The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  That was when another voice, Chief Sullivan’s, thundered, “Boys!” and a great surge came and this was no longer a show or a baseball game but a full-on riot, cops and bull goons mowing down Stevens, swinging nightsticks to clear the street, and people running, falling, being trampled, Rye swept up in a wave moving north, his last view of Jules a bloodied face and his hands shackled behind his back.

  “Hold the line!” someone shouted, and Rye could hear another man pick up the workingman’s anthem: “Come all ye who labor”— and that voice stopped, and a heavier accent, “The Industrial Band throughout all the land—”

  But he couldn’t see the action anymore, and there seemed to be nothing left of the Wobbly lines, just a man or two running from the cops, and the crowd heaved forward and pulled back like a living thing, Wobblies scattered to the edges, a new shift of cops running into the melee, fixing suspenders and buttoning coats, a man in a fine suit running down the street with a shotgun.

  For an hour, the crowd moved back and forth down Stevens to Front, where, amid the bedlam, a man on the corner began to sing: “Come workers unite! ’Tis humanity’s fight!” A brick flew from a third-story window and the man was dropped, then a hail of bricks came and Rye ran with the crowd out of the melee, and how long it went on, Rye couldn’t say, the crowd scattering and flowing like a tide, back and forth, bricks and sticks and winded cops, singers and speakers shackled and hauled off and so much happening Rye couldn’t focus on any one thing.

  Until his eyes fell on a small dark-haired man in a bow tie who walked calmly through the throng and climbed on what had to be the IWW’s last crate, for cops were stomping them everywhere, the man producing a mouth harp and blowing a note through it, Rye transfixed as the man took a deep breath and sang—“And the Banner of Labor will surely soon wave”—and for just a moment time seemed to halt, and everyone—cop, workingman, Pinkerton, and suffragist—turned to look—“O’er the land that is free”—for the man’s tenor was glorious—“From the master and the slave”—pure as birdsong—“The blood and the lives of children and wives”—as if God had broken through the melee to allow this song—“Are ground into dollars for parasites’ pleasure”—either that or the Italian was just too short for the cops to see—“The children now slave, ’til they sink in their grave”—for that’s when even God lost interest and the tenor’s face warped sideways, inside out, eyes and nose and lips bursting forth in blood—he’d taken a club to the head and down he went—that harsh music critic Hub Clegg on him like hound to bone.

  Another man quickly stepped on the box, and Rye’s first thought was surprise that he hadn’t seen Gig standing there, but there he was, climbing on the Italian’s tiny stage, and Rye calling, “Gig!” and lurching toward him, his brother so small up there, Rye struggling to get upstream though the fleeing people as Gig picked up the tenor’s chorus, “And the banner of labor will surely soon wave—”

  A security man took Gig off the box, and as he fell, another man swung a rifle stock at him, Rye yelling, “Gig!” And Rye had almost reached his brother when he found himself in front of the empty crate, and then he was on it, his voice thin and frightened as he picked up the song, “O’er the land that is free—”

  He blocked the first swing with his forearm and yelped the last of the song, “From master and slave!” as his brother yelled, “Rye!” and something hit him in the back and he tumbled to the street, looked for Gig through the scramble of legs and feet, but a kick to the gut took what was left of his breath and Rye Dolan finally gave up and curled into a ball, covered his face with his arms, and waited for what felt like had been coming his whole short sweet life.

  8

  The day he left Whitehall, Rye pulled himself up into a dark train car for the first time, and when his eyes adjusted, he realized there was an old man in the corner. He was thin and gray, sitting on an old case. His left hand was missing fingers and the eye above it was nothing but a caved-in socket. The man asked Rye where he was headed and Rye said, “West, looking for my brother.”

  “Well. Get off before Spokane,” the man said. He’d been arrested in Spokane and said the cops went hard on vagrants there. He was rolled, robbed, and knocked around for a week in a windowless cell, then, without a court hearing, one morning was simply dragged to the edge of town and dumped on the tracks by a cop who said he’d end up in the river if he ever came back. “It’s where I lost this.” He pointed to the scarred, flattened eyelid. “Get off before Spokane,” he said again. “The tracks keep going, but there’s nothing west of dead.”

