“The Spirit of ’49 is now arriving,” a Negro porter said. “Please ready your luggage.”
The wind, foreshadowing snow, blew down the white-lit mountain. Dust flew into my eyes and then settled on my skin. A pair of cows wandered out onto the tracks and the conductor got off the locomotive and shooed them with his coal shovel. Boarding passengers stood a safe distance from the clock tower, where, beside me, lay a dark cluster of war gimps, those breathing memorials, limbless in battered army uniforms with tin cups outstretched, moaning at different pitches like a deaf a cappella troupe. In my coat I found a bottle marked “Maple Syrup” and took a swig of something that resembled rye, before I offered it to a nearby cripple, a man I called Eli, but that wasn’t his real name. Eli shook his head no.
“You sure?” I said. “It might make your legs grow back.”
A boy came by with a stack of the New Sligo Eagle. The headline: Strike Talks Break Down from Red Menace.
It was horseshit.
“Nickel for the Eagle, Mr. Stephens,” the boy said. “Best paper in town.” Only paper in town he should have said.
“Trade you a drink.” I offered the bottle.
The boy looked at me like I’d just propositioned his mother. “You got a nickel Mr. Stephens?”
“No, do you?”
The boy swore under his breath, afraid to say anything lest he found himself out of his ripe paper job and inside a mineshaft just like the rest of his family. He lowered his head, sulked away.
I shimmied up the steel supporting post, and then slid Miss Constance from her bag. She found Eli, legless and sober. “Don’t move, corporal.”
Eli turned and looked right at Miss Constance. Within that flinty face, Eli managed to open his mouth and expose a few charred teeth.
“Christ,” I said. “Act natural, will you?”
But Eli kept it up. A picture of a smiling cripple—no matter how horrifying a smile it may be—was no good to me back then. It was staged and it was phony and I wasn’t some damn portrait artist like Curtis with his Indians. No, I’d sooner trust Miss Constance to a band of gypsies.
I went over to the radio room and looked in at the operator, a myopic man named Anderson, while he gave orders to the train conductor. It was a small job, not much dough in it. A couple of miles outside the station, the radio went dead and you entered this space outside the modern world.
The Negro porter stopped beside me. I’d seen him a dozen times, but I didn’t know his name. We both leaned against a wall littered by wanted posters with my father’s picture on it.
“They’re all going,” I said. I turned and spit. “Shame, them shitting themselves over a little strike like this.”
“If I may say, Mr. Stephens, they’re the smart ones.”
—2—
Because it was nearly noon, I drove across town to McGuffey’s, the greatest tavern in the Western world. I should have been at work—all hands on deck during a strike—but I figured Roosevelt Robinson, the editor of the Eagle, would find me if I was needed. Besides, there was no better place to find rest and companionship than McGuffey’s.
Established in the last century as the town’s Negro-friendly saloon, McGuffey’s was New Sligo’s lone tavern to survive prohibition, partly because it was hidden in the basement beneath O’Clair’s Butchery, but mostly because it was the joint favored by Jacob Bailey, the town’s police detective. On Friday nights, the crowd of miners, newspapermen, and cowboys swelled to nearly a hundred, with a line ten deep at the bar, while everyone else mingled alongside the dozen tables in the back. It was not, you could say, a tavern frequented by the genteel. Cigarette smoke fogged the underground bar, camouflaging the smell of iron and the darker, rancid odors beneath it. Animal blood occasionally dripped through the ceiling cracks, filling the ashtrays and coating the tables. Even in the dead of summer, everyone wore one of the black slickers hanging on the coat rack. Near festivals or holidays, when Old Man O’Clair really hacked away, when each cut of his cleaver rattled the light fixtures, blood pooled on the dirt floor and seeped through your boots. Without windows, without natural light, with only candles illuminating the path your hand took to your drink, time’s normal constraints evaporated like river water. If I reach back into the recesses of my memory, I can still feel the blood of lambs on my fingertips.
I was halfway through my second beer when the old Negro barkeep, the indomitable Lazy Eye Norris, hung up the phone and turned to me and winked with his good eye.
