The High Divide (3 page)

“What if
I
had three dollars for you?” Eli asked.

“You don't. Or if you do, I will be angry.”

The agreement, when he'd gone to work for Goldman, was for him to bring home the two dollars he made each week and put it in the family pot. When he needed money for himself, he'd asked his mother for it.

“I've done some extra jobs for him lately—deliveries. That's why I've been late sometimes. Tomorrow's payday, and I should be getting it. Then we'll have Fogarty's money for him. We cannot go over there, Mother.”

Gretta reached out in the dark and found her son's face and placed the palm of her hand on his cheek. For days she'd been haunted by a fear she couldn't hold on to any longer. “Promise me something,” she said.

Eli pulled away from her.

“Please,” she said. “That you won't go off looking for him. That you'll stay here and help me. I need you here, and so does your brother.” She reached out for his face again, but it wasn't there.

“Elijah? Do you hear me? Your brother needs you too.”

When her son spoke next, it was in a hoarse whisper from a point farther away in the darkness, saying words she had no choice but to settle for: “I'll do what I can to help,” he said, “I promise you that.”

Northern Pacific

T
he rifle was a Spencer carbine, .50-caliber, an old army issue his father brought home from the war. It was kept in the mud room off the kitchen, tucked behind the winter coats in a tall chifforobe, and the next day after work while his mother and Danny helped their neighbor dress some geese, he brought it over to the shop off Railroad Street where Two Blood bought, sold, and fixed guns, but mostly fixed them.

“He wouldn't mind you selling this?”

Two Blood's eyes were the color of a sky in winter, a shocking light blue against his dark skin, and they had a way of making Eli wonder if the old man could read minds. His face and movements were smooth and young, but his fingers curled like tree roots. He wore his yellow-white hair in two braids to his shoulders. Ulysses had often come here to sit and smoke with him, and during the past weeks Eli and Danny had found themselves stopping in to look at the old man's guns and his stuffed buffalo head, and to drink the cool milk he drew from a cistern beneath the floorboards. He was the only person in town whose questions about their father didn't sound like accusations or gossip.

“Do you want it?” Eli asked him.

Two Blood lifted and dropped his skinny shoulders. “Does your mother know you're here?”

Eli handed him the rifle. “Have a look.”

The old man took a rag and ran it up and down along the barrel, put it to his shoulder and drew a bead through the window. He lowered it and tested the action, pulling back the large hammer until it caught and clicked, then releasing it with a squeeze of the trigger, his thumb easing the hammer forward. His hands roved, fingers touching every joint and nick. He patted the scarred stock. Eli walked down along the counter and peered into a felt-lined box of revolvers, most of them well worn, their wooden grips stained and scratched, barrels shiny from use. He picked up the one he'd kept an eye on, a .32-caliber Smoot's with a bone grip, small enough to fit in the pocket of his coat, and he pictured himself on a dusty street, coat flapping in the wind, one hand hovering close to where the Smoot's lay hidden, the men of the town stepping clear to give him a wide berth. Until now, going off to find his father had seemed like an obligation, but he was aware at this moment of how badly he wanted to leave this town behind, along with the crushing weight of his mother's fear and the burden of his brother's ill health.

“Will this be a trade?” Two Blood asked.

“That depends.”

“Ah, Goldman hasn't wasted his time on you.” Two Blood sighed and let his head fall to one side. He leaned the rifle against the counter, removed a tablet and piece of lead pencil from a drawer, and started to figure, pausing to scratch the side of his face with the tip of the lead.

“The Smoot's and three dollars for the Spencer,” he said. “People want the newer repeaters, you know. Not these old models.” He smiled.

“Four dollars,” Eli said, “and a box of shells.”

“Done.”

They shook hands, Eli mustering the strength to meet the old man's grip, but Two Blood didn't let go. “Are things well in your house?” he asked.

Eli nodded.

“All right, then,” Two Blood said, still not letting go, still squeezing. “All right then.”

At supper, when Eli reached into his pocket and brought out three silver dollars and pushed them across the table toward his mother, he expected questions but they didn't come. She looked at him, her eyes searching his, slid the heavy coins off the edge of the table into her hand, then got up and dropped them into the coffee can on the shelf above the cook stove.

