Coeur D'alene

By Linnea Larsson

Coeur dAlene is a city on the north end of Coeur dAlene Lake, a hundred miles from the Canadian border. In 1930, prohibition was in force, and the mines to the east and logging camps to the south were filled with men who were paid on Saturday night and where a fellow was served at a bar if he was tall enough to order across it. Grag Bergman, a widower and father of two, was a banker in Coeur dAlene. Gary Madison brought whiskey across the border from Canada, owned a few clubs, supplied red-light establishments, the police, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and private citizens.

This is a story of that special time of probation, of Depression, a time between world wars in that special part of the north Idaho, where homesteads were still new and civilization as we know it today was only a dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 25, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469107639

Linnea Larsson

Linnea Larsson was born, raised and went to school in Coeur d’Alene in North Idaho. After school she moving East and later traveling for several years abroad. She lives now in Springfield, a town of 1200 people, in Up State New York. She runs Tintagel a rare book store. She has one daughter, Guenever, who is married and lives in the Washington D. C. area.

Book preview

Part 1

Chapter 1

Wallace is a town God has to loath. And Kellogg its twin. The whole Damned Valley of the Coeur d’Alene River from high in the Rocky Mountains to where it dumps into Coeur d’Alene Lake is dead, treeless and barren. The scared, lifeless basin is hung in a yellow, eye burning pall that sears the lungs and leaves the steep mountains brown with eroded gullies. There are no deer, no fish, no wolves and at the village dumps even the flies are few. The river runs, a poisonous, acid track through tailings heaved out of the mountain side mines and each spring for miles on either side of the river’s mouth on Coeur d’Alene Lake dead fish wash up in piles inches deep. In the spring the rocky beach at the bottom of the hill side town of Harrison smells of rotting fish. Yes, I hate the poisoned towns of Wallace and Kellogg. And Silverton and Osburn and Wardner and Smelterville and Burke and Gem and Mullen.

About twenty miles due south of Mullen on the steep banks of the Saint Joe River is Avery. Due south. There is no straight road. Out of one river, over a mountain where there can still be snow in early August and down to the Saint Joe. Away from the mines and into the tall pines. You can breathe in Avery. The sky is a bright blue and all spring and summer in the quiet eddies of the Saint Joe river there are flowers and in the deep pools trout. In the dusk deer come to the river to drink and on winter nights you can hear wolves call and echo like answers sing from peak to peak to peak.

I first saw Kellogg in 1925. I needed a job. A lot of men needed jobs. There is no other way to explain it. Man wasn’t meant to spend his life a thousand feet below the brush and trees. I got out of school in June and was in the silver mines a week later. There was talk of a strike. Threats. My old Man’s real name might have been Jack Simpkins. I grew up on tales of Harry Orchard and bombs down mine shafts and bull pens filled with miners and federal marshals recruited from Chicago’s skid row. Maybe Jack Madison was Dad’s real name, I don’t know, still, at nineteen who needs his head busted in someone else’s strike?

After mining I logged. At least you’re out in the air. The food in the camps is not great but there is lots of it. And I like loggers. Maybe they’re not brilliant but they’re good, they’re honest and when they aren’t and are called they don’t run off crying about lost teeth. It’s a healthy, wholesome life. Fresh air, six days a week and whores and whiskey and blood and poker the seventh.

By the time the woods shut down that first winter I was giving serious thought to whores and whiskey and poker. Not blood. At nineteen I didn’t know I didn’t like blood. It took a year to get a heavy truck that could bring down whiskey over the seasonal logging roads that scar the mountains between Canada and the Panhandle of Idaho.

Barreling down narrow, unpaved mountain roads in a red hot logging truck piled high with twelve foot lengths of two foot, three foot logs, each a hollow log full to the end with beautiful cases of Canadian Club. The noise, the songs, the smells, the sound of half dollars cascading out of slot machines I own and set. Watching the wheel spin and red or black the house cut is mine. And girls. What can anyone say bad about girls? Each sweet thing says she loves me, and I love them all and the law shoots and I shoot back. It’s a wild and wonderful game.

I was surprised when the sheriff, Jon Johnson, up in Wallace sent word that Pearson wanted to see me. Old James Pearson owns the Bunker Hill mines. I have one of the boys dump off a case of Crown Royal every month or so at the big summer homestead Pearson had built where there is air and trees out on the side of a mountain above the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. I might have actually spoken to Pearson twice. He sends word he wants to see me. I’m his bootlegger. Of course he wants to see me. So I tell Henry Larson to run out to the homestead and see if the man wants wine or girls or what? I’m a business man. You want wine, you get wine, you want absinthe, dancing girls, faro, roulette, ask. I can pull the old fore locks if that’s what you need. Whatever you need, I’ll quote a price.

Let me tell you about Henry Larson. I keep five guys working. I’ll tell you about our whole half dozen. Henry is a tall, lean, black Swede. Black curly hair, bright white teeth, has to buy his suit coats two sized bigger than his pants because his shoulders are so broad and his build so lean. Except that I’m better looking, of course, that’s all of us. Larson has green eyes, one has black eyes like me, the last three shades of blue or grey. Except for women, who checks eyes? I run three logging trucks. Mud covered. Plates not too easily read. The men dress the same, red and black plaid wool shirts, black stagged pants. That’s heavy work pants with the hems whacked off. We’re loggers in logging trucks. In the woods if a limb snags a man’s pants and the pants can rip clean without a catch at the hem it can mean the difference between life and sudden death. Pants held up by wide black suspenders. Hank Anderson cuts neat wooden pegs and hooks the suspenders to his belt hoops. I think the rest of us keep them together with buttons. No logger wears clip ons. I spent half a day on a logging road and my trucks are the most common color, most common make, most common everything. My car, I leaned on Harry Benson’s corner on Sherman in Coeur d’Alene and listed the makes, colors and model of the first hundred cars by. I drive a black Ford with the biggest engine I could have Rod Lestern push into her. After a bullet hole got in the windshield I had steel plates welded inside the doors and the backs of the seats, on the car and the trucks, too. Nothing you can see from the outside, inside its cozy feeling safe.

