The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 3
Left untended, that same dollar could bring his older brother plenty of trouble. Like last night.
Pay in pocket, Gig Dolan liked to bounce from Dutch Jake’s to Jimmy Durkin’s until the money ran out. And while caring for Rye the past year had half tamed him, they were coming off three weeks apart—Rye picking up a late harvest near Rockford, Gig getting on a skid crew at a Springdale log camp. Fired for union agitating, Gig came back to booze it up with his east-end labor pals and hawk daywork at the city’s vaudeville theaters, and it was there, among the freaks and jugglers, the variety houses and leg shows, that he happened to meet an actress, name of Ursula—Rye back in Spokane less than an hour before his brother was showing him a newspaper review of her show. “And therein,” Gig said.
“I’m at the Comique Theater last week hauling lumber for the carpenter when this red-haired vision emerges from her dressing room and says, ‘Well, who are you?’ and I say, ‘Why, the hero, of course,’ and she says, ‘Then you must get the damsel,’ and I say, ‘Every night. Twice on Saturdays.’ And she says, ‘I’ll bet that second performance really suffers.’ And I smile back and say, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Goes on longer, but what’s lost in zeal gets made up in familiarity.’ ”
She went by the name Ursula the Great, the Spokesman-Review referring to her as “a spectacle of indecency” and “the last of four acts of increasing depravity.” Gig talked Rye into using their sock money on a shared public bath—older brother taking the suitor’s hot, Rye settling for warm flotsam—and they got haircuts and nickel shaves, though a scrape was hardly needed on Rye’s baby face, and instead of boiling clothes over a cook fire, they paid for proper clean-and-folds in the Chinese Quarter. All gentlemanned up, they got fifty-cent seats at the Comique and settled in for some mild depravity—blind accordion player, Bavarian juggler, wrestling match between armless and legless men (always bet legs)—until the curtain split for the finale, depravity number four, and the smoky stage lights revealed the source of Gig’s infatuation, Rye wondering what pinch-hearted critic came up with a word like depraved upon first glimpsing the flame-haired beauty who strode into the lights in front of a big iron cage—
For inside was a full-grown cougar! Pacing and snarling while the band played a hurdy-gurdy and the big cat stalked and Ursula danced around it singing a few numbers and slow-stripping to nothing but corset and stockings, kicking those long legs higher and higher, leaning her backside against the cage until all went black and the spotlight came up and the whole theater held its breath as Ursula unlatched the cage door and the big cat lowered its head, hissed, and spat—and brave Ursula ambled in as if going to her pantry for butter, closed the cage door behind her, and serenaded the beast, holding an ungodly high note as she ripped off the corset, and oh! the flash of flesh, of narrow waist and pale back, and the fury of that mountain lion as it made to pounce at her bare breasts—which Rye could only imagine, as she was facing away—and that was when Ursula tossed the corset at the cat, who tore into it in lieu of her fair skin, and drowned out by cheers and whistles, she took a silk robe from the back of the cage, slipped it on, tied the belt, and, still singing over the roar of cat and crowd, Ursula the Great walked out of that cage in one lovely piece.
Rye had to agree: This Ursula was the real thing. Made the blind accordion player seem like . . . a blind accordion player. Afterward, Rye ran the aisles for leftover food, but Gig was smitten, and when Gig was smitten, by cause or by woman, there was no sense in him, and he dragged them out of that warm theater and down the alley to the stage door.
A thick doorman was manning that post, and even with the brothers’ freshly shaved faces and laundered shirts, he wasn’t about to let such worn boots in to see the talent. Gig pleaded, but the doorman explained: Ursula was otherwise engaged, and for two bits he said how, entertaining a gentleman, and for two bits more, who, a wealthy mining man named Lemuel Brand. The Dolans had been sharked by enough of Lem Brand’s operations to know it didn’t matter how charming and handsome Gig was, a skid-rower like him was no match for a man of means like Brand, so they started back up the alley, Rye saying, “I hope the cougar wins next time,” when a call came from the stage door—“Gregory!”—and Ursula, still in the robe, emerged into flickering gaslight. “Gregory,” she called again, like she hadn’t hit the note the first time, and he ran down the alley to her. Gig listened as Miss Great explained, shoving his hands in his trouser pockets at the bad news, Ursula touching his chest, Gig nodding, turning and leaving her at the stage door, returning to Rye at the end of the alley. She watched him go, hand on heart, Gig refusing her the satisfaction of looking back.
“Well?”
“She swears she won’t bed the man,” said Gig, “but he owns the theater, so—”
And with no words on the other side of that so, they ventured back onto the street to salve Gig’s wounded soul.
Two hundred fifty taverns in Spokane and last night every one of them hummed on high, like a pot before boil, street cops looking for drunks to rake and the tenderloin packed with the end of harvest, the closing of log camps and the coming union action, downtown whipped up like a wind-fed blaze. A week earlier, a union speaker had gotten arrested and word went out in the Industrial Worker newspaper for floaters to come for the Spokane Free Speech Fight,