Live it up while you can, Mister Man About Town,
Because what you gonna do when the rent comes roun’?
Whistling it softly to myself, I contradicted the catchy popular tune by counting out my rent money as usual, that subsequent week, as I came down a few minutes early for supper. Grace was not there to take it. The table was not yet set. This was a new experience; generally the Faraday Boarding House ran like a seven-day clock.
I peeked in the kitchen, to find supper uncooked but Grace steaming.
“Make yourself useful, please,” she said testily, bent low to the opened oven. “Yell up to the others that supper will be a while yet. This bird refuses to get done.”
In double defiance-pale and dry-the latest turkey lay there in the roaster, and after calling upstairs to Hoop and Griff to hold on to their appetites, I returned to the kitchen, rolling up my sleeves. “If I might suggest, it is time to baste the beast.”
“Baste,” Grace said, with a fry cook’s doubtfulness.
“Allow me.” Crouching where she had been, I spooned the turkey’s drippings over the breast and drumsticks, then stoked up the kitchen stove with a couple of pitchy sticks of wood. “There, now, the meal has no choice but to cook.”
No sooner had I said so than the floor did a little dance. Silver-ware jingled, and Grace steadied a cream pitcher. After a moment, she dismissed the latest shake of everything. “That could have been worse.”
“Grace,” I let out along with my breath, “I will gladly take your word for that.” I doubted I could ever get used to dynamite going off beneath the house.
Pushing a rather fetching flaxen wisp of hair off her forehead, she studied me as if I was the newest distraction. “Sit down for a minute, star boarder. There’s something we need to talk about.”
I went still. Was I in for another grilling about whether I was an IWW secret operative? What was I supposed to do, march around Butte wearing a sandwich board that read I AM NOT A WOBBLY?
“If it’s about an unfortunate event in the library a while back,” I fended as I settled across the kitchen table from her, “that was sheerly a case of mistaken-”
“It’s church,” she announced, rolling her eyes. “There’s talk. About us. ‘Ye and me,’ ” and she did not a bad imitation of the wee Welsh preacher. Griff had been asked to fill in with the choir a few more times, and the two of us and Hoop duly had made command performances as audience. What was wrong with that? Answering my inquiring look, Grace fanned with a hand as if brushing away pests. “What some of the nosy ones around the neighborhood are saying is”-she reddened at the exact words-“I’m taking up with a boarder. The old biddies.”
Gossip, forever the whisper in the wind. “Mmm,” I met Grace’s report with uncertainty.
“Morrie?” Her violet eyes took in mine, a test that wouldn’t go away. “Do you feel, um, taken up with?”
“I am about to fork over my week’s rent,” I said, unsure of how much honesty beyond that was a good idea just then. “That tends to put matters in a certain perspective.”
Carefully folding my money away into her apron pocket, she allowed: “It does, doesn’t it.” Still hesitant, she went on: “There’s the matter of appearances, though. A boardinghouse has to be extra careful not to be lumped in with-” She gestured off toward the fleshly neighborhood of Venus Alley.
Now Grace looked at me, but not quite straight at me. “So you know what this means. I’m sorry, but-”
I waited, dreading the prospect of trying to find any other lodging in Butte as cozy as this.
“-you’ll have to go to church just with Hoop,” she finished off her decree. Then bounced up to take out the perfectly roasted turkey.
REPRIEVED AT THE BOARDINGHOUSE, I could now busy myself learning the ins and outs of the library’s finances. Sandison’s style of bookkeeping had been what might be called extemporaneous, with occasional casual entries of Miscellaneous book purchases followed by sums that might well make a library trustee gulp. Trying to untangle his method, if that’s what it was, I finally spotted in the ledger pages of staff wages and hours his hole card, so to speak. Me. Counting up, I could see there was not quite as much staff as was budgeted for-always a position or two short-and he covered those gaps in service, and doubtless put what would have been the wages into that bland expenditure on books, by shuttling employees from job to job during the course of a day. That works until, say, the board of trustees’ president’s wife is kept waiting at the temporarily vacant genealogy desk. My arrival plugged a lot of slots. Shunting me from task to task as Sandison did took those burdens off the other staffers; on a ranch I believe I would have been called the choreboy. I didn’t mind; variety has always been more to my taste than its opposite. I even was growing fond of the diverse evening groups, catching the end of the discussion those nights when it fell to me to go back to the library and close up, enjoying the verbal volleying about Hamlet’s nervous condition or Wilson’s strategy at the Paris peace conference. (However, I prudently waited for the Gilbert and Sullivan clan to vacate entirely before I tended to the music stands, lest Dora Sandison pounce on me with some other demand.) And on a more daily basis, when needed at a desk, I happily stepped into that role of librarian as bartender of information. Presiding over shelves of intoxicating items, dispensing whatever brand of knowledge was ordered up, I am sure I poured generously. At least Sandison must have thought so, the morning he told me to get downstairs and fill in for Miss Runyon at the Reading Room main desk as she made her grand descent to prepare for story hour.
