Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  • • •

  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-tched, 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?”

  13

  I HAVE TO ADMIT IT: the iambic beat of “’Twixt thee and me, you don’t happen to be” as uttered by Sandison came like the opening of a new chapter of myself. As if some turn of plot had sprung loose from the most imaginative of his books there in their wise ranks surrounding us in the circular room and, in the surprise coil of a sterling tale, captured the story line of my existence. Imagine what that would mean. My telling of the episode in the booze warehouse is shown to be a charade, and I stand revealed as the bootlegging mastermind I was taken for. Possessor of a daring secret existence such as that of the Scarlet Pimpernel during the French Revolution. Avenger in the mask of a people’s hero who causes chaos in the despotic haciendas of the rich and mighty, as per Zorro. Dual personality with an interchangeable identity in the manner of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—no, that goes much too far. In this doffing of disguise, I simply emerge in my own telling as the Highliner whose appearance I already shared, with access to a safe crammed with cash, a legion of willing henchmen, and a ready-made legend. What a wonder the human chronicle is, how one’s character can be rewritten so thrillingly in the space of a page.

  “What,” I parried Sandison’s all too poetic inquiry, “makes you ask?”

  His gaze never veered from me in the least. “Let’s review. Back in Chicago you were Morgan Llewellyn, then you show up out here miraculously transformed into Morris Morgan, and you’re also Pluvius along the way. I just thought I’d check to see if I’m staying current.”

  I held the moment. Then slipped back to the plain print of reality. “I am irremediably me, Sandy. Morgan Llewellyn, from birth on. A fallible being like any other. With a few too many names to my name, perhaps,” I joked feebly.

  “Hmmp.” The man whose own tags included String ’em Up Sam and the Earl of Hell frowned at me. “Too bad if you’re not this notorious bootlegger. It’d give you a reliable livelihood.” Sighing heavily, he folded his hands on his stomach and sat back in the ringing silence of a house empty except for the two of us. “What’s for supper?”

  • • •

  Dual identity divides a person in more ways than one. I’d had long practice at being Morris Morgan, with Morgan Llewellyn put aside like an uncomfortable memory, and while that rearrangement of myself always took some toll on the nervous system, my assumed role in life was a safe bet as long as no one knew I was acting, so to speak, under an alias. Now the two individuals who meant most to me were aware of my change of name and the unflattering reason behind it, and while their reactions were worlds apart, the result was the same. Still volcanic as she flung things into her suitcase to leave, Grace erupted as I had tried one last time to assuage her. “You can call yourself Confucius for all I care, I am having no part of it. I refuse to look like a silly goose for marrying someone whose right name I had no least idea of. And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t tell anyone either.” In his turn, Sandison merely drawled, “I suppose what you call yourself is your own business. Just remember what happened to Billy the Kid.”

  So, unexposed except to the bleakness of existence without Grace—and the challenges of bachelor life with Sandison—all I knew to do was to keep on as before at the Thunder. One thing about a newspaper office, behavior that would get you thrown out on your ear elsewhere in society is winked at as long as your fingers can still find the right typewriter keys. “Something happen to your dog, Morgie?” was the extent of Armbrister’s fellow feeling toward me in my low mood. I felt an actual sense of relief when the Post’s editorials sharpened again with Cutlass calling my anti-Anaconda diatribes warmed-over cabbage in a cracked dish while I called his contributions the antics of an organ-grinder’s monkey on a copper chain. That kind of contest seemed safer than the domestic gauntlet I had just been put through.

  • • •

  Life had no more tricks up its sleeve until the day Sandison announced he would be late for supper—“The library trustees got it into their fool heads to have a meeting; bad habit of theirs”—and rather than face the empty house alone, I stayed on at work, thinking up Pluvius stratagem
s and losing track of the time.

  Dusk had given way to the lit windows of storefronts when I belatedly set out for home, into the teeth of a squall. Maneuvering through the sidewalk traffic of pedestrians ducking their heads as they hurried out of the weather, what popped to my mind was Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s hackneyed phrase in a justly obscure novel, “It was a dark and stormy night . . .” Well, it was. Energized by the wind, rain streaked the darkness, and as I climbed the street toward the Ajax end of town, each corner streetlamp was a silver cone of raindrops.