Deep in the night, Eli's bladder woke him. He'd planned it this way, forcing himself to drink four glasses of water before going to bed, and now he lay still in the dark, listening, hoping his brother was asleep. Danny had come through his recent struggle unscathed, the pain passing over him, and tonight he was breathing easy and slow. Eli rose fully dressed from his straw-filled tick and put on his blanket-lined coat, which he'd tucked last night beneath the covers. Quietly he rolled up the quilt his grandmother had made for him and which he'd slept beneath for as long as he could remember. He tied it up with a shoelace. He crept to the wall and from the space behind the loose board removed the letter, the Smoot's, and four dollars—one left over from his trade with Two Blood and three from his wages at the store.

Downstairs in the kitchen he held his pocket watch up to the window. Three-fifteen, plenty of time. The Northern Pacific eastbound, with both freight and passenger cars, stopped for water at four-thirty.

As he crossed through the kitchen to the back door, avoiding the planks that moaned, his mother called out from her bedroom: “What is it, Eli?”

Damn it.
He set down his bedroll.

She was lying on her side, up on one elbow, her face pale in the starlight filtering through her curtained window. “Where do you think you're going?” she asked.

“I didn't want to wake you. Fargo, remember? A shipment of rugs came in from New York,” he said. “Mr. Goldman wants to pick them over before, you know, everybody else gets there. We're leaving at four.”

“Who has the rugs?”

“Michaelson.”

“You didn't tell me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You said that he wanted you early, not in the middle of the night.”

Eli shrugged.

“When are you getting home?”

“I don't know. Six or seven, I guess. No earlier, with that team he's got. The one mule's blind, you know.”

She was quiet for a few moments. “You're not going to eat anything?” she asked.

“He said he'd have rolls for me—those hard, flaky ones his wife makes. With the chocolate inside.”

“Well go on then. But give me a kiss first.”

When he bent down, she took hold of his head, a palm on each ear, and pulled his cheek hard against her lips. “You be careful now,” she told him.

You, too,
he thought, and turned away, the muscles twitching in his back and legs.

The night was clear and still, the stars a chalky whitewash across the sky, no weather this time to make him give up and turn back home. The town was quiet, every window black, and at first he walked along the dirt street, right down the middle of it. Then, out front of the tailor shop, a kitten darted in front of him, making him cut over into the alley where there was less chance he might be seen. A block later, at the back of Fogarty's rooming house, he heard a faint cough and dived behind a brittle lilac bush. For a minute or so he kept still, watching. There was nothing astir in front of him and nothing behind, not that he could see, but then it came again, the same cough, and he was able to track the sound to its source: the third floor of Fogarty's, an open window there, and the orange glow at the end of a cigar. It was Harry McLaughlin, former baseballer with the Cincinnati Red Stockings, former town alderman, former proprietor of a water-hauling business he lost to gambling. The man was blind now, and rumor had it he was dying.

In a rush, an idea came to Eli—a bold picture that rose up and danced in his mind's eye. He couldn't turn away from it. Two months ago he'd delivered a new porcelain chamber pot to McLaughlin. It was eighty-thirty or nine in the morning when Eli arrived, and he found Fogarty in the lobby, wiping down the maple woodwork with a vinegar rag. When Eli announced his purpose, Fogarty reached beneath the counter and came up with the ring of keys he liked to flaunt, a couple dozen or so large brass skeleton keys on a steel ring and chain. Fogarty led Eli up two flights of steep stairs to the third floor and down the dark hallway to McLaughlin's small room, all the while playing with the keys, tossing them forward and snapping them back into his hand, forward and back, up and around. At McLaughlin's door he knocked. No answer came from inside.

“He's paid for it already,” Eli said. “You can give it to him later, he's probably still sleeping.”

“Sleeping? Nah,” Fogarty had said, and then selected a key from his ring, slipped it in the lock, and pushed open the door, all in a motion.

McLaughlin managed to throw his legs free of the dirty bedclothes, and he sat in his yellowing shorts half in and half out of bed, shaking his head back and forth, arms crossed in front of his pendulous breasts, empty mouth moving soundlessly, knees pressed together like a child's. His eyes blinked and fluttered in their sockets. Fogarty took the porcelain chamber pot from Eli's hands and set it on the floor. Then he reached out and clapped the old man's bony shoulder. “Rise and shine,” he told him.

Overcome by the ammoniac smell, Eli had backpedaled into the hall, then followed Fogarty all the way back downstairs to the lobby, having to listen as the man chuckled to himself.

