Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  Innocent of such concern, Grace paused in her peeling to tug mischievously at my apron strings. “You men and your games.”

  • • •

  With Griff and Hoop proclaiming, “Best meal in ages, Mrs. Morgan,” and Grace keeping a rueful silence, Sandison surprised us all by not grunting a good-night as usual when the last bite was done and going off to his lair of books. “Here, madam.” He thrust a squarish envelope across the table to Grace. “Morgan can read over your shoulder.” He tendered a similar envelope to the other side of the table. “You two can share one, surely.” Hoop opened it and Griff leaned over to read.

  YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE ANNUAL

  ROBERT BURNS BIRTHDAY AND COSTUME PARTY

  JANUARY 25, 8 P.M.–MIDNIGHT BUTTE PUBLIC LIBRARY

  “Sandy,” I exclaimed, “I had no idea you are an aficionado of the Ploughman Poet.”

  “His rhymes are all right if you like wee this and bonny that,” Sandison allowed. “But the main thing is his birthday comes at the time winter is driving people crazy. The library has been throwing this party for years. It was—it was Dora’s idea.”

  “And what a nice one,” Grace warmly endorsed the notion of a Scottish extravaganza in the Constantinople of the Rockies, even if there were a few more wintry weeks to endure to get to it. “Thank you ever so much for the invitation, Samuel. We’ll be there in full regalia, won’t we, Morrie.”

  “Unquestionably.”

  “Eh, us, too.”

  “Righto. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Sandison acknowledged our thanks with a slight bow, or at least his beard seemed to, and he hoisted himself off to his books. As Grace cleared the table, I headed to the living room to finally peruse the Sporting News. However, Griff and Hoop had preceded me as far as the staircase.

  “Hsst. Can we have a word with you?”

  I looked up to two worried faces, ancient as Ajax in the gloaming of the stairwell, halfway to the top. “And that word is . . . ?”

  One hemmed and the other hawed, combining into the protestation that they did not want to hurt Sandison’s feelings, not the least little bit, understand, and I was beginning to before it came. “This Scotch party of his. Are we gonna have to wear them little dresses?”

  “Kilts, you mean?” How mighty the temptation, to see the pair of them, bowlegged as barrel staves, stumping through the social evening in drafty Highland tartans. Somehow I resisted and told them they might well costume themselves as, say, shepherds instead.

  After making absolutely sure that sheepherders wore pants even in Scotland, the two of them retired to their rooms and I set out for the living room again. Passing the door to Sandison’s library tower, though, on impulse I stopped and knocked.

  “Come in, it’s on hinges.”

  Seated at his desk as if moored there, he glanced up from what was evidently the latest treasure, still nested in its wrappings. “Ever seen this?”

  Even closed, Oeuvres Complètes de Buffon was a true work of art, the leather spine elegance itself and the marbled cover aswirl with blues beyond blue. “Paris, 1885,” Sandison said clerically. “Go ahead, have a look.” Inside, the steel engravings of Buffon’s beasts and birds were the most vivid menagerie imaginable. It is a trick only the finest illustrators can pull off, a bit of egg white mixed into the hand coloring to give sheen and add life. Holding my breath, I turned the folio pages to the peacock. The colors practically preened off the page, so vivid were they.

  “Exquisite, Sandy.” I thought again what an achievement a book is, a magic box simultaneously holding the presence of the author and the wonders of the world. Ever so carefully I shut the dazzling volume. “A marvelous find.” My curiosity couldn’t be held in. “Will it live here”—I meant the shelves stocked with his personal favorites, which ran to hundreds and hundreds of everything from fiction to phenomenology—“or downtown?”—meaning the public library.

  “Haven’t quite decided.” He patted the gorgeous cover and chortled into his beard. “It would make the dimwit trustees sit up and take notice, wouldn’t it, to have this in the collection. The only copy west of Chicago.” Without looking up at me, he asked, “What’s on your mind besides your hat? You didn’t pop in here to see if I have Mother Goose Rhymes for bedtime reading.”

  “It caught my attention during supper the other night that the mention of Teddy Roosevelt drew a bit of reaction from you.” He had harrumphed like a bullfrog. “I wondered why.”

