In the Stingaree they stand on their soapboxes and preach revolution: socialism, single tax, salvation, Christ and Marx running together in an uneasy blend to the winos, the workers, and the whores, in English, Mandarin, Spanish, Chinook, Creole. A better world to come, or a better world in this one, if you’ll convert, repent, organize, strike!

A fight’s been brewing for weeks, ever since the cops raided Wobbly Hall on Haymarket Day. The wobs won’t take that lying down, and the call’s gone out for bodies to swarm the city. Arrest one, arrest all, until the jails swell and burst, until the merchants throw up their hands and turn vigilante, until newspaper publishers drive their cars into protests, until the city forbids speaking on the street, until the governor sends a special investigator to try to corral the horsewhip boys back into line, until the cops burn down the Stingaree and drive speakers and listeners both out into the waste places. Or try to, anyway: block the roads, search the trains, drag the rivers, the Wobblies will slip in to organize.

But that’s all in the future. Now it’s just a tense, searing atmosphere that hangs over the neighborhood, hot and dry and dangerous as a Santa Ana wind. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but hunker down, cling tight to each other, and brace against the fires yet to come.

The loggers overwinter in Spokane and are meat for the sharks in their tan suits: mister, want a job? got a line on a good one, two dollars and it’s yours. And then the job is a farrago or the bosses hire and fire folks so fast it might as well be. One company with a staff of 50 went through 3000 men in a season that way, each out on his rump after two days at most.

So the soapboxes come out and the placards go up, Wobblies marching up and down in front of the agencies on shark alley, chanting Don’t Buy A Job. Bordet is one of them, up from California by way of Seattle, and gets scooped up with the rest when the city cops decide to sweep up the suckers so the sharks can swarm in peace.

In the can he’s starved, hosed down, shuttled between unheated cells and sweltering steam rooms. His hair freezes, his gums recede, tuberculosis settles into his lungs. The cops beat him repeatedly. No charges are brought, but when he finally leaves town, his appendix is swollen fit to burst and the Portland hospital does such a hack job of removing it that the wound never closes entirely, weeping pus for months.

The Wobblies in Holtville pass a plate around to try to get him back in the hospital, try to crowdfund through the other chapters, but it isn’t enough, isn’t fast enough: Bordet sinks lower and lower and finally dies of his wounds a year later, seventy pounds lighter. The Spokane council repeals the ban on public speaking and the cops call it a victory. The Wobs call it murder.

The strike has been going on for months, for months, shingle workers against the bosses, against the cops, against the surly water rats who would turn no hand to an honest trade but were happy to smash noses, fingers, legs, or arms for a pittance. The Wobblies have been and gone, run out of town at the end of an axe handle around a wet November, leaving blood and teeth and flesh on the rails, but Wobblies are like feral cats that way; beat ’em, throw ’em in a sack, toss ’em in the Sound and by the time you turn around there are a dozen more, a hundred, choking the jails till they burst, making speeches, handing out pamphlets.

When the boat comes into harbor the sheriff and his bully boys are there, armed and hungry. “You can’t land here,” says McRae the bastard, and “The hell we can’t,” say the Wobblies, leaders all, as they march down the ramp to the docks.

By the time the smoke has cleared, more than thirty workers have been shot (by the cops) and more than twenty cops have been shot (also by the cops). In fair Verona the cops have planted almost two hundred bullets; passengers fled into the oily, wintry water in their panic, some shot, others just unlucky.

They will arrest the Wobblies, and brag about it until the election is over; not one is convicted. The striking workers return to work; the capitalists remain in power. The struggle goes on.

The swarm crests the top of Yesler and rolls down toward the water, a frothing, riotous mass of simple machines, screws stampeding past inclined planes, wedges trampling wheels. They think no thoughts, but coiled in their dim Euclidean geometry they have built a map of the city accurate down to the grit ground between the paving blocks. Lost in the schmutz of their odyssey lies every twisting tartape ribbon mending asphault between the Smith Tower and the hubcap forests of South Everett, every wire counting cars along 99’s fertile wasteland.

Christian the Lion would join no union. He was no strike-breaker, but he held no signs and chanted no slogans and stared with unruffled hostility at the hundred men who stood arm-in-arm outside the lumber mills. He paid no dues, he attended no rallies, he displayed no stickers. The fight was hard-won for the union, against bosses, against owners, against police and shopkeepers and pinkertons and federals and Christian the Lion watched it all from outside. He had no contract with the mills, reaped no benefits from the guarantees so bloodily won, but somehow worked each day through the summer and the fall. He was beaten six times, nose broken, right ear wrenched off, bright burning hair pulled and burned and hacked away, but still no union would he join, nor strike-line cross.

They killed his wife when they burned his house in the mistaken belief that he was inside. He was watching the river, underneath the bridge that crossed from Hoquiam to Aberdeen and back again, cigarette burning down to his fingers; he came home to ashes and ambulances and Edna under a white sheet. He watched hatless from within the crowd the fire had drawn as the body that was no longer his life rolled away and in the morning drizzle was back outside the mill watching the strike. They roiled and tumulted as a kicked open anthill before him, until they charged across the street and fell upon him with fists and boots and placards. The police watched from the end of the street as they snapped his legs and smashed his face; if Wobblies wanted to beat Wobblies so much the better.

When the bell rang for the start of the day Christian the Lion shrugged off the strikers and got to his feet. He crossed the street through the suddenly motionless crowd, face a red ruin, legs twisted and knobbed where the splinters of his bones were misaligned, placid, hostile. He went into the mill. The union leader, a bald, bearded man with a shining, veinous nose, watched him punch the clock and move to the machinery before the door closed. There was a horrible noise of metal twisting and buckling and biting into itself and twenty minutes later Christian the Lion walked out, blood drying on his face, arms boiled, the wreck of the mill behind him. He crossed through the strikers again and cleared his throat, hacked up blood and phlegm and sawdust, a black bile stain on the ground.

The union was silent. The police were silent. The rain slowed into mist, stopped, and the sun shone through the rising fog around Christian the Lion.

“Godspeed,” said Christian the Lion in the bitter voice of an angel, and walked away.