“Where’d ya suppose he got shoes like thayet?”
“One more bend-over and he’s gonna bust them britches clean open.”
“Them big hands of his never done a man’s work, I can tell ya.”
Cree learned not to bristle when they called him “boy.” They called each other boy a lot too. But “Steeplehead” began to grate. In the long leisurely hours of polishing and sweeping and waiting for some yo-yo to step away from his crushed cigar butt long enough for Cree to pick it up, he’d daydream that Aletha would come for him and just before stepping back through the tear with her he’d turn around and flip off Willy and the boys at the gambling tables.
He’d never realized how beguiling the thought of stealing could become. He had nothing but scraps saved from his lone meal and a dead man’s coat, while stacks of gold and silver coins worth ten and twenty dollars apiece sat on the tables along the walls.
One of his duties was to keep the round stove in the corner stoked with coal, and at least he was warm during the days. But nights were long and cold. Cree stayed away from Stringtown, where all the other bums lodged, and found a boxcar with some loose hay down at the tracks instead. The hay and the heavy coat probably kept him from freezing the first night but they didn’t help his disposition much, nor his skin, already itching from the bandages around his middle. He saved the scraps from his meal to eat in the night when hunger attacked the little sleep he managed. He fantasized about the Jacuzzi and the queen-size bed in the modern Pick and Gad. Things looked up the second night when Willy presented him with a knitted wool cap and scarf. “Told the wife about you. Said you was a proud man and might not take ’em. Belonged to her brother.”
Cree took them. That night he removed his wet shoes and socks and wrapped the scarf around his feet. The wool was as scratchy as the hay and his bandages. He put the cap and scarf in his pocket when he went to work. He could easily carry all his possessions. “Don’t even have a toothbrush.”
“What’d you say, Steeplehead?” Willy leaned over the bar to peer at Cree on his hands and knees by a spittoon.
“I said I don’t even have a toothbrush.”
“What do you want a brush for your teeth for?”
“Think I’ll moon all of you instead.”
“Talks to hisself,” Willy explained to a customer, and Cree tried to decide whether he’d hug Aletha if he ever saw her again or throttle her.
He was just getting used to being dirty when payday came around and he bought himself a bath at a bathhouse in the rear of a saloon, a tall narrow building on Colorado Avenue that would still be around in his day. He’d thought it leaned from age but it was fairly new now and seemed to have been built that way. It had round wooden tubs like hot tubs but with much less water and heat. It was after ten and most of the business was in the saloon, so Cree had a tub to himself. He unwrapped dirty bandages from around his rib cage and finally took a decent breath. A heavy set man replaced him at ten every evening at the Cosmopolitan. By the mess that greeted Cree in the mornings, he guessed the guy served more as bouncer than scrubman.
After his bath, Cree went to a barbershop, where he had a shave and his hair cut too short. This all totaled seventy-five cents and would have been worth that in dollars if he’d had them. Next he visited Van Atta’s, “The Up-to-Date Outfitter,” to look for a pair of boots. Rows upon racks of almost identical suits for men and shelves of derby hats like he’d seen in the funeral procession were offered for rent. Someday this place would sell skis, but now a miner could come down off the mountain dirty, clean up at the bathhouse, rent a full suit of dress clothes at Van Atta’s, and be respectable for a night on the town. In the morning—having drunk, gambled, and whored away a month’s pay—he could return the suit and collect the deposit to buy breakfast or rent a blanket and thin mattress in an unheated room and sleep off his excesses or rent a horse to get him to work.
Van Atta’s sold clothing as well as rented, and must have stayed open most of the night, as did the rest of the town. Cree bought a pair of something called “Lumberman’s Pacs” for $2.10 and two pairs of socks for fifteen cents. The pacs, as the salesman proudly repeated over and over had “… ten-inch legs of oil-grain leather with oil-pac leather uppers and double soles sewn and inserted with round cone-headed Hungarian nails.” But Cree bought them because they were big enough to fit over two pairs of heavy socks. Since he’d worked a short week his grooming and shopping spree left him with $1.85 for the next week.
Although he smelled better he still was uneasy about stopping in at the Senate to delay his frigid night in the boxcar, but a bartender served him a five-cent mug of warm beer and told him to help himself to the free sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs on the bar. “Only what you can eat here,” he warned, sizing Cree up accurately. “You’re not to fill your pockets.”
