Sweet Thunder (24 page)

“Now's the time to voice them,” I said, as if I hadn't just bypassed my own. “Such as?”

“Sure it isn't a fancy way of getting beaten up?”

I sucked in a breath. “Famine, we want to keep that from happening. That's why I am going to have to teach very carefully and you are going to have to learn very thoroughly.”

He twisted and turned before coming out with it. “See, what I like to do when a scrap comes up is run.”

He made sure I understood. “'Stead of a fight. I'm awful good at running.”

That was not so far from the philosophy that had governed certain chapters of my own life. Run away and live to fight another day; not for nothing is that the most poetic of strategies. And I had seen him bolt off at full speed, swift as a zephyr. What was I doing, what were his supposed protectors Jared and Rab doing, in upsetting the defense nature had given him?

“Sometimes the circumstances are such,” I tried to sound convincing to both of us, “that you simply can't get away. Or choose not to. You don't want the
Post
newsies to take away your corner, you said.”

“Yeah, that's the trouble,” he said darkly. “Can't run and be there too.”

“And in the oldest story there is, that's why hands are sometimes made into fists,” I said as I pulled on boxing gloves for the first time in a dozen years. “And ultimately why we're at this. The first thing is to guard against having your block knocked off, as I believe the hoosegow school approach is, hmm? Here, watch me protect my head. Elbows in, forearms up, see how my gloves shield my face?” Gloved hands dangling almost to his knees during my demonstration, Famine studied the matter before reluctantly nodding. “All right, now it's your turn,” I encouraged. “As they say in the funny papers, put 'em up.”

He did so in a way that made me drop my guard as though I'd seen a ghost.

“What's the matter?” he asked, peering at me over the leather moons of his gloves. “Ain't this the same as you done it?”

“You're left-handed.”

“Person's gotta be one or the other, don't he?”

“It's an advantage,” I somehow found the words, overtaken as I was by the flood of memory. “Be sinister to be dextrous.”

“Huh?”

“Merely a saying in Latin about the left and right hands. Never mind,” I murmured, still hurtled back to a boxing ring where the young fighter facing me was nearly my mirror image, except for his cocky grin and the bit of footwork he was practicing. Casper and his left hook, as I sparred with him to develop that surprise punch. “I got it down pat, Morrie. Squash the bug”—the ball of his left foot digging in—“give a hug”—the left arm and shoulder coming around as if in sudden embrace—“hit the lug”—whapping me half across the ring as his fist connected. Casper's little rhyme and sinister hand, the left, put away opponent after opponent who literally did not know what hit them. As if at the sound of the bell at the start of a round, I came out of my trance, back in the company of a scrawny boy whom life was apt to rain blows on if I did not do something about it. “Famine, we are going to concentrate on one particular maneuver. Here, watch.”

Time after time I put him through the motions, footwork, shoulder and arm and fist working as one, until we were both panting and could hardly hold our gloves up. Even so, he was reluctant when I called a halt and began to strip off our mitts. “When am I ever gonna get a real punch in?”

“Tomorrow night.”

•   •   •

“Oof!”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to bust you one when you wasn't ready.”

“No, no, surprise is a permissible tactic, within limits. I was thinking when I should have been ducking. Always dangerous. Let's work on that left hook some more. The last one was more of a haymaker, which is why I wasn't looking for it.”

“Here goes. Squash the bug . . .”

“That's correct.”

“Give a hug . . .”

“Yes, good.”

“Hit the lug.”
Smack.

“Yes, well, I felt that one on the jaw, definitely. You're showing progress.”

“Better be. Running's easier.”

“All right, now let's spar a little before you throw the next one. Gloves up, remember.” Bobbing and weaving, I circled him as he pawed back, instinct of defending what I held dear gaining possession of me.
Take that, Mazzini!

“Ouch!”

“Oops, sorry, Famine. I got carried away.”

“Ain't it about my turn to whack back?”

“Arguably. Give it a try. Keep that foot planted, good, good, shoulder and arm and fist ready, now!
Ow!
Casper would be proud.”

“Huh? Who?”

“Someone familiar with a left hook, is all. Let's call it a night.”

