Sweet Thunder (14 page)

It took no great divination to guess that if the person in charge was caught up in the stormy scene surrounding the mineshaft, his office might well be vacant. Head down as if I had urgent business, I strode across the mine yard to the appropriate building and brazenly walked in.

I was in luck. Everyone in any office down the long corridor was caught up one way or another with the mine accident and the interruption of production, and those who did glance at me as I passed presumed from my topcoat and hat—and beard—that I must be someone important sent up from the Hennessy Building headquarters. At the office marked
SUPERVISOR
, I ducked in.

Aha, unoccupied. And, sitting right there on the desk, a telephone. I at once appropriated both, clapping the receiver to my ear and hurriedly tapping the switch hook for the operator, to place the necessary call to the rewrite desk in the newsroom. Only to be intercepted by a prim female voice at a switchboard somewhere on the Neversweat grounds, “Sorry, what department are you ringing, please?”

I was struck wordless. The telephone system was internal to Anaconda; was there nothing the damnable company did not control to the very last detail?

Swallowing hard, I said with forced casualness, “I'm calling to downtown,” gave the
Thunder
's telephone number, and hoped.

After forever, a familiar raspy intonation came. “Matthews here, what've you got?”

“Matt, it's Morgan, at the Neversweat,” I spoke fast and low to the rewrite man. “Don't use my name or Cavaretta's on here, I'll explain later. I'm holding the line open for him, he's still at the mineshaft getting the story.”

“Sure thing, I'll stay on. But he'll need to go some to make deadline.”

“He will, we will. Sammy's set to shoot when they bring the victims up, let Armbrister know for the front-page layout.”

Just as I finished speaking, the red-faced man from the din around the mineshaft barged into the office, charging toward what was unmistakably his desk, his chair, his telephone.

He stopped short at the sight of me sitting there, dressed to the gills and hat still on, hugging the phone to myself. “Do I know you?”

“Hardly.” Which was true enough. The mine supervisor, whose name I fumbled out of memory from 1919 as Delaney, had laid eyes on me, somewhat disguised—and beardless—when he was night overseer at the Muckaroo and Jared had smuggled me into an unimaginably deep shaft to meet with miners on the matter of a union anthem; it's a long story. With deliberate vagueness, I now said, “I'm new at the newspaper.”

“Reporters,” he said as if the word left a bad taste. “Tell your yobbos at the
Post
to be damn careful how they handle this one, understand?” He jerked a thumb. “Out of the way. I need to use that.”

My heart skipped as he rounded the desk and reached for the phone still in my possession.

“No,” I startled both of us, holding the instrument away from him. “You can't, right now, this in use. I'll explain later.”

“Can't?” Knocked back a step or two by my effrontery, he was turning apoplectic. “Who do you think you are? Get up from there! This is my office, my—”

Before he could finish, a storm burst in the room. No gate guard could keep Jared Evans out. “What's going on, Delaney?” he demanded as he hurtled in, angry to the point of bursting. “Five whistles, and you don't let us know at union headquarters, we have to find out for ourselves? That's a new low, even for your bunch of snakes.” Throwing a look my way for an additional target, he did a slight double take at my still presence. Something told him what I was at, maybe the white of my knuckles in my death grip on the phone stem and receiver, so, showing no hint of recognition, he spun from me to the mine supervisor. “Don't stand there like you've lost your tongue, let's hear the accident report.”

“It . . . it happened in the Chinese Laundry, that's why it's taking so long.” Listening for all I was worth, I blanched. The hottest, sweatiest level of any mine, in this case nearly a mile deep. Delaney hesitated, caught between being cowed and in authority. Jared's shrewdness in entering the political realm was proven again; an incensed union leader who was also a state senator was obviously more than a mine overseer wanted to face. Delaney licked his lips and fumbled out, “It's a nasty one, see, and we—”

“I gather that it is,” Jared snapped. Like me, he was dressed nattily, but in the tension of his body and the set of his shoulders, he was once again all miner underneath. “Now, will you quit beating around the bush and—”

“The pair of them were getting set to blast a fresh run of ore, and the charge must have went off on them,” Delaney reported in a rush of words. “It's taken some digging to get them out. They're both gone. I'm sorry as hell.”

