The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 22
Rye sat still through all of this, hoping his own lawyer could match Pugh in spewing mouthfuls. And then, like one more pull from the tap, the prosecutor looked right at Rye and said, “And finally, as Mr. Dolan has lived an adult life of criminal vagrancy and broken adult laws willfully, the state recommends that he be tried and treated as an adult by this court.”
The prosecutor sat, and the judge said, “Mr. Moore?” and Rye turned to his lawyer, who stared at the floor a moment, Rye worried he might be stumped.
Then Mr. Moore said simply, “Sixty-one.” And he took a deep breath. “Mr. Dolan was recorded in the booking sheet as being sixty-one years old, Your Honor. The state would have you believe that a conniving sixteen-year-old looked at his jailers and thought them too stupid to tell the difference between sixteen and sixty-one. While we are prepared to stipulate to the stupidity of Mr. Dolan’s jailers, the idea that Mr. Dolan tried to pass himself off as an old man to embarrass the city is ludicrous on its face, Your Honor.”
This brought a murmur of laughter and then Mr. Moore was on his feet and every bit Mr. Pugh’s match, railing at the “bastardization of decency and law,” saying that the city would “attempt to retroactively remedy an egregious mistake by blaming an abused child for his own abuse, a poor indigent born under fortune’s darkest cloud, an orphan boy with no home, no parents, nothing of comfort in this hard world.”
As his lawyer spoke, Rye felt an odd mix of emotions—pride that someone so eloquent was working on his behalf, but embarrassment, too, a painful self-awareness that he was the hobo waif Mr. Moore was describing, and shame at the way he must look and smell, he and the other scraggly shit-souls shackled behind him awaiting their own trials. He looked around the courtroom at the men in fine suits. And he thought of Gig back in jail, every bit this lawyer’s match in intellect but born, as Mr. Moore said, under fortune’s darkest cloud, with no chance at fine suits and fancy courtroom Latin.
Rye slumped in his chair as Fred Moore finished speaking. Mistaking Rye’s shame for worry, Mr. Moore patted his arm and said, “It’s going to be okay, Ryan.”
Judge Mann sighed, then flipped through some papers. Finally, he looked down at the prosecutor. “What do you say you toss this fish back?”
Then Mr. Pugh smiled as if even he hadn’t believed his own argument, and he turned and winked at Rye as the judge rapped his gavel and said, “Charges dismissed. Mr. Dolan, you are free to go, but I had better not see you back in this courtroom, because I will not be so generous next time.”
The words stung Rye: shiftless wastrel and poor indigent, beaten and jailed for eight days and then tossed back? All so the union could make a point, the judge joking about who got the best of it—like some kind of game?
He was moved to the backbench and watched his five teammates take the field. He felt bad for Mr. Moore, who didn’t have a sixteen-year-old waif and stupid jailers for these cases and tried arguing the illegality of the law against union men gathering on the street, Judge Mann saying he wasn’t prepared to rule on the merits of that—“Only the lawless behavior of anarchist rascals”—and despite Mr. Moore’s energetic ipsos and factos, one by one the other five struck out, were found guilty of disorderly conduct and given their thirty days back at Franklin School.
Two jailers came in to shackle the five men—while the other team gathered at the bench in their bow-tied uniforms—and Rye felt again the horror of this game.
“Hold the line,” Rye said as his teammates were led out.
“Happy birthday,” one of them said back.
Jules, 1909
THREE YEARS before she died, my mother sent me to live with the French ferryman and said I should not speak anymore. I could talk English or French, since she did not consider them speaking. What she meant was I should leave our language behind. She said it did not belong in the world anymore and would only get me hurt. It was losing your mother and your tongue at once.
She gave me another warning. Stay out of it.
Out of what? I asked.
Everything. Listen. Walk to the side. Keep yourself. Go the other way.
And then she warned me about my laugh. I had a great whelping laugh like my father’s, and she said that if I laughed at the wrong people, it would get me killed, as sure as it had got my father killed, as sure as if he’d pulled a knife.
He did pull a knife, I said.
But that was after he enraged a man by laughing at him, she said. So, if you must laugh, do it with your mouth closed. Through your nose.
After I went to live with the ferryman, I tried to stay quiet. I listened, and walked to the side. My mother died and I spoke French and English and no Salish or Sahaptin, although I still sometimes muttered words to myself.
But I could no more laugh through my nose than I could see through my ears.
She was right, it did get me in trouble, my laugh, that morning on the river with the Dolan boys and Early Reston, the man who beat the cop. I laughed with them boys and a couple of old hands I’d ranched with, and I followed them all