Sweet Thunder (19 page)

In short, a person could survey every liars' club from here to Chicago and not find a bigger falsehood than that in the
Post
's false diatribe of yesterday.

—PLUVIUS

“That ought to hold them awhile,” Jared exulted, and the staff cheered as the press began to roll with our boldly headlined shot back at Cutthroat Cartwright and the higher snakes on the top floor of the Hennessy Building.

•   •   •

“My, aren't we glad Sandy had books by all those Russians,” Grace said.

•   •   •

“Maybe you're learning your trade, Morgan,” Sandison granted. “That Chicago gibe was a nice touch. Heh, heh.”

•   •   •

True to Jared's prediction, the
Thunder
's retaliatory blast did give the
Post
cause for pause. Its editorials for the next some days were confined to topics such as streetlights and stray dogs—and to our relief, the corner bonfires of
Thunder
s were quenched when Cutlass wasn't furnishing the matches.

Our own philippics, in Jared's choice word, kept up the drumbeat on taxes, taxes, taxes, though I was exceedingly careful not to give Cutthroat Cartwright another opening; the “Red menace” episode had been too narrow an escape. Newspaper life seemed to have settled down to the usual journalistic rivalry, our reporters resorting to every wile to scoop theirs, our newsboys outshouting theirs with catchier headlines. Yet there was a feeling in the air, distinct as the ink-and-nicotine atmosphere in the
Thunder
newsroom, that in the ongoing struggle with Anaconda, it was our move next.

Rab precipitated it.

On Saturday furlough from the hoosegow school, she and Russian Famine accompanied Jared when he dropped by to brief Armbrister and me on that week's legislative progress toward the vital statewide vote on the tax commission matter. “It's slower than digging the Panama Canal, but we're getting there,” he vouched. “The bill survived the committee hearings despite all the company's Ulcer Gulch stooges tried to do to it, and now it comes to the floor. We win there, and all it takes is the governor's signature.”

And many thousand voters' X's, I thought but didn't say. Jared was inhaling the smell of victory, Rab bright and keen at his side, and even Armbrister for once came out from under his cloud. Maybe we all caught exuberance from Famine, darting to the society desk where Mary Margaret Houlihan, possessed of a sweet tooth, kept a jar of gumdrops free for the taking, and helped himself to his customary handful. Back in high spirits myself—there is nothing like a close call to sharpen one's zest for life—I caught his eye and when the others were lost in conversation, I clinked the brass knuckles in my pocket as though I were jingling loose change. Grinning conspiratorially at the sound, the newsboy bounded off to the back room for his bag and bundle of
Thunder
s.

“He thinks you're the cat's meow, Mr. Morgan,” Rab observed. “All I hear is how much he wants to be like you.”

Touched by that, “He's one of a kind himself” was as much as I could say.

“Maybe the kid is getting us more readers than we are, bless his buttons.” Armbrister really was in a sunny mood. “Circulation's up, day by day.”

“That's the stuff,” I chortled.

“The more the merrier,” Jared said jubilantly.

“All well and good,” the feminine voice of reason abridged us, “but aren't you just preaching to the choir?”

We three men buttoned our lips like caught schoolboys taking our scolding and reluctantly faced around to its authority. It was up to Jared to ask warily, “How so, Rab?”

She poised for a moment before settling to the corner of the editor's desk, in the attitude of a canny abbess revealing the Gospel. “You're selling papers like mad here in town, but what does that prove? Butte people mostly have their minds already made up about Anaconda and the miners, they've had to for years, haven't they.” She was not waiting to hear the male view of things. “What about other places? Every voter in the state is going to have a say on the tax issue, but how many of them have any chance to read Mr. Morgan's editorials, unless they pick them up out of the tumbleweeds?” Having made her point, she crossed her arms on her bosom and looked at us sternly.

Jared recovered first. “As much as I hate to admit it, she's right. I practically wallpaper the legislature with the
Thunder
when I can, but go downtown in Helena and there's Anaconda's local propaganda sheet being sold on every corner.”

