The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  Oh, but I know whose pockets I’m into now.

  And I know what it means for me.

  So I have no cover at all when this Rose Elliott case comes—a teenage girl raised by this Civil War veteran J. H. Elliott, and he files a complaint that two of my officers, a kid named Hood and that old wart Clegg have had relations with young Rose and took her to get an operation. But when we interview the girl Rose, she says that the stepfather, J.H., is the one had relations, and that he is the father of her six-year-old son which everyone thinks is her little brother. But then Rose changes her tune, says maybe Clegg did what her stepfather did, too, and she names the woman who gave her an operation, an old dove of Clegg’s, so I fire Clegg, and still the Press hounds me and mocks my speech—I have nothin’ t’say to ye, fer I dasn’t believe ye’d print th’ trouth—and that’s when the city council officially charges me with misconduct.

  I’m done now. I come home to Annie and say, I should never have taken this job, and she says, I know, John, and I say, I’m not what they say, am I?

  No, she says, you’re not, John. You’re a good man, truly.

  I wonder, am I, though? And I don’t drink, but one night I feel drunk as I leave the house and I walk downtown and past the Spokane Club, and I see the warm lights in there and something breaks in me. I go straight into that rich dining room, four fat millionaires sitting around drinking brandy in front of a roaring fire, and I grab that pork chop Lem Brand and pull him out of the dining room and into the street, and I only mean to question him about the note I got, or to scare him, but Brand is saying, What is the meaning . . . and I will have you brought up . . . and do you know who I am?

  Yeah, I say, I got a pretty good idea who you are, and though I just mean to scare the man, instead I give him two hard Irish hammers to his fat face, like I’d have done a bum back in the old days, and he crumbles and I get down in the blood and I say I wish I was a smarter man, Brand, but all I got is these, and I give him another right to remember me, leave him whimpering in the street, and walk home to Annie.

  That’s it, I tell her, I’m done. I’m not going to be chief, I tell her, and she says, That’s fine, John, and the next day, I resign. Go back to being a captain.

  I tell the papers I did nothing but stand up straight while others were blowing in the wind, but when the weak look for someone to blame, it’ll be the man standing up.

  We always lived in the flats north of the river, for even on a chief’s salary, the South Hill was beyond us, and I should offer that as proof of my honest heart, for did a policeman ever take a bribe, sure, but as God is my witness, one cop who never took a dime of that city’s whore money was me—and look, I’ll not ask for credit for doing my job without being shite, but sometimes an honest man has the hardest go of it, especially if he’s not perfect, or smart, and God knows I am neither.

  I said so to Annie as she left our house to go to the theater, but she said again, You’re a good man, John, and I sat in my rocking chair facing the fireplace in our little house, hoping it was true. And that’s when the window behind me cracked like a bird hit it and I tried to get up to check, but I had been stung in the back and my chest went tight like five hundred pounds was on me and my first thought was what poor man on this earth gets shot twice?

  The bullet had come out my chest and was in my lap. They shot me? Christ. Through the back and out the chest, a rifle shot by the hole in the glass and the slug in my lap, and I tried again to get out of the chair to go beat the man to death with his own rifle, but I was going nowhere and they shot me?

  I carefully set the bullet on the table. Evidence.

  I would die if I didn’t move, so I forced myself up, stumbled to the telephone, and remembered that two days earlier our line had been cut, but it was fixed now, for it was department policy no captain be without a phone, and the operator came on and I said, Police desk, and Ed Pearson was the sergeant, and I said, Send a wagon, and Ed said where to and I said 1318 West Sinto and Ed said that’s your house, John, and I said I know it’s my house, Ed, it’s where they shot me. And then I asked him to call the theater and tell Annie to meet me at Sacred Heart.

  Then I hung up and waited. I turned to the window but it was black outside. Could of been anyone shot me, I had no shortage of enemies, anarchists, unionists, thieves, pimps, Black Hand or Tong, even a cop or two, could have been about Rose Elliott or that fat pork chop Brand. And it didn’t matter except I wanted to see the man. Look in the eyes of who done this to my family.

