Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  Jared looked at me levelly, frank as the moon. “That’s not what I was thinking, believe it or not.” He lowered his voice as he had done in the newspaper office. “Rab and I need your help. With Russian Famine.”

  I blurted, “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “The worst,” he said whimsically. “He’s growing up. Remember what a holy mess that was, for any of us?”

  Looking off ahead to where the street started to climb, Jared continued: “He’s not really ours to raise as if our word is law, worse luck. Can’t adopt him because he’s still legally the ward of that uncle of his who used to go round with a pushcart sharpening knives, remember him?” A rueful shake of the head. “The old devil was pretty sharp himself, scooting back to Poland when he saw that Rab and I would look out for the boy. But never mind that, we just want to do the best we can for Famine, and that’s where you come in.” Jared marched the words out of himself at a pace as determined as his strides. “He’s at that restless age. Not saying much, but you can tell there’s more going on in him than he knows what to do with. So, we wondered if you might pitch in and find something to keep him occupied.”

  I was listening hard, but still had trouble believing my ears at Jared’s next words. “Say, boxing lessons.”

  I stopped short, under a streetlamp casting a cone of light like a net. “Wh-what makes you think I’m capable?”

  Jared turned to me in surprise. “Rab again. She picked up the notion, back when you were her schoolteacher, that you knew a little something about boxing. Said you could square away with the eighth-grade galoots smartly enough, it kept them in order.”

  I breathed again.

  Man to man, Jared confided: “She’d rather you gave him Latin lessons, wherever she got that from.” He grinned ever so slightly. “I had to point out to her, Russian Famine has trouble sitting still for English.” Then, more soberly: “That’s a tough bunch he’s around at the detention school, and then there are the Post newsboys. We just want him to be able to stick up for himself if push comes to shove, as it generally does in this town.”

  “All well and good,” I sighed. “And I happen to know a right cross from a left hook. But honestly, I am no pugilist myself. I don’t see what good I can—”

  “You’re a teacher. You can do anything.”

  The blunt force of that statement took my words away. Jared Evans reached out a hand and shook mine, a pact beneath the moon as old as brotherhood between men.

  “It’s settled then, Professor. You’ll show Famine how to handle his dukes.” And he strode away at that marching pace, into the night.

  • • •

  Cautious as I was in answering the door since the postal gunman, Russian Famine was shuffling his feet like a nervous suitor by the time I let him in the following evening. “Hiya, sir,” he said with a swallow, stepping in as if across hot coals. “Some house,” his voice sounded shrunken. “You live here all by yourself?”

  “For the time being,” I put the best face on that.

  “I’d be spooked.” That hit home, in more ways than one. The manse yawned around us, growing bigger with the night. What does it say about the human nervous system that one of us had been more at ease springing around atop bookshelves at the public library, and the other of us thought less of cajoling a hundred people into a dance called America, than either of us felt at the prospect of spending time in a lonely house?

  While I was hanging up Famine’s jacket and cap, he turned so fidgety that I expected he was about to ask the way to the bathroom, but no. “Where’d the old fella get plugged?”

  Uncomfortably, I indicated on my rib cage the approximate spot of Sandison’s wound.

  Famine shook his head, hair flopping. “Unh-uh, where was he at? Is there bloodstains?”

  “As much as I hate to disappoint you, it happened right where we’re standing.”

  “Aw.”

  Taking pity, I pointed to the bullet holes overhead. He brightened. “That’s better!” After counting the ceiling perforations to himself, he gave me an awkward glance. “You didn’t get a lick in on the guy with your brassies or nothing?”

  That question in other forms had circled me ever since, but it took a boy to ask it. With a tight throat, I related that I was down the hall when the shooting started, but Sandison managed to land a blow.

  “The Earl of Hell bashed him one? Awright!” I could see in his eyes he was imagining the scene down to the last detail, then the frown coming. “So how’d he get plugged?”

