The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

Prod, Chinese, Irish, or African, Finn or Indian, rich or poor or poor or poor, the world is built to eat you alive, but before you go down the gullet, the bastards can’t stop you from looking around. And he doubted that any magnate in a San Francisco mansion ever woke to a better view than he and his brother had that morning, staring at a red slash of sky from the crisp dirt infield of a weedy baseball diamond.

Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.

There is no world but this one. And all we want is to be seen in it. I see you, the boy said. And I was grateful.

I wasn’t sure what it would mean this time. People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.

He spoke with the western remnants of a British accent, like something fancy covered in dust.

I couldn’t believe how the syphilitic town had metastasized. Smoke seeped from twenty thousand chimneys, pillars to an endless gray ceiling. The city was twice the size of the last time I’d hated being there. A box of misery spilled over the whole river valley.

A stray thought: If I spend this, I will no longer have it. This was the crazy thing about wealth: You only had it if you didn’t use it, but if you didn’t use it, there was no value in having it. It was like a riddle. No wonder some men died with more money than they could spend in a second life while other men starved.

Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap—that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself.

Rye thought that history was like a parade. When you were inside it, nothing else mattered. You could hardly believe the noise—the marching and juggling and playing of horns. But most people were not in the parade. They experienced it from the sidewalk, from the street, watched it pass, and when it was on to the next place, they had nothing to do but go back to their quiet lives.

TIME AND patience are the strongest of all warriors. Tolstoy wrote that.