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1890: A place in the world to be

By Pam Houston

Published September 15, 2008 at 7:39 a.m.

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Photo by Chas Chamberlin, The Rocky

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It wasn't money that Harner was after, as much as a place in the world to be. He'd been kicked out of several places in his short life, the first one being his father's gentleman farm just outside Scottsbluff, Neb., which, he would be the first to admit, had never been a comfortable fit, not even when he was a baby. After his mother died of influenza the winter Harner turned 11, no amount of try on his part could earn him a place there. He got a job as a hand on a huge wheat and cattle operation just over the Colorado border but got kicked out of the bunkhouse for snoring and eating more than his share of the food. Then he drifted west and took up with a lonely widow in Cheyenne, but she kicked him out when, despite the fact that at 17 he was 20 years her junior, he could not be aroused enough times a day to satisfy her sexual appetite. His love for Katherine was never in doubt, but the truth was, she scared the scrap out of him, and when you added it all together, his father's fists and Cookie's threats and Katherine's eager, insatiable organs, he decided to head for Denver, the biggest city to which he could afford the fare, a city so big he might get lost inside it, so lost that nobody who wanted anything from him would ever find him again.

Harner's talents were few but reliable. He was a gifted horseman and had a gentle way about him that made him innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the animals. He was a big man and could lift heavy things, and most kinds of machinery did not intimidate him. His father was a bookish and lonely man, a retired psychologist who read the works of young Sigmund Freud in the original German and had committed long passages of Emerson and Thoreau to memory. Harner had picked up a way with words without really meaning to. He could pick out a tune on the guitar and make up lyrics that seemed — to his great surprise — to delight listeners, especially women. He would have never described himself as good-looking, but he might admit to being one of those men whose ugliness was regularly found appealing.

He didn't know what kind of work he might find in Denver, but Katherine had said that the combination of his country-boy politeness, his surprisingly broad vocabulary and his unconventional good looks made him ripe for the picking in a city on the rise. As she carefully packed his bedroll for him, adding at the last minute the heel of the roast they had eaten the night before and a swatch of cloth from one of her slips sprayed generously with her perfume, she spoke reassuringly.

"Apply for a job as a waiter at the Denver Club for starters. You'll make good tips and meet all the right people. Sing your songs on Larimer Street on Sunday morning, and when folks try to tip you, smile and say no thank you. You'll charm the pants off of somebody — or maybe the petticoats — and if you are lucky they will have enough money to make you a star."

When Harner got off the train in Union Station, it was not lost on him that he was stepping into the grandest building he had ever seen in his life. He had a hundred dollars in his pocket — Katherine's final parting gift at the Cheyenne station. He missed her, but not acutely, much in the way — he tried not to wince as the thought came to him — a boy might miss his mother. (He could almost see his father, shaking his head and pronouncing Harner doomed with a couple of phrases of guttural German from his favorite psychotherapist.)

He stepped out of the train station and onto Seventeenth Street, where vendors, businessmen, families, tourists, bums, prostitutes and con men dodged street cars and delivery wagons, horses and hacks. He wasn't half a block outside the train station when a great ruckus on the sidewalk took his attention, a gold banner stretched all the way across the street announcing the grand opening of a grand hotel called the Oxford. There were flags of all colors and carriages with fine horses parked out front and the fanciest people Harner had ever seen outside of photographs, pouring through the hotel doors.

A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150


A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150

We asked 11 authors to pick a decade in Denver's history and turn in 2,500 words of fiction set in the city. Each week we've featured a new story and an interview with the author. Today, look for a special section in print compiling all the stories, plus one additional piece: Heirlooms, by Robert Pogue Ziegler, the winner of our story contest.

Harner stashed his bedroll in a storefront and slipped inside the lobby, which had marble floors, frescoed walls, sliver chandeliers and stained glass, all combining to fill the room with something that resembled pure light. In the dining room, tables glistened with cut, engraved glassware and Haviland china. Down the hall was a barbershop, a library, a Western Union office, a saloon and, finally, a door bearing the sign, "Employment Opportunties: All Levels of Experience Welcome to Apply."

