The Threshold Read online

“No. I’m … uh … looking for Charles.”

  “Like as not he’ll find you first.” She had a nasal voice and smelled strongly of funeral roses. “His money, ain’t it?” The woman walked Humphrey off into the dark.

  Dread and curiosity mixed like bubbles in Aletha’s blood. “What if you get lost in time and can’t go back?” Cree Mackelwain would be saying. The comforting streetlight still shone at the other end of the alley. Her cat-following had disappeared into another decade.

  Aletha held her breath and stepped off into the mud. It oozed cold through the open toes of her sandals, tried to suck the straps off her heels, insinuated through the mesh of her hose. When she’d passed the false-fronted livery stable she could see tiny lights twinkling high in the mountains at the head of the canyon and shadows of familiar peaks against dim moonlight. The sweetness of recent rain didn’t mask the stench of garbage and yeasty beer. Over the slamming of her pulse in her ears she heard voices raised behind closed doors and the splash of the San Miguel River down at the end of the street. The thudding sound of distant mills provided multiple heartbeats for this mountain night.

  A woman carefully silhouetted in a window scratched her head. Row upon row of cribs, interspersed with larger frame houses. This part of Telluride was built up solid as far as Aletha could see in the night light. A few moments ago there’d been empty lots, raw condos in-the-building, and only remnants of the old left behind.

  Buildings replaced the trees and cut off the view of the Pick and Gad from Mildred Heisinger’s cupola. The Big Swede, the Monte Carlo, the Idle Hour—all names in scrolly print on lighted windows. A straining violin tried to accompany an out-of-tune piano and something made the sound of two pieces of wood slapping together repeatedly. Two men leaned against the Monte Carlo’s lighted front, each with a heel up against the building, a knee bent, each with hands deep in his pockets. Horses dozed at hitching rails.

  The brick Pick and Gad had a light over its front door too and it wasn’t red. Except for the lurid brocade at the windows it looked disconcertingly the same. There was another such house next to it, noisier, not as fancy. And then the railroad tracks shiny with use on a raised bed of cinders, and dark shapes of wooden boxcars. Aletha turned around and almost lost a sandal. If only she could be invisible and wander these streets safely.

  The two men holding up the Monte Carlo had their heads turned her way. They looked more like cowboys than miners, but their pants were baggy and worn inside round-toed boots. They wore hats with rounded crowns that resembled state-patrolman hats rather than Stetsons. They did have holstered guns hanging from their middles, though. She’d lose her shoes for sure if she tried to run in this mud.

  “Hardly no clothes,” one of the cowboys said overloud so she would hear. “Think she’s tetched, Jesse?”

  “Lookin’ for business, more like.”

  “Why’d she chop her hair off then?”

  Aletha pretended not to hear, glanced nonchalantly down Pacific Avenue to see Miss Heisinger’s house lit even to the cupola and funny round window in the attic room. Shivers came over her in spasms, from the damp chill, from the excitement. It was all laced with a hearty dose of misgiving.

  “I’m paranoid,” she said aloud to keep the freaky night at bay.

  “I’m Jesse,” a voice answered right behind her. “This here’s Carl.”

  Aletha left her shoes in the mud and ran. The light from her flashlight bounced and blinked off buildings and street with a strobe effect. Both her feet slipped and she nearly ended up doing a split. The man from the livery stable leaned against the door frame and watched her. She could hear Jesse and Carl not far behind, laughing, cursing the mud.

  There appeared to be a great deal of light, people, and noise on Colorado Avenue up ahead, but Aletha had lost her curiosity. She turned and slid into the alley leading to the Senate. Why hadn’t she listened to Cree? The comforting light at the other end of the alley was gone now like the cats. The mud didn’t end where it had begun before. The shadows had deepened, taken over. She was afraid to go on, and afraid not to.

  “Forgot your wooden shoes, lady.” One of the cowboys dangled them in front of her by their muddy straps. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed or changed his clothes for a year—and that in an alleyway redolent of rotting food, outhouses, and the horsey stable.

  “Iddy-bit scrawny, ain’t she?” The other man appeared and doubled the stench. Aletha brought her hand up to breathe through and the flashlight up to shine in his face. “Ever see’d such a little light bulb? Where’s the cord at?”

