John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Sure will miss it,” says Hod and steps quickly past the mine thugs.

He wanted to greet her with a job and a bankroll. He has twenty-five dollars hid in his street shoes but that won’t last long here, nothing but a man’s labor cheap in Leadville.

The boys in the washhouse are careful to avoid him, not sure who might be a spy scrubbing under the steaming water, sympathetic but living from payday to payday themselves. Hod sniffs shower spray into his nose and blows out gray clots, swishes the grit out of his mouth and works the carbolic soap deep into his hide, feeling it burn a little before he lets the cold water blast it off. The smelters pay only two dollars a day, two and a half tops, but they haven’t been struck so often and are less vigilant. In town there are only pimps, faro dealers, and respectable folks, the doctors and lawyers and assayers for the big outfits, and then a lot of former rock donkeys missing arms or legs who are living, more like slowly dying, on the bum. The clothes shed is empty but for Hod by the time he laces his shoes up and is ready to leave, hair wetly combed, shoe tops polished on the backs of his legs. He wishes he’d shaved this morning.

They take one look and say they aren’t hiring at the Thespian, or the Irene Number Two or the Julia Fiske or the Eclipse or the Forsaken or any of the other diggings and by the time he gets to Harrison Reduction it is dark.

It takes a while for the floor boss upstairs to understand what Hod is yelling in his ear, bulk ore thundering down the chute onto crushers and the crushers spinning, cannonballs inside tumbling to smash the biggest chunks into smaller ones that rattle walnut-sized to the shaker screens then tip into the grinders, iron ore-cart wheels screeching over the thrum of the conveyor belts and the roaring furnaces below, but finally he points down through the floor and hollers back “See van Pelt!”

The smelting works is not allowed to cool, men feeding the furnaces day and night, and Hod has to pause halfway down, air searing his lungs, till the heat of the metal steps prods his feet into movement. A bare-chested worker jams his lance into the mouth of the nearest furnace, which erupts with blue-green flame before the glowing red tongue oozes out, bubbling and smoking as it fills the sluice and rolls forward, the heavier matte beneath channeled off to the side as the molten surface waste spills over the front edge to splash, hissing viciously, into the conical slag pot below. Another sweat-drenched worker rushes forward pushing a cart frame, jacking the pot up off its stubby legs and rolling it, still sizzling, out through the low opening to the tip. Cones of just-dumped waste glow on the spoil bank, their light fading as they cool to ash, piles flickering here and there, dying, smoke wisping up toward the moon. Van Pelt is a balding man scribbling on a production log steadied against his assistant’s back. Both men wear flannel jackets and appear not to perspire.

“Worked in a smelter before?” Van Pelt gives Hod the briefest of glances and continues to write in the log.

Hod nods at a worker rolling a slag cart past, head turned away from the trailing fumes. “I can do that.”

“But you just come from a mine, didn’t you?”

Hod’s hair feels like it’s on fire, each breath scorching, and his high-mountain headache sits right behind his eyeballs, sharp as a fresh drill bit. He is in no shape to invent a plausible lie.

“Yes sir, I have.”

“Fired.”

“They didn’t have no complaint with my work.”

When the supervisor turns to look at him again there is the reflection from the angry furnace in his eyes. “Agitator.”

“No sir,” says Hod, cap held twisted in his hands. “Just a working man needs a job.”

Van Pelt lifts the production log and the assistant straightens his back. “Won’t find one in Leadville, not in the mines, not in the mills. Word’s gone out on you, son.”

The man was a colonel in Horace Tabor’s light cavalry, Hod remembers, the vigilante outfit that tried to boot the union out of town before the militia came in. The man is on the list Cap showed him once in the company dormitory before lights out, high up among the ones to be dealt with if the class war ever really boils over into something serious, something final. Hod is wasting his time here.

When he gets back to the dormitory he finds his lower bunk stripped bare, his few belongings piled on the mattress. Mrs. Mapes sits scowling and rocking and smoking her pipe in the entryway, snorting once when he passes with his roll to go out the back stairs.

There is a burro standing in the path down the hill, a slat-ribbed jenny with scabs on her rump, staring at nothing and still as a painting. Most of the wild pack wandering around the gulches are too old or too ornery to work anymore, no longer worth a prospector’s handful of feed, but this is a loner with a mad gleam.

“Look like you had your fill of it,” says Hod softly, making a careful arc around the animal. “Don’t spose I blame you.”

There is not the slightest movement in the creature’s eye as he passes, only the stare, angry and infinite.

There are men in tailored suits and ladies not for hire outside of the Delaware and at Tabor’s Grand Hotel on Seventh. Hod fights the notion that he should go inside and search out someone higher up the pyramid than Burt Grimes, maybe surprise old J. J. Brown or John Campion or any of the top-hatted, champagne-swilling bonanza kings who own the town and suggest where they might stick the Little Johnny and the rest of the Ibex works, but they are probably forted up in their Denver mansions and unavailable to entertain his opinions. Instead he drifts down slag-paved Harrison to Chestnut Street, already bustling with miners determined to throw their hard-earned money away, and begins to search the thirst parlors and love shops for Addie Lee.

He begins asking in the saloons. He has taken up whiskey, to scour the deep dust out from his craw, and it seems only polite to order at least a small one in each place before asking questions.

“Couple days ago, sure,” says McCormack in the first of the gin mills. “It isn’t like ye could miss her in a crowd. Had a bad cough, though.” The bartender pours Hod two fingers’ worth. “Word has it ye’ve been chased.”

Company spies are rampant in Leadville, and more than one miner has been dumped, bleeding and unconscious, on the railroad platform late at night, a paper with Out of State scrawled on it pinned to his back.

“They got me confused with a Federation man.”

“False witness is a terrible thing,” says McCormack. “Not that I’ve anything against the union.”

There are Federation men in town as well, and the mine dicks, the smart ones, never walk abroad at night unless they’re heeled or in a group.

“I suppose we all look alike to them.” Hod pours the whiskey straight to the back of his throat, still not reconciled to the taste of it.

“I’ve heard they’re hiring again in Blackhawk,” says the bartender. Behind him hangs a painting of naked women being chased by bearded men with goat’s legs. There was an identical one in Skaguay, Hod can’t remember which saloon.

“ The thing to keep in mind ,” Jeff Smith used to say, “ is they’ll never catch up with those females .”

There are a dozen flockie miners taking up the rest of the counter and talking whatever it is they talk, a couple assayers losing at hi-lo and Riggins, who used to be a foreman at the Morning Star before his leg was shattered under an ore car, passed out face-down at his table. No women yet. Hod feels the welcome numbness start at the roof of his mouth. Addie Lee tries to dress in green, to compliment her hair, and wears a scent like nothing else smelled in Leadville.