American copper, p.17
American Copper, page 17
At sunrise when he brought the fire up and set bacon to butter in the cast-iron skillet the fox ascended the rise, tentative but intent. The young ones followed closely, but when they tried to move ahead she nipped at their shoulders. He drew a larger brick of bacon from the wax paper in his satchel and threw it on the skillet. The last of his store. He sat on his heels and let them come. For a moment as she topped the lip of the knoll she put her nose high and sniffed. The pups mimicked her. He took the pan from the fire, setting it on the ground. He waited. She stared. She was not the length of a man away. He drew forth a thick strip of bacon then placed it on the flat surface of a half-buried lichen-covered stone in front of him. He averted his gaze. Nose down, she crept forward. He remained still. She snatched the bacon and retreated, and the pups scattered over the lip as she gulped the bacon whole.
He took another strip, tearing it in three pieces. He set the pieces in a triangle on the stone. Again he averted his eyes. She came on with greater haste this time. Her skulk of kits followed her. She paused only for a moment, then stepped forward and took each piece delicately and ate. Only an arm’s length away now she lay down with her nose on her paws. Her four kits lay beyond her. He put the pan back on the fire and let the bacon heat again.
The kits inched forward. Gray-bodied and thin, black in the forelegs, black behind the ears, they watched him with their mouths closed. He placed a strip of bacon out for each of them, and they ate ravenously.
He fed them this way until all the bacon was gone, then he stretched out on his bedroll, watching them descend into the field until they entered a crease in the land and were gone.
He remained two days, but they did not return. He had only canned beans and salted crackers in his satchel. On the third day he slung his bedroll to his back and took up his rifle. He walked north to Wolf Point and the train.
63.
At wolf point Zion was hired by a rail foreman to work the Empire Builder and travel to points east and west, where day was buoyant and the night sky was a silver vestment overhead.
The older men on the line laughed at his size. They sat behind their counters at each station and chewed their chaw. When they spoke, they looked through him. He was nothing to them. He let them think they owned him. He had a job, he’d bide his time. The railroad furthered the chasm between himself and Evelynne and the loss of all things. Something was closing over him. Often he saw the darker image of his father’s body alongside the placid face of his mother.
Riding the Highline, he was mostly out of sight of the passengers as he hauled freight and worked coal. But a change in duty came, one he didn’t welcome. He was to provide muscle for the boss man, the conductor, a man named Prifflach. Three times tossing drunks to local sheriffs at the next stop, twice tracking rich old lady no-shows still wandering after the all-aboard.
Just past Bear’s Paw, when the first theft among the passengers was discovered, he was put in charge of public calm. On the ride west toward the walled mountains of Glacier, he felt numb. In the first compartment the conductor leaned toward him casually in order to avoid alarm even as he yelled over the noise. First seat, worst position because of the engine’s coal fire, thought Zion. He disliked Prifflach, the haughty tenor of his voice. The conductor set the course with regard to the thief. They were two towns past Bear’s Paw now. “Get some leads,” he said. “Happening nearly every stop. Bad for business.” Then came the next town, Malta, where they found an elderly man dead, his head askew, a small well of blood in his right ear.
“He had money,” said the help in the dining car. “Paid for his meals in crisp new bills. He had to have a hundred dollars or more.” But when Zion checked the body, Prifflach looking over his shoulder, there was nothing, no money, not even any silver.
Prifflach’s mouth tightened. “The line ain’t gonna like it, guaranteed. Give me the tally.”
“Four thefts now, with the dead man,” Zion said in a muted voice.
“Tally his take again,” said Prifflach.
Zion used a small piece of paper, a gnawed pencil. “Near four hundred dollars. Four hundred ten to be exact. Not counting what we figure for the dead man.”
“Get going,” Prifflach said.
Zion stared at the double doors with their elongated rectangular glass, two top squares open for the heat.
“Look alive, Middie.” Prifflach slapped him on the back of the neck.
He heard the words, noted Prifflach’s face. Wet lines in a wax head. But he stayed seated.
