The Threshold

by Marlys Millhiser

  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.”

  “Cree, you’ve only been gone six days.”

  “Six days …” He sat staring into the steam between them and then laughed. “When I left here it was September, when I got there it was November. And they were talking about Christmas when I left. I’ve been gone six days and lived a month.”

  “I went back for an overnight, but it was the wrong year.” Aletha described the day of the fog. “A couple of the gals here at the cathouse did remember you though, Cree. Your stay couldn’t have been all that much work and no play if they remembered you after two years. I mean, there was probably a lot of traffic in and out of this place.” His gaze was steady, unrevealing. He didn’t bother to comment. It was his business if he wanted to visit a whorehouse. It had probably been a very long month in those six days. It irked her anyway. “What if the time switch happens again? Right now, like we are? Here we’d be in the past with nothing but two champagne glasses, surrounded by a bunch of sweaty, gawking prostitutes.”

  “That experience was no joke. Promise me you won’t mess with this again.”

  “I wish I’d taken your advice and left town when I could. But now the sheriff has told me not to leave. He’s looked up my prison record, which was reversed but not erased. And I really feel responsible for what happened to you, but I can’t stop it from happening again. I probably shouldn’t go to work and expose others to God-knows-what, but I have to eat and pay rent. And the delicious, sexy mood the champagne and I were conjuring up is evaporating like the bubbles in—”

  “Shush, please? Shut up.” He pulled her toward him by her knees. “Don’t get all simpy and weepy on me.” He was just drawing her onto his lap when someone literally pounded on the door.

  “I know you’re in there, Mackelwain. This is the sheriff. Open up.”

  Aletha huddled in clothes still wet that she’d hurried into without drying herself off. Cree sat in a terrycloth robe at the other end of the couch. The sheriff, a deputy, and the town marshal swaggered around them talking tough. “Those three guys are mob, Mackelwain. You expect me to believe you took care of them?” the sheriff asked. “If so there’s a lot in your background that is not known by the computer.”

  “I didn’t do anything to them. Aletha did, and I told you how.” But Cree explained again. “And when the tear opened up, they weren’t around to come back. Guess they’re stuck.”

  “Bunch of screaming nuts
, all of them,” the sheriff told the marshal. “And the reason you show little sign of the beating those guys gave you, according to Miss Kingman here and Miss Ledbetter, is because in the last six days you’ve been gone you lived a month in the year 1901 and had time to heal.”

  Cree winced, then shrugged. “Right.”

  “The mob goes after your partner, Massey, and he’s dead. Now the mob is after you. What do you suppose they want? This?” And the sheriff took the hunk of rock his men had found in Alta from a bag. “Know what it is?”

  “A rock?”

  “Don’t get smart. Most of this ‘rock’ is highgrade gold, the likes of which have not been seen in this county since the old days when they tore up the San Juans for it. Now it’s worth bucks, but nothing like what your partner was into. Maybe Miss Kingman whisked this out of 1901 for us with her special powers?”

  “They found that under Callie’s cabin, Cree,” Aletha said. “But the only time I’ve been under there was when we were trying to flush Charles. Remember?”

  “Charles who?” The sheriff put a foot up on the coffee table and struck a pose.

  “Callie’s cat … my cat now. Callie’s a little girl from the past. She—”

  “Cat.” Sheriff Rickard nodded patiently. “I’m not interested in cats. I’m interested in cocaine.” He kept right on nodding. “Which happens to be relevant to your past and to Mr. Mackelwain’s and what the employers of the missing Clyde Duffer, Maynard Bellamy, and Lennard Pheeney are interested in. I see a connection somewhere.”

  “You’ve had no reports of a sudden winter on Colorado Avenue this morning?” Cree asked. “What about the fog on Pacific a couple of days ago?”

  The marshal looked interested and about to speak, but the sheriff cut him off. “The only snow I want to know about comes in kilos, grams, and ounces. You are both under investigation and I want you to stay where I can find you. You so much as take a walk in the woods, you check in with the marshal first.”

  “I’m going to enjoy the luxury of this place while I can,” Cree said when they’d left. “It’s only a matter of time before they discover it belonged to Dutch and grab it too. Or that sheriff will have me in jail for something I don’t know about yet. Or the local narcs or the feds will have my balls for—”

  “And you’re glad to get back?”

  “Sure beats hell out of a cold boxcar, lady.” Cree reached for her again. And someone knocked on the door again. A more polite if insistent rapping this time. “Shit!”

  “Cree Mackelwain,” Renata Winslow said when he’d opened the door, “where have you been?”

  “Right here. In 1901.” Cree slammed around the kitchen, filling the teakettle and dumping beans in the electric coffee grinder.

  “And you I had work for,” Renata told Aletha. “But could I reach you?” She slipped the phone back on its cradle and turned to Cree. “And I thought you’d gotten killed like Dutch. There are all sorts of nefarious nerds ranging our tiny community and asking questions about you. And who was the gorgeous hunk on the horse in the snowstorm with you this morning?”

  “Mr. Bulkeley Wells.” Aletha leafed through a book on Telluride until she came across Wells’s picture.

  “He did sort of look like him, but Wells died out in California sometime in the thirties I think. The guy on the horse was young. And how did you manage that little snowstorm? Or the fog the other day?”

  “Renata, I told you about my problem at your party.”

  “And I still don’t buy it. But I know a few people who were at the film festival who would give their eyeteeth to know how you do this stuff. I can contact them if you’re interested.”

  Aletha curled up in her damp clothes in a close approximation of a fetal position. “Why do all these things happen to me?”

