The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  Most people waiting at the stage just wanted to thank Gurley or to hand her an envelope with a donation it. These went so swiftly into the big coat that Rye thought she’d have made a good sleight-of-hand grifter if she hadn’t been such a terrific union agitator.

  A few people wanted to talk to Rye, too—a woman in a bonnet asking about his brother, an older man thanking him, a floater saying he’d be in Spokane at the end of the month for the next free speech action. One woman said she had a sister in Spokane, “Agnes Poole? Married to a furniture man? Carl Poole? I don’t like Carl much, no one does. Do you know him?”

  Rye was relieved when a tall man in a Stetson grabbed his arm to make a plea for sabotage instead of peaceful protest. “Son, you know all this talk ain’t worth a well-placed spike in a tree.”

  “That’s what I’ve tried to tell him,” said a familiar voice.

  Rye turned to see Early Reston, still as a rock in a stream in that crowd, hands in his trousers pockets, hat tilted forward.

  “Early!” Rye left the saboteur and walked over.

  “Look at you,” Early said. “I leave for two weeks and you go become a famous radical.”

  They had a tussling handshake and Early put a hand on Rye’s shoulder and became serious. “I’m sorry about your brother. And Jules.” He shook his head. “I should have made him come with me.”

  Early said that after leaving Spokane, he’d made his way to Seattle and was scraping up day jobs when he saw on a poster in Pioneer Square that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was in town to talk about the trouble in Spokane. “I figured Gig might be caught up in this, but I didn’t imagine I’d find you here.” He chewed his bottom lip. “I hope what I did to that cop didn’t make things worse for you fellas.”

  Rye shrugged. “They were going hard at us anyway.”

  “Well, I’m still sorry for it, Rye.”

  Their reunion was cut short by raised voices.

  Rye turned to see an older, gray-haired man yelling at Gurley from just below the stage. The man was possibly hard of hearing, or just angry, because in his opinion, her speech had “devolved into a screed about women’s suffrage!”

  “A screed—” she said.

  “Yes, a screed!” the man said. He reminded Rye of the older labor bosses in the union office, yelling at Gurley like she was a child. “A screed that hardens the listener’s heart against the merits of what could be an otherwise honorable message, the cause of justice for the poor!”

  Rye could see that from the edge of the stage, Gurley was smiling at the old man. He marveled at her calm but thought he saw something else in her eyes, too—a hint of mischief. “With all due respect, sir,” she said, “I do not believe justice will ever be truly possible, economic or otherwise, for any human being, until we have once and for all emancipated the vagina.”

  The man sputtered. He took a step back and was still sputtering, red-faced above his priest’s collar, when he rushed past Rye and out the door.

  18

  They had raised nearly $250, a fourth of their goal, the Seattle IWW leader, Garrett, pointing out that they might’ve done even better “if you hadn’t decided to end the evening by yelling profanities at a priest.”

  “He was yelling,” she said, “I was quite calm.”

  In addition to the money, a dozen men had promised to come to Spokane for the second free speech protest, including, to Rye’s great surprise, Early Reston.

  Rye had just introduced Gurley Flynn, “Early here was the man at the river I was telling you about who got some good licks in the day we got rousted,” when Early surprised Rye by taking off his hat and bowing.

  “You are some speaker,” he said to her. “By the time you finished, you’d half convinced me to come back to Spokane and join up.”

  “Just half?” she said.

  “Maybe more than that,” he said.

  Rye looked sideways at Early.

  “I’d do it for Gig,” he said. “And you and Jules. You all took a beating for me.”

  “Why don’t you come with us now,” Gurley said. “To Montana. I’m supposed to travel with two men anyway, for security, and Ryan speaks well of you.” She said she had union funds to buy him a train ticket.

  “Yeah?” He looked at Rye and then back to Gurley. “Well. Okay. But I’m not singing. And if some cop comes at me with a nightstick, I can’t promise I won’t—”

  “No,” she said. “No violence. That’s the one rule.” She put out her hand. Early stared at it a moment, as if not used to shaking with a woman.

