The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  Filigno gave Gurley the grim update: union coffers depleted, membership flat, cops patrolling the streets and rail yards, picking up anyone with a foreign accent and running them out of town before they could protest. No one had been arrested in four days. The union was basically out of men, word having gone out among the floating class that railing to Spokane meant a beating. The last editor of the Worker had been arrested three days earlier and, like the editors before him, charged with conspiracy for luring protestors to Spokane.

  Charlie shrugged. “We can’t run this without a paper.”

  “I’ll edit the paper,” said Gurley. “We’ll publish this afternoon.”

  Filigno looked at the other two men. “Publish what?”

  Gurley tossed the articles she’d written on the table, the pages scattering the cards from their poker game. Rye had read them on the train—announcing the second free speech action and promising waves of support from Seattle, Idaho, and Montana. There was no mention of the robbery in Taft or the canceled speech in Missoula, just a story about full donation buckets and men promising to come fight. Filigno read aloud: “ ‘We welcome the ranks of organized labor in our battle against the corrupt Hibernian Police Chief Sullivan and his brutal bunkmate, the Drunken Judge Mann, these monstrous minions of the mining millionaires.’ Elizabeth—”

  She smiled. “I know, the alliteration.”

  She told the cook to fire up the canteen so that floaters could see they were open, and she told the newsstand clerk to take her stories to be typeset. She scribbled headlines on top: SECOND SPEECH ACTION IN SPOKANE! and GURLEY FLYNN TO SPEAK TONIGHT! The one-page paper would feature these two huge headlines, the second story announcing, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, is giving the first of a series of speeches leading up to Friday’s Free Speech Action tonight at 7 p.m. Will detail city’s brutality and the Union’s response. Free, at the IWW Hall, 240 Front Street, Spokane. Apple, cherry, mincemeat pie & coffee.”

  “Tonight?” Filigno looked up at Rye as if to ask, Is she okay?

  “It’s one o’clock,” she said. “If we get this typeset and run the press, there’s no reason we can’t get newsboys on the street by five.”

  “And the pies?” asked the canteen cook.

  “You have six hours to figure that out,” she said. She took the cards from the cook’s hand and tossed them on the table. A pair of eights. Rye couldn’t believe her energy, after all they’d been through, and more than that, how the hardship in Montana seemed to have fired her up even more. She sent Rye to gather newsboys to distribute the Worker and to get copies of the daily newspapers to see what news they’d missed while they were gone.

  It was a cold and foggy afternoon, the sun skirting the hills and a snow so light and dry that Rye couldn’t tell if it was falling or blowing up from the street. He fixed his coat around his shoulders and buried his hands in his pockets, but still the cold took his breath. He walked to the train station first, where a regular clutch of newsboys was selling dailies.

  They formed in crews around an older boy, and Rye recognized the leader of this crew, a kid named Lidle, who ran six younger newsboys and who liked to hang out in front of the union hall. Although he was a foot shorter than Rye, Lidle was only a year younger.

  “Hey, Ryan. I like your bowler.” Lidle self-consciously patted his own nest of unruly brown hair.

  Rye explained to Lidle what was happening. In a few hours, they’d need five newsboys to go out and sell a hundred papers each—a special edition of the Worker. They could keep the money they made, and they’d each get an additional nickel for putting posters on walls and light poles.

  “I’ll take care of it, Rye,” Lidle said. He still had copies of the afternoon Chronicle and the morning Spokesman-Review, so Rye got one of each.

  Rye hurried back to the hall, glad to be out of the cold. Through the front door, he saw the old cook in the canteen, busily stirring pie filling. He went through the doors into the main hall. At the end of the hall, the office door was open, and Gurley and Filigno were bent over the table, planning. Rye plopped down in the pews to look through the newspapers for IWW stories.

  But the union’s fight was old news now, the front pages on to a brakemen’s strike and the announcement of a big heavyweight bout in New York between the old champ, Jim Jeffries, and the new one, Jack Johnson. A Chronicle cartoon portrayed Johnson as a baboon training with fried chicken, and a local story had the six hundred colored troops at Fort George Wright planning to bet heavy on Johnson.

