The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 15
“We leaving before breakfast?” Rye asked. “I thought it started at noon.”
“Committee meeting first.”
“Well, give me a minute to get ready, and I’ll go with you.”
“You’re not on the committee.”
“I’ll come later, then?”
Finally, Gig looked up at him. “Rye-boy. You’re not coming.”
“Of course I’m coming.”
“No.” Gig explained that he was one of twenty men slated to speak, which meant he would probably get arrested, and he didn’t want Rye getting hurt if things got out of hand with the police.
“I should be there,” Rye said.
“No. You stay for breakfast. Then you can rake Mrs. Ricci’s leaves.”
Rye hated when Gig started ordering him around—like he was some kind of authority. “I’ll eat down at the hall,” Rye said. “And rake leaves tomorrow.”
“No.” Gig smiled. “You’re gonna have breakfast with Mrs. Ricci. Then rake her leaves—” He pulled his coat on. “This isn’t your fight, Rye.” He walked out the door into the backyard, Rye following right behind him.
“Wait. I spend a year listening to you go on about this business, and now it’s not my fight?”
Gig turned back, face set. “I’m your guardian and I say you’re staying here.”
“My guardian!” Rye could barely believe the nerve after he’d spent the last year pulling Gig out of saloons. “What are you guarding me from, Gig? Sobriety? A home?”
It stung the way Rye knew it would. Gig turned and began walking away, muttering. Rye picked up a word here and there: responsibility and bullshit and baby. And the next thing he knew, Rye was on Gig’s back. He didn’t even remember running and he didn’t remember jumping and he certainly didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish, hanging off his brother like a pack, arms around his neck.
Gig threw him into the dewy grass. “What’s the matter with you?”
What was the matter? This panic he felt watching his brother walk off—and suddenly, he was back in Whitehall, alone with her. “You can’t just leave!” Rye spat, voice breaking, panting. He pictured their mother’s handkerchief, pink from the blood he could never wash out.
Gig was staring down at him. After a moment, he offered Rye a hand and pulled him to his feet, Rye wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Gig said. “This thing’s like a show. They’ll haul a few of us to jail and we’ll make a big deal of it and that’s that. The IWW ran this same show in Missoula, and after a week of feeding twenty singing tramps in jail, the city dropped the whole thing.”
Rye pictured the big angry police chief—a good four inches taller than Gig, with that stern brogue—and couldn’t imagine the man just surrendering to a bunch of singing labor men.
“Here,” Gig said, and he handed Rye his work gloves. “Have breakfast. Rake leaves. I’ll see you this afternoon or, at the very worst, in a week or so.”
Rye held the gloves and watched Gig’s broad back recede, the scratchy window in the Whitehall apartment, his big brother always walking away. “Goddamn it, Gig,” he muttered.
He went inside then, and ate breakfast with Mrs. Ricci, Gig’s plate empty next to his. Rye slurped eggs onto his bread.
“Tu mangi come un cavallo, Geno,” Mrs. Ricci said.
“Sorry, Mrs. Ricci,” he said. He tried to remember the Italian word for sorry. “Dispatch?”
“Dispiace,” she said. “Si.”
“Yeah, that,” Rye said.
Breakfast over, he pulled on his brother’s work gloves and grabbed the rake from the side of the house. The wind swirled the leaves and he worked grimly, got two piles into the burn bin and lit them, but they were wet and smoldered instead of crackling. Rye watched the gray soupy smoke curl into the sky. The wind must’ve been howling above the valley, because the high clouds raced like migrating birds above the smoke, as if the world were flying by. “Goddamn it, Gig,” he said again. And he set the rake against the house.
7
Rye hurried through Little Italy and the Irish neighborhood, kids hanging from porches and running around big leafy yards. Normally, he’d take the river trail along the tracks to downtown, but today he felt like walking the blocks of houses, imagining he belonged, and he crossed Division into rows of brick apartments, then down Howard to the sprawling train station on Havermale Island, which split the river into two channels between the upper and lower falls.
There was a trapdoor in the north deck of the Howard Street Bridge, and Rye stood watching a work crew dump a wagonload of tin cans and other garbage straight into the churning river below—a brown city soup of refuse, sewage, and train oil. People usually just threw their trash on the riverbanks, hoping the water would take it away, but by August, when the water got low, the stench was overpowering. So the city put trapdoors in the bridges where crews could dump garbage into the center of the river, easier for the current to flush downstream.
At the Great Northern depot, Rye crossed four sets of tracks, a big passenger train steaming beneath the 150-foot tower, the four clock faces informing Rye that it was twelve minutes before high noon—the time Gig said the union’s action was set to start. Across the island, on Front Street, Rye didn’t need a clock to tell him something was on. Dozens of people milled outside