Elevated there at the high desk, I was coping with patrons’ questions when commotion broke out in the foyer.
“Don’t, pigface.”
“Can’t take it, huh, bag ears?”
“Jack and Molly, quit that or I’ll have your hides.”
The purr of threat in the teacherly voice settled things down, at least momentarily, and in trooped as rough and tough a crowd, male and female, as I had seen yet in Butte. On the other hand, they were twelve-year-olds and a freckle epidemic was loose among them. In flat caps and pigtails, hand-me-down britches and mended pinafores, plainly these were children from one of the neighborhoods on the Hill, spruced up for the library visit, but the sprucing could go only so far. Watching casually as edgy girls and pushing boys milled down the stairwell to the auditorium, I took a bit of guilty pleasure in the thought that Miss Runyon would have her hands full with this mob.
“Mr. Morgan.” The purr was close at my side. “Your mustache is back.”
I turned and was nearly startled off my sitting place.
“Rabrab!” I blurted, drawing nasty looks and one severe shhh from the Reading Room patrons.
A knowing laugh arrived with the same throatiness as the purr. “You remember. But you would, wouldn’t you. Did you know the whole school used to call you the Walking Encyclopedia?”
I had last seen Barbara Rellis as a sixth-grader, a dark-eyed willow of a girl on the lookout for intrigue. Foremost in my memory was my first day of teaching at the Marias Coulee one-room school, when she ever so innocently raised her hand during roll call and asked if for the sake of keeping up with certain contrary stunts of the boys she couldn’t turn her name around, most of it at least, just on the schoolground where name-calling ran every direction anyway? I found an appealing flavor of logic in that and let her. The Rabrab of then had filled out into a fashionably bobbed young woman, still slender but with a substantial bodice, and those eyes that so often held mischief like a flash of struck flint now had authority to them as well. She called over to the tail of the brigade dragging its feet in the stairwell. “Margie, mind them, please, give them a swat if you have to. Tell the story lady they’re all hers, she can start. I’ll be there in a minute.” An older schoolgirl, obviously conscripted for the outing, took charge and the last of the children were hustled down the stairs.
Rabrab’s-Barbara’s-attention swung back to me. “I see that little smile,” she said with one of her own, “don’t try to hide it. You caused this, you know, my ending up a teacher. A number of us have. Paul Milliron is already a county superintendent, had you heard?” She was studying me, from my mustache on in, a faint wrinkle of puzzlement at the side of her eyes. “At first I didn’t think it could be you, perched here like the head canary. In Butte, of all places. We were told you’d gone to-where was it? Transylvania?”
“Never mind. In the here and now, I-”
“Have you been back to Marias Coulee, since?”
“Not in person. I mean, no. Rab-Barbara, that is-”
This time her smile was the sly schoolgirlish one I remembered so well, as though she had something sweet tucked in her cheek. “You can call me that. It would make two of you who do. That’s rather nice.”
We were conversing in spirited whispers, not the best etiquette for the Reading Room, and I summoned Smithers from periodicals to sit in for me. Hurriedly escorting Rab out into the foyer, where there was only Shakespeare to overhear us, I began trying to contain the situation.
“About Marias Coulee. I must take you into my confidence, Rab.” It worked. The racehorse keenness she had always shown at any prospect of conspiracy was immediately there to see. “It is best if no one in our old neighborhood knows I am back in Montana,” I went on, “because of-well, possible hard feelings, you’ll understand.” I paused for what I hoped was drama’s sake. “Rose and I had a falling out. A family matter.”
She swooped on that. “It happens over and over, doesn’t it. A brother and a sister, you’d think they were built to get along, but no, they find every way there is to get crosswise with each other. I see it all the time in my pupils. So I’m not surprised-those of us at school thought you and Rose were born in different phases of the moon, as the saying goes. And you won’t go back now because you don’t want to stir up old trouble-that is so like you, Mr. Morgan.”