  Rye flipped to the Spokesman’s Labor News page and found a short bit headlined FOREIGN BUMS LEAVE; DISAVOW IWW. After being served bread and water for Thanksgiving, three men had told the judge they were no longer with the union. “We was tricked into this,” one of them was quoted as saying. The story gleefully pointed out that more than sixty men had now been released after agreeing to disavow the union and immediately leave town. After a high of five hundred in lockdown, the numbers were falling.

  The Spokesman-Review also had a small story about the successful prosecutions of four union leaders on conspiracy charges. These were one-day summary trials in front of six-man juries, in spite of the objection of what the paper called “the young Socialist mouthpiece Fred Moore.” Walsh and Little had both been found guilty and sentenced to six months’ hard labor in the state prison, as had the first two editors of the Worker, James Wilson and E. B. Foote. The last line of the story listed the upcoming conspiracy trials of four more union leaders this week, “those involved in organizing the Nov. 2 riot.” The last name on the list was Gregory T. Dolan.

  In the empty hall, Rye’s head fell to his chest. Six months?

  He felt like such a fool. Lem Brand had said he’d get Gig out early. And Rye had believed it.

  He thought he might get sick.

  He looked around the dark union hall.

  In the office, Gurley had straightened up from the table and was staring at him. “Ryan?”

  Christ. What were they doing here? What were they pretending they could do? He thought of Early: You don’t believe this shit, do you, that it’s possible?

  And Lem Brand: You’re a pawn.

  And Gurley? Did she ever have a plan other than having them throw themselves at the cops and rotting in jail? They had no money, no men, no pressure, no Clarence Darrow, no hope.

  Gig was going to jail for six months. Or worse, he’d die in there, like Jules had. And if Gig did get out, what would he be like? He’d been gone a month already, on hunger strike for part of that time. Rye looked around the empty union hall. He felt like his chest might collapse.

  He stood and left the newspapers open on the pew.

  Gurley came to the office doorway. “Ryan, is everything okay?”

  He lurched toward the door. “I just need some air.” By the time he reached the street, Rye felt like his sternum was cracking. Six months. He gasped at the cold air, needles in his lungs. What would he do? Tramp around and try to find work himself? Where would he go? Rye doubled over but couldn’t catch his breath. He glanced to his left and saw a policeman on the corner, watching the hall.

  It took a moment to recognize the big cop, Clegg. “Hello, Dolan. Back from Montana already?”

  Rye couldn’t speak, his breathing shallow and pained. He turned away from Clegg and hurried down Front Street. He passed a couple staggering on the street, passed a saloon, a café, a Chinese cleaner.

  He passed the newsboy, Lidle, followed by three other boys, like quail crossing Front Street. “Hey, Ryan, we’re ready.”

  He waved at them from across the street but kept moving, turned south on Stevens, wavering against the flow on the sidewalk, people headed for east-side saloons. He passed job sharks, hired guards on stoops, and an alley where two women stood smoking outside their storefront cribs. He had no idea where he was going. He just kept thinking the word home, although he didn’t think it existed without Gig.

  He looked ba
ck once to see if Clegg had followed him.

  But no one was there. Had he imagined the big cop?

  He slowed, his breath returning to normal.

  He looked up. He was on Sprague Avenue, in the fancier part of downtown, where a better class of steam escaped people’s mouths.

  25

  Tramps didn’t venture into this part of downtown without getting hassled, so Rye pulled his coat tight and lowered the bowler on his head, trying to blend in, just a man on his way home from work. Even with Mr. Moore’s coat and hat, though, his dungarees and boots gave him away. At Howard Street, he paused for an electric trolley car, its overhead wires crackling, and he was spellbound by the pale-lit, ghostly faces inside the car, people headed to families and meals and fires. Automobiles and horse wagons filled the streetcar’s wake, and Rye stood at that intersection for a long time, staring at the tracks. The whole country was laced together with tracks. He could get on a train and end up in New York City if he wanted, and this felt like another reverie, or a premonition.

  The world was becoming a single place.

