The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  I’m sorry, Rye, I was cold and tired and done with it all.

  An rud nach leigheasann im ná uisce beatha níl aon leigheas air. That was Da’s old adage: What cannot be cured by whiskey and butter cannot be cured. I used to believe it meant that butter and whiskey were the cures for everything, but I have come to realize that saying is about something else, about that which cannot be cured by whiskey or butter or anything in this world, namely, life. That steaming fly-covered shit pile of heartache, life.

  Real hunger shuts everything down. By day five in jail I couldn’t remember why I liked to eat. By day ten I couldn’t remember anything. Dull-witted and numb. Took a week after getting out of jail for Thirst and Hunger to return. But they did, old friends waiting on the curb outside the boardinghouse.

  Hello, boys, where have you been?

  You had a good job, Rye, and I didn’t want to crumb it for you, but Christ I had a tightness in my neck. I couldn’t sit at that old Italian woman’s table three times a day, pretending to be her son and eating slippery noodles. When you brought home that fancy volume of War and Peace from the library, honestly, that was the final blow. This was my life now? Sit by the fire and eat dinner while my little brother borrows books for me to read in bed?

  So while you were at the machine shop, I went out for a round: a pint and a shot of uisce. A bartender sympathetic to our labor cause served me up—toasted me and set me up again. And again. I told the bartender the great realization I’d had after a month of beating and starvation in jail—that none of it mattered. That we were flies buzzing around the heads of millionaires, fooling ourselves that we had power because they couldn’t possibly swat us all.

  The man could think of nothing to say about that except to fill my glass.

  After ten days of rest, and the return of Thirst and Hunger, the old road soul began to stir. I felt the pull again, to go, fly, ride a rattler lumber rack, wind in my face on the way to some new rail stem. Thought maybe I’d go find Early Reston down Lind way, where he said he holed up sometimes.

  I was done with Spokane. Done with jail and done with Walsh and done with his martyr Wobblies, done with your fiery girl, Flynn. Done with Ursula and her cougar and her millionaire, Brand. Done with it all, Rye, and you, too, if I’m being honest, at least for a while. Done with your faithful heart, your good job, your warm fireplace, your goddamn library card.

  During the days, my thoughts would not give me rest: Why was I here? Why did I get out of jail while the rest of the committee got six months? Was Early right, was a rambling soul like mine better served by anarchy than labor union? And then, when the thoughts got heavy, I knew how to lighten them, uisce, and I left Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse to drink about it all for a while, until either clarity came or the thoughts leaked away.

  Like our dear departed da, I hit it hard that night, went to every sympathetic saloon in the city and asked for doubles on me troubles, Irish pubs and labor joints, and I gave the flies-on-millionaires speech, finished half-drunk glasses, bummed smokes and walked the streets, retched and pissed, and was shocked to find myself in the alley of the Comique, yelling at the doorman that inside was the most disloyal woman in the world, and he said, “Move on, drunk,” and I said, “Are you the one to move me?” and he said, “Sure I am,” and suddenly, there she was, the show ended, cat put away, robe pulled tight, and all my anger bled away in her eyes. I thanked her for coming to see me in jail that time, but my tongue was thick and my words jibbery, and I told her I had vowed to stay away until I felt my old self, for I didn’t want her to see this wretched me, but I didn’t know where else to go, drunk like this, I’d get my kid brother kicked out of our boardinghouse if I went back there and—

  “Be quiet,” Ursula said, and she took me by the hand to her dressing room and set me in a chair in front of her lighted mirror. I could barely look at myself there: dirty, hollow cheeks, and rat beard up to my bruised eyes. She fed me coffee and bread and meat left over from the cast room. “Look at you,” she said. “What have they done to my beautiful Gregory. I just hope they left a bit of the soul in there.”

  This nearly made me weep, for I suspected the soul had taken the worst of it.

  “What will you do now?” she asked.

  “Get back on the road,” I said. “Rattle out.”

  “Where?”