  By then, the only other storm-adrift soul in sight was a delivery van driver who had pulled to the curb and was bent over at a fender, apparently checking a tire. Slogging past with my head down against the chilly wind and rain, I suddenly felt something much, much colder at the back of my neck, unmistakably the business end of a gun. An authoritative voice ordered, “Get in the back of the truck. Fast.”

  Rather than have my head blown off, I clambered up the bumper step and stumbled into the blackness of the van. My captor followed swiftly, yanking the door shut behind him. “Sit down,” he snapped, “and don’t try any monkey business while I get a light going.” Managing to grope my way to a crate of some sort to sink onto, I tried to formulate a plan of action, not easy to do with the memory of that shotgun blast from undiscriminating bootleggers filling my mind. Mistaken identity could be a mortal error, a trigger squeeze away, if I made the wrong move. Meanwhile this assailant, kidnapper, whatever he proved to be, lit a carbide lamp such as was used in the mines. With the aid of its glow, my eyes adjusted to the dim interior of the van. Stacked around me were egg crates, sans eggs. In the full light of the lamp, I found myself looking at a near replica of myself.

  “You’re”—I swallowed—“him.”

  “And you’re not,” said the Highliner, keeping the pistol casually but steadily aimed straight at me. “Although there seems to be some confusion about that.”

  “Please understand,” I tried to keep a quaver out of my voice, “I did not set out to pose as you. It just happened.”

  “Right out of the blue, I suppose.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Isn’t that something.” He whistled through his teeth. “You’re just strolling along innocent as a lamb, two or three times, when all of a sudden Smitty and the boys, not to mention certain others, somehow get the notion you are me, eh?”

  With a flick of the gun, he cut off my protestation that such was exactly the case, and in the abrupt silence we sat studying each other. This was unnervingly like confronting myself in a full-length mirror. Upon close inspection, and mine of him was nearly microscopic in intensity, the Highliner was more solidly built than I was, but the pounds I had put on in the traveling year with Grace enforced the resemblance. My beard was dark chestnut to his cinnamon brown, but again, similar enough that it took more than a casual look to tell the difference. Our taste in clothes was not identical—tweed for me, serge evidently his preference—but overcoats concealed that. And as if we shared a forehead like Siamese twins, both of us chose snappy fedoras that pulled down low over the brow, a rakish effect I had liked until now.

  “Interesting how close we are in looks, isn’t it,” he broke my trance.

  “Breathtaking.”

  “Morris Morgan,” he tried the name on his tongue. “Easy one to remember, if you’re forgetful.”

  This was risky territory, but since we were there anyway, I tried: “Inasmuch as you know mine, this might go more easily if I had a name to call you.”

  He responded coolly, “Not in this life, friend.” Maybe it was my imagination, but his trigger finger seemed to twitch with those words. Oh, how I wished Chekhov had shot a toe off in a hunting accident, so he’d not been so eager to proclaim the theatrical dictum that when a gun appears onstage, it must ultimately be fired. The weapon I was facing, however this scene played out, plainly was in the hand of someone with a dramatic enough reason to use it, ridding himself of a troublesome double. One who was in no way bulletproof. To delay that outcome, I stammered, “How did you know I’m . . . me?”

  “It didn’t take any stroke of genius,” he scoffed. “That stunt of loading the trucks with newspapers got me to thinking about who a brainstorm like that would come from. This Pluvius character stands out as being pretty clever, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That depends,” I said dispiritedly. “If he were as smart as he sometimes thinks he is, he would not right now be incarcerated in a Golden Eggs delivery van.”

  What may have been a fleeting smile moved in his beard. “Speaking of that kind of thing, how’d you like your taste of jail hospitality?”

  No sooner had I blurted, “How did you find out—” than he shrugged as if there were nothing to it. “I have my ways of keeping track of what the cops are up to.” I recalled the startled desk sergeant. “Anyway, better you than me in the slammer. They let you out. Me, they’d throw away the key.”

  Still unable to keep my eyes off the unwavering gun, I ventured, “I hope you appreciate the favor.”