  He moved deeper into the west side, fancy hotels, restaurants, and theaters. He found himself on the sidewalk in front of Louis Davenport’s frilly white stucco restaurant, pillars at the door, arched windows—inside, the bright lights gleaming off crisp white tablecloths and sparkling on gowns and shoes. He couldn’t stop staring—the light inside was like a vision of heaven.

  Three men in fine suits and leather gloves were walking into a cigar shop next door. At the curb, a young man in tails was helping a drunk woman in a gown into a brand-new automobile. Another man was leading a woman in a fur into the restaurant, and casually slipped the tuxedoed doorman a dollar.

  A day’s wage for opening a door.

  Rye stood on the sidewalk and turned a slow circle, taking it all in. It was dusk, early supper hour, and men were leaving offices for a beer together, or taking their wives to a meal before the theater.

  Right now he and Gig would be lining up at a Starvation Army soup kitchen or warming their hands over a rail-yard cook fire or, best case, huddled in their coats on Mrs. Ricci’s sleeping porch, hoping she’d invite them in for dinner.

  “Come on, get!”

  Rye looked back over his shoulder. The Davenport’s doorman was shooing him. He wore a heavy coat over his tuxedo and was waving a gloved hand as though Rye were a stray dog. “Come on, kid, move it.” He was probably only nineteen or twenty himself, hair slicked on either side of a widow’s peak.

  But what caught Rye’s eyes were the young man’s hands, encased in a pair of the warmest-looking gloves he’d ever seen. They were heavy black leather and reflected the diamond sparkle of the restaurant. Rye looked around at people on the street, some of them turning to watch. Everyone’s hands were gloriously gloved in fur and pelt and lined leather. One woman wore what looked like a pair of otters to her elbows.

  The doorman clapped his gloved hands and made a muffled sound. “Hey! You deaf? You can’t be on the sidewalk. No begging here.”

  Rye looked down at his own icy red, calloused hands—pure rebuke, dead giveaway. “I’m not begging,” he said, “I’m just walking.”

  “Then keep walking!” The man started toward Rye. “You can’t be here.”

  “Where’d you get your gloves?”

  “What?” The doorman gave Rye a shove, and he lurched into the street.

  Rye sat down on the sidewalk and began unlacing his boot.

  “Don’t do that, kid! Don’t make me call a cop.”

  Rye reached in his sock and came out with Brand’s twenty-dollar bill. He’d carried it there for over two weeks, the safest bank in the world, a hobo’s sock. “I want to buy some gloves,” he said.

  The doorman grabbed him by the collar, lifted him, and walked him to the end of the block. “I don’t care if you want to buy a Ford, you can’t do it on my curb.” He gave Rye another shove, pushing him down the block. “Now get, before I crack your head open. You’ll put people off their dinner.”

  Rye staggered down the block, one boot untied, gripping that rank bill in his hand. It had been like an infection in there. He’d thought about donating it to Gurley’s bucket but hadn’t—thank goodness, or a thief in Taft would have it. It occurred to him that he’d kept it for another reason. He’d convinced himself that as long as he didn’t spend the bill, maybe he could deny what he’d done, betrayed his friends.

  But he had betrayed them. He had told Lem Brand their plans, and in his Seattle hotel he’d answered Del Dalveaux’s questions: Where are you going next? Is Early Reston with you? He had betrayed them and then tried to convince himself that he hadn’t, or that it was harmless information, or that it was the only way to help Gig.

  But it was a rock in his conscience, this twenty-dollar bill. And Gig was spending six months in jail anyway.

  Rye stared at the wrinkled bill. A stray thought: If I spend this, I will no longer have it. This was the crazy thing about wealth: You only had it if you didn’t use it, but if you didn’t use it, there was no value in having it. It was like a riddle. No wonder some men died with more money than they could spend in a second life while other men starved. And him: a fool with twenty dollars and ice-cold hands.

  He kept walking west, paying particular attention to the gloved hands of the men and women on the street, gesturing in conversation, climbing on streetcars, opening doors. Finally, he followed a man in a smart suit and warm gloves up a set of stone steps and straight into the dark wood door of a store called Bradley & Graham’s, Fine Clothing and Rich Furnishings.

