Power (26 page)

Perhaps some of this passed through my mind as we walked from the station around the big square to the Union Building. There were a lot of men in the square today. They stood in little groups, and they were armed. Almost every man carried a rifle or a shotgun, and at least half of them wore one piece or another of old army equipment, a bandoleer, a rucksack, a sheathed bayonet, and here and there, forage caps and tin hats. They were not enthusiastic in their greetings to Ben. They nodded or they muttered a word or two; but back of their minds was plainly the fact that he had made the original arrangement for the Arrowhead Pit to remain open.

As we neared the Union Building, Andrew Lust, the chief of police, joined us. “I want to talk, Ben,” he said.

“Come upstairs.”

There were at least a hundred men gathered around the Union Building, armed men with quiet, hard faces. The kids were still in school, but later that afternoon, they would be there too. Like the others, these men looked at Ben and speculated about him. They stood aside as we went into the building.

The building was strangely quiet inside, and compared to the streets, it was almost deserted. Grove and Mullen were waiting for us. Lena Kuscow asked me about Mark Golden. Their relationship puzzled me, and I found myself watching her curiously as I told her that he was all right. “But you left him there alone?” I informed her that he wasn't alone, not by a long shot. We moved into Ben's private office. Oscar Suzic carried in some extra chairs. Lust began talking, but Ben interrupted him with,

“For God's sake, Andy, hold it a moment. The world's not coming to an end. Let me call my wife and at least tell her that I'm back here.”

We sat there in silence, while he called Dorothy—and I began to understand the relationship that exists on the end of a telephone wire. When would he be home? He didn't know that he'd be home at all. “I just may have to go to Springfield and get to the governor somehow.” He was uneasy with us listening to the conversation, but neither could he bring himself to ask us to go and leave him alone. He faced us, scowling, and when Mullen asked about the station incident, he snapped,

“The hell with those lousy finks! I took a gun away from Joe Brady.” He nodded at Lust. “Give it to him, Al.”

I handed the pistol to Lust, who examined it curiously, pulled out the clip, and emptied it. “What's this?”

“I took that away from Joe Brady,” Ben answered morosely. “We met him and Empek at the station. Nothing came of it.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“No.”

“All right, you got your troubles,” Lust said impatiently. “I got your troubles and mine as well. I swear I never seen anything like this in all my born days. We got an ordinance in this town about carrying weapons apart from the hunting season. This ain't the hunting season, and there's an army walking around downstairs. I swear there's seven, eight hundred armed men in town right now. Supposedly for the funeral, but they come from all over the county and they never heard of the Duffey kid until yesterday. What about it, Ben? Just tell me what about it?”

“There's nothing to tell you, because we don't know.”

“The hell you don't!”

“Just don't call me a liar, Andy,” Ben said softly and dangerously. “Just don't give me any lies, that's all. We didn't organize this. You ought to have enough sense to know that. The word gets around, and you know the diggers in Egypt as well as I do. This kind of thing isn't new down here. It happened before. These damn diggers think with guns, not with their heads.”

“But I try to think with my head. I got twelve officers—twelve officers. What am I supposed to do?”

“That's up to you, Andy.”

“What can I do?” Lust demanded. “I tell you, Ben, call it off! I'm not going to slaughter my men to protect those lousy finks out at Arrowhead. I can't protect them anyway. So call it off.”

“I can't call it off,” Ben growled. “God damn you, don't you have a brain in your head? We didn't organize this.”

“You went into West Virginia with guns in 1920, didn't you?”

“No! No, I did not! The diggers there took up guns because it was a matter of life and death. This is no matter of life and death. What difference does it make to the union how many finks they put into that crater? Sure it's a damned shame that the Duffey boy was killed, but do you think I'm so brainless that I'm going to organize a slaughter on top of that? Do you really think that, Andy?”

The chief of police hesitated, then shook his head. “No. You don't work that way, Ben.”

“Thanks. All right, just cool off, Andy. We'll go out to Arrowhead and talk to Klingman. If he agrees to clear out and take his bums with him, will you give them police protection?”

