The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 4
The Dolans ran into a couple of Gig’s labor friends coming from the big IWW hall on Front Street—gregarious James Walsh, sent from Chicago to run the Spokane labor action, and an intense Montanan named Frank Little, who Walsh introduced as “part Indian and the rest trouble.”
Rye didn’t like it when Gig ran with these union types; he thought their revolutionary banter half foolish and half dangerous and was never quite sure which was which. He couldn’t keep up with the boozing and sporting and jawing about wage slavery, and all things equal, he preferred the peace of Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse across the river in Little Italy. A warm soup, a hard cot, an early rise to get first crack at a good job.
But last night, in sympathy with Gig’s heartache, Rye let himself get pulled in the wake of the union men, who sneaked Rye into Jimmy Durkin’s big beer hall under a sign that read, “IF YOUR CHILDREN NEED SHOES, DON’T BUY BOOZE.” They toasted Rye’s hand-me-down boots and told rich stories of sharks and foremen, and soon Rye was nodding, laughing, singing along.
It’s quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don’t have to be—that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself. Two beers in, Rye felt lifted by a sense of hope.
James Walsh was a musician and mining man who had once rounded up twenty toughs, dressed them in red, and taken them cross-country on cattle cars to shake up the 1906 IWW convention in Chicago, stopping to sing in work camps along the way. He called it the Overalls Brigade and said it was “to remind the dandies in suits and spectacles arguing over amendments and articles that this is about the goddamn rights of goddamn men.” That night in a packed Durkin’s, he opened the taps on his charm, calling Rye “boyo” and Gig “the esteemed Senator Dolan,” buying round after round until Rye was drunk for the first time in his life, arm over shoulder with the labor men, warbling along to Frank Little’s IWW songbook:
Oh, why don’t you work like the other men do?
How in hell can I work when there’s no work to do?
Hallelujah, I’m a bum
Hallelujah, bum again—
Then the beer ran out, as beer will do, and whiskey, clocks, and nickels, too, and the union men left and it was just Gig and Rye, on a full-blown now, ducking the vagrant patrols and singing their ire in the street, a bitter tune their father taught them—Here’s a memory to all the boys, that are gone, boys—gone!—too bent for Mrs. Ricci, the boardinghouse widow who did not abide Gig’s drinking, and that was when older brother told younger about this overgrown ball field, and the big cook fire on the pitcher’s mound, although by the time they staggered down the hill into Peaceful Valley the fire was dying, the diamond dotted with bedrolls. Their own packs back on Mrs. Ricci’s porch, Rye and Gig curled on their coats on the dirt infield, not for lack of outfield ambitions but because if you were tempted by that soft center-field grass, you might wake in dew and catch your death—
Catch your death. Now, there was a thought. As he watched the smoke-red sun rise in the sky, Ryan Dolan recalled his mother saying it when he was a boy and used to wander outside without coat and shoes. Well, he’d got to know death pretty well in the interim, was practically on a first-name basis, and from what he could see, it was death generally did the catching.
Rye nudged his brother: “Hey Gig, let’s see if that doorman at the Empire will pay us two bits to carry his trash to the river.”
Gig sat up and yawned. He patted himself for paper and tobacco, neither of which he had. “You go on, Rye-boy,” he said. “I’m going to the hall today.”
Here was Rye’s chief complaint about Gig’s involvement with the Industrial Workers of the World, the one big union that took anyone as a member: Finnish logger, Negro seamstress, Indian ranch hand, even floater like them. What good was a union meant to help them find work if Gig spent so much time there that he couldn’t work?
Gregory Dolan was a man of squares—shoulders, jaw, thick brown hair over arch blue eyes. Smart, too, about books, though less about work, which was more Rye’s area. Gig had made it to grade eleven, three years beyond any other Dolan, and was his own schooling after that. He always carried a book in his bindle and read as if he expected an exam. Rye could read fine, well enough to make out a pay sheet or a flyer for a brush job, but he never much saw the point in studying economics to hoe a field for sixty cents a day.
The other difference between them had to do with the fairer sex. Rye Dolan was tall enough to fool a job agent, but up close he was boy-faced and pin-shouldered, with ears like the handles of a vase. But even ladies in automobiles cast long glances when Gig strolled the street. And among variety girls, sport ladies, tavern hags, and soiled doves, no vagrant in history got more half-offs and free rolls than his big sweet brother, Rye suspected.
“Just come with me to the Empire,” Rye said. “We’ll go to the hall after.”
“Nah.” Gig’s smile spread to a yawn. “I think I’ll lie here and reflect some more on the nature of man.”
“Well, I ain’t going without you,” said Rye. His whole world was on that ball field: Gig and Rye Dolan, last of the Whitehall Dolans—sister Lace dead at sixteen bringing forth a cold baby in a Butte hospital, brother