The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  The report fell to my lap. How far you have fallen. Your ruin. For a moment I could barely breathe. I looked down at the floor.

  “You had to know I wasn’t going to bring her back here,” he said.

  I looked back up at Brand.

  “So I began thinking,” he said, “there must be some other reason you brought up my agreement with Ursula. And I realized that if I were in your position, I would do the same.” Brand reached into a valise next to his chair and produced another document. He handed it to me. There was a wax seal on it. It read Spokane County and Official Deed and Bill of Sale. The building was listed as the Bailey Hotel, Spokane, Washington.

  “This is the hotel we talked about her running,” he said. “Fifty-two single-occupancy rooms that rent for five dollars a month. But that’s just on paper. We get three dollars a day from the thirty or so women who ply their trade in cribs on the alley side. That’s where the real money comes from. From that, I pay the police to look the other way.

  “The legal owner is a man named Burke. I pay the taxes, and the upkeep, and I give Burke ten dollars a month to serve as a front for my interests.”

  I looked over the document. It was two pages long. At the bottom of the second page were two lines transferring ownership from Burke, who had signed below his name, to my legal name, Margaret Anne Burns. The contract was dated that day. Brand held out a fountain pen.

  “Of course, you’ll get a better deal than Mr. Burke had,” he said. Then he pointed to a paragraph in the contract. “This deed transfers twenty percent of real ownership of the building to you, as well as that percentage of monthly income from the property. You’ll be responsible for twenty percent of upkeep, improvements, and taxes. This stake requires no cash investment on your part but will be in exchange for agreeing to assume management of the property and being its public face. You have the right to sell your stake at any time, but I retain first right of refusal to match any offer.”

  It was quiet in the private dining room. My investment in the hotel was clear. His eyes sought out my chest and I felt my rib cage tighten, like I was still wearing the meat-filled corset.

  I looked up into his eyes. Whatever First Ursula had seen there, she was right: A woman owns nothing of this world.

  “Thirty percent,” I said.

  He smiled, crossed out 20 on the contract and wrote 25, then initialed it. “And you will pay Burke five dollars a month for two years,” he said.

  “I will pay Burke two and you will pay him three,” I said.

  He held out the pen. I took it. He pointed. “Here,” he said, “and here. And here.”

  When we were done, I set the pen down. It weighed forty pounds.

  Then dessert came. Bread pudding.

  16

  At midnight, Rye met Gurley at the Great Northern station for the overnight to Seattle. She wore her usual black dress with bulky black coat, hair tied back with a black ribbon. She carried a red and gold carpetbag. So he wouldn’t have to travel with his bindle, Rye had borrowed a boxer’s bag from Fred Moore.

  They settled in second class and Rye sat by the window. He’d never been in a train, only on one. It was how he’d traveled to Seattle the first time, lying in deep grass with Gig, ducking railroad bulls, then running down a Northern Pacific freighter just as it picked up speed outside the yard. They had spent a miserable seven hours hanging ladders and riding blinds, but even so, there were worse ways to go. Class existed among tramps, too; Rye had seen Negro hoe-boys from Texas clinging to the trusses a foot above the tracks.

  But now, how could he go back to riding on trains after he’d been inside one, nestled in this soft seat, lulled by the thumping rattle of the ties?

  When he jerked awake, he realized he’d missed most of the trip. The sun was up and Gurley wasn’t next to him. The snow had held off and they’d made good time through the mountains, easing down Cascade switchbacks into a lush valley. Log piles and shipyards rolled past the window—farms and stacks and waterfront hamlets, and then the train slowed and they crossed a bridge onto the isthmus that held that great shithole of prosperity, Seattle.

  Last time here had been a disaster for them. Gig had been sold a dock job by an employment shark, but it turned out to be unloading a contraband barge with no manifest, and on day two, when dockworkers with union badges showed up, Gig understood he was scabbing a union job. He beat it off the pier and found Rye scrounging for food in alleys. They were stranded four days down the Seattle skid, wet and cold, under a low gray ceiling. If the sun rose that week, Rye missed it.