  Rye thought of the old man’s warning as he was shackled and duckwalked toward the Spokane jail. There were six of them in his line and other shackled prisoners sitting in the street or already locked up. Even with his aching back and arms, and the fingers on his right hand swollen and bruised where he’d blocked a blow, Rye had gotten off easy. The Italian singer had it the worst, whistling mists of blood through his battered mouth and nose. “That was good,” Rye said to the singer, remembering Mrs. Ricci at Mass one day, “Bel canto.”

  “Thank you,” the Italian rasped.

  Gig was at the front of the line and kept trying to look back at Rye, but the cop in front rapped his shoulder. “Eyes ahead!” The riot was breaking up behind them, but a few people still catcalled the prisoners as they were led down Stevens.

  They passed the ornate five-story city hall and saw faces staring down from its towered and arched windows. The jail was just around the corner, along the river, a stone building with barred windows on the first and second floors. Next door, three firemen stood smoking and leaning on a new truck, watching the shackled prisoners waddle past.

  At the jail, they were led into a small booking area, and a harried jailer came from behind the counter to look them over. “Goddamn Wobs,” he said in a brogue that made Sullivan’s sound like the king’s English. Then he went down the line. “Nem?” he said. And “Edge?” When he was done, he gave a jagged smile. “Well, look at what you coonts have done now, fooked your own bloody arseholes.”

  Rye caught Gig’s eye. His cheek was bruising up a dark purple and he shook his head and frowned. Rye looked away.

  Three more jailers came into the holding area, one of them a man in round eyeglasses who seemed to be in charge. Another unshackled them and patted them down for weapons. He made a pile of belongings: coats and money and paper and pocketknives and cigarettes and any other worthless thing they carried. The Irish one kicked through the swag, picked out a few coins, but shook his head in disappointment at the rest. “Fookin’ rubbish, is it?”

  The head jailer looked down at the list of names and ages and then over the rims of his eyeglasses. “Where’s Gregory Dolan?”

  Gig raised his hand unsteadily.

  “This one’s strike committee,” the head jailer said. “C block.”

  “Wait,” Rye said. “Can’t I go with my brother?”

  This brought laughter from the Irish jailer, who gave Gig a shot in the back with his stick and pushed him through an open door.

  When that door closed on his brother’s back, Rye found himself really afraid for the first time: What have I done?

  The head jailer looked up. “Gentlemen. As our good rooms are taken by your fellow Wobs, you get the pen tonight.”

  They were led down a back wooden staircase to a basement with nothing but a single holding cell, something left over from frontier times. There was one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and, next to it, a pipe with an open valve spewing steam down onto what looked like fifteen men already packed into an eight-foot-by-seven-foot cell.

  “Please! I’m sick!” a man cried out from inside, and then others began yelling, too, for water, to go to the toilet, until the Irish jailor raked his nightstick across the bars, rapping fingers. “Shut your fookin’ traps!”

  Rye couldn’t believe it when the jailer with glasses put a key in the cell door and unlocked it. He meant to put them . . . in there? Where? Another jailer
jabbed at the wall of bums with his nightstick and gestured at Rye and the others to go in. “You Wobs wanted to pack the jail—here you go.”

  Rye was pushed inside and pressed between three men, the stench bringing tears to his eyes. There were no sounds but breathing and moaning, and minutes seemed to take hours. At some point, three more men were shoved into the cell, and then two more. “Twenty-six,” the jailer said proudly, but inside was a mass fever, the bulb went out and it was windowless basement dark, that pipe hissing steam all night, the smell of vomit and piss, time measured in pain and stench and thirst—then someone would snap and the others would subdue him, for the struggle hurt them all—knees and elbows and fists and rising panic. Then the basement door opened and a bit of stairwell light flooded in, men crying out that they had to piss or were sick, but two cops and two jailers clopped down the stairs, drunk and laughing. “We’re going for the record!” one said, and two more Wobblies were somehow jammed into the cell, cops and jailers throwing their full weight against the door just to get it closed on the crush of men, Rye mashed between stinking flesh and iron bar, and all around him, whimpering and moaning and gulping, as if they were drowning in rotten flesh, and someone near him passed out, but the man just hung there between the bodies, nowhere to fall. “Hold the line!” a man called from somewhere in their rank, and a jailer yelled back: “Fuck your mother.”

