Work Song - Ivan Doig [42]
“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.
7
Sometime soon, in the vocabulary of Jared Evans, turned out to mean the very next morning. As I rounded the corner to the library, I saw that the usual line of staff and a few patrons at the door had grown mightily and fanned out like a peacock’s tail, the entire street filled with new faces. For a moment my soul lifted at this surge of literary interest from the citizenry