Work Song - Ivan Doig [27]
Casually as I could manage, I walked back to the library, the music stands feeling like an armful of lightning rods with a storm on the horizon. When I reached the big front door, I opened it slowly so that I could see behind me in the glass. The window men were gone, naturally.
THAT EVENING AFTER SUPPER, I knocked on Griffith’s door.
The shuffle of carpet slippers, then the door flung open and Griff stood there in his long underwear and workpants, like a watchman roused by an out-of-place noise in the night. “What’s up, Morrie?” Down at his side, in his right hand, something sharp glinted. “Need a new notch in your belt?”
For the second time that day, my feet felt planted in quicksand. “I didn’t mean to intrude, I’ll come back another—”
“Naw, step on in.” The pointed instrument cut a circle in the air as he indicated a table and chair crammed into the far corner of the room. “Fixing Grace’s purse strap for her.” Ushering me in, he went on over and put down the awl he was holding, atop the leatherwork. “Guest gets the chair.” He perched on the edge of his bed, toes of his slippers barely reaching the floor. “What’s on your mind? You look spooked.”
“This will sound silly, but I think I’m being followed around town.”
Griff perused me, his wrinkles wrinkling even more. “Let’s get Hoop in on this.” He banged the heel of his fist on the wall, and shortly Hooper came in, bringing his own chair.
I described to them that morning’s experience, and the unlikelihood that the two idlers were pet fanciers. “Keep this to yourselves, please. I don’t wish to worry Grace about this.”
“Or have her kick you out of here on your can,” Hoop said.
“Well put.”
Griff hopped off the bed, went to the window, and pulled down the blind. “Tell me this,” he intoned, turning to me. “When you lit down from the train, was there a couple of bruisers hanging around?”
“Big and bigger,” Hoop specified.
“Beefier than ordinary, yes, now that you say so, there was such a pair at the depot.”
“That’s them,” Griff said. “Anaconda’s goons. The one big enough to eat soup off the top of your head is Typhoon Tolliver.”
I felt as if the seat of my chair had just pinched me.
Hoop was saying, “Jim Jeffries flattened him—”
“—in the second round of the title bout, right hook to the jaw,” I finished for him. “What on earth is he doing in Butte?”
“Beating people up,” Griff had no trouble answering that. “The Anaconda Company don’t play pattycake.”
“But—” Some questions scare off words. Why was I a candidate for a beating from an ex-heavyweight pug?
Hooper answered that without it being asked. “That bunch in the Hennessy Building sics the goons on any union organizers who come in from the outside.” He and Griff looked at me critically.
I shook my head.
“Especially anybody working for the Wobblies,” Griff prompted.
I shook my head harder.
“Somebody who’d lay low until the right time,” said Hoop.
“Then stir things up like poking a hornets’ nest,” said Griff.
“Anaconda don’t like that kind of thing,” Hoop added.
Another shake of my head, as much to clear it as anything else. “I am not any kind of an organizer, believe me. I simply came here to get ri—to find decent work.” Both old men watched me mutely. “The goons, as you call them, are wasting their time on me.”
One or the other of my listeners, like ancients who had heard it all before, spoke up. “You better hope they get tired of it.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY, day of rest for the library, but not for the boardinghouse. Scarcely was I seated for breakfast, wondering where the others were, when Grace forged out of the kitchen all but wrapped in a tie-around apron over a nice dark dress. Along with my plate of sidepork and eggs, she delivered with a flourish:
“I wondered if you might like to go to church.”
“Church.” I hadn’t meant for it to come out quite like that, but it