by Jess Walter
Yr brother Ryan
He sealed the letter in an envelope and wrote Gig’s name, care of the Spokane City Jail.
From the seat in front of him, Gurley turned back. “Listen, before we arrive, I need to tell you something about Al Bolin. To prepare you.”
She said that Al was an old union pick, blown up in an anarchist’s bombing in the ’99 labor wars. That in spite of his injuries, Al was a top organizer, and they should count themselves lucky he’d agreed to be their guide for two days of fund-raising in Wallace and the mountain mining towns of Idaho and Montana.
“Al can be a sight, and it takes a moment to get used to him,” Gurley said. “So try not to stare, though neither should you look away.”
Early sat up in the seat behind Rye. “How am I supposed to look and also not look?” Rye liked having Early along. It reminded him of traveling with his brother.
“I mean that you should behave normally,” said Gurley.
“Well, that’s what I’m saying,” Early said, “looking and not looking are fairly normal behavior for eyes.”
“You’ll see,” she said.
Al Bolin was waiting on the platform when they pulled into Wallace, and Rye saw right away that normal eye behavior was going to be impossible. The man lurching toward them was six feet tall on his right leg and six-four on his left; a four-inch peg had been nailed to his right cowboy boot to make up the difference. His arm and shoulder on the right side were diminished too, half gone, like his portraitist had lost interest.
But it was his face that Rye couldn’t keep from staring at: the cave-in that constituted the right side of Al Bolin’s burned, mottled mug, the eye patch and torn nostril, the gnarled mouth, and the hole where his right ear should be. A metal clip was punched through his cheek like a bull’s ring and held his jaw together on that side. When he offered Rye a hunk of stained bone with two scarred knuckles for a handshake, Rye hesitated.
Bolin said, “Best shake it, kid. The good one I use for fighting.”
Introductions over, they followed Al through the depot and out to a dirt street in front of the station. For a man half blown up, Bolin walked like he was in a footrace. He generated surprising speed on the block of wood, and Rye hurried to keep up with him as he strode into downtown Wallace, a picturesque valley town nestled between impossibly steep mountains. There weren’t three thousand people, and there were twenty horses for every automobile on the street, but Wallace was what passed for civilization here—schools, hotels, and restaurants, center of a spiral of two dozen smaller mining and logging towns that disappeared up in the mountains.
This area had been the site of a fierce labor war a decade earlier, culminating with a gang of angry, underpaid miners hijacking a train at gunpoint, loading up two hundred men and eighty boxes of stolen dynamite. The “Dynamite Express” picked up more men in every little town and rail platform until a thousand of them hung off the cars, men whooping and waving rifles as the train steamed to the Bunker Hill mine, where they shot the first security man they saw, then lit the boom sticks and blew the mill and a handful of scabs and managers off the world. Their work done, they took the train back to Wallace, got drunk, scattered, and went to bed. The mine owners appealed to the Idaho governor, who sent the army to put down the rebellion, and a thousand union men were thrown into detention camps with no trials, guarded by buffalo soldiers meant to inflame them. The governor paid for this in the end, getting blown up in his house near Boise five years later.
Wallace also had the most famous tenderloin this side of San Francisco, a block of brothels and cribs just north of Cedar and Sixth, along the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. Temperance and clergy were cleaning up other red-light districts, but in Wallace, the brothels were seen as a necessity by the town fathers to keep the miners mining and the loggers logging. The city legislated and regulated the houses, and it wasn’t uncommon to open the newspaper and see the mayor presenting flowers to the madam who’d donated money for a new streetlight.
“That’s Block Twenty-three, where our whores is kept,” Al Bolin said as they walked past a cluster of brick-and-stone buildings along the river.
Gurley had already given a speech in Coeur d’Alene and one in Smelterville. This last speech was to be here in Wallace, at dusk on the street from the back of a buggy up against that wall of mountains. The national IWW office had advertised the event as Gurley and Big Bill Haywood, the hero of the old mining wars, acquitted of assassinating the Idaho governor in 1907, but Big Bill never made it out of Chicago, so it was just Gurley and Rye.
