Two-Gun & Sun (19 page)

Help me, he called, balling up his smock and then his shirt and tossing them onto the floor. He coiled his braid and pushed his cap down tight over it.

The giant paper roll snapped loose then, bouncing across the floor and unravelling in a tangle of crushed and smudged paper in a far corner of the room. Several metal bolts, sprung free by the release of the heavy roll, clattered to the cement floor. A ragged remnant of paper slithered and snapped through the pounding machine, jamming the works until they shrieked. Ink sprayed and pipes steamed as I yanked and rolled my sleeves to my shoulders and climbed up after Vincent.

Grab that, he shouted, pointing.

I seized the knobbed lever and shifted forward, lifting the rollers from the ink. Pistons still pounded and he reached past me, arms snaking through mine, to snap off the switch. Clouds of steam filled the room as the machine shuddered to a stop.

There, he said, and released me.

At the front of the machine, not far from where I had stood, checking pages, the blade of the paper-cutter had risen up with the impact of the blast and bitten down onto itself, much as a child would, biting its own lip when it falls, breaking a tooth. I jumped down for a closer look. The blade's cutting edge was now warped and chipped. It was ruined.

Vincent had crouched beside me to inspect it, then stood.

We'll have to cut the pages by hand, he said. I'll bring a knife.

He held his hands wide, indicating a mighty blade.

I had seen it cut an apple, and only now realized his hands could also be indicating a parcel the length of a rifle.

It's a good thing the old press is so slow, he said, otherwise we couldn't do it. We'll have to fold by hand, too.

A siren began wailing, rising and falling with, I imagined, the fatigue of the man cranking the handle. It was a familiar sound to anyone raised near mines, and a dreaded one. Wives would be rushing to the pithead, anxious to know if their husbands were among the survivors.

Behind us, the stopped machine sighed like a wounded beast.

Vincent turned around and climbed back onto the machine, and I followed. The broken web had wrapped itself around the ink rollers. He reached into the press and began pulling out strips of blackened paper, passing them down to me to toss into a metal pail below. Once that was done, he shouted further instructions over his shoulder.

I climbed down, lifted the floor hatch and backed my way down the wooden ladder to the dirt floor of the basement. There, I threw water on the coals to dampen the fire and cool down the boiler. I unbuttoned my coveralls, tying the sleeves around the waist of my blouse. I fanned the sides of the thin cotton to let in more air, then climbed the steps upstairs.

I opened windows, scrambled on hands and knees for the scattered bolts and screws, returning them to Vincent's hands.

This needs both of us, he said.

We bent our knees and tugged at the giant roll of paper. It was strung through with a rusted shaft of iron that fit into two indentations at the rear of the press, like a spindle that turns as the paper unrolls. Vincent had wedged a wooden ramp under it. We wore gloves to stop the metal pole from tearing the palms of our hands.

The bolt of paper finally budged, rolling across the cement unevenly, paper catching and tearing as we tugged and grappled and steered it up the ramp toward its metal berth. We would lose yards of it to this rough journey. With each tug and tear I was seeing money spilling over the concrete floor. My money. Yet I was glad of this chance to work beside him. Every awkward moment between us, every blunder on my part, vanished with our joint efforts to fix the press.

Put your left shoulder under, he said, and indicated the pole.

He put his right shoulder under the pole on his side.

Use your legs, he said. Slowly.

I lifted until sweat burst from my brow and down my cheeks.

Now forward, he said, just a bit.

I did and the weight of the thing took over, tumbling itself into its berth with a thud. I lost my balance in the process, and might have slid down with it, but he caught me by the knotted sleeves around my waist and righted me.

We climbed around the press, a giant wrench between us. He took the end for better torque and I grabbed the middle, adding my weight to help tug or shove and therefore tighten the loosened screws and bolts.