“That was Jacob,” Lazy Eye said. “Someone plugged O’Leary. They found him stiffening up at the jailhouse.”
“Clyde O’Leary, the Sheriff?”
Lazy Eye spit. “No, his dead daddy rose from the grave, went to the jailhouse and someone shot him. Who do you fucking think?”
I looked at my beer, a foul elixir, and then drank it down. His death meant nothing but grief for me. To say Clyde O’Leary and I shared a history understates the depth of our long and violent association. A lot had happened between us—after all we’d grown up together and tangled in numerous ways—but our entire relationship was shaded by the simple fact that my father killed his father. The other problems—and there were many—all rested under the shadow of that lone fact.
Meanwhile, as I reconciled myself to Clyde’s murder, Lazy Eye hit the cowbell behind the bar, usually a sign of trouble. The crowd quieted.
“Someone just murdered O’Leary,” he said.
I swiveled my stool toward the sad lot of cripples and miners in the back. Their faces contorted, comprehending the news. Men turned to old friends, exchanging expressions of stunned good fortune, the kind rarely begotten in the hours before a strike. They didn’t know how to take the news.
Lazy Eye did it for them, raising a mug, then bellowing, “To O’Leary’s murderer. May they bronze his likeness in the town square, so the generations can admire a true goddamn hero.”
The mass of men, bone-tired and hunched, soot-stained and soused on this Monday morning, raised their heads from their drinks and collectively cheered as though the soprano had just finished her encore. They stomped their boots and hugged their fellow man. In retrospect, it was kind of touching.
But I didn’t see it that way at the time. As the celebration died down, the men turned to me and I knew what they were thinking.
“I’ve got to blow town,” I said. “No need for me to see this out. I ain’t brave.”
“Why? You plug him?” Lazy Eye’s smile disappeared. “What you going to say when they ask where you were early this morning?”
“This morning?”
“That’s what I said, ain’t it? O’Leary was colder than a cripple’s cunt.”
“Home,” I said. “I was home.”
“Too bad,” Lazy Eye said. “I was hoping it was you.”
“What did I do?”
“Nothing. You ain’t ever done a goddamn thing you pasty little cocksucker.” He leaned in and then whispered, “They ain’t gonna hang you, not like these mealy-eyed fucks.”
He was right. I looked around at a bunch of men who didn’t stand a chance against the law. It was a shame: Clyde couldn’t even die honest. He had to go ruin another man’s life from the grave. It reminded me of the time before our fathers went O.K. Corral on each other, when Clyde and I were just children in the old, violent days of the West, and Clyde confessed that he was destined to die before thirty because God had it out for him. Sweet Clyde O’Leary, sickly and weak, believed he’d catch diphtheria like his sister. But he was wrong. He caught a bullet, just like his father.
“You think your old man did it?” Lazy Eye said. “He cooled Big Hank.”
“He’s in Europe.” I stomped my boots against the boggy floor. “Been gone fifteen years now.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
I dropped a match in a blood-pooled ashtray. A plume of
smoke rose out of it. Above the shelves stock full of whiskey bottles hung a sign that read, “If Killed on Premises, Will Pay for Burial.” It was near a poster of Big Hank O’Leary, the old head of the coal miner’s union, wearing a Christ-like robe with a halo above his head: the union man as martyr.
Beside me, a slow wheeze drifted from Sam Bailey, the old pastor, who hunched over the bar gripping its rails like he was making sure it didn’t fly off the floor. Poor bastard. At fifty-five, Sam wasn’t long for this world. He was like a building caving in on itself one floor at a time. It was only a matter of waiting out the slowing tick of his liver’s clock, until Sam got his wish and died on his barstool.
“How you doing, Neal?” Sam’s lips were white like he’d been walking in the desert without water. “I’m real sorry about your Mama.”
“Thanks, Sam.” She’d been gone ten years.
Sam sipped the foam from his beer like a child with a cup of milk. When he pulled himself upright, beer dripped from his sagging chin. “And your father, Neal,” Sam said. “Your father has returned?”