“We've looked at this up, down, and sideways,” Armbrister protested. “Shipping bundles of papers around the state by train costs a fortune—the Anaconda bastards see to that with the railroads, you can just bet. And it's slower than the Second Coming, anyway.” He shrugged fatalistically. “We're putting out a Butte newspaper, Jared, we can't snap our fingers and change that.”

Maybe we couldn't, but someone could. In spite of myself, the phrase
What is to be done?
again raised a clamor in my brain, demanding answer. To quiet it, I entered the discussion Jared and Armbrister were having.

“If, as the Braille salesman said to the Cyclops, you'll turn a blind eye, I believe I can arrange to have truckloads distributed to other towns.”

“At how much per delivery?” Armbrister demanded.

“As low as it goes. Don't ask me more.”

“Truckload
s
?” exclaimed Jared. “How?”

“Blind eye, remember? Have the bundles waiting under a tarpaulin on the loading dock tonight.”

“There, see?” Rab said as if it had all been foretold.

Armbrister was dubiously doing arithmetic on a sheaf of copy paper. “We'd need to double our press run.”

Jared looked at me, then at the pleased pussycat that was Rab, then at me again. He set his jaw and said, “Let's go for broke.”

•   •   •

“
Hsst.
Over here, Smitty.”

“Boss! Almost didn't see you there in the shadows.” The thickset bootlegger veered off from entering the warehouse and joined me in the dark alley. “I thought you wasn't coming back until next week.”

“Change of plans,” I intoned in what I hoped was a passable Highliner voice.

“I bet I know. You don't want them dumb duck hunters catching on to your comings and goings.” He peeked around the corner until satisfied there was no sign of an ambush vehicle and someone riding shotgun, literally. “Coast's clear. Ain't you coming in to tell the boys what's what, like always?”

“I'm in a hurry, I have to leave it to you.” Smitty swelled in importance. “The trucks on the Whiskey Gap run—”

“Boy, that works so slick, boss, you'd think it was a regular highway out there in nowhere.”

“—the trucks are empty on the way north, am I right?”

“Sure they are, so we can load them to the gills when they get to Canada.”

“Tell the boys here's what I want done on the trips from now on.” I recited it as he listened closely. When I was through, he wore a puzzled expression.

“Just plain old newspapers, is this?”

“Hardly plain.” I thought fast. “More like an extra, only they can't call it that every day. You know how people snap those up to see what has happened. Think how many more drinks that will add up to while customers sit there taking in the news.”

“Oh, I get it.” Smitty brushed the shoulder of my overcoat in case any speck had dared to light on it. “You bet, we'll drop papers at every speakeasy from here to Canada. What a humdinger of an idea, boss.”

•   •   •

Fresh from that unblemished performance as the Highliner and riding high in the newsroom on account of the
Thunder
's miraculously doubled circulation, I hummed my way up the front walk after work the next day. Even Ajax on the door knocker looked less forbidding than usual. “Grace,” I called cheerily as I stepped in, for once unconcerned about whatever mischief the house had wreaked on itself during my hours away. “I'm home, darling. Yoo-hoo.”

No answer. Or did I hear a low moan somewhere?

“Grace?” With growing apprehension I headed for the kitchen, the silence at that end of the long hallway now more ominous than any sound.

I burst in, then stepped back at the sight of her, seated at the kitchen table as if dumped there. Her face was smeared white. The calamine lotion she was slathering on her arms barely covered the red welts from wrist to elbow. Stopping to scratch like fury, she looked at me woefully through her tragic white mask.

“Morrie,” she said in an awful tone, “you're giving me hives.”

“I just got here,” I said in confusion.

“You know what I'm talking about.” She strenuously banged the bottom of the calamine bottle with the palm of her hand for more of the soothing lotion, which unfortunately for me could not be taken internally.

“Grace”—I circled in as close as I dared, knowing better than to touch her—“I have no idea what brought this on.”