  Seattle was like an infection that started at the water and spread up the verdant hills. The smell of stewed harbor turned his guts: salt flats, log pulp, and fish guts stirred by a tide that gently rocked the city’s sewage back and forth. Gig said it was why he preferred a river town, because it took your shit away. “A man shouldn’t have to worry about his morning business coming back for him in the afternoon.”

  Rye hadn’t cared for the people, either—a humorless breed of fishermen and dockworkers, and tight shop owners. In four days, they found no work and little in the way of generosity, and finally grabbed a rattler back out of town.

  It felt entirely different now, arriving inside a warm passenger compartment, staring out his window at the city around him.

  “See that?” asked a man with a British accent from the seat behind him.

  Through the window, Rye watched a crew of workers using water cannons to blast at a steep hillside, sluicing away the dirt in muddy streams that left a few houses perched on a jagged man-made cliff.

  “They are flattening Denny Hill,” said the man, his face pressed against the window. “Farewell, Rome of the West, the City of Seven Hills is now six.”

  Rye wasn’t sure what to think of any of this.

  The train rattled along Elliott Bay, then through a tunnel behind the piers, and at last into King Station south of downtown, its huge clock tower rising into the low gray clouds.

  Gurley came back from the dining car with a man and a sandwich. The sandwich was wrapped in waxed paper, the man enduring a Gurley lecture, “. . . not trying to convince you of anything except that which you claim to believe,” and without a beat, she handed Rye “turkey and cheese,” then back to the man, “while you fret over a few extra pennies going to the poor,” then to Rye, “they were out of mustard,” then back to the man, “the rich live on untold millions in interest and inheritance, all of it unearned, by your own definition a free handout and proof of your inherent hypocrisy, now I hope you will pardon my candor and my brusqueness, but good day, sir,” and she dropped into the seat next to Rye. “Did you want coffee?”

  Rye spent the day like this, in this revolving door of Gurley’s considerable energies, first at the train station, where she introduced him to a tall union man, “James Garrett, IWW Puget Sound organizer, this is Ryan Dolan, sixteen-year-old orphan the Spokane police very nearly beat to death—” Garrett escorted Gurley to a female boardinghouse and Rye to a flop around the corner where he dropped his bag in his room and went down to the lobby to find Gurley and a red-faced man with a notebook and pen already in deep conversation.

  “I’m telling you, it’s not like Missoula. If that was a skirmish in the free speech war, this is Antietam,” Gurley said, and without pause, she touched the red-faced man on the arm. “Olen Parr, this is Ryan Dolan, sixteen-year-old orphan beaten and arrested in Spokane for nothing more than standing on the street, and then crowded into a sweatbox with thirty other men.”

  “Son of a bitch.” The man looked down to write in his notebook. “Is that so?”

  “Well,” Rye said, “twenty-eight, but . . . yeah.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the man said again.

  “Olen, walk with us.” Gurley rose and, her hand falling easily on Rye’s arm, spoke over her shoulder at Olen as they walked through the cluttered lobby. “Ryan here was on bread and water for two weeks, and he is only sixteen years old and an orphan to boot.”<
br />
  “Is that so?” Olen muttered. “Son of a bitch.” Rye wished she’d go easy on the young-orphan talk, which made him sound like a baby left on her doorstep.

  As they stepped through the door, she said to him, “Olen is the editor of the Socialist newspaper.”

  On the sidewalk, Olen looked stricken. “But I’m not anymore, Gurley.”

  “What?” She stopped, turned.

  “You didn’t hear? I split with the Socialist Party in July, and went with the Socialist Workers Party, but then I left them, too.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, we got into it with the Central Branch at the state convention over their platform, those uptown sons of bitches handcuffed us and pushed the Pike Street radicals aside, so I walked out and joined the SWP for two weeks, but those petite bourgeois sons of bitches were like a knitting club, so we finally had our own goddamned convention.”

  “You quit the socialists to have your own socialist convention?”

  “Then National failed to recognize us, so we quit altogether.”

