Two-Gun & Sun (2 page)

His eyes dropped to my wrist where I'd wrapped the strap of the lamp.

Wear it like they do so's it frees up your hands for carrying. I could have one of the boys assist you.

No, I said. I'll be fine. Thank you.

I took up the second bag and waded amongst the citizens, their pale beams piercing the grey, probing the pile for their things, not a hello from a single one of them.

Behind me, now, waves chopped as the vessel slipped from the dock. I let go of the handle and turned to wave uncertainly—was the navigator even looking?—and the light at my wrist danced crazily. Yes, I might have strapped the lamp onto my head, but I didn't want to look like one of them.

I struggled up the empty road, shoulders burning from the strain of the two heavy bags. In a short while I'd be glad of that bottle, but at the moment I cursed the bloody weight, I cursed my suffering self for dragging it along, I cursed my Christly insistence that I could make the walk unassisted. The lamp continually slipped behind my hand, my sleeve blocking half the light, making me stumble. In my pocket were the directions and they were straightforward enough: Walk down the road to the building at the end. I hadn't factored in the weight of my things, or the length of the road, or the dark.

I came to a standstill. Those Chinese hadn't worn headlamps.

Men sneaking about in the dark, carrying rifles, wouldn't want lights blazing. They could be around the next corner, for all I knew, ready to shoot me. I forced myself to keep walking, and quickly. The navigator didn't seem concerned about them. No business of mine, was the implication. Steal from their own if they want. Break their necks in the dark. Shoot themselves in the foot.

A golden light burned in a shop window just ahead, outlining the bent head of a dark-haired woman, busy stitching. I could use a friend, here. Before I could approach she reached up and pulled down the blind, done for the night I supposed. I was close enough now to see the words painted on the glass:
The Bluebell Shop ~ Dressmakers, Hats, Gloves, Alterations
. I could also see my own rumpled reflection. I would come back another time, when the shop was open and my outfit was pressed.

A scrum of wranglers whooped just ahead, the light of my lamp gilding them, their own lights bobbing on their hats as they strained and sweated and pulled on ropes, boot heels churning in the dirt to steady some lumbering beast lost in the dark. Between their dancing legs and the rows of buildings behind them, all corrugated tin, I caught a glimpse of an image, flickering like a moving picture show, of a black-haired man in white, hands tied behind his back, prodded along by a posse. I waded into the mist only to find the cowboys roping nothing more beastly than a boulder, and the man in white, gone, swallowed up by the grey.

Just ahead, at last, loomed a two-storey tin box with a wooden false front and veranda, a sight so welcome I didn't stop in at the hotel restaurant that appeared to be open, spilling green light onto the black dirt. I wasn't hungry after a ham and cheese sandwich on the ship. All I wanted now was a swig from my bottle. I walked past the hotel and up the steps onto the veranda, dropped a bag and fished in my pocket for the key, all the while studying, in the dim, grey-green light, the empty frame screwed to the tin siding by the door. Ragged strips of old news fluttered from its edges, all that was left from the front page, the torn masthead that left off the last two letters,
The Black Mountain Bullet--

I liked that,
Bullet
instead of
Bulletin.
Fast. As though news could be shot from a gun barrel right into the minds of its readers. Not tomorrow, but soon, soon.

I slid the long key into the lock, turned it, and kneed open the door. I used an elbow to flick on the switch next to the doorframe.

Light fell onto a sheet of paper that had been slipped under the front door. I snatched it up and read quickly. It had the bold print of a wanted poster but announced, instead, the upcoming performance of Puccini's opera
La Fanciulla del West
.

Here, in Black Mountain. I'll be damned.

There was a whole series of names under the title, and a swirl of colours, velvet curtains or something. I clapped it under my arm—I'd have a closer look later—and picked up my second bag, edging through the doorway, kicking the door shut behind me. A hallway led to stairs and the promise of a bedroom above. To my right, a front counter where I set down the intriguing poster; to my left, a darkened doorway. I stepped over and slid my elbow up that doorframe, too, until it hit the switch and light flooded the room.