  “Of course it set me off, nincompoop. Knew him in the line of business, didn’t I.”

  “What, politics? Sandy! Are you a secret Bull Mooser, you’re telling me?”

  “Hell no, before any of that nonsense of him trying to be president every time there was an election.” Sandison gazed off into the distance of the past. “Teddy was a rancher out here for about as long as it takes to tell it. Had a herd of cattle, over in the Dakotas. One bad winter was all he could take, and he scooted back east to something simpler, like policing New York or conquering Cuba.” I waited. Sandison sighed, taking his voice down with it. “Yes, ninny, he was in the cattlemen’s association with me, at the time we had to deal with rustlers. Good citizen Theodore lucked out and didn’t get known as Roosevelt the Rope Fiend—his cowboys weren’t as quick at stringing up cow thieves as mine.”

  How the strands of fate twine mysterious ways. One man is snared in the reputation of a vigilante, and another dangles free and becomes president. It would take more than leather-bound volumes of phenomenology to contain the workings of chance. Such thoughts were interrupted by the next rumble from Sandison. “You were smarter than you knew, using him in that editorial.” That is not a comment I too often get, and I cocked an eyebrow for him to continue.

  “He’s popular as hotcakes in the great state of Montana, from being out here in boots and spurs,” Sandison obliged gruffly. “You’d think he was a top hand with cattle, when he hardly knew which end the grass goes in.” He laughed, none too humorously. “How you do it, Morgan, I don’t know, but sometimes you plunge in blind and come out walking on water. The Galilee shortcut, ay?”

  “It is not a talent I set out to attain, actually.”

  “It could be worse, you could have a knack for the accordion.” He fingered the Buffon bestiary again. “That educate you enough for one night?”

  “Amply as always, Sandy.”

  “By the way, the sliding door in the drawing room is stuck half-shut.”

  “Righto,” I sighed.

  • • •

  Frowning so hard his green eyeshade was practically a beak, Armbrister summoned me into his office on an otherwise ordinary day of editorial mudslinging. “You seen this?” He brandished a galley of overset at me. When I took the freshly inked strip of proof sheet and held it up for a look, the spatters of consonants told me this could only be Griff’s contribution to “Voices of the Hill.” Armbrister meanwhile ranted that it “practically drove Sully cross-eyed setting it.” The compositor Sullivan who had delivered the item from the pressroom did look somewhat woozy on his way out. “What the blazes does it say, anyway?”

  “Oh, a joke of some sort, I imagine. I told Griff to keep the item short and light.”

  Armbrister nibbled his lip. “All those ffs, I don’t like the looks of it. What if it’s a dirty joke?”

  “In Welsh?”

  “Well, not that, then. Code of some kind to the Wobblies? Or something libelous about Anaconda? Those two old hoodoos aren’t exactly the souls of moderation.”

  There he had a point. Now I was nibbling my lip. “We must trust Griff.”

  “That’s not good enough. I’m not slapping something in the paper I can’t read a syllable of.”

  “Jacob, really, it’s not intended for us, it’s for those miners whose souls still yearn for the sounds of the green valleys and gentle streams of Wales.”r />
  “It’s still Greeker than goddamn Greek to me and I’m the editor.”

  “Jake,” I tried, “you’re being overly suspicious.” He merely strummed his suspenders, waiting me out. “You win,” I conceded. “I shall take responsibility if anything goes wrong with it.”

  “All right, we’ll run the thing.” Calling for a copyboy, the editor gave me a last speculative glance. “You’re adventurous, Morgie. That probably has double fs and ls in it in Welsh.”

  • • •

  After that, Griff was greeted on the street for days by fellow Welshmen who would repeat what sounded like a series of gargles and practically fall over laughing. Griff’s manner around the manse suggested authorship came naturally to the chosen, and he airily told me anytime the Thunder needed another contribution of the language of heaven, to just let him know. At first Hoop grinned along in the reflected glory, but something came over him during this time, I couldn’t help but notice. He was saying little at meals and bolting off to his room as soon as possible, and his mind often seemed elsewhere as Griff and he tackled the house’s latest ailment.