Thick slices of bread with hunks of chewy beef or sausages, dripping with butter and ketchup, sat on the bar. He took one of each and a couple of eggs to an out-of-the-way corner and felt like a rich man. The Senate, unlike the Cosmopolitan, had a piano player and women. Tobacco smoke swirled among the limbs of the naked statuette swimming above the tables. The pervasive odor here and in this whole sector of town was that of malt liquor. It had soaked into walls and floors and clothes and hair and wood and brick. It distilled into the air and oozed out onto the street, where it hung above the planked sidewalks like a sign and choked the alleyways behind. It was the best advertising a bar could have.
Cree sat back full and content, wiggled his toes in his new dry boots, and watched a fight brewing at a gaming table toward the center of the room. It was a big table with many men sitting around it, and two of them were insisting that unions weren’t just for foreigners and that the fire at the Smuggler proved the working classes had to organize to protect their very lives. Others claimed otherwise and the shouting grew over the scraping back of chairs on the wooden floor.
Cree started when a man walking by him almost fell over his outstretched legs. “You union or are you not?”
“I’m just a poor man down on his luck, came in to get a beer so he could eat a free sandwich.”
“Awww”—the man shook his head like Mr. Pangrazia at the hospital—“tha’s not right in this plenteous country.” He handed Cree a coin. “Go have yourself a woman.” Then he turned into the room and socked the first guy to come at him.
Cree pulled in his legs and tried to look small. No chairs were hurled at the mirror and bottles behind the bar. There were some crunches and one man fell against a table, knocking over stacks of coins; then the bartender and two bouncers helped several gentlemen out the door and it was over. The two men who started the fight were still at their table when the room settled down. Those standing at the bar merely held their drinks up out of the way. Neither the piano player nor the gamblers around the edges had even paused. Hard to believe the horrors that would befall this town over that very argument. He’d seen better fights over a football score in Wyoming bars. Not one gun had been lifted from a gunbelt.
In the back rooms the suits didn’t look rented, and complete dinners were being served. The gambling was quieter, the stacks of coins higher, and the women more relaxed. Cree felt shabby here and returned to the front room. He read his new coin. It was worth twenty dollars. He put it away quickly. Nobody would believe he hadn’t snagged that off a gambling table. Before heading for his freezing boxcar, Cree climbed snowdrifts off the alley in back of the Senate to stare at the crib Aletha and Tracy would live in someday, in the dim hope of making contact with Aletha. This was the third night he’d done this, and tonight a town marshal approached him carrying a sawed-off pool cue for a nightstick and kept whacking it into his glove. “You want to give Floradora some business, boy, that’s between you and her. You want to make her scared every night like she’s been complaining of, and it’s gonna be between you and me.”
Cree slunk off. Even worse, Sheriff Rutan stopped in to the Cosmopolitan the next day to thro
w back a shot of rye and check up on him.
“He don’t make trouble. Don’t get drunk,” Willy praised him. “Gets to work on time and don’t lean on his broom too much. Real dependable fella.”
“Glad to hear that, Willy, glad to hear it.” The sheriff bent over Cree, who was on his knees shaking down the ashes in the stove. “Looks like your other employer hasn’t paid up yet. Or is this a good place for spying?” When Cree didn’t answer, he said, “You seen your three friends lately? I hear they could be stealing food and who knows what-all. See to it I don’t hear that about you, Mr. McCree Ronald Mackelwain.”
35
Clyde Duffer spread cold hands to the tiny fire. He sat in a crate. They’d arranged three tipped-over crates in a triangle, leaving a space in the middle open to the sky for fires. It was not the Hilton. And it was snowing again. He hadn’t seen so much snow since a television special on the Yukon. It crunched like broken glass as Maynard slid the other two crates apart enough to crawl into the triangle. Maynard had a package wrapped in butcher paper.
“What’d you do, roll a baglady?” Duffer asked him.
“Slipped into a few places and snatched the freebies off the bars. Got more beer joints in this damn place than houses. Garbage in the alleys is frozen so stiff you can’t tell what it is. Have to fight the dogs for it.” Maynard blew on his hands and presented Duffer with a pickle the size of an erection. “Got some sausages too. Figure if we held them over the flames—”
“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.
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