Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  “I hear you had quite a chat with Cutlass.” Jared was waiting when I next arrived at work, after the weekend, with Armbrister attentively on hand.

  “He trapped me,” I sighed. I explained that in true Cutthroat fashion he wanted to make it appear that the two of us were in cahoots, obviously bought off. The pursed expressions on my listeners caused me to pause. “Which I hope did not work whatsoever.”

  Jared faced me squarely. “Professor, I don’t doubt your word. Besides, Rab would beat up on me if I did. You were caught in a bad situation, as you say, and you wiggled out of it, by all reports. Good enough.” Now he paused. “Although you might have tossed that grub on him a little sooner.”

  He cut off my protest. “That’s that, all right? We’ve got other things to worry about. I’m heading to Helena to hold the governor’s hand, he’s getting the heebie-jeebies about when the lockout is ever going to end. Can’t really blame him, I’m having a few of those myself.” He said it in droll enough fashion, for a man who had turned himself into a lightning rod under the menacing cloud of Anaconda. “Hold the fort, gents,” he left us with, off to catch the train to Ulcer Gulch.

  Armbrister still was looking sour about Cartwright. “Conniving bastard to do that to you,” he gave the matter one last mutter. “All right, let’s get back to making hay. I’ve been busy with Cavaretta, trying to figure out new ways to say no progress on the lockout. Please tell your suffering editor you aren’t stuck for editorial ammo, too.”

  “Have no fear.” By staying late as much as I had, I’d managed to work ahead; there was at least that to be said for doldrums at the manse. “I have blasts of various velocity against Anaconda ready to go in overset, slugged for each day this week. I wanted to surprise you with some good news for a change.”

  Turning into Generalissimo Prontissimo, he shooed me off to fetch them for him immediately. “Morgie, nothing you do surprises me. Let’s see the little wonders, so I can slap headlines on them and get them set. Damn,” he said with relish, “it’s going to be nice to get back to tearing the hide off the Post, no more spitwads.”

  • • •

  But when both newspapers rolled off the presses the next day, I was the one who felt as if I were missing some skin. I had written an editorial I quite liked, to the effect that the smokeless skies over the tight-shut Hill were a clear indication of Anaconda’s undue power, concluding:

  When one lordly company can turn the actual atmosphere of an entire city, of a whole state, on and off at will, it is the very reverse of heavenly. It is satanic.

  —PLUVIUS

  As if by divination, the Post trotted out an old argument in favor of the smudge of belching smokestacks, of course with a certain Chicago flourish:

  There are certain starry-eyed types who seem to believe that the Hill will produce its copper just by wishing, instead of basic economics. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again, we’ll repeat it until the daydreamers grow ears as long as the jackass variety: the scent of smoke from working factories, such as the Hill’s when the costs of labor and the rewards of corporate investment are in economic balance, is the smell of money, wages, prosperity. You only have to be smart enough to sniff.

  —CUTLASS

  • • •

  “The scissorbill seems to have looked out the window at the blue sky the same time you did,” Sandison needlessly pointed out to me when I fumed to him over the sparring editorials, round one handily to Cartwright. “Either that or he’s reading your mind, heh.”

  That began the longest week of my newspaper career. In humiliating Cutthroat Cartwright the way I did at the Purity, I apparently roused him to the peak of his not inconsiderable journalistic talents. Day after day, edition after edition, my carefully thought-out editorials looked lame in comparison to his masterpieces of anticipation; suddenly his were the thunderous dispatches to the readers of Butte. Talk about humiliation. I felt almost as if I had been called onstage by a sly magician, told to shuffle a deck of cards and cut them, and every time he named off my bottom card without looking. Razzmatazz had deserted me and found a home with him. I won’t say I was cowed by Cartwright’s supernatural show of ability, but for the first time I had to wonder if I belonged in the wordslinging profession.

  In that frame of mind, I came home from the newspaper one otherwise fine day to find the front-porch drainpipe being lustily repaired. “What do you know for sure, Morrie?” Griff called out heartily. Too heartily. “Isn’t this weather something?” Hoop followed that with, just as full of false cheer.

