The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen

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СКАЧАТЬ a bunch of lousy cops, but he knew not to say that. She was only just barely “his woman,” and she was not the type who liked to think of it that way.

      As he’d expected, she was defiant. “They can’t arrest me just for talking, and if they do, so be it.” She told him about her idol Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the original Rebel Girl and doyenne of “the cause.” Gurley Flynn had been put in jail more times than you could count, Tamara said, but she never gave up the fight. Tamara proudly declared herself a rebel girl as well, so bring on the cops.

      Graham had to admire her fire, but he wondered what this educated Chicago woman—she’d been in college when she first joined the Wobblies, she told him—really knew about anything. She talked a good talk, and she sure as hell never acted scared, but just to be sure, Graham tailed her to the street corner where she’d told him she’d give her speech that night. It was dark and anything but quiet—people were milling all around, chatter that exploded into laughter now and then but always highly charged—when the speeches finally started. First it was a hulking fellow with a thick beard and some accent Graham figured was Hungarian. After the fellow’s final fist-shaking exhortations, Tamara took to the pulpit.

      She started telling them about a recent strike in New Jersey and how things had looked bleak but everyone had stuck together. They had refused to submit to a few men in back rooms who controlled everything, and so will we, she said. The applause was so loud that it almost completely shrouded the sound of McRae’s goons moving in from the edge of the street and swinging their unimpressed clubs. Then the applause was gone and all that could be heard were the sounds of fighting, of dropped bottles popping when they hit the ground, of bones breaking and feet stomping and kicking, voices shouting and crying and grunting in an ever-tightening mass of enraged humanity. Graham pushed some folks out of his way and headed for the makeshift stage, where he grabbed Tamara by the wrists and pulled her through the crowd. An arm with a handkerchief tied around it got pretty close to them, but Graham jabbed a fist into the man’s nose and the goon dropped back. In a few frantic seconds they’d escaped not only the melee but also the notice of the cops who were standing beyond the crowd, supposedly to arrest anyone who tried to escape.

      “This happen in New Jersey, too?” Graham asked after they’d walked a couple of blocks, heading in the direction of the rooming house where she boarded.

      “Probably.”

      “Probably? You weren’t there?”

      She looked away, embarrassed. “It was three years ago. I was only seventeen.”

      “This by any chance your first strike?”

      She answered with silence.

      “Well, it ain’t mine, and not one of ‘em that I’ve been around has ended well.”

      “Then you’ve been around the wrong ones.”

      He laughed softly. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as sure of herself as you are.”

      She grabbed his hand, held it. “I wasn’t so sure of myself once the cops came. Thank you for coming to get me.”

      This was an opportunity for him to say something romantic, to court her by telling her it would take more than a few cops to keep him from her. But he was unsure how she’d react, so he kept walking.

      “We’ll win this,” she said. “I know it. The more people they arrest, the more we’ll send in.”

      Graham nodded. He still wasn’t used to her penchant for using “we,” her constant and assured feeling of being part of some great and uplifting whole.

      They were at the front door to the boardinghouse. The kindly old lady who owned it had no idea Tamara was involved with those awful Wobblies, and if she had, Tamara would have been out on the street in a minute. Nor would the old lady allow a man to visit one of her boarders in her rooms. Graham wondered if sometime he should propose walking Tamara back to his place instead, or if that would be too forward.

      “You ever think about what’ll happen after the strike?” he asked.

      “You mean if we win?”

      “I mean either way.” He was trying to act nonchalant but finding it impossible.

      She looked at him closely. He never studied anything—especially not her—like that. He’d only had to look at her once and he’d known all he needed to.

      Then she smiled slightly, like she had the first time they’d met. “I wonder what it is you’re really asking me.”

      He couldn’t help smiling back, either out of embarrassment or happiness or excitement, he wasn’t sure. “Does a rebel girl just follow the cause to the next strike? You off to Cheyenne or Coeur d’Alene or Walla Walla next?

      “I haven’t thought that far ahead.” Still smiling.

      “I used to be like that.”

      “Then what?”

      “I got smarter. And I met someone.”

      She’d only let him kiss her on the cheek before, but that night she leaned toward him as if giving permission for more, to do what he’d been thinking about damn near constantly for days. They kissed for a longer time than was proper for two people standing beneath one of the few streetlights on that side of town. He held her and was amazed at how fragile she felt, despite the steel in her eyes and her voice and her posture. Despite his happiness, he thought how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable he was, to have something in his life other than himself that he needed to worry about, and protect.

      The violence got worse, and fast. The night after the cops dragged a group of strikers to secluded Beverly Park and beat them nearly to death, Tamara told Graham that the IWW office wanted to send her down to Seattle to meet with the local chapter and recruit more people to Everett. That sounded like a safer idea than wandering around the violent streets of Everett, and Graham invited himself along.

      With some of his few remaining coins, he paid for ferry tickets. A mid-western boy who’d spent all his adult life in the mountain states, he’d rarely been on a boat, and he didn’t know how to swim. As a storm moved toward them, the chop of the waves increased. By the time they neared Seattle, the skies had opened and it was pouring—the Sound an infinity of liquid explosions—and the boat was pitching from side to side. The moment they got off, Graham let out a long, slow breath and tried to steady himself. He was not looking forward to the ride home.

      Tamara, who had apparently been on many a boat, not only in Lake Michigan but also on the Atlantic, as she had family in Boston and New York, was good enough not to tease him. Instead she told him more about her family, how she was the youngest of five sisters and had twelve nieces and nephews with more surely on the way. She loved and missed her parents, but the cause was worth the physical distance between herself and her family. Graham had nodded to all this, secretly wondering if one day he would meet this lawyer father and warmhearted mother, this gaggle of sisters and brothers-in-law with their Chicago and New York accents, their starched shirts and fancy cigars.

      This was what he wanted. Not necessarily the family and their unimaginable strangeness, but the comfort of sitting beside Tamara and knowing she wanted to be with him. He would create a haven for the two of them, carve a better existence out of the strange land he’d been wandering through, create a more beautiful and rewarding world than the one they’d known.

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