Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan Read Free Book Online Page B

was well received in much of the West. But in September, an assassin’s bullet effectively buried his plan.
    Before she moved to Spokane, Pearl had a temporary job in Idaho doling out bullets to out-of-work miners and timbermen living in tents along the Saint Maries River. Governor Ross’s idea of relief was to encourage hunting. But some of the broken men couldn’t even afford to buy bullets for their rifles. Pearl was given boxes of cartridges by state officials and assigned to parcel out a ration of bullets to each family she could find along the river. One of eleven white children raised at the Saint Ignatius Catholic Mission on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Pearl was living a near-subsistence life in Idaho when the Depression hit. But having grown up around Flathead natives who lived in tepees, snagged fish with dip nets, and hunted game by horseback, Pearl Keogh was no stranger to extracting food from the land. She fished and hunted and sassed back men who were twice her weight.
    When she moved west to Spokane, she was hired as a nurse at Sacred Heart. Pearl was happy to have the job—except that the hospital couldn’t afford to pay her. Her salary was a weekly allotment of scrip, which she could redeem with merchants for food. She worked a second job in the day as a nurse for a doctor who gave tonsillectomies to schoolchildren, who paid a quarter for the operation.
    During the endless hot nights of the final days of summer, Pearl joined the regulars at Mother’s in all sorts of diversions. Some nights, they piled into Virgil Burch’s Hudson and went out for a whirl and a gulp of cool air. But during the second week of September, the usual mix of loose humor, smart talk, and open deal-making seemed to be missing at Mother’s. Pearl felt the tension. When she asked Ruth about it, her sister put her finger to her lips and looked around. Something was up, she told her sister on Friday night, September 13. The boys were planning something.
    Burch caught the sisters looking his way; he snapped at Ruth. “You wanna keep this job, you stay out of other people’s business,” he said.
    Clyde Ralstin snickered; the idea that some little girl from Montana could hurt them was laughable.
    A third man, a goose-necked ex-con from Mississippi named Acie Logan, a regular at Mother’s, was also in on the talk. Tall and muscular, with gray eyes and floppy ears, Logan was covered with tattoosand scars, sketches on a body at war with the world since he had dropped out of school in the fourth grade. Nude women intertwined with snakes and cows on both forearms. On his chest an American flag was wrapped around a dagger. Logan had once challenged Clyde Ralstin to a fight. After Clyde whipped him, he became an acolyte, looking up to the big detective, impressed by his absolute confidence. King Clyde seemed invulnerable; nobody in the Stone Fortress or at Mother’s Kitchen could touch him.
    Logan, who’d served time in five different jails since leaving Mississippi in the early 1920s, was afraid of returning to prison. He used to talk about his last address in a Washington State institution, the damp stockade at Monroe in the forests of Snohomish County, northeast of Seattle: he swore he went nearly thirty days one winter without seeing the sun. Logan had been in on at least two other butter heists, but the plan to knock off the Newport Creamery seemed to bother him. The dairymen were up in arms, angry and trigger-happy, talking about organizing posses and hanging the sons of bitches who were stealing their food and their source of winter money. The job might not be as easy as Burch and Ralstin made it out to be, Logan said.
    The radio squawked of war talk between the Italians and the Ethiopians. Sipping her coffee, Pearl Keogh tuned out the news and listened to an exchange between Logan and the two friends who ran Mother’s Kitchen. Burch’s parrot was starting to chew on the wooden bar.
    “What if somebody’s