Sweet Thunder (34 page)

“Sir! You been following me.”

“I had to. Famine, listen—”

“Morgan!” Creeping Pete popped out of the funeral home with a glad cry, alighting between us on the sidewalk, rubbing his hands together in professional habit. “You're back! I knew you'd end up here. I have three wakes in need of a cryer and—”

Seeing his chance, Russian Famine turned tail and bolted. As he fled, the abandoned baby buggy rolled down the steep sidewalk, accelerating rapidly straight at a befuddled Creeping Pete. With an “Oof!” he caught the runaway pram squarely in his middle, long torso splayed across it and arms clutching around it protectively, unaware there was no baby in it. “I didn't know you were a family man, Morgan,” he panted. “Is this some sort of domestic dispute?”

“I'll explain some other time,” I said, taking off after the running boy. “Park it in the garage with the hearse, please, someone will be by for it.” Dodging past honking automobiles, I raced after my quarry, already a block away. “Famine, wait!” I called as loudly as I could while running. “I only want to talk to you!”

He streaked out of sight.

Worse, I knew exactly where he was going.

  22  

T
HERE MAY BE A TREK
through a neighborhood of hell—I hope never to find out—similar to the abandoned part of the Hill. The dead zone, where the violated earth had yielded up all its treasure of copper. Gray waste heaps lay like nightmare dunes that knew no shifting sands, inert forever. Glory holes gaped at random in what bare ground remained on the steep hillside. Up top, the gallows frame of the Muckaroo mine reared against the sky, westernmost of the stark dozens of such headframes, silenced by the lockout, scattered across the crest of the Hill like strange spawn of Eiffel's Parisian tower. Luck willing, those might operate again, but the Muckaroo never would. “They shut the Muck a while back,” the boyish voice echoed in me as I puffed my way up the winding haul road. There had been no time to enlist Jared and Rab nor anyone else, I alone had been confided in by an acrobatic gremlin grinning down from atop high-standing bookshelves that he climbed only dead headframes. My heart pounded with the knowledge of what a distraught and shattered youngster might do, scaling the steelwork tower girder by girder, handhold by foothold. He could fall. He could jump.

The abandoned mine yard was fenced with sharp wire, high and formidable enough that at first I wondered whether Russian Famine had merely been bragging in saying the Muckaroo was his pick for climbing gymnastics. Wildly scanning around, I spied the narrow opening, boy size, where a gatepost had separated from the guardhouse. It was going to be the tightest of fits for me, but there was no choice. Alternately grunting and sucking in my breath to make myself as lean as possible, I squeezed sideways through the narrow gap, regretting the consequences to my suit.

“Famine!” I shouted as soon as I wriggled in. The sound echoed emptily off the silent mine works. Bustling with hundreds of men who descended into the honeycomb of ore tunnels the last time I was unwillingly here, now the Muckaroo was a ghost town where no one had ever lived, only labored.

The haunting last testament of this, I came face-to-face with as I rushed across the yard to the mineshaft, passing the long building that housed the lamp room where the miners, and I among them one unforgettable time, started each shift by equipping themselves with helmet lamps and other gear for working in the deepest mine tunnels on earth. Griff had been my guide in that adventure, and it was he who pointed out the markings as high as a person could reach on the outer wall of the building. “Them's the dead,” he'd said simply and unmistakably. Chiseled into the brickwork were sharp but neat up-and-down strokes, one for each miner killed in the treacherous copper labyrinth below, with a diagonal slash completing each set of five. Every Butte mine with a fatal accident on its record, he told me, which was to say every Butte mine, displayed such gouges of death somewhere on the premises, tribute from the surviving miners to their fellow workers that no mine management dared touch. It raced through my mind that someone like Quin was doubly interred, in a cemetery grave and a groove chiseled as carefully as a jeweler's cut. By the raw toll on the wall, an even dozen lives had been sacrificed to the Muckaroo, and it had to be my mission to make sure there was no unlucky thirteenth.

Hastening around the corner from the lamp room, I stopped short at the spectacle of the headframe rearing over me, the spider-leg stanchions and the bracing girders at crazily ingenious angles thrusting like a colossal bridge truss with no roadway but the sky. Looking straight up to the top dizzied me, not a promising development. The steel-webbed tower stood perhaps no more than a hundred feet high, but with my apprehension of heights it appeared more like a thousand. Up there, where I could not see clearly past the crisscross of thick girders, the winding wheel that had lifted the elevator cages bearing men and copper ore was surrounded by a small platform, which could be reached by a steel ladder. But if I knew the climber involved, he spurned the ladder and was somewhere in the maze of steelwork supports, the better to defy gravity.

I cupped my hands and called, “Famine, I know you're up there. Come down, please, so we can talk this over. On firm ground.”

Only the wind in the steel frame answered.

A feeling of extreme dread setting in, this time I hollered louder. “If you're afraid of what Jared and Mrs. Evans will do to you, don't be. I'll speak up for you. You won't be punished, I promise. We're all merely concerned for you. Shall I say it again? Come. On. Down.”

Again, I was dickering with the wind.

“Very well,” the shout I had desperately wanted not to make, “then I'm coming up.”

That brought a strawy head of hair, startling against the black of the metal, into sight around a girder directly back under the platform. Good grief, he had climbed the entire vertical steel maze and tucked himself into an angle-iron support, to call it that, his back against the sloping strutwork and his feet idly braced against the nearest upright, like a sailor resting amid the stays and shrouds of a topmast. Open air was on every side of him, all the long way to the ground.

“Sir,” he anxiously called down as though it was only good manners, “don't bother. I'm just gonna jump and kill myself anyhow.”