  Aletha decided to scream, long and loud, because she didn’t know what else to do and she thought it might put them off for a while. But somebody beat her to it. It came jarring, wrenching, bone-tingling that scream—drawn out and then strangled off at the end as though murder had surely completed it. The man from the livery stable ran around the corner and stopped when he saw Aletha, as if he’d expected to see her lying in a pool of blood. Lights came on in small buildings on one side of the alley and some of the apartments above the stores on the other.

  A shadow figure walked through a shadow and into the light, turned first one way and then the other. Tracy Ledbetter.

  “Now, that’s more to my liking,” one said.

  Aletha sidestepped her antique companions. “Tracy, was that you?”

  “I walked out the back door looking for you, and everything was … different.” Tracy stared around at the people staring at her. “This is your doing.”

  “Careful,” Aletha whispered, and turned to Jesse and Carl. “Sorry, we’re … uh, booked. Booked for the night.” She took Tracy’s elbow and started them toward the Senate. “Just walk and shut up.”

  “Those two guys are following us,” Tracy said between chattering teeth. “They have guns.” They paused at the back door of the Senate. It would be senseless to walk into a kitchen full of strangers, so they continued, arm in arm, to the street. A sign read Pabst Milwaukee Bottling Works on the building across the alley from the Senate, where there had been only a dumpster and some cats. A boy in knickers and sagging knee socks raced down the board sidewalk, pausing to hand them each a sheet of paper from a stack under his arm.

  Aletha swerved Tracy around the corner and made her run past the Senate’s front door to the empty lot on the other side and into the shadows. “Maybe those cowboys’ll think we went inside.” She stubbed her toe on a board and had to hop. “Maybe if we go around to the kitchen it’ll be our time now.”

  “Will you just quit maybe-ing and do something?”

  There was a regular maze of little outbuildings behind the Senate and they tried to tug each other different ways in order to thread them. Aletha kept stepping on rocks and other sharp, unknown dangers in the mud. No smelly cowboys awaited them when they reached the alley again, just the rich smell of beef frying in the kitchen. She turned off the failing light. They held on to each other in a dark recess between the restaurant and a shed behind it, unsure of what to do next, hoping only to be present when a hole opened onto a more familiar world.

  “What if we can’t get back?” Tracy echoed the fear Cree had expressed in Alta.

  Cree Mackelwain sighted in on the Lizard Head, then turned the Cessna’s nose in the direction of Alta. The world always looked cleaner from above. At home the terrain below would have been the sear of brown rolling to mauve, gashes of crimson in the crevasses, tan string roads laid across empty miles, all blending sensibly. Here jarring contrast offered a different beauty—pockets of yellowing aspen, pieces of red ground cover, slashes of harsh shadow through sun-bright foliage. Green forest abutted beige rock and swept to the base of gray crags. The crag tops were frosted with snow that glittered against the endless depth of sky.

  Cree had known he wanted to fly about the time he discovered birds. He opted to earn an engineering degree and then try to get into commercial flight school after, especially since his inheritance from his maternal grandfather, Douglas McCree, had bee
n earmarked for a university education only. But he’d figured without Elaine. They had married when she became pregnant in his senior year at UCLA. Her brother was a roughneck on an oil rig in Wyoming and making “fabulous” money. Elaine’s folks had plastic deer and pink plastic flamingos stuck into their front yard on metal rods. They talked Cree into roughnecking a year or two. Elaine and he could live with them. Babies didn’t come cheap these days, they explained to Cree.

  “Hell, I wanted to do right by the kid.” There were no cars in Alta. Cree’d flown over this area before. And with the information in the now missing folder he’d found nothing. The hints in his partner’s papers had convinced Cree that the stash was either in the mine in Alta or in one of the many in the mountains nearby. Why hadn’t they assumed the same? Perhaps they’d already found it and left.

  Elaine had miscarried during Cree’s second week in a camp next to a rig out in the boonies. The camp consisted of five house trailers connected together. Cree worked two weeks for each week he had with Elaine. She grew used to living with her folks again. Cree grew used to making lots of money, came to prefer the rough camaraderie in the camp to Elaine’s parents and their everlasting TV set.