  “You quit the Socialists? Olen, you edit a newspaper called The Socialist.”

  “Like I said, I don’t anymore. I’m in the Wage Workers Party now. We started a newspaper called The Workingman Paper, but we only printed two issues. Now it’s called The Agitator.”

  Gurley stared at the ground for a moment. She looked over at Rye, who had no idea what to make of any of this. He tried shrugging with his eyebrows.

  She abruptly started walking again, hand on Rye’s arm, Olen at full pace behind them. “Well, you should still write about Ryan here, a poor orphan fighting for justice and for freedom of speech—”

  “And to get my brother out of jail,” Rye interjected for the first time.

  “Yes!” she said. “And for his equally courageous brother. That’s what we need you to write, Olen, that we came to raise money to launch a second free speech day in Spokane and to hire a lawyer of national caliber to eventually get those five hundred brave men, including Ryan’s only living relative, out of that horrible jail!”

  “Five hundred. Son of a bitch.” Olen was back to scribbling in his notebook. “Is that so?”

  Gurley tapped Olen Parr’s pad with her finger. “Five hundred workers whose only crime was to speak freely in the street and to seek a job without paying a crook for it! The cops filled the jail and filled the brig at Fort Wright, and they locked poor Ryan here in an old school with no heat and no electricity.”

  “And he’s an orphan, you say?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Rye muttered to himself.

  “The police don’t even wait for them to speak now,” Gurley continued. “Man climbs off a train or asks for directions, they shackle him on the spot. It’s tyranny!” She turned them around a corner, the sidewalk rising up a hill so steep that the side door was on the second floor in front of the building. “You need to see for yourself, Olen. Come! Write about it! It’s a great story. An outrage.”

  “Well, we have a committee meeting next week to vote in our bylaws, but I might be able to come after that.”

  “That will be too late.”

  “It’s the bylaws, Gurley.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, at least write something about our trip, Olen. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Well, sure,” he said, his face flushing.

  She tapped his pad again. “In ten days, we’re planning a second free speech action. A week after that, Clarence Darrow is speaking in Boise, and Ryan and I aim to travel there, raising money along the way to hire Darrow to fight this travesty! D-A-R-R-O-W!” She pushed Rye through the revolving door and said back over her shoulder, “Publish, Olen!” She squeezed Rye’s arm and said quietly, “What a waste of blood.”

  Rye glanced back to see Olen Parr through the spinning door and hear the man’s last muffled question: “Gurley, are you pregnant?”

  17

  Seattle’s IWW Hall was half the size of Spokane’s—cramped above a Pioneer Square dry goods store, stage half hidden by beams. The room was dark and smoky, a bog of beards and hats, legs crossing and uncrossing. Rye sat with Gurley in the front row as a local speaker went first—a snerfling, erming lumber bum who couldn’t put three words together—Rye unable to concentrate without imagining the whole town with the same flu bug.

  Back in Spokane, Gurley had assured the union men she would leave the agitating to others, but throughout the day Rye saw this was impossible. In meeting after meeting, she swept into the room and took it over, whether it was filled with socialists, suffragists, or society women. She got thirty dollars here, fifty there, and a commitment of four women to come to Spokane and help feed the union men. All leading to the main event that night in the IWW Hall, flyers in Pioneer Square announcing: “The Rebel Girl E. Gurley Flynn (Jones) Speaking Tonight 7 p.m. on Spokane Free Speech War.” Onstage, the local organizer was finishing: “Erm, I said my peace, and now the person you come to hear, Mrs. Jack Jones, previously known as, snerf, that fiery girl rebel out of New York and Chicago, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”

  She came out to musty applause, purposefully striding toward the crowd like she might dive in, her toes stopping at the stage edge. She leaned forward. “Listen,” took a few breaths, “brothers and sisters, have we ever seen such trying times?”

  She went through a list of outrages, fifteen-hour workdays and women dying at their sewing machines, men crushed in cave-ins while their families got nothing, copper kings and shipping magnates living like royalty while poor workers couldn’t even afford a flop bed, families in tents and hovels, workers given no rights and tossed aside when they were too broken or sick or old to work.

