by Chloe Garner
“You armed?” she asked.
“Always,” he said disdainfully.
“Good,” she told him. “I don’t have any place to put a gun in this getup, and I feel naked.”
His eyes sparked and he ran a scathing look up and down her form, then looked away casually.
“Look awfully dressed to me,” he said.
“Don’t start,” she scolded him. “I’m done with men hitting on me tonight. Disingenuously, at that.”
“Was I disingenuous?” he asked. “I’ll try harder next time.”
“Your friends are scum,” she said conversationally. “They may be good businessmen, but there isn’t a one of them today who looked at me and didn’t try me on as a call girl before he went back to talking to you, outside of Delphus.”
“Delphus is married,” Jimmy said.
“So is Maxim,” she told him and he looked fractionally further away, an attempt to keep her from seeing the amusement on her face.
“How could you tell?” he asked. “They don’t wear rings.”
“Picture on the wall,” she said. “And the way his secretary acted. She flirted up to you, but she kept her distance with Maxim. If she were looking for someone to treat her like sex meat, she’d have been all over him, but she wants someone powerful to notice her and pick her up out of the life she’s in now. Made the mistake of thinking you might be willing to give her a better life, rather than drag her back to Lawrence, but how was she supposed to know that? He’s married, and anything else he’s doing is recreational only. Probably prefers powerful women because they aren’t as needy.”
Jimmy tipped his head to look at her.
“I’d forgotten how much you tended to see. I’d assumed Lawrence kept you from knowing that kind of stuff.”
“It isn’t hard,” she said. “Am I right?”
“He pays cheap call girls and beats them,” Jimmy said. “Can’t get any of them to come back more than once. But the game... You’re right there.”
“You play?” she asked, furious at herself for how her heart rate spiked and her palms broke out in a sweat, just to ask. She hated the players, that part had been entirely truthful, and she was terrified that Jimmy would have picked up the habit in the years away from Lawrence. That he would have turned into one of them.
“No,” he said after a pause. “Never saw the appeal.”
He was watching her closely. She turned hard eyes to him and he tipped his head.
“That bad?” he asked. “Did something happen...?”
“They’re bad people, Jimmy. Got no respect and no decency. I’ll kill a man, put a bullet ‘tween his eyes, if I need to, but I don’t use ‘em just ‘cause they’re there.”
“It’s just a habit, like any other one,” he said. “You just don’t like any of them.”
“What? The drinking? The whoring? The gambling? No. They’re all signs of a man who ain’t in control of his own life.”
“It isn’t the clothes,” he said. “You really have turned into that woman.”
“Always was her, Jimmy,” she said, crossing her arms. “Just learned to talk different.”
“I see,” he said. “Do you want to ride back to the hotel?”
“I can make a walk this distance just fine,” she said. His eyes told her that he thought she was covering, but she ignored that. “We’ll get our investors, I’ll take their money off ‘em clean as clean, and then we’ll go back to Lawrence, no different there than here, but that I can keep my thumb on everything that’s going on.”
“I have no doubt,” he said.
“Why didn’t you get married?” Sarah asked. He shook his head.
“Never found the girl. What about you?”
“You seen the selection?” she asked. He laughed.
“I have, actually.”
They walked on. She wanted to press him, to make him say things she wanted to hear him say, but it wasn’t like her. Something had rattled her, and she kept her mouth shut, waiting for her native confidence to take back over and get in charge again. He seemed content enough to walk along with his hands in his pockets, just watching the city and the people as they went by. In the hotel lobby, he told her goodnight, unsentimentally, and left her. She went upstairs on her own and sat on the bed for a minute, then shook herself firmly and went to sleep.
––—
Four more cities, eighteen more contacts. She bought new clothes in the second city so that she could change clothes on two different days of meetings, but she was otherwise largely unceremonious about her appearance or what the men Jimmy introduced her to thought of her. She was professional and intelligent, and she had no doubt that all of them noticed it, but they were mostly the same quality of lecherous, powerful men that they’d met with in Preston. She handed out her invitations and she became less and less concerned with how well they did, as individuals.
She needed them to be successful as a group, because that was how she was going to make her money, but having a few of them go bankrupt along the way wouldn’t bother her at all. In fact, she could have picked the few she would have most preferred to see go bankrupt.
She and Jimmy had dinner together every night, but they discussed that day’s business and little else. Then they were back in Preston and getting on the train for Lawrence.
“You get the aisle,” he said as they sat down. “I won the bet.”
She had forgotten about it, but gave him the window seat without complaint. The train was full, at this juncture, and it would open up as they got closer and closer to Lawrence, and she’d take a seat on her own.
“We’ll start digging out Pete’s mine when we get back,” Jimmy said. “May as well have a stock of absenta set aside that we can use as proof that the mine is producing, as well as a war chest if we need it.”
“You haven’t got cash?” Sarah asked.
“We have a lot of cash, for Lawrence,” Jimmy said.
“But?”
