The Threshold Page 22

  Callie didn’t learn of the fire at the Smuggler-Union Mine until the next morning. She and Opal Mae had huddled together on the same cot all night, partly for warmth and partly for comfort. The cot next to Callie’s was empty. Elsie Biggs had been dismissed that morning. She’d committed the cardinal sin for Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls. She’d entered a room while the gentleman was present. “If she hadn’t been a ninny and screamed, no one would ever have known,” Opal Mae insisted. “The gentleman wouldn’t have told, would he?”

  “Not on himself,” Callie answered. “Elsie probably didn’t even know he was in there.”

  “Let this be a lesson to the rest of you,” Mrs. Stollsteimer had told them sternly. To be sure they behaved themselves, she decreed they would henceforth work in groups; the three youngest—Callie, Opal Mae, and Senja—would work together and Olina and Grace would do the same. “I don’t ever want to see any of you parading about separately.”

  Callie, Opal Mae, and Senja were trying to scrub and scrape dried tobacco juice off the wainscoting in the dining room the next morning when they heard about the terrible fire at the Smuggler and the estimates of the dead.

  “Bodies already being stacked like cordwood at the mortician’s,” a guest said to another as they waited at the door for the dining room to open.

  “That’s what those foreign buggers get for organizing unions, if you ask me. Good Lord just ‘struck’ back.” And the man laughed.

  31

  Aletha found the coat at the Old Claims Trading Post among a wide assortment of items—secondhand, just old, and valuable antique. It was heavy, made of gray scratchy wool, with black piping and buttons. It had darts pulling it in at the waist and reached the tops of her tennis shoes. It smelled musty and dusty but appeared sound enough.

  Her mouth felt considerably better. Her front teeth had not turned gray yet but she still ate carefully. The film festival was due to start the next day and the conversations in restaurants, stores, and on the sidewalk had taken on the broad A’s of those who had trained their speech habits or those who wanted one to believe they had. But the festival did mean work for her. Renata warned that after the festivals and before the skiing there would be an off season and work would be scarce. Aletha’s problem was keeping the coat and her black dress boots with her in case the hole opened up. She decided to wear them to work.

  “What a cool coat,” one of her fellow laborers remarked at Sophio’s the next day. “It even stinks old.” No one else noticed it. You had to get pretty far off-the-wall to be noticed in Telluride. But she couldn’t wear it while actually waiting tables so she hid it behind the antique sideboard on the restaurant’s balcony where her tables were assigned and then was nervous whenever she had to go downstairs for burritos and margaritas. She needn’t have worried because nothing happened that day. It happened the next.

  She was in the bathroom at the crib, washing out the towel with a circle cut in its center that she used on the toilet seat just in case Tracy’s disease of the decade could be spread in that manner, when Tracy started yelling and racing between the front door and the back. “I’m not getting caught this time. Which is it? Front or back? I don’t want to be wherever whatever it is, is.”

  Aletha dropped the towel, slid into her boots and coat, opened the back door. Charles bumped off her in his haste to get in. It was a sunny afternoon, just as it had been a moment ago, and a pickup sat in the alley. “Tracy, nothing happened. It’s still now.”

  “Yeah? Take a look out front.”

  The front room was chilly compared to the kitchen. Charles hid under a bed, only his puffed-up tail showing. Aletha peered through a window onto Pacific Avenue. All she could see was fog, a dark fog, as if it were night in front of the crib while afternoon in back. She tried to swallow down the rush of excitement. She was doing this only for Cree, not as a fling. This time she wasn’t wearing the quartz pendant either. So much for that idea. But she grabbed it off the top of the TV in a sort of superstitious hope it would bring her luck in finding Cree in Callie’s world. She pulled the TV away from the front door, calling over her shoulder to Tracy, “Wish me luck.”

  “Don’t go out there!”

  But Aletha was out there. On a board sidewalk in the cold. The fog had an empty feel to it. She could see a smear of light across the street and a watery streetlight that hung on invisible wires over the intersection of Spruce Street and Pacific Avenue. No tinkling pianos, rough laughter, or clicking gambling wheels. Just the whisper of the fog and the distant heartbeat of the mills. It wasn’t right and it was spooky and Aletha decided to look for Cree another time, but the door to the crib was locked.