Berry Beal, the sheriff up in Benewah County, that’s Saint Joe and Saint Maries, apologized about the glass. The Feds were visiting. Beal cracked the non-drivers side. Beal’s always careful. And considerate. He said I should deduct the new glass from that months take.

That’s the lay out. I told Henry Larson to pop in on Pearson. Henry’s all charm and he owns a suit, and even wears it sometimes, though the suit wasn’t necessary for this visit. So, next day, Larson leaves word at the bank that Pearson wants to see Gary Madison. I waited a day or two. I do own a whore house in Burke. Not a great place. But the doctor runs through it on Fridays. So Friday I picked up a truck to make the rounds, see what was goosing old Pearson and maybe get in a little quality control work at the joint in Burke.

I left Coeur d’Alene and took the road across the hill past Beauty Bay then over the mountains and down to the Coeur d’Alene River. At first it’s not too bad. The river is dead but you can still breathe and away from the flood plane there are trees. Then you drive into the yellow brown cloud from the smelters. For a few miles scraggly pines are still trying to grow. After that it’s desert. The high, steep mountains rise almost straight from the narrow flood plain and hold in the heavy, oily, sulfuric acid cloud that is pushed out of the tall chimneys of the smelters, day and night, week-days, week-ends. The road, the buildings, even the people are covered in the oily, acid scum.

I made a stop at the store by the Cataldo Mission to see if any thing was needed up the road at the Rose Lake dance hall. It’s a family place off the main drag. Little kids go there, right up to Grandma. The drinking is done by the chump studs in the car park along with the bragging, the pushing and posturing. Mostly the kids want beer. I drop off a couple of cases of hard stuff every month or so, a little more when the weather’s cold, maybe.

The next place up the valley is Smelterville. I pulled in on a back street, I suppose it’s an alley. Anyhow, unloading there is no need to advertise. I grabbed down the pike pole to crack the end off a log and Old Joe Fline was there. If I ever hire the cops I pay I’m enforcing a dress code. Pressed pants, polished buttons, I don’t think shaving could hurt much, it might scrape off the some of the dirt and clean hands and nails wouldn’t cost too much in soap, either. I dug around in the cab and got him a pint flask and asked him to run into the hotel and see what they wanted. Except for a couple of cases of ‘Crown Royal’ for Pearson, if he wanted them, this stuff, whatever the label said, was all the same, straight out of the Nelson brother’s still. Joe came back with a couple cases of empties and I sent in replacements, shifted the load a little so I still had full logs where I could reach everything, then closed up my logs and went inside to collect. I don’t own this den. Cash on delivery.

Coming out there were three quick shots, I dropped to the ground, rolled behind the truck and up the street I heard a car squeal rubber. It took the corner on two wheels and was gone. I got up, dusted, and was wondering what kind of garbage men these mining towns employ. Not gutters you’d want to spend your life in. I was standing with the pike pole in my hands ready to hoist it back on the load and a black Pierce Arrow came around the corner with a small hand gun sticking from the window. I threw the pole and dived and bullets whacked off the tire I was behind and gravel hit my feet, the car bumped over the pole and it splintered and then all was quiet and my head hurt. I had hit the truck bed going under. I felt my forehead and saw the blood on my sleeve, saw it dripping down from a rip, a hole in the checked shirt. I was sitting bent over under the truck and I pulled my arm around and the main thing I remember was curiosity. I wanted to see why I was dripping red. There were two holes in the shirt but none in my arm. I was feeling around and I felt the burning when my fingers touched where the skin had been seared off. And some flesh, too, probably. I was sitting there, my arm dripping and I heard the car again, it went over the splintered pole and there were a couple of shots, maybe into the air just for effect.

I was coming out from behind the tire, building side, and Joe ambled over, picking his teeth with his dirty thumb nail, They aren’t coming around again.

I told him, Good.

Got you, huh? Gathering information, nothing more.

I was leaning into the truck for one of the forty-fours I carry in twin holsters beneath the seat. I checked the cylinder, turned it so a round was under the hammer then laid it on the seat and picked up the holsters with the other piece and buckled it on.

Joe seemed to think I wanted an explanation. I was in the front. Went in to watch. Black car ran off down the river and its not coming around again.

You know who’s in it?

The man shrugged dumbly and he was looking past me at the back of the bank across the alley. Christ, if he had half a brain he wouldn’t be a cop in Smelterville, Smelterville couldn’t attract an intelligent bent cop. Labor, he said finally. I guess it’s the union.

Mine owners? I was squeezing my arm trying to make the bleeding stop. The burn was beginning to let me know it was there. I don’t know why I said mine owners. I was on my way to see Pearson, I suppose that was it. Most of my attention was on my arm.

Joe shrugged. Got to have owners to have labor problems.

I said, Ja. I didn’t want any part of it. I looked at him and said, I’m going home. I was wondering if I should try a little more seriously to stop the dripping in my sleeve and I hoisted my self up into the seat, lay the forty-four in my lap where I could get it with my left hand, pressed the starter and slid the truck into gear. Working the gear my arm hurt. I was going to be glad to be out of town and on the main road.