“I could not have put it better myself.”
Rab leaned closer, back to whispering. “Now I’ll let you in on a secret. It just happened, the other night. I’m betrothed. E-n-g-a-g-e-d,” she rattled off as if in one of Marias Coulee’s spelling bees. She wrinkled her nose, turning in an instant into the perfect facsimile of a pretty and mischievous bride.
There was no hiding my smile this time. “The lucky man is getting more than he bargained for.”
“But keep the news to yourself for now,” she added anxiously. “My pupils can be such awful teases, and I want to wait until the school year is over to-”
As if the word pupil had triggered open a gate at the head of the hall, here toward us came one of the schoolgirls, mostly knees and pigtails. Undoubtedly she had put up her hand in that urgent way that allowed her to go to the lavatory, but she marched right past it until she was practically at the hem of Rab’s smock.
“Just so you know, Miss Rellis, Russian Famine snuck off.”
“Not with you around, Peggy, I’m sure. Now do your business and scoot back downstairs.” The class tattler flounced happily into the lavatory, and Rab spun to me. “Is there another staircase?”
I took her down the hallway toward the set of stairs at the back of the stacks. “Rab,” I questioned as we quickstepped along, “isn’t your class somewhat advanced for story hour? They look very much like-”
“Sixth-graders,” she sighed. “Don’t you dare laugh, Mr. Morgan.” She herself had been a ringleader-it was the kind of class that had many-in the populous sixth grade that had been my biggest handful in the Marias Coulee schoolroom.
“I won’t bother to say justice is served,” I told her archly. “But story hour at that level-what sort of story?”
“First aid.”
It was always hard to tell with Rabrab whether she was pulling your leg. She shook her head as I scrutinized her. “It’s the school board’s big idea.” Her expression sharpened. “Most of the boys will be in the mines in just a few years, and most of the girls will be hatching other children, up on the Hill. The thinking is, it might spare the public treasury in the future if they learn some first aid before what is going to happen to some of them happens. In theory, I suppose I can’t argue with that.” Another sigh. “In any case, your Miss Runyon here is looked upon as the apostle of first aid. I’m told she was greatly disappointed that she was too far up in years to boss the nurses in France during the war.”
“I can imagine. Here we are.” I unlocked the delivery door to the stacks, and we stepped in.
To be met with sounds such as I had never heard put together before: a shoeleather chuff-chuff-chuff spaced what seemed a dance step apart, followed by a drawn-out soft whizzing like a very long zipper being drawn down.
“That’ll be him,” Rab said under her breath. “See?”
Beyond the bookshelves sheltering us, a boy as spindly as any I had ever seen was racing up the long staircase to the floors above. As if built on springs he bounded up the stairsteps three at a time, on the brink of trying for four, and when his leaps carried him to the top, the race against gravity, against himself, momentarily over, he in one swift mounting move jockeyed his legs over the banister and slid back down. There was a heart-stopping pneumatic grace, a fireman’s fearless ride down a twisting pole, in the way he shot to the bottom. The instant he touched the floor again, he was back into motion, chuff-chuff-chuff, trio after trio of stairs flown over by the broomstick legs.
“He does it at school whenever he can,” Rab’s murmur was close to my ear. “You should see him on the fire escape.” Just watching him here was mesmerizing enough; I felt as the audience must have when Nijinsky first flew out of the wings onto a ballet stage, and human ability would never be seen the same again. This pint-size dervish seemed determined to spring at the steep staircase until he could sail up it in one weightless jump.
“Wladislaw, that’s enough,” Rab called to him. I could have told her a teacherly tone was not effective in cases of extremity; it took something more.
Oblivious, the boy launched off on another waterbug skim up the cascade of stairsteps. Rab cupped her hands to her mouth and let out a shout that would have cut fog: “Russian Famine, do you hear me?”
“Yes’m. Can’t not.”
Strawy hair flopping, he slowly glided off the banister and dropped on the balls of his feet in front of us. He did not appear guilty, simply caught. I could see how his classmates came up with the nickname, brutal as it was. Gaunt as an unfed greyhound, the hollow-cheeked boy did resemble a living ghost from starvation times on some distant steppe. He met our gaze with a bleak one. “I was just fooling around a little.”
“While you are supposed to be in class learning about first aid,” Rab chided, combing his hair out of his eyes with her fingers. “Come, say hello to Mr. Morgan-the library couldn’t run without him.”
