Sweet Thunder (30 page)

“No army language now that you're a senator, remember,” Rab sweetly admonished.

“Chicago scissorbill,” I filled the blank for him.

“—that, too,” Jared blithely added the term to the military pile, “that he can't use you for target practice.” He leaned across the table toward me, reaching aside for Rab's wrist as he did so to hold her attention in more ways than one. “Professor, we're going to need you and your editorials more than ever,” his words were quiet and stronger for that. “Hard times are coming fast now. People did themselves proud thumbing their nose at the lockout yesterday, but it won't be long until kids start going hungry and women are scavenging coal down by the tracks and the men start to get antsy about no work and no pay.” I thought he could not have summed up the gamble any better: “Anaconda holds the cards—we have to stay in the game any way we can until they fold.”

“Or there's a draw,” Rab anted her two bits in. “Rome was not won in a day, a wise teacher I once had used to say.”

Sudden interest in my corned beef and cabbage let me duck that, while Jared sighed mightily. “Up against the cardsharp I'm married to and some earful in Latin, am I. Lucky thing Russian Famine is on my side—throw that left hook until it makes them dizzy, isn't that the ticket, Professor?”

“By the way,” curiosity was getting the better of me, “where is our star athlete? Surely he hasn't lost his appetite?”

With a little crimp of concern between her eyes, Rab checked the large wall clock with
PURITY IS SURETY FOR GOOD FOOD
! across its face. “Selling his papers down to the last scrap, I expect. But it's not like him to miss a mea—”

Just then the proprietor came bustling toward us from the front of the cafeteria, and inasmuch as I was going to be a regular customer, I tried to get ready whatever compliment corned beef and cabbage was owed.

“Your boy!” he cried as he came up to our table. “He's outside, somebody worked him over!”

We rushed out, Rab in the lead. Sagging against the building as if on his last legs was Russian Famine, clothes torn, face bruised and nose running with a mix of blood and snot, and his
Thunder
newspaper bag showing dirty footprints where it had been stomped on.

Before we could even ask, he spat out through bloody lips the word
Posties.
Painfully he wiped his lips. “Bigger 'n me. Three of 'em run me off my corner. One of 'em held me and the other two whaled me.” He did not quite meet the gaze of the furious Rab, freshly attacking him with a wetted handkerchief to dab away blood and such, or Jared's deep frown. “They didn't like it that we was in the parade.”

I asked weakly, “The left hook didn't . . . ?”

The beat-up boy shrugged thin shoulders. “Wasn't enough,” he reported, trying to hold back tears. “I'd no sooner get one of 'em knocked down good than the other two'd pile in on me from the other side.”

Three against one were simply too high odds, all right, yet I felt I had failed him. Rab was inveighing against the
Post
's junior auxiliary of brutes and vowing to give the chief of police a piece of her mind about hoodlumism running wild in the streets when Jared, hands on knees as he leaned down to the beating victim, spoke up.

“You did the best you could, we know that. Now it's time to get you out of the line of fire, trooper. We'll put you on the carriage route.”

“That?”

The boy's quick cry of despair was painful to hear, but Jared's reasoning was hard to argue with. The
Thunder
was most swiftly delivered
to newsstands
and cigar stores and similar vendors in the middle of downtown by way of a baby carriage stacked full of newspapers, a trick Armbrister had picked up on one of his journalistic stops. That safe route literally would save Famine's hide, with no bloody corners to be fought over. Wiping his nose with the back of his hand, the teary youngster mumbled something.

Rab was instantly attentive. “What? Famine, tell us.”

“Makes me feel like a sissy.”

“Never mind.” That came firmly from Jared. “The carriage route will keep you on the job, and that's what counts, right?” Famine mumbled, “Whatever you say goes.” Jared rewarded him with an encouraging grip on the shoulder, then decisively turned to me. “And we'll move on that other matter prontissimo, Professor,” he said grimly. “It's time the other side licked a wound or two.”

