Sweet Thunder (18 page)

I assured him Griff and Hoop were going through the motions of new property owners, and with them, motions were loudly noticeable. They enthusiastically spoke of having the boardinghouse open—with Grace's consent, of course—for the summer turnover, when numbers of miners returned to families in the old country and newcomers drawn by the smoky beacon of the stacks of the Neversweat arrived to take their place. I saw no reason to add that Hoop and Griff, for company's sake, still slept and ate at the manse.

Thus it was that I left work at the end of one of those heady days of editorial cloudwalking in the best of moods, humming the “America” reel from the Burns celebration as I started home. Spring was providing more definite indicators than Sandison's sniff sorting the Hill smoke from pleasant airs to come; any tree that managed to survive in Butte was showing buds, nature's assertion that hope springs eternal. Caught up in the season and my even sunnier mood, I did not pay particular mind when my usual route was interrupted by a broken water main, which had turned the street into a pond.

As a glum municipal crew tried to stem the flood, I detoured through an alley that brought me out on an unfamiliar backstreet. The prime business on the block, from the look of it an original bucket-of-blood saloon, now announced itself as the
MILE-HIGH BILLIARDS AND PINOCHLE SOCIAL CLUB
, making me chuckle at the resourcefulness of speakeasies. Although the enterprise evidently had not yet opened for the evening, out front a hawk-nosed man in a bowler hat was holding forth to a uniformed policeman, gesturing in frustration at the purported social club. He broke off at the sight of me.

“Well, well. Speak of the devil.” Swaggering up to me, he thrust his face practically into mine. “Couldn't resist dropping by”—he jerked his head toward the speakeasy—“to see how business is, huh?”

“You are mistaken,” I sputtered, drawing back from his intrusion. “I'm a, a property owner and a taxpayer and a fully employed—”

“The mistake's all yours, Highliner,” he sneered the word, “showing your face around here in broad daylight. Rub our noses in it, I suppose you think, strutting around collecting your bootlegging swag like a real businessman. We'll see about that.” Hawknose flashed a badge and practically purred, “Let's run him in, Murph.”

“No, wait, I'm not—” The uniformed policeman, the burly sort called a harness bull, clamped me by the biceps. “Shut your yap and come on along to the station house.”

•   •   •

There, the desk sergeant sat back in shock. “Jaysis, Davis, you'll be arresting the pope next.”

“If I catch him running booze right under our noses, you better bet I will.” The hawk-nosed detective cut off my attempt to protest that I had been doing no such thing. “Book him on something or other—‘spitting on the sidewalk' will do until I can come up with better charges—and toss him in the drunk tank. We'll see how he likes his customers for company.”

•   •   •

The view from behind bars was a disturbing one. The world abruptly striped with iron, smelling bad, and rife with company of dubious character. My cell mates were a pale, bony man still wearing a full-length apron that marked him as a dishwasher, traditional occupation of drunks, and a stouter individual with the characteristic stoop of a miner. The aproned one had the shakes. In a cracked voice he asked me, “Got a flask on you, buddy?”

“Sorry, I'm not equipped.”

“Dressed like that and you don't carry a drink of no kind? What are you, some kind of camel?”

The other inmate, marginally less unsteady, ogled me with a slowly dawning expression. “Say. You ain't—?”

“You're right, I'm not.”

“We unnerstand, don't worry. A guy starts owning up, it can get to be a bad habit, can't it.” Shielding his mouth with his hand, he whispered something to his jail mate. The shaky one said, “Ooh.” The other continued, low enough not be heard outside the cell, “He gives the cops fits.” They both took a wobbly step back in tribute. “You can have the lower bunk.”

I lay down and put my hat over my eyes, to try to let this nightmare pass. Of all the people on the planet I could resemble, why did it have to be the kingpin of a gang of bootleggers? True, the Highliner seemed to run a masterfully efficient operation, judging by that tempting cache of cash I had glimpsed at the warehouse, but he still was a lawbreaker, even if the law was a supremely stupid one. If I had to have a twin, why not Charlie Chaplin or George Bernard Shaw or some other personality the world would heap with riches and esteem instead of perilous misapprehensions? Finally worn out by the traffic of such thoughts and aided by the considerate
shh
s of my cell mates to each other, I drifted off to the only escape at hand, slumber.