I wasn’t bleeding much but the arm felt sticky and warm. I was thinking that Enaville was logging and there was a nice road house up there. Half a dozen cribs, it was loggers so they were used to blood and the food was good. I stopped at the intersection and was getting ready to pull onto the main road west. I flexed my fingers a few times. My arm felt like fire from my shoulder to the elbow but the fingers worked. I wiped blood that had run down my arm through my cuff and on to my hand onto my knee and lay my hand on the knob, ready to get it into gear and a black car shot past in front of me going west at about a hundred miles an hour. I pulled out into the road and my first thought with the noise was, that should have been me, there were three or four shots and a logging truck, its bed empty, skidded toward the road side with a splatter of broken glass. Rubber squealed and up past the empty truck the black car was turning. I ground a few gears and got her to full speed right down the center of the road. Then I ducked. The narrow road wasn’t going anywhere and I didn’t need any more lead. I kept my foot on the gas and we didn’t crash. I think there were a few shots but when I looked the black car was sinking in one of the stinking, smoking, filter beds that are the river through the lovely city of Smelterville and I was a hundred yards down the road and out of range if their only play things were the pistols they were showing.

I pulled over then, got out, the forty-fore in my left hand and standing close to the truck watched the black car. One of the back doors was forced out against the muck, another on the opposite side, and five men spilled into the thick, smelly soup. They were dressed funny, all five of them were. A couple of soft gray hats, homburgs, real pretty, all five in suits, ties the whole soup to fish and straight through to pie. They had been going fast when they left the roadway and were out twenty feet in the mud and I could see they couldn’t walk in it, wade through it, stand on it and I didn’t see any armorement. I got back in the cab and put it in reverse. I had to back past them to get to the disabled truck so I pointed their way and banged. Black powder is awful stuff. The pieces I had were made before the Civil War. They had been my Dads. Even firing out the window I had smoked up the cab. Then I was past them and by the truck. I slid across the seat and opened that door, got out and looked in the other truck. The man was bleeding all over hell. He was slumped sideways on the wheel and blood was dripping through the spokes. Some of the blood was pulsing. I grabbed him, pulled him into my cab after me, kicked his door, yanked mine shut, took off the break, slammed her into gear and then going past the men in the mud I emptied the forty-four, a sportsman’s good bye. I didn’t even check it in the rear view mirror. I couldn’t have hit. And we were on the road to Enaville.

I squealed a little, threw up gravel and turned off at Kingston. Logging trucks hold the road, they corner well. Two miles or so up the valley I pulled in beside a couple of trucks and a half a dozen cars at the roadhouse. My man was slumped where I’d dropped him. He hadn’t said a word since I’d dragged him in. They’ll get you a doctor here. I told him. I got out my bandanna and wiped his face, pulled a shard of glass out of his cheek. He had lost his hat and checking him over I realized a bullet had cut his hair and sliced scalp right into the bone. A concussion, I thought. Shock. I left him in the cab and went for help.

It was mid afternoon and none of the girls were busy. This wasn’t one of my joints but I brought them their booze so I knew the girls and the bar keep. We got the man inside and down in one of the cribs. Six fluttering, maternal young women bathing cuts and purring. It would have seemed like a grab for attention to say, look, I’m shot up, too. So while the keep raced off for a doctor and the girls purred I slipped out.

A hundred feet onto the main road I meet a black car. I backed up to the road house, turned and Damn, if the black car didn’t turn in, too. It swung out again and passed me and I suppose there are a dozen reasons a nice black car full of men in gray hats might be heading up the river past Enaville. I pulled the truck in so it was out of the way, found my gun belt beneath the seat, grabbed ammo and a couple of candy bars from the whiskey hole then pulled the lever to open the hood, took the distributor cap, pocketed it with the candy, closed up and walked off toward the road to Kingston. After awhile I thought I might look like a bad movie. I pulled my shirt out of the braces and let the tails cover the iron. The first truck past swung over to pick me up.

Chapter 2

It was dusk when the kid from the Powderhorn Bay store pulled the row boat up to the dock. He said it was the Bergman place. My whole life on the lake, he said. My guess had him at about thirteen. The banker lives here. Two points down from Valhalla point. Can’t miss the Bergman place even in the dark.

Someone will stop a bottle off for your father next week, the week after. He didn’t seem worried. I gave him a dollar and a ‘Babe Ruth’ bar, my thanks and shoved the boat off and listened to the oars hit and the splash, splash, splash of the small waves against the bow as he pulled away.

The house was a large black block against a hill still touched with light and over that the pink-white sky. On the narrow beach, overhung with trees, light reflected up from the water. South and north, the brush and woods were black, but in the yard where the thick forest had been whittled back there still was light. Grag Bergman had said several times that if I needed a place to lay low the homestead was open. There wasn’t even a lock on the front door. I fumbled around, bumping into furniture and finally went out and around to try the back door. The kitchen with its uncurtained window was lighter. There were matches by the big cast iron stove and a coal oil lamp on the table. Bergman had told me the place always had canned food but I was more interested in something to patch my arm. Upstairs I found a bathroom. Pretty modern. The big cast iron water tank that held water to be heated by coils that ran through the wood range in the kitchen was cold, of course. It had been placed where it was, uninsulated, so that when hot with water the tank would heat the bath room. I put the lamp down on the toilet back, stripped off my shirt and the arm didn’t look too bad. I tried the faucet. The place hadn’t been drained for winter. I went downstairs to look for kindling and fire up the stove and then while the water heated, find what I could to eat and see if there was a clean shirt to steal.