  Finally came the morning when he caught me alone as I was about to leave for work, and hoarsely whispered, “Morrie, got a minute? There’s something I need to talk to you about awful bad.”

  As he took me aside in the back hallway, I braced for the nature of the awful bad. Had I sundered his and Griff’s long-standing friendship with my bright idea about funny fillers? Was the something medical, old miners’ ramshackle bodies being what they were? Possibly the ailing house itself?

  Worry etched in his face, Hoop looked deep into mine and husked:

  “Do Huck and Jim make it?”

  I blinked that in. “Both of them, I mean,” he went on anxiously. “Because if they catch that Jim and do to him—”

  “Hoop, you’ve been reading, haven’t you.”

  “A person can’t help it in this place.” He gestured helplessly. “Every time you turn around, there’s books fit for a king. Pick one up just for a look, and next thing you know, you can’t quit.” Indeed, there were fatigue marks under his eyes testifying to late nights in the company of open pages. “Griff’s got his nose in Kipling poems. Probably safer.” He looked at me fretfully. “If the two of them don’t get to New Orleans on that raft—”

  I laid a hand on the bowed shoulder. “Rest assured, Mark Twain will not let you down.”

  • • •

  With the Robert Burns Birthday and Costume Party creeping up on us, Grace pondered what to wear. “Remember Edinburgh? Those plaids. I wish I had that shawl.” She paused to size me up like a draper. “And that Harris Tweed blazer you bought on Princes Street. You looked like the laird o’ the castle in it.”

  We both knew where those items of apparel had vanished to. “Say no more,” I gave in to the inevitable. “I’ll go by the depot after work and see if by some miracle our trunk has appeared.”

  But nothing that miraculous was produced, the depot agent merely reciting yet again that the lost would be found sooner or later. Given that my own trunk had been missing for practically an eon, that was less than reassuring.

  It did not help my disgusted mood that the warehouse district down by the railroad tracks was a snowy mess, and to save my London shoes as I headed back uptown I picked my way along a different street than I had come, past a run-down warehouse where a truck with GOLDEN EGGS POULTRY FARMS on its side was parked out front. I was just passing when I was overcome with the uncomfortable feeling of being watched.

  I checked around. Peering at me from the deepest recess of the warehouse doorway was a thickset figure with a face that advertised trouble. Old fear freshly flooded through me. A window man, even where there were no windows? Bundled up in overcoat and gloves as I was, I couldn’t reach to an inside pocket for my brass knuckles before he was on me like a springing tiger.

  “Boss!” he yelped, grabbing my elbow. “We wasn’t expecting you! We heard you’d be in Great Falls about now, fixing the trouble with that speakeasy that got raided. Man oh man, you move fast.”

  “You are—” I attempted to tell him he was wholly mistaken as to my identity but he cut me off with: “Smitty.” He winked. “I know we ain’t supposed to know each other’s real names, not even yours. But I never got to shake your hand at the big meeting back when Prohibition came in like Christmas all year long, and I been dying to ever since.” My hand was swallowed in his. “Boss, was you ever smart! This is the best racket ever.” It did not sound as if he meant poultry products.

  My confidant stepped back in admiration. “What a slick disguise, dressing up in fancy threads. You look like one of them Vienna professors.” With my overcoat collar turned up and winter felt hat pulled down, the beard no doubt was my most prominent feature, not helping any in convincing this enthusiast that any resemblance he saw in me was coincidental. Finding my voice, I tried: “Really, I’m not—”

  The engine roar of an automobile navigating the snowy street toward us at startling speed drowned me out. Smitty’s broad face registered alarm. Yanking a pistol from a coat pocket, he cried, “Watch out!” Before I could react, he bowled me over, tumbling us both into the snowbank near the Golden Eggs truck, him on top.

  His action came barely in the nick of time, as a gunshot blasted over our heads and lead splattered against the brick wall of the warehouse. Gunfire gets your attention like nothing else. I held an aversion to guns. In my estimation, sooner or later they tend to go off, and I did not regard myself as bulletproof. Someone—who?—had just tested that out.