“We could live the way we are for the rest of our lives and never worry about money,” he told her slowly. “But if we’re going to bring in all of these high-stakes players, I want to have a lot more than I do.”
She nodded.
“So the Lawsons are going to do honest work for once,” she said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “But we might pay someone to do it.”
“Has to be family,” she said. “No one else sees Pete.”
“You think anyone we’d pay to come dig out a collapsed mining tunnel is going to be able to tell what killed him, after all this time?” Jimmy asked.
“A bullet is a bullet,” Sarah said.
“Even if people did find out...” Jimmy started, but she shook her head.
“No. No one finds out.”
“Sarah, we own and we run the town. Everyone knows that that means we do things that we have to do, even when no one likes them.”
“I did what I had to do,” Sarah said, not specifically agreeing. “But they trust me not to do stuff like that.”
“I’m willing to agree that you didn’t show much foresight, doing what you did,” Jimmy said, “but if you really think that what they think of you matters, you’re a weaker partner than I’d been counting on.”
She looked at him with sharp eyes.
“What we do is an agreement,” she said. “‘Tween us and the folk in town and around town, the good folk. They come to the decision that we ain’t got their best interests in front of us, that we’re arbitrary or unreliable, it don’t matter how many guns or how much money you got, Jimmy. They’ll take it away from you and give it to someone else.”
He put his hands behind his head, settling lower in his seat.
“There’s a point where that’s no longer true, but I see what you’re saying. We’ll be careful. Where in the mine is he?”
“I don’t know how deep it goes, but we couldn’t see daylight no more, where I killed him.”
Jimmy nodded.
“Then w
e’ll clear out for a while with paid labor, and then Petey, Thomas, and I will get ourselves down to Pete and get him out of there. After we get it cleaned out, we’ll bring in my people again and finish it up, get it set up pretty for the mine tours.”
“Tours?” Sarah asked. He smiled at the window.
“You really think people are going to show up on the last train before the auction? It wouldn’t surprise me if a few of them beat us home. We’re going to have to have something to show them, and I can’t think of anything better than a methane lamp that makes the walls glow blue. Sight like that will put greed in most any man’s heart.”
“I don’t know if we can dig it out before the auction,” Sarah said, thinking of the quantity of explosives she’d used. He shook his head without looking at her.
“What amazes me is that, for as much greed as I’ve seen in my life when people are around absenta, you seem completely immune.”
“I just like gold better,” she said dismissively and he smiled.
“No, that’s not it. You were there, Sarah. You saw it with your own eyes. Saw it and knew even better than Pete did how much money you were looking at. Any other person I know, any other person I’ve ever met, would have been looking for the nearest pick axe. You shot him and blew it all up.”
“You know why I did it,” she said. He nodded.
“I do. I just don’t know if I could do it, if I’d been the one standing there.”
“No, you’d have started putting out invitations for an auction, and hired Pete to tell you where all the absenta was.”
“On my own?” Jimmy asked. “If I really did believe that no one else knew about the place? I’d have done just like you did. Your mistake was not thinking that it would get out, anyway. If it’s a mistake at all, it was not knowing that Pete would have sent it in for analysis first thing, even before he told you about it. That he would have wanted to be sure. But if you’d been right, that it was a secret that you could keep, I would have killed him, too.” He ticked his head slightly. “Except that I wouldn’t have. I’d have wanted to find a way to get it. You actually walked away. That amazes me.”
“It could still be the death of everything, and both of us,” Sarah said. “If I don’t find any more, the kind of people you’re bringing in...”
Jimmy gave the window a little laugh, nodding.
“Sure. Any one of them wouldn’t hesitate to kill all of us, for being that big a disappointment. Which is why we need more assets. Fast.”
“You’re going to need more people,” Sarah said. “It’s going to be a lot of digging.”
He nodded at the window again.
“I’ve got the feeling that that won’t be a problem.”
––—
They passed Mont Blanc. And Wellsley. And Carson. And then Jeremiah.
And still, Sarah sat in the seat next to Jimmy.
The people had changed. Some.
And they’d thinned out. Some.
But there weren’t any open rows of seats as they started out of the Jeremiah station for Lawrence.
Sarah stared up and down the train with suspicion. Surely they were just cattle-carring their passengers, putting them all into one train car to avoid having to staff the others, but when she got up and went wandering, the other cars were similar.
“Your boys are watching my house, right?” she asked as she sat down next to Jimmy.
“Thomas is going by about once a day, I expect,” he said. “Don’t think Rich or Wade will be going out much in this, and there’s no telling what Petey is doing.”
She shook her head, looking around again.
“What are they all going to do?”
“They’re looking for work, for money, for a life,” Jimmy said. “They’ve heard it’s there for the taking in Lawrence, so they’re going to Lawrence. I’ve seen it before, up and down the coast. They go rushing through, some of them stick, I assume, but the rest of them figure out it’s hard work, out here, and they go home.”
“Was this what it was like, the first time, you reckon?” she asked. He shrugged.
“Don’t know. Probably not. Absenta wasn’t even discovered until a few years after Eli started mining.”
