Sweet Thunder (22 page)

“Sandy!” I cried as I at last wrenched the revolver free, with him gasping in pain but still upright and wrestling the cursing gunman. In a supreme surge of strength, he grabbed the man in a headlock and with a supreme effort of his powerful arms, wrenched his neck until it snapped. The two of them crashed to the floor together.

Tossing the gun out of reach, I frantically did what I could to stanch the blood turning one entire side of Sandison's torso red. Neighbors who had heard the shots and called the police were by now poking cautiously through the doorway to assess the body-strewn scene. “Help is on its way, Sandy, don't give up, please don't,” I babbled as he lay on his back, laboring to breathe.

Chest heaving, Sandison turned his shaggy head to the dead man beside him. “That'll teach you,” he wheezed. Then he lost consciousness.

•   •   •

It took extra stretcher bearers to transport Sandison from the ambulance into St. Jude's Hospital and immediately the operating room. For what seemed ages, I paced the waiting room, nuns in white gliding by me with faces as composed as plaster saints. Half-sick from the medicinal atmosphere, I questioned myself over and over. Had I cavalierly brought this on? Put Sandison's life at gravest risk by rash words on a sheet of newsprint? Shouldn't I have listened to the common wisdom about this roiling cauldron of a place, “They play rough in Butte”? Impervious fool, me. Yet, how can you outguess fate, if it walks up your front steps gripping a pistol? My thoughts twisted and turned as the waiting dragged on. At last, a gray-haired doctor wearing half-moon glasses appeared in the corridor.

I nearly collapsed in relief when he told me Sandison would pull through. “He's already awake and complaining to the nursing sisters—that's a good sign. But,” the professional tone went to the next level, “we need to keep him for the next some days, whether or not it's popular with him.” Pausing, the medical man peered at me over his specs. “Ready for the story element?”

“I'm sorry, the—?”

“There is one every time someone survives a shooting, you know. ‘An inch the other way,'” the doctor mimicked, “‘and the bullet would have killed him dead as a doornail.'” He chuckled mirthlessly. “In this case, it happens to be true. The shot just missed his heart, by some miracle. But then”—he glanced down the corridor, where a white flock of nurses was wheeling in someone groaning on a gurney—“I could have given that diagnosis as soon as I saw who the patient was, couldn't I.” Another dry chuckle. “String 'em Up Sam isn't going to be done in by one chunk of lead. Excuse me, I have to go back to work.”

And I had to recount to the police the entire shooting episode. The gunman turned out to be a minor hooligan, known more for his lack of smarts than anything else. Not inclined to investigate now that the criminal was a cadaver, the police wrote him off as a political crackpot who saw Red where I and my editorials were concerned. To which I could only say a silent
Maybe
. He might have been some maddened newspaper reader or he might have been in the hire of Anaconda to act like one. Either way, it came to the same. The worse equation was that now I had been shot at by two out of three, the out-of-town bootleggers and the local foes of the
Thunder
. In the shooting gallery that my life was threatening to become, that left only the Chicago gambling mobsters, who had yet to try their aim.

  15  

I
STOOD AT THE WINDOW
of the hospital room with my hands clasped behind my back. Above the brooding horizon of grimy ground and stark headframes, smoke ribboned from the seven stacks of the Neversweat, the Hill's own cloud formation. As happened every eight hours, regular as the spin of the earth, the gullied streets turned into glaciers of people as a shift changed at the mines, the Cornishmen flowing to the Centerville neighborhood, the Italians to Meaderville—oh, why couldn't the interloper Giorgio Mazzini have taken lodging there?—the Irish cascading to Dublin Gulch, the Welsh and Serbians and Finns and Norwegians to their own enclaves. As clear as a historical diorama, they showed me the house of labor, these workingmen whose hard-rock toil had been a foundation of the union movement championed by Jared Evans and others like him. I knew, too, from his fraught experience as the mineworkers' leader and the evidence of my own eyes and ears in my travels, that the timbers of that house, although still standing, had been cracking and crumbling under corporate and government pressure for nearly half a century. I'd have hazarded a bet that historians of the future would describe the American Industrial Revolution as more truly an industrial civil war, driven mainly by the management side determined to incorporate and rule. In the West, the battles on many fronts were disheartening. The Colorado conflicts at the mines in Ludlow and Cripple Creek ended in violence, deaths, and suppression. On the coast, the Seattle general strike flared and went out, and in Everett a boatload of strikers, including suspected Wobblies, came under mortal gunfire from authorities on shore. The list went on, with this copper-rich, copper-cursed city inscribed on it in blood time and again. And my own efforts in the union cause, that of Jared and the men streaming to and from work on the Hill, had brought on the latest fusillade.