I was up early. The house seemed smaller when I could see the walls but it still wasn’t a log cabin beneath towering pines. I went upstairs to use the bathroom and coming out I counted four rooms off the main hall. I had blundered into most of them the night before. At one end of the hall was a window that looked out over the yard and draw and a road that probably came in from the state road up on Mica Flats. At the other end were two steps down and an attic room with its own stairs up from the kitchen. I had come up that way the night before. The house had been homesteaded before Grag Bergman had taken over the bank and moved to town for the winters. It was bare logs inside and out, scribed and fitted logs with no mud at the joints. The bathroom ceiling was a full seven feet with very little slope over the window. Downstairs the ceilings were over eight feet, maybe closer to nine. In the living room the logs had been sanded and varnished. There were red velvet drapes in the windows and the bedroom where I had lit for the night had some kind of a red and blue patterned carpet that covered most of the polished wood floor.

The house was cool. I built a fire in the kitchen range then found a can of coffee but no coffee pot. There was something the right shape on the back of the stove but it had to hold two gallons, at least. I settled for a sauce pan and began rummaging through the can goods for breakfast. The patch on my arm wasn’t neat but with sleep and food and a clean shirt I was feeling human.

I was on the porch with a book I had found in a library or office that was across the hall from the bed room I’d used, leaning against a log pillar, reading and drinking coffee and canned milk when I heard a car.

Grag Bergman had seen me because there were more people in the car and he came up the path alone. He recognized me when I stood and waved and he motioned back to the family that they could come.

I’d seen Greg Bergman in the bank off and on for over a year. Little by little I was coming to own a good hunk of that bank. I’d never been in Bergman’s home, never seen his family. He slapped my arm and I jumped a mile.

Sore. I was pointing to the arm, Hurt it a little.

Two kids had headed off to the beach and a woman about Greg’s age, maybe fifty, fifty-five came up behind him carrying a basket. She was a big sturdy babe and stridently tough. She didn’t say a word or even look directly at me and she stepped around us both and went into the house through the open door. I knew Bergman was a widower. The woman looked like a housekeeper.

Bergman watched her go. He was almost my height, close to six feet. His hair was sandy, going gray. He was tanned and his skin webbed with those tiny lines you see on blond men who spend their lives in the weather. He was a squarely built man, no fat, but thick. I could believe he had built the house himself.

A real bang up job up in the mines last night, he said when he saw that the woman was out of the living room and going toward the kitchen. Pearson said your truck was left on the road by Smelterville and you were in rough shape.

Wrong man.

One eyebrow cocked up. Ja, well, Pearson will be happy to hear.

I said as sweetly as I could, I’ll bet.

We talked about that for awhile, neither of us telling the other nothin’.

Probably better if folks think it is me, I said and I realized that talking about Pearson and the mining district my arm had begun to throb.

Bergman agreed. Except Pearson. He wasn’t happy about the shape you were in. He wanted your help up there. Your job as much as his, he said.

Pearson can go piss up a rope. I wasn’t feeling as cautious as I’d been a moment before. Pearson set me up. There wasn’t anything about the mines that I liked. Except for a hello here and there I didn’t know Pearson. I didn’t think I’d like him if I did get to know him. Bergman was frowning, trying to cool me and I said, Pearson can come and see me. That kind of talk, Hell, it only sounded like the Fourth of July.

Bergman said, Ja. He looked like he was thinking.

I told him, Ja.

He said, Ja, and just about when I thought we might go on jaing all day the housekeeper interrupted to say lunch was on.

Madison and I’ll have it in the dining room. Kids in the kitchen.

The woman nodded. Then still standing on the porch by where we were sitting, leaning back against the tall log pillars, our feet hanging into the weeds of the yard, she cupped her hands to her mouth and bellowed, Celest! Monty! Lunch! She went inside without glancing our way.

I looked toward Bergman and said, Lungs.

He said, more to the yard than to me, Good with the kids.

We got to the dining room as the woman bustled in to spread a cloth. We were standing there and the kids, a girl, then a smaller boy, came running in. They slowed when they saw us by the breakfront but went on without stopping. She was fourteen, fifteen, men’s blue jeans and a blue, long sleeved tailored shirt that almost exactly matched the blue of her eyes. Her hair was short and rumpled, wind blown, sun streaked, blond curls about her face. She was flushed from running and when she saw us she stopped laughing. Her eyes barely passed over us. I doubt if she saw me at all. She paused to catch her brother’s hand and they disappeared through a swinging door. He was quite a few years younger, six, seven years old. If she didn’t see me, well, I hardly saw him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl who looked as good in men’s clothes. I’ve never seen a girl who looked so good. I don’t think I let my breath run out until the kitchen door had swished shut. The housekeeper had our plates on the table, silverware. She went into the kitchen and with the door open I heard giggling then just a bar or two of some song and the housekeeper was back with chops and vegetables.

Bergman was watching me and I knew I wasn’t going to see any more of the girl. The kids finished eating before we were half done and I heard them whooping on the lawn and I kept my eyes on Bergman’s face and I think he relaxed.

I suppose I should hitch a ride to town. See Doc Wolf about the arm. It’s easy to tell when you’ve overstayed your welcome. He drove me in, dropped me at the joint I own near the Hayden Lake golf course. Bergman offered to catch one of my drivers, get someone to bring my truck down from Enaville, he’d see me at the bank Monday morning. Stand you to lunch, he said.

Pearson was at the bank when I got there. He was graying, a little stout, but it was obvious he had been a bull of a man, taller than I by an inch or two, six three, six four, and all the weight in the neck and shoulders. Maybe he was over the hill and more than a little anxious but he was a man you would notice, anywhere. His handshake was solid. Bergman’s coming afterward, seemed limp. Grag Bergman, as a person, seemed slight in the shadow of Pearson. And me, I probably looked young and stupid and if I didn’t, I know that was how I felt.

Pearson rubbed his hands together. He looked at me from under his beetle brows, You heard the man died. The voice was loud. Maybe he was a little deaf. It was a rough voice, forget the slight hunch, the sorry look, it was a voice that could cuss you out and leave you quivering in your logging boots and not even thinking to answer back.