  “Go away,” some woman who didn’t sound like Tracy answered her knock through the door, and the light went out inside. There was no answer at all to her second knock. Aletha buttoned up the coat partway down the front. Stealthy footsteps approached from the direction of Spruce Street and she slid around the side of the crib.

  “Tap ’er light,” a voice whispered out of the fog, and one set of footsteps crossed the street while the other continued up it.

  Aletha stood chewing on her knuckle, hoping for an idea as to what to do next, a shiver tickling her spine at the ghostly sound of that whisper. Her boots crunched on snow when she stepped into the side alley a couple of cribs down. But the fog was even darker here, so she followed the sidewalk to the corner, trying not to let her boots clunk where it was hollow. Her breath made its own little fog and she stuck her hands deep in the coat’s pockets. Her ears felt frozen and numb. She didn’t like the feeling of going directly from afternoon to night in a few steps. It felt like accelerated jet lag. If the Big Swede or the Monte Carlo, the Idle Hour or the Pick and Gad were operating tonight, business was slow. She could distinguish few lights and no sounds from that direction. From the other, horses stamped and snorted in the livery stable. Aletha turned that way, imagining all sorts of threats in the fog.

  How had she imagined she’d get to Alta from here? Fly? Was Cree still there? The fog, filled with the smell of wood smoke, thinned and thickened without warning, came to her in chunks. It couldn’t be the absolute dead of night when everybody slept, because there were lights in the apartments above the stores. She reached Colorado Avenue and again a watery streetlight hung dead center over the intersection. Nothing doing here either. What was this? Horse’s hooves thudded on dirt in a slow walk.

  “Who goes there?” someone called from up the street.

  “Sentry …” and words Aletha could not hear, male voices. The horse hooves began again and the horse with a white streak on his nose cut through a chunk of fog into a thin patch. The fog clustered in little beads on the hairs in his ears and on the mane that straggled over his forehead. He snorted steam in her face. The rider was dressed like a cross between a Canadian Mountie and a Boy Scout. “And who goes here?”

  Aletha backed up against a building and the horse followed her onto the sidewalk. “Where is everybody?”

  “In their homes as they should be.” The Mountie-Scout dismounted and the saddle creaked like a dead tree limb in the wind. “By order of Governor Peabody of the state of Colorado. The town’s under martial law and there’s a curfew, miss. I’ll escort you home.”

  “Uh, I just got here and I don’t have a place to go.”

  “You must have come from somewhere and in a hurry. You’ve come out without your hat.” Leading the horse with one hand, he took her arm with the other and showed clearly what he thought of her by walking them back into the red-light district. “Surely you have friends who’ll take you in? The penalty for breaking curfew is arrest, and the jail and Redmen’s Opera House are filled with ruffians. They are no place for a woman of any sort.”

  “I don’t know anybody—except Callie O’Connell. She works at the Sheridan Hotel, or did … or will.” The horse whinnied back to his friends locked up in the stable as they passed. “Oh, and I know Mildred Heisinger. But I don’t know if she lives here yet.” She kne
w she was chattering insanely. “What I really need is to get to Alta.”

  Another sentry commanded them to halt and stepped out of the fog with rifle lowered. “Ah, Captain Webbley, sir. All’s quiet that we can see, but I think they’re out and about. In this fog we can’t fire on ’em for fear of hittin’ one of our own.”

  “Yes, well, I have a culprit here. Says she has no home but knows a Mildred Heisinger somewhere who might take her in.”

  “She’d be the house with the iron fence and cupola right over there, sir. It’s the lighted window you’re seeing through the fog.”

  Captain Webbley jerked Aletha forward. “I don’t think Mildred’s expecting me,” she said.

  He tied the horse to the fence and guided her through the gate. There was a stained-glass panel in the door now. A black woman let them into the entry hall. It had a small table with a lamp and a coat rack instead of the many mirrors it would have. The worn linoleum had given way to polished wood and an oval throw rug. The black woman moved like the fog, with hardly more than a whisper. A short man stepped out from between the curtains that hung across the parlor door.