A small crowd of lumberjacks and miners, socialists and suffragists had gathered, maybe sixty people. Rye’s job was the same as always, matter-of-factly tell his story when she called on him, after she’d riled up the crowd with her socialist talk, when she got to the part about “the criminal mistreatment of workingmen by the thugs in the Spokane Police Department. And here with me is a victim of that abuse, a young orphan recently turned seventeen . . .”
“We woke in a ball field,” Rye said each time, and then he stood and removed Mr. Moore’s bowler and told his story as plainly as he could. He was careful not to exaggerate, to stick to real details, and not to make sweeping political statements. He always ended with the death of his friend Jules and the Salvation Army man asking his age. This last bit got gasps and angry tuts from folks, although Rye couldn’t see why it was so much more barbarous to beat on a sixteen-year-old. Or why it was worse than them killing poor Jules.
As he spoke, Rye noticed Early leaning against a wagon at the edge of the square. He wore a smirk that stung Rye.
When it was done, most of the crowd scattered, and Rye, Early, and Al Bolin met Gurley behind the wagon where she’d spoken. She was plainly discouraged. They’d collected only about fifty dollars, barely two hundred total from three speeches in Idaho, less than they’d gotten at one event in Seattle. And only a handful of volunteers had said they might come to Spokane.
“We’re speaking to the wrong people,” she said. “Socialists and retired men, women’s clubbers. I’m not getting through to the actual workers. This is not some dry Sunday lecture. It’s a fight with dirt under its nails.”
“That’s why I want to take you where the workers are,” said Al Bolin. He said he’d added one stop to their tour. Instead of going around the mountains, they were taking the Great Northern through the mountain pass for a noontime talk in the border town of Taft.
“Taft?” Early looked up sharply. “Wait, we’re going to Taft?”
“Sure,” Al Bolin said. “You don’t have to be in Missoula until five, and Taft is where the workers are. Probably two hundred of them just sitting up there. Timber work’s shut down for winter, and the rail jobs are winding down. You want workingmen, they’re in Taft.”
“What’s Taft?” Rye asked.
“I like this,” Gurley said. “Let’s do it, Al.”
“Jesus,” Early said, and he turned and walked away.
“Wait, what’s Taft?” Rye asked again.
But an old miner with a sideways foot had just limped around the wagon to talk to Gurley. He began telling her about the day in 1899 when troops marched down Sixth Street. Gurley nodded politely. He went on, “They built a bullpen down on the river, rounded up every man in town, and locked us up there. No trials. Nothing. You remember them days, Al?”
“If I didn’t recall it, my body would,” Bolin said, “just like yours, Jeff.”
Rye backed away from this conversation to go find Early Reston. That look on his face earlier while Rye spoke: It was eating at him.
The sun had gone down and there seemed to be twice as many people on the street now. The mountains were pine-blanketed walls on every side of him. Rye followed some men through the brick downtown to Sixth Street, where a block of saloons was broken by a single café.
He stuck his head in each saloon, and he finally found Early in the fourth, leaning on the rail with a half glass of beer. He turned and saw Ry
e. “Why, look, it’s Eugene goddamn Debs!”
Rye could feel his face redden again. “Were you laughing at me out there, Early?”
“No!” Early straightened.
“It’s not easy, getting up there talking.”
“Of course not. Rye, I was not laughing at you.” Early looked around for the bartender. He clicked his teeth like he was calling for a horse and pointed at the bar in front of them. The thick bartender gave Rye a harsh sideways look, but Early chided him: “Don’t be like that. Did you not hear the man’s speech? He’s got no mother, and his brother’s in jail in Spokane.” Early winked at Rye, spun a coin on the bar, and a glass of beer quickly landed on the rail. “A peace offering,” he said. “Drink up.”
Rye took the pint glass and tipped it, the tart foam reminding him of the sweeter foam around the ice cream soda he’d had with Gurley.