I had read the morning’s paper. I nodded.

They’re wanted for murder.

In the towns near logging camps there was a killing damned near every week end and no one was ever wanted for murder. The mines were quieter. A lot of the men were married. Still, with the cops around Kellogg and Wallace I didn’t see anyone being run in for something as frivolous as shooting someone.

Pearson frowned at his hands. The man owned a third of the silver and lead mines in the Coeur d’Alene River Valley. He owned half the smelters in Smelterville, the homestead above the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, a ranch down somewhere where the air was clean, a place in San Francisco, a couple of banks, a United States Senator, probably the governor, and assorted mayors, cops, news papers, hotels and maybe even a few whore houses and bars, I don’t know. I sat watching him frown at his fists and I was wondering what the Hell he wanted with me. He might look it right now but he couldn’t need booze that bad.

We need someone to knock ‘um out, he said. Then he lifted his big head and eyed me, We both need ‘um out.

I held up my hands, palms out, I hated his corner of the world, I didn’t need anyone knocked out. Whoever they were. Five men in shinny grey suits trying to wade through smelly muck.

They’ll close the mines. They say they’ll ruin you.

I nodded, They did seem to have me in mind.

Grag Bergman had been watching, listening and now he said, You know where all your trucks are?

I glanced his way. None are coming through the Coeur d’Alenes.

We can go to lunch, run out to the golf course, maybe. Let’s wait and see if your trucks get in.

I wondered if he knew something I didn’t. He saw the question in my face and shook his head.

They were shooting at you yesterday. They knew who to shoot at.

I thought that over. They don’t know one logging truck from another. Don’t know one’s that’s full from an empty.

They knew where to look for you, Pearson told me.

I reminded him, They shot up an empty logging truck. I mean really empty. Mine, even empty, have logs on them.

Pearson said, Ja, different men, different cars. The cop who saw it said the first car went east and the next came down from the east.

That was true. The Pierce-Arrow was not the car I had put off the road.

I asked, Joe pick the five men out of the sludge?

Pearson almost smiled. I don’t know what happened to those men. The car we got. Your man Joe didn’t see a thing until the five had walked away. He sighed. They’re staying at the Wallace Grand. At least some are. There are nine, ten strange men at the Grand.

Ten, two cars?

I don’t know. I’ve seen, I’ve talked to a gent named Mario. Comes with an armed color guard. I think it’s more than ten.

They still can’t tell a loaded truck from an empty.

My guess is the second car was told you were unloading.

I said, Christ.

Pearson nodded.

Bergman said, Ja.

You have a policemen in the towns up there. Put the dopes in jail. You’ve got a jail, haven’t you?

They’ll go on trial.

Well, ja.

This is labor, Madison. They’ll go on trial. Jury. Twelve good men and true. They’ll go free. But not until and bombs go off, the mines are closed and men are killed. You, it seems, included.

Ja, it seems.

We talked a while longer then went to lunch.

Pearson caught me, fly open in front of the urinal. He didn’t move his head my way and he asked, Your trucks? Bergman?

I shook my head.

Seems funny, he said.

Seems funny, I nodded.

Don’t like it at all, he said.

I agreed.

Close him out, he said.

I said, Ja.

People shooting. Keep your ass down.

We didn’t play golf that afternoon. Which is just as well. I never learned anything as civilized as golf. Grag Bergman and I drove to Saint Joe to see what the Benewah County sheriff, Berry Beal, was up too. How busy he felt. Which says a lot about the spit and polished police force that Pearson owns.

Sheriffs are elected. Which doesn’t mean they can’t be bought. Sometimes they seem to have the public weal a little more in mind than a bought cop, though. Berry Beal is a short, lean fellow. He’s forty-two. I know. I played second shotgun on the left at his wedding and that was all of six months back. Beal knows you can’t have twenty thousand single men in town on Saturday nights and not have something to keep them happy. He and I have always hit it off. Even before he stole one of my girls and married her we got along. I think he might have planned to really steal her, run away, elope. Sal LaCal, my manager—madam if that’s not too tasteless—at the Saint Joe joint, cut me into the circuit. Before the big day I picked up a white dress that was head to toe lace and brought it up. I’ve never seen a stable go so silly. I wore my best black pants, Beal wore his, we littered the church with flowers, there was a maid of honor, there were pictures even. The party went on until church the next morning. It was a grand wedding, even if the reception was held in a whore house.

Pearson had said that Jon Johnson, his sheriff, wouldn’t mind help from Beal. Wouldn’t mind any help he could get, Pearson said looking at me. And if I was getting involved I wanted someone watching my back and I couldn’t think of anyone I’d trust more than Berry Beal. I felt maybe I’d relax a little more in a car I didn’t own and so Bergman was driving me. He didn’t seem to have a lot to do. In 1930 bankers weren’t feeling over worked. The president of the bank that had been across the Fourth and Sherman intersection from the Bergman bank was now in residence at the state pen outside of Boise. Poetic license with the accounting system, I’d heard. Greg Bergman might have wanted something to take his mind off business. Maybe he planned on eaves dropping. Maybe he didn’t trust me any more with his car than he did with his daughter. He was driving a big, new, patrician Buick and I’d never seen it with even a hint of dust. I have to admit it rode well. Maybe if I ever own something like that Buick I’ll go out and get a blue suit to match, and a homburg, maybe even thin leather gloves. Beal and I left Bergman at a bar and went for a walk and Beal rode back with us. He liked the Buick, too.