  “Mr. Meldrum.” The men shook hands and the captain explained Aletha’s presence in a loud voice. Mr. Meldrum’s frosty blue eyes watched Captain Webbley’s face and not until the captain had finished speaking did they turn to Aletha. There was the same emotional blankness in them that had troubled her about Duffer and his goons.

  “What’s she done, bobbed her hair?” He worked the inside of his lips around on his teeth, pursed them a couple of times. Mr. Meldrum spit at a corner of the floor. It was brown and Aletha half-expected it to steam. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Millie? Come on out here and see if you got any use for this.”

  Aletha was aware of the smell of her old coat in the small entry hall. The young Mildred Heisinger made her feel like a frump in comparison, like Renata Winslow always did. Mildred emerged from the parlor in an ivory-colored gown puffed at the upper arms and bosom, slimming to waist and wrist and flaring gradually to the floor. The bodice was all lacy and the dress looked much like those Aletha had seen at the museum, but not yellowed, dusty, limp, or worn with age. And neither was Mildred. Pale hair, skin, dress, and eyes—she looked almost like a marble statue and held herself like one. A thin feathery curl hung down in front of each ear, the rest of her hair swept up in an impossible scheme.

  Captain Webbley drew in his breath and stared. Then he explained Aletha again. Mildred didn’t watch him speak but watched Aletha instead. Aletha could only stare back and wonder at the change the years would bring. “She has obviously fashioned a story for your benefit, Captain. I have never seen her.” Even her voice was lovely. “But I do agree she can’t be put out on the street with all the unpleasantness. Perhaps Leona would have room for her.”

  Aletha was struck by the complete lack of sympathy in Mildred’s tone. No empathy for another female here. Her eyes held more of a studied disinterest than the cold of Meldrum’s. “I’ll take her off your hands,” he told the captain now and reached around the curtained parlor door for a gun belt with two filled holsters. “Going that way myself.” He took his coat from the coat rack. It had a star pinned on it. He and Mildred exchanged looks and then he hustled Aletha out the door. “Come on, girlie.”

  “Who’s Leona?” And when he didn’t answer her—“I really have to get to Alta. Is there any way you could help me? It’s very important.” He just strode through the fog pulling her along with him. Even when a sentry ordered him to halt Meldrum didn’t stop until he saw the rifle pointed at his chest. “Oh, sorry, Mr. Meldrum. I didn’t know it was you.”

  Meldrum stared the sentry down and continued on his way with Aletha in tow, not by the arm as the captain had, but by a handful of the coat’s shoulder pad. He was headed for the Pick and Gad. “Uh, listen, I’m no angel but I’m not ready for that place. Will you stop and listen to me?”

  It was then she remembered her last conversation with the old Mildred Heisinger. This was the Bob Meldrum who murdered men by picking fights and outshooting them. And he didn’t listen to her because he couldn’t hear. “Deafer than I am now,” Mildred had said. Aletha would have thought somebody would sneak up from behind and shoot him if he couldn’t hear well.

  The scream of a horse. Dogs barking. Men shouting off in the fog. Popping sounds. Aletha would have liked to think they were firecrackers but she feared they were gunshots. This old town was obviously a town at war and Aletha had picked a lousy time to visit.

  32

  Cree Mackelwain found himself evicted from the hospital. Not because his body had fully healed but because he was a pauper and because those injured in the Smuggler-Union fire filled the town’s small hospitals. Nurse Swengel rewrapped his rib cage and gave him a last breakfast of oatmeal and coffee.

  “We don’t treat vagrants kindly in Telluride,” Sheriff Rutan told him. “Now, we could send you out on the next train. But then, you owe money around here. Hospitals don’t come free.” He stretched his upper lip down over his front teeth and scratched absently at his mustache. “Then again, you could find yourself a place in Stringtown. ’Course, with winter that could be uncomfortable. You don’t have much in the way of a coat and your feet’ll freeze in them fancy cloth shoes.” He waved his cigar around and the smoke drifted toward the little stove in the corner of his office in the courthouse on Colorado Avenue. Cree kept edging closer to that stove, longing to put cold wet feet up against it and get them away from the drafts on the floor.