  Truth can be such a difficult master. “He stepped in front of a bullet. Meant for me.”

  “No kidding?” The boy looked at me a new way. “You’re a lucky duck.”

  “I suppose I am,” I said huskily. “Let’s get on with the boxing lesson, shall we?” He trailed me into the drawing room, where I had shoved the furniture back for us to maneuver. When I produced boxing gloves for us both, he shuffled uncertainly again. “I dunno,” he mumbled, eyeing the mitts, each larger than his head. “How’m I supposed to wallop anybody with them things?”

  “That’s what we’re about to work on, how to wallop without being walloped. These are the tools of the trade in learning that.”

  “If you say so,” he said dubiously.

  I had him strip off his shirt, as I did mine, true to ring tradition, and at once regretted it. In his undershirt, he was the definition of skinny; no more meat on him than a sprat, as the old saying goes. But Jared was right, he was growing, his legs and arms ahead of the rest of him. Where there’s reach, there’s hope.

  As I was tying his gloves on, my fingers knowing how almost without me, he gnawed his lip before looking up at me and making it known, “I better own up—I got my doubts about this boxing stuff.”

  “Now’s the time to voice them,” I said, as if I hadn’t just bypassed my own. “Such as?”

  “Sure it isn’t a fancy way of getting beaten up?”

  I sucked in a breath. “Famine, we want to keep that from happening. That’s why I am going to have to teach very carefully and you are going to have to learn very thoroughly.”

  He twisted and turned before coming out with it. “See, what I like to do when a scrap comes up is run.”

  He made sure I understood. “’Stead of a fight. I’m awful good at running.”

  That was not so far from the philosophy that had governed certain chapters of my own life. Run away and live to fight another day; not for nothing is that the most poetic of strategies. And I had seen him bolt off at full speed, swift as a zephyr. What was I doing, what were his supposed protectors Jared and Rab doing, in upsetting the defense nature had given him?

  “Sometimes the circumstances are such,” I tried to sound convincing to both of us, “that you simply can’t get away. Or choose not to. You don’t want the Post newsies to take away your corner, you said.”

  “Yeah, that’s the trouble,” he said darkly. “Can’t run and be there too.”

  “And in the oldest story there is, that’s why hands are sometimes made into fists,” I said as I pulled on boxing gloves for the first time in a dozen years. “And ultimately why we’re at this. The first thing is to guard against having your block knocked off, as I believe the hoosegow school approach is, hmm? Here, watch me protect my head. Elbows in, forearms up, see how my gloves shield my face?” Gloved hands dangling almost to his knees during my demonstration, Famine studied the matter before reluctantly nodding. “All right, now it’s your turn,” I encouraged. “As they say in the funny papers, put ’em up.”

  He did so in a way that made me drop my guard as though I’d seen a ghost.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, peering at me over the leather moons of his gloves. “Ain’t this the same as you done it?”

  “You’re left-handed.”

  “Person’s gotta be one or the other, don’t he?”r />
  “It’s an advantage,” I somehow found the words, overtaken as I was by the flood of memory. “Be sinister to be dextrous.”

  “Huh?”

  “Merely a saying in Latin about the left and right hands. Never mind,” I murmured, still hurtled back to a boxing ring where the young fighter facing me was nearly my mirror image, except for his cocky grin and the bit of footwork he was practicing. Casper and his left hook, as I sparred with him to develop that surprise punch. “I got it down pat, Morrie. Squash the bug”—the ball of his left foot digging in—“give a hug”—the left arm and shoulder coming around as if in sudden embrace—“hit the lug”—whapping me half across the ring as his fist connected. Casper’s little rhyme and sinister hand, the left, put away opponent after opponent who literally did not know what hit them. As if at the sound of the bell at the start of a round, I came out of my trance, back in the company of a scrawny boy whom life was apt to rain blows on if I did not do something about it. “Famine, we are going to concentrate on one particular maneuver. Here, watch.”