Only one of my trucks was in. Henry Larson said he and Bob MacAlevey had started an hour apart, Larson first. Larson had unloaded at the warehouse out of Schweitzer and Bob hadn’t come in. Beal and I drove up to Bayview. Mrs. MacAlevey hadn’t seen her son since the morning before. We were still incognito in the Buick and without Bergman at the wheel, it was a good car. We drove on to Bonners Ferry and ask around. On a little used logging road between Meadow Creek and Moyie Falls a truck had slid down an embankment sometime in midmorning.

We found Bob encased in plaster at the local hospital. He claimed he had heard a blast and the road went under him. I was wondering what my hollow logs looked like at the bottom of the Moyie River ravine.

What do drunken fish do? I asked Beal as we left the kid’s bed side.

We walked a bit and he said, I’ll get in touch with the sheriff. I think we can get her out. On a pure cost basis it was never worth bringing a truck up out of a canyon like the Moyie. But we had to get whatever remained of those logs up fast and out of sight. If the Feds got wind of this cargo this close to the border it could blow the network. The problem in Smeltervill might have more to do with me than even Pearson thought.

I didn’t mention that to Pearson. He had the Kootenai County sheriff lined up when we got back late Thursday.

I woke up Friday morning with some broad’s hands all over me. I know she was glad for a night away from work and was trying to show her appreciation to the boss but I’d had a few busy days and was about to tell her to let me sleep off the matutinal when Beal tapped at the door. I’d left him, happily married man that he is, asleep on the fold out sofa down in my office, or what ever it was, my windowless cellar at the Hidden Hayden, which is my premier whore house, my flag ship house of ruin. Actually, my favorite joint is the one out at The Whiskey Rock, I call it my vice joint. Me, I’m vice president. Anyway, I’d left Beal down in the office where I kept extra clothes, the whore house’s better liquor, where I sifted the vice books, assigned drivers and such.

He tapped and I tried to remember the babe’s name, then just passed my lips over her ear and told her to get her beauty rest, adjusted the coverlet around her chin, pulled on my clothes and went to the office to shave. The help had brought us breakfast for two. Nice polished wooden tray with a linen cloth, napkins folded into dainty birds, polished silver coffee pot, toast under a silver cover, not too much in the way of serious food but Beal was impressed. He liked the fancy edge on the napery, I could tell by the way his nose and eyebrows moved when he dabbed his mouth. I didn’t tell him I had picked the stuff myself, and the silver too, and the china cups, and the navy blue with gold trim on the uniform of the boy who had brought it. The Hidden Hayden is one dandy shebang. The product is the same but with flourishes and gilding the price goes up.

At The Whiskey Rock on Pend Oreille Lake I’ve put in a rustic, hunting, fishing motif. Gingham napkins and a teen age boy who’ll catch trout for the hen pecked who need proof for the wife. Saturday night the girls wear gingham, pinched in at the waists and ruffles down to the floor.

You can’t gussy up every place. Sal LaCal’s, in Saint Joe, I’ve left pretty much as I found it. The doctor is around a little more than before, maybe. I try to tell the girls not to sit around at breakfast in their skivvies but no one listens to me. The Whiskey Rock and the Hidden Hayden don’t entertain loggers. You got to give people what they want. God bless Capitalism, is what I say. I didn’t tell Beal that these elegant, crustless, triangles of buttered toast are my usually breakfast when I wake up here in the morning. He smiled and took one daintily with two fingers and damn this morning, Beal looked better to me than the babe I’d left in the crib upstairs. The coffee was strong and dark and rich. Fresh ground. No restaurant in the area has it. We were meeting Grag Bergman and Pearson in Coeur’Alene, we could find food in town.

Chapter 3

We were trying to get lost in a mining town on a Friday night. I was ragged and dirty, Beal, dingy and with frayed shirt and contrasting elbow patches that he claimed the wife had done. Maybe she had. Neither of us actually stunk, not early on, not before the nerves and adrenalin had started perking. The places we hit, Gary Madison’s problems were every man’s problem. I pulled my hat lower over my forehead and listened for noise of Pearson’s partisans and all that was in the wind was the booze supply. Maybe these men knew mountains roads, knew that trucks do drop over. Maybe Pearson’s suited friends had done their homework, picked their target as easy as snow on New Years.

They say Madison’s not going to live. The man who offered this was looking into his glass and there were tears in his red rimmed eyes. He shook his head, sniffled, put his eye down on the top of the glass and moaned out loud.

Beal and I looked at each other then raised our glasses. Beal set his on the bar, May he rest in peace. He was trying to get his hat over his heart but his thirty-eight was under his left arm, he was just too intent on keeping his right hand free and his hat ended up left handed over his right lung.

Someone said, No one else is going to make house calls like Madison made house calls.

The niece got married and Madison got her a case like yesterday. She needed it yesterday, that niece did. The prettiest bottles. Three cornered. Pinches in the sides.

Beal asked, Same old slop in the pinch bottles?

A blank look in Beal’s direction, then, Women put great store by bottles. The niece, the wife, her sister, they loved them bottles. Little fine brass wires all around. Wife has candles in two. The women did love them bottles.

Beal looked at me and both of us raised our glasses to Madison and his bottles and sipped.

I damned near choked. I’ve heard if you run an electric current through the whiskey after it comes out of the still it’s the same as a few years in oak. I’m going to have to talk to Ruben Nelson. This crap would make a corpse croak.

A sippin’ drink, Beal said toward me when he’d caught his breath.

The inside of my mouth felt like dish pan hands.

We went back to swirling our glasses. After a while we did hear talk of a strike. Not enthusiastic talk. It wasn’t a year since Black October. There wasn’t a lot folks were enthusiastic about. The men seemed resigned to trouble. The few interested in anything wanted sabotage, a general messing up of the works. To most, even that looked stupid. Beal and I were both struck with the difference between the slap happy drunks in a logging town and the morose men from the mines.