A weight of soot covered everyone. Passengers held children and bags on their laps, gripping them as if to ward off death. The train was on the upswing through great carved mountains, and though Zion had worked the round trip from St. Paul to Spokane a number of times already, he still felt unlanded here, awkward under the long, slow ascent of the train and the sheer drop of landscape from rock to trees, all the way down to the thin, flat line of the river.
He thought of Evelynne. He pictured her walking among the gold medallions of autumn. A stand of aspens. Her dark wine-colored hair. Her fair face so pleasing to the eye.
The side windows remained shut. The air in the compartments, especially those closest to the heat of the locomotive, was thick to the lungs and lined with body odor. He had succeeded, through a forceful combination of the billy club Prifflach issued him and the jackknife he carried, in slightly opening the casement adjoining his seat. Air slid through the sliver of space even if the chug of the train tainted it all. He felt the clean blade of pine, the rich taste of high mountains, the nicker of winter, windy and subliminal.
Looking out, he sensed the calling an eagle might feel in the drafts over the backbone of the continent, a feeling that something of light and stone and water, perhaps fire, had created him and breathed life through his lips. There is violence in that, he thought, as well as tenderness, and he saw as if with the eyes of a child the wings of the eagle thrown wide over the land, the scream of the bird in the high-borne wind.
64.
Yet zion’s mind felt compressed, and he stared at everyone suspiciously.
When Prifflach rose, Zion followed. They walked a few steps and sat down again in another couplet of chairs. People were seated in a long line, from compartment to compartment, jostled by the bumps and turns of the train. They clutched their bags.
The scenario sickened him. Too many people. Too public. He’d checked the passengers three times by order of Prifflach. A full check after each of the three stops before Malta: Bear’s Paw, Wolf Point, Glasgow. The first time he’d apologized, comforting an older woman on her way to see her son in Spokane. The second check more of the same, and the third, this time soothing the worry of a young woman off to the Washington state agricultural school in Pullman. Prifflach called it coincidence—three different burglars, three different towns, a little over four hundred dollars missing. Then came Malta, and the dead man. Prifflach had sent a wire at Malta inquiring what to do, and Zion had felt the minds of the people begin to hum and move. He’d sensed Prifflach, angry as if cornered, pushing him to action. Zion hated it, but the railroad had chosen him, and he was big. He’d been taught to do things right.
On that first check no one had resisted. Everyone simply wanted the thief caught. Even on the second and third checks people had remained polite, just grimacing while Zion displaced their bags and Prifflach went through them. Zion had to pat the men down, search their coats, their clothing, have them empty their pockets. It took far longer than he wished, but mostly the people smiled and tried to be helpful. But the death changed things. The women whispered and shrank away from him. The body itself, alone in a sleeping car until the next stop, was a constant reminder of the predator among them. Zion felt the tension like a vein of cloud swept into the bank of mountains, collecting, preparing.
Prifflach declared everyone must hand over their weapons and ordered Zion to gather them. The men glared as he searched their bags. Some were openly angry. Many, he thought, suspected him or Prifflach. Only a few gave up their arms, and unwillingly, a cluster of revolvers and two Derringers along with one rifle. Other men lied. Though Zion felt their weapons, in a bootleg or under the arm, he decided not to press, and Prifflach silently colluded, the potential threat quieting the conductor’s zeal. What Zion retrieved he stored in the engineer’s cab. Returning, he walked the aisles and felt weary.
The next stop, Havre, was a town of locked-in winters, a town of bars. At last they could remove the dead man, to be shipped back to Chicago. The body was well blanketed, taken off from the end of the train. Zion carried it across the platform, brittle and bird-like in his arms. He used his back to shield the view. Prifflach held the door for him, and as Zion entered the station he saw, over Prifflach’s shoulder, the faces of passengers in the fourth car, most of them wan and dull, not wanting to meet his eye. But one, an Indian man he’d noticed on his passenger checks, looked right at him. The man had boarded the train in Bear’s Paw. People had stared at him during the checks, a few uttering quiet threats while the man stared back as if taunting them to make good on their words. Even though the Indian was well dressed, Zion had had to quiet the car twice as they searched him.
