Sweet Thunder Page 8
The bootleggers flocked around the map like crows at a picnic basket.
I waited tensely as they peered at the geography in studious silence until suddenly one of them broke out excitedly: “I know that neck of the woods, I’m from up toward there! The boss is right, there’s an old Indian trail through a gap in them benchlands up there. I bet it would take trucks!”
I nodded wisely, resisting an urge to wink lest I overplay the role. “It’s Whiskey Gap now,” Smitty declared, rubbing his palms together in satisfaction. “Didn’t I tell you the Highliner would have the answer?”
Very, very carefully putting down the sawed-off shotgun, I made a show of glancing at the wall clock as if pressed for time. But before I could make a move toward my departure, the mustached man was asking with urgency: “Boss, how’d that Great Falls mess come out? Did you get those cops that raided the speakeasy squared away?”
“We’ll—” I had to think hard for the barnyard phrase—“teach them not to suck eggs.”
Around the room a general nod of agreement indicated that took care of that, somehow.
Using the chance, I started to say it was time for me to take my leave, but reworked it in my head and brought out:
“I need to scram.”
Smitty put up a protesting hand. “Boss? We know you send Mickey around at the end of the month for it, but you brung your satchel and all—don’t you want the take? Save Mick the trip?” He gestured proudly. “We had a good holiday season. Everybody in Butte was busy hoisting drinks on New Year’s—boy, was they ever. Show him the dough, Sammy.”
I stood rooted, my dumbstruck expression mistaken for quizzical. The mustached thug went to the safe in the corner, knelt and spun the combination. When the safe clicked open, inside were stacked bundles and bundles of currency. Staring at the largesse, I was practically overcome with the memory of the munificent Black Sox bet. Here for the taking lay a similar fortune, sufficient to propel Grace and me back into the high life of the past year. A train tonight would put us and the bulging satchel in Seattle by this time tomorrow, and from there an ocean liner to Hawaii, Siam, Tasmania, anywhere . . . It was so tempting it was paralyzing. Like me, the whole roomful gazed reverently at the pile of cash.
Trying to keep the strain out of my voice, I said one of the harder things I have ever uttered.
“Let it sit on the nest and hatch out some more.”
An appreciative laugh rippled through the bootleggers. “You know best, boss,” said the mustached one, tenderly closing the safe. “While you’re here, you got any advice about how to keep the racket going so good?”
I stroked my beard as if in Viennese consultation. “Keep doing what you’re doing.” Leaving them with the simple wisdom of that, I rapped out, “Smitty?” He jumped like a puppet. “Walk me to the corner.”
• • •
“You don’t know who the Highliner is? Morrie, do you go around with your head under a bushel basket?” Across the table from me, Griff squinted as if trying to see if I was all there.
“Kind of a willie wisp,” Hoop propounded about my evident double. “Shows up somewhere and, poof, he’s gone.”
“This still tells me nothing definitive about his identity,” I pointed out.
Griff speedily took care of that. “He’s the number one bootlegger in the state. Most wanted man since Judas.”
“Nobody knows who he is,” Hoop anticipated my further question. “Drives the cops crazy.”
“I imagine.” Whatever his pedigree, the mastermind behind the fleet of egg trucks and similar innocuous delivery vehicles was resourceful. And to judge by that stack of cash in the safe, which still smarted to think about, highly successful. In any case, I felt fortunate to have dipped in and out of the Highliner’s persona without undue harm, and to have learned not to set foot in the warehouse district again. One shotgun blast was plenty. Not wanting to alarm her, I had not told Grace, or for that matter any of the others, about that episode of mistaken identity, let alone the gunfire. But I could see wifely curiosity being aroused as she followed my exchange with our tablemates. “Why do you ask, Morrie?”
“Merely keeping current. Newspaperman’s habit, you know.”
“Prohibition,” Sandison startled us all with a growl. “They might as well have tried to put a chastity belt on the entire country while they were at it. Pass the spuds.”