•   •   •

Sick at heart over Russian Famine's beating, feeling I had let him down in the boxing lessons, I knew nothing to do but watch and wait for some better turn of fortune in the days that followed. It was a tense time, with the feel of something major about to happen, some storm about to break, but there was no telling when. After the mile-high, mile-deep amplitude of the Fourth of July parade, Butte fell as quiet as if it had temporarily lost its voice. The mute mines of the lockout stood as empty as ever, an apprehensive stillness blanketing the neighborhoods as foraging food for the table and scrounging coal for the stove became the daily challenges of households without paychecks. Even speakeasies were subdued, according to my newsroom colleagues, where clots of miners speculated in low tones what would befall them if the union could not withstand Anaconda's ruthless shutdown. Out in the prairie towns and tawny ranchlands, the standoff was being watched as a prelude to the statewide vote on Jared Evans's brainchild, the tax commission that at long last would fix a price tag onto Montana's copper collar. High stakes, great issues, which to my and Armbrister's surprise the
Post
continued to tiptoe past in the immediate days after the parade, an editorial quietus from Cutlass as baffling as his passing up the chance to ripely reminisce about Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders' conquest of San Juan Hill.

At first I wondered whether my foe had indeed met his fate in a bottomless mine pit, but when I cautiously sounded out Jared on that, he only smiled mysteriously and said, “Don't concern yourself, the scissorbill is still in one piece.” The battle of words had only paused, in short. Meanwhile, I actually had leisure to write AOT editorials about matters other than the eternal battle over the Richest Hill on Earth—“spitwads,” Armbrister cackled over such offerings, just enough impact to them to annoy the opposition with our persistent presence.

In this lull, Sandison alone seemed to thrive, resuming his post at the public library like a potentate returning from exile. “He's here at all hours,” Smithers of the periodical desk confided to me when I stopped by to check on the impatient patient, “and not the least little thing anywhere in the building escapes him, I tell you.” Imagining Miss Runyon like a rabbit under the gaze of a hawk, I tried to keep a straight face. Smithers, a lively sort, was in his element as confidant. “And get this. When the janitor left the other night, he heard our man Sandison in his office singing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland.' Out loud! It's a changed place around here, Morrie.”

So was the manse, a changed place not necessarily for the better without my sole companion clomping around in old boots and pajamas early and late.

Often now it was near midnight when I would hear a taxi putt-putting up to the front door, and the sounds of someone more than sizable retiring for the night. At breakfast, Sandison would eat heartily as a cowboy, questioning me about any sign of Anaconda weakening on the lockout and grunting whenever I asked him the state of his health or that of the Butte Public Library, then off he went, still listing several degrees to his wounded side but as functioning as a locomotive. Leaving me with the echoing house and its principality of unoccupied rooms, as if I were some fairy-tale figure under a strange spell. Prince of an empty manse, with his princess fled.

•   •   •

“It's you, is it.” Answering my knock, Grace peeped the door open as warily as if I were about to storm the boardinghouse. “The famous trick rider. What brings you to our humble neighborhood?”

“I came to see if I can help out.”

“I can't think how,” the reply came swifter than swift. “We don't need any fights fixed or names fiddled with, thanks just the same.”

I flinched, but did not give up. “Grace, please. Couldn't a little money be put to use, perhaps?”

Her expression warmed one degree, from skepticism to suspicion. “I hate to ask, but is it honestly gotten?”

“Positively.” I reached in my pocket and produced the thin fold of bills. “Sandy had a fit of conscience and upped his rent somewhat. That's where this comes from, I swear on a hill of Bibles.”

Keeping one hand on the doorknob, Grace still eyed the money dubiously. “He opened his wallet, just like that? Tell me another.”

“I prompted him a wee bit,” I admitted. Which prompting, in truth, had been met by the Sandisonian grumble, “When I gave you this place, I didn't expect you to turn into a gouging landlord. Oh, well, leave it to you to get blood out of a Scotchman. Here.”

Back and forth between being shrewd landlady and aggrieved spouse, Grace bit her underlip, but the next thing I knew, the cash had vanished into her apron pocket. “All right then. It will come in handy. Good day, Morrie.”