  The Cessna followed the road to the Alta Lakes. A couple of tents. A figure in waders fishing. A pickup truck. How had Cree thought he could do anything from the sky? Or did he just fear some dangerous involvement on the ground?

  “After what happened to Dutch I’ve got damned good reason.” Dutch Massey ran a small air-freight service out of Casper. He had only three planes when Cree met him but did a good business flying roughnecks, supplies, and light equipment out to remote rigs and the men back to town on their free days. Cree’d had a pilot’s license since the day he was of age and he began to do a little flying for Dutch on his week off just to get in the air and away from Elaine. She’d taken a perverse pleasure in showing him off at cowboy bars. Every guy who pounded nails or sacked groceries during the day traveled at night in a Stetson and a pickup with a rifle slung across the back window. There were a lot more paunches in those cowboy bars than there were bowed legs. And the kind of macho-bluff he was used to out at the rig tended to turn nasty when mixed with liquor and women in town.

  “Shit, she even tried to pick fights for me.” But Elaine got to liking those places so much she took a job at one after her second miscarriage. By the time of the divorce, Elaine was pregnant again, and not by him. And Cree had enough money saved to buy into Dutch Massey’s little air-freight business. Before his partner’s murder, Massey-Mackelwain was flying a total of twenty-one aircraft out of Casper, Cody, as well as Butte, Montana, and had forty-two on the payroll.

  Now Cree turned the one remaining plane back toward the pitched roof of the boardinghouse in Alta for a last flyover before returning to the Montrose airport and at an altitude his experience told him was lower than it was wise. Still no cars parked where he could see them. If it hadn’t been for the all-pervasive engine noise he might have heard something before he noticed the small holes ripping in the Cessna’s wings.

  Someone was shooting at him.

  16

  “Keep that up boy”—Knut Talse took a pinch of snouse, the miners’ snuff, fingered it into a ball, and tucked it under his lip—“and you’ll be walkin’ down the hill talking to yourself.”

  Bram leaned on his muck stick, listened to the new timbers creak in the stull at his back. “Ground’s working, Mr. Talse.”

  “Thank you very much for that engineering report, Mr. O’Connell. I’ll pass it on to the shift boss, huh?” Talse was a little man with massive chest and arms, whose mood could be read by the positioning of his eyebrows. Now they moved up under his cap. “Speakin’ of which,” and he kicked the shovel out from under Bram in emphasis, “he should be here any minute.”

  But Bram couldn’t shake off his unease, continued to stand there trying to talk himself out of it. There were always dangers in the drifts, but as Pa had told him so often, a greater percentage of women died in their beds giving birth than men working underground.

  “Is yoost the snow melt seeping down,” Gus Lundberg, the big Swede, assured him. Bram had yet to meet a little Swede. Gus was known as one of the best machine-men in the San Juans. “It makes the dirt to svell there, shift here.”

  “That a fact now?” Sully, an Irishman whose real name was Thomas Sullivan, rolled his eyes at the roof so that a good portion of the whites shone out of a dirt-blackened face. As if on order, the little hollow, ghostly, shivery tappings began all around them. Bram’s candle went out. “And what’ll be making them noises, do ya think?” Sully whispered. “Snow melt?”

  Even the bohunks framing timber for drift sets further down stopped their foreign chatter to listen to the tommyknockers.

  “Don’t hear me no hammers,” Talse yelled down a manway from the stope where he and Shorty Miller were hand-drilling. Rock sloughed down a wall between lagging timbers behind Sully. The tommyknockers grew silent.

  Bram was almost afraid to breathe but he relit his candle, bent obediently to the muck stick. Sully went back to his single-jack, a heavy hammer he used to drive a star-steel drill ever deeper into the rock face to make a hole to fill with powder to blow up the face so Bram could muck it out and the mill could pulverize it. Gus inserted new steel into his machine drill to do the same, adjusted the air hose, and let rip.

