The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 6
Rye could see them settling in Spokane for good—so long as they found regular work and Gig went easy on the booze, so long as they camped outside on warmer and drunker nights, so long as a saw didn’t slip, or a hay pile fall, so long as they didn’t fall from a train or get killed by company thugs or rail bulls. So long so long so long—so long as Gregory and Ryan Dolan continued to draw breath—that cool fall day in the Year of the Lord nineteen hundred and nine.
Gig was twenty-three and Rye not quite seventeen.
And lying there, Rye had an insight that felt like a reverie, that, man or woman, Catholic or Prod, Chinese, Irish, or African, Finn or Indian, rich or poor or poor or poor, the world is built to eat you alive, but before you go down the gullet, the bastards can’t stop you from looking around. And he doubted that any magnate in a San Francisco mansion ever woke to a better view than he and his brother had that morning, staring at a red slash of sky from the crisp dirt infield of a weedy baseball diamond.
“Sorry about Ursula,” Rye said.
Gig leaned over, his wide, open face spreading into a grin. He shrugged. “Ah, nothing to do about that,” he said, “but play ball.”
Rye laughed and was about to make a joke about forming tramp teams and going nine when a commotion rose on the road behind them.
This was no smoke on the horizon, no reverie, but a gang of men descending the hill above the quiet diamond. Around them, stiffs leaped up, packed bindles and pulled on boots, grabbed pans and worn spoons, but there was no time. The mob bled onto the field and, as easily as if they were threshing wheat, began swinging at men’s heads.
2
They were off-clock cops and mining agents, security guards and private citizens, coats off, shirtsleeves rolled, boots kicking up dust. They swung billies and bats and the handles of axes, hoes, and shovels. They were on their third hobo nest of the morning, having given up all pretense of finding the murdered cop Waterbury’s killer.
Gig and Rye were up and running toward left field when they passed a boy wiggling into his boots, and Rye recalled the boy’s name—Diego—and that he’d been turned down by the job agents after his left foot got mangled in a baler. Just as Rye remembered that, Diego took a rake handle to the back.
“Goddamn tramps!” someone yelled, and “Move on, bums!” They’d been rousted and run from jungles before, but this felt different to Rye. These men wanted to bury them.
The brothers jumped the low left-field fence and skidded down an embankment toward the river, the more zealous of the stick-wielders following. A row of two-post houses lined the river road, and from a wood-piled porch, a woman in a yellow dress sipped from a tin coffee cup and watched the chase like it was a play at the Pantages.
Only then did Rye see that two other tramps were running with them. One was his friend Jules, an old Spokane and Palus Indian he’d met at Billy Sunday’s tent revival. Jules had been on his crew in Rockford, and was a tireless worker despite being sixty, a former cowhand with a bent back and weathered face, black hair like spilt oil. He was a tireless talker, too, a cook-fire storyteller who switched midtale from English to French, and whose booming laugh was, he said, “the only Salish I still speak.”
Rye didn’t know the other man running with them. He was thin and pale, in a worn coat and a hat that retained little of its original form. His mustache was graying, but otherwise the man’s age was a complete mystery: he could be thirty as easily as he could be fifty.
The four of them scrabbled to a ledge just over the rushing river, but here they ran out of path and had to turn back—four tramps faced up with six armed men on a narrow slab of dirt.
The mob leader stepped forward: “Looks like you’re at a crossroads.” He was tall and thick, with slate hair like a fresh-tarred road. Rye figured him for an off-clock cop and imagined his police mack on a doorknob back at one of those Spokane clapboards, bread cooking, wife tending babies while he went to take tramps’ teeth.
Gig stepped forward, too—he and the cop out like chess pieces. “What’s this about?” Gig asked in his citizen voice.
Rye had seen Gig do this before with the police: play it casual, like he’d sat up suddenly in a barber chair. Once they were camped in a rail yard when two cops came through to clear the line for Taft’s traveling train. Gig started in over whether Taft had the votes to pass the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, and by the time the train car rumbled past, draped in bunting and flags, Gig had one of the cops believing William Jennings Bryan would’ve made a better president.
But this one wanted no part of Gig’s charm: “You anarchist Wobs ain’t welcome here,” he said.
“Well, then it’s your lucky day,” Gig said, “for there are no anarchists here. And while I am a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, I don’t believe that to be against the law.”
“It is to me,” the slate-haired man said. He smacked his hand with his baton. “So what do you stinking