•   •   •

Sparring partners that we were, one of us sharpening reflexes long dormant and the other learning moves of a past champion, Russian Famine and I took on our foes.

“Nailed 'im,” he reported proudly when the next
Post
newsboy tried to hijack his corner. “Right in the kisser.”

I must have scored similarly with some editorial blow, judging by what transpired one evening after Famine had shed his gloves and gone home. The house now silent, I was doing a bit of bookkeeping in Sandison's ledger—the Butte Public Library budget was a miracle of levitation in his design, and if I did not keep things in balance to his satisfaction I was sure to hear about it—when the door knocker banged like a shot in the night.

Thinking it wise to put on brass knuckles first, I opened the door the barest crack and peeped out. Sleek as a sheikh, there stood a personage who could only be Cutthroat Cartwright.

“Moe sent me,” he parodied the speakeasy
“Open, Sesame,”
which had practically become the national password since Prohibition. Dressed in the brazen elegance that announced Chicago—snappy hat, tailored pinstripe suit, and two-tone perforated oxfords, reading from top to bottom—he gazed cavalierly in at me through the narrow opening as though I were the wiseacre in the matter. “Come on, buddy, where's your western hospitality? We need to have a chit-chat.”

The horns of a dilemma can come at a person, as that limited but effective poet Cheyne put it,
as hooked and blood-bright / as surprise in a bullfight
. And at the moment I had a paralyzing case of surprise. Which to do? Close the door on the importunate face, brassy as Ajax's, with something like “You must have the wrong address, this isn't the Fraternal Home for Character Assassins”? Or let the unwelcome visitor in as an opportunity to size up the opposition?

Falling in between is not at all a good course, yet that is what I ended up doing. Trying to deliver an austere “Sorry, I don't speak snake language,” I let the door swing too wide. Or perhaps it opened of its own accord, under the influence of that forceful gaze and wardrobe. Before I could muster myself and almost before I could slip brass knuckles out of sight into my side pocket, in strode the journalistic slasher called Cutlass, handing me his hat to hang up. He had the sheen of a big fish among minnows. I knew I must be careful not to be swallowed.

Taking in everything at a glance, the acre of house and me, he launched right in. “Fancy digs. How do you rate a setup like this on a scribbler's pay? Rich wife?”

“Providence of another sort,” I said stiffly.

“Good old Providence. What would we do without the old dame?” Looking every inch the John Held Jr. caricature that topped his famous column in the Chicago
Herald
—cannonball head, pencil-line mustache, calculating eyes, and mouth set for the last word—the unwelcome visitor at once glimpsed the floor-to-ceiling books in Sandison's lair and went and peered in. He gave a low whistle. “No wonder you were able to shoot down my try at nailing your
Thunder
bunch as a nest of pinkos, with all this ammunition. Nice job you did, incidentally.” A sardonic gleam as he turned to me. “Although I'll bet a lot of those books are in Lenin's library too, don't you think?”

I burst out, “If you're here to show off your bag of dirty tricks, Cartwright, you can just—”

“Call me Cutty,” he insisted smoothly. “What do you go by?”

I drew up short at the sudden jeweler's squint he was giving me, as if trying to evaluate past my beard. “Morgan will do.”

“Be that way,” he shrugged off my rebuff. He cocked an ear, then the other. “Quiet as a mausoleum in here, isn't it. No wife at all? Only you rattling around in this barn?”

Just that quick, he had me caught in a race with myself, fielding domestic questions to fend off worse ones. “She's away.” All too much truth in that. “I have a boarder but he's incapacitated, as I'm sure you know.”

“That's right!” exclaimed the journalistic cutthroat who was not going to hear a chummy “Cutty” out of me. “The leading citizen who got plunked instead of you. What did I hear the unlucky chump is in this two-bit town,” he pondered, “the old gray mare?”

“He's not mayor,” I immediately disparaged that. Too late realizing, with my heart fluttering, that I had just shown I was familiar with that flat Chicago pronunciation of it. And given myself away, that fast? If so, Cartwright showed no sign, blandly waiting for me to go on. Not quite through clenched teeth, I managed, “Samuel Sandison is the Butte public librarian, the best anywhere.”