  Time after time I put him through the motions, footwork, shoulder and arm and fist working as one, until we were both panting and could hardly hold our gloves up. Even so, he was reluctant when I called a halt and began to strip off our mitts. “When am I ever gonna get a real punch in?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  • • •

  “Oof!”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bust you one when you wasn’t ready.”

  “No, no, surprise is a permissible tactic, within limits. I was thinking when I should have been ducking. Always dangerous. Let’s work on that left hook some more. The last one was more of a haymaker, which is why I wasn’t looking for it.”

  “Here goes. Squash the bug . . .”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Give a hug . . .”

  “Yes, good.”

  “Hit the lug.” Smack.

  “Yes, well, I felt that one on the jaw, definitely. You’re showing progress.”

  “Better be. Running’s easier.”

  “All right, now let’s spar a little before you throw the next one. Gloves up, remember.” Bobbing and weaving, I circled him as he pawed back, instinct of defending what I held dear gaining possession of me. Take that, Mazzini!

  “Ouch!”

  “Oops, sorry, Famine. I got carried away.”

  “Ain’t it about my turn to whack back?”

  “Arguably. Give it a try. Keep that foot planted, good, good, shoulder and arm and fist ready, now! Ow! Casper would be proud.”

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Someone familiar with a left hook, is all. Let’s call it a night.”

  • • •

  Sparring partners that we were, one of us sharpening reflexes long dormant and the other learning moves of a past champion, Russian Famine and I took on our foes.

  “Nailed ’im,” he reported proudly when the next Post newsboy tried to hijack his corner. “Right in the kisser.”

  I must have scored similarly with some editorial blow, judging by what transpired one evening after Famine had shed his gloves and gone home. The house now silent, I was doing a bit of bookkeeping in Sandison’s ledger—the Butte Public Library budget was a miracle of levitation in his design, and if I did not keep things in balance to his satisfaction I was sure to hear about it—when the door knocker banged like a shot in the night.

  Thinking it wise to put on brass knuckles first, I opened the door the barest crack and peeped out. Sleek as a sheikh, there stood a personage who could only be Cutthroat Cartwright.

  “Moe sent me,” he parodied the speakeasy “Open, Sesame,” which had practically become the national password since Prohibition. Dressed in the brazen elegance that announced Chicago—snappy hat, tailored pinstripe suit, and two-tone perforated oxfords, reading from top to bottom—he gazed cavalierly in at me through the narrow opening as though I were the wiseacre in the matter. “Come on, buddy, where’s your western hospitality? We need to have a chit-chat.”

  The horns of a dilemma can come at a person, as that limited but effective poet Cheyne put it, as hooked and blood-bright / as surprise in a bullfight. And at the moment I had a paralyzing case of surprise. Which to do? Close the door on the importunate face, brassy as Ajax’s, with something like “You must have the wrong address, this isn’t the Fraternal Home for Character Assassins”? Or let the unwelcome visitor in as an opportunity to size up the opposition?

  Falling in between is not at all a good course, yet that is what I ended up doing. Trying to deliver an austere “Sorry, I don’t speak snake language,” I let the door swing too wide. Or perhaps it opened of its own accord, under the influence of that forceful gaze and wardrobe. Before I could muster myself and almost before I could slip brass knuckles out of sight into my side pocket, in strode the journalistic slasher called Cutlass, handing me his hat to hang up. He had the sheen of a big fish among minnows. I knew I must be careful not to be swallowed.

  Taking in everything at a glance, the acre of house and me, he launched right in. “Fancy digs. How do you rate a setup like this on a scribbler’s pay? Rich wife?”

  “Providence of another sort,” I said stiffly.