  “All right,” he said, and gripped her hand. “But I’m still not singing.”

  When everyone had left the hall, Gurley took Rye’s arm, and he walked her down the busy street toward her boardinghouse.

  “You did a fine job today, Ryan,” she said.

  “You’re the best speaker I ever heard,” he said.

  She took the compliment without comment. Rye remembered what Lem Brand had said, that Gurley didn’t care about workers like him. “But I wanted to ask. Do you think you could change one thing in your speech?”

  She stopped walking and turned to face him.

  “You keep calling me a sixteen-year-old orphan,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She touched her chest. “Is it terribly demeaning? At times the story overwhelms me and I get carried away.”

  “No, I understand that. It’s just . . .” He hesitated. “Well, today I’m seventeen.”

  The hand that had been on her heart now covered her mouth. And when she removed it, she was smiling. “Come on,” she said, and she pulled him up Second Avenue, through the mist, dodging the streetcar-auto-and-horse-hustle. At Yesler Way, she steered him into a building with a fancy scripted sign: G. O. GUY DRUG STORE.

  Gurley spread both hands on the soda counter and beamed. “My gentleman friend and I are celebrating, and we would like two ice cream sodas.”

  Gentleman friend! Rye watched the man at the counter produce two big glasses, thin at the bottom, wide at the top. He pulled vanilla sodas from the tap and dropped two plops of ice cream in each, the soda fizzing around them.

  They carried their ice cream sodas to a wrought iron table, Rye reluctant to take a bite. He’d had ice cream and he’d had soda and liked them so much separately that he worried they’d be ruined together. But the soda made the ice cream melt slowly and the ice cream made the soda colder. It was creamy and delicious, and he felt another pang of guilt about having such a treat while his brother sat in jail.

  Gurley was stirring hers slowly. “My mother used to take us for ice cream sodas when she earned a little extra from sewing. We didn’t tell Father.” She hummed at the memory and finally took a bite. “Ryan? Do you ever think back with regret on the choices you’ve made?”

  He wasn’t sure how to answer that. Had he made choices? He hadn’t really thought of it that way. Since his mother died, he’d bounced from job to flop to train—sleep here, sleep there—was that a choice? There were things he felt bad about, stealing chickens from an icebox, letting a tramp press against him on a cold night, but really, the first choice he remembered making was to step on the soapbox after Gig got knocked from it.

  Then Rye thought about Lem Brand’s warm library, the twenty dollars in his hand. There was a choice. And a regret. He had tried to tell Brand nothing important that day—only things that were already in the newspaper—but he knew what he’d done was wrong. He looked up at Gurley now, worried that the guilt was written on his face. But she was lost in her own thoughts.

  “When I was fifteen, my mother took me to see Vincent Saint John speak about the labor troubles in the west. He was dashing. I couldn’t stop staring at his mangled hand—he’d been shot in a dispute in Minnesota.” She laughed, then leaned forward, confiding. “It’s a grave disappointment: the discovery that you have a type.”

  Not long after that, she said, a note arrived at her house from a Broadway producer named David Belasco. “He’d read about my arrest in
the newspaper, and he invited Mother and me to see a play he was staging, The Girl of the Golden West, about a frontier saloon woman who falls for a notorious outlaw. It was a terrible play, although I must confess some stirring when the outlaw came on. Blanche Bates played the girl, and I recall my mother saying, ‘Well, at least her bosom can act.’ ”

  Rye glanced around the soda fountain, but the only person listening was an older man with a bulbous red nose, wearing a tweed suit, who sat over Gurley’s shoulder. He had lowered his newspaper at the word bosom but now lifted it back up.

  “After the play, we were led upstairs to Belasco’s office, and he asked if I might be interested in a career as an actress. He was producing a play about a young labor activist, and he thought having the real ‘East Side Joan of Arc’ could generate great publicity. ‘No, thank you,’ I told him, ‘and anyway, I’m from the Bronx.’ ” Gurley shook her head at the memory. “Mother was furious with me. Here was my chance for an independent life, on the stage! But I told her I would choose my own path and that she should not pass off her unlived ambitions to me.

