The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities—Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money flowed straight uphill.

These towns that had no business being towns, straddling islands and bays and cliffs and canyons and waterfalls.

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.

Rye had an insight that felt like a reverie, that, man or woman, Catholic or 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.

“I simply share the belief that since all wealth comes from labor, labor ought to share in the wealth it produces and not merely be its fuel—”

“This is about more than you and me making enough to buy some vacant lot, Rye-boy. It’s about equality. It’s about the worker owning the means of production.” That seemed awfully unlikely to Rye—like a beggar hungry for bread getting the whole bakery. And the idea that you could make men equal just by saying it? 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.

He imagined everyone had a picture in mind of the word America—flags or eagles or George Washington’s wig—but from that moment on, he thought he’d imagine waking on a ball field with his brother, fighting off a mob, then marching into town in a moving debate of economics and justice.

It was a boomtown that just kept booming, doubling in size every six years, going from a few hundred to a hundred-some thousand in just thirty years, until the only place bigger in the state was that ugly harbor blight Seattle. Spokane felt like the intersection of Frontier and Civilized, the final gasp of a thing before it turned into something else—the

A bum wanders and drinks. A tramp wanders and dreams. A hobo wanders and works.

the very definition of Irish hell: dying walking into a bar.

maybe that was love: grievance to grieving to grave.

block after block of wretched glorious humanity wandering the east-end streets and alleys, hungry, thirsty, lonely beggars and bums and hands and sawyers and millers and miners and scuffs, broke brothers and failed fathers and godforsaken grandfathers, all languages, religions, and races, crib rats and saloon girls, temperance ladies, nuns and cons and pickpockets and socialists and suffragists, the wicked, broken, and unholy—Americans, them, too, every one.

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.

Ryan J. Dolan of Nothing, Nowhere, having neither house nor bed, nothing a person might call a possession, somehow had a lawyer. Rye wondered if that, more than waking on a ball field or eagles or George Washington’s hair, was what it really meant to be an American.

THREE YEARS before she died, my mother sent me to live with the French ferryman and said I should not speak anymore. I could talk English or French, since she did not consider them speaking. What she meant was I should leave our language behind. She said it did not belong in the world anymore and would only get me hurt. It was losing your mother and your tongue at once. She gave me another warning. Stay out of it. Out of what? I asked. Everything. Listen. Walk to the side. Keep yourself. Go the other way.

I have always found the waiting worse than the beating. Death comes for everything, but only spiders and men make you wait for it.

they killed the world and called it progress.

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.

then the train slowed and they crossed a bridge onto the isthmus that held that great shithole of prosperity, Seattle.

If the sun rose that week, Rye missed it. Seattle was like an infection that started at the water and spread up the verdant hills.

Give money to a monkey and he’ll fill his cage with bananas. Give the same money to a dim American and he’ll build a show library every time.

“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.”

It didn’t matter what he did, what Gurley did, what Fred Moore did, what any of them did. Somewhere there was a roomful of wealthy old men where everything was decided.

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.

Elena reminds him that without his dad’s union job, he wouldn’t have had a roof over his head, but he’s one of those men of fragile confidence who needs to always believe that he’s made his own way in the world.

It’s another mystery of parenting: how you can love your kids without always liking them.

“How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?” She thought about it, and then she said, “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?”