• • •
For days after that, I jumped a little every time an automobile backfired, but gradually my encounter with warring bootleggers began to fade. Memory shares some of the properties of dream, and as time passed, the episode softened into something like deep-of-the-night thoughts: Was that actually me, turning down a stack of money that barely fit into a safe? What bound me (and of course Grace) to Butte and its backstreet hostilities except a gift-horse mansion? Answer came none, as is so often the case with thoughts that appear in the night, and increasingly I had to put my mind to the field of battle across town, the Thunder’s hard-fought contest with our competitor.
Armbrister may have charged me with being venturesome in the matter of miners’ fillers enlivening the editorial page, but as editor he showed a bold streak himself. Those of us in the newsroom learned to sit back like pewholders about to hear thunder from the pulpit whenever he would hold up crossed fingers and announce, “Lords and ladies, I have a hunch.” From his years of servitude at the Daily Post, always referred to on our premises as the Silly Boast, he knew Butte inside and out, and so constantly tinkered with our journalistic offerings to entice readers away from our despised rival. One time the hunch, inspiration, mad notion purloined from somewhere might be a gossipy new feature called “Around the Lodges”—the city had fraternal organizations of every stripe and inclination—and the next, “The Homemaker’s Helper,” solicitously aimed at weary miners’ housewives trying to keep a family fed and fit on the pay their husbands brought from the Hill. “Cranking up the hurdy-gurdy,” he called such audience-pleasers.
Thus it was that I was manning my typewriter, firing editorial ammunition in the direction of the top floor of the Hennessy Building as usual, when the editor sauntered over, actually looking pleased about something.
“Guess what, Morgie, we’re coming up in the world. We’re going to start running the weekend stock exchange roundup.” His harsh laugh. “We’ve got a source for it, let’s say.” He flourished the galley of companies and numbers set in practically flyspeck type. “I have a hunch it’ll draw us readers with some actual bankrolls to their name,” he said with relish. “Horse Thief Row types and such.”
“Devoutly to be wished, I’m sure. May I?” I held up the galley, the better to scan it. “Anaconda, up three, too bad. Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, down one, so on and so on,” I skipped through. “Hmm, hmm, hmm, here it is.” My thumb at the particular listing, I showed Armbrister. “Nelots, unchanged.”
“Never heard of the company, but so what?”
“Envision that backwards, as the Post is counting on us not to.”
His face drooped. “‘Stolen.’” He grabbed back the galley as if it might singe him. “Those tricky bastards. They almost made me fall for it.”
“Nosce inimicum tuum,” I counseled, “Know thy enemy,” and went back to my typewriter to cannonade that foe some more.
• • •
Almost like a boxing match, that day held another round of parrying and punching. The presses had run, ours and the competition’s, like twin but opposing engines in the daily race for readers, and the rival versions of news and opinion had been dispatched to the streets, to be hawked on every corner by newsboys as usual. Most of the staff had left for the day, except as ever the few nightside reporters and rewrite men, and I was putting on my coat and trying to settle down Armbrister as he shook his head over the latest piece of “Voices from the Hill” overset. From the ranks of the Irish, it ran:
I drive her with only one line.
On the ore car I sit,
While tobacco I spit,
All over my sweetheart’s behind.
“For crying out loud, Morgie, do we have to put this in the paper?”
“Of course we must. Quin sent it in, can’t you guess?” Armbrister looked even more pained. “Jacob, it actually serves the purpose quite well. In one regard, it is the very essence of Ireland, is it not?”
“This malarkey? How so?”
“It’s a limerick.”
The office door banging open ended that, as into the newsroom came Rab and Russian Famine, the one furious and the other downcast. “Hoodlums, that’s what they are,” Rab said through her teeth as she stormed over to Armbrister and me, “absolute hoodlums. Jared is in Helena or I’d have him find them and, and—” Dire enough punishment failed her. “Just look what they did to poor Famine.”
He had a bloody lip. Worse, tear tracks down his cheeks. Worse yet, his newspaper bag slung over one shoulder was torn and empty. “Got run off my corner,” the words practically twitched out of the upset boy. “Couple of the Posties slugged me and threw my papers in the gutter. Same thing happened to Abe and Frankie.”