Now, though, crawling out from behind the lilac bush in the alley, it was Eli who couldn't help chuckling. He knew the basement entrance of the rooming house was always left unlocked for coal drops, and so he lifted the big trapdoor and descended the stairs, pulling the door back down behind him. He lit a match and located the steps leading to the main floor, and then upstairs he tiptoed across the wide lobby to the counter, went around to the back of it and reached underneath, where, sure enough, his fingers touched the cool brass fan of Fogarty's beloved room keys. Eli didn't know what he was going to do with them, only that he wanted them. He wanted Fogarty to wake up in the morning and not have them. He imagined the man searching, panicked, then racing to the sheriff's office, imagined him blaming his renters, or better yet, Herman Stroud, who sometimes ran errands for him after school. The keys felt pleasantly heavy as he tucked them into the pocket of his coat, then he returned to the basement and left by way of the coal door.

In the alley back of Harlow's barber shop, as Eli passed by the outhouse, another idea occured to him and he made no effort to resist this one either. He opened the outhouse door, stepped inside, and dropped the heavy ring of keys down the black, smelly hole, laughing at the soft clanking sound it made when it landed.

He crossed the tracks fifty yards short of the depot, climbed onto the platform of the grain elevator nearest the station, and tucked himself behind a pile of feed sacks. From there he had a clear view of the depot and, beyond it, the water tank next to which the engine would rest while its reservoir filled. Depot agent Wheatfield made a habit of ambling the train's length, front to back along its north side then back to front along its south, and striking each empty car with his hickory walking stick—though he'd never been known to confront a free-rider. If it was a mixed-use run, the passengers who weren't sleeping might venture outside to stretch their legs. In any case there would be plenty of time for Eli to find a car and get himself settled.

The eastern clouds were starting to purple at the edges when Eli heard it—a far-off, steady thunder that rose in volume until he could feel it through the soles of his boots. Then the engine came around the last curve, cone of light sweeping before it, whistle blowing, and the air shaking with noise as the first cars howled past. He waited until the clanking stopped and the train was still, until the big cylinders were panting like tired dogs and Wheatfield had carried out his ritual tour. Then Eli climbed down from the platform and found an empty car toward the rear of the train, a lumber car from the smell of the redwood wafting out of it. He tossed his bedroll inside and climbed up after it and pulled the big sliding door three quarters closed.

As good as gone,
he thought. No one was going to catch him now.

The steam cylinders huffed and cleared their throats, and the long steel spine started snapping and clanging. The car jerked beneath him. He crouched low and set his hands on either side for balance. Then as he rolled past the grain elevator, he blinked and jammed his knuckles into his eyes to push the nonsense out: materializing like some droll spirit from behind a heap of crates, and dwarfed by the giant coat he wore that flapped and billowed around him, his brother Danny came running, arms pumping, knees lifting and falling, head jabbing forward chickenlike—all this motion, and yet there was a dreamlike sluggishness about him, too.

Danny's arm stretched forward. “It's me, it's me,” he yelled.

Eli jumped up and grabbed hold of the doorframe with his left hand and leaned out, reaching. Danny's hand felt small and damp. Stretching farther, Eli clamped hold of his brother's narrow wrist then pulled back hard against the doorframe, leveraging his weight and hauling Danny up like a catfish out of the river until they both fell back. Side by side they lay on the rough plank flooring of the boxcar, breathing hard.

“What in the hell,” Eli said.

Danny turned on his side, his roll of blankets caught beneath him. His eyes were huge. Besides the coat, which reached to his ankles, he wore a big, wavy-brimmed hat that made his ears stick out even more than usual. Both the coat and hat were their father's. Danny's dog-eared book—
Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men
—had come free of his bedroll and lay open on the planking.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

How in God's name?
Eli thought. What would their mother do when she found Danny gone in the morning? He was tempted to grab his brother by his ears and toss him back out. Picking up speed, the train blew its whistle at the crossing west of town. Eli sat down, legs crossed Indian-style, on the rocking floor of the car, and Danny did the same, facing him.

“How did you figure it out?” Eli asked.

The boy shrugged, matter-of-fact. He said, “That money you've been putting in the wall.”

“You think this is going to be easy? You think it'll be fun? Well, it won't—sleeping outside, nobody watching out for us. I've got to send you home, you know.”

But Danny didn't seem to hear. He shook his head, smiling. “I didn't know if I was going to make it there, for a minute.”