Against the Day (32 page)

When it felt to Fleetwood that every
bit of American predisposition had been leached away at last, he got on a train
for the Transvaal. But in the handful of minutes between Ressano Garcia and
Komati Poort, something rearranged itself in his thoughts. The moment he
crossed the frontier, he understood what he was supposed to be doing out
here—he was headed for Johannesburg to make his own personal fortune, in
that hell of chronic phthisis, scabbed veldt, shopkeepers’ avarice, seething
rickshaw traffic, desperately too few white women, a town belonging to the
unhistoried
. . .
“like Baku with
giraffes,” as he wrote home. The Veldt went on far too long, without a tree in
sight, only smokestacks and stamp mills, which pounded in a hellish uproar
audible for miles, day and night, sending up an inescapable, vile white dust
that either remained in the air for one to breathe or descended to coat
housing, clothing, vegetation, skins of all colors. At any

given time in the world, there would
be enough towns like Johannesburg to keep occupied a certain type of energetic
young fortune seeker. It would be necessary to plunge in, from whatever
condition of bourgeois stultification, whatever prevailing weather, market
narrative, fluctuations in harvests—including Death’s—might have
defined his average day, to leap as stoically as possible into the given fever
and conduct himself as survival and profit might direct in the way of
intoxication, betrayal, brutality, risk (deep descents into the abysses of the
gold reef proving minor next to the moral plunges available, indeed beckoning,
at every hand), sexual obsession, gambling for epical stakes, seduction into
the haunts of the
dagga rooker
and opium slave. Everyone white was in
some way caught up in this, it was a nolimit game, though the Witwatersrand
high court provided a locus of public conscience, in practice one could be back
on the Lourenço Marques train and into Portuguese jurisdiction in a day and a half,
for good if one liked, the money itself gone on ahead, deposited in safety,
already seeming to have proceeded from dream, unsoiled as any figures inked in
any ledger neatly as you please
. . . .
Little
to prevent one’s turning up one day back at the old local saloon, standing
rounds till closing time. “No, not fantastically wealthy, but you know
. . .
a tickey here, a tickey there, after
a while it adds up
. . . .
”

The Kaffirs called it eGoli, “The
City of Gold.” Soon after his arrival at Johannesburg, Fleetwood was well
aboard what the smokers of
dagga
called the Ape Train. There was a story
that he had shot a coolie, but the other story was that it was a Kaffir he had
caught stealing a diamond, and that he had given the Kaffir a choice, to be
shot or to step into a mine shaft half a mile deep. He was a thief, after all,
though the stone was not so grand as diamonds go, to Fleetwood’s admittedly
untrained eye perhaps less than three carats when Amsterdam was done with it.
“I did not steal this,” the black man was saying. But did as he was told, and
relinquished it into the white man’s hand. Fleetwood gestured him with the
Borchardt toward his fate and felt a queer euphoria expanding to fill his body,
amazed to see, moreover, that the Kaffir not only recognized the state but was
entering it himself. The American stain, after all, would not be eradicated.
The two stood for a pulsebeat by the edge of the terrible steep void, and
Fleetwood understood too late that he could have made the Kaffir do anything
but somehow had come up with nothing better than this.

Though legal pretense would have
taken the merciless honed edge from the joy of the deed itself, it scarcely
mattered whether or not the Kaffir had stolen the stone, and perhaps had only
been waiting for the right moment to take it out of the compound, where the
chances were good that within minutes someone else would have stolen it from
him, some other Kaffir half a

lungful of
dagga
smoke more
capable for the moment, at which point matters would have become far more ugly
and painful for him than this relatively humane long descent into the abyss
through the blue ground, the sidetunnels whistling by faster and
faster—rather pleasant, Fleetwood imagined, for as one fell, it would
grow warmer, wouldn’t it—perhaps even feel like being taken back into a
dark womb
. . . .

That came later, in the dreams, along
with the unavoidable face of the dead man, dustwhitened, looming close. As if
looking out through holes in a mask, the eyes moved and gleamed, shockingly
alive in flesh that might as well have been artificial. Seemed to be whispering
advice. Warning that there was some grave imbalance in the structure of the
world, which would have to be corrected.

Then each time Fleetwood would be not
so much overcome by remorse as bedazzled at having been shown the secret
backlands of wealth, and how sooner or later it depended on some act of murder,
seldom limited to once. He learned to wait for this revelation, though
sometimes he woke too soon.

It comforted him to imagine that on
the karmic ledger the Kaffir and the Jew balanced out. But in fact, as
Fleetwood was informed in these lucid dreams close to dawn, all the gold in the
Transvaal could not buy the remission of a single minute of whatever waited for
him. He laughed angrily. “Purgatory? A higher law? Kaffir next of kin, chasing
me across the world? Be serious.”