  “Listen,” she spoke softly, so the crowd had to lean in, “I know you believe in a better world—” Then she raised her voice and sat them back in their chairs. “But belief without the will to fight is nothing! And I’m here to tell you the fight is here! Now! In Spokane!” She gestured at Rye and he stood. “This is sixteen-year-old Ryan Dolan, beaten and jailed for trying to speak, for imagining his hard work might one day get him a foothold in this life. He came here with me today to plead for your help and help for his own brother, a political prisoner in a Spokane jail—”

  They’d rehearsed this part, Rye facing the crowd and telling his story as he always did, starting, “We woke in a ball field—” and continuing to the mob’s attack, Gig’s beating and arrest, his own arrest, the sweatbox, rock pile, bread and water, and then getting out, finding out his friend Jules was dead and that his brother was facing six months in jail, maybe more, for doing nothing more than standing on a crate and singing. And that was why he was here, raising money to hire “the great Clarence Darrow” to help get Gig and the others out of jail.

  “Thank you, Ryan.” She gave him a nod that he’d done well, and he returned to his seat. She’d added Jones to her name on flyers and posters, but it was all Gurley onstage now, striding about in her big black coat to hide her pregnancy, and which made her appear to float, ethereal, fine dark features on a thin pale face. “This is the fight, brothers and sisters! And it’s not just in Spokane!” She worked the space like a boxer, corner to corner, perched forward as though looking through a high window. “It is anywhere these robber barons own the land and the industry and the agency that sends you to work there! Anywhere men and women are forced to live on the street. Anywhere a handful of copper and timber kings steal the wealth created by the labor of tens of millions and then beat and arrest the very men they’ve robbed for simply asking why!”

  Rye had seen his brother jawsmith, and he’d seen Walsh talk an angry crowd out of busting up a job agency, he’d seen storytellers like Jules, and traveling quacks and palmists, and he’d seen the dazzling center fielder Billy Sunday keep a thousand hobos rapt with his jokey preaching (“Goin’ to church don’t make you a Christian any more than goin’ to a garage makes you an automobile”).

  But he’d never seen the likes of Gurley up there.

  The
crowd was nodding, perched to erupt, but Gurley wouldn’t pause, and she rode their murmuring yeses to a rising chorus. “Brothers and sisters, look around this room, at our bodies, our blood, the fuel for their machine! We can use the same fuel to start a movement! These bodies! This blood! To demand fair pay! Basic medical care! Rights for women, Negroes, Indians! To demand nothing less than the American right to speak out against corruption! Against greed and unfairness! Join us on the front lines, donate money, help young Ryan Dolan and his brother, for when we’ve won in Spokane, we’ll bring the fight here, to Seattle, to San Francisco and Fresno, to Portland and Minneapolis, we will fill a room like this in every building on every block in every city in every state in this country! And our righteousness will spill into the streets, into the lumber camps and mining halls! Join us in Spokane on November twenty-ninth to fight their corruption with our peace, and room by room, street by street, city by city, on rails and docks, in factories and farms, anywhere a workingman or -woman is cheated from a dollar and clings to a freight ladder for life and livelihood, we will stand as one and say, ‘No more! We demand a better world!’ ”

  Rye was sitting when all around him people rose up, stomping, cheering. A bucket passed, slopping change and small bills. Gurley, speech over, was swamped by men and women wanting to talk or to touch her, but as Rye stood nearby watching, she ignored them all and walked to the edge of the stage and called over a ragged-looking young woman who had been sitting off by herself.

  The woman looked to be twenty at most, no stranger to trouble, an opium girl or rustle boxer, Rye guessed. He had noticed her just before the speech, matted hair and a fresh black eye. Now, while the crowd milled, Gurley bent down, took the young woman’s hands, and said something to her. She pulled away and said in a louder voice, “You can do it.” Then she walked along the stage, thanking people as the raggedy woman made eye contact with Rye and hurried from the union hall.