  It was a corner shop, warm and gently lit. Rye stood in the doorway, unable to move. An older man in a fine suit with a kerchief in his breast pocket looked up, smiled grimly, and began approaching, but before the man could speak, Rye held up the twenty-dollar note. He sputtered, “Gloves?”

  The man looked down at Rye. His plain, thin suit coat, or rather, Fred Moore’s plain, thin suit coat, was dusty and worn from ten days on the road. It wouldn’t have come from a shop like this even when it was new, of course. And his once fine gray bowler had worn edges and a big grease stain on it. Still, that note in his hand was legal tender, and the salesman seemed perplexed by it. He was maybe sixty, with eyeglasses and a gray beard. He glanced down at the bill.

  “It’s real,” Rye said.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  Rye answered, “Ryan Dolan, sir,” and wished he hadn’t added the sir.

  “And what kind of gloves are you looking for?”

  Rye considered again his red, stinging, work-scabbed hands, the mitts of a sixty-year-old man sewn to the arms of a boy. His clothes usually came from the Catholic charity bin or the Starvation Army, and he’d only ever bought one new item of clothing, a pair of warm socks from the bin at Murgittroyd’s. He could probably get a pair of gloves there for four bits. Or, if he was feeling fancy, go to the Emporium’s Saturday sale. One time he had walked into the Crescent, hoping to pinch a biscuit at the lunch counter, but a security guard had hustled him out. He wondered how much gloves were at the Crescent. Two bucks?

  “Well,” he said finally, “the warm kind?”

  “I could sell you a pair of ten-dollar ermine-lined gloves.” The man lowered his voice. “Or I could be a decent fellow and send you to Murgy’s, where you could find a pair almost as nice for under a dollar.”

  Rye looked around again. He must be in the finest clothier in town. Rich men sat in velvet chairs while other men retrieved items for them. Here, they didn’t pick over bins for the things they wanted, but got served like guests in a restaurant. A handful of wooden dummies were dressed like they were attending a wedding. There were no prices on anything, no bins announcing six for a dollar, Rye guessing that if a man had to ask how much something cost here, he could not afford it.

  He had a feeling similar to the one he’d experienced in Lem Brand’s house—despair that this world existed, and that, normally, he could no more afford one-dol
lar gloves than he could ten-dollar gloves. That nine dollars, like nine levels of class, existed between the very limit of what he could imagine and what men like Lem Brand bought without a second thought.

  “Is that your most expensive pair, then, the ten-dollar jobs?” Rye asked.

  “The ermine? No,” the salesman admitted. “The ermine comes from the stoat, a kind of weasel. But you could spend as much as you want, really. If you want mink, for instance, I could order you sable fur gloves for twenty or thirty dollars a pair.”

  Rye shook his head. How naive to think that only nine dollars separated Brand and him. “And do you ever sell them twenty-dollar gloves?”

  “Of course.” The salesman leaned in. “There’s a pair of forty-dollar gloves I could order from Milan. I have sold two pairs this year.”

  Rye looked around the store again. A man and his wife were staring at him, the wife seated, the man behind with his hand on her shoulder, as if he might protect her from whatever Rye was surely carrying.

  When Rye looked back, the salesman was chewing his cheek. “You’re one of those Wobblies,” he said.

  Rye didn’t answer. But at that moment, he felt done with it all—done with the beatings, done with Taft, done with Lem Brand and Ursula, done pretending they could stand on soapboxes and draw justice out of the air. Early was right. Rye didn’t believe in anything but a job, a bed, some soup. A simple farmhouse behind Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse. Gig out of jail, living with him.

  And in that moment, all he wanted was to go back to the doorman in front of Louis Davenport’s place and clap at him in the warmest gloves in the world.

  “I was there the day of the riot,” the salesman said. “I saw you, shackled in the street. I remember because you seemed younger than the others. Reminded me of my grandson. I’m sorry what they did to you. The police here—” He shook his head but didn’t finish the thought.

  Over his shoulder, two other salesmen looked their way.