Clash of Mountains

by Chloe Garner

  “What were your terms with Pythagoras?” Sarah asked.

  “Banking is a tricky thing,” Jimmy said. “Takes certification, deposit ratios, oversight… Everyone’s worried about what happens when a bank goes insolvent.”

  For a moment she was angry that he was continuing to dodge, then she saw the link.

  “Pythagoras,” she said. Jimmy smiled, serpentine.

  “He’s going to be the CFO of the new enterprise,” he said. “He’ll get a percentage of the absenta profits. We’ll pay prevailing rates minus an overhead rate…”

  “Numbers, Lawson,” Sarah growled. This was more than a powerful man having a claim in Lawrence, a vested interest there. This was owning a business with one. A business where all the money lived.

  “Half,” Jimmy said.

  “Damn what?” Sarah demanded. “You’re giving him half our profits?”

  “Profits we weren’t even counting on,” Jimmy said.

  “For taking on all of the risk of getting the absenta out of the mountains,” she said. “He gonna take bullets, too, for that money?”

  “Yes,” Jimmy said. “Because it puts Descartes and Pythagoras into alignment, rather than fighting over us.”

  “He was willing to take the money and give up the competition?” Sarah asked.

  “He was,” Jimmy said.

  “Descartes isn’t going to like it,” Sarah said. “You selling him a claim and giving Pythagoras guaranteed profits off of his own back.”

  “No, he isn’t going to like it. Which is why we’re still going back to Lawrence on the next train, despite the fact that Pythagoras would very much like to meet you, while you’re on the coast.”

  Jimmy looked over his shoulder, an awareness of danger yet in his eyes, and he hailed a taxi, stopping to get the door for Sarah. She let him put her into it and waited as he went around to the other door to get in.

  “How much are you going to scalp the claim owners to feed Pythagoras? If you’re going to be making him enough money to be willing to give up his worry about wrecking the world economy and any goal of beating his brother at this?”

  Jimmy gave directions to the driver and twisted his mouth to the side.

  “We should wait to discuss this,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  He pressed his lips hard enough to drive the color out of them. She frowned, her face de-animating into anger.

  A muscle underneath his eye twitched, anger in return.

  “You make this so much harder than it needs to be,” he said.

  “If I don’t stand in your way, no one is going to,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “It’s five percent,” he said, and she tipped her head to the side.

  “That’s not enough to call it all off,” she said.

  His thumb rubbed across his fingertips and he looked out the front window, his body struggling with the forced stillness.

  Sarah put it all together without him saying any more.

  “Damn it, Lawson,” she said. “You offer a man like that enough money, he’ll abandon all ideals about preserving the global economy. You promised to expand.”

  He was silent, just the muscle in his jaw working.

  “You guarantee a ramp-up rate?”

  “I did.”

  “And how stupid is it?”

  His eyes flicked over at her, then went back to the windshield.

  “You’re going to destroy Lawrence,” she said, seeing it, feeling it, with a deflating sense of inevitability. She let her shoulders rest back against the seat, the world blurring past.

  More mines.

  More absenta.

  More claim owners, looking for workers.

  More money coming into Lawrence, competing for labor, competing for resources.

  “It isn’t a bad thing,” Jimmy murmured.

  “I can’t do it,” she said. “Not at the rates you’re talking about.”

  “I’m going to send Rhoda to Magnum to buy their claim histories,” he said. “They don’t know, yet. The news is a rumor. They just think that a claim got lucky and found a stray vein of absenta. They’ll sell them to her.”

  “And if they kill her instead?” Sarah asked.

  “Thomas won’t let that happen,” Jimmy said. “I don’t care what you think about his ability to kill a man, he’ll do it to protect his wife.”

  “Why not just send Thomas?” Sarah asked. He glanced at her.

  “Because no one is going to look at a woman the way they would a man, when she goes in to buy the maps. She’s going to pass herself off as an ecologist, interested in studying the local animal life up in the mountains.”