“How about that. From the sound of it, near immortal but not bulletproof,” he toyed with that philosophically while my heart did a bigger skip at his employment of that last word. “That beats most of us, wouldn't you say?” Casually tilting his head back, he gandered at the bullet holes overhead as if beholding the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “So here we are at the scene of the crime, hmm? They must be lousy shots in Butte.” He laughed. Jocular he was not. That laugh would have soured milk.

Still stargazing, he confided, “You came out of it lucky in more ways than one, buddy. The
Post
was going to plaster that little ruckus on the front page, drag you through all the mud it could, and the
Thunder
along with it. I made them spike the story.”

Dry-throated, I managed to respond: “I don't suppose your generosity comes at a price or anything like that.”

He waved that off with just his fingers. “The little stuff comes free.”

“Or maybe,” it was time I pushed back, “that story would have raised a few too many questions about who might have hired the gunman.”

“Conceivably,” he nodded on every syllable, meanwhile giving me a lidded look. “Anyway, I made it known they shouldn't be trying to bump you off, if they were. You're worth more alive than dead, Morgan. Not everybody who takes on the Anaconda Copper Mining Company can say that.”

However much of that was true, I managed to digest enough to say I supposed I should be flattered. “State your business, Cutthroat.”

“All in good time,” he passed that off in the manner of one man of the world to another. “We ought to get to know each other a little, don't you think? Journalistic blood brothers that we are.” Parking his hands, thumbs sticking out, in the pockets of his expensively tailored suit, he did a perfect version of a Windy City alderman. “Back where I'm from, we gen'lly start things off wid a drink togedda.”

Like the lord of the manor—well, I was—I responded, “If you don't mind Old Ballycleuch.”

His surprise showed. “You must have one hell of a bootlegger.” The Burns birthday libation from Sandison's bottom desk drawer to the rescue, I poured what I hoped were proper proportions to oil Cartwright's tongue and not mine. We sat down across from each other in the cavernous living room, like characters in a sketch, and he toasted, mock or not, “Remember the
Maine
!” I didn't like the way he kept looking at me. “Morgan,” he tasted the name along with the scotch. “You don't wrap yourself around that glass like an Irishman and you're not snotty enough to be English. Welsh, right?”

“Unavoidably. Now, as to why you're—”

He sat forward suddenly. “The way you sling words, you must have had quite an education. Where?”

“At my father's knee and other low joints,” I resorted to the mossy joke as if running out of patience. “Are we going to keep on like this all night?”

“This
is
a nice scotch,” he held up his glass admiringly. “And you're good with the razzmatazz.”

My blood turned to hot water at Casper's old word for clever boxing. “I mean, that's a real talent, slugging away at Anaconda the way you do, day after day,” said my caller in a knowing tone, while I took refuge behind my drink. Cartwright leaned toward me even more, as if about to spring. “I'll level with you. They're worried up there on the top floor of the Hennessy Building. They don't like the looks of that wild jackass Evans in the legislature and whatever you rabble-rousers are up to with the
Thunder
. You're in a position to call the shots,” he smirked toward the bullet holes in the ceiling, “for a change.”

“Speak plain,” I bluffed, “I'm still hard of hearing from the last guest.”

“Quit.”

That was plain enough. “Leave the
Thunder
? Just like that?”

“In the name of a higher wage, why not? Newspapermen have been doing it since Ben Franklin invented penny-pinching. You could move along to the
Post
, let's say, for the sake of argument. That long-eared editor of yours jumped like that, didn't he, just the other direction.”

I'd intended for my silence to make Cartwright talkative, but now it was working too well. Giving my beard the jeweler's squint again, he was saying with a rough laugh, “I have to hand it to you, Morgan, you're hard to read behind that bush. It reminds me of those pushcart peddlers, whiskers all over them, we used to have on Maxwell Street when I was a cub reporter working that part of town.” He curled a grin at mention of Chicago's toughest neighborhood, while I cringed inwardly. The West Side fight clubs there were where Casper learned his trade, the razzmatazz of the boxing ring. Where his likeness, so like my own, had appeared on prizefight posters on every brick wall. Where the Llewellyn countenance probably was still on fading poster board up some alley or another.