Early took a long drink of his own. “I guess, if anything, maybe I was thinking it was strange seeing you up there because you seem to agree with me about this one big union business. I thought it was more your brother’s folly than yours.”
Rye took another drink.
Early leaned over. “This utopian one-for-all bullshit . . . if it wasn’t for your brother and that cyclone of a girl, I don’t think you’d be doing any of this. I guess that’s what I was thinking.”
Rye felt a tightness in his chest, loyalty to Gurley and to Gig, but something else, too, which had been growing since the riot.
“Come on. Tell the truth.” Early closed one eye. “You don’t actually believe the story Gurley is selling out there, do you? I mean, that it’s possible?”
“I don’t know, Early,” said Rye. “Does it have to be possible to believe in it?”
Early stared at him a moment, then gave a short staccato laugh. “Jesus, Rye. That might be the best defense I’ve ever heard from one of you utopian shitheads.” He gave a small, appreciative nod and pointed at Rye with his glass of beer. “And are you willing to go to jail again for something impossible?”
“Yes, I am,” Rye said, wondering if that was true.
“Okay, then. If you’re going back to jail anyway, wouldn’t you rather do something to deserve it, something big?”
Rye looked around the saloon. It was full of men like them. He imagined a street of saloons in a state of saloons in a world of saloons, a million men spending their last dollar on a glass of frosty forget. It was all too much, this way of thinking. Rye took another drink, the tartness not bothering him anymore.
“I got a question for you, Early,” he said. “What the hell is Taft?”
20
It wasn’t even a town but an overgrown work camp that had sprouted three years earlier when the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad decided to connect the last transcontinental line. They mapped a route eighteen miles shorter than any competitor, but that meant going over, and mostly through, the steep Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and Idaho. Thousands of men came to the woods to lay track, spike ties, clear trees, and build dizzying trestles two hundred feet over virgin forest and canyons. They dynamited and hand-dug thirteen tunnels, the longest of which ran 1.7 miles through a granite peak. On either side of that endless tunnel, the St. Paul Pass, grew a pair of squalid work camps, like the front door and back door to hell, Grand Forks, Idaho, and Taft, Montana.
At their peak, each bustling camp housed more than a thousand men and nearly as many barmen, gamblers, and prostitutes, spread out in fifty or so rough-hewn wooden buildings—saloons, brothels, hotels and casinos, a barracks, chow hall, sawmill, and a sprawl of crib tents where the sorriest played-out jangle girls sat open-legged on dirty cots waiting for men too drunk to climb the brothel steps. Neither place had what you’d call streets—just crude wood buildings thrown up alongside the train tracks, where every night dirty, bearded men seeped from the woods to spend a day’s wages. Behind this one square block were the men’s shacks, lean-tos, and tents, trailing up the wooded hillsides with no more planning than sprouted mushrooms. Taft himself had visited as secretary of war in ’07, before becoming president. He called the camps a “sewer of sin” and “a sore on an otherwise beautiful national forest.” In response, the Montana side gleefully voted to take his name.
If Spokane was half-lawed, at least there was half. Taft and Grand Forks were built illegally on National Forest land, so neither had police nor government, and vice grew wild and untended there. An hour after frustrated forest rangers closed a saloon, three others opened. Taft did have what locals called a hospital—a dank cabin where a sawbones separated men from their smashed feet and gangrenous arms and where it was rare to leave better off than you arrived.
With no police, order was kept by the bosses of Baltic work gangs—Serb, Croat, Montenegrin, and Slav—who drove off the Chinese, Negro, and Indian workers and took over the camps. These bosses made deals with the job agents and foremen to control hiring, and they took a dime from every man’s paycheck. The gangs also policed each other, settling disputes quietly, with fists and knives and hammers. No one would ever know how many killings took place in the mountains in those three years, but the previous spring, forest rangers had counted eighteen corpses in the melting snowbanks outside Taft.
“I’d like to register my official objection,” Early said that morning as they boarded the Northern Pacific train from Wallace.
But Gurley had already been convinced by Bolin that with log and rail work down for the winter, Taft was the best place to recruit floaters to join the Spokane protests.