  I shrugged, thinking of Early Reston. “I’m beginning to think I’m cut out more for the darker side of this thing.”

  “Do they employ a lot of drunks, that side?”

  I laughed. “Suppose I’ll find out.”

  “And Rye?”

  “He’s better without me,” said I, and believed it. I told her you would do anything to survive, and good on you, the way you came up, our parents dying out from under you, the rest of us leaving you alone to scratch for food.

  “Once, Rye and I were bedded in a jungle this side of Ellensburg,” I told her. “The apple crews were full, so he went to bump lumps, because a begging kid does better alone, least that’s what I told myself. I stayed in camp and got drunk with a couple of fellas until Rye came back with a fat lip and said he’d found an open back door and got us two chickens out of an icebox. The woman of the house had hit him pretty good with a broom, but he got away. We celebrated that little thief like he was goddamn Ty Cobb. That’s the best I’ve got for Rye if I stay, Ursula, stealing chickens.”

  She smiled. “And all of this melancholy means you don’t have to try anymore. Throw off your life and die in an alley somewhere. Is that the plan?”

  “I don’t have the particulars worked out,” I said, “which alley, for instance.”

  I was sobering, and hated that most of all. Drunk, I could bear this lecture, but sober, it was starting to sting. “Hey, darlin’, what do you say you shut up and buy an old consort a pint? For good times?”

  She turned and wrote on a slip of paper: “The Phoenix Hotel” and “Edith.” And then she signed it: “Ursula.” She said she’d bought this hotel and that Edith was the manager and I could stay for a few days.

  I stared at the page. “You bought a hotel?”

  “I am going to come see you in three days. You’ve got two days to get sober. If you can’t do that, don’t ever come see me again.”

  The Phoenix was the old Bailey Hotel with a new sign and, inside, a new coat of paint. I stood outside for a minute before going in. This manager, Edith, was an older woman, attractive enough, and she looked me up and down and said, simply, “Huh.” She had the desk clerk give me a second-floor room in the men’s wing. It was a single-occupancy bed and bureau, water closet down the hall. Better than I deserved. And all of it covered by Ursula. Best of all, there was a saloon in the basement, a private club Edith had started for men and women to get around the law that they could not consort inside a drinking establishment.

  Now, if a woman gives me three days to sober up, it generally means I will spend the first two potted, and I did, eating and drinking in that basement saloon—and never once did a bill come, “Thank you, Mr. Dolan,” and “It’s on your account, Mr. Dolan,” and I thought I might live at the Phoenix forever.

  I figured you would come looking for me, Rye-boy. But there was a good shop job and a boardinghouse for you if I stayed away. And if you flew off with me? What then? Another hobo camp, another saloon, another icebox to pilfer, another cop to roust us from sleep, and in the end, another Dolan gone Drunk.

  What cannot be cured cannot be cured. Not by uisce, or by self-pity, or love or family or anything else. I had a good two days of that which could not be cured and woke in full light at the Phoenix. I did not remember getting myself to bed. They had given me a room with a window. One of those cold sharp winter suns was cracking the shades. There was a light rap at the door.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The door opened. It was the hotel manager, Edith, with a fresh set of clothes for me. “Good morning,” she said.

  “If you say so.”

  She set the clothes on t
he bureau, left, and returned a minute later with a basin of steaming hot water. Then she left and returned with another basin. Then three towels, a bar of soap, a straight razor, and a mug of shaving cream.

  “Are you preparing for surgery?” I asked. “Is that the price of this room, a kidney? Because I’ll gladly pay.”

  “You are funny.” Edith turned and considered me. “I must say, I didn’t see it when you first came in here. I just thought, Oh, God, she’s got a weakness for bums.”

  This stung more than I let on.

  Next, Edith brought in a chair and set it next to the bed. I lay there watching all of this without moving, without a word.

  Then she left again.

  And when the door opened this time, it was Ursula who came in.

  I sat up. “I thought I had three days.”

  “Today is the third.”

  “Your math is suspect.”

