Work Song - Ivan Doig [45]
But when I opened the door, my room looked as if it had been visited by a typhoon.
The bedding lay in a heap on the floor, the pillows flung onto the dresser top. The truly alarming thing, though, was the mattress, standing on its side and teetering toward me like a falling wall, while someone grunted in exertion behind it.
“You thugs!” I cried, wildly fishing in my pockets for the brass knuckles, expecting the pointy-faced Anaconda man to burst from the closet while the bigger one mashed me with the mattress. “Get out of here or I’ll—”
The mattress stopped its waggle. Around an edge, Grace’s face came into view. “Morrie!” She appeared as startled as I was. “Is it that time of day already?”
“Room devastation time, you mean?” The brass knuckles swiftly pocketed out of her sight, I stepped toward the disarranged bed.
“I’m glad you’re here, you can help me turn this mattress,” she said reasonably. “I do this every so often, so you don’t have to sleep on lumps.” I took an end and we flopped the mattress into place. As she unfolded fresh sheets she looked across at me curiously. “You came in sounding like you were declaring war. What were you so worked up about?”
“Oh, that. Everything upset as it was, I thought I’d caught Hoop and Griff playing a prank on me,” I alibied. “Tossing the room—all boys do it, and aren’t they that at heart?”
“They’re supposed to be painting the bad side of the house.”
“I must have come around the other way.”
Grace cocked an eyebrow. “‘Thugs’?”
“The word comes from thuggee, Hindu for someone who sneaks around and, ah, does mischief to you.”
She shook her head, making her braid dance. “I always learn something around you.”
I made no answer. A fresh apprehension was coursing through me. Over in the corner of the disheveled room, my satchel was missing.
Busily fluffing a pillow, Grace took a few moments to catch up to my alarmed gaze. “Oh. I had to move your bag out of the way. It’s in the closet.”
Undisturbed or gone through? I nearly asked. Suspicion was the contagion of Butte; now I was the one catching it. For once I was glad my trunk was not there, to disclose any of its secrets.
My landlady, dimpled with either innocence or guile, by now was done with the freshened bedding, the room miraculously back in order, and she announced she had better see to supper. “Grace?” I halted her before she could swish out the door. “You’ve been through the war of nerves between the men and the mining company before. What’s your sense of this one?”
She bundled her hands in her apron as she considered my question. “My Arthur,” she invoked somberly, “used to say taking on Anaconda is like wrestling a carnival bear. You have to hope its muzzle doesn’t come off.”
THE SPEED OF SOUND is slightly less than that of a shock wave, and so the tremor in the dark of that night shook my bed, and every other in the city, a few instants before the noise of the blast arrived.
Even foggy with sleep, I knew this was no usual detonation, no dynamiting at the depth of a glory hole. I stumbled to the hallway. Half-dressed, Hooper struggled from his room, yanking into the remainder of his clothes, while Griffith already was putting on coat and hat. At the head of the hall, Grace clutched her bedgown around her throat as she witnessed the exodus, then sent me an agonized look.
She did not even have to deliver my marching orders aloud. I dressed hastily and set off with the limping pair of old boarders to the Hill.
UP THERE, in the ghostly light of the headframes, a murmuring crowd was clustered around a mineshaft called the Flying Dutchman. When people gather from the nooks of a mining town to the surface of a disaster, they bring every degree of dread, and as the three of us edged through the throng I could feel the mood of apprehension, the air was sticky with it. Each arriving set of eyes, mine included, expected the sight of bodies laid out on the hard ground. But Griff and Hoop, pointing and muttering, saw at once this was no mineshaft accident, no explosion