Inside the station Zion heard Prifflach tell the attendant the death was of natural causes. “Old man died in his sleep,” Prifflach said. “Line needs to inform the family. They can meet the body in St. Paul or wait until Chicago.” Prifflach ordered Zion back to the train to watch the passengers. No sheriff, thought Zion. Railroad saving its own skin. Closemouthed, he looked at Prifflach, but the conductor waved him on, and Zion walked back to the train.
He sat in the first seat, put his head in his hands, ran his hands through his hair.
Then he disembarked, rounded the platform, and crossed the dirt street. He approached the front door of the Elk Horn Saloon. The door was painted black with oiled hinges. Inside, a dim small room and three tables, a dark marble counter with five stools. The place was clean. A lone bartender wiped things down. “Help you?” he said.
“No,” Zion answered, the murmur of his voice barely audible. He needed a chair to sit in, a space to calm his mind.
The tender spat in a tin cup on the counter. “Don’t drink, don’t stay,” he said.
Zion sensed things shutting down, his insides heavy and tight, the center of him like an eclipse that obscured the light. Three quick steps to the barman and one fist that rode the force of hip and shoulder, the man laid cold on the hardwood floor. Not dead, but still, and flat on his back. Zion, in the chair he desired, watched the blood curl from a three-inch line over the man’s eye, elliptic down his face to his neck, to the floor. The tender remained motionless as Zion considered him. “Should’ve been Prifflach,” he said aloud. But saying it made Zion feel broken. He couldn’t go back. His eyes felt grave, dull as his father’s. Darkness covered the earth and deep darkness its people, a darkness he could not undo. Prifflach came cursing, and Zion strode in the conductor’s shadow back to the train.
As he walked the aisle, thoughts of Evelynne overcame him, the form of her, the taste of her kiss, and he knew he must do his work here now without her. He saw her stiff back and perfectly aligned head. She walked through a field, away from him. He went to the back of the train and walked forward again as he eyed the passengers. Stuck in the clothing along his ribs, a burr needled him like a spur shank.
Three quick halts at Shelby, Cut Bank, and Browning. East Glacier next, the station at the park’s east entrance with the Blackfeet Agency greeting, where three Blackfeet waited on the small wood platform in full regalia. An elder in an eagle-feather headdress gave out cigars. Two women in ceremonial white deerskin dresses sold beadwork. Only a handful of passengers got out and gawked. Most remained in their seats, brooding. Then, on the track past East Glacier, as the train climbed the high boundary toward the west side of the park and the depot at Belton, two more reports of impropriety, two more thefts, lesser but significant, one of fifteen dollars, the other five.
“So?” said Prifflach.
“What?” said Zion. The burr in his clothing gnawed at his side.
“So start another check,” said Prifflach.
The conductor pulled a small piece of paper from his vest pocket, the wire retrieved from the Havre station in answer to his plea at Malta. Prifflach turned the paper to Zion and read the words: Keep quiet—no police—security man finds thief—or loses job.
“No good,” said Zion aloud, using a tone he’d heard his mother use to calm his father. “Look at them,” Zion said, motioning with his eyes down the aisle.
Prifflach turned on him, sharp-faced, and what he said made Zion desire to kill him. “Line’s takin’ you out if you don’t get it done, boy. Now, move!”
Zion saw it coming, and he wished against it, but he knew no alternative. Heavy-shouldered, he rose from his seat. He began again.
“Pardon me, can I see your bag?” The words sounded rough in his mind, his body too warm and lathered like a horse.
65.
People became openly hostile now. A woman in the first car and one in the third made a scene and wouldn’t unhand their bags. He pulled the bags from the two and let Prifflach search the contents. When he approached a third woman, she clawed a hole in his cheek.
He recoiled and stared at her.
Her face was a mountain of red.
Some of the other passengers helped him with the woman, holding her for him. What am I doing? Zion thought. They see it too. They all understand this doesn’t make sense. Still Prifflach gave the bag a thorough inspection. When Zion returned it to the woman, she railed at him. “God curse you,” she said and turned her back.