The boy’s reluctant handshake was like squeezing a puppy’s paw. As quick as seemed decent, he rubbed his hand on a hip pocket and cast an appeal to his teacher. “Can’t I skip that aid junk, Miss Rellis? Pretty please? All it’s gonna be is rags and sticks,” he maintained, with a certain degree of clairvoyance. “I seen them bring that Bohunk mucker up the other day at the Neversweat, wrapped up like a mummy and just as dead anyhow. The roof comes down on them in the mine and they’re goners. How’s rags and sticks gonna help that?”
Wisely not debating the point, Rab instructed with firmness: “You’re going to be a goner of another kind-after school until the seat of your pants wears out-if you don’t get down there in that room with the rest of them, right now.”
“Yes’m. Pretty please don’t do no good with you.” The spring was gone from him as he hunched off to class.
We watched him trail away, Rab making sure he went down to the auditorium rather than out the front door. “He’s an acrobatic marvel,” I remarked, “especially since he’s so thin you can see through him.”
“Wladislaw has been given the thin edge of life in every way,” she filled in the story for me. “His parents and a baby sister died in the flu last year. He’s being brought up, if you can call it that, by an old uncle. The man has a peddler cart, he sharpens knives around town.” She shook her head somberly. “What they live on is anybody’s guess.” As if having taken a cue from her rubber-legged pupil, she pirouetted to leave. “I’d better go or your Miss Runyon will be sending out a search party. We still have catching up to do, though.” She peered at me quizzically, schoolteacher and schoolgirl merged into a single soul of curiosity. “Such as, why does that mustache come and go?”
I had my answer ready, along with a slight smile. “We all have our disguises in the masquerade party of life, don’t we, Rabrab?”
She took that with a laugh and another crinkle of her nose. “That sounds just like you. But I’m not letting you get away that easily. You have to meet my Jared. Tomorrow night? Join us for supper at the Purity.”
THE PURITY CAFETERIA, I found, prided itself on its snowy table-cloths, the forest of tables and chairs that could hold a couple of hundred customers at a time, and, the dubious piece of progress that demarcated it from a café, a total absence of waiters. NO WAITING! YOUR FOOD AWAITS YOU! proclaimed a large sign in red, and across the rear of the ballroom-size dining area stood a line of counters with the menu’s offerings, condiments, cutlery, glassware, and so forth. “A new customer! They must be cleaning out heaven!” I was greeted by a plump bow-tied individual, evidently the owner, presiding over the cash register. “Sir, I can tell from here, your belt buckle is hitting your backbone. Skip right in and fill on up.”
Smiling thinly at that gust of Butte bonhomie, I cast around for Rab and her fiancé amid the eating crowd. I spied him first, with a prickle of inevitability up my backbone.
Rabrab had been leaning in, tasting something off his plate, as lovers will, and as her bobbed head came up into view, she spotted me and waved.
Mindful of his manners, the young man stood and turned to me with a soldierly correctness that I could have predicted. He’d had that same deportment while tendering the union’s envelope of benefit to the widow Dempsey, and in marching like a Roman at the head of the miners in shift change on the Hill. Rabrab gazed up at him as if she’d had him made to order.
“The men in my life,” she announced fondly. “Jared Evans, this is Morris Morgan.”
“Morrie,” I amended over the handshake, to put us on familiar terms.
“Jared,” he said, perhaps humorously, perhaps not.
As soon as chairs were under us, he sat back and regarded me through dark deep Welsh eyes that reminded me of Casper ’s, only more reflective. Beyond that, he and Rab together were like matched cutouts in charcoal paper by a scissor portraitist, his slicked-back hair black as hers. Any children of these two would be ravens. Yet there was something even more striking about this lean chiseled man, and it took me a second to single it out. His ears were different sizes; the left one was missing its earlobe, clean as a surgery. Together with the fathoms in that gaze, it gave him the look of a reformed pirate. I tried not to stare at the foreshortened ear, which of course only creates another level of attention.
Still examining me with those grave eyes, Jared spoke as if I were a question brought before the podium. “You’re the cryer. You get around.”
“A temporary appointment,” I brushed away my career of wakes.
“The best kind to have where a coffin is involved.”
