping their feet and talking steam balloons between Cree and his boxcar, so he walked on down the tracks past piled lumber and the R. Wunderlich and Rella Bottling Works and Beer Storage. He turned off to the ice pond, a dammed-up offshoot of the river. The brick icehouse would someday be a restaurant but was now used to store squares of ice cut from the pond to distribute to Telluride’s iceboxes.

They stood at the edge of the pond near a roped-off area and at first Cree thought they might be ice skaters. She had her hands demurely ensconced in a muff and pleaded with voice tone and movements of her head instead of gestures. He hunched into his coat, bent slightly toward her. They kept about a foot apart. Cree turned away, feeling as lonely as he had that day at Dutch Massey’s funeral.

Then he heard her running toward him, light footsteps, and what he first thought were hiccups but realized soon were choked cries. She passed him in awkward hopping steps, hampered by her skirts, her arms held out for balance on the icy path between snowbanks. She slipped, skidded, and fell. The muff came flying back toward Cree. She was on her feet almost at once and racing over the tracks to the street on the other side. Cree braced his body to block the man if he was intent on chasing her and found himself facing Callie’s brother.

“Aunt Lilly?” Bram called softly after the fleeing figure. He looked more like himself filled out by his heavy clothing, but he sounded stricken.

Cree walked the plowed tracks with Bram O’Connell. “I couldn’t take her money,” Bram explained, stroking his aunt’s muff. “Not that we couldn’t use some. Ma’am needs her medicine. Pa can’t work till they rebuild up at the Smuggler.”

“Why can’t you accept help from your own aunt?”

“She’s Floradora now. One of them. She’s dead to us.” For a boy who was so emaciated, he had a long, strong stride.

Cree worked to keep up. Bram formed an odd and tenuous link with his own world. “Tell me more about the cave-in.”

“Who are you? You knew about it months before it happened,” Bram said. “How do you close up holes without leaving any mending marks?”

Cree had no answer that would make sense, so he just said, “Charles is getting fat and lazy. Aletha spoils him.”

“You warned me not to go back in the drifts up at Alta, and one caved in. Your lady warned Callie not to come to Telluride and she did. I’m afraid to ask what you plan for her.”

“Bram, we didn’t plan the cave-in. We feared it would happen. Aletha is worried that your sister might become like … like your Aunt Lilly, one of them.” Cree was saved by Aunt Lilly’s muff as the boy swung at him with the hand that still held it. He grabbed Bram in a bear hug and was almost thrown off the tracks. There was power in this kid still. “Listen to me, will ya? I’m not insulting your sister. It’s just that Aletha worries for her. She loves your sister too.”

“Then she’d never even think such a thing of my Callie girl.”

“It’s not thinking it that makes it happen. Weren’t you a little surprised when your aunt became Floradora?”

Bram pushed Cree away and broke an ice chunk off the edge of a warehouse platform and hurled it into the night, his whole body behind it, a cut-off groan escaping his throat. He stared at Cree, his eyes shadowed by a bony face and the tilt of his head under a yard light. He wore a knitted cap like Cree’s.

For a moment Bram’s head reminded Cree of a skull. In Cree’s reality, Bram O’Connell would have been dead for years, probably decades. All the background sounds of this mining camp seemed suddenly as remote and hollow as the wind. Cree shuddered, shook his head clear of ghosts. They tramped past the dead burro and around the curve in the tracks where the dregs of the prostitutes held court in sagging cribs. Bram stopped suddenly. “Are you my real father?” When Cree was too stunned to answer, the kid slouched farther into his shoulders and walked on. “You’re so tall like I am and … you seem to search me out.”

“But your pa—”

“I’m a foundling. But I always wondered what he’d be like. If he ever wondered too. Men don’t, I guess.” Bram stopped again. “I belong to John O’Connell and I’d gladly die for him, so don’t think—”

“Bram, hey, I’m not your father. I’d like to be your friend.” I’m a good half-century younger than you, kid. “But if I ever have a son, I’d be proud if he were like you.” Cree wasn’t sure how much he was talking aloud to himself, how much he meant to say.