I sighed at Sam’s spindly shadow. His hair had fallen away, his jowls hung from his face like a bulldog, and lint collected in the dark folds of his hands.
“Because if he was, I’d have to lynch him,” Sam said. “Yes, I’d hang him in Pioneer Square. Wouldn’t I, Nigger Norris?”
“Be quiet, Sam,” Lazy Eye said. “Let the man drink his fill.”
“I’m just saying that the Stephens’ and the O’Leary’s got a blood feud. Been going on for near twenty years now. That’s all I’m saying,” Sam said. “And you know what else I’m saying? No, well let me tell you two gentlemen that the older O’Leary was killed just like the younger one. In cold Devil’s blood.”
“Stop it Sam,” I said. “Everyone knows Big Hank was armed.”
“Not when he died he wasn’t.”
“Yes, he was.” I grabbed Sam’s thigh and I could almost feel down to the bone. “And my father is in Europe and I know a hundred people who’ve been itching to kill Clyde, so let’s ease off on the rumors, please.”
“Blood feud,” Sam said. “Like the Hatfields and McCoys.”
The phone rang and Lazy Eye retreated. Sam smiled. “I’ve been thinking, Neal. We should, I mean you, your sister and me should go down to the Lutheran church together sometime. It do you good in these trying times.”
“You know I don’t go to church and Tillie don’t believe in God.”
“Just like your Daddy. Just like that Jesse Stephens.”
When Lazy Eye returned, he tapped my mug. “Finish up, kid.”
“You kicking me out?”
Lazy Eye nodded. My editor, Roosevelt, had called: O’Leary’s murder was my story. I took the last of my drink, and then turned to the rabble, hoping they might wake me. Their faces were familiar, like I’d photographed them once upon a time, but it wasn’t the same as recognition. It was different for them; they knew where I’d been born, where I’d gone to college, and that my wife was dead. They nodded my way and held the door, but it wasn’t entirely friendly because my uncle owned the mines and my father shot their leader and I worked for the company paper and those facts were all that mattered.
“Take a nice a picture of O’Leary’s bullet holes for me,” Lazy Eye said. “Least you could do you son of a bitch.”
The masses cheered, again. A man wearing a blue trench coat raised his glass and began singing an old union song.
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops; endless miles of railroad laid.
Now we stand outcast and starving, ‘midst the wonders we have made;
But the Union makes us strong
For the Union makes us strong.
Lazy Eye took my mug. “Before you go,” he said, “you mind searching old Sam’s pocket for his billfold?”
I tapped Sam, but the old preacher didn’t stir. Inside Sam’s coat, I found his wallet. There was only a dollar, but Lazy Eye took it.
“Man has got to pay for his bed,” Lazy Eye said. “Has to pay for it.”
—3—
I drove out to the jailhouse, taking a right on Garivogue, then a left on Fourteenth, along the town’s thoroughfare with its three-story fronts, ornamental brick sidewalks, and twenty-foot high telephone poles running wires alongside electric streetlamps illuminating the boulevard for window shoppers. The town had changed since I’d gone to Europe, and even after three years back in New Sligo, I was still amazed at the pace of growth, the rapidness of the modern world encroaching upon the frontier. There were two new car barns replacing the livery stables, a couple of ornate picture shows, and you could even buy honest to goodness Parisian summer shoes if that was your taste. My uncle hoped travelers saw that New Sligo, rather than the other New Sligo, the New Sligo of Lazy Eye and Sam. We did our best to hide our refuse, our Mexican migrants, war cripples, and flu orphans, concealing them on the other side of the railroad tracks, or, if they insisted, inside McGuffey’s. It was better that way, my uncle said: you don’t need to show your houseguests your underwear drawer, and to an extent, I understood. We needed to make money. Yet, during that drive to the jailhouse, I got the nagging feeling that the town’s sordid skivvies were about to be put on display at the National Museum.