Rab rippled a laugh. “Now he’s the resident genius of the library, aren’t you, Mr. Morgan? Have you read every book in it by now? I remember when you knew everything there was to know about comets, and that was just the start of-”
“Flattery does not have to be laid on more than an inch thick, Rab,” I waved that to a halt. Basking in her words more than I should have, I shared to Jared: “You must know how she is by now-when her enthusiasm gets going, she’ll talk your ear off.”
Immediately I wanted to crawl under the table. Jared’s dark brows drew down as he leaned in and pointed a cocked thumb and finger at me like a pistol, and I wildly wondered what I was in for. Then, of all things, he winked.
“A German bullet took care of that for me. I got off lucky-they didn’t call that sector Dead Man’s Hill for nothing. A medical corps-man slapped a patch on me and I went right back into the thick of it.” Fingering what was left of the ear, he dispatched a droll half of a smile to the rapt Rab and around to me. “I have to watch out not to be too proud of it-the earmark none of the rest of the herd has.”
As when Sandison plunged off into livestock terminology, I chuckled uselessly.
Rab came to my rescue. “Mr. Morgan, you need to hunt up some food. We had to start, Jared has a meeting. He usually does.”
“To dicker the lost dollar out of the Anaconda lords and masters?” my natural interest in wages prompted me to ask.
The question was flicked right back to me. “How is it that you know we’re in there dickering?” Over a deliberative sip of his coffee, the union leader held me in that compelling gaze again. What was it about the Richest Hill on Earth, that I seemed to be a suspect of some kind no matter which way I turned?
“My usual dining partners,” I alibied hastily, “are Griffith and Hooper at the boardinghouse. They discuss matters.”
Jared’s look softened somewhat. “If that’s who you’re hanging around with, you probably know more about anything and everything in town than I do.”
In the time soon to come, I would learn that Jared Evans had been thrust from the thick of one war into that of another. The combat between the hierarchies of Europe had at last reached a mortal end, while the struggle he came home to on the Hill showed no sign of abating as long as there was corporate capital and there was unionized labor. Flint and gunpowder had the same relationship. Put simply, although Hoop and Griff in their telling of it to me seldom did, the Great War had crippled the once-mighty Butte miners’ union; its bargaining power had been hampered by government decrees, rivalry from the IWW, and Anaconda’s imperious determination to fatten profits at the expense of wages and workers’ lives. Jared alit back into the middle of all this, chosen for that sense of capability he carried as naturally as the set of his shoulders. The better I came to know and observe him, I could not help thinking of Rab’s beau as a paradoxical version of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman soldier who fought his battle and returned to his plow; Jared had been summoned from the battlefield to plow the ungiving ground of Butte’s conflicts.
“You two,” Rab broke in now, her napkin a flick of white flag between us, “would rather talk than eat, I know, but that’s not me.” She was onto her feet, poised in the direction of the dessert counter. “Rhubarb pie. I can’t resist. Jared, sweet, can I bring you some?”
He leaned back in his chair and stretched mightily, a man with much on his mind and a long night of negotiating ahead of him. “Just some more java, thanks, if you have enough hands.”
“Back in a jiffy,” she promised. She sailed off, spiffy as a Riviera princess in the shorter style of dress that was coming into fashion; you could actually see she had legs.
“I had better follow Rab’s example,” I said, starting to get up to find a meal for myself. Only to be stopped in mid-rise by Jared’s thumb pinning the sleeve of my suitcoat to the table. It was a very substantial thumb.
“How does it come to be”-unmistakably the words were those of a stern young fiancé-“that you call her ‘Rab’?”
“I, ah, officiated on that name.”
That didn’t seem to help. “Officiated how?”
Rapidly I told the story of Barbara’s verbal somersault into Rabrab in my classroom. The thumb grudgingly lifted from the fabric of my sleeve. “All right,” he granted, “it makes two of us who call her that. That’s a great plenty.”
With a measure of relief I moved off toward wherever the food waited. “You’re lagging,” Rab scolded as she passed me, bearing a tray with her slice of pie and Jared’s cup of coffee. “Only until I can track down the breaded veal,” I assured her. Grace had many virtues as a landlady, but it had been a considerable time since I had seen a cutlet.
Cafeteria dining, Butte style, evidently meant that half the clientele was fetching mounds of food for itself at any given moment, and so I had to work my way through the crowd to the counter where the meat dishes were listed, past a huge mahogany breakfront stacked with glassware and coffee cups and saucers. Squeezing around that furniture, I popped into an opening in the meal line, nearly bumping into the larger-than-life figure piling a plate with liver and onions.