And there it was, confronting me in a way I'd never anticipated. Pipes bent in half, studded with bolts, clamps that bit into congealed grease and rust, drooling brown at the edges. I let my leather bags drop to the floorboards in a double thud of astonishment, reckless of the fragile contents.

The old printing press was bolted to a raised platform reached by three steps. A regal setting for a tangle of metal dredged in dust. It twisted itself up into the likeness of a huge creature from one of my brothers' action books. Incredible and awful at once.

Surely a month was not enough. Had anyone from the bank even stood in this doorway?

An oval brass side plate gleamed like a single eye, daring me to unlock the limbs of this contraption. The press filled the room all the way to the ceiling, was twelve feet high at least, and must have set the walls shaking once, a deafening resurrection that marked the start of each news day. Now, corroded and jammed with crud, the monstrosity was made stillborn by neglect.

Dare accepted.

Hanging from a hook on the doorframe was a pair of ink-stained coveralls. I slung them over my shoulder and carried my leather bags out into the corridor and up the stairs, flicking more light switches with my elbows as I climbed.

At the top of the staircase I turned and looked down the long, narrow room that was half the width of the space downstairs: a bathtub set in the middle of the floor, its claws gripping the raw boards, and a toilet, mercifully in its own closet, door agape, fitted next to the staircase. A bachelor's room, not even a sink, just a hole in the blue-painted boards where one had been intended. At the far end, underneath the window, was a bed. I didn't feel the need for sleep, not now. I wanted to get back to that press. I tossed my jacket onto the bed and stepped into the pair of coveralls. I unbuckled one bag, pulled out the bottle and took a long swig, then corked it and dropped it back in. I smoothed my sleeves and looked down at myself, dressed like a garageman.

So I was. So what?

I buttoned up as I clomped down the stairs.

An instruction booklet lay face down on the top step of the platform, its corners rounded from constant thumbing. Some comfort there. I wasn't the only one who'd puzzled over these parts. I flipped through the pages, circling the platform as I read.

*

Heat and oil had made slick work of the bolts and nuts and screws, the wrench I'd dragged over to get a grip, my fingers around it a useless knot, equally wet. I was sprawled on the floor of the raised platform, elbows up and spine grinding into the boards. A balled-up greasy apron propped up my head but still, more bits of brown frizz had worked their way free from the knot and hung in my eyes, and I scraped them away with my knuckles.

I was no stranger to machines. My big brother Will had a cantankerous Ford, and I had worked beside him, loosening and tightening bolts, steam billowing from gnarled pipes of lead. But this was different, more like two trucks clamped one on top of the other, maybe three, its insides of another nature entirely.

As I worked, I composed a letter to my brothers.

Dearest boys,

The voyage was rough but arrived here without incident shortly after midnight. Don't tell father that —

No, scuttle that. I should just say the voyage was several hours' duration. I didn't want their sympathy.

And now here I am working on Uncle's printing machine. I will write again soon.

—your loving sister, Lila

No. Just:
—Lila

With the heel of my hand on the wrench, the weight of my body behind it, I shoved. Too hard. The bolt squawked, then gave, and sent the wrench flying.

I cursed the godforsaken grimy tin walls and sat upright, barely missing a metal bar overhead. That was it. I was done. Pale light shone in the windows now, just as the navigator had said it would. Day one of my new life and a wasp of anxiety buzzed from rib to rib inside me. A month to get the newspaper out. I fought a sense of welling panic, the fear that I might have tackled too much, was attempting the impossible and therefore was doomed to failure. And then the fear of succeeding, of feeling this beast leap to life under my fingers. What then?

Someone in town must know about my uncle's printing machine, who ran it, and where I could find him. I rolled to my feet.

With a rag that reeked of kerosene I rubbed furiously at my stained fingers and knuckles, squeezing through the cramped back shop as I worked at my hands, past the drawers of type, shelves of ink cans, stacks of paper. Newsprint smudges from Uncle's thumbs blackened the doorknobs, window sills and tin walls. Against the back wall, a washtub streaked black and full of jars of putty knives and rags and solvent. Above it a battered metal mirror, where I checked my face for streaks of black, then stuck my head under the tap to rinse my mouth. Uncle had a tin of denture powder on the shelf. I sprinkled some onto my finger and rubbed it over my teeth, rinsed again, and dried my face on my sleeve.

