The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 9
In Rockford, Rye had heard Jules answer questions this way, with winding stories that tailed off before their conclusion. He wasn’t sure if it was the Salish way or the French way or Jules’s way, but he suspected the story’s meaning was like an undercurrent beneath the surface, the opposite of how Gig and his union friends told stories, skipping the story part to go straight to collectivism or syndicalism. Jules seemed to want Rye to figure out the ism himself.
Finally, Rye could wait no longer. “What’s it mean, Jules?”
Jules gave a laugh. “Un homme dans un bateau.”
“Come on,” Rye said, “you know I don’t speak nothing but English.”
“One man to a boat,” Jules said. “We all go over alone.”
They broke over a rise then, and caught up with Gig and Early, the four of them moving toward the stout brick skyline of that smoke-capped city.
4
There was no place like it then, Spokane—such hell and hair on that town. A full day’s ride from anywhere, isolated between mountain ranges on the stair-step deck of waterfalls, it took Rye’s breath away the first time he railed in: basalt cliffs jutting like teeth from pine-covered hills, train bridges latticing the valley, and in the center that big river, which carved a steep, tree-lined canyon that led from the silver mines and forested mountains of Idaho to rich Washington farmland.
It was a boomtown that just kept booming, doubling in size every six years, going from a few hundred to a hundred-some thousand in just thirty years, until the only place bigger in the state was that ugly harbor blight Seattle. Spokane felt like the intersection of Frontier and Civilized, the final gasp of a thing before it turned into something else—the Last Rush Town, Gig called it, for the silver rushes in the foothills, but also the rush of railroad and bank, school and merchant, brick, stone, and steel, old-growth timber turned to pillared houses, hammers popping nonstop against the wild, a mad rush to log and pave the whole world.
Downtown, the money turned west at Howard Street, to banks, clothiers, clubs, law offices, and gilded hotels, Louis Davenport’s fine restaurant and the Hall of Doges, the marbled Spokane Club, bricked roads leading to grand neighborhoods of mining and timber barons and the men who banked and doctored and lawyered them.
The eastern half of downtown was all skid and tenderloin, six blocks by six blocks of drink, dance, rent-a-room, liquor-and-chance, opium, garter-bird weekend beds. Gig said that in the years before Rye found him, he had railed from San Francisco to St. Paul and every town in between, and for his money, of which, admittedly, he had none, Spokane was the best city of them all.
It grew on Rye for different reasons: the quiet neighborhoods and the way you could look up brownstone canyons and see, at the end of even the busiest street, a pine-covered hillside. And he liked the idea of one day building their own house among the fruit trees behind Mrs. Ricci’s boardinghouse. But however much the Dolan brothers had grown to like Spokane, the city didn’t exactly return their affections—seeing them as just two more bums in a city thick with them, a point Gig argued this way:
A bum wanders and drinks.
A tramp wanders and dreams.
A hobo wanders and works.
That second part was open for negotiation, but no question, Rye and Gig wandered, out of necessity or character or both. Maybe they’d have stayed in one place if they’d been born wheat farmers or gentlemen grocers and not the sons of a man like Dan Dolan, who came from Ireland, where the family name Dobhail meant unlucky in Gaelic and apparently translated perfectly to America, Dan doing a year in debtor’s jail before finding work as a shovel mucker, at which point he sent word back to County Leitrim that Ahearn Dobhail’s youngest was a budding American silver baron in need of a bride. Neighboring villages pooled money to send their most disagreeable old maid, who was all of twenty-two, and for whom two men had left Ireland rather than engage her. She arrived in Montana after two weeks on boats and trains and wagons to find this played-out convict a decade older than advertised, her first words “I pray there’s enough of you left to make a baby.”
“Your mother arrived with grievances,” Dan Dolan used to say, “and plans to send me out with the same.” And so she did after four children, Rye the last, eight years old when his da dropped dead on the steps of a tavern, the very definition of Irish hell: dying walking into a bar. Rye’s mother fell sick not long after and took to her bed—poor Dan this and poor Dan that—in her sickness creating a love for the ages, or maybe that was love: grievance to grieving to grave. With their da dead and their ma sick, the union books closed, mines and railroads sloughing off workers, the Dolan siblings had no choice but to leak away, first doomed Danny, then poor Lacy, and finally, Gig, who couldn’t bear the shame of being a healthy young man not working the mines and walked off one day without a word.
Gig always said that in another life he’d have been an actor, and that’s what led him to “the theater capital of the west,” Spokane’s gem, the redbrick Auditorium Theater, encrusted with ornate balconies and barnacled boxes over the Biggest Stage on the Planet, sixty feet wide and forty-six deep. Ten other theaters progressed downward in size and culture, west to east, Pantages to Orpheum to Comique, powdered plays and piano concertos on the west end, European horns and pince-nez monologists in the center,