Sweet Thunder Read online

  “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.

  “Those old Maxies were hard to dicker with, too,” Cartwright was finishing his smirking reminiscence while I rigidly sat, trying not to look like myself. “But they’d strike a bargain in the end.”

  I shook my head, mainly to unclog my voice box. Cartwright read an answer into that and heaved a sigh. “Okay, no go on packing your talents across town. But you could investigate retirement, better yet, hmm?” His eyes locked with mine. “Maybe Providence would come around again, like Christmas.” He drilled the point home. “Brighten up, Morgan. All you have to do is nothing. You can be prosperously self-unemployed.”

  Now I had to say something. What came out was, “Drink up. The house limit is one.”

  The justly named Cutthroat sized me up one last time. “You are full of razzmatazz, aren’tcha.” Tossing down the rest of his drink in one swallow, he got to his feet. “Anyhoo, pard,” now he was comradely, as if we were old campaigners bivouacked around a campfire, “the offer stands. Think it over.” He didn’t bother to wink, but might as well have. “By the light of day, I’ll bet you see I’m right, buddy.”

  That echoed in me after he was gone and I was alone in the house. To some extent, he was right. Journalistic blood brothers we inescapably were. Buddies we were not.

  17

  “I SEE THE BATS and owls haven’t moved in quite yet.”

  Even Sandison’s growl about my less than inspired housekeeping was welcome, just to have him out of the hospital and back in the manse for companionship, such as it was. Whatever might be the fit description of a crabby wild-bearded shooting victim stalking through the place in cowboy boots, deafening silence was the farthest thing from it. His wound still nagged him, a fact he acknowledged only by grunting through set teeth whenever he sat down or stood up. The absence of Grace, and for that matter Hoop and Griff, told grievously on the pair of us as we went about domestic life only fractionally, the way bachelors do. I cooked as necessary, Sandison ate without comment. Nobody dusted, swept, or mopped on any regular basis; no offense to my dear wife, but never had I missed Rose and her housekeeping skills so much.

  Say for Sandison, however, grumblesome and moody as he was, he was not unfair on larger matters. Try as he might, he could find no fault with my juggling of the public library’s ledger in his absence—“One thing about you, Morgan, you know the meaning of legerdemain, heh, heh”—or for the most part, my handling of scheduling and personnel matters. He nonetheless was chafing to get back to bossing the Butte Public Library from top to bottom himself, which I daily had to restrain him from. “Sister Magdalena”—she of the majestic wimple—“instructed me you are to take it easy until your side is completely healed, no exceptions.”

  “Sister Magdalena holds the firm belief men can’t blow their noses without hurting themselves,” he could only mutter to that, listing to one side as he sulked off to his book-lined lair down the hall. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to simply stack on his desk the book parcels that arrived while he was hospitalized, and after heaving himself around in his chair until his side hurt least, he would settle in there like some Rip Van Winkle catching up on Christmases by opening the packages and turning the pages as carefully as a boy. Many a morning I left him engrossed in some fine edition of Turgenev or Blake or Balzac or Whitman, and would find him at the end of the day dozing in peace over the open book.

  • • •

  There was no such peacefulness in my working hours, as I grappled daily with what Cutthroat Cartwright threw at the Thunder and Jared and the tax commission plan, which the Post continued to imply—although not in so many words, since my desperate defusing of the “What Is To Be Done?” imbroglio—was a union-conceived plan to undermine capitalism and cause the crash of America into Russia-like rubble. I am happy to say he equally had to fend with what I flung in Anaconda’s direction. Thank heaven Theodore Roosevelt’s unrestrained enthusiasms had included smiting his foes with that Latinate billy club, “malefactors of great wealth”; my typing fingers continued to play every tune I could think of that hit the notes of the tax burden maleficently heaped on the honest citizens of the Treasure State while the copper colossus paid hardly pennies. Pluvius and Cutlass, we were hammer and tong, day after day as the newspaper war was shouted out in the streets of Butte by our newsboys and theirs.

  Howsomever, as Griff would have said, the weak point, if there was one in Jared’s plan of attack, was the amount of time it was taking. The statewide vote could not be held until autumn, a special election set for the first Tuesday of September. Propitiously, the day after Labor Day, a conjunction that made Cutlass howl to high heaven in print, but Jared and his Ulcer Gulch allies had managed it somehow, perhaps by black magic. Pluvius didn’t ask. In any case, the showdown date was months off yet, an interval that made me uneasy. Caught up in the heat of competition, the Thunder staff gleefully produced news pages that shone with sharp writing and keen coverage and seemed exhilarated by the fight in which our typewriters and telephones served as artillery. But Armbrister and I, going over my editorials, which somehow had to keep up the barrage until election day, exchanged glances now and then that said, without ever daring to utter the word aloud, stalemate.

