The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  “How come you didn’t ask us for money?” said a tall man with gray-blond hair. “You think we ain’t got any to give?”

  “We’d be honored to have your contributions”—Gurley looked at the two men by the door and then back at Rye—“to challenge the unconstitutional law against speaking on the street—”

  Another man with a thick accent cut her off. “How much money—”

  Gurley persisted: “As I said in my speech, we hope to hire—”

  “How much?” the man came again.

  “—the great Clarence Darrow—”

  “How much fuckin’ money!”

  Rye’s eyes darted around until they landed on the shirt of a small dark-haired man standing next to him—his white undershirt was stained yellow, with a bib of crusted brown blood below his chin, like he’d eaten something alive.

  Then the tall man with graying blond hair stepped forward until he was right in front of Gurley. Something about him seemed authoritative, and he spoke with an accent Rye couldn’t place. “Mind if I look in your bag, miss?”

  Rye took a half step between the man and Gurley. This caused the man to turn slowly and look sidelong at Rye. A toothy smile crossed the tall man’s face. With the heat from the woodstove, the awful breath of the tall gray man, and the ripe of the men around them, Rye felt bile rise. His only defense might be to vomit on the man.

  “Well, look at here,” the blond-gray man said. Rye could feel Gurley’s hand in the center of his back, supporting him or cautioning. “The orphan boy wants a go.”

  Thirty minutes of speeches and socialist talk and rise-up-brother and the room hadn’t made so much as a peep. But now the men laughed.

  “This money belongs to the Industrial Workers of the World,” Gurley said, “and I would ask—”

  The man was faster than Rye would have thought—and in what felt like a single move, he swept Rye aside, into the burning old boiler stove, and grabbed at the bag. But Gurley wouldn’t let go and they tussled over it.

  Rye pushed off the burning stove. He saw Gurley gripping the bag’s handle, started toward her, but felt his arm yanked and twisted behind his back, and then something sharp pressed against his cheek. The man with the bloody shirt was holding a big deer skinner against his face, the knife scratching Rye’s cheekbone.

  “Not in here,” the gray-blond man said.

  Gurley still wouldn’t let go of the bag’s handle. “Listen—” And that was when the man hit her, open-handed but full, not a child’s slap but a shoulder-rotating heel-of-his-hand swing that knocked her off her feet and slid her into the legs of some of those other men. And now the man held the bag alone.

  Gurley looked up from the wood floor like a cornered badger, like she might leap up and rip that man’s head from his neck. “You would steal from people who come to help you?”

  “I don’t recall asking for your help,” he said. “Any of you men ask for this bitch’s help?” He opened the bag and flipped through the clothing and held up some underthings for the others to see. “What have we got here?”

  Then the gray-blond man pulled the money from the bag, held up the cash for the others to see, and threw the bag to the floor in front of Gurley. The money disappeared into his lumber coat. “Best get on, you two,” he said with a vicious half-smile, “before it gets any colder out there.”

  Rye knew then what he meant by “Not in here.” The minute they stepped out that door, the knives would come. They’d been robbed, and now these hounds would make sure there were no witnesses. They would rifle his pockets and try on his boots as the last of his squirming life spilled out in a snowbank. As for Gurley, Rye didn’t want to think about it.

  He looked helplessly at the door, wishing he’d never agreed to this, wishing he and Gig were sleeping in Mrs. Ricci’s house, wishing Early Reston could come back in with a gun and save them, wishing he could overpower the man, take his knife, protect her.

  From the floor, Gurley carefully pulled herself up and gathered her clothes. In the midst of those wolves, she carefully folded her things and put them back in the travel bag. She appeared to be in no rush. She patted at her red-black hair and at the rising mark around her eye. If she was feeling Rye’s panic, she didn’t let on. Her hands were steady. She wasn’t crying, nor did she look particularly frightened.

  She took a deep breath, reached back, and pulled the ribbon tighter around her hair. She took in the faces around her. And then she spoke, her voice changed. Lower, steadier. She wasn’t jawsmithing or high-handing—she was just talking.