I put a shaky hand on the cold steel of a ladder barely wide enough to stand on, calling out as I did so, “Not until I come up and we have a talk.”

The fair head shook vigorously at me not to. I hesitated with hand and foot still on the narrow ladder, but the threat to jump did not renew itself just yet.

“You trying to kill yourself, too, sir?” he scolded instead. “You told me you don't like high places, and ain't none in Butte higher than a gallus frame, everybody knows that.”

There was all too much truth in what he said, my twanging nerves informed me. Even from ground level there at the Muckaroo mineshaft, the city sprawled below the Hill as if it had run out of breath trying to climb to our elevation. “What's the sense of you getting up here and falling off,” Russian Famine's maddening logic persisted, “just because I'm gonna?”

Rather than answer that, I began to climb, each steel rung slick under my city shoes, telling myself over and over not to look down and carrying on aloud a one-sided conversation to the effect that neither of us needed to fall off—as if that were insurance against it—and we simply had to settle things face-to-face, the situation was not as bad as he thought, and so on. I was gambling that my precarious ascent would keep him watching rather than drive him to leaping, a theory that might hold until I was up even with him. Then something else would have to be devised, and I had no idea what.

The wind worried me, for both our sakes. My hat sailed off, probably to downtown. As if that were an omen, a hint of what the forces of nature could idly do, I was nearly halfway up the spider-spin of ladder when the spasm hit, clamping me to the rung I was on.
Acro
, from the Greek for “high above” or “topmost,” and
phobia
, which needs no definition other than “sheer fear.” Holding to my resolve not to look down, instead I glanced upward, just the flick of an eye, to see how much farther it was to the top, and the void above loomed as a blue canyon impossible to climb. My hands clenched on the cold steel of the ladder and my feet would not lift. Clinging there, I would have been a victim of muscle failure and gravity, had it not been for the voice from on high.

“You don't want to be stopping like that, sir, you'll tucker out from holding on. If you're gonna climb, you got to keep climbing.”

“J-j-just resting,” I hoarsely called back to the anxious onlooker somewhere overhead. Where I summoned the strength from, there is no knowing, but with an overwhelming effort of will I forced a hand free and pulled myself to the next rung, my feet shakily following.

Then another.

And another.

Counting to give my mind something to fasten onto, it was another thirty-three rungs before I finally drew level with the spot beneath the platform where the boy was squirreled away in the strut braces, looking quite at home perched on a six-inch-wide girder. “Do you mind,” I wheezed, hugging the ladder with both arms, “if I climb up on the platform and we can talk from there?”

Acrobat to acrophobe, Famine eyed me. “Looks like you better. Told you it was high up here.”

Arms aching as if they were going to fall off, I pulled myself onto the planked platform belly-first and lay there like an exhausted swimmer reaching a raft. Squirming into position to peer over the lip of the platform at the boy tucked away in the angles of the supports, six or eight feet below, I managed to say, “You didn't have to run from me. There's nothing to be afraid of, I swear to you.”

“That's you talking,” he replied miserably, shifting on his steel beam in a way that made my heart lurch. “I seen that look on your face when you caught up with me from Heinie's. Jared and Mrs. are gonna be even worse. They won't raise me no more,” he choked on that. “I'll be back to getting by on the street or else in the hoosegow school forever.” Involuntary tears streaking his face, he shook his head decisively. “Huh-uh, I might as well be dead.”

“Just . . . just listen, Famine, please”—if only I could keep him talking instead of leaping, falling—“Mrs. Evans and Jared won't throw you out, I swear to you. The carriage route was not a good idea for you, that's our doing, not yours. We'll find something else for you to do, how about? Honestly, you can patch things up with everybody, starting now.” Blood was rushing to my head as I hung my face over the edge of the platform and I was seeing spots before my eyes, but at least the youngster was hearing me out, however dubiously. “What we want to know is who put you up to it. That's the only person who needs to be dealt with.”

“Huh. That's easy. The flashy guy with the cookie duster, who else?”

Cutthroat Cartwright never better defined.

“He told me there wasn't no harm to it,” Famine unburdened himself. “All it was is whatchacallit, something like garbage—them long sheets of paper in the wastebasket.”

The spoilage! Of course! The smeary proofs tossed away as the compositor adjusted inking on overset such as my editorials. Smeary but mainly legible. “People was gonna read 'em anyway in a couple of hours, he said.”

“One person, anyway,” I said grimly. “There's still something I don't understand. How did you get those out of the back shop without being caught?”

“Punky. He'll swipe anything for gumdrops.”

The detention school cherub who could steal the puffball off a dandelion. Enough said.

“But why?” This was pressing him, but the question would not stay in me. “If you needed money so badly, you could have come to Jared or me.”

“Wasn't the money itself,” came the downcast answer.

“What, then?”

“You know.”

“Famine, I swear I don't.”

“Knuckies.”

“Brass knuckles? What do those have to do with—” I broke off, remembering the beating he had taken from the posse of
Post
newsboys.

“I wanted to get my own,” he said bleakly. “Stick up for myself and not get the stuffing beat out of me for a change.” He glanced at me as if that required an apology. “A left hook's no good against a bunch.”

My head swimming from altitude and revelation, the words jumped out of me without my needing to think. “Why didn't you say that's what you wanted so badly? If you promise not to jump, I'll share mine with you.”

The boy shifted in surprise, not a movement I wanted to see on his perch with no inch to spare. “You're woofing me.”

“No, I'll prove it.” Awkward as it was while lying flat, I dug in my side pocket, the pair of brass knuckles clinking. I withdrew one and held it out over the platform edge for him to see.

Staring at the object of desire, Famine even so looked like he didn't trust the proposition. “You'd be short one knuckie, and those are 'spensive. How come you'd do that?”