“Your, your past history,” she half whispered as if in agony. I blanched. She went on miserably, “There was a knock on the door after you left for work this morning. Who else but the railroad drayman, saying our trunk had turned up finally. Hurrah, I thought, but when he brought it in, I saw it wasn't ours”—she gritted her teeth and dug at both elbows before going on—“and figured it had to be the one you'd lost when you first came to Butte.”

I had lamented the loss of that trunk, with all my earthly belongings in it, for a year and a half, but right then I wished it had vanished forever.

“Then I thought,” Grace was struggling to tell the rest, “I don't know what I thought, but I peeked in the trunk and there were some clothes and things but mostly books. I picked up the one on top, wanting to surprise you with it when you came home—it was something or other in Latin—”

“Julius Caesar's
Gallic Wars
,”
I said numbly, knowing what was coming.

“—and when I opened it out of curiosity, there it was on the flyleaf, wasn't it. ‘To Morgan. Merry Christmas 1908 in any language. Forever yours, Rose.'” She looked at me furiously. “Another wife, have we here?” She scratched at herself so hard it hurt to watch. “And that wasn't all.”

“No, but I can expl—”

“Newspaper clippings of a prizefighter. Who looked for all the world like a younger you, but with some name I never heard of.” This woman I so loved, the mending spirit of my life, gazed at me through her wretched mask of lotion and asked the question I had hoped would never come. “Who are you, if you're not Morris Morgan?”

  12  

M
ORGAN
L
LEWELLYN, OF COURSE.
Although for someone left as much in the dark about my past as Grace, there was no “of course” to it, unfortunately. More like a plaintive owl hoot
“Who?”

In desperation I set out to explain that the prizefighter was not me but my late brother Casper “the Capper” Llewellyn, onetime lightweight champion of the world, and Rose was not my wife but his, and therefore merely my sister-in-law—“You must believe me, Rose is the sort who would sign ‘Forever Yours' on a Montgomery Ward catalog order”—and that certain unforeseen circumstances back in Chicago had made it imperative for me to change my name. With interruptions accompanied by Grace's furious scratching, the story came out in fits and starts. Even so, she soon enough grasped that a fixed championship fight, the gambling mob's wrath that did in Casper, and the necessity for Rose and me to flee together to Montana were involved.

When I was finished, or at least out of words, the woman I had never wanted to hurt looked at me in a heartbreaking way. “Morrie, you are a magnet for trouble,” she despaired. “If all this happened a dozen years ago, why are the gamblers still after you?”

“Long memories and short tempers.” I thought it best not to add that a suspicious World Series bet worth a junior fortune was enough to stir both of those.

My hopes went up while she deliberated as if to herself. “I can understand that much, I suppose.” Butte as well as Chicago certainly held examples of such behavior, after all. Then, though, she spoke with more agitation than even hives could bring about. “But to marry me under”—was I imagining, or did the red of her eyes increase like the glow of coals as she sought the most damning phrase—“false pretenses! Who am I supposed to be, let alone you, with a phony name that I'm not even sure I can spell?”

“I, ah, apologize for the discrepancy,” I gingerly tried soothing her. “But people alter names all the time.”

“Oh, really? Since when, impostor?”

“Since, well, let's say Mark Twain. It is well known he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and if that doesn't constitute an alteration—”

“Morrie, he was a writer,” she said through her teeth, “of course he made things up. I'm talking about honest citizens.”

“Then what about a vice president of the United States?”

“Now you're telling me that pickle-puss Calvin Coolidge is not actually Calvin Coolidge?”

“I'm not prepared to speak to that,” I backed off markedly. “I refer to an earlier officeholder—Henry Wilson, who served under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, 1873 to 1875, I believe the dates were. The poor man began life as Jeremiah Jones Colbath. So, you see, there is precedent for improving on one's given na—”

“I see, all right. And I don't care what some forgotten mucky-muck back in the time of Useless Grant called himself, what matters to me is the husband I thought was Morrie Morgan but who turns out to be Morgan Llewellyn, if he is even telling the truth about that, and with a price on his hide besides.” Tear tracks glistened on the calamine mask of her face. “I never expected life with you to be all strawberries and cream. I went through enough with Arthur to know a marriage isn't like that. But to find out that you're not at all who I thought you were—” Her voice trembled and broke. “Why couldn't you have told me before now?”