  “The next year, I went to my first IWW convention. That trip changed me, the factories, the mining camps, the great stands of forest and mountains. I just wanted to keep traveling, going west, one more train stop. I did not want to go home, Ryan. It was like . . . falling in love.”

  She smiled at the memory. “And that’s where I met Jack. He was a miner and a union organizer on the Mesabi Range. His eyes, oh, I can’t tell you. So when Vincent Saint John suggested I take a speaking tour of the west, starting in Minnesota, I jumped at the chance.

  “But my parents were furious, and Mr. Saint John came to plead my case and to reassure them. He said I would stay in decent boardinghouses with matrons and that he would have two men assigned to my security. As he explained all of this, though, my mother just stood in our living room with her arms crossed. ‘And who,’ she said, ‘will you assign to protect these men from her?’ ”

  Rye blushed again and looked down.

  “I was so humiliated! I dragged her to the kitchen and we yelled at each other, but she wouldn’t budge. I had just turned your age, seventeen, which she thought was too young to travel to rough labor camps and western towns alone. Besides, she reminded me, I had promised that I would finish high school. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. High school? Should I ask Jack Jones and Vincent Saint John to wait a few months for the revolution while I took my exams in comportment and had my final piano recital? Or perhaps my mother preferred I stay home and marry a Newark bookkeeper who would spend the rest of his life fumbling at my skirts while I learned to boil cabbage?

  “Mother threw her arms in the air. At the very least, I could admit there were choices in life other than bookkeeper’s wife and miner’s whore!”

  Rye glanced around the soda fountain. The old man in tweed was peering over his newspaper again, but Gurley didn’t seem to care, in mid-performance, replaying this fight with her mother.

  “I yelled back at her, ‘At least a whore has the good sense to get her money up front!’ ” Gurley shook her head. “Oh, it was a horrible thing to say. My father had never been much of a provider, except of stories. Mother slapped me. And I slapped her back. And she slapped me again. And I knew better than to go another round with Ann Gurley. We faced off like prizefighters in the kitchen while the great Vincent Saint John sat patiently in our parlor, awaiting my answer and listening to my father dither on about some speech he’d given about home rule back in 1890.

  “That’s when my mother’s face changed. It was as if, in that moment, she suddenly became an older version of herself, and the rage drained from her eyes.

  “ ‘I am going, Mother,’ I said.

  “ ‘I know you are,’ she said. And she looked around this kitchen, this place she worked twelve hours a day, cooked three meals and sewed and darned for extra money, where she would live and die, and where I would have died, or some kitchen like it, had she not raised me to break out. She sighed and took my hand and said, ‘Give ’em hell, Gurley.’ ”

  Rye’s ice cream soda was long gone, the glass licked so clean it barely needed washing.

  “Look at me going on,” Gurley said. She slid her glass forward. “Please, finish mine. My stomach is unsettled.”

  “No,” Rye said, “you should eat it.”

  “For your birthday,” she said, “please.”

  A woman passed by smiling, and Rye became aware that they must look like sweethearts, him in his secondhand lawyer’s clothes and bowler, Gurley in her big black coat—a young couple sharing an ice cream, not a pregnant nineteen-year-old revolutionary and a seventeen-year-old orphan who was days removed from a jail sweatbox. He imagined them as real sweethearts, and the thought caused him to blush.

  He looked around the room, but no one else seemed to be looking at them. Even the tweed man with the bulbous nose had gotten up and left. Rye finished Gurley’s ice cream and they left the drugstore. Outside, a woman was leaning on a light post. She straightened when they came out.

  It was the woman with the black eye Gurley had spoken to after her speech. “I followed you from the hall,” she said. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course,” Gurley said. “Ryan, this is Carol Anne.”

  Carol Anne wouldn’t even look at him.

  Gurley turned to him. “I’m sorry, Ryan, would you excuse us a moment?”

