“He does it at school whenever he can,” Rab’s murmur was close to my ear. “You should see him on the fire escape.” Just watching him here was mesmerizing enough; I felt as the audience must have when Nijinsky first flew out of the wings onto a ballet stage, and human ability would never be seen the same again. This pint-size dervish seemed determined to spring at the steep staircase until he could sail up it in one weightless jump.
“Wladislaw, that’s enough,” Rab called to him. I could have told her a teacherly tone was not effective in cases of extremity; it took something more.
Oblivious, the boy launched off on another waterbug skim up the cascade of stairsteps. Rab cupped her hands to her mouth and let out a shout that would have cut fog: “Russian Famine, do you hear me?”
“Yes’m. Can’t not.”
Strawy hair flopping, he slowly glided off the banister and dropped on the balls of his feet in front of us. He did not appear guilty, simply caught. I could see how his classmates came up with the nickname, brutal as it was. Gaunt as an unfed greyhound, the hollow-cheeked boy did resemble a living ghost from starvation times on some distant steppe. He met our gaze with a bleak one. “I was just fooling around a little.”
“While you are supposed to be in class learning about first aid,” Rab chided, combing his hair out of his eyes with her fingers. “Come, say hello to Mr. Morgan-the library couldn’t run without him.”
The boy’s reluctant handshake was like squeezing a puppy’s paw. As quick as seemed decent, he rubbed his hand on a hip pocket and cast an appeal to his teacher. “Can’t I skip that aid junk, Miss Rellis? Pretty please? All it’s gonna be is rags and sticks,” he maintained, with a certain degree of clairvoyance. “I seen them bring that Bohunk mucker up the other day at the Neversweat, wrapped up like a mummy and just as dead anyhow. The roof comes down on them in the mine and they’re goners. How’s rags and sticks gonna help that?”
Wisely not debating the point, Rab instructed with firmness: “You’re going to be a goner of another kind-after school until the seat of your pants wears out-if you don’t get down there in that room with the rest of them, right now.”
“Yes’m. Pretty please don’t do no good with you.” The spring was gone from him as he hunched off to class.
We watched him trail away, Rab making sure he went down to the auditorium rather than out the front door. “He’s an acrobatic marvel,” I remarked, “especially since he’s so thin you can see through him.”
“Wladislaw has been given the thin edge of life in every way,” she filled in the story for me. “His parents and a baby sister died in the flu last year. He’s being brought up, if you can call it that, by an old uncle. The man has a peddler cart, he sharpens knives around town.” She shook her head somberly. “What they live on is anybody’s guess.” As if having taken a cue from her rubber-legged pupil, she pirouetted to leave. “I’d better go or your Miss Runyon will be sending out a search party. We still have catching up to do, though.” She peered at me quizzically, schoolteacher and schoolgirl merged into a single soul of curiosity. “Such as, why does that mustache come and go?”
I had my answer ready, along with a slight smile. “We all have our disguises in the masquerade party of life, don’t we, Rabrab?”
She took that with a laugh and another crinkle of her nose. “That sounds just like you. But I’m not letting you get away that easily. You have to meet my Jared. Tomorrow night? Join us for supper at the Purity.”
THE PURITY CAFETERIA, I found, prided itself on its snowy table-cloths, the forest of tables and chairs that could hold a couple of hundred customers at a time, and, the dubious piece of progress that demarcated it from a café, a total absence of waiters. NO WAITING! YOUR FOOD AWAITS YOU! proclaimed a large sign in red, and across the rear of the ballroom-size dining area stood a line of counters with the menu’s offerings, condiments, cutlery, glassware, and so forth. “A new customer! They must be cleaning out heaven!” I was greeted by a plump bow-tied individual, evidently the owner, presiding over the cash register. “Sir, I can tell from here, your belt buckle is hitting your backbone. Skip right in and fill on up.”
Smiling thinly at that gust of Butte bonhomie, I cast around for Rab and her fiancé amid the eating crowd. I spied him first, with a prickle of inevitability up my backbone.
Rabrab had been leaning in, tasting something off his plate, as lovers will, and as her bobbed head came up into view, she spotted me and waved.
Mindful of his manners, the young man stood and turned to me with a soldierly correctness that I could have predicted. He’d had that same deportment while tendering the union’s envelope of benefit to the widow Dempsey, and in marching like a Roman at the head of the miners in shift change on the Hill. Rabrab gazed up at him as if she’d had him made to order.
“The men in my life,” she announced fondly. “Jared Evans, this is Morris Morgan.”
“Morrie,” I amended over the handshake, to put us on familiar terms.
“Jared,” he said, perhaps humorously, perhaps not.
As soon as chairs were under us, he sat back and regarded me through dark deep Welsh eyes that reminded me of Casper ’s, only more reflective. Beyond that, he and Rab together were like matched cutouts in charcoal paper by a scissor portraitist, his slicked-back hair black as hers. Any children of these two would be ravens. Yet there was something even more striking about this lean chiseled man, and it took me a second to single it out. His ears were different sizes; the left one was missing its earlobe, clean as a surgery. Together with the fathoms in that gaze, it gave him the look of a reformed pirate. I tried not to stare at the foreshortened ear, which of course only creates another level of attention.
Still examining me with those grave eyes, Jared spoke as if I were a question brought before the podium. “You’re the cryer. You get around.”
“A temporary appointment,” I brushed away my career of wakes.
“The best kind to have where a coffin is involved.”
Rab rippled a laugh. “Now he’s the resident genius of the library, aren’t you, Mr. Morgan? Have you read every book in it by now? I remember when you knew everything there was to know about comets, and that was just the start of-”
“Flattery does not have to be laid on more than an inch thick, Rab,” I waved that to a halt. Basking in her words more than I should have, I shared to Jared: “You must know how she is by now-when her enthusiasm gets going, she’ll talk your ear off.”
Immediately I wanted to crawl under the table. Jared’s dark brows drew down as he leaned in and pointed a cocked thumb and finger at me like a pistol, and I wildly wondered what I was in for. Then, of all things, he winked.
“A German bullet took care of that for me. I got off lucky-they didn’t call that sector Dead Man’s Hill for nothing. A medical corps-man slapped a patch on me and I went right back into the thick of it.” Fingering what was left of the ear, he dispatched a droll half of a smile to the rapt Rab and around to me. “I have to watch out not to be too proud of it-the earmark none of the rest of the herd has.”
As when Sandison plunged off into livestock terminology, I chuckled uselessly.
Rab came to my rescue. “Mr. Morgan, you need to hunt up some food. We had to start, Jared has a meeting. He usually does.”