The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  Watch! I called out. I cannot say why I yelled this except I imagined that if I were witnessed now, I might continue to exist, even if only as a tale the boy thrilled his children with—the scoundrel who stole a ferry and rode it over the falls.

  From the back of his pony, the boy raised his hand as I passed, and he called out to me the way you would to a friend you recognized, three short yelps as my barge passed, a song whose meaning I would never know but which I took to mean: I see you.

  There is no world but this one. And all we want is to be seen in it.

  I see you, the boy said. And I was grateful.

  Then a crack and a roar and my barge seized up beneath me, front end risen like God Himself had reached down from heaven to save The Kid with His great forgiving thunder of a Hand—

  But no—

  I had run against a boulder, which tore the current and my vessel in two, and I was riven by sin from salvation and tumbled to the smaller end of my broken punt, clinging to its side. I looked back and could scarcely believe what had happened—I had gone over! Fallen ten feet on half a wooden raft and lived to tell it! I looked at the north shore for the boy and tried to make the whooping sound he had made—but I was weak and if this first stair step had been the easiest, what came next would surely be my end.

  Behind me, the boy sat atop his pony on that rock ledge—his wide eyes mirroring my own thoughts: Did you see that! He began to raise his hand once more (this the end of the story he would tell his children, As he went over, I waved) and I began to raise my own arm in response, but before either of us could finish, the next step came and I was taken by the cold froth that awaits—

  6

  Tramps knew Spokane by its rail stations: the big depots downtown and James Hill’s freight yard in Hillyard, a neighborhood of little houses and big saloons, dry goods and feed stores, and so many stray mutts it was known as Dogtown.

  Rye was walking to Dogtown to look for his brother on the day he first met Mrs. Ricci, on the hobo highway, a trail that paralleled the tracks along the river. Between downtown and Dogtown was all Catholic—the huge steeple of the new St. Aloysius Church being built on the riverside next to the Jesuits’ Gonzaga College, Holy Names Academy and the Knights of Columbus, a seminary and convents for Dominican and Franciscan nuns, orphanage, asylum, and high school, a vast Vaticanland surrounded by blocks of broad-porched Irish houses and the cottages and bungalows of Little Italy, Paddy taverns, spaghetti houses, groceries, shops, and the ghetto shacks of recent immigrants.

  Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse lay on the northern edge of Little Italy, at the base of the Lidgerwood hill. It was a one-story farmhouse with an enclosed porch and an empty lot out back where her husband, before his death, had tended three rows of beloved fruit trees. Rye first saw the Ricci place when he noticed ripe plums hanging from two stuffed trees below the hillside, behind the paint-chipped house. He thought about taking a few plums but knocked on the door instead. The woman who answered was ancient, a hunch below five feet, and nearly bald beneath her head scarf. She stuck out her bottom lip and looked Rye up and down before proposing in heavily accented English that he keep a fourth of what he’d picked (“Three me, one you”). Eventually, she let him borrow a stepladder, a bucket, and a pair of gloves, Rye not twenty minutes into emptying the first tree when Mrs. Ricci reappeared with bread, noodles, and a glass of iced tea.

  She had three grown sons, but two of them lived in Idaho with non-Catholic wives who sparked such deep disapproval that the boys rarely came to see their mother. The third son was an imbecile who lived in the asylum six blocks away. Mrs. Ricci walked there to see him every day after Mass.

  She took immediately to Rye, and with time, to Gig, her eyes narrowing as if he might be too smooth to trust. The previous December, the Dolans had set up cots on her back porch and opened vents to draw heat from the woodstove. Her enclosed porch became a cheap place to winter so long as they abided Mrs. Ricci’s particular rules: that they not show up drunk or take the Lord’s name and not correct her when she got distracted and accidentally called them by her sons’ names. “Wait, am I Marco or Geno?” Gig would ask before they went into the kitchen for breakfast. “You’re Marco,” Rye would answer. “I’m Geno.”

  This would be their second winter on Mrs. Ricci’s porch, and they woke there the morning of the great Free Speech Fight, buried under coats and blankets, the smell of bacon stirring both brothers from their cots.