“Nobody wants a scarecrow for a son, mister, a scholar who can’t even swing a double jack.”

“Where I come from, scholars do very well. Brains outweigh muscle every time.”

“Where do you come from? You talk in a strange way.”

“Wyoming.”

“Do they have many scholars in Wyoming?” Bram scratched at his scalp through his cap. “Where I come from a man tests his mettle with a hammer and steel.”

The next time Cree saw Bram, the boy told him he’d found work after school, loading and unloading boxcars at the R. Wunderlich and Rella Bottling Works and didn’t feel the need to walk so much at night.

And the next time Willy Selby at the Cosmopolitan Saloon paid him, Cree bought himself a bath, rented a three-piece suit and a derby at Van Atta’s, and took his twenty-dollar gold piece to the Pick and Gad.

36

Cree was sweeping out the Cosmopolitan Saloon the next morning when he saw Aletha Kingman. He always stirred up the fire in the coal stove first, then cleaned the toilet behind it where the flush tanks sat high on the wall. He’d clean himself at the sink placed just outside the door in the saloon proper. It had two faucets; one ran cold, the other icy cold. He’d change the blackened four-foot towel for a clean one each day. Cree would spread buckets of sawdust on the floor to soak up any mud or tobacco juice that hadn’t dried to concrete. With snow everywhere and mud streets thawing now and then at midday, the floor was always filthy. He’d sweep sawdust and everything that came up with it out onto the sidewalk and then shovel it and any new-fallen snow out onto the street. Last, he mopped the floor with soap and water.

This morning, Cree was still at the sweeping-it-out-onto-the-sidewalk stage when Bulkeley Wells himself rode up on a sleek and nervous horse. He stopped and watched Cree over the snowbank. “I think, Mr. McCree Mackelwain, that this sort of thing does not suit you.” His horse shied and pranced but he sat it as if he didn’t even notice. “I think perhaps we can find something more to your liking. If you’re interested, I should be in my hotel suite at the New Sheridan around two o’clock this afternoon.”

Cree was interested in anything that would pay enough for him to rent a room and buy three solid meals a day. He was about to tell Mr. Bulkeley just that when he noticed Aletha standing across Colorado Avenue. He dropped the broom and the horse reared. “Aletha, I’m here. Over here!”

“What the devil?” Wells said, more discomfited by the sight across the street than by the dangerous antics of his steed. Across the street there wasn’t any snow. The sun shone on Aletha’s honey hair and the bare sidewalk was concrete instead of wood. Across the street Aletha looked comfortable in a light jacket. She started toward him.

“For God’s sake don’t come to me. I’ll come over there.” Cree recognized the building she’d been about to enter as the one where Renata Winslow had her office, and he recognized the woman who came to lean out of a secondstory window as Renata Winslow. Bulkeley Wells’s terrified horse practically ran him down as Cree raced across to Aletha, and he heard the snap of authority in the other man’s voice as he tried to control the animal.

The herbal dusty scents of autumn instead of horseshit. And Aletha Kingman smelled blessedly of soap and hair rinse and toothpaste.

Aletha sat naked in the Jacuzzi in the condominium at the Pick and Gad. She sipped champagne mixed with orange juice and faced Cree through steam. The side of one leg gently brushed his as the bubbles frothed and lifted her while he told his story. “I’d just gotten my twenty-dollar gold piece broken so I’d have some money, and there you were. I couldn’t believe it.”

Aletha couldn’t believe it either. She’d been on her way to find out if Renata had any work for her when she’d felt a cold wind on her back. Cree had rushed her here before Renata or anyone could question him. He’d showered, shaved, and brushed his teeth—to hear him tell it—forty-two times. When she returned with the fixings, he prepared fluffy cheese-and-mushroom omelets and a half-pound of bacon. They took the phone off the hook. The world would come down on them soon enough. “Love your new hairdo. Makes your ears stick out.”

“And you have something the matter with your smile.”

“One of your goon friends kicked me in the teeth. I’m lucky I’m only going to have to have one of them capped. What gets me is how you could have healed up so fast. There’s only a few marks left on you from that beating.”

“Well, it was over a month ago. Even old men like me heal eventually.”