Hanging from a bolt in the wall next to the sink was a calendar. It had 1922 neatly printed over a painting of an orchard not unlike ours back home, and I could see why Uncle had picked it. I tore off the May, June, July and August pages from the pad at the bottom. A pencil had been tied to the bolt, and I grabbed it up to strike through September 1, yesterday, and September 2, today. I spun around and left the pressroom, the pencil clattering against the wall behind me.

Next, my coveralls. They slid into a heap around my ankles and I shook one foot and then the other to step out of them, smoothing as I did so the lavender-grey pleats of my travel outfit, even more rumpled than before. I was ready.

The opera poster still lay at a crooked angle on the counter. I'd pin it up later. The front office was the only room in the building where anything could be pinned. Its walls had been framed in wood and then finished with lath and plaster. It could use some brightening, though, because the white paint had yellowed over the years.

I felt along the shelves underneath the counter, finding trays of rubber bands and bundles of envelopes, pencils and paperclips. I took up one pencil and stuck in into the sharpener screwed to the countertop, cranked the handle five times and pulled it out. Perfect. The sharpener in my old classroom used to chew the pencils to bits. On the second shelf I found a ledger, and behind it, at last, the thing I had been looking for, a notebook. Spiral-bound, brown cover, the inside pages a series of calculations, my uncle's attempts to tally income and expenses and find a balance in his favour. I had the same habit and made a mental note to stop it. This was like finding someone's love letters, all their emotions and fears laid out for the finder to examine: my uncle's frantic discovery that he was nearing bankruptcy, each series of sums tallied hopefully, and then crossed out angrily. I tore out the scribbled pages and tossed them into a wooden box full of other scraps of paper.

Then I lifted the hinged counter and dropped it with a bang behind me.

Outside I was struck by the sensation of plodding through a dust storm. I could barely make out the wooden sign in my neighbour's darkened window: General Store. The navigator was right. A low-hung sky of dark grey turned mustard grey about the edges where the sun must be trying to burst through. Feeble as the daylight was, I could see what I had missed last night. No need for a lamp. To my left, thick black trunks of chimneys belching smoke. To my right, a strip of simmering walls of black metal pipes and roofs. Soot-stained windows that glowered dully. I turned in quick circles, trying to take it all in, trying to decide where to start seeking information. Leaning corrugated metal shacks and rotting logs, heavy iron pipes running between them, down low and up high, gave the whole place the look of a furnace room with the lights turned off. The road sign told me that this was Zero Avenue. Fitting. A nothing street. Not a leaf. Not a tree. The mountain that the navigator told me about rose through the mist, with a long tail of hills that whipped around the town.

Some towns are marked by the cry of gulls or the clanging of streetcars. But this one's music was a constant rumbling of coal carts along the tracks that skirted the tops of the hills.

At my feet its dank centre, strewn with boulders, hunks of cement, buckets on their sides.

Black motorcycles roared out of the fog, their silver-snouted sidecars squealing around me as I tried once, then twice, to dodge them and cut across the road. I had no idea these were taxis, that the black-booted thugs in goggles and tight leather caps were, in fact, the taxi drivers. Uncle never mentioned them when he came to visit. His talk was all about the newspaper. I didn't see a single taxi last night. I realized what they were only when a man across the way flagged one down. And I noticed him only because he was relieving himself against the side of a tin building, a saloon by the looks of the swinging doors, and waved with his free hand, turning his spray into the street.

In two long strides I had leapt out of his way, too.

I pressed on, past the only building of any substance, the bank all stone and equally grey—at once the wasp was back in my guts, reminding me of my deadline. I pushed the thought away. Before me was the only promise of elegance in town, a skeleton of iron girders that formed a square frame and, lying on the ground beside it, a matching skeletal dome that one day might top the structure. Right now, there wasn't a single worker on the site.