The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 78
Hello, boys, where have you been?
You had a good job, Rye, and I didn’t want to crumb it for you, but Christ I had a tightness in my neck. I couldn’t sit at that old Italian woman’s table three times a day, pretending to be her son and eating slippery noodles. When you brought home that fancy volume of War and Peace from the library, honestly, that was the final blow. This was my life now? Sit by the fire and eat dinner while my little brother borrows books for me to read in bed?
So while you were at the machine shop, I went out for a round: a pint and a shot of uisce. A bartender sympathetic to our labor cause served me up—toasted me and set me up again. And again. I told the bartender the great realization I’d had after a month of beating and starvation in jail—that none of it mattered. That we were flies buzzing around the heads of millionaires, fooling ourselves that we had power because they couldn’t possibly swat us all.
The man could think of nothing to say about that except to fill my glass.
After ten days of rest, and the return of Thirst and Hunger, the old road soul began to stir. I felt the pull again, to go, fly, ride a rattler lumber rack, wind in my face on the way to some new rail stem. Thought maybe I’d go find Early Reston down Lind way, where he said he holed up sometimes.
I was done with Spokane. Done with jail and done with Walsh and done with his martyr Wobblies, done with your fiery girl, Flynn. Done with Ursula and her cougar and her millionaire, Brand. Done with it all, Rye, and you, too, if I’m being honest, at least for a while. Done with your faithful heart, your good job, your warm fireplace, your goddamn library card.
During the days, my thoughts would not give me rest: Why was I here? Why did I get out of jail while the rest of the committee got six months? Was Early right, was a rambling soul like mine better served by anarchy than labor union? And then, when the thoughts got heavy, I knew how to lighten them, uisce, and I left Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse to drink about it all for a while, until either clarity came or the thoughts leaked away.
Like our dear departed da, I hit it hard that night, went to every sympathetic saloon in the city and asked for doubles on me troubles, Irish pubs and labor joints, and I gave the flies-on-millionaires speech, finished half-drunk glasses, bummed smokes and walked the streets, retched and pissed, and was shocked to find myself in the alley of the Comique, yelling at the doorman that inside was the most disloyal woman in the world, and he said, “Move on, drunk,” and I said, “Are you the one to move me?” and he said, “Sure I am,” and suddenly, there she was, the show ended, cat put away, robe pulled tight, and all my anger bled away in her eyes. I thanked her for coming to see me in jail that time, but my tongue was thick and my words jibbery, and I told her I had vowed to stay away until I felt my old self, for I didn’t want her to see this wretched me, but I didn’t know where else to go, drunk like this, I’d get my kid brother kicked out of our boardinghouse if I went back there and—
“Be quiet,” Ursula said, and she took me by the hand to her dressing room and set me in a chair in front of her lighted mirror. I could barely look at myself there: dirty, hollow cheeks, and rat beard up to my bruised eyes. She fed me coffee and bread and meat left over from the cast room. “Look at you,” she said. “What have they done to my beautiful Gregory. I just hope they left a bit of the soul in there.”
This nearly made me weep, for I suspected the soul had taken the worst of it.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“Get back on the road,” I said. “Rattle out.”
“Where?”
I shrugged, thinking of Early Reston. “I’m beginning to think I’m cut out more for the darker side of this thing.”
“Do they employ a lot of drunks, that side?”
I laughed. “Suppose I’ll find out.”
“And Rye?”
“He’s better without me,” said I, and believed it. I told her you would do anything to survive, and good on you, the way you came up, our parents dying out from under you, the rest of us leaving you alone to scratch for food.
“Once, Rye and I were bedded in a jungle this side of Ellensburg,” I told her. “The apple crews were full, so he went to bump lumps, because a begging kid does better alone, least that’s what I told myself. I stayed in camp and got drunk with a couple of fellas until Rye came back with a fat lip and said he’d found an open back door and got us two chickens out of an icebox. The woman of the house had hit him pretty good with a broom, but he got away. We celebrated that little thief like he was goddamn Ty Cobb. That’s the best I’ve got for Rye if I stay, Ursula, stealing chickens.”
She smiled. “And all of this melancholy means you don’t have to try anymore. Throw off your life and die in an alley somewhere. Is that the plan?”
“I don’t have the particulars worked out,” I said, “which alley, for instance.”
I was sobering, and hated that most of all. Drunk, I could bear this lecture, but sober, it was starting to sting.