  • • •

  The one clear victory of this time was Russian Famine’s. I jumped up when I saw him slip into the office from the back shop with his newspaper bag jauntily slung at his side, grinning despite another split lip. “Done it,” he boasted, grabbing his daily allotment of gumdrops from the candy jar and popping one into his mouth. “A dumb Postie jumped me again. He got some licks in, but it ended up I cleaned his clock good.” Seasoned pugilist though he now was, he could not help giggling at the next. “He never seen the left hook coming.�
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  “Nicely done, Capper,” I said without thinking, my tongue slipping back more than a dozen years.

  “Huh?”

  “I merely meant, I wish I had been there to watch you at it.”

  The giggles contending with his attempt at nonchalance, Famine imparted: “Jared says he’s real proud of me, sticking up for myself like that. Mrs. Evans scolded me, you know how they do,” now speaking man to man about the ways of women. “But I think she was kind of tickled, too.”

  “As are we all,” I told him warmly, “when the side that deserves to wins.”

  • • •

  “It happened out of the blue” is one of those phrases worn smooth to cliché, I realize, but a wording of that sort endures because there is no better way to say it.

  Consequently, I was enjoying myself on the steps of the public library, having ducked out for a breath of air that agreeable June forenoon—by the calendar, summer was not yet here, but it felt like it—while filling in for Sandison on some minor directorial matter, when I noticed something odd taking place on the Hill. More precisely, in the otherwise clear blue sky above the dominant rise of ground. One after another, the plumes of smoke from the seven stacks of the Neversweat were diminishing to nothing as each drifted off and vanished. Along with that, as though the disappearing smoke were taking the usual machinery noise with it, the Hill quieted steadily down as I stood watching until it fell silent.

  In that ominous moment, I strained to hear the dreaded whistles signaling for medical aid, but there was not even that sound. Puzzled, I pulled out my watch and checked. Right on schedule it was time for the change of shifts, but ordinarily that did not stop the throb of mining operations at all.

  By now people in the street had stopped to look questioningly up at the earthen height humped on Butte’s back and the silent headframes spearing the sky, and my feet had found their way down the library steps almost without my knowing it. As I hastened through the downtown streets, trolleys still clanged and automobiles yet honked, but there was a sense of the city slowing, like some great clock running down. Repeatedly asking storekeepers who had come out to stare or shoppers bolting for home what was happening, invariably such answer as I received was along the lines of “Something at the mines.” But what, what? The last few blocks to the Thunder office, I broke into a mad dash.

  I found the newsroom going crazy, half the staff shouting into telephones, the others typing madly, Cavaretta trying to handle two phones at once. Plainly the Thunder was putting out an extra, hitting the streets with the news behind the sudden silence of the Hill. I panted into Armbrister’s office, where he and Jared stood together like men stricken.

  “Another accident?” I asked, gasping for breath. “You called the men out?”

  Ashen-faced, Jared shook his head. “Not a walkout. This is a lockout.”

  • • •

  The news was worse than I could have imagined. In a ploy of its own, the Anaconda Company had declared an impasse in the wage negotiations and informed Quinlan’s stunned successor at the bargaining table that from this day forward, mining operations were shut down until the union accepted a pay cut of more than twenty percent. At a stroke, the past two years’ gain in ten thousand paychecks was gone, the tenaciously won “lost” dollar per day lost again. Quin must have been howling curses in his grave.

  The rest of us—Jared, myself, Armbrister when he wasn’t shouting to the news staff or the back room to hurry up with the extra; the Thunder had an entire city waiting for it—were flummoxed. “They can do that, without so much as a by-your-leave?” I struggled out of my daze. “Doesn’t the government care whether half of the world’s copper supply is choked off or not?”

  “Professor,” Jared responded bleakly, “if the country was at war, Washington wouldn’t let the company bigwigs—”

  “The plutocrat sunuvabitches,” Armbrister improved on one of my recent editorial epithets with his own.

  “—get away with it for one minute. But production regulations and the like were thrown out the window right away after the Armistice.” Jared’s tone was more bitter than I had ever heard it. “Now ‘normalcy’ is back, haven’t you heard, and its high priest is Harding.”

  “Here in our parish, it’s Cutlass, worse yet,” Armbrister bluntly spoke what I was thinking. “And pardon my French, Morgie, but we’re down the crapper and he’s on the hole.” That distressing analogy aside, the day’s development did make it all the more evident why the powers that be in the Hennessy Building imported Cutthroat Cartwright. They had been preparing to escalate the battle with us from the very first volley over the taxation issue. I felt sick. However, worse off by far was Jared, in his public role as the instigator in all this. He turned half away from Armbrister’s words as though physically struck by them. “A strike is one thing, hell, Butte’s been through those how many times and lived to tell the tale,” the relentless editor went on even as he checked around and shouted, “Roll it, Charlie!” to the pressman waiting in the back room doorway. “But this is the same stunt the company pulled in ’03, isn’t it, and we all know how that turned out. Three weeks of shutdown until the only sign of life anywhere in the state was grass growing in the streets, and the copper bastards got everything they wanted.”