  “You mean the vermin Dog hunts,” Sarah said.

  “There are people here on the coast who would love to spend their lives studying that,” Jimmy said. “They just don’t realize how many indigenous species there are up there.”

  She twisted her mouth, and he shrugged, leaning up on his elbow to look out the back window. He was agitated, but not just with a sense of danger. This was Jimmy at his most creative, the inability to contain himself. Freed from the paperwork and the details, just looking at the horizon and pointing at the holes he was going to put in it.

  “We can’t do it,” she said.

  “There’s no one to stop us,” Jimmy said.

  “You’re already spread too thin,” Sarah said. “How are you going to expand that much?”

  He looked at the back of the taxi driver’s head, narrowing his eyes. Thinking about putting a bullet into him. Sarah knew Jimmy too well than to worry he’d actually do it, but it hardly surprised her that he was thinking about it.

  The fingers on both hands were going now.

  “We signed the papers this morning,” Jimmy said. “He’ll file them today. Lawson bank will be an official entity by tonight, pending certification.”

  “And Descartes will know about it,” Sarah said.

  “He will,” Jimmy said.

  She sighed.

  He hadn’t told her what he was going to pitch to Pythagoras. She should have expected it would be something this crazy, this unacceptable.

  They got to the train station and Jimmy walked with her back to the private car attached to the end of the train waiting there, loading her luggage and closing the door behind them. He threw himself onto the window seat, and Sarah finally relented, rolling a gremlin cigarette and lighting it. He stood, pacing back and forth on the carpet as she pulled the flame into the gremlin, then offered it to him. He took her wrist and pulled it off to the side, out of the way, his other hand finding the back of her neck. She pulled her face away.

  “You are…” she started, then pulled her wrist. He held tight, face at a slight downward angle, eyes hard up at hers. They breathed.

  “We are going to own the world, when I’m done,” he said.

  “I don’t want the world,” she answered, and he laughed, just a shudder, not a trace of mirth on his face.

  “That’s why,” he said, and she frowned, then shook her head, pulling her face back again.

  “Jimmy, I got a lit cigarette in my hand,” she said. He peeled his fingers off her wrist, one by one, and she gave him a dour look as she reached across herself, her arm sliding between their bodies, to put the cigarette into a dish on the table. She paused there, just to make the point, even as the pressure on the back of her neck stayed firm, then she lowered her mouth to his. He kissed her hard, deep, pulling away at the flimsy clothes, finding guns, knives, and stripping them to the table.

  At some point the train started, but Sarah didn’t notice. Jimmy was manic, distant, but right there with her, taking her away with him off wherever it was he kept those faraway dreams.

  Sunny was right.

  It was like addiction.

  --------

  They didn’t even leave the train car when it re-hitched from the coastal train to the one bound for Lawrence. They lay on the floor,
on the window seat, on the table, covered sometimes with a blanket out of the closet, sometimes in the altogether. Jimmy quit fidgeting so bad after the first day and got to the point where he could prop himself up on his elbow and talk to her. It wasn’t different from how they had always been, but it wasn’t the same, either. His hand on the flat of her stomach became normal, the way she could feel him breathe or speak where his chest pressed against her side.

  “It’s going to be good,” he told her at one point. “I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think that, someday, you were going to look at it and say that it’s good.”

  “Yes you would,” she’d scolded, and he grinned, his happy smile.

  “But I can’t finish something I want to do without you taking a step back and saying it’s good. That’s who you are.”

  “It’s who we are,” she’d told him, quiet.

  He’d put his nose against her ear, his eyes closed, and they’d just been still.

  No telling how long.

  Nobody keeping time.

  --------

  The train took increasingly longer stops at Wellsley, Carson, and Jeremiah, to the point that they actually got up and clothed themselves, getting off the train to go eat a meal at the diner while the train unloaded. The equipment got more provincial as they went, and it just took longer to get everything done. The longest stop would be at Lawrence, because everything had to be loaded and unloaded by hand.

