The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 2
After Seventh, Hage and I met on Adams, at the alley entrance, where Roff had stopped to piss on the knuckled root of a maple.
“I don’t like it,” Hage said.
“Roff pissing on trees?”
“I don’t like that, either, but I mean walking up this hill hoping to bump into some ace burglar on the job.”
“Well, we won’t find him rousting bums downtown with Clegg.”
“We will if he’s a bum.”
“Fancy work for a bum.”
“I suppose so.”
Roff had finished pissing. We turned the next block and split up again at Ninth, where I was admiring the pillared porches of the big houses and paused to light my pipe. I wondered then if Rebecca’s feelings about Spokane might change if I could ever get us off poverty flats and into one of these grand houses on the hillside.
Wasn’t likely on a cop’s salary; Chief Sullivan himself lived in the flats. Anyway, I didn’t think even these grand houses could make my wife happy. Not anymore. Not here. What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities—Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money flowed straight uphill. It made me think of something I’d heard about the Orient, that water drained the opposite way there. Who wanted to live in a place where water spun backward or money flowed uphill? These towns that had no business being towns, straddling islands and bays and cliffs and canyons and waterfalls.
I fell deeper into this somber mood and was thinking Rebecca’s word, drastic, when Roff stepped from the shadows.
“You got something?” I asked. “Or—”
I couldn’t say what came next: the crack, me yelling, “Stop,” or the flash, or realizing this wasn’t Roff. As to what came last, I have no doubts, for I doubled over and held my flaming, open guts. There was another order that made sense (not Roff, “Stop,” flash, crack, doubled over, flaming guts), but I couldn’t place it—
The man who was not Roff was running away, his long black coat flapping, his shoes clicking on cobblestone, and I thought of Sullivan taking a gunshot to the leg and still bringing in his man, and I managed to get my revolver and squeeze four off, but I fired wildly and the man ducked between two houses down the block.
I was folded in half, pitched forward on my knees in gravel, my guts a sinkhole, and I cried out, to my shame—
Hage was first to me, saying my name over and over, “Alfred, Alfred, Alfred.”
“He shot me!” What grave disappointment, my lack of imagination. When I think of all the things a man could say. Shakespeare or Greek or even the Bible. Proper last words. But all I could manage was “He shot me.”
“I know, Alfred,” Hage said. “I’m sorry.”
Hage reached into my coat, around to my back. “Roff!” he yelled. I could hear in his voice that there was no exit hole. The bullet was inside. They would have to go for it.
I’d heard from the old cops that a mortal wound did not hurt as much, but this, like everything about the brutes, every word out of their fat mouths, was a fairy tale, a justification, a pernicious lie.
“Roff!” Hage yelled. “Waterbury’s shot!”
“How could they know?” I said.
“What?”
“How could they know what a mortal wound feels like?” Even to my ear the words were garbled, like I was talking underwater. My thoughts, too, leaked out: A gut shot could take hours, days, but the result was the same: agony and—
Other thoughts crowded: Had I eaten dinner? Was that to be my last meal? Who would tell Rebecca? Would she mend this shirt? Maybe she could sell my clothes and make a little money. I reached down to feel if the bullet had gone through my coat.
“Coat’s fine,” I said, but my voice sounded far off.
“Roff!” Hage yelled again. “He shot Alfred!”
“Lay me down,” I said, and Hage helped me onto my side.
“Roff!” Hage yelled again.
“Rebecca,” I said, but it was bubbles in water. I wanted to make sure that she knew—what? I could not think. “Rebecca,” I said again, clearer this time. And even if I had memorized all of Shakespeare and the Bible, I suppose this is what I would have wanted to say at the end, Rebecca on my lips, Rebecca, Rebecca, over and over, into the dark.
Part I
. . . we love most what we must have but can never have; and so on we go, west and then west.
—Brian Doyle, The Plover
1
They woke on a ball field—bums, tramps, hobos, stiffs. Two dozen of them spread out on bedrolls and blankets in a narrow floodplain just below the skid, past taverns, tanners, and tents, shotgun shacks hung like hounds’ tongues over the Spokane River. Seasonal work over, they floated in from mines and farms and log camps, filled every flop and boardinghouse, slept in parks and alleys and the pavilions of traveling preachers and, on the night just past, this abandoned ball field, its infield littered with itinerants, vagrants, floaters, Americans.
The sun was just beginning to edge the mountains when Rye Dolan sat up, halfway down the first-base line. He looked across a field of sleeping humps, his older brother, Gig, beside him, curled a few feet from the pitcher’s mound.
Rye turned back to watch the sunrise over the Selkirks—a smoky red gash where someone had set a fire to get a job fighting it. Last year, Rye might have paid to get a shovel on that blaze, but Gig had gone and joined the IWW, the union fighting the corrupt employment agents who charged a buck