  Rye had gone there alone after Gig went out looking for Early Reston at Durkin’s. Rye worried that his brother wouldn’t come home at all, but he’d dragged in just after midnight, smelling of cigars and booze. “I’ll tell you what, Rye-boy,” Gig said as he settled into his cot, “after four whiskeys, Early’s case for making bombs instead of speeches begins to make a little sense.” He hummed a laugh that made Rye jealous. He wasn’t sure what to say about bombs versus speeches (How about neither?) but it didn’t matter: Soon Gig was snoring.

  In the morning, Gig rose and used the outhouse first, then Rye, who paused at the door to glance back at what he thought of as his orchard, three rows of fruit trees, apple, plum, and pear. Leaves littered the ground beneath skeletal branches. Mrs. Ricci had agreed to sell them the lot for two hundred dollars, although they had yet to pay more than a few bucks toward it.

  When Rye came back from the outhouse, Gig was dressed and arranging his things as if he were going on a trip, folding his extra shirt and stacking his three books: Jack London’s White Fang, and Volumes I and III of Count Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Gig had traded a bottle of wine for the first Tolstoy and had found the third for sale at the Salvation Army. There were five total, Gig told Rye, part of a larger twenty-volume set of Tolstoy’s Collected, Gig always on the lookout for the rest of War and Peace, the second, fourth, and fifth volumes. Now he carefully lined his three books next to his cot as if this constituted a library.

  “We leaving before breakfast?” Rye asked. “I thought it started at noon.”

  “Committee meeting first.”

  “Well, give me a minute to get ready, and I’ll go with you.”

  “You’re not on the committee.”

  “I’ll come later, then?”

  Finally, Gig looked up at him. “Rye-boy. You’re not coming.”

  “Of course I’m coming.”

  “No.” Gig explained that he was one of twenty men slated to speak, which meant he would probably get arrested, and he didn’t want Rye getting hurt if things got out of hand with the police.

  “I should be there,” Rye said.

  “No. You stay for breakfast. Then you can rake Mrs. Ricci’s leaves.”

  Rye hated when Gig started ordering him around—like he was some kind of authority. “I’ll eat down at the hall,” Rye said. “And rake leaves tomorrow.”

  “No.” Gig smiled. “You’re gonna have breakfast with Mrs. Ricci. Then rake her leaves—” He pulled his coat on. “This isn’t your fight, Rye.” He walked out the door into the backyard, Rye following right behind him.

  “Wait. I spend a year listening to you go on about this business, and now it’s not my fight?”

  Gig turned back, face set. “I’m your guardian and I say you’re staying here.”

  “My guardian!” Rye could barely believe the nerve after he’d spent the last year pulling Gig out of saloons. “What are you guarding me from, Gig? Sobriety? A home?”

  It stung the way Rye knew it would. Gig turned and began walking away, muttering. Rye picked up a word here and there: responsibility and bullshit and baby. And the next thing he knew, Rye was on Gig’s back. He didn’t even remember running and he didn’t remember jumping and he certainly didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish, hanging off his brother like a pack, arms around his neck.

  Gig threw him into the dewy grass. “What’s the matter with you?”

  What was the matter? This panic he felt watching his brother walk off—and suddenly, he was back in Whitehall, alone with her. “You can’t
just leave!” Rye spat, voice breaking, panting. He pictured their mother’s handkerchief, pink from the blood he could never wash out.

  Gig was staring down at him. After a moment, he offered Rye a hand and pulled him to his feet, Rye wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve.

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” Gig said. “This thing’s like a show. They’ll haul a few of us to jail and we’ll make a big deal of it and that’s that. The IWW ran this same show in Missoula, and after a week of feeding twenty singing tramps in jail, the city dropped the whole thing.”

  Rye pictured the big angry police chief—a good four inches taller than Gig, with that stern brogue—and couldn’t imagine the man just surrendering to a bunch of singing labor men.

  “Here,” Gig said, and he handed Rye his work gloves. “Have breakfast. Rake leaves. I’ll see you this afternoon or, at the very worst, in a week or so.”

  Rye held the gloves and watched Gig’s broad back recede, the scratchy window in the Whitehall apartment, his big brother always walking away. “Goddamn it, Gig,” he muttered.