He’d never called his grandfather anything but ‘Eli’. Nor had Elaine.
“What do they eat?” Sarah asked.
“Hopefully, Granger hired help,” Jimmy said. “Your little halo of protection for him isn’t going to hold up, with this many strangers around.”
“These are tomorrow’s bandits,” she said, feeling listless. She wanted to get up, to pace, to make sure they all saw her, that they’d know her. She was dressed for Lawrence. At least they had a shot at recognizing her, if they saw her again.
“How many of them am I just going to have to kill, in the next ten years?” Sarah asked.
“If all goes well, almost none,” Jimmy said. “We’ll have people to do most of it for us, and most of these guys will have little claims and jobs and things to keep them busy and paid and fed.”
“We haven’t got enough gremlin to feed this many,” Sarah said. Jimmy nodded.
“That’s why I told Granger to stock up,” he said. “Gremlin will do for now, but we’ll eventually start getting in some of the better grains. Lawrence isn’t going to be able to grow enough out in the middle of the desert to feed everyone, so it’s better if we get started setting up suppliers now.”
“We ain’t gonna be able to make anything in numbers this big,” Sarah said. Jimmy was laughing and she turned to face him. “What’s funny?”
“Do you even remember how big Lawrence was, when we were little?”
She struggled, but couldn’t find any way of even guessing. He gave her a bemused look.
“My dad kept tabs on everyone. It was what he was good at. At its peak, Lawrence had almost fifteen thousand people in it. You’re looking at two or three hundred and you’re panicking.”
“This is just one train,” Sarah said. “How many train loads of single young men like this one are there going to be? How many have there already been?”
“It keeps the train running,” Jimmy said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“The Perpeto,” she said. “Where are we going to get all the Perpeto these men are going to need?”
“You know that missing Perpeto isn’t life-threatening, right?” Jimmy asked. “We get them employed, we get them paid, and then they can pay a chemist who will give it directly to them. You don’t have to keep it in your pantry anymore.”
“How many of them can shoot?”
He jerked his head slightly.
“Now that’s a good question. I’ll have to put together a group of men, at some point, who can monitor claims. I’ll want to find the best shots, obviously.”
Sarah thought of the snipers she’d killed, up in the hills. She shook her head.
“There really isn’t anything I can do to keep it from changing.”
“You’ll cope,” he told her. “You did fine in Oxala, once you adapted. It’s not like you thought of the place as home.”
She sighed, wishing for a moment that she had the window seat and the ability to look at something other than the thronging mass of men bound for Lawrence.
She checked her guns, missing her rifle, and looked up and down the train again.
“Will you relax?” he asked. “You’re going to make me nervous, and that takes work.”
“There are too many of them,” Sarah said. “And I’m just going to have to kill them all.”
He shook his head, dropping his dark hat down over his eyes.
“It won’t be that bad, Sarah.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because this time I’m here.”
––—
By the time they got to Lawrence, she was making everyone nervous. The general conversation on the train, spotty and anxious, had turned dark and whispering as the men began to recognize her on the way by, resenting her intrusion on thei
r anonymity. Jimmy didn’t stop her, he just sat with his hat over his eyes most of the ride, eating and sleeping as he felt like it. No one spoke to Sarah. No one had to, to know who she was or what she meant.
Thomas met them at the station with horses; Sarah was disgusted at how gratified she was to see the great black horse. And that he seemed to be happy to see her.
“Shut up,” she told the animal. “You’re still the dumbest thing in sight, and I’m including the rock over there.”
He bobbed his head at her.
“Still picking fights with animals?” Jimmy asked. “Thought you would have outgrown that.”
“They haven’t gotten any less dumb,” Sarah answered, and he gave her a tiny smile.
“I’m going into town,” he said. “You want to come see the damage?”
She didn’t, but there was no point putting it off.
She rode alongside him, the black horse prancing with only just-subdued excitement, and she whacked him.
“You throw me ‘cause you get too wound up, we will have words,” she said.
“You have the most contentious relationships with horses I’ve ever seen for someone who loves them as much as you do,” Jimmy said without looking at her.
“Do not,” she said. “They’re dumber’n lace in a thunderstorm.”
“Oh, I know they are,” Jimmy said. “And what’s more, I know you know they are. And yet.”
She grunted.
“What’s his name?” Jimmy asked.
“He ain’t got one,” Sarah answered. Jimmy nodded.
“And the one before him?”
“Sasquatch,” Sarah answered despite herself. She saw Jimmy’s shoulders shake once.
“When did Sasquatch get a name?” he asked. She didn’t answer, and Jimmy looked cross-ways at her. “Right around the time you figured out you were going to have to put him down, am I right?”
“Shut up, Lawson,” she said. This actually drew a laugh from him.
She shook her head, not willing to give him the dignity of a response.
The dusty path from the train station to town was clogged with young men and their trove of personal treasures. As they got closer, it stopped resembling a road so much as a shanty town, as if they’d given up moving forward and just settled, using whatever they could find to put up shelter against the sun and the cold.