  As Sarah was getting off the train, though, something about the air made the hair on her arms tingle, and she took several long steps away, looking up at the sky.

  “What is it?” Jimmy asked.

  “You need to go tell the conductor not to stop,” she said. “Now.”

  Jimmy looked at the sky with her, not seeing what she felt, but went, anyway. A moment later, Sarah looked up toward the engine of the train, seeing Jimmy arguing with a uniformed man, and she went to stand next to him.

  “… obligation to our passengers and cargo customers to stop as long as it takes to get everything completed as promised,” the conductor was saying.

  “If you want to turn this train around in anything less than six inches of rushing water, you will close those doors and start the engine,” Sarah said. “Right now. You can do everything you would have done when you get back, but this line doesn’t include turnaround junctures, and if you don’t get turned around at Lawrence, you’re going to be stranded in the middle of a desert flood that might last days or weeks. Might last long enough that people on this train start to starve. Might be bad enough to derail the entire train, depending on how bad the whole thing gets.”

  “She’s been telling me for months that this is going to be a bad one,” Jimmy said. “There isn’t anyone I trust more to make that guess correctly.”

  The conductor looked from one to the other of them, then off at the sky.

  “I don’t see storm clouds,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t,” Jimmy said. “They start up in the mountains and they only just barely make it off of the foothills before they’ve dumped all of their rain. Lawrence will get torrential rain for…” he looked at Sarah.

  “One to four days,” she supplied, and he nodded.

  “One to four days, and then it’s just rushing water for days and days after that. You’re new to this line. You’ve never seen it. But you want this train to be out of there before it happens.”

  “Then we should turn around here,” the conductor said. “If it isn’t worth the risk.”

  “You have an obligation to us,” Sarah said. “If you miss this window, we’ll be stuck out here for weeks. If you skip your unloading break, everyone and everything else will be back in two days.”

  The conductor was still not convinced. Sarah shook her head.

  “You abandoned the town of Lawrence for years,” she said. “I ain’t gonna let you do it again on account of the flood comin’ and you not knowin’ what it is. If I have to threaten you, I will. If he has to pay you off, he will. But you need to know what’s gonna happen here. You’re gonna close up them doors and you’re gonna start this engine, and we’re goin’ to Lawrence fast as your train can get us there. Clear?”

  “City Sarah was nice while she lasted,” Jimmy said, tippin’ his head at her and twistin’ his mouth to the side. He looked at the conductor and the man shook his head.

  “I can’t rush the stop,” he said.

  Sarah took out a gun from her holster - she weren’t goin’ into Jeremiah unarmed for nothin’, after last time - and she showed it to him, pointed not so much in his direction as not at anythin’ else.

  “You’re gonna,” she said. “We don’t get there in time, people are gonna die, and they’re gonna die in their thousands. Ain’t up for negotiation.”

  Jimmy gave the conductor a wan smile.

  “Do it. We’ll be back in my car. If this train isn’t rolling in…” He glanced at Sarah again. She looked at the horizon, trustin’ her bones to tell her right.

  “Ten minutes,” she said. Water might already be runnin’, for all she could tell. Minutes were gonna mean lives.

  “Ten minutes,” Jimmy echoed. “She’ll be back out to check on you, and I won’t be with her to supervise.”

  She narrowed her eyes at the bitty conductor man, then followed Jimmy back to the end of the train, climbin’ aboard the preposterous, frilly car and goin’ to get her proper Lawrence clothes out of the closet.

  “Is it really that bad?” he asked.

  “Wouldn’t say it was if it weren’t,” Sarah answered, puttin’ her feet into her boots. Damn, but she’d missed ‘em.

  “Yes you would,” he said. “You lie just because you like to see the reaction.”

  “Never lied about nothin’ so important as this,” she said.

