“ Where is she?”
“ In town at the music festival. Spends all day there. They got more concerts in that little town than a dog’s got fleas.”
Cimarron turned back to the plywood, whipping the heavy nail gun as if it were a revolver, and added a whomp, either for extra stability or to deliver a message. “Damned hailstorm broke three windows, scared the shit out of the cattle and the summer tourists. Not that it bothers me when the tourists get caught in the rain or avalanches for that matter. Are you one of those assholes who straps boards on his feet, races down the mountain, then waits for a ride back up so he can do it all over again?”
“ I was, until my third knee operation.”
He came down from the ladder and walked toward us, the nail gun still in his hand. “Skiers!” He spit into a stall and an Appaloosa gave him a dirty look. I tried to imagine Jo Jo with this guy, but it just didn’t compute.
“ What a waste of time, what a piss-poor use of our resources,” he was saying. “You know what’s under the ski slopes on Ajax, what you tourists call Aspen Mountain?”
“ Shafts and tunnels,” I said, displaying my knowledge so recently gained. “Silver mines crisscrossing under the town from one mountain to the other.”
He nodded and seemed surprised. “Right. That’s our history, the history of the West. Mines and small towns grown big with gold and silver. Now what do we have, million-dollar condos and music tents and jugglers and little red wagons selling crepes with cinnamon and bananas, and traffic jams because assholes from Miami and Beverly Hills have taken over.”
“ The Silver Queen,” I said. “That’s part of your past, too.”
His eyes narrowed just a bit. “What do you know about it?”
“ Enough. You spent some money trying to find her, a statue that disappeared from a World’s Fair a hundred plus years ago. It was made from a pure chunk of silver that weighed over a ton.”
“ The nugget was taken from the Mollie Gibson on Smuggler Mountain. Hell, it was more like a boulder, weighed twenty-one hundred fifty pounds and assayed out at ninety-six percent pure. Never been anything like it ever, before or since. The town fathers commissioned the statue for the Chicago World’s Fair as part of a lobbying effort to keep Congress from demonetizing silver, but it didn’t work. The Sherman Act was passed, and that was the end of the silver boom. So the Silver Queen is the perfect symbol of a lost era. Can you understand that?”
“ Sure, what I don’t understand is you. I didn’t figure you for a historical society type.”
“ There’s a lot you don’t understand.” He put the nail gun on a table of plywood supported by two sawhorses. “How about the two of us have a drink and talk?”
It wasn’t quite noon, but Cimarron was pouring bourbon from a cut-glass decanter into crystal tumblers. “What’s the little tyke want?”
“ Gimme a viskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, bay-bee,” the little tyke answered.
“ What?”
I gave Kip the crossed-arms signal for declining a penalty. “He doesn’t care for your Garbo, kid, so play it straight.”
“ Okay, Liberty Valance, gimme a Grolsch,” Kip ordered.
We had taken the stone path back to the house, walked through the foyer past the buffalo and the antique rifles, through the living room, around the bearskin rug, and were in a room with a green felt pocket billiards table, and old, cracked leather chairs.
“ Will a root beer do?” the big man asked.
Kip grimaced. “If that’s all you’ve got, bartender, make it a double.”
I took a hit on the warm bourbon. Cimarron didn’t offer ice, and I didn’t ask. He racked the balls, offered me a choice of cues and games. I chose eight ball.
“ What should we play for,” I asked, “money, stock…Jo Jo?”
“ She said you make lousy jokes, and she was right. Or maybe I don’t have much of a sense of humor. I don’t joke about Josefina.”
“ What do you joke about?”
“ There isn’t much I find funny.”
“ Maybe you should loosen up,” Kip said.
“ What’s that supposed to mean?” Cimarron asked. We were double-teaming him. If it got rough, maybe Kip could bite him in the ankle.
“ Nothing,” Kip said, trying to suppress his malicious grin, “except you’re so tight, if you stuck a piece of coal up your ass, in two weeks, you’d have a diamond.”
“ What the hell!”
“ It’s from a movie,” I explained.
“ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Kip said.
Cimarron was shaking his head. Then he looked at me. “I know all about you. You’re a trivial man. You couldn’t appreciate a woman of substance like Josefina. “
“ Yeah, so what happened to the two of you?”
“ That is none of your concern, but the life I can give her is of far greater significance than what you can do. For most of your life, you played a game, a game! Do you even have a philosophy?’’
“ Sure. I try to go through life doing the least damage possible. Having fun without hurting anyone, maybe doing a little good along the way, but without taking myself too seriously.”
“ Having fun! I don’t know what Josefina ever saw in you…”
Funny, that’s what I was thinking about him, but now, he was starting to sound like her. Maybe they had more in common than I thought.
“…unless it was the chance to reform you, make you over, but it didn’t work, and you ended up in cahoots with her worthless brother.”
He chalked a cue stick, leaned over the table and broke, sending balls ricocheting with a crack like a rifle shot. The fourteen ball plopped into a corner pocket.
“ High balls,” Cimarron said, a little like the way we played the game at home. Without looking at me, he knocked in the ten, fifteen, and nine, the last on a nifty bank shot that threaded the four and the seven. He lifted his head from the table and gestured with the cue stick toward a black-and-white photo on the far wall. “There she is, part of our legacy.”
I walked over to the wall and studied the Silver Queen. The lady wore a crown and looked a little like the Statue of Liberty, but she was riding in a chariot with giant wheels. The front of the chariot resembled the prow of a ship, and two little Greek god types ran alongside, wearing what looked like diapers. They carried cornucopias that seemed to be overflowing with coins. The queen held a scepter topped by a star and a gigantic silver dollar. Under the photo was a glass-enclosed clipping from the Aspen Times dated March 1893. It was a review of the sculpture. “A noble work of art, majestic in proportions…”
I turned around in time to see Cimarron whack the thirteen ball into a side pocket, stopping the cue ball just short of dropping in.
“ It’s big,” I said, after a moment. “Big and gaudy. It would be hard to say beautiful.”
“ Victorian style, a symbol of the end of that era, too,” he explained, patiently. “Eighteen feet high. The face, bust, and arms are of solid silver. The drapery is studded with precious stones. Her hair is glass. The chariot is finished in stripes of dark minerals and crystals. The two winged gods represent Plutus, carrying riches. One horn overflows with gold, the other silver. The pillars are made of burnished silver, crystals, and a mosaic of minerals.”
“ What’s it worth?”
Cimarron laughed, bent low over the table, and sent the eleven ball careening into the four-one of mine-which ended in a side pocket. “Damn.”
I chalked a cue stick while he talked. “Who knows what it’s worth? Who cares? It’s the history of this town, this state, and I wanted to find it, preserve it.”
I hit the cue ball too high and knocked it and the six into a corner pocket. “How could it disappear from the World’s Fair?”
“ It didn’t. That’s one of the misconceptions. The Queen came back from the fair and was put on display at the Mineral Palace in Pueblo, which was eventually torn down. Nobody knows what happened to the silver lady. She just disappeared.”