•   •   •

I awoke on the jail bed to Sandison frowning through the bars at me. “Turn him loose,” he wearily told the hawk-nosed detective at his side. “I know him like a bad habit.”

“If he's not the Highliner,” the detective protested, “then who is he?”

“My butler, you fool.” Sandison scowled at me. “The next time I send you downtown for cigars, do you think you can stay out of trouble?”

“I'll make every effort.”

•   •   •

We left the jail, the clangor of the nearest mines on the Hill following us as we headed home in the dusk. After the first wordless block or so, Sandison glanced at me. “What's the matter? Your jailbird phase make you forget how to talk?”

“‘Butler,' Sandy?” I gave him a look. “You could just as easily have said I'm your landlord.”

“
Tch tch
, hurt feelings? Maybe I should have left you in there with the bedbugs and barflies.”

“How did you know I was incarcerated?”

“The boy. Snickelfritz or whatever you call him.”

“Russian Famine, in reality. Thank heaven he watches out for me.”

“Someone needs to, Morgan. You seem to be a walking lightning rod.” An observation of the sort from the Earl of Hell did not lift my spirits any. “The whippersnapper came tearing into the library to find me, saying he'd been delivering newspapers to the jail as usual when he spotted you back there in the drunk tank. ‘Must've got into that libation stuff,' he told me.” Sandison's upper half shook with amusement. “Sharp lad.”

•   •   •

“Jail, Morrie. That's not good.”

“Grace, it could have happened to anyone of my general appearance under the circumstances.”

“I thought you just said it was a million-to-one chance that you happen to be the spitting image of this Highliner person.”

“Paradoxical, but true.”

She softened the next with a bit of a smile, but concern was behind it. “I don't remember that part in the wedding vows.”

“Only because ‘for better and for worse' sounds less dire,” I muttered, undressing for bed. Already in her nightie, Grace undid her braid and shook her hair for brushing. She watched me in the dresser mirror while silently counting her strokes. Much too disturbed to settle in for the night, I paced the floor in my slippers and pajamas, trying to reach some conclusion. If my stint in jail was upsetting to Grace, the shotgun blast from the other side of the law in my first encounter with the Highliner's shadow world of bootlegging would be decidedly more so, were I to tell her the whole thing. Yet it would hardly be right to leave her wondering what manner of mannequin she was married to. The remedy was drastic, but had to be swallowed. Going to Grace, I nuzzled her cheek as the hairbrush paused in mid-stroke. “I have something to tell you, darling.”

What a picture we made as a couple, caught there in the mirror's reflection, she as violet-eyed and pleasant-faced as a maiden in a Dutch painting and I in my set expression of determination, my beard practically bristling with resolve as I announced my decision. “I am going down to the barbershop tomorrow and have it shaved off.”

Grace took in my mirrored image before finally saying, “Let me be sure I'm following this development. You intend to make the earthshaking change to clean-shaven in order to not look . . . paradoxical?”

“Exactly. More or less.”

She pursed her lips coquettishly. “Naturally I'll miss the whiskers. But of course, you must do what you think is right.”

•   •   •

Sacrificing a beard may sound easy, but believe me, it is more than a matter of lather and razor. There is an attachment that goes beyond the follicles. My crop of whiskers had been carefully grown during our honeymoon year, and thus was a kind of keepsake of that romantic time. And a cultivated beard had proved to be a successful disguise on our travels, permitting me to pass with impunity even through the Chicago train station, in proximity to the gambling mob and its window men. No, shaving it off would be like losing an old friend, one who had served well. My reflection in the downtown store windows was more than a little guilty, the upper part of my face apologizing to the lower half. Why couldn't the damnable Highliner shave his? A mute question, as Hoop and Griff would have called it, and I trudged on toward the barbershop.

I was passing the
Thunder
building when Armbrister thrust his head out the office window. “Morgie! Damn it, man, we've been looking high and low for you.”

“I'll be in later,” I called back, “I'm on my way to a tonsorial appointment.”

“Never mind that, get yourself up here right this minute. We've got big trouble.”

When I entered the newsroom, the entire staff was clustered around Armbrister's desk. He was scowling down into what I could tell was our contraband early copy of the day's
Post
, the ink practically dripping from it. “All right, everybody. Hold on to your hats and listen to this.”

The Truth Comes Out. In Red.

What is black and white and red all over?