“What I can, I'll give them, Ben. I got twelve men.”

“I understand. Still we can do it. We'll offer them cars to drive them right out of the county. We'll offer it tonight.”

“And when do you want to go out there, Ben?”

“We'll go right now. Get your squad car, the one with the green light on top, so we can look official and not have some nervous hooligan pop off at us. We'll meet you downstairs in five minutes.”

He left, and Ben looked at us, his eyes going from face to face. “Any better idea?” he demanded.

“You made up your mind,” Grove said. “You didn't ask us.”

“I'm asking you now.”

“You can talk to those men in the street, Ben. You got the force of the union behind you. You can ask them to turn in their arms.”

“And they'll do it?”

“They're going to kill every last man out there in Arrowhead,” Grove cried. “Don't you know that?”

“I don't know anything. I don't read the future.”

“Then maybe it's time you did read the future, Ben. It's plain enough.”

“You read it, Fulton.”

“I do. And if I was in your place, I'd call in the militia and disarm this mob.”

Ben smiled thinly. “I know you a long time, Fulton, but I never thought I'd live to hear you tell me to call in the militia against the members of my own union. I never thought it. I've heard of unions that were broken and died, but they died decently. They didn't die because the president of the union turned the militia loose against his own membership. I never heard of that, and I don't intend to be the first.”

“Just to be fair, Ben,” Mullen put in, “we heard you tell your wife that you might go up to Springfield and see the governor.”

“Yes. To ask him to clean out that Arrowhead crater before it became a grave. But that wouldn't work. In the end, we'd get the militia—not the owners. Believe me, Jack, there's only one way—to talk Klingman into getting out while he's still alive.”

 

19

In a few minutes, we were on our way out to Arrowhead, Andrew Lust sitting next to the uniformed driver, and squeezed tightly into the back seat, Ben Holt, Jack Mullen, and myself. I think it was at this point that I first began to sense Ben Holt's need for me, for my presence, for whatever he felt I gave to him. Just what that quality was, I still do not wholly understand, nor was it simple. He needed a balance, as if he knew that, brooking no interference, he tended constantly toward the brink of disaster. Yet it was not that entirely. He had a vast confidence in himself; his essence was wild and headstrong; yet he had a deep feeling of something missing. We were as different as two human beings could be; I came hard by judgments, he judged easily; he lived in a world of black and whites, I lived in a world of grays; he simplified, I saw nothing simple, nothing easy; he was as certain as I was uncertain, and I hated power as much as he loved it and needed it. Yet his deep need for someone like myself was evident—and basic to our working together.

On our way out to Arrowhead, he said to me, “Al, how would you put it to Klingman? You're new to this.”

“Tell him he's going to die if he stays there. That ought to be convincing enough.”

“No. No, it won't be. We're facing arrogance. There's nothing in the world as arrogant as a coal operator. Even small potatoes like Klingman. Why, I have known operators to tell me to my face that God appointed them stewards of the earth's wealth—and that they knew better than I did what was good for their diggers. I tell Klingman he's going to die if he remains there, he won't believe me. He just won't.”

He didn't. We drove up to the mine, and the day was as clear and bright as the last time I had been at the Arrowhead Pit. As we drove toward the road that led down into the crater, two men with rifles stepped out from behind rocks. When they saw that it was a police car with a uniformed driver, they let us pass, and we turned toward the entrance. It was true about the machine guns; at either side of the entrance road, at the lip of the crater, there was a nest of sandbags, each holding a Browning water-cooled gun and three men to serve it. Yet the emplacement was childish and thoughtless, as I pointed out to Ben.

“Why?” he wanted to know.

“Because it can be enfiladed, from the side and from across the crater. A machine gun is no good if you can get behind it. They're trying to defend a circle, but the way they're placed, the arc of both is only eighty or ninety degrees effective.”

“We won't discuss that with Klingman. The hell with him. If he won't move, let him depend on his goddamn machine guns.”

