Sweet Thunder (9 page)

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.

The bootleggers flocked around the map like crows at a picnic basket.

I waited tensely as they peered at the geography in studious silence until suddenly one of them broke out excitedly: “I know that neck of the woods, I'm from up toward there! The boss is right, there's an old Indian trail through a gap in them benchlands up there. I bet it would take trucks!”

I nodded wisely, resisting an urge to wink lest I overplay the role. “It's Whiskey Gap now,” Smitty declared, rubbing his palms together in satisfaction. “Didn't I tell you the Highliner would have the answer?”

Very, very carefully putting down the sawed-off shotgun, I made a show of glancing at the wall clock as if pressed for time. But before I could make a move toward my departure, the mustached man was asking with urgency: “Boss, how'd that Great Falls mess come out? Did you get those cops that raided the speakeasy squared away?”

“We'll—” I had to think hard for the barnyard phrase—“teach them not to suck eggs.”

Around the room a general nod of agreement indicated that took care of that, somehow.

Using the chance, I started to say it was time for me to take my leave, but reworked it in my head and brought out:

“I need to scram.”

Smitty put up a protesting hand. “Boss? We know you send Mickey around at the end of the month for it, but you brung your satchel and all—don't you want the take? Save Mick the trip?” He gestured proudly. “We had a good holiday season. Everybody in Butte was busy hoisting drinks on New Year's—boy, was they ever. Show him the dough, Sammy.”

I stood rooted, my dumbstruck expression mistaken for quizzical. The mustached thug went to the safe in the corner, knelt and spun the combination. When the safe clicked open, inside were stacked bundles and bundles of currency. Staring at the largesse, I was practically overcome with the memory of the munificent Black Sox bet. Here for the taking lay a similar fortune, sufficient to propel Grace and me back into the high life of the past year. A train tonight would put us and the bulging satchel in Seattle by this time tomorrow, and from there an ocean liner to Hawaii, Siam, Tasmania, anywhere . . . It was so tempting it was paralyzing. Like me, the whole roomful gazed reverently at the pile of cash.

Trying to keep the strain out of my voice, I said one of the harder things I have ever uttered.

“Let it sit on the nest and hatch out some more.”

An appreciative laugh rippled through the bootleggers. “You know best, boss,” said the mustached one, tenderly closing the safe. “While you're here, you got any advice about how to keep the racket going so good?”

I stroked my beard as if in Viennese consultation. “Keep doing what you're doing.” Leaving them with the simple wisdom of that, I rapped out, “Smitty?” He jumped like a puppet. “Walk me to the corner.”

•   •   •

“You don't know who the Highliner is? Morrie, do you go around with your head under a bushel basket?” Across the table from me, Griff squinted as if trying to see if I was all there.

“Kind of a willie wisp,” Hoop propounded about my evident double. “Shows up somewhere and, poof, he's gone.”

“This still tells me nothing definitive about his identity,” I pointed out.

Griff speedily took care of that. “He's the number one bootlegger in the state. Most wanted man since Judas.”

“Nobody knows who he is,” Hoop anticipated my further question. “Drives the cops crazy.”

“I imagine.” Whatever his pedigree, the mastermind behind the fleet of egg trucks and similar innocuous delivery vehicles was resourceful. And to judge by that stack of cash in the safe, which still smarted to think about, highly successful. In any case, I felt fortunate to have dipped in and out of the Highliner's persona without undue harm, and to have learned not to set foot in the warehouse district again. One shotgun blast was plenty. Not wanting to alarm her, I had not told Grace, or for that matter any of the others, about that episode of mistaken identity, let alone the gunfire. But I could see wifely curiosity being aroused as she followed my exchange with our tablemates. “Why do you ask, Morrie?”

“Merely keeping current. Newspaperman's habit, you know.”

“Prohibition,” Sandison startled us all with a growl. “They might as well have tried to put a chastity belt on the entire country while they were at it. Pass the spuds.”

•   •   •

For days after that, I jumped a little every time an automobile backfired, but gradually my encounter with warring bootleggers began to fade. Memory shares some of the properties of dream, and as time passed, the episode softened into something like deep-of-the-night thoughts: Was that actually me, turning down a stack of money that barely fit into a safe? What bound me (and of course Grace) to Butte and its backstreet hostilities except a gift-horse mansion? Answer came none, as is so often the case with thoughts that appear in the night, and increasingly I had to put my mind to the field of battle across town, the
Thunder
's hard-fought contest with our competitor.