  Rye jerked awake at some point in the night, bars pressed against his face, stunned to think he might have slept on his feet, but no idea if it was a minute or an hour. At last the stairwell door opened and light came in, a shift change and a new jailer appeared alongside the one in glasses. He looked at the cell and covered his mouth in disgust. “Jesus, Carl.” Then he turned and spoke to the other one quietly: “Who approved it?” Finally, the door was opened and the prisoners poured out; they wept as they squeezed out the cell door. Rye looked back to see six men still inside, collapsed on the floor, the Italian singer one of them.

  They were marched upstairs and into the jail courtyard. Soon other Wobblies from other cell blocks joined them and they lined the four sides of the square. No one looked any good—there were black eyes, cut lips, torn clothing—but Rye’s group had gotten the worst of it, pissed and sweated and bloodstained, and the others looked at them with pity. Rye saw Jules in a line to his right, coughing and breathing heavily, staring at the ground, and Gig across the square, mouthing, You okay? and Rye nodding a lie: Yeah. Gig had been put in with Walsh and Little and the union leaders, segregated to keep them from organizing and agitating. A man next to Rye said there were more than a hundred men in a jail built to hold forty. Three jailers and six private security men with rifles stood guard on the edges.

  They were given scratchy jail grays, and they changed quickly in the cold, their old clothes piled in front of them, a jailer poking through them with his nightstick. Then another man came with a biscuit and cup of water for each man. They bounced in place, waiting for their turn, and ate and drank like animals. After the heat of the sweatbox, it was freezing in the courtyard, and even out of his damp clothes in the jail coveralls, Rye couldn’t stop shaking. Men fell and were helped up by those around them.

  They had been in the dirt courtyard an hour when Hub Clegg came out with another cop, his face bruised purple, and it took a moment for Rye to recognize Old Slate Hair, the bull cop who’d led the attack on their camp, left squirming in the dust by Early Reston.

  Rye and Gig caught eyes.

  Sergeant Clegg put a hand on Slate Hair’s shoulder and spoke kindly to him. “Ready, Edgar?” Slate Hair nodded and he and Clegg walked the lines, looking from face to dirt-scarred, bloodied face.

  Rye couldn’t help himself and glanced up as Slate Hair went past, the deep raspberry Early Reston had put on the big cop’s face filling him with a kind of pride.

  “I don’t see the one hit me,” Slate Hair said when he’d looked at all of them. “He was thin and older.”

  “What about the others?” Clegg asked.

  The big cop pointed at Jules. “That old Indian was there, but he didn’t do nothing but laugh. There was a kid I didn’t get a good look at.” Then he pointed at Gig. “But this is the one did the yapping before the other one jumped me.”

  Clegg walked over to Gig. “That right? You a yapper?” Then Clegg turned to Slate Hair. “He’s not so yappy now.” Then back to Gig. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Gregory Dolan.”

  “Where you from, Gregory Dolan?”

  “Montana,” Gig said. “Last few years, I lived here.”

  “Nah, you don’t live here any more than a cockroach does.” Clegg had thick lips and bulging eyes, a face that looked like it was pressed against a window. “Tell me, Gregory Dolan, what Montana town had the good sense to run you off?”

  “Whitehall.”

  “Your whore mother suck off Irish mine rats there? Or was it coolies?”

  Gig just stared.

  “You don’t look Chinese, so I’m going with Irish whore. And your da? Whatever man lifted her skirts a Saturday night?”

  He didn’t answer and Clegg got even closer, so that he could’ve taken a bite from Gig’s face if he’d wanted to. “Tell me the name of the man attacked my sergeant, Gregory Dolan of Shitfuck, Montana.”

  “Your man attacked us,” Gig said.

