The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

It’s quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don’t have to be—that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself. Two beers in, Rye felt lifted by a sense of hope.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

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.

People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.

All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.

A WOMAN owns nothing in this world but her memories—a shabby return on so steep an investment.

“Come on. Tell the truth.” Early closed one eye. “You don’t actually believe the story Gurley is selling out there, do you? I mean, that it’s possible?” “I don’t know, Early,” said Rye. “Does it have to be possible to believe in it?” Early stared at him a moment, then gave a short staccato laugh. “Jesus, Rye. That might be the best defense I’ve ever heard from one of you utopian shitheads.”

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.

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

“It’s easy to be disappointed in people,” she said, “but we do our best. And maybe what a person is and what they do—is not always the same.” “Yeah,” he said. “But maybe it is.”

Standing there, alone on the courthouse steps, 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.

“Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you’ll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right? “But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?”