Work Song - Ivan Doig [32]
I snapped my fingers. “Aha! The World’s Fair, of course! The African native village and the big-eyed boys that we were.” Wiggling my eyebrows suggestively, I took a chance and leaned right into the meaty face. “The bare-breasted women of the tribe, remember?”
Tolliver blushed furiously. “Every kid in Chi was there looking.”
“We know of two, don’t we, although the passage of the years has dimmed my recollection of you more than yours of me.”
“Yeah, well, sure, what do you expect, a mug like yours—”
“Knock it off, both of you.” The one with those aquarium eyes moved in on me. “Let’s try another angle on what kind of four-flusher you really are. What did you do in the war?”
“I was elsewhere.”
“Like where?”
“Tasmania.”
“Say it in English when you’re talking to us,” Tolliver warned.
“It’s in Australia, stupe,” the other one rasped. “And you weren’t in any rush to come back and enlist, is that it? You look like a quitter if I ever saw one. No wonder this country is full up with pinkoes and—”
“Infiltrators,” Tolliver recited mechanically.
“—and stray cats from half the world and—” The lesser thug’s yammering broke off and he eyed me suspiciously. “What’re you cocking your head like that for?”
“Just listening for the clink of your own medals.”
You find concern for reputation in strange places. The pointy face reddened to the same tint Tolliver’s had. “I kept the peace here at home.”
“I can imagine.”
“Hey, punk, a smart aleck like you can end up in a glory hole if you don’t watch your—”
Swish, and then bang! All three of us jumped.
Samuel Sandison towered in the doorway, the flung-open door still quivering on its hinges behind him. “What’s this? The idlers’ club in session?”
All at once there was more breathing room around me, both goons stepping back from the perimeter of authority Sandison seemed to bring with him. What was I seeing? He was twice their age, and though of a size with Tolliver, no physical match. Yet the two burly interlopers now looked very much like spooked schoolboys. Why the white-faced wariness all of a sudden?
Sandison’s ice-blue gaze swept over them and onto me, and I blinked innocently back. “We’re only here because this helper of yours is up to something,” the pointy-faced one was saying, not quite stammering, “and the people we work for need to know what he’s—”
“Quiet!” Sandison boomed, the word resounding in the enclosed room. “You tell them on the top floor of the Hennessy Building that they maybe run everything else in town, but not this library. Clear out of here, and I mean now.”
The pair cleared out, but not without glares over their beefy shoulders at me.
Now all I faced was the stormcloud of beard. Sandison inspected me as if having missed some major feature until then. “Miss Runyon told me you were taking an unconscionably long time down here. Morgan? Are you up to something?”
“Sandy, I swear to you, I am an utter stranger to the battles of Butte.” That left Chicago out of it.
He shook his head. “If you weren’t such a bookman, I wouldn’t have you on the payroll for more than a minute.” Turning to go, he said, as if he was ordering me to head off a stampede: “Get the damn corkboard rigged up so we don’t have to hear any more from that old heifer Runyon about it.”
I PICKED AT MY FOOD that suppertime, drawing a look of concern from Grace. “More turkey, Morrie? It’s not like you to be off your feed.”
Down the table, two sets of bushy gray eyebrows squinched in similar regard of me. Neither Hoop nor Griff asked anything about my disturbing day, however, in respect of our pact not to bother Grace’s head about the goons’ interest in me. Pushing away my plate, I alibied: “A touch of stomach disorder, is all. Nothing a restful evening in my room can’t fi x, I’m sure.”
Upstairs, flat on my back atop the dragon coverlet while I stared at the ceiling and waited for inspiration of some sort to show up, I never felt less sure of fi xing anything. The zigzags of life were more puzzling than ever. There I lay, in the most comfortable circumstances I had known for a long while,