  “Yes you have,” he answered, still defiant. She pursed her lips, but didn’t threaten him.

  “Gonna be a bad one,” she said.

  “What, exactly, are you seeing that the rest of us aren’t?” Jimmy asked. She shook her head.

  “Ain’t so much seein’ as feelin’,” she said. “Don’t have words to wrap around it. Just know it’s time to be home-bound, and I hope we got the supply of food to see us through.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “I left good instructions,” he said. “But if they don’t get the right cue from Granger in time…”

  “Gonna be a lot of young men go missin’ ‘cause we was off playin’ world domination,” she said.

  “They’re only there because I’m playing world domination,” Jimmy said. “We couldn’t have moved any faster.”

  “Coulda put off Maxim’s fancy-footed trip up to see his holes in the ground,” Sarah said.

  “You wouldn’t have intercepted them to know that Pythagoras was making a play on the surveyors,” Jimmy said. “They would have made it out of the range and been able to report back where Maxim’s claims were.”

  “You couldn’t know that,” Sarah said. “You did know flood was comin’.”

  He went to sit at the window, openin’ the curtain to look out at where the mountain’s’d come into sight once the train got underway. Weren’t more’n about five minutes and the train whistle sounded. Sarah nodded to herself, rubbin’ her hands one on the other, then gettin’ out her bag of gremlin and rollin’ a cigarette, goin’ to sit next to Jimmy to watch the sky. From in here, the sense weren’t so strong - the car was all but air tight and she couldn’t feel the buzz that she got outside, but the sky there at the horizon… it just weren’t quite the right color.

  “Better hope there ain’t been a sandstorm,” she muttered. “No way we’re gettin’ all the boys up into the hill, we have to go through fresh sand.”

  “I left good instructions,” Jimmy said. “But men are going to die at this. We knew that, going into it. That’s what happens when there’s absenta involved. People die.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, not disagreein’ with his point so much as his tone. People’
d died every other day in Lawrence before Pete had gone and dug absenta out of the ground again. They’d died in pools of blood, gaspin’ and gawkin’ at the hole in their bellies. They’d washed away in floods and they’d disappeared in sandstorms. Not so much, but, place like Lawrence, it happened.

  She just didn’t like believin’ it were an inevitability, like that made it not her problem, not her fault.

  Weren’t none of it her fault, ‘cause she weren’t conjurin’ up floods or storms, but it didn’t make it at all not her problem.

  “You hold yourself to too high a standard,” Jimmy said, watchin’ her face.

  “Or yours is too low,” Sarah answered. “You brought this to ‘em.”

  He sighed.

  “I’m not having this fight with you,” he said. “Again.”

  The spell was broken.

  “You got the launch set,” she said, glancing over at him.

  “When we stopped in Boon,” he answered. She’d been asleep, and he’d been dressed when she got herself up for breakfast. She nodded.

  “Ain’t gonna get back out ‘till well after it’s up,” she said.

  “You think it’s going to last that long?” he asked. She nodded.

  “Just got a feel,” she said. “Last flood were a big one, but this one…”

  “We’re much more ready,” he said.

  “There are long stretches of nothin’, ‘tween here and Lawrence,” she said quietly as the train rocked and started forward. “No water, no food, no nothin’. Kind ‘a place what if your horse kicks you loose, you’re dead.”

  “We didn’t come this way very often,” he said, and she shook her head.

  “No reason,” she said. “Up in the mountains, you can make it a good long time, you know what you’re doin’, and for as hellish as they are, what the flats got goin’ for ‘em is they ain’t that big. Mountains right there, you just head up, hit water within two days’ walk. This way, though… It were the great nothin’ you gotta cross to get to Jeremiah, horseback.”

  “Perpeto,” Jimmy said, and she nodded.

  “Without Perpeto, Lawrence woulda been dead, time you got back to it,” she said. The working population couldn’t have survived agin’ a decade. Just couldn’t.