He sat down on the plain comforter next to her, and held her hand. She watched him with that curious half-Oriental look of hers, her expression giving nothing away. You could look at some women and know something about them, almost straight off; whether they were happy, or sad; whether they had loved many men, or only a few, or none. You could usually tell if they were well-travelled, how much they liked music, whether they were kind. But Henry found Nina undivinable. She smiled at him and he couldn’t even tell if she was smiling at him or smiling at herself.
‘Why do you still do it?’ he asked her.
‘Why do I still do what?’ Her voice was as cool as water over pebbles.
‘Walk on the tightrope; why?’
‘Do I have to answer you?’
‘There’s no obligation.’
‘Well ...I walk on the tightrope because it is what I do. I am a tightrope artiste. Do you understand that? People have to do what they are. The only unhappy people you ever meet in this world are those people who are trying to work at something which is not themselves. You can distinguish a man who is a natural-born miner from an inexperienced prospector, right away. Your friend Edward is a natural-born guide. He loves to take people through the wilderness. Mr Harrison is a gambler, and a thief, and a murderer.’
‘And me? What do you think I am?’
She leaned forward and kissed him. Her lips parting made a click like a cricket. Behind her, the engraved-glass oil-lamp softly flickered, and Jesus sadly looked down from the bedroom wall. I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. He kissed Nina back, and held her shoulder; and the wild flowers fell as slowly as a memory on Doris’ grave; and Alby Monihan looked up from his lunch; and the train rattled across the southern shore of Lake Michigan, still in darkness, although dawn was very near now, and the lights of America’s homesteads glimmered pale. Milking time, dreaming time; time for open eyes.
‘You,’ whispered Nina. ‘You are a man who carves epitaphs, and always will be.’
She folded back the comforter, and she was naked. Soft skin, the colour of blanched almonds, thin wrists, delicate limbs. No superfluous flesh whatsoever; a body light and fit, with a ribcage like a shuttlecock, and two small round breasts with wide crimson nipples. Henry stared at her, and then slowly began to unbutton his shirt. She knelt up on the bed, and kissed his hair, and rubbed her hands all over his face and around his back and shoulders, helping him to tug his arm out of his sleeve and then kissing him again, fire and butterflies.
But, once he was naked, he took control of her, and lifted her up in his arms, and laid her down on the bed; and climbed above her, and kissed her with the kind of urgency with which he had once kissed Doris. She sighed, and gasped, and twisted beneath him, clutching at his muscular forearms, digging her nails into his shoulders and his back. But he held her so surely, one hand cradling her head, and caressing her hair; the other hand cupping the cheeks of her bottom, squeezing them, and then stroking them, and sometimes straying close to the moistened tangle of her sex; and then he bent his head forward and kissed her breasts, taking her rising nipples gently between his teeth, and she cried out something in some language that he couldn’t understand, not French, not even Polish by the sound of it, ‘Ah Dhe mheinnich nan dula!’
She raised both of her legs, stretching them apart impossibly, opening up for him the scarlet throat of her vagina, so that he could see deep inside her, glistening and swollen. He pressed the purple head of his erection up against her; and she hesitated, holding his shoulders with the very lightest of touches. Then with a single long thrust she pushed herself downwards, and swallowed him right inside her body, until hair intertwined with hair, and he could feel himself stretching her internally, and she quaked, and snapped at his nipples with her sharp teeth, and hurt him.
For Henry, it was the most disturbing and most revelatory of nights. Although he was always dominant with her, because she was so light and small, and he was so heavy and strong, she played with him as if he were an instrument, the Henry-forte, and brought out of him an explosion of sharp sensations and feelings that before he had only experienced foggily, or not at all. He stood up, with his thighs braced, and lifted her right off the bed; and perfectly balanced she parted her legs and slid down on to him; kissing him with pert amusement when their connection was complete. She arched herself backwards, so that he could enter her more deeply, and all he could see of her was her protruding ribcage, and her breasts. She was athletic, but also emotional, and when he had thrust himself inside her for the third time, she wept with delight, and kissed him as if she never wanted to let him go. And at the very end of the night, when the room was already grey with the light of dawn, she performed for him a finale that he could scarcely believe was real: by standing on her hands, each hand grasping one of his thighs, upside-down, her bare toes almost touching the ceiling, poised and silent, white as a statue, and then lowering herself with infinite slowness so that her long hair wound silkily around his penis and over his belly, and taking him into her open mouth, and actually into her throat, so that his penis entirely disappeared. He climaxed instantly; and so violently that he let out a hoarse, deep shout.
