The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 23
After the riot, I was put in a crowded cell with seven others, we were cold and hungry, but we still laughed and sang. Then, on my fourth night in jail, a cop pulled me out alone and brought me to the empty courtyard. It was a nothing sky, gray and starless. The cop made me wait. When I was a boy, Plante used to make me wait for his anger to set, and so I hated waiting, shifting foot to foot, wondering when the blow would come. I have always found the waiting worse than the beating. Death comes for everything, but only spiders and men make you wait for it.
Eventually, that cop Clegg came out. Our first morning in jail he had come in to ask the Dolan brothers and me what happened that day at the river.
Now I’m here to talk to you alone, Chief, said Clegg. You got no reason to protect them Montana boys. Or the man who hit my sergeant that day. So why don’t you just give me the man’s name and I’ll see to it you’re let go.
I stayed quiet.
This ain’t your fight.
Stay out. Don’t speak. Keep yourself. Eyes down, walk the sides. But no laughter? When the world is etrange et ridicule?
He whispered: Come on, Chief. Give me a name. Who was it?
I wished I could make a joke like the older Dolan saying John Rockefeller, but the cop wouldn’t take that from me. Still, just thinking it made me laugh.
At least no more waiting. Clegg hit me in the stomach and then in the chest with his baton. On the third swing I felt something give, a rib. And I caved in. There was no breath anywhere in that yard.
A jailer dragged me back to the cell and dropped me like an empty shirt. I slept all night on the stone floor.
In my sleep, I imagined my mother would come, call me by name, and be angry: What did I tell you? Once, when I was a boy, we saw an old French-Canadian skinner fighting with crows over a dead raccoon. You see? my mother said. But I never saw. And remembering her now wasn’t the same as seeing her in my sleep. Maybe old men didn’t get to dream about their mothers anymore.
I woke up wheezing in the dark cell. Eight of us taking turns on two hard cots. I’d done vagrant time in the stone blockhouse, but not packed like this. Nothing in our guts but stale bread and dank water. After the beating, and the wheeze in my ribs, I worried this might finally put me in a grave box. We took shifts on the cots. One of them said, Why’s the old Indian get a turn, but the others ignored him and I took to that cot like a sweet wife. They were all decent men in the cell except that one. Not a bad number, one idiot in eight. I had a cousin once who told me kindness lives in the lips, and when I got a good look at the one who questioned my right to the cot, he had only a line where he took in food and put out merde. He was lucky I was not in good health or I’d have put him on the stone floor myself.
After my beating, I saw Rye once at the rock pile but I was too sick to speak. I’m sorry, he said, but how could I blame him for my own laughter. He was a good kid and I hoped they would not beat the good entirely from him. One night I heard they moved him and some others from the sweatbox to an old school building and I was glad.
There was a Finnish sawyer in my cell, a man named Halla, and one night I must’ve muttered in French, because after that, he made jokes in the language whenever they brought us hunks of bread and dirty water. Merci, garçon! he’d chirp, and then stick his lip out in a frown and wave his handkerchief like a fancy tablecloth. Bon appétit! This Halla would sniff the stale bread as if it was the finest cheese and say to the jailer, Mais mon vin, garçon? Deux Côtes du Rhone? I would laugh every time at this, and Halla would wink at me. Once I joined in and said to the guard, Deux steaks du boeuf s’il vous plaît, and Halla clapped my back and said good on me, though my French was chien de champagne. Country-dog French. I laughed at that, too. Laughed and coughed and could not stop. Blood on my hands.
Halla said, We need to get you a doctor, Jules.
But the jailer said the infirmary was full.
At night we talked about food and women like men who had experienced neither. Halla told me about the herring his mother used to fry every night for dinner. I asked, Did you get tired of herring? He said, Never. I asked, Are the herring still in the Baltic? He looked at me like I was crazy. Of course, he said.
I told him our river once ran thick with salmon and steelhead, and at the falls, the fish rose like flies over a pond, and you could swing a drop net and catch dejeuner pour deux. My uncle grew so fat on fish and shade-berries that he became a bear. Fur grew all over his body and his voice became a growl.
But our fish are gone now, I said. The dams keep them away. Now our river is shit and trash and wash from the mines. On the ground, they drove all the game away with hammering and sawing, they cleared the hillsides of berries to build