  “You think I’m a fool.” She slowly buttoned the travel bag. “Some Sunday temperance lady with no idea where she’s landed.” She looked directly at the man with the knife against Rye’s face. “I know where I am. And listen: I’ve been to worse. Iron camps in Minnesota, Pennsylvania coal towns, Butte copper mine so deep I could smell the earth’s mantle.” She looked around again. “And I know you. I know you don’t give one shit for the brotherhood of men some stupid union cadge comes up here selling. Fine.”

  Rye couldn’t say what it was—her language, her posture—but he felt a shift and the men stayed quiet. “But whether you want me to or not, I am here to fight for you stupid sons of bitches. For your jobs and your booze and your right to be as stupid and poor a son of a bitch as any rich, stupid son of a bitch. I’m here to fight for your backs and for your arms, and for the freedoms you’re too goddamn stupid to use. To come and go as free men, as goddamn Americans no matter where you were born, to make your way in this world without some robber baron owning you.

  “But I will be damned if I’ll let you end it all here”—she choked up and cleared it away—“in this place,” and Rye felt the hum of her anger in his throat, in the whole room.

  Gurley’s lips hardened and she took on a mocking tone. “ ‘I didn’t ask for your help, Gurley.’ Fuck you!” She said it right into the gray man’s face. “I fight for any man who labors, and I will fight against anyone who gets in my way, and that includes you! All of you! You want the money? Fine! It’s yours.”

  She stared at the gray-blond man as if daring him to say something. Then her eyes swept the room, landing on every eye that would meet hers. “Now maybe you think you still have business with us. Maybe you think you can do what you want, that no one cares what happens to some Montana tramp and a pregnant Irish girl—”

  All eyes went to her heavy dress and coat.

  “But I will tell you this: If I’m not in Spokane leading this second free speech action five days from now, it will not happen! And then, make no mistake, you will have chosen sides. You’ll have chosen the side that lives off your blood and tosses you aside like trash.

  “But if you want to give those bosses a poke in the fuckin’ eye?” She grinned. “Let us go. Let us go finish our thing and fight for you, and next week I promise to make those rich bastards feel every bit as terrified as you’ve made me feel. Now, if there’s nothing else, we’ve got a goddamn train to catch—”

  And with that, Gurley turned and started for the door, the man guarding it so surprised that he stepped aside, and Rye, hurrying after her, pulled away from the man with the knife, bent to grab his bowler off the ground, and ran to catch up.

  21

  The frosty ground crackled as they walked quietly up the trail, Gurley first, then Rye, taking small steps, not daring to look back at the barracks or up the dark-shadowed hills on either side. They got a good thirty feet before Rye remembered to breathe.

  “Bolin set us up,” Gurley whispered. “And where’s your friend Reston?” Hot anger emanated from her.

  The hundred feet seemed to take an hour to walk, every tree a threat, the shadows terrifying, until they came over a hump in the dirt and there was Early, walking toward them from the cluster of buildings with a big woman who seemed all bosom and revolver.

  “See,” said the woman with the gun. “I told you them boys wasn’t all bad.”

  “No, you said not all the boys were bad
.” Early Reston still had his hands in his pockets, as if nothing had happened.

  “Well, that’s true, too,” the woman said.

  “Where’d you go?” Gurley demanded.

  “I ran after Bolin,” Early said, as if it were obvious. “Then I went to get help.” He tilted his head at the woman without removing his hands from his pockets.

  “Where’s Al?” Gurley asked.

  “He took off into the woods,” Early said. “I think he was in on it.”

  The woman was named Effie and she was the madam at the brothel above the Swanson Bros Saloon. She brought them up the back stairs into what she called the parlor, a small bare front room with no furnishings save an old couch with torn upholstery. Early went out to make sure the signal was down for the next train to stop, and Effie sat Gurley down and tended to her eye. She had Rye gather some snow in a handkerchief and told Gurley to press it to her face on the train ride to Missoula. Then she took out a makeup brush and began applying her craft. “You’re a pretty girl,” she said.

