Work Song - Ivan Doig [95]
He grunted and advanced toward me as if he needed a closer look. The gleam in his eye seemed diamond-sharp. “You’re an odd duck, Morgan,” he declared, halting an uncomfortably short distance from me, “but you’re cultured, I have to hand you that. You damn well mean it when you jabber about the music of men’s lives, don’t you.”
A weird hope sprang up in me. Maybe he had discovered I was flouting his orders against “taking sides” by letting the miners congregate in the basement in search of a song and was merely going to fire me. I would take that instead of a death sentence any day.
“Anyhow,” he immediately brushed aside that hope, “we can talk about that tomorrow. You’re coming with me in the morning.”
“Where to?” I asked over the thump of my heart.
The white whiskers aimed at me. “A place you ought to see. Section 37.”
WAS THAT A JOKE from Samuel Sandison? If so, it was his first. I cleared my throat, to try to speak without a quaver.
“Perhaps, Sandy, you could elaborate a bit on that destina—”
Somewhere within the whisker cloud he snorted. “What’s the matter, sissy, coming down with a case of Hic sunt dracones?”
I had to bridle at that. A measure of caution about traveling in the company of someone nicknamed the Strangler did not equate me with skittish mariners of old who feared sailing off the edge of the map into the abyss that carried the warning Here be dragons.
“That’s hardly fair, I am only naturally curious as to—”
Sandison didn’t pause over my hurt feelings. “Never mind.” He briefly stared at me again with that strange gleam. “Don’t tell anyone we’re going, eh? Tongues are already too busy in this town.” Turning back impatiently to the newspaper spread on his desk, he told me to meet him at the depot, good and sharp, for the six a.m. westbound train.
THERE WAS A MIDNIGHT TRAIN. Eastbound.
Why not be on it? the ceiling posed the question, a certain seam in the plaster straight as a railtrack as I lay fully clothed on my bed. I was as alone as ever in this latest dilemma. At supper, Hoop and Griff had been as animated as carnival pitchmen, while Grace put actual cutlets on the table in evident celebration of the boardinghouse’s new lease on life. No one seemed to pay particular attention to my unmoored state of mind; when that happens, it makes you wonder about your normal mien.
The bed was crowded with debate. Sandison was a latent noose-wielding unpredictable madman. Or not. He’d had the perfectly sound sense to hire me, I tried telling myself. Just to be on the safe side, though, pack the satchel for the train; saying a permanent goodbye to Butte would be only a strategic withdrawal, after all. But so was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.
My head now really did ache from going back and forth. I checked my pocket watch again. Midnight was not far off. Abruptly my mind made itself up, almost as if I had not participated. I scrambled off the bed.
Quietly as I could, I opened the door of my room and tiptoed into the hall. Snores emanated from Griff’s room, and Hoop’s next to his; at the end of the hall, Grace’s bedroom kept a silence. Feeling like a burglar in the darkened house, I slipped past one door. Then another. And stealthily turned the doorknob of the end one.
I crept to the sleeping form and, hesitating just a bit, shook the bare shoulder where the nightdress had slipped down.
“Grace, I hate to interrupt your slumber. But I must talk to you.”
My whisper penetrated as if I had jabbed her. Bolting upright in the bed, she clutched the coverlet around her, huskily reciting: “In the name of decency, Morrie, we really ought not—”
“This is imperative or”—I looked at the ivory slope of shoulder still showing—“I would not come uninvited. Please just listen, Grace.”
Vigilantly, she did so while I told her she had to be my witness, to attest that I was alive and in one piece before boarding the train early in the morning with Samuel Sandison. “Just in case worse should come to worst.”
“Worse coming to worst,