  His gaze as steady as the weapon, the Highliner studied me, the moments ticking by. Out in the dark, the wind howled and the rain pounded as though we were in some stormy cell of hell. Finally, he spoke. “You didn’t spill about the warehouse. You could have, you know. Cut a deal. Given them the boys and the booze, to let you off.”

  I answered stiffly, “I am not a stool pigeon or whatever you call it.”

  “Canary, songbird,” he reeled off, “fink, squealer, snitch—”

  “I get the idea.”

  “You’re not as enterprising as you could be, are you.”

  That stung. “All I want is to mind my own business.”

  “Which is putting a hornet up Anaconda’s nose.” He shook his head. “There are easier ways to make a living. Bootlegging, for one.”

  “Suum cuique,” I said before I thought. The gun lifting by an inch indicated rapid translation would be a good idea. “To each his own.”

  Once more, his expression softened under the beard. “You’re an odd duck, Morgan. And that probably makes us two of a kind, in more than looks.” He fondled the gun. “Am I right that you won’t try anything funny?”

  “Nothing even close, I assure you.”

  The pistol disappeared into a handy pocket and I breathed easier. “Do you mind telling me how is it that you, or I, or we, are so recognizable to the world at large?”

  The Highliner laughed, the dry kind with no mirth in it. “Don’t you know? That propaganda sheet, the Post, ran a likeness of me and a big story, back ’round Thanksgiving. Anaconda doesn’t like to see anybody make a dollar besides them. How’d you miss something like that?”

  “I was, ah, traveling.”

  “That answers that.” His voice even had a similar timbre to mine, and he had picked up the pattern of my diction with the ease of an actor; this person was a chameleon in his own right. “I kept trying to figure out why you showed up all of a sudden and Smitty and the boys couldn’t get over what a whirlwind I am.” He leaned forward and tapped my knee. “There at the warehouse—you passed up the chance to walk off with a bundle of money. How come? Some kind of Holy Joe, are you?”

  “Not noticeably. The temptation was tempered, so to speak, by the prospect of you dogging my trail every step of the way.”

  His laugh this time was silky with danger. “You’re not wrong about that.” Another tap on my knee. “Fill me in on something, so I look as smart around the warehouse as I’m supposed to be. Where’d that Whiskey Gap idea come from?”

  “Ocular logic.”

  “That or a lucky guess?” The Highliner sat back, tipping his fedora up a fraction in a minor salute. “Either way, it’s been perfect for us—we run trucks through there day and night. I ought to thank you some way.” He gestured royally to what was stacked around us. “Would you like a crate of hooch?”
/>
  “No, I would not. But if you really want to do me a favor—”

  “Yes? What?”

  “Shave.”

  He chuckled. “Nothing doing. The boys would think I chickened out, gotten scared of the other gangs.”

  I despaired. “Then you won’t part with a beard, and I can’t. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

  “Can’t?” That quick, he was gazing at me as if through a gunsight. “There’s something more on your mind than barbering. Spill it.”

  I drew in breath. This slick bootlegging operative had granted me reprieve, and in all conscience, I had to do the same for him. “While we’re in the trading mode, I should warn you—you’re not the only one with people on the lookout for you.”

  “Is that a fact,” he let out with a world-weary sigh. “It must be our irresistible good looks.”

  “If only it were that simple.” I told him my own twofold story, the Chicago gambling mob’s ire over the long-ago prizefight ready to be fanned anew if the big World Series bet was traced to me.

  When I was done, the Highliner whistled through his teeth again. “Man, you’re a case. I thought bootlegging was complicated. Thanks for tipping me off, I’ll put the boys on the lookout for stray hoodlums.” I felt better on that score, for the first time since Cutthroat Cartwright arrived. That lasted until the next words I heard. “What are you going to do to keep breathing? Don’t you carry?”

  “Carry—? Oh. A gun. No.” How much better off humankind would be had gunpowder never been invented and combat was waged with more civilized weapons. Such as brass knuckles. “Chicago pinkie rings,” I tried to sound tough but had to pat hard through my layers of clothing to make the telltale jingle.

  The Highliner rolled his eyes. “Sure, those are really great up against some gink armed to the teeth and more than arm’s length from you. But if that’s how you want to plan your funeral, it’s your choice.”