Katherine had said the Denver Club, but she might not have known about the Oxford. She had also on many occasions told him to keep his eyes open, that opportunities presented themselves all the time to boys who kept their eyes open, that the secret in life was to seize upon them quickly, the way she had seized upon him his very first night in Cheyenne.

He ran his fingers through his hair, straightened his vest, composed his face into one of the versions of himself that Katherine found the most irresistible and strode through the employment office door.

He got a job in the gentleman's-only dining room, and within two weeks he had served lunch to every banker, merchant, politico and attorney in the city, along with Soapy Smith, Bat Masterson and Doc Baggs, down from the mines in Leadville, fresh off the mountain and ready to make another deal.

Harner befriended Judy, the pastry chef, who made a study of the major players in town and could identify them immediately — especially the mine owners and the con men — by the cant of their strides or the bands of their hats. She knew who was trying to rip off whom and for how much, and who might get killed over it in the aftermath.

At the moment, she said, all of the talk was of Creede, where silver had been found only a year before, but in such great quantities it had made even the most seasoned gold men like Smith and Masterson sit up and pay attention.

The town was named for Nicholas C. Creede, who had prospected his way down to the southwestern part of the state to a place known then only as Willow Gap. Just arrived, he picked up a rock so full of quartz that he sunk a shaft immediately below the spot where he had found it. According to Judy, it was as absurd to dig for silver where he dug as it would be to sink a shaft in Larimer Street because you had found a silver quarter lying in the roadway. But Creede dug the shaft, and when he sized up the result of his first day's work, he cried, Great God! and Holy Moses! and the Holy Moses Mine was born.

Where Katherine had been willowy, elegant and mysterious, Judy was quick-witted and sturdy, kind and helpful, straightforward as a calf. She had a group she ran with on her days off — "her girls," she called them — and they all took a liking to Harner, adopting him the way one might a pet. Patty, Bea, Janice, Martha, Mildred, Jolene and Louise — they were single girls from good homes, with jobs and a little money, and they had connections to every hotel, restaurant and saloon in Denver. It wasn't long before Harner was playing his songs to small but appreciative audiences five nights a week all over town.

For a little while it seemed to Harner that he might have found in Denver what other people meant when they talked about belonging. He was universally liked at the Oxford, he made friends with his music and he knew without ever having to ask that if Judy tired of him and kicked him out of her small but stylish apartment, one of the other girls, boisterous Mildred or soulful Jolene, would take him in in the blink of an eye.

Sometimes, on his coffee break, he went up to the roof of the Oxford and watched the construction crews on all sides of him pounding the nails and laying the bricks that were increasing the size of the city — it seemed almost daily. The newspaper said Denver was now the third-largest city in the West, after Omaha and San Francisco, and it wasn't all that long ago that it had been a modest cow town at the foot of the Rockies. That's what change was, Harner thought, an idea.

From his rooftop perch he could watch the winter storms come roaring down over the Front Range, from Mount Evans all the way to Long's Peak, and see the fresh coat of white glistening up there when they blew on through to Nebraska.

He felt the mountains calling to him in much the same way the city had a few months earlier, and it occurred to him that maybe a big city was more like the mountains than small, sensible plains towns like Scottsbluff and Cheyenne were like either one. Both the city and the wilderness were unpredictable ... they asked everything of a person and the nature of the request was always changing; they would heap you with good fortune and turn on you just as quickly. Denver had been almost absurdly good to Harner so far, but he was afraid his luck couldn't hold. Maybe he longed for a place that would test his mettle, that would ask more of him than a song, a shrug and a smile.

By the time the short days of December gave way to the warm winds of March, the name Creede seemed to face him everywhere. From billboards, from canvas awnings stretched across the streets, from daily papers in type an inch high. Shop windows advertised "Photographs of Creede," "The only correct map of Creede," "Specimen Ore from the Holy Moses Mine, Creede," "Only direct route to Creede." "Wanted: $500 to start drug store in Creede" "You will need boots in Creede, and you can get them here!" The gentlemen whose lunch he served at the Oxford Hotel dropped the word so frequently it was like an incantation.

