The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 99

real name, anyhow,” she said, “and Jules was lost in the world without his real name.” Gemma died a few weeks before Calvin was born. As I say, I don’t believe in luck, but I do sometimes wonder if she wasn’t right about that name.

Elena and I raised our kids on the north side of Spokane. We lived for ten years in a little house that I built in an orchard, then we moved to a bigger house along the river canyon. I worked almost fifty years as a machinist, starting as stock boy for a small shop owned by two brothers. I apprenticed, became a journeyman, and eventually the shop steward for my machinists’ local. In ’43, the brothers sold their business and I got a job at a government smelter north of town. When the war ended, Henry Kaiser bought our plant and we went from making aluminum for ships and airplanes to making it for Buicks and TV trays. I became a member of the United Steelworkers, and twice was elected grievance officer of my local.

I retired from Kaiser six years ago. Now we live on my pension. Elena and I putter around the garden and wait for our kids to ask us to babysit. We have eight grandchildren, five of them boys and not a decent ballplayer among them. How’s that for luck? I can’t bowl anymore because of my heart, but on Fridays, I go to Playfair racetrack with my old machinist pal Paul Orlando, and we bet on the last horse to take a piss or the one with the fastest-sounding name. In the afternoons, I read, or rearrange the tools in my garage, or take short walks along the river. I listen to the Dodgers on the radio. I sit on my front porch with the newspaper and a glass of iced tea.

That’s what I was doing this afternoon when I opened the Chronicle and read that the chairwoman of the Communist Party USA, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, had died. The story said she kicked around the west as a young labor organizer, was the author of three books and a founding member of the ACLU (along with Helen Keller and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter). That she became a Communist in ’36 and, during World War II, fought for day care services for women workers. That she ran unsuccessfully for Congress and, in ’51, was arrested with sixteen other members of the Communist Party and served two years in prison for “advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.” That in the last decade, she fought for civil rights and against McCarthyism, and worked to get her passport restored so she could visit the Soviet Union, where she hoped to write another book. That she was greeted as a hero in Moscow but was diabetic and fell into a coma and died there. That she was seventy-four and had no survivors, her son, Fred, having died in 1940.

And that’s it.

A life in two paragraphs.

At my age, you don’t cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, “Ah,” that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness—here is yet another person I will never see again.

After that come the memories, and these swirl for days afterward.

It is as sharp as a photograph in my mind, the last time I saw her. February 24, 1910. She is climbing in a car. She has just been acquitted of conspiracy. I am following in the crowd but get left behind on the courthouse steps. Then, as she gets into the car, she sees me and gives a half-wave. A half-smile. Then she’s gone.

What happened next cemented that day forever in my mind—my brother, Gig, dying with an anarchist spy named Early Reston after their Model T sped away from the courthouse and flew off a cliff into the river gorge.

Their bodies were never recovered, and Gig and Early were never identified as the men who drove off the cliff, but I knew.

An old Pinkerton named Willard, who was working for the mining magnate Lem Brand, dragged me off the riverbank that day. He led me to his car, put me in the passenger seat, and drove me away. “You don’t want to talk to the cops about this,” he said.

I was wearing the suit I’d bought for Gurley’s verdict. It was covered in mud and soot. It took six months to pay for that suit and I never wore it again.

Willard talked gently as he drove me back to the boardinghouse where I lived. They must have had a bomb in the car, he said, the way it exploded like that. Was it possible they had wanted me to deliver a bomb to Lem Brand? Did I know anything about that?

I looked over at him, unable to even comprehend what he was asking.

“No,” he said. “Of course not. Do you think your brother got cold feet?”

Then I remembered meeting Gig’s eyes right before he started fighting with Early in the car. “I don’t think he knew,” I said.

Willard parked in front of the house. I was crying again. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking until I stopped.

“Here’s what’s crazy,” he said, “you giving them the money right before all of that.”

“But I didn’t,” I said. I reached in my inside pocket and held out the envelope.

But he wouldn’t look at it. “Crazy,” he said again. “I’ll bet they were fighting over the money. I’ll bet that’s why they went off the cliff.”

Had he not heard me? I held up the envelope again for him to see, but he just kept staring straight ahead, smoking. “No peripheral vision,” he said, “remember?”

I barely recall the rest of 1910, except for its darkness, its emptiness. I mourned. I worked at the machine shop. I read Tolstoy and picked through the newspaper. I wondered if the whole world wasn’t collapsing. The