  The Irishman’s hammer clanged. The Swede’s drill spat and whined. Bram’s shoveling made a slicing-sucking noise. But he could still hear the water streaming into the levels instead of seeping. He could still hear wrenching timbers creak in agony all the way back down the drift. Had those sounds ever seemed so ominous? A shout came along on sluggish air from where the rest of Talse’s crew was driving a crosscut. “Fire in the hole!”

  The warning wafted down to them just before the round fired and blue smoke trailed along behind. Bram, Sully, and Gus had moved as one away from the creaky stull as the blast reverberated down the drift. It shoved a puff of air before it that set the candle flames lying over on their sides. Bram’s eyes watered in the stench of burned powder. But the stull and lagging around them creaked no more than usual and they drew a relieved breath. They’d just turned back to their work when more shouts cracked through the smoke like shots from a repeating rifle.

  Then came the awful, dreaded sound of breaking timbers and grinding rock. A far more violent rush of air exploded on them this time with a pressure that “whumped” in their ears. It was filled with dust so thick it quenched the smoke.

  The candles snuffed out completely. A depressing silence weighed down on the blackness. And there is no blackness like that hundreds of feet deep in the earth where sunlight, starlight, or even shadow was never meant to reach. It pressed on Bram’s eyelids and against his eardrums. He straightened from the cringing expectation of having the roof crash heavy on his body. He coughed out dust and grit, and the sound wakened others to scuffle their boots and clear their throats.

  “Whore’s shit.” Sully’s voice came out of the dust-clogged dark with an almost tender slowness. He managed to add a mixture of anger and resignation to the exhalation that came with it. One of the bohunks began a whispered chant in what might have been Latin, surely was Catholic, and sounded a lot like prayer. Then Knut Talse’s growl as he climbed down the manway, the hissing of his carbide lamp, the metallic grating as he tried to spark the flint wheel, and the “pop” when it ignited. The pointed yellow flame seemed small and weak now, moved silently up the drift, raising to study the quality of the fear on each man’s face as it passed.

  Shorty Miller limped along behind Knut. “Told you, after them angels in the cookhouse give warning, it’s dangerous crewing with that big bastard.”

  The word “bastard” came just as Talse had lifted the lamp to Bram’s expression, and the foreman pursed his lips at the reaction he witnessed. “Shut up your head, Shorty, or I’ll have the kid knock out what’s left of your teeth.”

  “She’s caved,
” Bram said stupidly. What difference did it make if someone called him a bastard when he was as good as dead anyway?

  “Another engineering report, Mr. O’Connell? We’d best go have us a look then, hadn’t we?”

  The stull they’d all been so suspicious of had held fine. They tramped on past the station, all crowding as close as they could to Talse’s light. The dust hung unmoving now. Bram put his handkerchief to his nose to breathe through. Piles of earth had sloughed to the floor, narrowing their passage and forcing them to spread out more than they wanted. They came to the new end of the drift before they came to the crosscut where the others had worked. Rubble heaped tight to the roof. Knut played the light from top to bottom, side to side. Water covered the tracks, but the air pipe stuck out broken off and clear of the water.

  “Think the rest made it?” Shorty asked. No one answered; no one knew. He knelt to the pipe and sniffed, put a hand over the jagged break and tapped his signal with a crowbar. The silence and the crew waited for an answer that didn’t come.

  “Too soon.” Knut Talse coughed and the light jumped around on the wall of debris. “They have to organize a rescue. Meantime we’d best plan.”

  “Want me to start mucking this?” Bram needed something to do. He kept picturing how cowardly he’d look dying, and Ma’am’s stricken whiteness when she heard of it.

  “Where would you muck it to? There is more there than just a little plug, boy. Could go as far as the hoist even, if George and the boys brought it down driving the crosscut. Take days to reach us. You save your strength for living long enough to greet ’em when they get here.” Knut led them back to the station and collected the remaining candles and snuffs from each man. He sorted and stacked all the food in one locker. Then, back a ways where the ground was good and the drift widened, he set them to building two platforms from the timbers the bohunks had been using for drift sets. They nailed a cap box to an upright timber between the platforms to hold a communal light and an empty powder case at one end of each platform for a thunder mug. The spent carbide from lamps that had been dumped near the lockers would serve for deodorizing these crude privies.