  I’m here! I called through the cowardly little hole in my window. Come inside and meet your maker!

  But I could tell by my breathing that it was me headed to such a meeting and not him. And I did not want to face God with hatred on my heart, so I forgave my enemies, the thieves, vagrants, and unionists. But I did not forgive the politicians and newspapermen, because they are beneath forgiveness. Lastly, I forgave the man who shot me, and prayed for his soul and mine, sorry we’d been born into such a place.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Annie when she came weeping into my room at the hospital, and to little Kathleen and baby John, too, “It’s okay,” I said, and with that, my shift was done.

  Epilogue

  Life did not stop, and one had to live.

  —Tolstoy, War and Peace

  Rye, 1964

  TIME AND patience are the strongest of all warriors.

  Tolstoy wrote that. I used to say it to my boys to get them to do their schoolwork and to practice baseball. I think they thought I made it up, and I never told them otherwise, not because I wanted them to think I’m smarter than I am, but because they wouldn’t have known Count Tolstoy from Count Dracula.

  My daughter, Betsy, she’s the one who got my love of books. She’s a high school English teacher and would’ve seen right through me stealing from Tolstoy. In fact, she keeps trying to convince me that Anna Karenina is superior to War and Peace, which she calls “needlessly unwieldy.” Why does it make a father so proud to hear a phrase like that? The mysteries of parenting.

  Bets never needed a saying like Time and patience because she drew on her own deep well of ambition. Born deaf in one ear, she got all A’s through high school and put herself through teacher’s college. She still works as hard as anyone I’ve ever met—she’s a back, as we would’ve said—even with two little ones at home and a lazy, bottle-tipping husband. She probably would’ve been the best ballplayer in the family, too, if they’d let her play.

  My youngest, Calvin, might have grown into a reader, too, but he died before turning twenty, in the Pacific, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, when his light carrier, the USS Princeton, was bombed by a Japanese warplane. I don’t think he’d ever even shaved before he drowned.

  Of the 1,469 men on board the Princeton, 108 were killed and the rest rescued, so I guess you could say Calvin was unlucky. But I’m not convinced luck has much to do with war or with life. Two of my three sons fought in the Pacific. One returned and one did not. Does that make me lucky or unlucky?

  I will turn seventy-two in a few weeks. I’ve been having dizzy spells and find myself breathless after walks, or a flight of stairs. My doctor says my heart is giving out, and that I am at the end of things. He has given me nitroglycerin pills to put under my tongue and keeps using phrases like “affairs in order.”

  But if this is to be my last year, I wouldn’t mind it too much. Other than losing my brother in 1910 and my son twenty years ago, I’d have no complaints. I was an orphan and a tramp who made a home here in Spokane. In 1916, I married a shy, pretty girl named Elena, the daughter of my friends Dom and Gemma, and—we found out a few years later—the granddaughter of my old friend Jules. Gemma told Elena the truth in 1920, not long after Dom passed, near the end of the Spanish flu outbreak. Elena said she’d always suspected it, and that her mother told her the world had just become too fragile for such secrets. When Calvin was born a few years later, we gave him Jules for a middle name, although my mother-in-law was adamant
ly against it. She thought it would bring the boy bad luck.

  “It wasn’t his real name, anyhow,” she said, “and Jules was lost in the world without his real name.” Gemma died a few weeks before Calvin was born. As I say, I don’t believe in luck, but I do sometimes wonder if she wasn’t right about that name.

  Elena and I raised our kids on the north side of Spokane. We lived for ten years in a little house that I built in an orchard, then we moved to a bigger house along the river canyon. I worked almost fifty years as a machinist, starting as stock boy for a small shop owned by two brothers. I apprenticed, became a journeyman, and eventually the shop steward for my machinists’ local. In ’43, the brothers sold their business and I got a job at a government smelter north of town. When the war ended, Henry Kaiser bought our plant and we went from making aluminum for ships and airplanes to making it for Buicks and TV trays. I became a member of the United Steelworkers, and twice was elected grievance officer of my local.