  “You came to see me Saturday night. Today is Monday.”

  “I guess I was thinking of a day as more of a twenty-four-hour period . . . a discrete unit of—”

  “Should I leave?”

  “No, it’s just, I’m afraid I’m not—”

  “Quiet,” she said. And she laid me back down on the pillow. Then she took one of the towels and pressed it down into the hot water. She wrung it out and then put the towel on my face. It nearly burned at first, then the heat seeped into my teeth. Eye sockets. My thoughts, bones, regrets, all hot and open, and I teared up beneath the hot cloth. Nothing in the world has ever felt as good. When she lifted the cloth away, she had the brush from the shaving mug, and she began putting the cream on my face. She spread it carefully on my cheeks and neck, using the tips of her fingers to clear it from my nose and lips. Then she had me hold the bowl of hot water on my chest and she gently shaved me, the whiskers falling into the bowl. She dipped the razor into the hot water and glided it across my cheeks, the pelt of whiskers falling away. She was a whiz with that straightedge, sure and fast as any barber.

  I watched her eyes as she shaved me, careful and intent, looking for what she might be thinking, but she seemed as distant as if she were onstage. She shaved nearly up to my eyes and all the way down my neck. When my beard was gone, she used the wet towel again, wiped away the last of the cream.

  Then she touched my cheek. She smiled. “There he is.” Next she told me to stand and undress.

  “Ursula, I don’t even know if—”

  “Just be quiet,” she said.

  So I got out of bed and stripped to nothing. I threw my rank long johns in a pile next to my dirty clothes. I stood before her, shaking and ashamed, flaccid, ribs sticking out. I closed my eyes and I kept them that way.

  She was even more careful in the washing of my body, dipping the towels and dabbing under my arms, across my neck, my chest, over the purple and yellow of jail beatings. Ursula used the soap and the water from both basins. I kept my eyes closed and I let myself be washed and rinsed and dried by her. And when she began washing my legs and torso, I felt myself roused.

  “There he is,” she said again, and I felt her mouth close around me and I must have made a noise like this was too much, because she put a hand on my stomach to support me and it wasn’t a minute before I was gasping and shuddering, and I let go, doubled over like I’d been kicked. When I straightened up, she went right back to cleaning me like nothing had happened.

  When she was done, she went out and got one more bowl of warm water. She rinsed me again and patted me dry. She got powder and oil and cream and rubbed these into my arms and chest and hair and face. I watched her walk across the room to the bureau to get the clothes that Edith had brought earlier—her narrow waist and back, her long neck—and when Ursula returned to the bed, I was roused again.

  “There he is.” She whispered it this time, and she let me remove her clothes and we went at each other, soft and hard, slow and frenzied. We played like fancy honeymooners in that flophouse bed.

  When we were done, she lay with her head on my chest. We talked quietly, her words buzzing my skin. She said if I managed to put some weight back on and went easy on the drink, she might see me again.

  “I’ll try,” I said. “But maybe . . .”

  There was no need to finish that sentence.

  I looked around the room. “Is this really your hotel?”

  “A woman owns nothing in this world except her memories,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?” We lay there another moment, breathing each other in. If I could’ve stayed anywhere in the world, it was there. But I couldn’t.

  I looked down at the top of her head. “Tell me everything,” I said.

  For almost an hour, she talked. Told me where she grew up. How she became an actress. How she fell in love with a grifter. How she met Edith and how she became Ursula the Great. And how, once she’d arrived in Spokane, Lem Brand offered her part of this hotel. Through it all, I just listened.

  When she was done, I asked, “Is that everything?”

  “No.” She laughed and fell back onto my chest. “It’s never everything, Gig. But it’s probably enough.”

  Part IV

  The wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

  —Jack London, White Fang

  31

  In the days after Gig left, Rye began to see that he was living in a particular moment in history.

