The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 98
The bullet had come out my chest and was in my lap. They shot me? Christ. Through the back and out the chest, a rifle shot by the hole in the glass and the slug in my lap, and I tried again to get out of the chair to go beat the man to death with his own rifle, but I was going nowhere and they shot me?
I carefully set the bullet on the table. Evidence.
I would die if I didn’t move, so I forced myself up, stumbled to the telephone, and remembered that two days earlier our line had been cut, but it was fixed now, for it was department policy no captain be without a phone, and the operator came on and I said, Police desk, and Ed Pearson was the sergeant, and I said, Send a wagon, and Ed said where to and I said 1318 West Sinto and Ed said that’s your house, John, and I said I know it’s my house, Ed, it’s where they shot me. And then I asked him to call the theater and tell Annie to meet me at Sacred Heart.
Then I hung up and waited. I turned to the window but it was black outside. Could of been anyone shot me, I had no shortage of enemies, anarchists, unionists, thieves, pimps, Black Hand or Tong, even a cop or two, could have been about Rose Elliott or that fat pork chop Brand. And it didn’t matter except I wanted to see the man. Look in the eyes of who done this to my family.
I’m here! I called through the cowardly little hole in my window. Come inside and meet your maker!
But I could tell by my breathing that it was me headed to such a meeting and not him. And I did not want to face God with hatred on my heart, so I forgave my enemies, the thieves, vagrants, and unionists. But I did not forgive the politicians and newspapermen, because they are beneath forgiveness. Lastly, I forgave the man who shot me, and prayed for his soul and mine, sorry we’d been born into such a place.
“It’s okay,” I said to Annie when she came weeping into my room at the hospital, and to little Kathleen and baby John, too, “It’s okay,” I said, and with that, my shift was done.
Epilogue
Life did not stop, and one had to live.
—Tolstoy, War and Peace
Rye, 1964
TIME AND patience are the strongest of all warriors.
Tolstoy wrote that. I used to say it to my boys to get them to do their schoolwork and to practice baseball. I think they thought I made it up, and I never told them otherwise, not because I wanted them to think I’m smarter than I am, but because they wouldn’t have known Count Tolstoy from Count Dracula.
My daughter, Betsy, she’s the one who got my love of books. She’s a high school English teacher and would’ve seen right through me stealing from Tolstoy. In fact, she keeps trying to convince me that Anna Karenina is superior to War and Peace, which she calls “needlessly unwieldy.” Why does it make a father so proud to hear a phrase like that? The mysteries of parenting.
Bets never needed a saying like Time and patience because she drew on her own deep well of ambition. Born deaf in one ear, she got all A’s through high school and put herself through teacher’s college. She still works as hard as anyone I’ve ever met—she’s a back, as we would’ve said—even with two little ones at home and a lazy, bottle-tipping husband. She probably would’ve been the best ballplayer in the family, too, if they’d let her play.
My youngest, Calvin, might have grown into a reader, too, but he died before turning twenty, in the Pacific, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, when his light carrier, the USS Princeton, was bombed by a Japanese warplane. I don’t think he’d ever even shaved before he drowned.
Of the 1,469 men on board the Princeton, 108 were killed and the rest rescued, so I guess you could say Calvin was unlucky. But I’m not convinced luck has much to do with war or with life. Two of my three sons fought in the Pacific. One returned and one did not. Does that make me lucky or unlucky?
I will turn seventy-two in a few weeks. I’ve been having dizzy spells and find myself breathless after walks, or a flight of stairs. My doctor says my heart is giving out, and that I am at the end of things. He has given me nitroglycerin pills to put under my tongue and keeps using phrases like “affairs in order.”
But if this is to be my last year, I wouldn’t mind it too much. Other than losing my brother in 1910 and my son twenty years ago, I’d have no complaints. I was an orphan and a tramp who made a home here in Spokane. In 1916, I married a shy, pretty girl named Elena, the daughter of my friends Dom and Gemma, and—we found out a few years later—the granddaughter of my old friend Jules. Gemma told Elena the truth in 1920, not long after Dom passed, near the end of the Spanish flu outbreak. Elena said she’d always suspected it, and that her mother told her the world had just become too fragile for such secrets. When Calvin was born a few years later, we gave him Jules for a middle name, although my mother-in-law was adamantly against it. She thought it would bring the boy bad luck.
“It wasn’t his