The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 86

I inquired of the barman, aptly named Slim, about work and a room.

“The room will be easier to find than the work,” he said. “Wheat’s all up. You are . . . let’s see.” He consulted his pocket watch. “Six months late.”

“Or,” I said, “I am six months early.”

Slim had a bed upstairs as long as I needed it—he looked at me—“or as long as you can pay twenty cents a night.”

“I can pay fifteen,” I countered, and he said, “Why not,” no doubt figuring I’d spend the rest of my money on beer anyway. “I’ll take it for tonight,” I said.

“What brings you to Lind,” he asked, “other than the rods of a freighter?”

“Oh, I’m no rod man,” I said. “I don’t have the nerve for it, holding an undertruss for two hours with those rocks kicking up. I prefer flying on top, a flatcar if I can get it, though today I came nestled like a baby bird in a soft grainer.”

“A discerning hobo.”

“Only kind,” I said, and gave him the real reason I was in Lind. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to know a man named Early Reston?”

“No,” he said. “Don’t think so.”

I started to describe him—and then realized it would be like describing a stalk of wheat, thin and pale and, well, that’s it. “I’m an old friend of his from up Spokane. He said to look him up if I was ever here.”

“Well, you are here,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”

I finished my beer, then walked the town, which took only a few minutes, three blocks this way and three that. I returned to Slim’s, had a plate of liver, and took to that upstairs bed. With food and board, even easy on the beer, I’d spend Ursula’s ten dollars in less than two weeks. She’d offered more, but pride had kept me from taking it. I slept restless that night, agitating about the way she had washed and shaved and bedded me. I dreamed of buying new clothes and going back and taking her in my arms again.

The next day, I tried a couple of farms around Lind, but nobody had heard of Early. The next town over was Ritzville, seventeen miles north. I walked half toward it, then caught on a hay wagon the rest. Ritzville was a Volga German town, and I ate a fine plate of sausage and potatoes in a café. I inquired about Early, but the cook there had never heard the name.

At the next table, a man leaned over and asked if I was looking for work.

“Almost always,” I said.

He ran a scrap mill on a creek just outside town and had orders for raw boards and firewood. But his hired man had left for the week to bury his father down in Oregon. “It’s only five days, but I can give you six dollars,” he said.

“And a room?” I asked.

He said there was a wood boiler in the sawmill, and I could sleep there and he would bring me a meal in the morning and one at night. But, he said, if I went near his house or if I went into town to booze it up, I was finished.

Not in top negotiating position, I accepted his offer.

The man’s name was Schulte, and he struck me as dour and incurious. His sawmill was little more than a shop with a rusty boiler that powered an old steam drop saw, like something he’d brought with him from the old country.

I tried to engage him in conversation, but he worked quiet. At night in that cold shop, I found myself thinking of you, Rye-boy, and wishing I’d taken that volume of Tolstoy you checked out. It was a thoughtful thing, bringing me that book, and I should’ve thanked you instead of going off drunk like I did.

On the second day, I asked if Schulte had anything to read in the house. He said they were strict Anabaptists. “Only the Good Book.”

“I have never found that to be a particularly good book,” I said, and if I’ve ever gotten a colder response from a joke, I don’t recall it.

Three days I sawed and edged and treated boards, split logs and loaded up the wagon, but Schulte insisted on doing the deliveries himself. Each time he set off for town, his admonition about staying away from the house got harsher. If I went near the house, he would have the sheriff run me off the property. If I went near the house, he would get his shotgun and shovel and bury me upstream. If I went near the house— “Yeah, I get it, Schulte,” I said.

The fifth or sixth time someone tells you not to do something, it becomes the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do, and when he left in the wagon, I lit a smoke and walked halfway up the drive. I glanced at the simple wood-framed house and wondered what manner of woman he was protecting in there. But something about the gray house felt oppressive, too, and I kept my distance. Finally, on the fourth day, Schulte came back from town and said his hired man had returned early, but as I had done a fine job and minded his admonitions, he would pay me all six dollars. He had one more delivery to make and would take me back to Ritzville on the way.

We loaded the wagon with cut tamarack and butt ends, and I grabbed my bindle and climbed on the seat next to him. We approached the house, and I glanced over without turning my head. Like a lot of lumbermen’s houses, his was doomed to go unfinished and unpainted, windows and doors not even properly framed. As we passed, a young woman came onto the back porch, thin and lank-haired and, I assumed, his wife. She was carrying a massive boy child, arms under his butt, his head over her shoulder. The kid was eight or nine, far too old