Jared looked like he wanted to throttle him. “Two men
dead
and you don't even have the union shift rep in here to start notifying the families and the rest? It's in the contract, you know that—you're supposed to get our man on the first fast cage for this.” He shot a look out into the corridor. “Where the hell
is
Quinlan? Isn't he up yet?”

Blindly defensive, the mine supervisor blathered, “They're bringing him up as quick as the stretchers could get there, I told you it happened in the deep shaft and it takes—”

“Bringing?”
Jared turned pale, and no doubt I did, too. “It's Quin, in this?” It was an accusation, not a question.

No sooner had that truth crashed into the room, while I was still sitting paralyzed, than a voice trilled in my ear: “I'm so sorry, but has your party spoken with you yet?”

“No, I mean yes, he's there, he's merely occupied.”

“I'm awfully sorry, but other departments are waiting to use this line.”

“Things are delayed,” I said tersely, hoping that would sound like official business to the switchboard operator and newspaper business to the mine overseer.

“I'm just terribly sorry, but the company rule is that an outside line should be used no more than—”

“I am sitting at the desk of the supervisor of the entire mine,” I said slowly and distinctly. “Does that tell you enough?”

The voice went away without even saying it was to any degree sorry.

More shaken than I had ever seen him, Jared was hearing out Delaney's pleading try at explanation. “God's truth, Jared, I wish it had been anyone but Quin. I know how this looks, but it was a total accident, it has to be.”

“Then it's a sonofabitch of a coincidence, isn't it,” Jared said savagely. “The one man, after me, that Anaconda would be glad to be rid of. What's the company trying to pull? Pick us off, the way the goons did outside your gate and—”

Frantic, Delaney interrupted and pointed at me. “Is it all right for him to hear this? He's one of those, you know.”

Of course Jared waved that away and went on with his tirade. But that was the moment I truly realized I was one of those. A newspaperman. Fresh to me, the hunger of the newsman to be first with the story, but oh, how I felt it. The same appetite raged in Cavaretta, Sammy, Armbrister, Matthews hunched ready at his typewriter on the far end of the line, every man and woman of the
Thunder
, it was our calling: To tell the reading public this story of the Hill, before the
Post
could bury it away on page eight in the death notices. If we could only get the news out. The time, the time. How I did so with both hands engaged with the telephone, I don't know, but I fished my pocket watch from inside my topcoat, suit coat, and vest pocket, and looked. Deadline was not that far off.

Meanwhile Delaney was still maintaining that Quinlan's fatal accident was only that, sheer chance, until Jared coldly broke in on him.

“Just tell me this. Will you swear to me, man to man, the company didn't have anything to do with it?”

Delaney's face froze. “Them downtown, you mean.”

Jared and I realized in the same instant. The Neversweat overseer was frightened. Nervously he rattled out, “I don't see how they—anybody—could have set this up to happen. I make every shift boss inspect the blasting supplies for short fuses, powder leaks, all that. You raise such hell with us anytime anyone's hurt, I come down hard on handling explosives. I swear to you, that's the honest truth.”

Still incredulous, Jared asked: “Then how do you explain it? Two drillers, as savvy as anybody on the Hill, get blown up just like that?”

Delaney mustered himself. “You know what Quin was like. He never saw a corner he couldn't cut. How many times did I get after him for chasing into new rock ahead of the timbering crew? He'd laugh in my face and tell me he'd never yet heard the undertaker's music in the rock, he'd back off when he did.” He stopped, his jaw working as if deciding whether to say the next. “Jared, you had better know. He was drinking, some. On the job, I'm pretty sure, although I couldn't ever catch him at it.”

Jared winced but shook his head. “I can't buy that entirely. Quin could hold his whiskey, he had a hollow leg.” I'd have said the same. I watched Jared reach his decision. “Whatever the hell happened, no matter whose fault, I'm calling the men out.”

Delaney cursed, then pleaded. “How's a wildcat strike going to help matters any?”

“Nobody said ‘strike,'” Jared made the terms plain. “Just this shift, a walkout. We owe Quin that much.”