  In the shock of it all I went inert as a mummy, but Smitty fortunately did not. Rolling off me where I was squashed into the snow, he swiftly was up and firing back at the vehicle speeding away.

  “A shotgun, the dumb clucks,” he jeered as the car disappeared around a corner, “what’d they think, they’re hunting ducks? Everybody knows you can’t reload a double-barreled real quick.” Pulling me to my feet, he alternately wiped snow off my overcoat with the barrel of his gun and kept watch around the fender of the truck. “Amachoors. It’s that Helena gang. Don’t worry,” he risked stepping far enough into the street to retrieve my satchel for me, “we’ll hijack a couple of their loads on the Bozeman run. That’ll make them think twice about stunts like this.”

  With gunfire still echoing in my ears, I numbly started to ask about the police. Smitty didn’t let me get past the word. “Nahh. Cops don’t come nosing around here. If they do, we’ll tell them we was shooting snowshoe rabbits.” He had me by the elbow again. “Come on in, quick, in case those dummies double back.”

  That sounded prudent. But as soon as he bustled me into the huge warehouse, I regretted it with a nearly audible gulp. From behind file cabinets and desks and every other piece of furniture, a dozen or more men peeked in our direction, holding pistols like Smitty’s.

  “Put away your artillery, boys,” he called out jovially. “Everything’s hunky-dory now, the Highliner is here.”

  Instantly there was a swell of cries of “Yeah, hi, boss, great to see you!”

  By now I realized I was in a precarious situation; the only question was, how deep. The picture before me was becoming all too clear. In back of the desks and filing cabinets, nearly filling the rest of the warehouse, stood a sleekly painted fleet of delivery vans, the majority with Golden Eggs blazoned on the sides, others with Treasure State Pork or some such. However, what they were delivering, I could tell at a glance, was not the product of hen and pig, but stacks and stacks of boxes labeled SUPERIOR RYE—CANADA’S TRADITIONAL WHISKEY.

  “Them Helena jaspers,” Smitty was holding forth to an appreciative audience about our ambush escape, “they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. You shoulda seen the boss when they jumped us—he never said a word. Cool as ice.”

  Frozen with fear was the more accurate description, a condition not allayed by facing
a gang of gun-toting bootleggers who had mistaken me for their mastermind. This did not seem the right moment to set that straight. Ringed around me like admirers at a banquet, the whole assemblage awaited my words expectantly.

  “How’s”—my voice sounded high as a choirboy’s. I cleared my throat and made a face. “Butte air.” They all laughed knowingly. “How’s business?”

  There was a chorus of “Terrific!” “Great!” “Out of this world!” Then, though, a mustached individual, otherwise a bulky replica of Smitty, stepped forward with a worried frown. “Boss, I hate to tell you this when everything is running so slick, but we got a problem, up at the border.”

  I cocked my head inquisitively, and he rushed out the news that the crossing point at Sweetgrass had been shut tight by federal alcohol agents. “They’re even inspecting carloads of nuns,” my mustached informant complained. By now I was putting two and two together and realizing that the Highliner, whoever he was, must be the authority on that northernmost “high” stretch of Montana, where the boundary line with Canada extended for hundreds of miles but roads were few.

  A hush of expectancy settled over the assemblage as my solution—that of the evidently all-wise Highliner—to the border-crossing problem was awaited. Looking around the office section of the warehouse as casually as my nerves would allow, I spotted a roll-down map, such as had been in my Marias Coulee schoolroom. Stepping over to it, I yanked it down with a flourish, desperately hoping it was not a Mercator of the entire world.

  I was in luck: the long-nosed profile of the state of Montana displayed itself. Still not saying a word, I studied the map. The Sweetgrass portal was like the lip of a funnel from Canada to main roads on the American side, which no doubt was why it had drawn the attention of the government agents. Off westward from there was what looked like wild country with no sign of habitation or roads. The old advice “Go west” had not failed me yet. As if back in a classroom, I seized the nearest item of any length lying around to use as a pointer, which happened to be a sawed-off shotgun. Mutely and gingerly, I held it by the grip and planted the end of the barrel at random on an obscure spot along the western reach of the Canadian border.