In a vote if the ballots are counted in town there won’t be a strike, one man said. Send them to Chicago and we’ll all of us be on the street.

Beal leaned back into the bar and looked into his glass and said, Ah, Pearson’s rich. Pearson could do us better.

Do nothing, all of us on the bread lines and Pearson’ll do better.

Don’t even need scabs. Shut her down till silver’s price is up.

There wasn’t anyone here drinking for fun. They were mean, bitter men and mean liquor made them meaner.

The boys in gray had shot up a bootlegger, had dumped a truck down a ravine, they may have stepped on a banker or two; they hadn’t seemed to be stirring up trouble for Pearson, not among my consumers.

A little before midnight there was noise, yelling from the street. Beal and I followed the crowd out. Men were milling in front of the Union Building which was lighted up like a Christmas tree. The men at the outer edge of the mob didn’t know any more than we did. I worked my way to the front steps of the building with Beal holding me back every step.

What’s the fuss? I asked a dirty faced man I happened to be next to.

They rushed the door. A full dozen men pushed through and forced open the door there. My buddy here, He pointed to a man sitting on the steps holding his jaw, They hit him with a gun butt.

From each way on the street came sirens and lights and then three police cars were bulling through. I felt under my arm for the Colt tucked in Dad’s Texas pattern Skeleton holster and started worming my way to the door, pulled it open with no trouble and went in. The first floor seemed empty. I was considering the stairs and a door opened and Tim Moyer, the local union noise, waved me to follow and we ran the length of the hall and up a back stairs.

The sirens were still at it in the street. Someone must have hooked up a bull horn because at once the sirens stopped and an amplified voice said, We’re coming in and we don’t want trouble.

Tim Moyer said Shit, under his breath.

I asked, Who’s side are they on?

We had paused for breath on the second landing and he asked, Who?

The cops. The street.

God, they’re never on my side.

A couple of shots went off downstairs. Small caliber. There was a muffled explosion and white flashed in the stairwell. Then the building, the street were still. Expectantly quiet. I was bending, trying to see the floor below. From an open door there was an orange flare, like fire catching, and then two men I didn’t know came out fast and toward the stairs. They both had pistols in their fists. I pulled mine and fired at their feet. Maybe it was the black powder, maybe the sound of a forty-four in a tight place. They stopped dead in their tracks. I said, Drop them and come up real slow.

That’s Willie and Mike, Tim said. Keep your pieces, he told them.

Willie and Mike joined us at the top. Blew the safe, one of them said. Both were breathing hard, the one who had spoken was as blond and as pretty as a soap ad. The other was a little older, a little more worn. They both seemed revved and ready for action and I didn’t think either one should be trusted with a fire arm.

Tim Moyer said, Dandy, I guess about the safe.

The pretty one looked at me and said, I heard you were dead.

I told him I had heard that, too. We were getting nice and social so I asked, Who blew the safe?

Moyer didn’t look at anyone and said, Chicago.

Ja, they’re all over down there. That was the soap ad. I hadn’t seen anyone.

They send them out and they don’t know shit what its like here. Tim Moyer said it more as an oath than a statement.

Anything important in the safe?

Records. Damned little money.

The bull horn was going again in the street, telling us they were coming in, didn’t want trouble.

I asked, Anyone friendly still down there.

Tim shook his head.

Let’s get out. Let the cops have the place.

They’re in the front and the back. That was the pretty one again.

I started down the stairs and the landing was empty and I motioned for them to follow. The first floor seemed a little more active but maybe that was just the swirling lights reflecting in from the street. I retreated to the landing and pushed up the window. The cop guarding the back door I knew, of course. A greedy bastard. Or Hell, a cut smarter than most. He wasn’t a Kellogg cop. I knew both of those better. I fished in my pocket for a silver dollar and flipped it down. He looked up and I waved. Johannson, hey, we need a car.

He stood there looking up. I dropped two more silver dollars and said again, We need a car.

Sometimes a little fame is a good thing. He nodded, tucked his police special in its home and left us. Three minutes later a police car pulled in under the window. I uncocked my piece and pushed it in my belt then dropped to the car roof. Tim Moyer came next and finally the two blond babies. We all four crammed in the back and I told the driver, I’m staying at the Wallace Royal, I don’t know where these jokers want to go. I gave him a twenty and we shot down the alley and five minutes later Tim and I were bellying up to the Royal Bar and Tim was buying. At least at the Royal you get what it says on the bottle. I sipped my drink and an hour later I was still sipping it and Tim was on his third.

I left Tim long enough to book a room. I wondered briefly about being dead, booked under the name Jack Simpkins. I gave Tim my room number and alias, explained that since I was dead staying dead might be handy, and then waited, swirling my drink, until he had been gone ten minutes before heading out the back way and down to the whore house on Placer Street and Beal.

This wasn’t one of my shebangs. I asked the girl who took me upstairs how often the drip doctor made his rounds.

She said, Doctor?

Beal pulled my arm. Anyone’s who’s checking their medical records doesn’t need nothin’ that bad.

I told him, Medical records are important.

Christ, no matter what any doctor said I wouldn’t touch one of ‘um with a pike pole.

Well, Christ, yourself, who’s using pike poles?

I wouldn’t come close with a peavey.

I made a face at him. I was going to asking about this new nick name but he frowned and snapped, You’ve made your point.

Not half the point a peavey would-

He hit my arm. You need a night’s sleep sometimes.

I allowed him to pull me away and we retreated into the attic room where one of the girls had made up a couple of cots under eves that were so steep that if we’d sneezed we’d have whacked our skulls.