‘I was taught to do that by Senorita Pippa, the Mexican sword-swallower,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as she lay on the pillow afterwards with her hair spread out all around her, smoking a small black-papered cigarette. ‘She said, Nina, she said, you must always breeze wiz your noss.’
Henry lay propped on his elbow, watching her. She held the cigarette between her full, curving lips, and let the smoke leak out all around it, in aromatic curls. Henry kissed her on the forehead, and said, ‘You’re somebody special, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded, her eyes half-closed. Then she laughed.
Henry said, ‘I have to go out to California Gulch today, to look at my mine. I may have to stay for a couple of nights. But you’ll still be here on Saturday won’t you?’
‘Yes, I’ll still be here on Saturday.’
‘Nina,’ he said.
She smiled at him, and ran her hand down his naked side, so that he shivered with involuntary pleasure. ‘A righ nan reula runach,’ she whispered.
‘What does that mean? Is that Polish?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s Celtic. A very ancient language, older than Christ. A righ nan reula runach means, “O king of the stars mysterious”, and that is what I shall always call you.’
‘And what were those words you said before? What did they mean?’
Nina took out her cigarette, blew a long stream of smoke, and winked at him. ‘Translated politely, they mean, “O merciful God”. So you can see what it is that you do to me, O king of the stars mysterious.’
‘Who taught you Celtic?’
Nina looked away. ‘A man. A long time ago.’
‘And what did he call you?’
She turned back and stared at him. ‘He called me, “ailleagan cumh nan neamh”, which means “precious lady of the skies”.’
‘Can I call you that.’
Her eyes lost their humour. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It has other meanings, too. And, besides, it was a long time ago.’
She sat up. The bed smelled of perfume and tobacco smoke and sex. The first bar of sunlight had intruded through the shutters, and was moving with increasing brightness across the wooden ceiling. Henry looked at Nina’s narrow back, the bumps of her vertebrae, the curve -of her hips. It occurred to him that he might very easily fall in love with her, unless he was careful with himself. She had a quality about her which disturbed and attracted him; and most of all, she wasn’t his.
Seven
Edward didn’t ask him where he had been all night. He was probably glad to have been able to snore undisturbed, without being continually dug in the ribs and told to turn over. Nonetheless, he was noticeably taciturn as they drove out of Denver that morning in a small rig that he had borrowed from Mrs Cordley (assuring her six times over that he would feed the
horses regularly, and not attempt to raise the awning, which was broken). He didn’t speak until they had left Denver itself, and started rattling up the trail which would take them another five thousand feet above sea-level between mountains that rose on all sides of them like the ramparts of Heaven itself. Then he spat over the side of the rig, and said, ‘Don’t get too settled.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Henry.
‘Just what I said. Don’t get too settled. This mine may turn out as rich as all hell; but we made an arrangement, remember? Not interested in mining, you said. The deeds are for you, Edward, you said. And I’m willing to stand by my part of the bargain. You bet. I’ll take you to Sutter’s Fort as soon as the passes are clear after the winter. But you just remember to stand by yours.’
Henry gave Edward a quick, sideways look. Today, he was dressed in the warmest of the three outfits with which he had been left after selling all of his trunks to Mr Seforim: a three-piece tweed suit in brown dog’s-tooth with thick brown woollen socks, and fancy-patterned walking-shoes. He even had a tweed hat to match, and he had waxed up his whiskers extra high, five-after-eleven, the way that most of the dudes seemed to do it in Denver. He felt suddenly dandified next to Edward, and ridiculously green.