In the grey glow of the pressroom turned mustard by the burning lights, we grappled all night with the machine. I grew filthier by the hour, I knew, because I could see myself reflected in his own slick skin and smudged cheeks, in the strip of wet running down the back of his undervest. We drank water to quench our thirst, and as we neared the end of the night, whisky. We clinked glasses to toast our success at bringing the machine under control, then our success at starting it up again. The room shook to signal its rebirth and I felt the vibrations all the way up my legs, buzzing around inside me like a hungry insect. I wanted it to stop. I wanted it to buzz even harder. I was breathless by the time Vincent pulled out his watch and declared it four in the morning. Time to go.

Now I could go see what had happened at the mine. I shoved the jars and putty knives aside and washed my face in the work sink, drank straight from the tap, then undid the knot of sleeves and buttoned up the coveralls, smoothing my hair as I stepped out the door.

A crowd, veiled and indistinct in the mist, had gathered between the pithead and my back porch. Coarse laughter, hoots.

All night with her, China Man?

It was the voice of the dirty deputy, ugly, and low.

I couldn't see Vincent. I pushed my way past shoulders and elbows, shouting into the thick air, Silver! Are you out there?

The sheriff had to be close by, and sure enough his helmet emerged, gleaming weakly in the fog.

Now, now, now, he said, drawing closer. What seems to be the problem?

He's harassing my printer! I shouted.

At the sound of Silver's voice the crowd drew back, and at last I saw Vincent, rolling a shoulder, getting ready.

Gonna' fight me? the deputy said. Gonna' lose, China Man. He lifted his head and spat on the ground between them.

Enough, Silver said. Will someone explain?

We were working on the press, I said. That's all. The explosion damaged it.

That's all
. Such words reduced us to merely employee and employer, or perhaps mechanic and helper, and surely neither was adequate, though necessary, given the mood of the moment.

Silver stepped between the deputy and Vincent, waving his stick, insisting that both move on their way.

Just then, a second tremor shook the ground beneath us.

That's Number 5 going! Silver cried. Clear out. Everybody out!

Concerns about what might have happened in my shop vanished under the threat of another explosion. Boots thudded and heads bobbed, decapitated in the mist. I saw the goggled faces of taxi drivers, blackened boots of miners, grimed skirts of miners' wives. I had lost sight of Vincent and found myself alongside one of the women from
The Saloon
. I supposed the whole town had come out to gawk, at the explosion, first, and then at Vincent.

That was my printer, I said.

The only one of them I wanted to talk to was Dee, given what she had said so recently about the deputy, and I asked where she was.

Taken sick, miss, she said.

Tell her that I asked after her.

I stopped and turned at the sound of shouts and thuds. Miners had emerged in the mist, carrying out the dead. The bodies were loaded into coal carts and sent hurtling to the docks.

Coal. Men. Whatever the mine had given up that day. What was news to me didn't seem to strike anyone else as remarkable. They simply nodded sadly as each body made its noisy descent.

At my back porch at last, I turned one more time and peered through the grey, wondering if my printer would return, today, or ever. And I felt a shift, then, as though we had climbed that mountain of a press together, working as one, only to have me slip short of the peak somehow, and be left dangling, inches from his grasp, the late hour and the accusations about it making any such further contact impossible, and that no amount of scrambling was ever going to put me back up there, again.

One week to go. One more hand-cranked newssheet after yesterday's, then finally, the first edition from the big press. I stared at the calendar, the 23 scored though, now, and let the pencil drop by its string to clatter against the wall.

When Vincent appeared in the pressroom doorway yesterday I had looked up from the table and held his gaze.

Thank you, I said at last, for coming back.

And I asked if he was hurt.

Nah, he said.

He stayed only long enough to help set type, and to test-run this third sheet, then he was out the door the instant the light began to fade, to avoid any possibility of him working with me at night, though in this dreary place, really, what was the difference between night and day, though of course there was, there was, and he of all people knew that, leaving me to crank the wheel myself and run off the copies. I did so with a full chest. It was lonely work. How different from the first newssheet, when excitement surged through both of us—briefly.