  He went inside then, and ate breakfast with Mrs. Ricci, Gig’s plate empty next to his. Rye slurped eggs onto his bread.

  “Tu mangi come un cavallo, Geno,” Mrs. Ricci said.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Ricci,” he said. He tried to remember the Italian word for sorry. “Dispatch?”

  “Dispiace,” she said. “Si.”

  “Yeah, that,” Rye said.

  Breakfast over, he pulled on his brother’s work gloves and grabbed the rake from the side of the house. The wind swirled the leaves and he worked grimly, got two piles into the burn bin and lit them, but they were wet and smoldered instead of crackling. Rye watched the gray soupy smoke curl into the sky. The wind must’ve been howling above the valley, because the high clouds raced like migrating birds above the smoke, as if the world were flying by. “Goddamn it, Gig,” he said again. And he set the rake against the house.

  7

  Rye hurried through Little Italy and the Irish neighborhood, kids hanging from porches and running around big leafy yards. Normally, he’d take the river trail along the tracks to downtown, but today he felt like walking the blocks of houses, imagining he belonged, and he crossed Division into rows of brick apartments, then down Howard to the sprawling train station on Havermale Island, which split the river into two channels between the upper and lower falls.

  There was a trapdoor in the north deck of the Howard Street Bridge, and Rye stood watching a work crew dump a wagonload of tin cans and other garbage straight into the churning river below—a brown city soup of refuse, sewage, and train oil. People usually just threw their trash on the riverbanks, hoping the water would take it away, but by August, when the water got low, the stench was overpowering. So the city put trapdoors in the bridges where crews could dump garbage into the center of the river, easier for the current to flush downstream.

  At the Great Northern depot, Rye crossed four sets of tracks, a big passenger train steaming beneath the 150-foot tower, the four clock faces informing Rye that it was twelve minutes before high noon—the time Gig said the union’s action was set to start. Across the island, on Front Street, Rye didn’t need a clock to tell him something was on. Dozens of people milled outside the union hall, more arriving all the time, from flops, cafés, saloons.

  In front of the hall, men stood smoking in clusters of four or five, shuffling their feet, talking in low voices and foreign tongues. Most of them wore the faded clothes and work boots of floating workers, but Rye picked out Everett and another black porter, saw high-collared suffragettes and socialist women in hats, saw craggy old men with canes and eye patches—veterans of the mine wars.

  He watched from across Front Street, ducking behind a produce wagon as the strike committee emerged from the hall, Walsh and Little in front, and right behind them, Gig, looking as nervous as Rye had ever seen him. Rye’s chest tightened, from fear or pride, he wasn’t sure. “Goddamn it, Gig,” he said again.

  He felt another tug of misgiving when the last person came out of the hall—Jules walking out alone, black hair loose and falling between his shoulder blades.

  The men huddled around Walsh as if he were saying a prayer, then dispersed like marbles in every direction, so they couldn’t all be arrested together. Walsh led five or six men down Front Street, Rye following in a pack of onlookers before he realized Gig wasn’t there.

  “Fuckin’ Wobs!” said a man next to Rye, but most people just seemed curious. They lined both sidewalks as Walsh walked down the center of the street. He turned up Stevens and walked between streetcar tracks, Jules and a few others behind him.

  On Stevens, the crowd was thick, the carnival in full swing, a man in a turban offering to “Foresee your shocking future!” next to a barker selling ginger ale and chestnuts. People leaned out of upper-floor windows as if they’d paid for balcony seats, and others pressed in on the street, businessmen from the west side, sporting girls and gamblers from the tenderloin, laborers and barmen, reporters, nurses and uniformed Salvation Army men, hats and coats as far as Rye could see. Wobblies mixed with the crowd, too, and Rye recognized one of the ranch hands Jules knew, muttering the words he must’ve been given to say when it was his turn, “Mah fella workers . . . mah fella workers . . .”

  As Walsh marched down the middle of this wide street, Rye saw the security men hired by the mining and timber companies; they straightened up from brick walls and light poles, or stood on stoops with their arms crossed, clubs and rifle barrels peeking from beneath their long coats.