He said, carefully, ‘You don’t think I’m going to go back on my word, do you?’
Edward sniffed. ‘Let’s just say that you seem to be making yourself cosy here, and cultivating some fancy company, like a man who thinks he’s going to stay; yes, and have some ready money to pay for it, too.’
Henry let out a short, dry laugh, trying to be scornful without being unpleasant. ‘You sound as if you’ve caught gold-fever already.’
‘The only ailment I’m suffering from is the ass-itch; that and the deeply suspicious mind. I can read the way of a trail, young Henry, and I reckon that I can read you, too. You’ve changed, since you’ve been here. I’ve seen your eyes. You’re going to be here until spring, that’s if this mine is any danged good; but then you’re moving on, and don’t forget it.’
Henry decided not to say anything at all; because the last thing he wanted Edward to know was that he was right. Until he had arrived in Denver, Henry had never come across newly-minted wealth before: he had never smelled gold in the air, or met men who had suddenly and accidentally become millionaires, and were hell-bent on showing it. Those few people around Bennington who had owned large properties and substantial inherited incomes had been infinitely discreet about their money. Here in Denver it was champagne and diamond stick-pins and every imaginable display of good fortune, from varnished carriages to pretty women, from jewellery to grand mansions. Denver had excited in Henry the one part of his character which in Carmington had seemed like nothing more than the passing peacockery of a good-looking young man: his love of fashion, and ostentatious clothes, and all the fine and amusing things of life, like good food, and drink, and art, and attractive girls. If he had stayed in Carmington, he would probably would have grown old and sober like the rest of the community, and like his father. But here, it was flash and dazzle and pocketfuls of $10 golden eagles, and let’s have another bottle of vintage wine, waiter. Nina had excited him, too, and flattered him more than any-other woman he had ever met. He still felt stunned when he thought of what she had done to him last night. All in all, he had decided that he had a taste for Denver: her people and her mountains and her way of life; and if the Little Pittsburgh mine was everything that Alby Monihan had said it was, he couldn’t turn his back on it and trudge meekly off to Sutter’s Fort like an impoverished emigrant.
Edward said, ‘You and that balancer get on pretty good, did you?’
‘You mean Mademoiselle Carolista? Yes, she’s all right.’
‘No meat on her for my taste.’
Henry shrugged. He didn’t want to get into an argument.
The air grew chillier as they gradually climbed higher. It was over sixty miles to California Gulch; and another mile straight up. Hardly speaking to each other, they drove all day between high crags of rock, and stands of yellow pine; stopping once or twice for Edward to stretch his legs and wiggle his fingers and take a long swallow of whiskey. Mrs Cordly had packed for them a basket of poor-boy sandwiches made with cold roast beef and tomatoes; and fruit, and bottles of beer. Just after noon they sat on beds of pine-needles in the sharp mountain wind, and had a quick, silent lunch.
‘That gold-mine better be good,’ said Edward, when they had finished, wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘I don’t know what Mrs Cordley’s going to say if we can’t pay her. Kill us, most like, or make me fuck her for three weeks non-stop.’
‘That doesn’t sound like a hardship.’
‘You bet it isn’t. After two wrassles with Mrs Cordley, it’s a softship.’
At its highest point, the trail over the mountains rose above eleven thousand feet; and they reached it at evening. The sight of the sun setting over the Rockies, over Bald Mountain and Red Peak, and further into the distance, over the mystical spire of the Mountain of the Holy Cross, was dazzling. The sky was intensely clear, and the sun burned into the horizon like a crucible of molten gold. Henry sat shading his eyes, while Edward finished off the last of his whiskey, which he made a point of not sharing equally. He wasn’t drunk. The air was too sharp for anyone to get drunk. But he was being erratic and irascible; and Henry guessed that he was afraid. Henry didn’t quite know why. Perhaps Edward thought that if the mine proved to be profitable, then Henry would try to kill him. Then again, perhaps it was nothing more than the fear of the mine being a dud, or worked-out by claim jumpers, or even not there at all. Suddenly, this deed of claim which in New York had seemed spurious and unimportant was burningly valuable to both of them. Henry had heard of gold-fever, but never experienced it, not until now. It was an extraordinary kind of euphoria, an anticipation of riches that was almost a pleasure in itself; distinguishable from every other kind of fever by the hardships which its sufferers were prepared to endure, almost happy to endure, just for the chance of picking up that nugget, or striking that glittering vug.