Early leaned over to Rye. “Nothing to recruit there but the drips.”
The train slowed as it slid through Grand Forks, and they looked out at a cluster of half-burned log buildings along muddy paths. A prostitute had recently set fire to the camp to cover up the murder of a sadistic barman. “And that’s the nicer of the two camps,” Early said as they left Grand Forks and entered the endless black tunnel, bound for Taft. It was dead quiet in their car through the mile and two thirds of darkness.
Finally, they came out of the tunnel on the Montana side. Taft was a scar, half the buildings empty, roofs caved in by snow. No one greeted them on the platform, and in the center of that mud-and-ice square were only two human beings, and those two barely, a couple of slack-mouthed booze sacks perched on empty kegs waiting for the saloons to open.
“It looks like this during the day,” Early said to Rye. “But the player pianos start jangling and the men come out of tents and shacks, straight for the saloons and cribs. We won’t want to be here after dark.”
It already felt dark to Rye as Bolin led them along a narrow trail between peaks toward a dark barracks hall. They walked single file down a rutted path, clumps of trees felled on either side for strips of roughhewn cabins. Smoke tipped from the tin chimney of the log barracks in front of them.
At the door, the smell hit Rye. “Here we go,” Early said.
The faces inside were whiskered, sooty, dull. They wore dirty long johns and work clothes—loggers, rail spikes, and tunnel rats out of work until spring. They sat on sleeping pallets or leaned forward on the few rickety chairs they hadn’t burned for heat. An old boiler had been turned into a woodstove in the center of the room, and it burned so hot its iron sides glowed red. Yet no matter how close he stood, Rye couldn’t shake off the Bitterroot cold.
“Well then,” said Al Bolin, and he clomped to the center of the room next to the stove. With as little fanfare as possible, he made the introduction: “Boys, here’s Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the labor girl out of New York I said about.”
No applause, just quiet stares from the thirty or so men in the room, a third the number Al had promised. Rye’s eyes and nose had adjusted, and he watched as, again, despite the setting, Gurley brought the fire. “The ruling class will keep you in slavery until you demand freedom!” she said. “Come stand beside me in this fight!” But unlike the other crowds, these hard, hungover men just stared. She introduced Rye and he told his usual story o
f getting knocked around and surviving the sweatbox. The shadowed faces didn’t seem to register any of it, and Rye wondered how many of them even spoke English. They watched with bored, hungry stares—like hawks trying to decide if that mouse was worth the dive.
Gurley gave another pitch for them to come to Spokane for the November 29 free speech action, and when they’d finished, Al Bolin hobbled into the center of the room, tilted his ranch hat back, and said, “Well, boys, give a hand to these folks come to tell you about this business.” They did, a couple of short claps. Then Al Bolin said, “You’re welcome to come ask them questions and wish them luck as they travel on to Missoula to continue raising money for this thing.”
At the door, Early Reston straightened. Rye felt his unease and watched his friend’s eyes sweep the room and finally fall back on Bolin, who was backing away toward the rear of the building. They both watched as Al slid out a side door.
“Where’s he going?” Early said, and he went out the front door to catch up to Bolin. Rye was frozen. He couldn’t follow Early and leave Elizabeth alone. He could see why Early was alarmed. Why had Al made a big deal of them raising money? And why, when he’d introduced Gurley, had he mentioned the “New York girl I said about”? When had he told them about her?
Rye made eye contact with Gurley, who also seemed to sense something was wrong. Then he looked at the travel bag at her feet. She had hundreds of dollars in there from their fund-raising, plus whatever she’d brought for expenses on the trip, more than enough to stir those hawks.
“We’d love to take questions, but we should get going on to Missoula,” Gurley said, and she edged toward Rye and the door.
“I got a question,” a voice called.
“We really should be—”
“How much money’s in the bag?”
A thick man stepped in front of the door just as Gurley reached Rye’s side. She cleared her throat. “Whatever funds we’ve raised are intended for the legal representation of those labor leaders in the Spokane jail.”