Pearson mentioned Chicago, too. I heard it, didn’t believe him. And everyone’s talking Chicago, Beal said. Christ, I thought the place had been organized since ’26. I mean happily. IWW out and ‘International Union of in. I thought I heard Haywood was dead, a couple of years ago.

What I heard, I agreed. I was lying on my back with my hands under my head and I was thinking about the girl with blue eyes I’d seen run through Grag Bergman’s dining room out at his place by Coeur d’Alene Lake.

He died in Russia.

I turned Beal’s way, Who died in Russia.

Big Bill Haywood.

I said, Oh. I should have said, So?

And the union offices are in Salt Lake City, not Chicago.

I rolled over onto my side. God, these cots were narrow. And they sagged. I want to check on MacAlevey in Bonners. I don’t like hearing I’m dead whenever I turn around. I breathed in, let it run out. So I loose a few bars up here. To Hell with the mines. I hate this valley.

Your MacAlevey kid wasn’t messed around here.

I said, First thing tomorrow we check MacAlevey.

We talked that over and Beal asked, Do you think they’re still working down at the ‘Idaho Tribune’?

They have it on the street by six or seven. I had already rolled off the comforter and pulled the light string. My boys deliver to the editor on the once a month milk run. If he’s not at the office we’ll trot out to his place on upper Maple. Wallace had been built where four deep canyons join. The population with families and homes wasn’t large, the houses had been built in the flood plane on a grid and like a regular city with woodsy names: Maple and Fir and Pine.

The lights were on at the Tribune. We had to pound on the door for ten minutes before someone heard us over the crash of the press but finally a janitor let us in.

I asked, Anyone official here?

Whole crowd here. He was a young man turned hunched and old. He coughed and covered his mouth with his sleeve then motioned toward a back room.

I might have knocked. Beal didn’t pause but pushed open the door and the six men inside turned and we were interrupting, that was certain. Pearson separated himself from the mob and tried to look like he was happy to see us. Gary, he clasp my hand warmly and slapped my sore arm, I heard you were dead.

The arm was getting better. Being dead was getting old. I said, Ja.

Beal asked, Give us the skit, where dead, why and how?

The editor, mumbled, Who, where, when, why and how.

I said, Something like that.

Pearson tried a hardy laugh that came out hollow. Obviously, bad information.

Who did get it? I asked him.

Pearson motioned one of the men toward the door, Get him a paper. Then he said to me, It came over the wire from Bonners. Dead in bed. Awaiting the coroner’s findings.

I leaned against the desk and then after a while I said, Bob MacAlevey. I looked at Pearson, You knew it wasn’t me?

He nodded. In a moment he said, Some things people don’t need to know.

That seemed right. When folks are playing you for skeet.

Beal ask, Police pick up anyone at the Union Hall?

Five heads shook, no.

Police go in?

The place was empty, Pearson said.

The place was filled with Chicago’s worst. So I was told.

Someone called that to the police station and the paper, Pearson said. The place was empty.

An old man pushed the morning’s paper into my hands. The sheet was damp. There was nothing on the front page about the raid on Union Hall.

Pearson asked, You haven’t hooked up with Johnson?

Beal shook his head.

Wallace, Kellogg weren’t that big. The sheriff knew me, he had met Beal a few times. Had he wanted to find us, if he had looked at all, we’d been there.

Pearson looked from us to his big, gnarled hands and back to us. If it had just been him and Beal and me I think he had something he wanted to say but then he looked away, out through a darkened window, and shook his head. I’ll get Johnson down in the morning.

Beal told him, Sure. Beal didn’t have much faith in Johnson. He turned to me, Let’s hit the sack.

Where you putting up?

Beal told him, Wallace Grand.

Pearson knew that wasn’t true. He turned his face away and shook some more. Not under your own names? We had talked about that in Coeur d’Alene. It was a question for the editor.

Beal cut me off with a sharp, Sure.

Pearson waved us out, You take care.

We were walking like a couple of drunken bums and we circled a few blocks, joining other bums spilling out of the dens on Riverside. Beal was talking about guns. All that thing you got does is smoke and noise.

I put my hand under my jacket and touched the curved old fashioned handle. My Dad brought them out of Utah with him. I learned to shoot with them.

Christ, you’d think there haven’t been improvements in the last eighty years. You need a thirty-eight. For now, Johnson probably has an extra.

Do you think Pearson was surprised Johnson hasn’t showed?

Beal said, Maybe we shouldn’t ask Johnson for an extra.

Around a few corners he said, No one behind us. No one not a pro. Let’s make like the chickadees, get the flock to the bird house. The back door was unlocked, as promised.

I told Beal, I hate this valley. God, I never thought I’d rather go to bed.

He bent to pull off his boots, then set them straight beside his cot and said, You’re growing up. Getting old.

I said, Christ, and turned away from the window and started to unbuckle my pistol.

Put ‘um where you can get ‘um in the dark. He was jumpy.

I looked at him, at the gun holster. I didn’t feel I could ever sleep.

Chapter 4

I was cleaning the forty-four when Beal opened his eyes. He yawned and stretched and finally sat up.

It’s hardly past labor day, I told him. How can you live in long woolies?

Beal scratched here and there and said, I wasn’t so raw I ended up pissing out the window.

Getting a chamber pot up here would be too much like home.

You don’t know what home is.

I told him, My car is home.

He stood up, scratched some more and leaned over to the window, glanced at the street, then reached for his shirt, got out his ‘Copenhagen’ and packed his lip. We’re getting you a new home today. You know someone or do we steal it?

Head whore in Burke has a car.

How do we get the head whore?

I’ll call from the Grand.

From the Grand Hotel?

I’ll mosey over and bathe and bother room service for breakfast.

Beal looked at me and shook his head. That’s making yourself pretty Damned obvious. He pulled on his