My mood spoke for me. “I should simply leave. The
Thunder
and Butte and Montana, maybe even America. Take passage for Tasmania. Trouble finds me too easily here.”

Shifting in the high bed with a mighty groan—from the tone of it, caused as much by me as the pain of his wound—Sandison dismissed my plaint. “Don't talk nonsense. Running away won't make up for that pistol-packing moron.”

“Maybe not, but—”

“Besides, you can't leave. I need you to pitch in so the Butte Public Library doesn't fall to pieces while I'm out of commission.”

“You do? I mean, do you?”

“Use your head, man. You're the only one besides me who knows the ins and outs of the whole place. All you have to do is duck in there now and then and say I told you to tell the staff thus and such. They're a good bunch, they'll follow orders.” Flat on his back, he still managed to give me a lofty look. “While you're at it, you might pack home the ledger that has the payroll and the book budget and so on in it. We could just as well tend to that at our own convenience.”

“Mmm.” To make sure what I was in for, I dropped my voice and inquired: “By any chance, does that ledger perhaps need some mending? From the inside?”

The hospital bed shook. “Damn it, it hurts when I laugh.” The fierce white eyebrows doing their work, he confronted my question. “I knew you were a ring-tailed wonder when I first hired you. Call it instinct. Or dumb luck.”

Right then a nun appeared in the doorway, holding a bedpan. “The call of nature will have to wait,” he impatiently instructed her. “I'm doing other business.”

She vanished, and he resumed on me. “Anyhow, handling numbers like hot potatoes isn't my strong suit, never has been, and you've got a trick mind for it, so why not put it to use, eh?” He must have seen my own eyebrows hoisting. “Yes, of course, thickhead. If the idiot board of trustees happened to snoop into the ledger, they could get the wrong idea. You know how it is.”

Did I ever. In my time as his assistant when one of my countless assignments was to balance the bookkeeping, I had no choice but to unravel the Samuel Sandison approach to library administration. The madness to his method, it might jocularly be called, if shunting funds from where they belonged to where he wanted them could be considered a joke. For it had become clear to me back then, bit by bit, that there never seemed to be quite as much library staff as was budgeted for, the shortfall ingeniously made up by shuttling someone from task to task—namely, me—so the unspent wages could gravitate down the ledger columns to entries labeled
Miscellaneous book purchases
. The migration did not stop there, I realized when I undertook an inventory of his trove on loan to the institution, those magnificent books that would still be around a century and more from now, that were the heart of the Butte Public Library's “finest collection west of Chicago.” The old rogue was slipping “miscellaneous” purchases into his
SSS-
bookplated holdings; there was a paste pot on his office desk just as there was at home, after all.

Well, how severely can you judge a person whose crime is a passion for the very best that literature has to offer? And who like a generous Midas sets out the timeless volumes on open shelves for the reading public to share? In my previous incarnation as the Butte Public Library's jack-of-all-trades, I had kept a wise silence about its librarian juggling the books, so to speak. But now I hesitated.

“Sandy, I already have a job. One that is perfectly aboveboard,” I said pointedly, “and which keeps me so busy I meet myself coming and going. On top of that, there's the house threatening to fall down on our heads, and—” I broke off at the huge sigh heaved by the patient flat on his back. “None of which counts, does it. You saved my life.”

“In bad fiction, this is the point at which the one who saved the life says, ‘Pshaw, it was nothing,'” Sandison drawled. “That's twaddle. Dime-novel stuff. Undying gratitude from you will suit me fine, Morgan. Now, get over there to the library. And don't forget the ledger.”

•   •   •

I must concede, spending whatever time I could afford at the familiar old granite grandiosity with
BUTTE PUBLIC LIBRARY
proudly incised over one of its twin arches of entrance and
LUX EX LIBRIS
over the other was gratifying. The staff enthusiastically welcomed me back—always with the exception of Miss Runyon, the Medusa of the main desk—and never questioned my grant of authority from Sandison. With my experience, whatever knotty matter of scheduling or personnel presented itself, I could resolve. And if I may say so, more quickly and decisively than Sandison customarily did, with his habit of tugging at his beard and muttering, “I'll let you know before doomsday.” Still, adding that to my editorial exertions at the
Thunder
, plus regularly visiting Sandison in the hospital, where he now kept the ledger in a bedside drawer the way other people keep a Bible, lent credence to Grace's analogy of a chameleon on a barber pole. More often than not, I reached home late at night, ignored whatever complaint the manse had developed that day, and dropped straight to bed, too exhausted even to crack open a book.