  “And Eugenio Pangrazia tells me this wild story about you foretelling the fire at the Smuggler. Now, I don’t believe in foretelling, so that leaves me with the possibility you might know somebody who was planning on flicking a match into that hay wagon.”

  “Mr. Pangrazia must be mistaken, sir. And I would like to stay in Telluride if you could suggest a way I could keep from starving and freezing.”

  “You’re one mighty polite fellow, you know that? And a mighty suspicious one too.” The sheriff stood by the stove with his back to it, lifted his coattails to warm his ass. “First, the union’s blaming management for that fire—should have had safety doors, say they. Should have blown the tunnel mouth right away, say they. Then management says the unions probably started it to cause trouble, which is what they do best. Now me, I don’t know. But I don’t like unions. And if I find out you’re working for St. John, Haywood, and that outfit you’ll think freezing and starving heavenly compared to what I’ll see done to you.” Sheriff Rutan watched the smoke from his cigar for a while, turned his front to the warmth, and spoke over his shoulder. He seemed the antithesis of the harried lawman of Cree’s day with nothing else to do and crowds swelling the street.

  “Personally, I think you’re a spy for one side or the other, got caught up in some troubles you won’t talk about. For all I know, you’re working for Mr. Bulkeley Wells himself. Because, friend, you ain’t from this part of the United States of America.” He moved to a table under the window and picked up a bundle that unfolded into a coat. “But seeing as you’re such a polite bastard … this belonged to a big German by the name of Brandt. Went out and forgot it one day last week and walked right in front of a passing bullet. Too bad they buried him in his boots. They might have fit you too.”

  The coat smelled sour, was heavy and black and a little short—but it was warm. “Thanks. What about the starving part?”

  “Ain’t no excuse for a man to starve in this country, friend, unless he’s afraid to work. And last I heard, Willy down at the Cosmopolitan was looking for someone to muck out the barroom. His nigger got in a fight in Stringtown and died on him. One free meal comes with the job, and wages. Just in case your other employers don’t pay up soon.” Cree thanked him for the tip and was almost out the door when Sheriff Rutan called him back. “Just one more thing, Mr. McCree Mackelwain. Since you didn’t die and we needed the room, we had to let your three friends out of the jailhouse. You might want to keep a w
atch out for them.”

  Cree hadn’t felt this helpless since he was a kid. He’d been unemployed once, but in a world he understood a little and there’d been unemployment checks to ease the strain. Now he didn’t have shelter, he didn’t have a cent, and at least until he talked to Willy he didn’t have a job. He could see his way out of this bondage to history only if he could make contact with Aletha. If she ever visited Telluride in 1901 again.

  Colorado Avenue was black with men in dark suits and derby hats. The quietest mob Cree had ever seen. The men formed orderly lines and waited to move forward. Grim faces turned toward him and Cree scrunched into Brandt’s coat collar and hurried across the side street where a brick building sat on the corner in place of the New Sheridan’s patio. Church bells clanged hollowly in the narrow valley. People stood on the sidewalk watching the silent parade. It was the funeral procession for the men killed in the Smuggler fire. He’d read where thousands of miners from all over the region had come to march in this procession. Under other circumstances this would have seemed a miraculous opportunity to indulge his penchant for history. But if he was to spend the rest of his life in it, history seemed more frightening and lonely than intriguing.

  He asked a woman where he could find the Cosmopolitan and she directed him two blocks down, where a handwritten sign on the glass door read, Closed until after the funeral.

  Where much of the Colorado Avenue Cree had known consisted of vacant lots, this Colorado Avenue was crowded on both sides with commercial buildings, many of brick, two-story, with people hanging out of apartment windows above. Cree was the only person on the street without a hat. Even the kids wore hats here. A woman at an open window next to an elaborate sign of The Knights of Pythias pointed him out to the man next to her. Cree felt like the bum they probably thought he was and walked on quickly with an unreasonable sense of shame and embarrassment. Of course it didn’t help that he still had swellings, cuts, and bruises on his face. And he still limped to protect a tenderness in his groin where one of Duffer’s little helpers had kicked him repeatedly.