The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  The Dolans ran into a couple of Gig’s labor friends coming from the big IWW hall on Front Street—gregarious James Walsh, sent from Chicago to run the Spokane labor action, and an intense Montanan named Frank Little, who Walsh introduced as “part Indian and the rest trouble.”

  Rye didn’t like it when Gig ran with these union types; he thought their revolutionary banter half foolish and half dangerous and was never quite sure which was which. He couldn’t keep up with the boozing and sporting and jawing about wage slavery, and all things equal, he preferred the peace of Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse across the river in Little Italy. A warm soup, a hard cot, an early rise to get first crack at a good job.

  But last night, in sympathy with Gig’s heartache, Rye let himself get pulled in the wake of the union men, who sneaked Rye into Jimmy Durkin’s big beer hall under a sign that read, “IF YOUR CHILDREN NEED SHOES, DON’T BUY BOOZE.” They toasted Rye’s hand-me-down boots and told rich stories of sharks and foremen, and soon Rye was nodding, laughing, singing along.

  It’s quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don’t have to be—that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself. Two beers in, Rye felt lifted by a sense of hope.

  James Walsh was a musician and mining man who had once rounded up twenty toughs, dressed them in red, and taken them cross-country on cattle cars to shake up the 1906 IWW convention in Chicago, stopping to sing in work camps along the way. He called it the Overalls Brigade and said it was “to remind the dandies in suits and spectacles arguing over amendments and articles that this is about the goddamn rights of goddamn men.” That night in a packed Durkin’s, he opened the taps on his charm, calling Rye “boyo” and Gig “the esteemed Senator Dolan,” buying round after round until Rye was drunk for the first time in his life, arm over shoulder with the labor men, warbling along to Frank Little’s IWW songbook:

  Oh, why don’t you work like the other men do?

  How in hell can I work when there’s no work to do?

  Hallelujah, I’m a bum

  Hallelujah, bum again—

  Then the beer ran out, as beer will do, and whiskey, clocks, and nickels, too, and the union men left and it was just Gig and Rye, on a full-blown now, ducking the vagrant patrols and singing their ire in the street, a bitter tune their father taught them—Here’s a memory to all the boys, that are gone, boys—gone!—too bent for Mrs. Ricci, the boardinghouse widow who did not abide Gig’s drinking, and that was when older brother told younger about this overgrown ball field, and the big cook fire on the pitcher’s mound, although by the time they staggered down the hill into Peaceful Valley the fire was dying, the diamond dotted with bedrolls. Their own packs back on Mrs. Ricci’s porch, Rye and Gig curled on their coats on the dirt infield, not for lack of outfield ambitions but because if you were tempted by that soft center-field grass, you might wake in dew and catch your death—

  Catch your death. Now, there was a thought. As he watched the smoke-red sun rise in the sky, Ryan Dolan recalled his mother saying it when he was a boy and used to wander outside without coat and shoes. Well, he’d got to know death pretty well in the interim, was practically on a first-name basis, and from what he could see, it was death generally did the catching.

  Rye nudged his brother: “Hey Gig, let’s see if that doorman at the Empire will pay us two bits to carry his trash to the river.”

  Gig sat up and yawned. He patted himself for paper and tobacco, neither of which he had. “You go on, Rye-boy,” he said. “I’m going to the hall today.”

  Here was Rye’s chief complaint about Gig’s involvement with the Industrial Workers of the World, the one big union that took anyone as a member: Finnish logger, Negro seamstress, Indian ranch hand, even floater like them. What good was a union meant to help them find work if Gig spent so much time there that he couldn’t work?

  Gregory Dolan was a man of squares—shoulders, jaw, thick brown hair over arch blue eyes. Smart, too, about books, though less about work, which was more Rye’s area. Gig had made it to grade eleven, three years beyond any other Dolan, and was his own schooling after that. He always carried a book in his bindle and read as if he expected an exam. Rye could read fine, well enough to make out a pay sheet or a flyer for a brush job, but he never much saw the point in studying economics to hoe a field for sixty cents a day.