  My mood sank farther toward my shoe tops. If rheumatic old miners were feeling sorry for me, I had to be even worse off than I’d thought. Brooding my way past the pair of them, I stopped on impulse. “You’re regular readers of the Thunder, am I right?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. Most definitely,” came the chorus.

  “And you’re familiar with the Post since the advent of Cutlass, yes?”

  They cautiously admitted to looking at the Anaconda rag now and then.

  “So you’ve no doubt been following his most recent editorials.”

  They looked back and forth uneasily. “Been on kind of a tear, hasn’t he,” Hoop finally came up with. “Strutting his stuff, a person would have to say,” Griff added.

  “And mine, lately?”

  “A little falling off, maybe,” said Griff.

  “Just a little. Got to read close to see it,” said Hoop.

  “So much for vox populi,” I muttered, and went on up the steps. They glanced up as I passed, the last word coming from Griff:

  “You asked.”

  • • •

  At the Thunder, Armbrister wasn’t saying anything, although the gloom evident beneath the green eyeshade bespoke plenty. When Jared returned from trying to settle down the governor, he looked unsettled himself by the Thunder’s recent editorial performance.

  “We’re gradually losing ground, Professor,” an understatement if there ever was one. “I’m hearing mutters from the Hill that maybe we’ve pushed Anaconda too far. What’s wrong with the company making enough money to pay people to work, even some of the miners who’ve stuck with the union through thick and thin are asking me.” He rubbed his short ear as if such questioning had done the damage. “I’m sensing we don’t have much time to turn this around,” he said somberly. “Morrie”—his use of my actual name said volumes about how serious a fix we were in—“I don’t have to tell you to do your best. But pull out all the stops in taking on this Cartwright hoodoo, all right?”

  Sound advice, but I knew nothing to do but compile another several days’ worth of my most imaginative efforts to be typeset, Armbrister outdoing himself with the flaming headlines he added. At the end of that awful week, though, I took home with me to Sandison, Ajax, and the manse the paralyzing sense that Cutlass could outguess, outmaneuver, outwrite me anytime he wanted. And that was not the worst.

  • • •

  Sunday morning, the plump weekend newspapers spread around Sandison and me at the breakfast table. Prominent of course was the editorial matchup, mine yet another dogged invocation of the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt against malefactors of great wealth, and Cutlass’s, alas, mocking a certain unnamed critic of the American way of business who blew the same limited tune on the same tin whistle time after time. I brooded into my coffee while Sandison was sopping up syrup with the last of his hotcakes and squinting critically at the side-by-side editorials. “Foxed you again, it looks like,” he unnecessarily announced. “He’s on quite a streak.” A prim eater for someone of his girth, he dabbed with his napkin lest any trace of breakfast find its way into his beard. “What’s this Cutlass character look like?”

  Bitterly I described the Chicago sheen of the man, outdressing me as well as outguessing me.

  “Hmm. Hmm.” I looked at him curiously. “Think I spotted him in the Reading Room yesterday,” Sand
ison drawled. “Took his hat off to read—didn’t strike me as the Butte type who wanders in to kill time until the speakeasies open. After he left, I went down and asked Miss Runyon what he’d looked up. She didn’t pay me any mind at first, claimed he was obviously a gentleman in town on business. Silly old bat.” He snorted. “She thinks any male who gives her the time of day is Prince Charming. Had to tell her he looked to me like he might be a snipper. That sent her flying off to what he’d asked for, which turned out to be in the bound newspapers.” His frosty eyebrows raised the dreaded question before he did. “The Chicago Tribune for July 1909. Mean anything to you?”

  My life, was all.