The usual punch line, cue the guffaw, is a newspaper, read to the fullest extent of the pun and readerly endurance. But there is a wholly unfunny answer when the gazette in question is the daily issuance of ominous noise that calls itself the
Thunder.
For it has revealed its true colors, and those are, in the anthem of revolutionaries awaiting their chance, deepest red.

“Whaaat? Have they gone loony?”
Hoots and groans and profanities chorused until Armbrister held up a hand. “It gets worse.”

Consider this: The
Thunder
's latest jeremiad against the existing order in the mining industry—which is to say the capitalistic system—was brazenly headlined
What Is To Be Done?
Which was, let's don't mince words, the exact question of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, with which he titled his published blueprint for undermining the existing order in Russia and seizing power for his ruthless socialistic coterie. It is all there, the plan for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it surfaces now on American soil with the coaxing of a supposedly legitimate newspaper. The telltale phrase is a code for Bolshevism, nothing less and nothing more.

That was met with stunned silence. My head felt as if it were going to burst.

Armbrister read on.

The Red menace takes various forms—anarchist bombs and bullets, on-the-job sabotage by the Industrial Workers of the World (the so-called Wobblies; may they wobble back to their holes) that this industrial community only lately has rid itself of through apt governmental prosecutions and direct action—but here is a new and insidious manifestation, striking at the profits that pay the wages that provide prosperity. As the mouthpiece for the radical element in the miners' union, the
Thunder
is slickly setting the tune for nothing less than the soviet of Butte.

It's enough to make an honest patriot see red and hurl those bespoiled batches of newsprint being peddled on the street into the nearest trash can, isn't it.

There was more, much more. All of it invective, expertly done. The blood seemed to have drained out of the
Thunder
staff; I am sure I had turned pale as a ghost.

When Armbrister finally recited the last iota of innuendo, he removed his eyeshade and mopped his brow. The younger staff members glanced around nervously. Mary Margaret Houlihan moved her lips in prayer.

As for me, I had an awful feeling in my gut. From lede to end, Scriptoris never saw the day when he could deploy language in so deadly a fashion. In the stunned silence of my colleagues, I asked, “How . . . how is it signed?”

With extreme distaste, Armbrister read off the editorial signature beneath the diatribe: “‘Cutlass.'”

Of course. It would be.

  11  

C
UTLASS, AS
I
TOO WELL KNEW,
was the byline and trademark of the newspaperman more familiarly called Cutthroat Cartwright, the most famous and feared columnist in the savage pages of Chicago journalism. Just the thought of him anywhere in my vicinity made my head hurt.

Cecil Cartwright had claimed early fame in the Spanish-American War for writing dispatches under fire during the charge up San Juan Hill by Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and parlayed that into the safer but still combative career of sportswriter. Meaner than Ring Lardner and shrewder than Damon Runyon, he scourged anyone he set his sights on—I'd immediately recognized touches such as “cue the guffaw” and “let's don't mince words” as characteristic of his cold-eyed, coldhearted style. The fact that the Anaconda Company had imported him to wage editorial battle with the
Thunder
was bad enough, to judge by our stunned newsroom. But his arrival to Butte brought with it an even worse threat to me. Cartwright's latest notch in his belt was breaking the story of the Black Sox scandal, and should it somehow come to his attention that his wordslinging counterpart across town, a rival to be eliminated by innuendo or whatever else it took, happened to be the mysterious Montana bettor who had outguessed the World Series fixers and won a fortune, he would leak that news back to the Chicago gambling mob as surely as water runs downhill. So I was in deep, deep trouble if Cutthroat, as I would always think of him, ever saw through me and my beard.

At the moment, the urgent need was to rally the shell-shocked
Thunder
staff. Putting up a show of confidence as bold as it was illusory, I addressed the silent ring of faces around me, Armbrister's worried one foremost.

“Never fear. Tomorrow Pluvius will respond in kind, fang and claw.”

•   •   •

“My, you are a marvel,” Grace greeted me, beard and all. “You've grown another one already.”

“I'm more fond of it than I knew.”

“I'm glad. It makes you stand out.” Before I could blink that away, she was giving me a kiss and asking, “And how was your day at the paper?”

“Heart-stopping. You'll hear more than enough about it at supper.”