  The other difference between them had to do with the fairer sex. Rye Dolan was tall enough to fool a job agent, but up close he was boy-faced and pin-shouldered, with ears like the handles of a vase. But even ladies in automobiles cast long glances when Gig strolled the street. And among variety girls, sport ladies, tavern hags, and soiled doves, no vagrant in history got more half-offs and free rolls than his big sweet brother, Rye suspected.

  “Just come with me to the Empire,” Rye said. “We’ll go to the hall after.”

  “Nah.” Gig’s smile spread to a yawn. “I think I’ll lie here and reflect some more on the nature of man.”

  “Well, I ain’t going without you,” said Rye. His whole world was on that ball field: Gig and Rye Dolan, last of the Whitehall Dolans—sister Lace dead at sixteen bringing forth a cold baby in a Butte hospital, brother Danny a pond monkey in an Oregon timber camp until he side-spiked a rain-slick log boom, lost his balance, and drowned in a river of trees. Then there was their father-who-aren’t-in-heaven, that cursed old mine muck Dan Senior, so long to the dirt that the brothers could barely conjure his face, though they could recall his sadder songs and every inch of the back of his hand.

  Their ma was the last to go, from TB. The only kid still at home, Rye helped her to Mass and picked up enough work for a pasty-and-turnip dinner. He wetted scarves for her to breathe through and whispered a thousand lies to the woman, promised to write her sister in Galway and said Da was waiting in heaven with Lace and Danny, and, oh yeah, Gregory was on his way home with a sweet Catholic girl—so many lies Rye told in that room he was surprised Christ Himself didn’t appear to smite his bony back. Ma died feverish, unable to afford a hospital, coughing knots of blood, bruises rising from nothing but the idea of them, joints swollen with tumor, moaning and yelling and praying and wailing, and, alone at fifteen, Rye thought the devil had come into her until the parish priest came to last-rite the poor woman and said, “That’s just dying, Ryan.” Christ forgive him, Rye felt delivered when she finally stopped gurgling and left her wretched banty body, the undertaker carting her off like rubbish. A day later, Rye pawned his parents’ wedding rings and, dirt still wet above his mother’s moldering corpse, he became the last Dolan to walk out of Whitehall, Montana—off to find his long-lost brother, Gregory.

  And find him Rye did, two weeks later, sacked in a crib this side of Spokane with a hard piece of trouble. He stepped into that room with its dusky-whiskey-smoky smells and said, “Gig, our ma’s dead,” his big brother staring as if he didn’t recognize this long-armed kid. Then Gig made a noise like the air was pressed out of him, and turned and wept into his girl’s rashy bosom. This made Rye cry, too, the only tears he shed during the matter, standing in a dank flop watching his big brother sob on this girl’s chest. Next day Gig sent the girl back to the house of trouble where he’d found her, and the brothers lit out—

  For a year they moved, barely pausing for breath. They walked twenty miles some days, and ran down freight on the slow edges of towns, hopped boxcars and crouched on the blinds between mail cars. Gig showed Rye his favorite way to travel—in the open, on flat cars and lumber racks: “flying,” he called it, wind in his face, sun on his arms. They flew and floated this way, job to job, week to week, farm to farm, Washington to Oregon to Idaho, until they landed a gyppo logging crew on the St. Joe River, Gig talking his way onto one end of a two-man misery whip, Rye ladling water and pounding wedges in the kerfs to keep the saws from binding. But they got run from that job, too, replaced by the foreman’s nephews. They followed rumors to interior farms and staggered harvests, bushed wheat and picked huckleberries. The Panic
of ’07 had run the banks, and it was rare to find a boxcar or a barn without a vagrant in it. Most days they’d wait hours in line at the job sharks’ only to be told there was nothing for them. They huddled under burlap on boxcars, drank from streams, and ate squirrel meat over jungle cook fires, boiled up their clothes and slept beneath stars, ducked train gangs and rail bulls, and if it wasn’t an easy life, Rye would be lying if he didn’t admit some adventure in it.

  Spokane was base for five thousand floating workers, and the brothers put on their best shirts and queued at some of the thirty employment agencies lining Stevens Street, beneath bunk signs promising work for GOOD MEN! $1! JOBS FOR ALL! INQUIRE WITHIN!

  A hard season for men, but lying was having a banner year.