  At the south end of the block stood another line of men, six uniformed cops led by big John Sullivan. All of them had some lesser version of the chief’s facial hair, bush beards or marmot sideburns, and Rye wondered if they’d chosen the force by sheer whiskers alone. If the chief had looked unhappy the day before, today he looked like he might rip the arms off the first man to speak.

  That turned out to be Walsh, who took a National Biscuit crate from another man and set it on the street in front of the worst job shop, the notorious Red Line Agency. A buzz went through the crowd: Here it comes.

  Sullivan was walking even before Walsh started speaking—“Brothers and sisters, fellow wor—!” The labor man stumbled on the box, nearly losing his balance until Frank Little caught him, patted his coat, and pushed him back up, a ripple of laughter passing through the crowd. In that moment, Rye thought Gig might be right about this being like a show at the Comique: The tramps would do their tramp thing and the cops their cop thing and everything could return to what it was, Gig with a good story to tell next time at Jimmy Durkin’s.

  On the box, Walsh removed his hat and spread his arms like a preacher: “We are here to stand against injustice,” to cheers and boos, “in peaceful exercise of our right to speak out against the brutal tyranny of this city government and its corrupt bargain with these job agencies—”

  Walsh was not a small man, and the crate made him a foot taller, but he seemed like a toy when Chief Sullivan marched up, two thick cops on either side. Rye recognized one of the cops as the bull goon Hub Clegg.

  Sullivan yanked Walsh off the box and grabbed him by the neck like a chicken he might shake dead. He threw him to the ground and slammed a boot through the biscuit crate, Clegg wrestling Walsh’s arms behind his back.

  “Disperse!” the chief yelled to the crowd. “Next man steps on a box gets it worse! And worse for each after.”

  No one moved, neither Wobblies nor crowd, and the chief turned and said something to Clegg.

  Then a voice in the crowd called out, “Hold the line!” and that brought a cheer, and more boos, a man calling, “Kill the bums!,” more cheers and chatter, the crowd speaking all at once, drowning out Sullivan—then the people in front of Rye snapped their attention to the left as if a baseball had been lined up the middle, and Rye stood on tiptoes to see over the hats: Another box had appeared in the street, half a block north, and Frank Little was climbing on. This was the u
nion’s plan, after Walsh was arrested, to go up one after the other in different spots, force the cops to scramble one end of downtown to the other, arrest dozens of them, and fill the jail with the only weapon they had, their bodies.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Little began, but before he could say another word, a cop was on him and threw him to the street. He disappeared in the crowd like someone slipping beneath waves.

  “Disperse!” Sullivan yelled again, and the crowd took a few steps back but didn’t leave, Wobblies pressing forward, onlookers straining to see, every window on Stevens Street now full of people sticking their heads out and a man yelling from a second-story window of a lawyer’s office, “This is freedom? You call this freedom?”

  A few minutes later, the same man appeared in the doorway of the building, face bloodied, pushed into the street by one of the security men, his glasses skittering onto the cobblestone as he cried, “What is my crime? What is my crime!”

  The crowd rumbled and muttered like it hadn’t chosen which team to root for, heads swinging left and right at signs of action: To the south a young woman in a plain gray smock yelled, “Wake up! Wake up!,” and a cop pulled her down the street, then the crowd swung the other way, to the north end of Stevens, where Frank Little had gone limp and was being dragged by the arms, his legs bumping on the streetcar tracks. His soapbox was still in the street, and a long-bearded man climbed up and began singing with a heavy Slav accent, “Oh, say can you hear,” the first lines of the workingman’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” Coming near and more near—

  That man went down, too, pounded by a security goon, but another man was already on the box behind him, and Rye yelled, “Jules!” as if he might warn his friend, who either didn’t know the workers’ anthem or didn’t like it, because he started singing in French: “C’est la lutte finale, groupons-nous et demain!” and a cop standing just a few feet away cocked his head in confusion. But Hub Clegg had no hesitation and stepped in behind Jules with a raised nightstick, Rye reflexively closing his eyes rather than see the blow land—but when someone near him yelled, “Oh!,” Rye opened his eyes and tried to fight through the crowd.