  She walked the woman halfway down the block. On the sidewalk, people made a wide berth around the thin woman, but Gurley held her hand, nodded, and listened. Then Gurley reached into the pocket of the black coat, pulled something out, and pressed it into the woman’s hands. The woman shook her head no, but Gurley nodded as if she were insisting. She patted the woman’s hand and seemed surprised when she suddenly gave Gurley a hug.

  The woman continued down the street. When she rounded the block, Gurley returned to Rye and took his arm again and they began walking back toward the hotel and boardinghouse.

  “Did you see her eye?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Rye said.

  “Her sister’s husband did that and much worse, I’m afraid. She would be in danger if she didn’t leave, so I advised her to catch a train and get out of town immediately. She has family in California, cousins, so she’s going there.

  “Oh, and another thing,” she added. “I had believed we raised two hundred fifty dollars tonight, but due to a bookkeeping error, it was closer to two hundred.”

  They had reached the door of her boardinghouse. Rye could see through the window the house matron sitting next to a fire with a cup of tea. “A bookkeeping error,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Rye looked at her closely. How had he imagined they might be sweethearts? She lived such a different life, not just married and expecting a child but commanding a union fight against a whole city, this slip of a girl who fired up rooms full of workers and decided on a whim to pay a poor beaten girl to get out of town. It seemed silly that he had imagined what it might be like to kiss her. What he wondered now was what it might be like to be her.

  “I hope it was the priest’s money,” Rye said.

  She stared at him a moment and a wide smile slowly spread on her face. “I don’t believe he donated,” she said.

  “Too bad,” Rye said.

  She enveloped him in a hug. “Thank you, Ryan,” she said into his ear. “I needed this. Happy birthday.”

  Rye watched her walk up the steps, the matronly figure in the window rising to greet her.

  He walked down the street to his own dank hotel, got his key from the ghost at the desk, and went up the narrow stairs to his room, still feeling the pressure of her hand on his arm. So strange, the turns of life. Gig in jail, him here in Seattle with someone like Gurley.

  Rye turned the key and slid inside the door. A man was sitting on his bed.

  “Who are you?” Rye asked.

  He was an older man, sixty at least, in a gray tweed coat and trous
ers, with a great flourish of a tie. But it was his red, veined nose that drew Rye’s eye, and he recognized him as the man from the drugstore.

  “How was your ice cream, Mr. Dolan? To your satisfaction, I hope?” He spoke with the western remnants of a British accent, like something fancy covered in dust. Rye remembered the voice from the train seat behind him when they’d arrived in Seattle, pointing out the window at men blasting away Denny Hill.

  “Who are you?” Rye repeated.

  “I’ve been sent to collect the debt you owe Mr. Brand.”

  Rye was confused. “He wants his twenty dollars back?”

  The man laughed. “No. He does not want his twenty dollars back.”

  None of it made sense to Rye. “Who are you?” he asked a third time.

  “Oh yes, forgive me, where are my manners?” The man stood and removed his hat and held out his hand. “My name is—”

  Del Dalveaux

  SPOKANE GAVE me the morbs. Right blood blister of a town. Six-month millionaires and skunk-hobos, and none in between, Spokane a gilded carriage passing by peasants bathing in the very river they shat in.

  Last place I wanted to go, but the job was the job, so I packed three shirts and lingered a minute over which barking iron to take (in the end I went small, loud, and kicky, the .32 Savage automatic). I caught first-class Denver to Billings, my first day sober in a month spent crossing Montana, then two hours over the Idaho panhandle toward the Washington border, and that’s when the old morbid voice rattled up: Careful, Del—

  At Hope, I slipped the porter a buck for a whiskey, then another when the train slowed the last five miles, forest, foothills, farms, and finally, Spokane.

  I couldn’t believe how the syphilitic town had metastasized. Smoke seeped from twenty thousand chimneys, pillars to an endless gray ceiling. The city was twice the size of the last time I’d hated being there. A box of misery spilled over the whole river valley.