The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 14
From the back of his pony, the boy raised his hand as I passed, and he called out to me the way you would to a friend you recognized, three short yelps as my barge passed, a song whose meaning I would never know but which I took to mean: I see you.
There is no world but this one. And all we want is to be seen in it.
I see you, the boy said. And I was grateful.
Then a crack and a roar and my barge seized up beneath me, front end risen like God Himself had reached down from heaven to save The Kid with His great forgiving thunder of a Hand—
But no—
I had run against a boulder, which tore the current and my vessel in two, and I was riven by sin from salvation and tumbled to the smaller end of my broken punt, clinging to its side. I looked back and could scarcely believe what had happened—I had gone over! Fallen ten feet on half a wooden raft and lived to tell it! I looked at the north shore for the boy and tried to make the whooping sound he had made—but I was weak and if this first stair step had been the easiest, what came next would surely be my end.
Behind me, the boy sat atop his pony on that rock ledge—his wide eyes mirroring my own thoughts: Did you see that! He began to raise his hand once more (this the end of the story he would tell his children, As he went over, I waved) and I began to raise my own arm in response, but before either of us could finish, the next step came and I was taken by the cold froth that awaits—
6
Tramps knew Spokane by its rail stations: the big depots downtown and James Hill’s freight yard in Hillyard, a neighborhood of little houses and big saloons, dry goods and feed stores, and so many stray mutts it was known as Dogtown.
Rye was walking to Dogtown to look for his brother on the day he first met Mrs. Ricci, on the hobo highway, a trail that paralleled the tracks along the river. Between downtown and Dogtown was all Catholic—the huge steeple of the new St. Aloysius Church being built on the riverside next to the Jesuits’ Gonzaga College, Holy Names Academy and the Knights of Columbus, a seminary and convents for Dominican and Franciscan nuns, orphanage, asylum, and high school, a vast Vaticanland surrounded by blocks of broad-porched Irish houses and the cottages and bungalows of Little Italy, Paddy taverns, spaghetti houses, groceries, shops, and the ghetto shacks of recent immigrants.
Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse lay on the northern edge of Little Italy, at the base of the Lidgerwood hill. It was a one-story farmhouse with an enclosed porch and an empty lot out back where her husband, before his death, had tended three rows of beloved fruit trees. Rye first saw the Ricci place when he noticed ripe plums hanging from two stuffed trees below the hillside, behind the paint-chipped house. He thought about taking a few plums but knocked on the door instead. The woman who answered was ancient, a hunch below five feet, and nearly bald beneath her head scarf. She stuck out her bottom lip and looked Rye up and down before proposing in heavily accented English that he keep a fourth of what he’d picked (“Three me, one you”). Eventually, she let him borrow a stepladder, a bucket, and a pair of gloves, Rye not twenty minutes into emptying the first tree when Mrs. Ricci reappeared with bread, noodles, and a glass of iced tea.
She had three grown sons, but two of them lived in Idaho with non-Catholic wives who sparked such deep disapproval that the boys rarely came to see their mother. The third son was an imbecile who lived in the asylum six blocks away. Mrs. Ricci walked there to see him every day after Mass.
She took immediately to Rye, and with time, to Gig, her eyes narrowing as if he might be too smooth to trust. The previous December, the Dolans had set up cots on her back porch and opened vents to draw heat from the woodstove. Her enclosed porch became a cheap place to winter so long as they abided Mrs. Ricci’s particular rules: that they not show up drunk or take the Lord’s name and not correct her when she got distracted and accidentally called them by her sons’ names. “Wait, am I Marco or Geno?” Gig would ask before they went into the kitchen for breakfast. “You’re Marco,” Rye would answer. “I’m Geno.”
This would be their second winter on Mrs. Ricci’s porch, and they woke there the morning of the great Free Speech Fight, buried under coats and blankets, the smell of bacon stirring both brothers from their cots.
Rye had gone there alone after Gig went out looking for Early Reston at Durkin’s. Rye worried that his brother wouldn’t come home at all, but he’d dragged in just after midnight, smelling of cigars and booze. “I’ll tell you what, Rye-boy,” Gig said as he settled into his cot, “after four whiskeys, Early’s case for making bombs instead of speeches begins to make a little sense.” He hummed a laugh that made Rye jealous. He wasn’t sure what to say about bombs versus speeches (How about neither?) but it didn’t matter: Soon Gig was snoring.
In the morning, Gig rose and used the outhouse first, then Rye, who paused at the door to glance back at what he thought of as his orchard, three rows of fruit trees, apple, plum, and pear. Leaves littered the ground beneath skeletal branches. Mrs. Ricci had agreed to sell them the lot for two hundred dollars, although they had yet to pay more than a few bucks toward it.
When Rye came back from the outhouse, Gig was