As I drove, I tried not thinking on Clyde’s murder, but I couldn’t help it. Like I said, we’d been friends once, as boys, long before the war took me away, but that all changed on one black day in 1904, when Clyde’s father walked into my father’s office and never walked out. Back then, my father had been a normal man, running Rahill Coal & Electric, alongside my uncle Seamus, my mother’s brother. There was a strike on, but then there always seemed to be a strike on. Yet that one was somehow different. Not too long after Big Hank died, my father disappeared, eventually showing up in Europe as a leading anarchist, one prone to violence and melee. For a long time, I’d been able push my father out of my mind, almost as if he was dead, but with Clyde’s murder, it all came rushing back.
By the time he died, Clyde had been Sheriff for two years, elected with 90 percent of the vote, mostly because his opponent, the incumbent Sheriff, Michael Corrigan, dropped out at the last minute. Some say O’Leary threatened Corrigan’s children, others thought it was simply blackmail, a type of crime Clyde had special deftness with. In any case, Clyde was the youngest Sheriff in New Sligo’s history, and our first Sheriff who only had one working eye, a result of mining accident when Clyde was thirteen. Sure, Clyde was cruel and corrupt, but they all were. Back then democracy was a bit more rough and tumble. We’d only just gotten the secret ballot and a lot of our elected class was owned by either the union or the company. However, O’Leary was different: he didn’t owe anyone. We were all scared of him.
I turned right on Seventh Street, then slowed to cross beneath the Union Pacific rail trestle. Here, the paved avenue ended and the gravel strip through Germantown began, with its windy, abandoned roads scarred by deep gullies that had been left unfilled since the war broke out. Fragments of broken window glass littered the roads, sparkling like a dry salt bed. Most of the homes were gone, burned to the ground with only their tin roofs remaining like industrial headstones. Stray dogs wandered the roadside, looking for their long-dead owners. Further on, I came upon a sandy strip of barren land, eventually passing Chinktown, which lay nearly dormant, just a few cooking fires burning inside oil drums, the smoke funneling into the blackening air. And a little past there, I found myself across the road from Rahillville, where several thousand miners and their families endured in identical two-room shanties, a ghetto owned and operated by Rahill Coal & Electric. It seemed like the sort of place where someone cried, real loud, all night long, so that it kept you awake until the dawn.
When I reached the jailhouse, I parked, and then saw, just over a crest about a hundred y
ards west of the road, a pair of prairie dogs standing on their hind legs, scouting me. I shivered. Nasty creatures, the type of animal best suited for Clyde’s company. I got out and looked around but didn’t see Jacob. Just outside the front door, surrounded by a half dozen milk crates, an old oak tree towered thirty feet into the air, with a single limb pointing west. Black burn marks ran unevenly spaced along the limb, counting, like shamed tree rings, the number of nooses that had been fixed to it.
I went inside, stepping into the shadow cutting across the jailhouse floor, and my feet sunk into a puddle of dark, drying blood sloughed beneath the doorway. The blood swept into the room like a mop stroke, coming to an abrupt halt at O’Leary’s bare feet.
“Huh,” I said. “That’s odd.”
O’Leary, plainly dead, sat bound and naked, his body bent against the desk, his wrists roped and knotted to his feet, his head slumped in repose, the back of his skull open and breathing. Sunlight shot through the high window bars, spotlighting his bloody forehead, which looked like it had collided with a blackjack. I lifted O’Leary’s chin: he’d been shot in the mouth. His eye patch was his only clothing. I got close and photographed his profile, taking care to focus on the eye patch.
I searched the jailhouse, scouring the makeshift kitchen and the toilet for any telling detail worth photographing, only coming to a halt at a cell where a rope lay knotted to the bottom of one of the bars like a dog had been tied to it. It had bound something, wrists perhaps, and then been severed with a knife. I snapped a picture. I went to the desk and pulled open the drawers. They held forms and other assorted police supplies, along with the usual sorts of interrogation devices found in any backwoods Western jail: knives, handcuffs, pliers, hatchets, kerosene, matches, and salt. There was a camera empty of film, some photographic paper, but no file with my name on it.
The Trench Angel Page 2