“Do what you must,” the supervisor gave up. He glanced uncertainly at me jealously guarding the phone. “I'll let them downtown know, whenever.”

No sooner had he said that than a sudden wash of light through the office window startled the three of us, before we realized it was photographer's flash powder going off like daylight lightning. Delaney drew a breath. “I suppose that'll be the cage with the bodies.”

Cavaretta came racing in, puffing from sprinting from the mine head and searching the corridor for me. He drew up momentarily at the sight of Jared and the mine superintendent, but swiftly stepped around them. “Don't mind me, just borrowing the phone a few minutes. Thanks, Morgie.” He began dictating: “Two veteran miners perished in an explosion of unknown cause deep in the Neversweat mine earlier today. Patrick Quinlan, mineworkers' union representative on the afternoon shift and a well-known figure in the Irish community, and his drilling partner, Terence Fitzgerald, were said to be setting a dynamite charge in the four-thousand-foot level when—”

•   •   •

“—history repeated itself as tragedy,” my editorial picked up the story the next day. It went on in this vein:

In rough numbers, the mining operations of the Hill kill a miner a week. This week it was two, one of them the combative presence across the bargaining table from the Anaconda Company in wage and safety negotiations. Pat Quinlan died, insofar as is known, because something went terribly wrong in a routine blasting of a wall of ore. Whatever happened, it fits on the list of mining conditions terribly wrong in the copper monopoly's empire of mines:

Is there enough ventilation at the extreme depth Anaconda has pushed its mineshafts in, say, the greatly misnamed Neversweat, so that a mineworker is not blinded by his own sweat as he handles dangerous materials? No.

Is there medical help, even of the first-aid sort, in place and prepared when the dreaded signal of five whistles goes off? No.

Is there a change of course in the company's administration of its mines since the Speculator fire, when the escape doors that were supposed to be in the tunnels' cement bulkheads somehow were not there and one hundred sixty-four miners died? No.

That's Anaconda history for you. That's tragedy.

“About close enough to the line,” Armbrister judged, Jared reluctantly concurring, as they read over my words practically letter by letter before letting them into print. The
Thunder
could not accuse the Anaconda Copper Mining Company of murder, without proof, because of the libel law. But people could read beneath the ink of our version of Quin's death if they wanted. Take that, Scriptoris and company.

•   •   •

“All right, Sherlock. Who do you think did it, them or him?” Grace with her common sense got right to the question, handing the editorial back to me from her side of the bed.

I smoothed the
Thunder
atop the
Sporting News
before setting both away for the night. “I would not put money either way. One is treacherous, one was reckless. Unless something else comes to light, it's anybody's guess.”

•   •   •

I attended Quin's wake, and then the burial, for to my surprise I was asked to be a pallbearer. In the nature of things Jared was, too, and it was after the service at the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home while we waited for the hearse that he took me aside. “I've had a word with Armbrister, you'd better know. No more editorials about Quin.”

“What!” Funeral home or not, my voice rose to a pitch. “Why not? After what happened, it gives us all kinds of ammunition to—”

Jared squeezed my shoulder hard enough to shut me up. “I found a Wob card on him.”

My stunned silence didn't require the hand he now dropped. “Delaney did the decent thing and left me alone to go through Quin's belongings, before the undertaker got there. It was right there in his wallet, big as life, along with his union card.” Jared spoke quickly, keeping an eye out for the arrival of the hearse. “Anaconda can't have known he was a Wobbly”—he shook his head as if trying to clear it of Quinlan's plural versions—“if he really was to any extent, or they'd have blackballed him from the Hill, the way they did all the others. And,” his face hardened, “painted us Red along with him.”

I did not need that spelled out. Since the Russian Revolution, America from the top of government on down had undergone a spasm of fear, not nearly over, of Bolshevism, anarchism, any ism that could be deemed un-American. Only the vegetarians were spared, it sometimes seemed, the epidemic of prosecutions, deportations, jailings, blacklistings, of left-wing activists of any stripe. In the mines and forests and ports of the West, the Industrial Workers of the World and their “radical” philosophy of workers' power had been singled out as a particular threat to the existing order, and crushed. It could keep happening.