Typhoon Tolliver and I stared at each other.
“The rumor is wrong, then, Typhoon. You don’t eat hay.”
“You,” he said thickly. Beside his tray, I saw his fists ball up. Something about the way I thrust my hands into the side pockets of my coat halted any further movement from him. I had decided that if it came to blows, I would try to hit him on the left fist with my brass knuckles, in the hope of putting his best punch out of action. But I did not particularly want to test that tactic, and from his slow, perplexed blinks, Typhoon seemed not sure he wanted to initiate anything either. Before he could think it over too much, I rushed to say: “The crowd in here is not going to be entertained by you beating me up in public-this isn’t the boxing ring.”
“No, it ain’t,” he agreed with that.
“Where’s”-I cast a hasty glance around for the telltale set of sideways eyes-“your partner in crime?”
“Who, Roland? He goes for that Chinee stuff.” Typhoon swiped a dismissive paw in the direction of Chinatown and its bill of fare. “Noodles and chicken feet or something. I can’t stomach it myself.” Independence seemed to be linked to appetite somewhere in that big thick head. “He and me ain’t joined at the rib cage.”
“Then he doesn’t need to know we’re showing the good sense not to whale into each other in front of two hundred witnesses and get ourselves arrested, does he.”
“I guess maybe not.” The mention of witnesses caused the flat-faced pug to look around nervously, peeking over the top of the breakfront for anyone watching our impromptu meeting. I did the same, around a corner of it. We both had more than enough reason to be jittery. It was perilous for me to be seen talking to a prime Anaconda goon, and just as detrimental on his side of things to be caught conversing with me, possible Wobbly that I might be. Luckily, back at the table, Jared’s attention centered on Rabrab, and Typhoon’s jerky scan around the room evidently did not pick up any watchers either. Rolling his big shoulders, he huffed to me:
“There’ll be another time, punk.”
“Until then, I’d be careful if I were you,” I responded in a concerned tone. “You see the union bug there?” I inclined my head toward the small but significant Federation of Labor emblem in the bottom corner of the wall-hung certificate attesting that the establishment proudly employed members of the Cooks and Dishwashers Brotherhood. “I hear that if the crew in the kitchen knows you wear the copper collar, they slip ground glass in the onions.”
I left him staring down at his plate.
“What, did the calf have to be butchered first?” Rab bantered when I returned to the table with my cutlet.
“Something like that.” No sooner had I sat down than Jared leaned my way and spoke in a low tone. “Morrie,” he tried the name out, “I maybe jumped on you a little too hard there at first, about union matters. Rab worked me over and says you can be trusted.” His face said, We’ll see. “Keep this under your hat, but there might be a work action, sometime soon. I’ll make sure Hoop and Griff stay out of it. I’m telling you now so you don’t have to worry about the old devils, all right?”
“I’ll try not to. From what they’ve told me, though, doesn’t Butte turn into a hornets’ nest during a strike?”
“I didn’t say ‘strike,’ did I?”
“We went through enough of that, last time,” Rab said as if instructing both of us. “Anaconda’s squads of bullies in our streets. You’d think we weren’t Americans.”
“That smarted,” Jared admitted, his brow creased. He looked over at me. “A year ago I was getting shot at in a trench in France, and I come home to the mines, and next thing I know, a bunch of muscle-heads who never even got overseas are ambushing me on the picket line. We’re going to try to get around that this time.”
Rab traced a chevron on his shoulder. “My sergeant.”
Covering Rab’s hand with his own, he made a wry face, again in my direction. “You tell me, is it a promotion or a demotion to head up the union council when Anaconda is trying to make us eat dirt?” The question lingered in those agate-dark eyes. “When the company goons broke the strike last time, the men kicked out the council leaders.” He spoke the next very levelly, as if sharing it between Rab and me. “The same way they’ll kick me out if I don’t deliver the lost dollar.”
“Can’t not, as Russian Famine would say,” Rab said confidently. “You have to budge Anaconda somehow, so you will. I’ll bet on it.”
For their sake and Butte ’s, I hoped she was right. Jared got up, saying he had to get to his meeting, and Rab moaned that there was a school board session she had to attend, while I had to make sure there were enough chairs for the Shakespeare Society’s Merry Wives’ Night back at the library; and I imagined Typhoon and Eel Eyes would be flexing their shoeleather and muscles somewhere in the night, too.