Pygmies at the Club stared at him
with unspoken loathing. Chinese in the street cursed him, and, knowing only a
few words, he still thought he could recognize “kill,” “mother,” and “fuck.”
Word was about that Alden Vormance was getting up a party to go north and
recover a meteorite. There would be no gold, no diamonds, no women, no
dreaminducing smoke, no coolies or blacks, though possibly the odd Eskimo. And
the purity, the geometry, the cold.

aking quick looks behind him on the trail, Lew Basnight was
apt to see things that weren’t necessarily there. Mounted figure in a black
duster and hat, always still, turned sidewise in the hard, sunlit distance,
horse bent to the barren ground. No real beam of attention, if anything a
withdrawal into its own lopsided starshaped silhouette, as if that were all it
had ever aspired to. It did not take long to convince himself that the presence
behind him now, always just out of eyeball range, belonged to one and the same
subject, the notorious dynamiter of the San Juans known as the Kieselguhr Kid.

The Kid happened to be of prime
interest to White City Investigations. Just around the time Lew was stepping
off the train at the Union Station in Denver, and the troubles up in the Coeur
d’Alene were starting to bleed over everywhere in the mining country, where
already hardly a day passed without an unscheduled dynamite blast in it
someplace, the philosophy among larger, citybased detective agencies like
Pinkerton’s and Thiel’s began to change, being as they now found themselves
with far too much work on their hands. On the theory that they could look at
their unsolved cases the way a banker might at instruments of debt, they began
selling off to lessestablished and accordingly hungrier outfits like White City
their higherrisk tickets, including that of the longsought Kieselguhr Kid.

It was the only name anybody seemed
to know him by, “Kieselguhr” being a kind of fine clay, used to soak up
nitroglycerine and stabilize it into dynamite. The Kid’s family had supposedly
come over as refugees from Germany shortly after the reaction of 1849, settling
at first near San Antonio, which the Kidtobe, having developed a restlessness
for higher ground, soon left, and then after a spell in the Sangre de Cristos,
so it went, heading west again,

the San Juans his dream, though not
for the silvermine money, nor the trouble he could get into, both of those, he
was old enough by then to appreciate, easy enough to come by. No, it was for
something else. Different tellers of the tale had different thoughts on what.

“Don’t carry pistols, don’t own a
shotgun nor a rifle—no, his trademark, what you’ll find him packing in
those tooled holsters, is always these twin sticks of dynamite, with a dozen
more—”

“Couple dozen, in big bandoliers
across his chest.”

“Easy fellow to recognize, then.”

“You’d think so, but no two
eyewitnesses have ever agreed. It’s like all that blasting rattles it loose
from everybody’s memory.”

“But say, couldn’t even a slow hand
just gun him before he could get a fuse lit?”

“Wouldn’t bet on it. Got this clever
windproof kind of striker rig on to each holster, like a safety match, so all’s
he has to do’s draw, and the ’sucker’s all lit and ready to throw.”

“Fast fuses, too. Some boys down the
Uncompahgre found out about that just last August, nothin left to bury but
spurs and belt buckles. Even old Butch Cassidy and them’ll begin to coo like a
barn full of pigeons whenever the Kid’s in the county.”

Of course, nobody ever’d been sure
about who was in Butch Cassidy’s gang either. No shortage of legendary deeds up
here, but eyewitnesses could never swear beyond a doubt who in each case,
exactly, had done which, and, more than fear of retaliation—it was as if
physical appearance
actually shifted,
causing not only aliases to be
inconsistently assigned but identity itself to change. Did something, something
essential, happen to human personality above a certain removal from sea level?
Many quoted Dr. Lombroso’s observation about how lowland folks tended to be
placid and lawabiding while mountain country bred revolutionaries and outlaws.
That was over in Italy, of course. Theorizers about the recently discovered
subconscious mind, reluctant to leave out any variable that might seem helpful,
couldn’t avoid the altitude, and the barometric pressure that went with it.
This was spirit, after all.

Right at the moment Lew was out in
the field, in Lodazal, Colorado, chatting with Burke Ponghill, the editor of
Lodazal
Weekly Tidings,
the newspaper of record for a town which as yet was little
more than a wishful realestate venture. It was young Ponghill’s job to fill
empty pages with phantom stories, in hopes that readers far away would be
intrigued enough to come and visit, and maybe even settle.

“But so far all we’ve really got’s a
mining town that ain’t built yet.”

“Silver? Gold?”

“Well, ore anyway
. . .
containing this metallic element
that ain’t exactly been—”

“Discovered?”

“Maybe discovered, but not quite refined
out?”

“Useful for
. . .
?”

“Applications yet to be devised?”

“Well, say, sounds good to me. Where
could a fellow get a room for the night?”