  20

  THIS TURN OF EVENTS HIT ME where it hurt most. Why oh why hadn’t I seen it coming? Cartwright was blocked from causing me grievous harm himself, or Jared’s men would do the same to him. But it became something terribly different if some third party—say, the Chicago gambling mob—were to target me. And the Windy City underworld style in these things was to make it perfectly plain who had done the target practice; it was a matter of bragging rights. No, Cartwright would be in the clear, and with twenty-twenty hindsight I saw how he was getting there. In the Purity when he squared off against me, the boxing stance I instinctively adopted not only set him back on his heels, it set him to thinking. It had taken him a while, but he figured out who that reminded him of, and a trip to the library refreshed his memory of a certain boxer who had been lightweight champion of the world and, worse, fitted me into the picture: the fixed fight, Casper’s well-known fate at the hands of the gamblers, and the gossip in the sporting circles Cartwright drew on for his column, that the other Llewellyn brother had got away but if the mob ever caught up with him, it was curtains.

  And that did not even include a notorious World Series bet that had fleeced the same gambling crowd a second time. I was a dead man twice over, if Cartwright tipped them off to my whereabouts.

  “You look green around the gills,” observed Sandison. “Anything a poor librarian can do to help?”

  “I’ll—I’ll let you know, Sandy.” I got to my feet, trying not to totter. “I have to think.”

  I went straight upstairs and dropped flat on the bed. The prone position maybe did not promote thinking, but it at least kept me from acting on my first impulse, which was to get on the next train out of town. Not for the first time had I come to this point of decision. You would think self-preservation made the choice definite, yet running was not the ready answer it had been too often in the past. Lying there, the ceiling of the manse over me like some blank plaster map, I thought of all I would be leaving behind for good. Grace. Sandison. Jared and Rab. Russian Famine. Armbrister and the newsroom. And Butte itself. This tortured, boastful, inventive, grudge-ridden, wisecracking city built not upon bedrock but copper ore was impossible to banish, like some wayward family member you can’t help but keep in touch with. If Butte fairly often got under everyone’s skin, including mine, the heart is located there as well as the spleen. Not to mention the red blood. No, there had to be some other answer than steel rails for the mortally tight spot I was in. If only I could come up with it.

  • • •

  They were waiting for me when I reached the Thunder newsroom the next day. Through the cubbyhole office’s pane of glass I could see Armbrister looking agitated, Jared determined, Rab tense as a cat.

  “Are your ears burning?” Jared said the instant I stepped in, their eyes fixed on me. “We’ve been trying our double damnedest to figure something out.” Union leader, publisher, senator, all his burdens of command weighed on his words. “Such as, how come you lost your touch at writing rings around Cartwright all of a sudden.”

  “I’ve spent a sleepless night on that myself,” I replied tonelessly.

  “Cutlass, pah,” Rab said with contempt. “I’d call him something else.”

  “Purple-prose bastard,” Armbrister provided in the next breath. Even more wound up than usual, he paced behind his desk as if caged. “Not to excuse what he’s been doing to Morgie lately, but the SOB has been a show-off right from the start. Christamighty, I was just a cub reporter in Denver when his Rough Riders dispatch came in, and I’ll never forget it. ‘Outlined against a tropical azure sky,’” he parroted, “‘they rode like horsemen of the Apocalypse, not four in number but a cavalry charging into history, wreaking destruction and defeat on the Cuban forces atop San Juan Hill.’ It made every front page in America.” He stopped short, green gaze leveled at the other three of us. “The hell of it is, I’d have run the damn thing, too, that fast,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “Anyway, that’s what we’re up against and we’d better quit beating around the bush and figure out—”

  “Say that again,” I blurted. “Back there at the start.”

  “What, purple-prose—”

  “No, the other. The lede.”

  Armbrister looked at me askance, but recited it again. “If you’re trying to pick up some tricks from him, it’s a little late.”

  I let that pass. Jared stirred, patience at an end, Rab biting her lip against what was coming. “Let’s get to the main thing. Go ahead, Jacob, you came up with it.”

  A picture of reluctance, Armbrister hesitated in facing around to me but said what he had to. “Cutlass outguesses your every move lately. If it were checkers, you’d be cleaned off the board. Are you thinking what we are?”

  “Inescapably,” I sighed.

  Veteran of journalistic shenanigans that he was, he spelled it out. “No one is that good a guesser, not even this Cutthroat bird. Somebody’s tipping off the Post.”