We were driving down the road that made a circular ramp inside the crater. Inside the crater, a whole village of tents had been constructed, as well as several shacks. As it turned out, ninety-two men were living there, all of them well armed, and there were six professional women, brought down from Chicago to ease the boredom of the nights. There were two big tank trucks to serve as the water supply, piles of canned goods in corrugated boxes, piles of smoked ham and sides of bacon, and at least fifty bushel baskets of potatoes and onions. No expense had been spared to make these Chicago imports comfortable, and indeed there appeared to be more food in that pit than in all of Pomax. A bar had been set up on two barrels, and a certain amount of bootleg whisky was sold there. For all that, there was no sense of order or discipline about the place. It stank of excrement and swarmed with flies. The cots in the tents were unmade, and there was filth and refuse everywhere.

As we approached the cluster of tents, dozens of men with rifles moved toward us, but again, as up above, when they saw the police markings, they fell back. We parked at the bottom of the road, fifty feet or so from the tents, the giant steam shovel looming over us, and waited there as Klingman and his foreman, a freckled, redheaded man named Babe Jackson, well hated by everyone I heard speak of him, pushed through toward us. Each of them wore a revolver belted around his waist, and Klingman affected a wide-brimmed western hat, which he took off now to wipe his brow. The day had turned hot, and he was sweating.

We climbed out of the car. No one shook hands. There were nods of recognition, and Klingman said,

“You took a hell of a chance coming in here like that, Andy. This is private property. You got a warrant to come in here?”

“No warrant,” drawled Lust. He too wore a gun at his hip; he was skinny, snakelike and dangerous, and he didn't frighten. “I just took a chance.”

“Well, if you're looking for the man who shot the Duffey boy, you won't get him. Matter of fact, we don't know who he is ourselves. Them Duffey kids were trespassing, and a dozen men shot at them.”

“I figure to find out who he is,” Lust said lazily. “All in good time. Right now, we want to prevent some murders.” He turned to Ben. “Tell him about it.”

“Just this, Klingman,” Ben said. “There are almost a thousand armed men in Pomax right now, diggers, and more coming in every hour. You know the kind of men who live in Egypt. They don't wave guns for excitement. They never touch a gun unless it's hunting season or they're very angry. Right now, they're very angry. They don't like the murder of a kid who wasn't doing any harm—just a curious kid. They don't like this kind of Chicago scum brought down here to break a strike and given machine guns and rifles. They don't like it a bit, and I imagine they plan for something to happen out here. If it does, not one of you will leave this pit alive. I don't want that. Andy Lust doesn't want it—and I don't think you want it. So we're here to tell you to get out. We were ready to furnish cars, but you have enough trucks to do it yourself. We want you out of here and out of the county before dark.”

Jackson, the foreman, grinned and said, “Listen to him talk, Mr. Klingman.”

Klingman said, “Don't make me laugh.”

“We wouldn't try to make you laugh,” Lust said.

“No? Well, let me tell you this—and it goes for you, Andy, and for Ben Holt and that whole goddamn Bolshevik union of his. This is private property. We are on this property, and we have the legal right to defend it from intrusion. Don't try to frighten me with a pack of ignorant diggers with shotguns. We have two machine guns, and a hundred well-armed, trained men. We're not moving. We stay here and we mine coal. So save your breath and get moving. And if you want your diggers to pay their union dues, keep them away from here!”

“That's it?” Ben asked.

“That's it.”

“There might be one other way,” the chief of police said. “You turn over to me the man who shot the Duffey kid, and I might have a fifty-fifty chance of taming those diggers. Maybe I can persuade them to legal ways if I can show them that there's some legal way to enforce a law against murder.”

“I told you there's no way of ever finding out who fired that shot. But let me tell you this, Andy. If there's going to be trouble, you got an obligation to prevent it.”

Lust grinned and shook his head. “No, sir. This is outside of town limits. Anyway, it would take the National Guard to protect you, Mr. Klingman, and then some.”