"Pay attention to the signs," Katherine had told him. She had been right about Denver and right about the women. He didn't know if he had the gumption to make it as a prospector, but who knew what else a town of 10,000 that was growing by 300 souls a day might have in store for him?

Judy shed one tear the morning Harner boarded the train. "You come back down here when your feet get frostbit and I'll warm them up for you," she said, good-naturedly. She did not put a hundred dollars in his pocket, nor a swatch of her underclothing, and for that Harner was grateful. At Union Station she had identified a stern-looking older man as "one-third owner of the Last Chance Mine," and Harner chose a seat in his car more for luck than for any practical purpose. The car filled up with grubstake prospectors with their picks propped on the seats beside them, men in flannel shirts and Astrakhan fur coats and top boots laced at the ankles, and one woman in a bright-colored dress who smoked with the men and passed her flask down the length of the car and winked at Harner when it reached him.

She caught a glimpse of Harner's guitar and sat on his lap and begged for a song, and before long she had the whole car singing along to Ta Ra Ra Boom Di Ay and Throw Him Down, McCloskey.

Her name was Bess and she was from Trenton, N.J., and she had that take-no-prisoners quality that he admired in girls who were raised back East. She had brown eyes and auburn hair that she tossed every time she hit the high notes. She was older than he was, to be sure, but less older than either Katherine or Judy.

"What's your plan when you get to Creede, stranger?" Bess asked him, and for the first time in his life he knew better than to admit he didn't have one.

He was saved by the slowing of the train, which stopped at the mouth of a canyon cutting through two slabs of brown rock more than a thousand feet high. He jumped out into two feet of mud and snow and took account of things. There was not a brick or awning or painted front in the whole town. Kegs of beer, bedding and canned provisions, furniture and raw lumber were heaped up in front of buildings that were cut from fresh pine and looked no more than several hours old. The street was full of men leading ox teams, mules and donkeys, loaded with ore and sinking deep into the mud. Harner smiled to see the familiar blue and white of the Western Union sign — the same one in the lobby of the Oxford — in front of a building that leaned so precariously into the building beside it that they both seemed to be made out of cardboard.

He looked back down the way the train had come to see a half-circle of magnificent peaks, still deep in snow, and the mountainsides covered in pine and aspen, and behind those peaks another snow-capped range, mountains in every direction, for 50 miles and beyond. He paused at a bulletin board covered with hand-written notices: "Prize Fight at Billy Wood's on Saturday," "Pie Eating Contest: sign up at Kernan's," "Mexican Circus, April the First at Wagon Wheel Gap," and, most interestingly, "Church Service at Watrous and Bannigan's Gambling House — Sunday — all denominations welcome!"

Harner saw Bess mincing through the mud on the arm of an older man who she had said was one-fifteenth owner of the Amethyst Mine and was surprised when the words that formed in his head were, "Good riddance."

If Judy had been born a man, she'd sure enough be up here, knee deep in mud with a pickax over her shoulder. Who knew where Katherine would be if she'd had a man's prerogative to "follow the signs"? What if Harner's father had ever taken his head out of his books long enough to smell the clean scent of ponderosa and sage that was just that minute whistling down the mountain?

The train sounded its whistle and began to chug back down the valley toward Wagon Wheel gap, and Harner closed the collar of his jacket against the dropping temperature. He thought about all the people who had taken him in out of kindness, sent him on his way out of frustration. It was true that each one had taught him something. It was also true that they had set him free.

Dusk was falling and red and blue electric lights were shining in globes outside the buildings, mixing with the hot, smoky glare rising from the gambling houses, making the canyon floor look like something out of a gypsy's dream. Harner had wanted to lose himself in the hustle and surge of Denver, but this town felt more like a place for finding. Above the din and shuffle of town the two slabs of granite stood, impassive, unyielding in the twilight. They had something to teach Harner, too, and he was smart enough now to know it. He shouldered his bedroll and headed deeper into town.

Comments

  • September 16, 2008

    2:37 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    isis023 writes:

    I have always been a tremendous fan of Houston's. She possesses the ability to truly capture the flavor of the West and this story is no acception! Thank you, Pam Houston, for another fabulous nugget of literary inspiration.