And no doubt countless other Thunder newsboys, Armbrister and I understood with a glance at each other. “Isn’t this swell,” he uttered in a Job-like tone. “It leaves us with cigar stores and Blind Heinie’s newsstand and not a hell of a lot else to get the word out.” He threw his hands up. “Take me now, Jesus! Without newsies, we might as well be whistling down a gopher hole.”
As the editor’s lament raged on, Rab and I watched Famine test his split lip with his tongue.
After a little, I murmured to her, “Rab? I wonder—”
“Mr. Morgan,” she purred in my ear, “are you thinking the same thing I am?”
• • •
The detention school amounted to a slightly prettified reformatory, the high brick wall surrounding it garnished with a few flower boxes, growing nothing but icicles this time of year. According to one of Rab’s remarks, the soot-gray many-gabled residence on a shoulder of the Hill above Dublin Gulch had been a nunnery—a short journey for pious girls from the mine families, now a holding pen for troublous sons from those same shanties. As I topped the last street rise and left behind the world of downtown, the day was a rare one of winter clarity, the snow-held Rockies beyond the city limits dazzling in full sunshine, while the thirty or so mining operations in full swing along the Hill stood out in every detail of black steel headframe towers and bin cars loaded with peacock shades of copper ore and squat redbrick hoist houses throbbing and thrumming with cable work, the entire spectacle as if a gigantic factory had been thrown open for inspection.
The Richest Hill on Earth never ceased to thrill and chill me at the same time, with its powerful manufacturing of wealth and the squalid leavings of that, dump heaps like Sahara dunes and gaping bottomless pits called glory holes. And three times a day, the human equation came into stunning view as shifts changed and miners in their legions poured forth to and from neighborhoods gullied into the surroundings of machinery and dumps and pits. I am not subterranean by nature. Only once had I dared to go down in one of these mines, the forbidding Muckaroo on the crest of the Hill not far beyond the detention school, and it took every drop of courage in me to trek through a labyrinth of narrow, unforgiving tunnels. Yet beneath the ground I stood on, beneath all of Butte, around the clock three thousand men per shift drilled and blasted and shoveled in the most dangerous of circumstances to produce the metal that would wire the world for electricity. The old twofold question: What price progress, what cost if not?
With those thoughts in the back of my head, I rang at the iron front gate of what Russian Famine had aptly enough called the hoosegow school. But looking every inch the spirited schoolmistress rather than a jailer, Rab met me with a rush, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she hastened me into the building. “So far, we’re in luck, Mr. Morgan. I’ve sweet-talked the superintendent into it. If the boys can get steady jobs that don’t interfere with school, they can be let out for that period of time.”
“A perfect fit. You haven’t lost your wiles since you practiced them in my schoolroom, Rab.”
“Such things as I learned from you,” she acknowledged that trace of mischief with the right kind of grin, then turned seriously to the matter at hand. “I chose the seventh grade for this. The eighth are one step short of desperadoes.”
I smiled. “That hasn’t changed either.”
“Although I suppose I should warn you about even these.” She paused with her hand on the knob of the classroom door. “If you remember Eddie Turley”—my poorest and most ill-fated student, son of a bullying fur trapper, in that Marias Coulee schoolroom—“I have loads of him for you.” I assured her I was not expecting little gentlemen in velveteen.
Still, walking into that room was a step into bandit territory. Row on row, street toughs who looked hardened beyond their twelve and thirteen years—Rab had warned me they’d earned detention terms for fighting in class, petty theft, or chronic truancy, although some were simply from disrupted families that could no longer care for them—the lot of them were coldly eyeing me and my suit and vest. It was all I could do not to stare back. The youthful faces were sketch maps of Ireland, Italy, Cornwall, Wales, Finland, Serbia; early drafts of the mining countenances drawn from distant corners of the world by word of a hill made of copper. In the person of their immigrant fathers and mothers, Butte’s hard-won contribution to the American saga still went on, its next chapter these young lives ticketed, like those, to the mines.