“Because I was afraid of something like this.”

“Did you think I wouldn't forgive you?”

“You could start now,” I said hopefully.

“Ooh, you. Morrie, I can't take it,” she moaned. “I cannot live with someone who goes through life like, like”—she scratched more furiously than ever—“a chameleon on a barber pole.” As ominously as I could hear them coming, her next words hit me worse than blows. “I'm going back to the boardinghouse. You can have your mansion and your shenanigans and your names, and see if I care.”

•   •   •

The door-banging commotion of her departure drew Sandison out of his book-lined stronghold, the drumbeat of boots preceding the familiar bulk and beard into the drawing room where I waited despondently for the next round I was bound to lose. Before he had time to do more than scowl at me, Griff and Hoop appeared behind him, suitcases in hand.

“Um, uh,” Griff stammered, and could manage no further utterance.

Hoop croaked out: “What he means is—”

“I know,” I acknowledged the valises they were holding as guiltily as robbers making a getaway.

“It's nothing against you, Morrie,” they practically chorused.

“That's welcome news.”

“We're sort of attached to Mrs. Morgan, is all.”

“Understood.”

“We aren't taking sides, you know.”

“Of course not.”

“It's not for us to judge whose fault it is when a woman walks out on a man or anything.”

“Just go.”

“Righto.”

They shuffled to the door. “It's been nice, Mr. Sandison.” He grunted in response as they gimped out to join Grace at the boardinghouse.

“The last two rats on the ghost ship, are we?” Sandison rumbled in the oppressive silence of the house. “What did you do to the poor woman, Morgan?”

“Nothing that can be corrected without going back in history, I fear,” I said in agitation, pacing back and forth on the Turkish rug.

“That bad, hmm?” He crooked a finger for me to follow him into the library. “What a shame. I liked that Grace,” his words kept after me as the desk chair groaned under his bulk. “Reminded me of Dora. Had a mind of her own. Not every woman does.” No, mainly the ones who repeatedly tossed me in the reject bin. Rose and Grace. Womanhood unbridled, when it came to my efforts to be a reliable mate in life. Caught up in self-pity as I was, it took me a moment for Sandison's change of tone to register and stop me in my tracks. “Tell me,” he was saying quietly, “the whole thing.”

I did. My true name. The fixed-fight scheme, when Casper yielded his lightweight championship of the world—“Just parking it until the return bout,” he reasoned—that worked all too well. The unabated fury of the Chicago gambling mob after it figured out we had won a fortune betting on the opponent. My beloved brother's long walk off a short pier into Lake Michigan, as the gamblers took their revenge and looked around for more. The pose of Rose and myself as sister and brother in our Marias Coulee concealment, her as a housekeeper and me as teacher in the one-room school. My impulsive return to Montana after nearly ten years' absence, only to become enmeshed in the 1919 chapter of struggle between the miners and Anaconda and thence shadowed incessantly by company goons suspicious of my identity. Even I had to admit, it added up to quite a story. If confession was good for the soul, mine should now have been so freshly scrubbed it shone.

Stroking his beard like a pet, my listener said not a word until I was done. “Gamblers. Bad company,” he
tch
-
tch
ed, the man who had sent people swinging from the end of a rope for looking sideways at his cows. He heaved himself around in his chair to face me directly. “Back there in '19, I wondered why you rated goons trailing you around more than anyone else in this demented town.”

“Yes, well, at least that pair of imbeciles long since departed Montana for the sake of their health. As prescribed by the Wobblies, whom they were managing to annoy when they weren't after me like bloodhounds.”

Sandison eyed me thoughtfully while I awaited whatever wise counsel he could offer to a wifeless, overworked, underpaid editorialist operating under an alias beyond an assumed name. Instead, what I received was:

“Morgan? 'Twixt thee and me, you don't happen to be this Highliner character, by any chance?”