Then came the morning when I was awakened by loud knocking, which I assumed was the furnace or a water boiler signaling disaster, and I moaned and turned over under the covers. As the commotion mounted, I realized the front door knocker was to blame.

Groggily checking at the window—there was just enough daylight to see—I looked down on the unmistakable heads of Hoop and Griff. Spotting me, one of them called out, “Don't worry none, Morrie. We're unarmed.” The other one cackled.

Still in my pajamas and wondering what their reappearance portended, I met them at the door. Griff lost no time enlightening me, Hoop nodding along. “Mrs. Morgan figured you could stand a little help with the shack now and again.” They had with them the bulging tool bag that showed hard use in the mines, much like themselves.

With alacrity I showed them in and told them to start anywhere. They shrugged off my gratitude as they clanked down the hallway, one of them saying over his shoulder, “We got nothing better to do anyway. Giorgio can take care of things at the boardinghouse.” The other one cackled again.

How I burned to ask just what the extent of his caretaking was.

•   •   •

As usual, later that day I made time to go by St. Jude's and look in on Sandison. A visitor already stood posted by his bedside. Grace.

“Ah. Hello.”

“The same to you, man of many names.” In visiting clothes, she looked as fetching as she had on our honeymoon promenade around the world.

“Heh. Don't make me call in the sisters of mercy to form a cordon between you two.” Sandison was sitting up in bed by now, still bandaged around his middle like a mummy. “Madam, this husband of yours—as I understand he still is—at least is not dull to be around, you have to grant him that.”

“Nice try, Samuel.” Grace gave him a chilly smile, and to me simply the chill. “His thrilling approach to life includes marrying a woman under a false name. That kind of excitement I can do without.”

“Grace, I have explained the extenuating circumstance.”

“It didn't extenuate by itself, Morrie.”

Heaving himself higher on his stack of pillows, sultan holding court, Sandison mournfully came out with, “I wish Dora were here. She'd sort this out so quick your heads would swim.”

The specter of Dora Sandison regulating our lives did give both of us pause. Grace recovered quicker than I. “I simply came to pay my respects,” she turned to the patient, “I hope you're well soon. The wrong one of you is in for repairs.” So saying, she marched out of the hospital room.

With just his eyes, Sandison told me to quit standing there like a fool and follow her.

“Grace, one minute, please.” I caught up with her in the waiting room. “I wanted to thank you for the loan of Hoop and Griff.”

“Charity begins at home.” Halting, she took the opportunity to confront me again. Even the dimple that ordinarily was a beauty mark looked fierce. “Don't think that was any kind of a favor to you. The less upkeep you have to do, the faster you can finish the job at the newspaper and I can be rid of you as a husband, understand?”

“Implicitly. But—”

A nurse wearing a majestic wimple, evidently a senior nun, sailed past us like a resolute angel. In her wake, Grace unexpectedly giggled. “You and him among the holy. Life is too funny sometimes.”

“There, see? We can agree on that much. And if you will just give me another chance—”

“Oh, no, you don't,” she bristled again, enough that I backed up a step. This was like trying to pet a lioness. “With your record,” she blazed, “what does another chance amount to but another headache? Ever since we came back to Butte, you've been up to your neck in fix after fix. Thrown in jail because you look like some other disreputable character. Then that stupid trunk of yours. Now it's gunplay, is it. What will you get yourself into next, Morrie?”

“A maniac brandishing a revolver wasn't my idea,” I couldn't help pointing out.

“Fine, but it's just one more proof that trouble finds you like rain goes in a barrel, isn't it. No, stop, please, don't make sad eyes at me.” Her own were blinking back something. “If you're worried I'm going to divorce you sooner than later, you needn't get yourself worked up like this.” How could I help it, with a Giorgio tending the home fires that had been the hearth of my happiness? “I gave you my word,” Grace flung at me as she stalked toward the hospital exit, “which is better than some I could mention.”

•   •   •

Wifeless and without even the grumpy company of Sandison until the hospital ever discharged him, I had only the silent, empty manse to see me off each gray morning and to come home to each long night. Something had changed in me; something in the weight of life. For more of my years than I cared to count, solitude seemed to be my full measure spooned out by fate. Ever since Casper. Ever since Rose. It was hard, alone, but I thought I had myself resolutely sorted out, reconciled to my own company in the experience of living, independence strapped firmly on me. Now, though, I longed for Grace as if part of myself were missing. I even yearned for Hoop and Griff making a racket in the precincts of the house. One's own footsteps, the only parlance in the emptiness between hyphens of carpet, are a sad stutter of existence hour upon hour.