  “You want us to cave, just like that?” Jared rounded on him with a steely look. “Give up the dollar in wages, and pull back on the tax vote, which is what is really behind this? I hired you for this because I thought you had guts, Jake.”

  “Guts, hell,” Armbrister flared back, “brains are the shortage in this mess.”

  “Boys,” I instinctively stepped between them as if breaking up a schoolyard fight, “if they could see this up in the Hennessy Building, they’d fall out of their chairs laughing.”

  “Right, right. Sorry, sorry,” they muttered back and forth. The floor trembled under us as the press began to roll and the lockout Extra literally began to thunder into existence. Sheepishly, Armbrister took off his eyeshade and rubbed his forehead. “At least we got the damn paper out.”

  “And it’s a good job well done,” Jared told him. “The same as you and the professor do every day.” He began pacing the narrow confines of the office, like a sentry on high alert at his post. “All right, my rod and my staff,” he rallied the pair of us. “Let’s put our thinking caps on, as Rab would say. We have to try to stick this out, and time is maybe on our side for once. Anaconda can’t let the Hill stay shut too long, or some outfit in Arizona or Chile or somewhere will start digging copper like mad to meet market demand. The powers that be, up in the Hennessy and higher, have got to be looking over their shoulders at that, however pigheaded they are toward us.”

  “Sounds like their weak spot,” Armbrister agreed, as did I.

  “It’s not going to be easy, keeping spirits up,” Jared calculated like the veteran of union battles he was, “since we couldn’t prepare for this. But we’ve got one advantage ahead.” Very much the publisher at this moment, he pointed to the calendar board, where potential stories ahead were marked in red.

  I still didn’t follow, but Armbrister stirred as if about to be hit by a hunch.

  “That’s right, Jake,” Jared encouraged that response, “it’s a while yet to Miners Day. That’ll help the town hold out.” A ghost of a smile visited him. “Show me any miner who isn’t going to want to march this year to demonstrate to Anaconda we can’t be pushed around.”

  How right he was, if past experience was any guide at all. Miners Day was Butte’s version of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, Venice’s Carnevale, Munich’s Oktoberfest, of all such gala holidays from the daily strains of life, a civic celebration giving mineworkers a chance to march in their thousands under peaceable conditions, the various lodges and brotherhoods and sisterhoods to show off their regalia, businesses to build floats to wow and woo customers, on and on through the ranks of all those with loca
l pride or some cause to flaunt. It was a spectacle, a declaration, a civic rite, a coming together of the nationalities of the Constantinople of the Rockies, all that and more. I oh so vividly remembered watching—no, there was not time for that memory now as Jared in his authoritative way was going on, “The Hennessy Building jaybirds think they’re so clever, how’d they overlook that? We’re one up on them until the big day, anyway.”

  “I shall remind them of it so incessantly they’ll hear it in their sleep,” I promised to do my editorial utmost.

  “That’s the stuff.” What remained of the smile hovered another moment as he gave the mock instruction, “Give Cutlass a dose of bayonet.”

  “It’s still going to be a damned hard slog from now till then, Jared,” Armbrister warned. “You know how things get when the mines aren’t running. Butte goes on its back like a beetle.”

  Jared knew that only too well, his face told, but he remained grimly resolved. “Every family on the Hill has lived on short rations before.” Under the weight of command in such circumstances, his voice went low and reflective. “One thing about it, Dublin Gulch and Finntown and the rest”—he solemnly named off his vital constituencies, as union leader and senator—“are used to misery. We’ll see how Wall Street likes the taste of it.”

  • • •

  At least the newsboys prospered as the lockout took hold, with headlines raging back and forth over the dead quiet of the Hill. My editorials were variations on a theme, practically operatic in orchestration, back and forth from characterizing Anaconda as the cold-blooded money-grubbing untrustworthy reptilian corporate monster it behaved like—this was no time to spare the adjectives—and sounding every note of hope and defiance I could think of, for a citizenry under economic siege to hearken to. Or so we hoped. Jared and his union council were busy keeping the anger banked in the miners’ neighborhoods, helped by the newspaper running pleas and pledges in various tongues that echoed those of “Voices of the Hill,” only with much graver accents. And while the Thunder lived up to its name, Cutlass dueled with my offerings by employing every dirty trick known to journalism, from quotes out of context to implications that Pluvius was, of all things, a hired gun of the writing sort, bought and paid for so richly he lived in a mansion while posing as a tribune of the people. “He ought to have to live in this overgrown bunkhouse,” Sandison said to that.