John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Of course, if yer on their list, ye might consider a change of careers,” says McCormack, who the men say worked the hard coal back in Pennsylvania, lowering his voice as he leans in. “Speakin from me own experience.”

Hod drains his glass and wanders back out onto the street, packed with miners now, men speaking in a half-dozen tongues and searching, searching for a fight, a card game, a woman, searching for some proof they are alive and of some consequence on the earth’s shaft-pitted surface. Music spills out from the saloons, from house ensembles and melodeons and groups of soon-to-be-drunken men harmonizing—

Oh show me a camp

Where the gold miners tramp

And the buncos and prostitutes thrive

Where dance halls come first

And the faro banks burst

And every saloon is a dive!

Hod steps into the street to avoid a strutting mucker with blood in his eye. If she is here and he can find her he doesn’t know what he’ll do, no money, no job. There are men, he knows, who live off their women, who set them up in cribs or turn them onto the streets, but he has never considered it. And she never offered.

He looks for Addie Lee in the Saddle Rock and the Cloud City Saloon and in Hyman’s and in Curley Small’s pool hall and behind West Second in Stillborn Alley and even passes by the Crysopolis again to get the same answer, payday girls sitting in the lobby offering to take her place it’s all the same in the dark honey but he continues, throat not so raw now, a swallow or two in each of the saloons and nobody has seen her, not the faro dealers or the sporting women or the men dishing poison behind the bar, and by the time he finds Spanish Mary in the Trail’s End he can’t feel his nose and even the American miners are speaking words he doesn’t understand.

Spanish Mary has one crooked eye and seems always to be looking over your shoulder.

“Sure, I know her. Skinny as a broomstick.”

“She been around tonight?”

If the woman recognizes him she doesn’t let on, neither of her eyes making contact with his as she watches the action in the saloon. “She gone off to Cripple Creek with the others.”

“Others?”

“Fellas get tired of the same old slop buckets, they shift em around. There’s a bunch just come in from the Creek if you’re looking for something new.”

“She just left?”

“The Poontang Special rolled out yesterday.”

“But you said she just got here—”

Spanish Mary shrugs. Down Went Mc Ginty is on the pianola and she absently taps her fingers on the tabletop, a little behind the beat. “Maybe she’ll end up at the Old Homestead, spreadin it for the carriage trade. The cough she got, she sure can’t stay up this high.”

Hod grabs the back of a chair to steady himself. He’s only passed out once, climbing the hill back to his bunk, and woke with his pockets empty and his shoes gone. He feels like if he doesn’t find his girl, his skinny, tubercular whore of a girl, there will be nothing left to tie him to the earth, that the whiskey will float him somewhere else, somewhere darker and less solid than the deepest mine he’s ever crawled into.

Spanish Mary snorts. “Think they getting something new,” she smiles, “when it’s only been relocated.”

He doesn’t quite remember how he gets to the next place, but there he is, standing in the middle of the narrow, unsteady room. There are paintings, mostly of gaudily dressed women, balanced on a strip of wood trim high on one wall and a herd of animal heads — deer, antelope, elk, mountain goat — hung on the opposite. There is a sallow little professor sleep-walking his fingers over the piano keys in one corner and a heat-blasting woodstove, a bar with a dozen Polish muckers swilling beer and, at one of the three faro tables, little Billy Irwin and Niles Manigault losing to the house.

“Behold,” says Niles, “a fellow pugilist has graced our presence.”

Hod knows Irwin as a tough little mick who works at the Maid of Erin mine when he’s not fighting.

“This scruffy mine rat, is it?”

“Hands of stone,” winks Niles. “In the land of Gold and Hardships he was legend.”

Hod stares at him and tries to keep his balance.

“He’s the one was bounced at the Ibex today,” says the Irishman. “The story’s all over Leadville.”

“I note that you have finally succumbed to the nectar of the grain,” says Niles, raising his own glass. “May I offer you a libation?”

Hod sits heavily in the empty chair next to the gambler. “I’ve had enough.”

“Yes — extemely discouraging to lose one’s employment. Or are we still pining after that underfed daughter of joy?”

“Ye won’t find any work in this town,” says Billy Irwin. “Unless it’s a potwalloper in some hash house.”

“You left Skaguay.” It is hard for Hod to form the words.

“Shortly after your own retreat. A rather large sporting debt to a person of lethal temperament—”

“Soapy couldn’t fix it?”

“We run that skulkin little rat out of town years ago,” says the fighter.

Manigault’s expression does not change. “Soapy has met his Maker.”

“Bastard still owes me money,” says the little mick.

“Billy here is on a card in Denver this Friday—”

“I’m not fighting,” says Hod.

“Dago Mike Mongone, and I’ll lay the bye flat in less than five rounds—”

“I’m not fighting.”

He has managed not to think too often about Ox Knudsen. Real fighters, if the bout is straight, know what they’re getting into. Like soldiers on a battlefield. But a fella like Ox, all swagger and no sense, sooner or later in Skaguay somebody was bound to—

“Of course not,” says Niles, “Only a desperate man would deign to step into the prize ring.”

The professor is playing Break the News to Mother and Hod wants to cry. He’s not sure exactly where Cripple Creek is, only that it is downhill from here. Everything is downhill from Leadville. Niles jiggles his stack of blues in one hand, studying Hod as if his face is the faro layout and he is figuring his next play.

“Only a man with nothing left to his name.”

Hod feels himself falling, falling into the center of the earth, lights beginning to flicker, the man-skip plummeting too fast, and reaches for something to hold on to.

Here we scribe truth in hot lead.

The phrase makes Milsap smile as he sits at the machine, compositing the front page for the morning edition. It’s what Mr. Clawson always shouts out when he’s giving someone a tour of the paper and stops by the Linotype. The visitors, whether they’re schoolchildren or adults, will have their hands over their ears against the din, but they nod, understanding, and it makes Milsap swell.

“ Drew, here ,” Mr. Clawson will say, putting a hand lightly on his shoulder, “ is an extension of this wonderful machine .”

The left header has been set, in 24-point Clarendon—

NEW OUTRAGE IN EAGLE ROCK

RURAL WOMEN LIVING IN FEAR

— another violation in what seems to be an epidemic throughout the state. Milsap’s fingers fly over the keys, brass and steel rattling into the assembler box and molten metal flowing down to make the slugs. He did it by hand in what they’re already calling the old days, building sentences a letter at a time with a dozen other setters in the room. Mr. Clawson got the Model 1 five years ago and Milsap is the only one left who can look into the machine and savor its intricate beauty, the interplay of belts and blocks, gears and wheels, the way it cycles the matrices back into the distributor, every letter into its distinct channel, drink in the thick, hot-metal smell of it. And he is the only one who can glance at a piece of copy, even something scrawled with hasty hand, and see it in solid block columns before his fingers touch the keyboard, edit the wording on the fly without resorting to awkward hyphens or loose lines for his justification. There are no orphans or widows dangling from Milsap’s paragraphs. He understands better than anybody that words are not sounds made of air but solid objects, with weight and consequence.