  “Good old Providence. What would we do without the old dame?” Looking every inch the John Held Jr. caricature that topped his famous column in the Chicago Herald—cannonball head, pencil-line mustache, calculating eyes, and mouth set for the last word—the unwelcome visitor at once glimpsed the floor-to-ceiling books in Sandison’s lair and went and peered in. He gave a low whistle. “No wonder you were able to shoot down my try at nailing your Thunder bunch as a nest of pinkos, with all this ammunition. Nice job you did, incidentally.” A sardonic gleam as he turned to me. “Although I’ll bet a lot of those books are in Lenin’s library too, don’t you think?”

  I burst out, “If you’re here to show off your bag of dirty tricks, Cartwright, you can just—”

  “Call me Cutty,” he insisted smoothly. “What do you go by?”

  I drew up short at the sudden jeweler’s squint he was giving me, as if trying to evaluate past my beard. “Morgan will do.”

  “Be that way,” he shrugged off my rebuff. He cocked an ear, then the other. “Quiet as a mausoleum in here, isn’t it. No wife at all? Only you rattling around in this barn?”

  Just that quick, he had me caught in a race with myself, fielding domestic questions to fend off worse ones. “She’s away.” All too much truth in that. “I have a boarder but he’s incapacitated, as I’m sure you know.”

  “That’s right!” exclaimed the journalistic cutthroat who was not going to hear a chummy “Cutty” out of me. “The leading citizen who got plunked instead of you. What did I hear the unlucky chump is in this two-bit town,” he pondered, “the old gray mare?”

  “He’s not mayor,” I immediately disparaged that. Too late realizing, with my heart fluttering, that I had just shown I was familiar with that flat Chicago pronunciation of it. And given myself away, that fast? If so, Cartwright showed no sign, blandly waiting for me to go on. Not quite through clenched teeth, I managed, “Samuel Sandison is the Butte public librarian, the best anywhere.”

  “How about that. From the sound of it, near immortal but not bulletproof,” he toyed with that philosophically while my heart did a bigger skip at his employment of that last word. “That beats most of us, wouldn’t you say?” Casually tilting his head back, he gandered at the bullet holes overhead as if beholding the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “So here we are at the scene of the crime, hmm? They must be lousy shots in Butte.” He laughed. Jocular he was not. That laugh would have soured milk.

  Still stargazing, he confided, “You came out of it lucky in more ways than one, buddy. The Post was going to plaster that little ruckus on the front page, drag you through all the mud it could, and the Thunder along with it.
I made them spike the story.”

  Dry-throated, I managed to respond: “I don’t suppose your generosity comes at a price or anything like that.”

  He waved that off with just his fingers. “The little stuff comes free.”

  “Or maybe,” it was time I pushed back, “that story would have raised a few too many questions about who might have hired the gunman.”

  “Conceivably,” he nodded on every syllable, meanwhile giving me a lidded look. “Anyway, I made it known they shouldn’t be trying to bump you off, if they were. You’re worth more alive than dead, Morgan. Not everybody who takes on the Anaconda Copper Mining Company can say that.”

  However much of that was true, I managed to digest enough to say I supposed I should be flattered. “State your business, Cutthroat.”

  “All in good time,” he passed that off in the manner of one man of the world to another. “We ought to get to know each other a little, don’t you think? Journalistic blood brothers that we are.” Parking his hands, thumbs sticking out, in the pockets of his expensively tailored suit, he did a perfect version of a Windy City alderman. “Back where I’m from, we gen’lly start things off wid a drink togedda.”

  Like the lord of the manor—well, I was—I responded, “If you don’t mind Old Ballycleuch.”

  His surprise showed. “You must have one hell of a bootlegger.” The Burns birthday libation from Sandison’s bottom desk drawer to the rescue, I poured what I hoped were proper proportions to oil Cartwright’s tongue and not mine. We sat down across from each other in the cavernous living room, like characters in a sketch, and he toasted, mock or not, “Remember the Maine!” I didn’t like the way he kept looking at me. “Morgan,” he tasted the name along with the scotch. “You don’t wrap yourself around that glass like an Irishman and you’re not snotty enough to be English. Welsh, right?”