  “You didn’t spend a month sleeping in a boxcar.” Cree poured coffee into three mugs. “I just want to hide in here and never go out.”

  “Probably the first place the narcs will look for you,” Renata said. “You work that snowstorm on the ski slopes in October and the town will hire you for life.”

  “I told Bram that Charlie is fat and sassy. Did you know Floradora was his aunt? He about killed me when I suggested Callie might go the same way. Floradora lived in the crib you and Tracy are renting.”

  “I know you two want to be alone,” Renata said. “You can talk gibberish over my head all day. But I’m staying until I get some answers.”

  “What I didn’t tell him about was the snowslide.” Cree picked up the book and started turning pages. “At the Liberty Bell. Let’s see, it was … oh, God, next spring. Figures. You should have seen the snow they have already. You have to climb over snowbanks to get down to the doorways.”

  “You warned him about the cave-in. What good did that do?” Aletha said. Cree and the champagne were giving her a headache.

  “But he’s going to school and working at a warehouse. Which he shouldn’t be. Looks brittle enough to break. But there’s no reason for him to go near the Liberty Bell.” Shortly after noon, Cree picked up the phone and called MoNika’s, Telluride’s version of a carryout, and ordered roast duck à l’orange, crab-stuffed artichokes, spiced fruit, French bread, and more champagne. “You should have met the sheriff then. Makes the present one look like a preacher. And the gamblers, the professionals that worked in those places. They could be steely-eyed and drunk at the same time.”

  Renata gave in halfway through the afternoon to go back to her business. “Watch out for the narcs, you two. They invariably arrive at the halfway point in a good climax.”

  37

  The Winter of 1901-1902 was one of the worst ever known in the San Juans, which are fabled for their winters. Bram worried about the tall man, Cree, who slept in a boxcar, and he stopped to check for him often after work at night. But the car was always empty and eventually it was moved away. Bram lived in a sort of haze that winter. He’d grown so good at ignoring the taunts of his classmates they’d begun to ignore him. He concentrated on his studies in order to limit his homework so that after supper he could hurry off to the Wunderlich Bottling Works, where he marked order forms and stacked crates of bottles, readying for distribution by wagon in the morning. When the seven-o’clock train came in he unloaded barrels and crates into the warehouse. At first the work exhausted him, but eventually it made him pleasantly tired. Mrs. Pakka began leaving milk, cheese and bread, pieces of leftover meat pie, and cookies out for him at night.

  John O’Connell returned to work after Christmas up at the Smuggler but Bram refused to quit his job. Instead he insisted they use the money to move Luella into a small room just off the parlor so she could keep warmer, and he moved into the attic, where as many as seven men could sleep on cots. In the beginning he had trouble sleeping for the cold, but soon the heavy work and food before bed kept his blood flowing hard enough to warm the blankets. The second week in January, Mrs. Pakka took in three new boarders and the dorm room was filled. The three were freshly shaven and smelled of the bathhouse, but their clothes were shabby and ill-assorted. They paid two months’ rent ahead in good coin, though, and were quiet and orderly at table. They spent much of the day around the stove in the parlor like old women.

  “His marks are good, Mrs. O’Connell, and his appetite is healthy even though he’s very … lanky,” Bram overheard Mrs. Pakka tell Ma’am one evening. “He’s a loyal son to you and seems to me he thrives on all the work he does.”

  “But the doctors in Denver warned of his fragility, Mrs. Pakka. They—”

  “It’s you I worry over, Mrs. O’Connell. And, pardon my forthrightness, but if there’s another worry coming to you, it’s your little girl, not your boy.” Bram’s heart turned cold.

  It turned cold again the next day on his way home from school. Another blizzard raged and the students were warned to travel in groups. Bram, as usual, had no group and ducked his head into the sleety onslaught alone. Nothing moved but the snow. Buildings were shadow-blurs sometimes
seen, sometimes imagined, definite only when he walked into one. He came across a man trying to tug a stalled horse and lost them instantly.

  Bram tried to turn away from the wind to catch his breath, but whichever way he faced, snow gorged the air and he felt the return of the old terror of suffocation, the nightmare brought on by a caved-in drift flooding to its roof. The more he panicked and fought, the more the snow swirled into his mouth and reached for his lungs, filled his eyes to blinding and coated his lashes together. He found himself making a constant circle where he stood to fight for breath, terrified at his helpless isolation.

  It finally occurred to Bram to pull his arms out of his coat sleeves and hold the coat up over his head to give himself some breathing space. He’d long since lost his schoolbooks and was stunned at how easily he could come to losing his life as well in the middle of a town. He’d walked into the train depot before he regained his bearings. It was closed up tight with no train expected in this storm. Bram remembered the abandoned feeling he’d had looking at the drawings of Callie’s lady, Aletha, pictures of familiar places gone all strange and empty. He took off again at the angle that should lead to Mrs. Pakka’s, not far from the depot. Just as he reached an outbuilding, he tripped over a sprawled body. He dragged it to the kitchen door by its ankles. It was Mr. Pheeney, one of the new boarders. He was half-frozen and he’d been shot.

  In the parlor, Duffer and Maynard played gin rummy at a small table by the stove, unaware of what had happened to Pheeney. Now that they were warm and fed, boredom goaded them to bad temper. They shared the parlor with the scrawny O’Connell woman and a drug salesman stranded there by the storm. He cleared his throat a lot and just sat. She had a perennial runny nose and her polite sniffing made them all the more irritable. She was reading the Bible again. She had to be the salesman’s best client.