The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 73

and he and Gig fell into each other. The smell was overpowering, and Gig was bones beneath his baggy coat. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a squeak, then “Rye-boy,” and then he was crying and Rye was crying, and for a long time, they just did that.

The eight-fingered goob decided he wasn’t cut out for machinery work, and on Monday, Rye became the full-time stock boy of North Hill Fittings and Machine Shop. Each morning Rye got up, checked the envelope under his cot, and said goodbye to Gig, who had spent the weekend days curled up on his cot and the nights sitting in front of Mrs. Ricci’s fire. “I’ll be back around six,” Rye said as he put on his coat, hat, and gloves. Gig said nothing.

Rye loved being a workaday guy: Grab a grip on the streetcar, arrive before eight, and wait for Joe to open the shop. “You don’t have to beat me to work, kid,” Joe said, Rye smiling: “I don’t mind.” He’d hang his coat, put on his shop apron, turn on the lights, warm the machines, and watch everything come to life, a rhythm to all of it, the flow of customers, the banter with Dominic, the precise order of cleanup at the end of the day. He liked to anticipate which parts customers needed, showing up with a toilet flange before the plumber from Millwood had a chance to ask for it. This garnered a nickname from Joe—Seer. A mechanic’s wagon would pull up and Joe say, “Seer?” Rye gazing into the future: “Hub roller bearings.”

Joe’s brother, Paul, rarely spoke except to ask for things he needed. But Dominic, the big machinist, was even friendlier than he’d been on Rye’s first day. He asked where Rye was from and about his parents and siblings. “Well, you’ve had a tough go,” he said when Rye told his story. By Wednesday, he was inviting Rye to share his prodigious three-sandwich lunches, which he spread over the cutting table as carefully as a surgeon. And by Thursday, when Dominic’s wife found out the new stock boy was eating a half-sandwich from her husband’s lunch every day, she began putting a fourth sandwich in the basket. “Soon she’ll just send the whole loaf of bread,” Dominic said.

But Rye worried about leaving Gig alone all day. His brother was hollowed out by thirteen days on hunger strike, on top of the beatings and privations of jail. Rye couldn’t believe how frail he seemed; even Gig’s hair was thinner. He had a bath at Mrs. Ricci’s, and a meal, but after that, he slept all day, rising only to pick at his food and sit by the fire Rye built each night, a blanket around his shoulders, his new fur-lined gloves on his hands. “Thanks” was all he’d said when Rye gave him the fancy box with the gloves in it. He didn’t even ask where they came from.

At night, Gig’s breathing was raspy and uneven. He made noises in his sleep like he was being startled. The only time he spoke was late at night, when the brothers lay in the dark. Once he talked about the hunger strike: “We started after they put the rank and file on bread and water. The jailers thought this was pretty rich, so instead of our normal rations, they sent out for steaks and potatoes, fresh vegetables. They’d leave our fancy meals outside our cells all night. Then, after lights out, the rats came. We’d lay there listening to those rats eating our dinner.”

Another night, he talked about Jules. “I met a Swede who was in his cell, said Jules went out good and strong, laughing, making jokes. Two other men I knew died in there, one with diabetes, the other I don’t know what he had. When the cops saw someone dying, they’d release the man so they wouldn’t have to explain a corpse in jail. The man with diabetes didn’t even have a family. They just released him to some woman who agreed to take him in for a dollar a day. He only made it two days, but I heard they gave her five bucks.”

The next night, he said simply, “I shouldn’t have gotten us into this, Rye.”

Rye didn’t hesitate. “It was the best thing I ever did, Gig.”

“Nah, it was pointless,” Gig said. “Little kids shitting our own pants trying to teach our parents a lesson.”

“Don’t say that,” Rye said.

“It’s the truth,” Gig said.

Rye had been waiting for the right time to tell Gig about Early, about Lem Brand and Ursula, about Del Dalveaux, about what he had done—but Gig seemed so broken by what had happened that Rye was worried about how he’d react if he knew the truth. He imagined his brother calling him a spy, or running out to confront Ursula, or going to try to kill Lem Brand or something crazy—so he decided to keep quiet until Gig had regained his strength.

They barely talked about the union. Each night, Rye brought newspapers home from the shop to read by the fire after dinner. Gig might flip through the sports and theater sections, but he had no interest in stories about the IWW. Rye devoured them, especially stories about Gurley.

She was everywhere, granting interviews in the labor-friendly Press and the establishment Chronicle and Spokesman-Review. To get around the judge’s ruling that she not speak about her case, she talked about the city’s arrest of the newsboys, “poor twelve-year-olds hauled off by the Spokane police goons to be sweated like bank robbers!” When all charges against the boys were dropped, she proclaimed victory: “The city’s war against children is over. Maybe now they will declare a cease-fire against its workers, too.” She railed against the decision to ban the Industrial Worker, saying that, as the sixth editor of the newspaper (with the first five now convicted of conspiracy), “I have no intention of abiding by this clearly