  Rye had never seen paint on Gurley’s face, and he ventured she didn’t need it, so drastic were those dark lashes and brows against her Irish pale.

  “Don’t worry, honey, I’ve treated my share of these,” the woman said. “Shouldn’t raise a bruise. You were fortunate it was with an open hand. A fist is harder to hide.”

  Gurley’s own hand came to her mouth then, and two tears made tracks in the coat of paint on her face, as if she’d just realized what had happened.

  “Don’t go and do that,” Effie said. “That ain’t helpful.”

  “I’m supposed to see my husband in Missoula tonight,” Gurley said.

  Effie looked down the length of Gurley’s body. “Honey, are you pregnant?”

  Gurley nodded.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Gurley still couldn’t answer.

  “What are you, about five, six months?”

  Another nod.

  “Well, don’t worry about that, neither. I seen girls fall down two flights of stairs couldn’t shake a child loose, once it gets hold up there.”

  “I lost one before,” Gurley said, Rye surprised to hear this.

  Effie kept tending the eye. “Well, like I tell all my girls, don’t go crying for a thing misses out on this business.” She turned to Rye next and put a bandage on his bleeding cheek. “Why, this one’s just a baby himself.”

  They sat in Effie’s parlor for almost an hour, before a train squealed to a stop on the platform. “All a-goddamn-board,” Early said. With Effie covering them from the window, they rushed down the stairs, across the muddy square, up onto the platform, and into the passenger car. They sat there, breathless, watching the trail to the barracks, waiting for men to come pull them off the train. Minutes later, the Milwaukee’s engine lurched and the train pulled out. They watched out the windows. Gaslights and shadows loomed in the saloons. Smoke billowed from the wood barracks where the wolves had robbed them. It was dead quiet on the car and no one said a word, long after the cluster of rough-hewn buildings had fallen away.

  22

  Gurley stared out the window as the train rattled over a bridge across the Clark Fork River.

  Rye sat next to her. “Are you okay, Elizabeth?”

  She turned as if surprised it was him. “We fell in love on a train,” she said. “Minnesota. Hibbing, Biwabik, the iron camps north of Duluth. My first trip west of Chicago. I loved seeing the world through a train window.

  “It was Jack who insisted we get married. For my own safety, a single girl traveling through these parts. He was thirty. I was just seventeen. I thought I was so grown up.” She laughed. “I used to see the coal steam shovels off in the distance and imagine they were dragons, that Jack was my prince, and we were exploring this mysterious land together.” She glanced up at him, embarrassed. “My romanticism is my great weakness, Ryan. But you probably guessed that by now.”

  “If you have a weakness, I haven’t seen it,” Rye said.

  She hummed a small laugh and looked at him fully, her wet dark eyes dipped at the corners. “Thank you.” Then she turned back to the window. “When my mother found out I’d gotten married, she said, ‘Well, now you’ve done it. Wasted both our lives.’ Even Vincent Saint John thought it was a bad idea. ‘Look at you, Gurley,’ he said, ‘you fell in love with the west and went and married the first man you met there.’ ”

  Rye wished he knew what to say about any of this.

  She touched his arm. “I’m sorry, Ryan,” she said. “I’m being morose. Will you give me a moment with my thoughts?”

  “Of course,” he said, and he moved a few rows, to where Early Reston was drinking from a flask he’d borrowed.

  “The purser is from the town next to mine in Wisconsin,” Early said.

  “I thought you were from Indiana.”

  Early glanced over his shoulder. “Well, he doesn’t know that.” He nodded ahead at Gurley. “How’s she doing?”

  “Morose,” said Rye, adding it to his list of words to look up.

  “Taft would make anyone morose. But I warned her. Going to Taft and not expecting trouble? It’s like jumping in a lake and hoping to stay dry.”

  “They almost killed us, Early.”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t.”

  “Because she talked them out of it.”

  “She can talk.”