  Maybe this was obvious to other people, but it had never occurred to him. It was a strange, unwieldy thought, like opening a book and seeing yourself in its pages. Seemingly unrelated events—meeting Early Reston at the river that day, the free speech riot, Ursula the Great taking him to meet Lem Brand, traveling with Gurley Flynn, smuggling her story out to Seattle, maybe even Gig’s disappearance—these moments seemed linked, like events leading up to a war. And he supposed that was what they were in, a war—this skirmish between the IWW and the city was part of a larger battle fought in a thousand places, between company and labor, between rich and poor, between forces and sides he wasn’t sure he had understood before.

  Part of this new perspective came from the fact that Rye was trying to read War and Peace in the evenings at Mrs. Ricci’s house and on his lunch breaks at the machine shop. He’d started the book when he realized that Gig was not coming back, in the hope that it would tell him something about his brother—if not where he’d gone, at least maybe why.

  Over the next few weeks, he read slowly, five or six pages a day, jotting down words he didn’t know on a small notepad, then looking them up on Saturday afternoons in the big Carnegie Library dictionary. At the shop, the Orlando brothers took little interest in the book he was reading during breaks, but Dominic tried to follow along at least with the basic plot, and he would look over Rye’s shoulder and ask, “What’s happening in your book now?” and Rye would say, “Andrey’s about to leave,” and Dominic would say, “Where’s Napoleon?” and Rye would say, “Still on his way,” and Dominic would answer, “Well, keep me posted,” and go back to his work.

  One day Dominic’s wife came in with a rhubarb pie for lunch while Rye was reading in the shop. He looked at the tall, dark-haired woman and she stared back at him, recognition arriving for both of them at the same moment.

  “You were Jules’s friend!” Gemma Tursi said.

  “I’m sorry,” Rye said, feeling again the sorrow of her uncle’s death and the guilt of him and Fred Moore trying to convince her to further the IWW cause.

  “No,” she said, “I should have invited you in for a meal. Jules would’ve liked that.” And now she smiled. “But look. I get to remedy that. Won’t you come for dinner this Sunday?”

  “Thank you,” Rye said. He was happy for the invitation. Sundays were the hardest days because he didn’t work. Rye would do chores for Mrs. Ricci and then spend most of the day reading War and Peace by the fire, staring out the window and wondering what his brother was doing—maybe sitting around some jungle cook fire, drinking from a communal bottle. He wondered if Gig wi
shed he’d taken War and Peace with him, or if he’d found another book in the big floater library.

  Rye wasn’t always sure he understood Tolstoy, but he was surprised at how much he enjoyed reading him, from the first moments of Anna Pavlovna’s soiree to meeting the beautiful Natasha and the dashing Prince Andrey and the thoughtful Pierre. He liked picturing the fancy clothing and fabulous mansions and grand palaces, larger even than Lem Brand’s big house (When Natasha ran out of the drawing room she only ran as far as the conservatory). He tried to imagine a house so big you got tired running from one room to the next. The language seemed musical, and he found himself humming sentences like songs (The coach with six horses stood at the steps. The coach with six horses stood at the steps . . . ).

  And the deeper he got into the story, the more he began to imagine his own life as part of an epic story. It was the thing he felt the count got right, the comings and goings of all of these characters, in and out of each other’s lives, as if Tolstoy were able to re-create the breadth of life as well as its depth.

  Sometimes, late at night, the count’s words swirled around with Rye’s own thoughts, and descriptions of characters became descriptions of Rye and his brother, as if some tramp Tolstoy had created them (Prince Andrey possessed in the highest degree just that combination of qualities in which Pierre was deficient . . . ), and it was in one of these swirling late-night thoughts (At moments of starting off and beginning a different life, persons given to deliberating on their actions are usually apt to be in a serious frame of mind) that Rye came to the conclusion that, instead of merely waiting for Gig to come back, he had to do something.

  That Sunday, he had dinner with Dominic and Gemma and their two shy daughters. After talking about Jules, and remembering the stories he always told, Mrs. Tursi had asked about Rye’s family.

  Rye explained that they were all gone except his brother, whom he’d tramped around with the last two years but who had recently lit out on his own.