“It’s not the best part of Trinidad. We’ll come to the hotel.”
&n
bsp; “You don’t have to hide your circumstances from me.”
“Don’t ever tell me about the debt you think you owe someone else, Hack. You understand?”
“I do.”
Then she was gone and he was left standing alone on the elevated sidewalk, the stars fading into the harshness of the day as though they had never been in the sky.
SHE SAID SHE and Ishmael would meet him in front of the hotel at seven P.M., but he thought it unseemly that she and his son should have to hide the whereabouts of their home and circumstances. He found out where they lived from a miner in the saloon next to the union hall, then went back to the hotel and dressed in a light blue coat and Confederate-gray trousers and a beige shirt and a black string tie. He brushed his Stetson and had his cordovan boots shined in the lobby, all the time wondering about the fleeting nature of life and the way one or two seemingly insignificant choices could open the door to a kingdom or sweep a man’s destiny into a dustbin.
He bought a whirligig for Ishmael and a bouquet and a box of candy for Ruby, and hired a carriage to take him up a canyon that seldom saw direct sunlight and probably had been worked by individual prospectors for float gold and abandoned when the mother lode was never found. The road wound along a stream lined with rocker boxes and desiccated sluices and houses that were hardly more than shacks; the stream was a trickle at the base of the canyon, its exposed rocks greasy with an unnatural shine.
Hackberry leaned forward in the seat and spoke through the viewing slit to the driver. “What kind of place is this?” he asked.
“One to stay out of,” the driver replied. His back was massive and humped like a turtle’s shell, his coat splitting at the shoulders, his neck thick and ridged with hair beneath his top hat. The accent was Cockney. “They drink out of the same creek they build their privies on. They live like animals. There’s an invalids’ home here, too. Not a pretty sight.”
Hackberry looked out the carriage’s side windows. The canyon was precipitous and rocky and unsuitable for habitation. The only flat ground where a shelter could be built was close to the stream. He leaned forward again just as the carriage jolted across a deep hole. “Tell me something,” he said.
“What might that be, sir?”
“Why would anyone want to live here?”
“That’s a good question.”
“It’s not a question.”
“I don’t get your meaning,” the driver said, raising his voice above the noise of the wheels on the road.
“Nobody wants to live in a place like this. They live here because they’re poor and they have no work. Nobody wants to be poor and without work.”
The driver turned around. He looked into Hackberry’s face as though seeing it for the first time. “Your destination is right ahead, sir,” he said. “Should I wait, or will you be having a jolly night with a lady friend in this splendid little spot?”
AFTER THE CARRIAGE driver rumbled back down the road, his whip and his crushed top hat lying in a puddle of dirty water, Hackberry knocked on the door of a paint-stripped, rotting frame house with a tiny porch and bare yard and a privy and wash line in back. What he could not get over was the absence of any distinguishable color in the canyon, as though the sky and earth had conspired to rob its inhabitants of hope or joy.
Ruby was obviously surprised when she opened the door. “I said we would meet you at your hotel. How did you know where we lived?” She looked around the disarray of her small living room, pushing her hair up, her face flustered. “How did you get here?”
“In a carriage.”
“Where is it?”
“I sent the driver on his way.”
“A top hat is floating in a mud hole.”
“I think he needed to check on his family, an emergency of some kind. Do you have a neighbor I could pay to drive us to town?”
“I never know what’s in your head. Or when you’re lying. No one does.”
“You don’t need to hide your situation from me, Ruby. I want to be your friend.”
“Come in.”
Their level of privation filled him with shame. Through the side windows he could see the backyards of the neighbors, house after house, the children in rags, grimed with dirt, some with rickets and others with runny noses.
“The driver told me there was a house for invalids here’bouts.”