“To dicker the lost dollar out of the Anaconda lords and masters?” my natural interest in wages prompted me to ask.
The question was flicked right back to me. “How is it that you know we’re in there dickering?” Over a deliberative sip of his coffee, the union leader held me in that compelling gaze again. What was it about the Richest Hill on Earth, that I seemed to be a suspect of some kind no matter which way I turned?
“My usual dining partners,” I alibied hastily, “are Griffith and Hooper at the boardinghouse. They discuss matters.”
Jared’s look softened somewhat. “If that’s who you’re hanging around with, you probably know more about anything and everything in town than I do.”
In the time soon to come, I would learn that Jared Evans had been thrust from the thick of one war into that of another. The combat between the hierarchies of Europe had at last reached a mortal end, while the struggle he came home to on the Hill showed no sign of abating as long as there was corporate capital and there was unionized labor. Flint and gunpowder had the same relationship. Put simply, although Hoop and Griff in their telling of it to me seldom did, the Great War had crippled the once-mighty Butte miners’ union; its bargaining power had been hampered by government decrees, rivalry from the IWW, and Anaconda’s imperious determination to fatten profits at the expense of wages and workers’ lives. Jared alit back into the middle of all this, chosen for that sense of capability he carried as naturally as the set of his shoulders. The better I came to know and observe him, I could not help thinking of Rab’s beau as a paradoxical version of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman soldier who fought his battle and returned to his plow; Jared had been summoned from the battlefield to plow the ungiving ground of Butte’s conflicts.
“You two,” Rab broke in now, her napkin a flick of white flag between us, “would rather talk than eat, I know, but that’s not me.” She was onto her feet, poised in the direction of the dessert counter. “Rhubarb pie. I can’t resist. Jared, sweet, can I bring you some?”
He leaned back in his chair and stretched mightily, a man with much on his mind and a long night of negotiating ahead of him. “Just some more java, thanks, if you have enough hands.”
“Back in a jiffy,” she promised. She sailed off, spiffy as a Riviera princess in the shorter style of dress that was coming into fashion; you could actually see she had legs.
“I had better follow Rab’s example,” I said, starting to get up to find a meal for myself. Only to be stopped in mid-rise by Jared’s thumb pinning the sleeve of my suitcoat to the table. It was a very substantial thumb.
“How does it come to be”-unmistakably the words were those of a stern young fiancé-“that you call her ‘Rab’?”
“I, ah, officiated on that name.”
That didn’t seem to help. “Officiated how?”
Rapidly I told the story of Barbara’s verbal somersault into Rabrab in my classroom. The thumb grudgingly lifted from the fabric of my sleeve. “All right,” he granted, “it makes two of us who call her that. That’s a great plenty.”
With a measure of relief I moved off toward wherever the food waited. “You’re lagging,” Rab scolded as she passed me, bearing a tray with her slice of pie and Jared’s cup of coffee. “Only until I can track down the breaded veal,” I assured her. Grace had many virtues as a landlady, but it had been a considerable time since I had seen a cutlet.
Cafeteria dining, Butte style, evidently meant that half the clientele was fetching mounds of food for itself at any given moment, and so I had to work my way through the crowd to the counter where the meat dishes were listed, past a huge mahogany breakfront stacked with glassware and coffee cups and saucers. Squeezing around that furniture, I popped into an opening in the meal line, nearly bumping into the larger-than-life figure piling a plate with liver and onions.
Typhoon Tolliver and I stared at each other.
“The rumor is wrong, then, Typhoon. You don’t eat hay.”
“You,” he said thickly. Beside his tray, I saw his fists ball up. Something about the way I thrust my hands into the side pockets of my coat halted any further movement from him. I had decided that if it came to blows, I would try to hit him on the left fist with my brass knuckles, in the hope of putting his best punch out of action. But I did not particularly want to test that tactic, and from his slow, perplexed blinks, Typhoon seemed not sure he wanted to initiate anything either. Before he could think it over too much, I rushed to say: “The crowd in here is not going to be entertained by you beating me up in public-this isn’t the boxing ring.”
“No, it ain’t,” he agreed with that.
“Where’s”-I cast a hasty glance around for the telltale set of sideways eyes-“your partner in crime?”
“Who, Roland? He goes for that Chinee stuff.” Typhoon swiped a dismissive paw in the direction of Chinatown and its bill of fare. “Noodles and chicken feet or something. I can’t stomach it myself.” Independence seemed to be linked to appetite somewhere in that big thick head. “He and me ain’t joined at the rib cage.”
“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.”