The mealtime consensus was that the Cutlass editorial was deadly. Coming to the “soviet of Butte” phrase in the
Post
I had forced myself to buy on the way home, Griff observed to Hoop, “That's pretty strong, ain't it.” In her turn at it, Grace gasped—“Bolshevik! Oh, Morrie, how awful!”—and wrung her hands until I put a calming one atop hers and repeated my ill-founded assurance that I would take care of the matter on the morrow. For his part, Sandison scanned the invective with a series of grunts but otherwise stayed dangerously quiet. As we rose from the table, however, he gave me a sharp glance and I followed him to his library quarters as if magnetized.

“Good grief, so-called wordsmith,” he wasted no time, “you handed them the billy club to beat you into the ground with. ‘Red menace,' hah,” he practically spat out, “but you left yourself wide open for that one, didn't you. Jared Evans can't help but be utterly sick when this reaches Helena and the louts in the legislature, can he. What were you thinking, man?”

“Sandy,” I sounded as miserable as I felt, “I was writing at deadline speed and the connection of ‘What is to be done?' to Lenin's infernal revolutionary tract simply never occurred to me.”

“You'd better race the deadline for wriggling out of the straitjacket this Cutlass character slapped on you.” Irritably he reared back, his paunch bulging as he considered me, down the formidable slope of himself. “Well? What are you going to do about it, mad dog Marxist. Skedaddle off the newspaper, so it can say you're out of the picture and the revolution isn't coming to Butte after all?”

“Quite the opposite.” I repeated to him my last-ditch vow to the
Thunder
staff that I would parry Cutlass's slashing attack. “Toward that end, may I borrow this”—I indicated to his library trove that surrounded us on all walls—“for the evening?”

“I should hope so,” Sandison drawled as if it were his idea all along. “You need all the help you can get, Pluvius.” Grumbling to himself, he lumbered to a shelf and plucked out
Paradise Lost
, the beautiful edition with Gustave Doré illustrations. “Myself, I'm retiring for the night with Milton as company. There's a man who savvied ‘confusion worse confounded.' You might read him sometime yourself. Heh.”

With that, I was left alone with the silent legion of books standing at attention all around me, tier upon tier of the world's finest literature. I draped my suit coat over the back of Sandison's oversize chair and tried to decide where to begin, on a search through so many pages. What I was after had to be somewhere in the riches of this room. It had to be.

•   •   •

I still was hunting, groggy and haggard in the small hours of the night, when Grace tapped on the door and came in before I could respond. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she peered worriedly at me and the books piled in the pool of light given by the desk lamp. “Aren't you coming to bed at all?”

“Sleep isn't the answer,” I mumbled, not looking up from the open pages.

I heard her slippers shuffle on the carpet as she crossed the room, and then she was beside me, hefting
War and Peace
from the stack at my side, weighing her words along with it. “Morrie? I realize you're in a fix and looking for a way out of it, but I have to ask.” Strain thinned the usual lilt out of her voice. “You aren't trying to read yourself to death, are you?”

Until right then I had never considered an overfill of books as one of the mortal varieties of fate. There are worse. But that was not my mission. “No, darling,” I answered hoarsely. “I'm trying to raise the
Thunder
from the dead.”

•   •   •

However, the newsroom the next day was like a tomb when I dragged in, so exhausted I could hardly see straight. All eyes were on me, although that changed as soon as the reporters who had covered the newsprint conflagration incited by the Cutlass editorial straggled to the editor's desk with their eyewitness accounts. They'd had the sickening experience of watching their own words go up in smoke while mobs, doubtless spurred on by Anaconda operatives, seized stacks of
Thunder
s from outnumbered newsboys and chanted “Burn the Bolshie rag!” while turning the newspapers into bonfires on street corners. Naturally Armbrister in hearing these painful reports was long-faced as an undertaker whose dog had died, but when the last reporter had his dispirited say, the editor had his. “Don't bring me a laundry list, get me a story, damn it,” he instructed with an intensity that made heads snap back even among those of us merely listening in. “Pull up your knickers, the whole bunch of you,” he barked—which happened to include Mary Margaret Houlihan, pressed into service in the scramble to cover the firestorm of anti-
Thunder
thuggery—“and sit down with Matthews on rewrite and give him what you've got, one by one, like with any other assignment. I know this story hits you in the gut, but we're going to pull it together and front-page the sunuvabitch like it's the lede of the Bible, everybody savvy that? Now get at it.”