  Rye acted older, Gig sober, and they forked a dollar for the pleasure of a twelve-hour workday, knowing full well the shark was likely to split their buck with the straw boss and pull the job after two weeks for another crew (at a dollar-a-man), churning them like water in a paddle wheel, so no man could get a foothold. The Bunker Hill Mine rotated three thousand hungry muckers through fifty jobs that summer—three grand in fees split with the bosses, the sharks bleeding them other ways, too, subtracting two bits for doctoring, for stale bread, for a straw mattress. Then, harvest over, they recast the migrants as worthless bums and had security men knock their heads and drive them from town.

  This was the call of the IWW, the Wobblies, whose nickname came from a Chinese rail hump asking for the “Eye-Wobble-Wobble.” The whole operation had started in Chicago in 1905, and it landed hard in Spokane, where seven freight and passenger lines converged in the busiest terminal west of Chicago, a kind of Tramp Central Station. A thousand signed up in Spokane for IWW red cards, one of them Gregory Dolan, who dragged Rye downtown to hear Walsh call for nonviolent action, to peaceably gather in the streets to protest the sharks. And if the cops wanted to arrest them for speaking out, fine: they’d pack the jails, clog the courts. The union action cooled that spring of ’09, when the floaters went back to work, and Gig and Rye caught on at an apple orchard, made enough to sock-bank twelve bucks each to give to the widow Mrs. Ricci, so they might winter at her house in Little Italy.

  It was Gig’s favorite place on earth, Spokane, “theater capital of the west,” he always said, by which he meant “actress capital,” since every brothel and crib girl listed herself in the city directory as “actress.” And while Rye didn’t share his brother’s affection for Spokane’s unrulier side, the city had begun to feel like his home, too, after Mrs. Ricci rented them her enclosed porch for half what a proper boardinghouse charged, and even offered to sell the brothers the orchard behind her house, where they might build their own place. “Our porch should have posts like that,” Rye would say as they walked through a neighborhood, or: “What about a rainwater cistern, Gig?”

  Rye could see them settling in Spokane for good—so long as they found regular work and Gig went easy on the booze, so long as they camped outside on warmer and drunker nights, so long as a saw didn’t slip, or a hay pile fall, so long as they didn’t fall from a train or get killed by company thugs or rail bulls. So long so long so long—so long as Gregory and Ryan Dolan continued to draw breath—that cool fall day in the Year of the Lord nineteen hundred and nine.

  Gig was twenty-three and Rye not quite seventeen.

  And lying there, Rye had an insight that felt like a reverie, that, man or woman, Catholic or Prod, Chinese, Irish, or African, Finn or Indian, rich or poor or poor or poor, the world is built to eat you alive, but before you go down the gullet, the bastards can’t stop you from looking around. And he doubted that any magnate in a San Francisco mansion ever woke to a better view than he and his brother had that morning, staring at a red slash of sky from the crisp dirt infield of a weedy baseball diamond.

  “Sorry about Ursula,” Rye said.

  Gig leaned over, his wide, open face spreading into a grin. He shrugged. “Ah, nothing to do about that,” he said, “but play ball.”

  Rye laughed and was about to make a joke about forming tramp teams and going nine when a commotion rose on the road behind them.

  This was no smoke on the horizon, no reverie, but a gang of men descending the hill above the quiet diamond. Around them, stiffs leaped up, packed bindles and pulled on boots, grabbed pans and worn spoons, but there was no time. The mob bled onto the field and, as easily as if they were threshing wheat, began swinging at men’s heads.

  2

  They were off-clock cops and mining agents, security guards and private citizens, coats off, shirtsleeves rolled, boots kicking up dust. They swung billies and bats and the handles of axes, hoes, and shovels. They were on their third hobo nest of the morning, having given up all pretense of finding the murdered cop Waterbury’s killer.

  Gig and Rye were up and running toward left field when they passed a boy wiggling into his boots, and Rye recalled the boy’s name—Diego—and that he’d been turned down by the job agents after his left foot got mangled in a baler. Just as Rye remembered that, Diego took a rake handle to the back.

  “Goddamn tramps!” someone yelled, and “Move on, bums!” They’d been rousted and run from jungles before, but this felt different to Rye. These men wanted to bury them.