“Mouths closed and eyes and ears open, everyone.” Rab swished to the front of the classroom, brisk as a lion tamer. “Today we have with us someone schooled in so many fields of learning it would tire you out to hear them. Except to say I will make anyone who misbehaves regret it to the end of time, I’ll let Mr. Morris Morgan tell you himself why he has come. Mr. Morgan, they’re all yours,” she demurely invited me up to the desk and blackboard, her eyes saying, Have at them.
That introduction did not impress the captive audience as much as might have been hoped. At desk after desk, young roughnecks slouched as if they had heard their fill from figures of authority, as they no doubt had. A fortunate exception, up front amid the obvious hellions, was a smaller, redheaded boy with the face of a Botticelli angel, watching as if he couldn’t get enough of me. It wrung a person’s heart to think of such a one cast out into the world; why someone had not put him in a pocket and taken him home, I couldn’t fathom. Meanwhile at the far back sat Russian Famine, prudently away from sharp elbows and random clouts, looking restless but curious. Well, two such were better than none. I cleared my throat and set to work on the rest.
“Your instructor, Mrs. Evans”—off to one side Rab tried to look matronly, not at all successfully—“has invited me to offer this select group a chance for each of you to go into business for yourself.”
“Huh, us? That’s a good one,” a long-shanked tough in the second row jeered. “Who do you want us to knock the blocks off of?”
I forced a chuckle. “I didn’t say that, did I. What Mrs. Evans and I have in mind is for you to become individual merchants. With the freedom of the city, at hours that won’t interrupt your, ah, education, in which to sell your merchandise.”
“Sellin’ what?” another sarcastic voice demanded. “Noodles to giraffes?”
“Nah, canary birds, cheap, cheap,” yet another member of the unholy chorus was heard from. Retribution in her eye, Rab started for the nearest offender until I held up a hand to stop her. “The merchandise,” I went on as if uninterrupted, “is the entirely honorable sort produced at the place where I myself work.”
“Yeah? Where’s that, then?”
“At a bastion of the
Fourth Estate. At Butte’s citadel of fair enterprise,” I couldn’t help getting a bit carried away. “At the pinnacle of journalistic endeavor, the Thunder.”
In an instant the room rang with wild hoots. “You mean that rag down by Venus Alley? . . . Newsies! Beat that! He wants us to be newsies! . . . That don’t sound like no way to get rich.”
There was only one thing to do. Sighing, I took off my suit coat and rolled up my sleeves as if for a fight. Stepping closer to the blinking rank in the first row of desks, I singled out a chunky youth who had been one of the loudest hooters. Gazing at him so relentlessly his Adam’s apple bobbed, I demanded to know: “What day of the week is this?”
“T’ursday, natcherly.”
“What if I told you it had another name?”
“Uh, like what?”
I whirled to the blackboard and wrote in big letters THOR. “Thor’s day. In the time of some of your great-great-great-grandfathers, that was the pronunciation.”
“Yeah, so?” some skeptic called out. “Who’s this ape Thor?”
I glanced around for some kind of implement. The window crank would have to do. Seizing it by the handle, I leaped onto the teacher’s desk and brandished the blunt instrument overhead so threateningly that the entire front row reared back in their seats with a sucked breath. “THE GOD OF THUNDER!” I roared. “That’s who.”
While I had the class’s undivided attention, I stayed atop the desk and regaled them with the mighty reputation of Thor and his mountain-crushing hammer in the bloodiest of Viking myths. Rab had her hand over her mouth, eyes sparkling, and Russian Famine squirmed in excitement as I led the lesson around to thunder’s inception from lightning. “What we hear as that hammer blow of sound is the air being disturbed by the bolt of electricity. And so,” I concluded, still looking down at the pale sea of faces, “thunder comes of a troubled atmosphere. I hardly need to tell any of you that describes quite a lot of life here in Butte as well, hmm?”