This one had included the ad for the airship as well as the opera, and just two news items:

Mine Kills Ten

Next To Nothing — A New Kind Of Protest

My column, however, ran the entire length of the page and included two commentaries set apart by headlines:

The Need For Safety In The Mine

and

Let Us Oppose Violent Ends

Finally, there was Silver's letter. For simplicity's sake I slugged it:

Letter to the Editor

Since handing it out last evening I had heard no reaction to my coverage of the explosion, or to my editorial on safety. There was no denying that it had happened, that men had died, and that safety was an issue. In my second editorial I addressed the rights of workers to protest a threat to their livelihood, if done without violence, verbal or physical, as well as to stay at one's task all night if the job demanded it, without fear of false accusations. I didn't go into details. The town knew very well to which two incidents I referred.

Perhaps the lack of detail was the reason I had received no complaints. I hoped Vincent would read it. He who can read upside down and backwards should not take long to see that the first letters in each line of the four-decked headline about violence spelled a message to him.

Silver's letter was such a tangled attempt it drew not a single comment except from the man himself, who was pleased to see his name in print and asked for ten copies to send to family members back home. It was a relief, not to be confronted by shouts or by foul fish nailed to the door. Though I wondered if that meant I was not doing my job.

It had been raining all morning, then stopped and the air upstairs grew warm. I turned off the radiator and slid the window up, hoping for a cool breeze. The room grew dark and a cloud of creatures with little black wings poured into the window and filled my room, vibrating in front of my eyes and stirring the air around my ears, not a buzz but a constant hum. I flailed at the air and sent little bodies into the walls, but they circled crazily and then flew crookedly back into their cloud formation, around and around the room, landing on the ceiling and walking over the plaster, into the lampshade where they crackled and went up in smoke, sizzling onto the still-warm radiator like a coat of dripping, black paint.

The press—

I pounded down the stairs and flung open both front and back doors. The cloud was there before me, whirling around the machine, offspring to the hive. I snatched up a broom and batted them out the doors, protecting the machine as he would have, slammed the doors shut, dashed up the stairs to close the window and stood in the empty room. Breathless.

Back downstairs, I climbed as I had done before and peered into the rollers, the ink tray. I rubbed bodies from the rollers with a rag, lifted them from the ink tray with a putty knife. The press itself would have to be stripped of ink once Vincent arrived. I didn't know how, but he could show me. I smiled, hesitantly, thinking of that. I cleaned my hands on a rag, wrote him a note, and left it by the press.

I was too restless and excited to return upstairs. I headed over to Parker's to see if the cloud had entered his store.

Black moths, he told me. An infestation shaken out of some tree or shed by a disturbance of nature. Barometric pressure. That's my guess. A sign that autumn is coming. That's storm season on the coast. November is the height of it, but October is the start.

A week from now?

Maybe. You'll know it when it hits. It's not just a blast of a wind that shakes the walls. It blows away all the fog, too. People get pretty excited about it around here. Sometimes just for an hour, or for as long as an afternoon, we see light. Not always sunlight, either, but a brightness. Think of a long winter coming to an end, like in January when you get that hint of spring. Not because it's warm or even sunny or has stopped snowing or raining, but because the days are getting longer. It's that return of light that we long for, and here it's cause for jubilation.

Back home, I said, we watched for birds returning. Have you ever seen a bird, here?

He lifted his shoulders like someone behind him was helping him out of his jacket.

In Black Mountain? No, can't say I have.

I've seen a crow, I said, on the other side of the mountain. But I mean songbirds, small birds.

There aren't any trees here, he said. They'd need branches to land on.

One more thing, I said, and held up my notebook and shook its well-worn pages. I need another. This one's filling up, too.

Parker pulled open a drawer and dug around for a minute, dumping envelopes onto the counter, followed by loose sheets bound with ribbon. At last he produced a small booklet about the size of Meena's notepad, but thicker.