  The brothers jumped the low left-field fence and skidded down an embankment toward the river, the more zealous of the stick-wielders following. A row of two-post houses lined the river road, and from a wood-piled porch, a woman in a yellow dress sipped from a tin coffee cup and watched the chase like it was a play at the Pantages.

  Only then did Rye see that two other tramps were running with them. One was his friend Jules, an old Spokane and Palus Indian he’d met at Billy Sunday’s tent revival. Jules had been on his crew in Rockford, and was a tireless worker despite being sixty, a former cowhand with a bent back and weathered face, black hair like spilt oil. He was a tireless talker, too, a cook-fire storyteller who switched midtale from English to French, and whose booming laugh was, he said, “the only Salish I still speak.”

  Rye didn’t know the other man running with them. He was thin and pale, in a worn coat and a hat that retained little of its original form. His mustache was graying, but otherwise the man’s age was a complete mystery: he could be thirty as easily as he could be fifty.

  The four of them scrabbled to a ledge just over the rushing river, but here they ran out of path and had to turn back—four tramps faced up with six armed men on a narrow slab of dirt.

  The mob leader stepped forward: “Looks like you’re at a crossroads.” He was tall and thick, with slate hair like a fresh-tarred road. Rye figured him for an off-clock cop and imagined his police mack on a doorknob back at one of those Spokane clapboards, bread cooking, wife tending babies while he went to take tramps’ teeth.

  Gig stepped forward, too—he and the cop out like chess pieces. “What’s this about?” Gig asked in his citizen voice.

  Rye had seen Gig do this before with the police: play it casual, like he’d sat up suddenly in a barber chair. Once they were camped in a rail yard when two cops came through to clear the line for Taft’s traveling train. Gig started in over whether Taft had the votes to pass the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, and by the time the train car rumbled past, draped in bunting and flags, Gig had one of the cops believing William Jennings Bryan would’ve made a better president.

  But this one wanted no part of Gig’s charm: “You anarchist Wobs ain’t welcome here,” he said.

  “Well, then it’s your lucky day,” Gig said, “for there are no anarchists here. And while I am a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, I don’t believe that to be against the law.”

  “It is to me,” the slate-haired man said. He smacked his hand with his baton. “So what do you stinking bums want first? A beating or a bath?”

  Rye made eye contact with Jules, and they both looked over their shoulder. The river, then? But the Spokane was no bath, no gentle dip or quaint Montana fish stream. This was a Pacific-bo
und rager, a drowner, a freezer, a cold, rocky white-water deluge draining the whole of the Coeur d’Alenes from the big lake to the massive Columbia.

  Gig was still playing lawyer. “Why don’t you tell us first what law we’ve broke.”

  “The anti-agitating law,” Slate Hair said. “No more than three men can gather for public speaking or organizing.”

  “And what were we organizing?” Gig asked. “A union of sleepy ballplayers?”

  Even the civilians grinned at this, and Jules gave one of his big-throated laughs. Their fourth, the thin man in the worn suit, stayed quiet, hands in his pockets, head forward, Sunday slant to his hat.

  “A policeman got shot two nights ago,” said Slate Hair.

  This quieted even Gig, who cleared his throat. “You don’t think one of us had something to do with that.”

  “No,” Slate Hair admitted. “I don’t. But if it gives me reason to roust a hobo camp, I’ll take it.” He took another step forward with his nightstick.

  That was when the fourth man did the strangest thing. Without a word, he walked to the other side like he’d just remembered an appointment. Maybe it was his thin, hunched shoulders or his sad-sack face, but the civilians didn’t seem concerned in the least when he strolled up, calm as a man approaching a bank window, toward a young man to the right of Old Slate Hair, standing with his own smaller blackjack, a junior version of the mob leader’s club.

  The thin tramp was relaxed, smiling, leaning forward, hands in his trouser pockets, so the civilian didn’t even flinch when he reached out and yanked the man’s club away—like a parent taking a stick from a child. He must have planned the move while Gig talked, because he didn’t hit the smaller man; instead, he stepped once to his left and swung the club matter-of-factly at the pumpkin head of Slate Hair, as if he were still at that bank window—I would like to deposit . . . your skull.