Everyone else in the newsroom, including me, walked a wide circle around Armbrister after that outburst. Not to my surprise, Jared came in practically on my heels, redeploying himself from the legislative fight in Helena to try to rally the
Thunder
troops in the crisis my editorial had caused. Noble fellow, he did not assess blame, although his expression was much like it must have been under fire from German snipers. After a brief exchange with Armbrister that won a dour nod of the green eyeshade, our publisher called the staff together, with the exception of the reporters working with the rewrite man typing at machine-gun pace in the rear of the room.

“Chin up, everybody,” Jared started right in on what we faced. “Anaconda has tried this old stunt on us before, playing the Red card. It didn't work then because there were always the Wobblies raising hell and the union looked sane in comparison. Now we have to slug it out on the Bolshie issue, so we will.” Smacking a fist into his palm, he turned to me. “I hope you're loaded for bear, Professor.” In my sleepless near trance, Grace's image of Anaconda as a carnival bear dangerous when unmuzzled so transfixed me that the roomful of
Thunder
staff began to shift uneasily before I thought to respond.

“I've . . .” I had to swallow that croak and start again, “I've found what is needed. I'll put it to use.”

Depend on it, Armbrister rapped out, “You need to make it prontissimo. We're coming up on—”

“—yes, yes, deadline.” Without another word, I started across the newsroom to my typewriter, trying not to totter. Armbrister and Jared shadowed me as if I might fall and break, the latter asking in my ear, “Professor, are you sure you can write straight? You look like you've been dragged by the eyeballs.”

“Just get me coffee. Lots of it.”

•   •   •

They hovered around me like handlers tending a boxer in a corner of the ring, Armbrister snatching each finished page from me to read in one gulp and cry, “That's the stuff!” before thrusting it to the copyboy to run it to the back shop, while Jared kept replenishing my coffee until I practically sloshed. But when the last sheet of paper was ripped from my typewriter and dispatched for typesetting, the
Thunder
had spoken.

What Is To Be Done? Come Clean, That's What.

Yesterday, the copper mouthpiece known as the
Daily Post
sounded a note of shrill hysteria, inciting mob action against, of all innocent targets, newsboys. Those bonfires of
Thunder
bundles are only the flicker of the conflagration the
Post
and its Anaconda masters hope to set off, however. The corporate potentates and their journalistic janissaries are resorting to one of the oldest and ugliest tactics, guilt by association. Let's examine again the inflammatory charges made against this newspaper and its purportedly notorious editorial,
What Is To
Be Done?

“Which was, let's don't mince words,” the
Post
blustered, “the exact question of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, with which he titled his published blueprint for undermining the existing order in Russia and seizing power for his ruthless socialistic coterie. It is all there, the plan for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it surfaces now on American soil with the coaxing of a supposedly legitimate newspaper. The telltale phrase is a code for Bolshevism, nothing less and nothing more.”

Oh, really?

The
Post
accuser-in-charge must not be much of a reader. One only has to delve into that acknowledged masterpiece of Russian and world literature,
Anna Karenina
, written long before Bolsheviks ever existed to serve as bogeymen, to come across this supposedly sinister catchphrase uttered time and again by the cast of characters as a cry of the Russian soul to the heavens: Oblonsky in despair over his debauched life, Levin—Tolstoy's country squire alter ego—in guilt over the political paralysis of his privileged class, and most tellingly, Anna Karenina herself in torment over a marriage that is coming apart. If the Robespierre of the Russian revolution, V. I. Lenin, plucked a similar plaint out of the air three decades later, it only shows how common the expression is, down to the current day. To charge that anyone uttering it in print—Tolstoy, we are humbly in your company—is espousing Bolshevism is like saying the dictionary is full of words radicals use.

At that point of the piece, having fought off the worst Cutlass could throw, it was time to fight back, and I did so with vehemence.

The
Post
and its insinuating editorialist likely cannot be counted on to come clean about their true purpose, so the
Thunder
is happy to do it for them. If there is anything “Red” about this episode, it is the red-handed attempt to scapegoat a rival. This is the kind of propaganda that produces class warfare, pogroms, lynchings, and in this ridiculously contrived mob outburst, the bullying of blameless newsboys and destruction of their wares. Such malicious instigation is the venom of hate throughout the worst of history. The antidote is truth, and here it is: the only revolution this newspaper advocates is the overthrow of Anaconda's unconfessed influence over the state of Montana's tax system.