  Rye felt defensive of her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means she can talk. That’s all.”

  “Why do you think Bolin set us up like that?”

  Early didn’t hesitate. “Money.”

  “He’d get us killed for a little bit of money?”

  Early shrugged. “Everyone does everything for a little bit of money.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Rye said.

  “Sure I do. Money and sex. That’s why we do everything. The desire for sex can be quenched at least for a few hours by having sex. But give someone money? They just want more.”

  Rye shook his head. “Not everyone is like that. I’m not like that.”

  “Come on!” Early laughed. “You and your brother got yourselves arrested over what? A dollar!”

  “It was not over a dollar!”

  “Sure, it was. Same dollar that got Jules killed.”

  Rye’s hands balled into fists. “No! It was about free speech!”

  Early seemed amused by Rye’s defensiveness. “Yeah, and what were you free-speeching on? The dollar you didn’t want to pay a job shark.”

  “It was the principle!”

  “Yeah. And the principle was a dollar.”

  Rye wished he had Gig here to debate Early. “It’s not the same! Arguing for basic pay versus a guy taking money to sell out the people he’s helping.” As soon as he said it, Rye flushed with guilt, thinking about Del Dalveaux questioning him in Seattle, and Lem Brand’s twenty-dollar note, still rolled up in his sock.

  “Is it? I mean, that girl up there, she is a whirlwind onstage, don’t get me wrong, but in the end, what’s she really jawing about? Getting you bums a few more dollars. That’s all.”

  Rye shook his head again. “You didn’t hear her in Taft, Early. She was amazing. No, it’s about a lot more than that.”

  “Sure it is.” He held his hand up in surrender. “Hey, don’t listen to old Early. I got nothing against that girl and her little union. It’s as good as any other thing.” He offered the flask to Rye, closed one eye and considered him. “But ask yourself this, little brother. Why is this conversation making you so upset? Two possibilities, I see, and they are not exclusive to one another. One, because you’re getting sweet on her. And two, because you’ve had these thoughts yourself—I see it on your face.” Early leaned in closer. “This thing she’s out here doing? It’s nothing but a show. I suspect you know there’s a more direct way to accomplish things.”

  It was quiet, just the sound of the rails beneath them. Rye took the flask and had a pull to keep him
self from saying anything.

  “Look,” Early said, “in case the first possibility is true, let’s not talk about her at all. Let’s say,” he stuck out his bottom lip, “there’s a castle. And a king in the castle. And he’s an ass, because, well, kings are asses. Takes too much in tribute. The other knights and noblemen hate him. They say, This fella is getting rich off our fields and the tribute we get from the peasants. They scheme and plot and one day they slit his throat. Replace him with a new king. But pretty soon the noblemen say, Well, goddamn, the new king is as shitty as the last greedy son of a bitch. So they whack his head off, too, and they put in a new greedy king. Kings killing kings. You know what that’s called?”

  Rye shook his head.

  “Shakespeare,” Early said. “Now let’s say you’re on the other side of the moat, and you got these peasants watching one rich king bump off another rich king, thinking, Wait, this ain’t changing anything.” He gestured at Gurley. “They gather behind some charming rebel who leads the peasants in revolt, and they behead all the shitty knights and princes and noblemen.”

  Rye just shrugged.

  “Here is my point—the peasants own the castle now, and they become the greedy sons of bitches. It’s all the same. What I’m saying is maybe the king ain’t the problem. Maybe what it is”—Early took another pull from the flask—“is time to blow up the whole goddamn castle.”

  23

  A felt cowboy hat rose from a bench in the Missoula depot and the man beneath it ambled toward them, Rye assuming this was Gurley’s husband until he saw that she was looking around the man for someone else.

  “He ain’t here, Elizabeth,” the man said. He shook hands with Rye and Early. “Arn Burkitt, IWW local vice president.” Arn handed Gurley a letter. “It’s from Jack.”

  As Gurley opened the letter, Burkitt told her that her two speeches in Missoula had been canceled.