They tented that night, and lit a fire, and made coffee and hash. The next morning was dewy and damp, and Edward woke with a horrendous cough. After they had eaten the rest of the hash for breakfast, he went off among the trees by himself and coughed and coughed until he vomited. When he came back he was grey-faced, and even less communicative than before.
Henry said, ‘Are you all right?’ But Edward snapped only, ‘What’s it to you?’
Henry didn’t answer, but felt fractured and uncomfortable. The truth was that he was creating the tension between them himself: because if he really hadn’t wanted the mine, he would have made it quite clear to Edward by now that he wasn’t interested, and Edward wouldn’t have been in such a condition of fear and alarm.
He sang ‘Sweet Josephina’, and made himself sing it all the way through even though Edward scowled over the reins, and Henry’s voice in the thin mountain air sounded flat and unconvincing.
‘Sweet Josephina she fell ill
And they buried her down by Green Tree Hill
But her ghost it walks and it sings this song
“It was Willy O’Brien that done me wrong.”’
After a long while, as the rig began to rattle along the last stretch of hard furrows that led to California Gulch, Edward snarled at Henry, ‘Will you shut up, for Christ’s sake?’
The community of California Gulch was a ramshackle collection of huts and timber-framed houses built along both banks of one of the streams that rushed down from the higher peaks of the Mosquito mountains. It was the longest, skinniest town in the territory, because the gold washed down the gulch, and fronting the gulch was the only place where it was worth having a property. There was a grocery store, a drugstore, a pie-and-cake stall, and a grand emporium that announced itself as ‘Poznainskys Gentlemans Tailor & Dry Goods Palace, Late of Last Chance Gulch, Montana’. The single street was churned and rutted and strewn with lumber, and
as Henry and Edward drew up their rig outside Willard’s Saloon, three dogs with mud-streaked pelts came barking and yapping around their wheels.
A young man with an immense red beard was leaning on the rail on the boardwalk, his eyes squinting against the midmorning sun, smoking a pipe. He wore a tall-crowned hat which looked as if it had been deliberately plastered with slurry. As Henry climbed down from the rig, he lifted his pipe in greeting, and said, ‘How’re you doing?’
‘How’s yourself?’ answered Henry, and stepped his way carefully through the mud until he reached the boards. The dogs kept yipping and jumping and circling around and around, until a miner on the opposite side of the street yelled out, ‘Gumbo! Come here, you half-assed excuse fer a dog!’
The young man with the red beard looked down at Henry’s Oxford shoes with amusement. ‘Did you come to mine, or did you come to dance?’ he asked, though not unpleasantly.
Henry said, ‘I’m looking for the Little Pittsburgh. Any idea where that might be?’
Edward waited patiently with his thumbs in his belt, and suppressed a cough. Henry took out the deed-of-claim and unfolded it, and held it in front of the young man’s face so that he could look at it. The young man shrugged and said, ‘No good showing me anything on paper, your highness. I can’t read fit to spit.’
But just then, a big-bellied man in a linsey-woolsey shirt and the most capacious pair of miner’s jeans that Henry had ever seen came puffing out of the saloon, and said, ‘What’s that you was talking about? Little Pittsburgh, was it?’
That’s right,’ replied Henry, and held up the deed.
The man came up, all prickly double chins and thick moustaches, and peered at the deed with watery eyes. He smelled of whiskey and fresh sweat, and that indefinable sweetness of men who haven’t changed their underwear from one month to another, and haven’t bathed since they came up into the mountains, on account of the water being so damned cold, and if you think I’m going to freeze my balls off in some bucketful of melted snow then you can damned well think again. The man reached into his shirt pocket, and produced an unexpectedly delicate little pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, which he hooked around his ears; and then examined the deed again.
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