  “Snitching, I’d call that,” said Rab indignantly.

  “Spying,” Jared bleakly defined it.

  Armbrister swore a short blue streak, then threw up his hands in frustration. “How can it be? I handpicked the entire staff.” Through the office window he scanned the newsroom, every man and woman head down at their tasks, trying to picture to himself who out there amid the busy typewriters and jangling phones of news gathering—stalwart Cavaretta, Sibley the go-getter, coy Mary Margaret Houlihan, Matthews the old hand on rewrite, twenty others—could conceivably be the traitor. Very slowly he turned to Jared. “I ought to have my tongue scraped for saying this, but it needs to be said. Everyone but Morgie here.”

  • • •

  The Scarlet Pimpernel moment again. Myself rewritten. Only, this time the secret existence, the hidden identity, stands forth in a far different light. This time the chameleon on the barber pole, in Grace’s unfortunately immortal phrase, is shown to be desperately trying to save his skin, as it were. How many pages back in the chronicle of time does such a mask, as dramatically alluring to don as those of tragedy and comedy, have to be put on? Merely to the chapter break after the episode in the Purity Cafeteria, when quicker than the eye can follow on the page, the chameleon gets cold feet and turns a subdued color. Cartwright is contacted, a price is named, a deal done, and the Thunder’s editorials take a dive, in boxing parlance. Always intriguing to see oneself cast in a new role.

  • • •

  Ah, well. Enough of make-believe. I faced my jury of three—Armbrister edgy, Jared alert, Rab frozen—and spoke from the heart. “I hope no one really thinks that I spend part of my time writing my soul out for the Thunder, and the other part slipping information that makes me look like a fool.”

  “There, see?” Rab couldn’t contain herself. “Morris Morgan is a better man than that, I’d bet my life on it.”

  Jared did not go that far, but he was earnest in his verdict. “Relax, Professor. Even you aren’t that much of a Houdini.”

  “I didn’t mean to accuse you,” Armbrister backtracked in a mutter, “it just drives me up the wall that anybody in this newsroom is in cahoots with Cartwright.”

  “Thank you for the votes of confidence,” I said without irony. “Besides, I know who our informer is.”
<
br />   There was a moment of silent goggling at me, before Armbrister beat Jared and Rab to speech. “Why in the name of Pete didn’t you say so? Just point the finger. I’ll fire whoever it is so fast he won’t know what hit him.”

  I drew the deepest breath possible. “Unfortunately, the solution isn’t that simple.”

  It fell to Jared to ask: “Why not?”

  “Because . . . because . . .”—the words did not want to come—“the spy is Russian Famine.”

  21

  “MR. MORGAN, Y-YOU”—RAB, stricken, shocked, next thing to speechless for once but not for long—“you have to be wrong. I can’t believe it. I won’t.”

  Jared, equally jolted, was more to the point. “Are you sure?”

  “Unfortunately so,” I spoke with the firm conviction that a sleepless night of thinking can lead to. “It has to be him. No one else comes and goes so readily, in time to tip off Cutlass to what I’ve written, day after day.”

  “But a milk-tooth kid like him?” Armbrister burst out. “How in hell does he do it?”

  “That is yet to be determined. And if we simply accuse him, he may swear with all his heart it wasn’t him. Rab, do you agree?” Governess of the boy empire of fibbers—to say the least—at the detention school, she could only nod mutely. “To put it in starkest terms,” I said with reluctance, “we have to catch him at it.”

  The three of them glanced at one another, then read my face before the words came. “Let me.”

  • • •

  When the Thunder rolled off the press as usual that afternoon, Rab and Jared made themselves absent so as not to give away what we were up to, and Armbrister wasn’t any more scowly than ever when Russian Famine beelined in from the back shop to the gumdrop jar, mumbling “Hiya” as he passed me, and like a wraith, he was gone again to load his baby carriage with newspapers. I slipped out of the newsroom immediately after, mentally mapping out his route. And down on the street, as the newsboys spilled out of the back shop with their shouldered bags bulging to head for their corners and one came pushing his newspaper-laden pram, I turned myself into a window man.