???
That afternoon, the young man with the missing fingers, having hidden successfully all morning, was pinned down again as the insurance man launched into the Russian-Japanese conflict, the unrest in Moscow, and the wayward nature of automobiles, a boon to his business. For once he was timely: as the train slowed at the outskirts of Missoula, they passed a crushed green Rambler, and the conductor explained that a driver had misunderstood a train the week before. This same train.
Misunderstood. They mulled it over while they waited for a freight to go by. The bright green curl of metal looked like a giant had stomped on it, then gnawed it in half; it couldn’t have looked worse after an earthquake. “Is he dead?” asked one of the cardplaying ladies. She had loose pale eyes and a thin red mouth, but she wasn’t as grim as her features, and she smiled often.
“Oh, they all are,” said the conductor. “Before the snow, you could still see blood.”
Heads swiveled. Dulcy knew the passengers wanted to rush to that side, and she wondered if trains could tip over, like ferries. They might have tried it, but the conductor interrupted the moment and announced a reroute through Butte, rather than Helena, because of more snow slides.
Dulcy stood as the train slowed—she had to get out, at least walk on the platform, but the old man and his gray companion blocked the aisle, and she waited just behind the young man with the missing fingers while the couple wrestled with a dropped cane. He was studying the crooked wall of a firetrap theater, where a recruiting poster for the war in the Philippines was half covered by the generous shape of the actress Anna Held, a cloud of a woman who did whatever she wanted to do when she wasn’t attached to a building. He held a notebook instead of a novel, and his script was tight and even. She read a line marooned in the center of the page, above and below dense paragraphs:
I’d do better with someone else’s plot.
She studied the clockwise whorl in his chocolaty hair. He smelled nice, at least for someone who’d spent two days on a train. She wondered what he really thought, and if she’d like it, before the old man moved and she hurried down the aisle.
Dulcy wandered down the platform, thinking past the reroute and one more ruined plan. She sucked in new air, the smell of dirt and different trees. It was almost fifty degrees; she heard a splashing sound by the baggage cars, ice beginning to melt under Minnesotabound shellfish. Walton would be warming up, too.
Back inside, the passengers dozed. Carrie had been stung enough by Dulcy’s criticism to plow through The Soft Side, and Dulcy returned to her quest for a husband with a military history in Victor’s last issue of the Atlantic . William James against the Rough Riders’ world:
The plain truth is that people want war. They want it anyhow; for itself; and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life’s fireworks. The born soldiers want it hot and actual. The non-combatants want it in the background, and always as an open possibility... What moves them is not the blessings it has won for us, but a vague religious exaltation. War, they feel, is human nature at its uttermost. We are here to do our uttermost. It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical bloodpayment.
It would have been convenient if Victor, instead of boring the world to death talking about the war in Cuba and the Philippines, had enlisted, been shot, and never met her, and this got to the point: she wasn’t sure she could imagine being married to someone who would have volunteered. She hadn’t been part of the fever, and now even newspapers were tired of it, which couldn’t compete with the way the men stuck in the Philippines felt about the mess.
She dozed, and looked up to locate a hissing sound, a flurry of motion: the insurance man was waving a newspaper at the young man with the missing fingers, whose eyes were closed. Dulcy thought he was pretending until she took in the half-open mouth, the long, outstretched leg in the aisle, and an equally unfettered pyramid at his crotch. The insurance man threw his newspaper on the younger man’s lap, and his eyes flickered open as the paper slipped off. The older man stared pointedly, and the younger man looked down. He reached for his derby and dropped it on his lap, without apparent embarrassment.
The insurance man, as ever, relied on conversation. “What do you write about, then?” he asked.
“Unions and immigrants and politics,” said the young man. “Brown people and the Irish and lynchings, and nasty, selfish Anglo-Saxons such as ourselves. Plenty of things to say.”
The insurance man finally changed his seat.
???
Dusk, Butte: half of the passengers climbed off and headed for streetcars. These were the paler immigrants, the city people, not the red-faced farmers who’d disappeared into the frozen grass of eastern Washington. Dulcy studied a dozen skinny clouds rising from the city on the hill. They looked like volcano plumes, dragon exhalations, and it took her a moment to realize she was seeing steam from the mines. When she’d come through here at sixteen, Walton had explained, ad nauseam, the strangeness of a city built on an anthill, tunnels that stretched a mile down, engines rumbling below department stores and fancy hotels. Dulcy had thought it might all cave in, but he’d said that Butte was no different, really, than Paris or Rome, any city built over old mausoleums and sewers. The rock and ore underneath wouldn’t dissolve like the salt mines in Normandy or Austria.