“Wait. I wanted to ask—” What I wanted went beyond words, to the essence of man and woman and life altogether, the constellation of chance that draws us one to another out of the lonely depths of night. Try speaking that to an unwilling listener, especially one you are only nominally married to. I instead pleaded: “Can I come in? Only for a minute? I feel like a leper, standing out here.”

Wordlessly she swung the door open and pointed to the parlor. “Make it quick. What was it you wanted to ask?”

“If I can borrow Hoop and Griff. The kitchen drain is leaking again.”

“I'll send them first thing in the morning.” She looked at me questioningly. “Is that all, I hope?”

“Did you enjoy the parade?”

Grace closed her eyes as if seeking strength. “You. Can you not get it into your head, Morrie, that you can't come mooning around here and win me back with sweet nothings? Too much has happened.” Blinking now, the violet of her gaze hazed a little with moisture, she said huskily, “Just go. Please.”

“Grace, can't we—” Such a thumping broke out overhead, I feared for the ceiling. “What's making the awful racket?”

“Oh, that,” she said as though the commotion were nothing. “Giorgio at his exercises. He does jumping jacks. Lifts a dumbbell.”

I somehow held my tongue about the aptness of that word associated with the Mazzini creature. My turn to be highly suspicious.

“How is he paying his rent? There are no wages these days.”

“On the cuff. You would let him do the same,” she maintained entirely inaccurately. “He can catch up on the rent when the mines are running again.”

“Not much of a provider until that day ever comes, is he,” I took what little satisfaction jealousy would allow me.

The jumping or dumbbelling or whatever it was went on above us as we stood looking at each other helplessly. Grace was the first to say anything. “Morrie, what's going to happen? I don't mean with us. That's—” She washed her hands of the topic. “The lockout and all, what can make Anaconda ever back down?”

“Jared and I are putting every effort to it.” Unspoken was the fact that our every effort so far had left the greatest copper mines in the world shut tight as a drum.

Tight-lipped, she nodded. From her expression, I could tell that there luckily was not more.

•   •   •

My mood weighed down by wife, lockout, Cutlass, manse, and anything else that came to mind, I retreated from the boardinghouse one more time. Deep in brooding as I started home without even Sandison to look forward to, I let traffic thoroughly pass so the next turn of events would not be, say, getting run over by a Golden Eggs truck.

As I crossed the street thinking the coast was clear, traffic of an unanticipated sort emerged as a pram came trundling out of Venus Alley, simultaneous with a covey of streetwalkers sashaying to their posts for the night. Bent low behind the laden baby carriage, pushing for all he was worth on the uphill street while the ladies of the evening kidded the pants off him, in a manner of speaking, was a depressed Russian Famine. Misery famously loving company, on impulse I changed direction to accompany him as he distributed the
Thunder
.

“Hiya, sir,” he greeted me disconsolately, his ears burning. “Come to hear the canaries sing?”

“Ooh la la, what's under that beard, hon?” a buxom redhead in minimum street apparel squealed at the sight of me. “I bet you been just waiting for the barbershop special.”

Quite sure she did not mean a shave and a haircut, I declined the offer, to a round of catcalls from the Venus Alley sisterhood as they stationed themselves along the block. My ears now the red ones, I joined Famine in a concerted stint of pushing that propelled the buggy and us out of the red light district into a calmer neighborhood of speakeasies and funeral parlors.

As the street turned less precipitous, I let him commandeer the conveyance by himself again. Brushing my hands, I asked as cheerily as I could, “The daughters of Venus aside, how goes the carriage route? At least, you only have to drop the papers at each place and collect for them, am I right?”

“Yeah,” he said grudgingly. “It's slow nickels instead of fast dimes, though,” he gave the classic response of the frustrated earner.

I had to smile. “Sometimes something comes along and changes that. Luck, for a better word.” He eyed me as if it had better hurry up. “Do you mind if I walk with you? I'd like the company.”

“Nah. Help yourself.” Strenuous as his task was, he managed to jounce along typically, every part of him on the move. I fell into step, and that seemed to loosen his mood. “You get that way, too, huh?”