He walked from the third car toward the fourth, opening and closing the double doors at the end of the compartment. He stood on the deck, heard the raw howl of the train, the wind. Something will happen now, he thought.
To his left a wall of wet granite rolled, hard and black, blurred by the train speed. The rock face reached upward thousands of feet, jagged and pinnacled at the top as it swept out over the train. Beyond this the gray sky was low and thick. It gave him vertigo, and he turned his head down and gripped the handrail. Seeing his worn boots on the grated steel, he couldn’t remember his mother’s face.
To his right the valley spread wide in a pattern of darks and lighter darks, filled from above by the distant pull of fog and heavy rain. The downpour fell in wide diagonal sheets, descending into massive rock shelves far on the other side of the valley. Among the bases of the mountains, forests robed the land like cloaks. The water ran hard from the runoff of the storm, and everything converged to a river turned coal black.
The river was the middle fork of the Flathead, past the summit of Marias Pass and past the great trestle of Two Medicine Bridge. They had crested the Great Divide. The train’s muscle pumped faster now, louder on the westward downgrade. The river ran due west from here, seeming to bury itself into the wide, forested skirt of a solitary land mass. The flat-topped tower of the mass was mostly covered by wet fog but visible in its singularity and the ominous feel of something hidden in darkness, something entirely individual, accountable to neither sky nor storm. The hulk of the land felt gargantuan. He couldn’t make out if it was Grinnell Point or Reynolds Mountain, Cleveland or Apikuni. Montana, he thought dimly, land of one hundred mountain ranges.
Here in his reverie, muffled shouts came faint like the far-off cry of a cat. He looked up to the doors of the final passenger car. Slender windows framed his view and suddenly the disembodied words came to him: “I’ve got him! I’ve got the mother-hatin’ rat.”
Zion leapt forward, opening the fourth car, shouting, “Stop! Wait!”
About midway up the car a heavyset man along with four others had thrown someone to the floor in the aisle. The man wore a brown tweed suit and struggled vigorously with his assailants.
“It’s him!” cried the heavier one. “We caught him red-handed.”
The other passengers pressed back against the walls. Women pushed their wide-eyed children behind them.
“Let go,” said Zion, staring at the fat man. The men heeded his word quickly and without complaint. People harbor fear, he thought, and he recognized the sway he held, over people, over men. They viewed him as rock or landslide, not man.
The captive stood in the aisle and brushed wrinkles from his suit, his hair flung forward, black and thick over his face. Dark-eyed. The Indian.
When the man pushed his hair back, the bones of his face appeared chiseled in stone. His body was angular, the skin thin as a sheet of newsprint, ready to tear open, Zion thought, ready for it all to break out. But the man tucked in his shirt and realigned his belt. He straightened his vest, then the lapels of his jacket, visibly pulling the tension in and down, breathing. He was silent. He viewed his captors, each one, with contempt.
Zion pictured his firm step and upright gait when the man had first walked the aisle and positioned his bags. Assiniboine or Sioux, he’d thought. But after pulling his bag and questioning him he’d found him to be a Blackfeet-white cross, a Blood in fact—a Blackfeet subtribe—and Irish on the other side. He was on his way to his family’s home south of West Glacier after a trip to Bear’s Paw. The man said he taught at the college in Missoula. In education, he said. They had locked eyes when Zion had carried the dead man at Havre, but Zion had dismissed it, and other than the agitation of the crowd during the checks, an agitation that seemed always to accompany Indians and whites, he’d found nothing unusual. The Indian carried no weapon.
“What is it?” Zion asked the heavy one.
A short man with slick hair, one of the others who’d held the accused, spoke up. “This man”—he pointed in the Indian’s face—“this man’s been lying! He’s the one. He took all the money.”
“Slow down,” said Zion. “Say what you know.”
“I have not lied,” said the prisoner.
“Shut up!” the slick-haired man yelled.
Zion put a forearm to the slick one’s chest. “Settle yourself,” he said.