  “That ain’t what I asked,” Clegg said. “Who else was at the river yesterday?”

  “I don’t know,” Gig said, but Clegg did not like the answer and gave him a quick jab to the gut with his nightstick.

  “One more time,” Clegg said. “Tell me who was there?”

  “I was there,” Rye said, surprised to hear his own voice.

  Clegg spun. “Who said that?”

  “I did.” The men around Rye stepped back slightly, and he spoke in a rush to get it all out: “We were just sleeping when your man attacked us with that mob. We ran away and your man chased us and tried to throw us in the river. The man who hit him, I didn’t know him, and he left right after—” Rye felt clever at his truthfulness: He hadn’t known Early Reston’s name before he beat Slate Hair.

  By this time, Clegg was standing in front of him, his features even worse up close. Black flecks of tobacco spotted his teeth. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Ryan Dolan. I’m his brother.”

  “So, we got both whoreson Dolan brothers.” Clegg looked back and forth, from Rye to Gig and back to Rye. “I don’t see it. Must’ve been half a poke made this little one.” Then Clegg walked to the line Jules was in. “How about it, Shitting Bull—these Dolan boys telling the truth?”

  Jules nodded without looking up or making eye contact. Clegg gave him a lighter poke, in the side, Jules’s face unchanged.

  And now Clegg circled back to Gig and stepped up into his face again. “I suspect I could beat and sweat a buck like you for a month and not get anything. So how about I work on your little sister instead. Give him another night in the box. How’s that sound, Gregory Dolan?”

  Gig swallowed hard, his mouth pinched.

  “Unless of course your memory has returned and you’d like to tell me who was at the river with you and attacked my man here.” He got even closer to Gig. “Come on, Gregory, you got a name for me?”

  “John Rockefeller,” Gig said.

  The blow to the gut was quick, and harder than the others, and it dropped Gig straight to the ground.

  “Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Gig rasped from his knees.

  Clegg scratched his head with his stick. Then he shook his head, and just before he kicked Gig in the face, he laughed. “Goddamn it, I almost like you Dolan boys.”

  9

  The second night in the sweatbox, a Wobbly named Brazier organized the cell. He had them fashion a crude ceiling with their shirts to block the steam, and with so many in the infirmary, there was a little room, and he had two men sit at a time and rest. He spoke with the cadence of a preacher: “Listen, my Fellow Workers, I want to tell you about the
three stars. Not the three stars of Bethlehem. The stars of Bethlehem lead only to heaven, which nobody knows about. These are the three IWW stars, of education, organization, and emancipation. They lead to pork chops, which everybody wants.”

  Later, Brazier had them sing, and they kept it up all night long—“Up with the masses”—songs from the IWW Songbook—“Down with the classes”—in every flat accent—“Death to the traitor who money can buy”—to piss off the jailers—“Cooperation is the hope of the nation”—and raise their own spirits—“Strike for it now or your liberties die.” Finally, the jailers offered to take them out to use the toilet if they would just stop.

  News traveled through the cell: After a hundred were arrested the first day and fifty the second, cops began taking new prisoners to the brig at Fort George Wright. The next morning, Chief Sullivan set up a special rock pile overlooking downtown, and in daylight, lines of shackled prisoners were marched over the bridge to swing sledges for no purpose, the chief wanting both sides to see the hardship, to show the mining bosses he was being tough on the union, and to discourage new men from agitating. But some people on the street called out support to the chain gang, and three suffragists tried to give them food and water and were hauled off to the women’s jail for it. A dozen more Wobblies were arrested downtown, and it might have been three times that number, but Sullivan had firemen open the hoses on anyone who tried to speak while he figured out where to put the extra prisoners.

  Sullivan had separated out the union leaders to keep them from organizing, but word came down that they should refuse to work the rock pile to protest their treatment. So the next day the sledges sat idle, men’s arms at their sides, or they picked up the sledges and laid them down gently on the rock pile, as if patting the stones to sleep. Rye saw Jules on the rock pile that day, coughing like he might have pneumonia, but he winked when he saw Rye. The Italian tenor was there, too, his face stitched like a baseball glove.