  I retired from Kaiser six years ago. Now we live on my pension. Elena and I putter around the garden and wait for our kids to ask us to babysit. We have eight grandchildren, five of them boys and not a decent ballplayer among them. How’s that for luck? I can’t bowl anymore because of my heart, but on Fridays, I go to Playfair racetrack with my old machinist pal Paul Orlando, and we bet on the last horse to take a piss or the one with the fastest-sounding name. In the afternoons, I read, or rearrange the tools in my garage, or take short walks along the river. I listen to the Dodgers on the radio. I sit on my front porch with the newspaper and a glass of iced tea.

  That’s what I was doing this afternoon when I opened the Chronicle and read that the chairwoman of the Communist Party USA, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, had died. The story said she kicked around the west as a young labor organizer, was the author of three books and a founding member of the ACLU (along with Helen Keller and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter). That she became a Communist in ’36 and, during World War II, fought for day care services for women workers. That she ran unsuccessfully for Congress and, in ’51, was arrested with sixteen other members of the Communist Party and served two years in prison for “advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.” That in the last decade, she fought for civil rights and against McCarthyism, and worked to get her passport restored so she could visit the Soviet Union, where she hoped to write another book. That she was greeted as a hero in Moscow but was diabetic and fell into a coma and died there. That she was seventy-four and had no survivors, her son, Fred, having died in 1940.

  And that’s it.

  A life in two paragraphs.

  At my age, you don’t cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, “Ah,” that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness—here is yet another person I will never see again.

  After that come the memories, and these swirl for days afterward.

  It is as sharp as a photograph in my mind, the last time I saw her. February 24, 1910. She is climbing in a car. She has just been acquitted of conspiracy. I am following in the crowd but get left behind on the courthouse steps. Then, as she gets into the car, she sees me and gives a half-wave. A half-smile. Then she’s gone.

  What happened next cemented that day forever in my mind—my brother, Gig, dying with an anarchist spy named Early Reston after their Model T sped away from the courthouse and flew off a cliff into the river gorge.

  Their bodies were never recovered, and Gig and Early were never identified as the men who drove off the cliff, but I knew.

  An old Pinkerton named Willard, who was working for the mining magnate Lem Brand, dragged me off the riverbank that day. He led me to his car, put me in the passenger seat, and drove me away. “You don’t want to talk to the cops about this,” he said.

  I was wearing the suit I’d bought for Gurley’s verdict. It was covered in mud and soot. It took six months to pay for that suit and I never wore it again.

  Willard talked gently as he drove me back to the boardinghouse where I lived. They must have had a bomb in the car, he said, the way it exploded like that. Was it possible they had wanted me to deliver a bomb to Lem Brand? Did I know anything about that?

  I looked over at him, unable to even comprehend what he was asking.

  “No,” he said. “Of course not. Do you think your brother got cold feet?”

  Then I remembered meeting Gig’s eyes right before he started fighting with Early in the car. “I don’t think he knew,” I said.

  Willard parked in front of the house. I was crying again. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking until I stopped.

  “Here’s what’s crazy,” he said, “you giving them the money right before all of that.”

  “But I didn’t,” I said. I reached in my inside pocket and held out the envelope.

  But he wouldn’t look at it. “Crazy,” he said again. “I’ll bet they were fighting over the money. I’ll bet that’s why they went off the cliff.”

  Had he not heard me? I held up the envelope again for him to see, but he just kept staring straight ahead, smoking. “No peripheral vision,” he said, “remember?”

  I barely recall the rest of 1910, except for its darkness, its emptiness. I mourned. I worked at the machine shop. I read Tolstoy and picked through the newspaper. I wondered if the whole world wasn’t collapsing. The news was all famine and influenza, murder and war, every day some fresh horror.

  The snow that year just kept coming, and on the first of March, a lightning storm caused an avalanche that swept down the Cascades, picked up a Great Northern passenger train, and tossed it like a toy, tumbling cars down a thousand-foot embankment and burying ninety-six people under forty feet of snow. I had been on that run once, carrying Gurley’s story to Seattle. Ghostly people on the platforms.

  In April, a boy went missing near the river, and when they couldn’t find his body, the city decided to dynamite below the falls in Peaceful Valley. They did this every few years to dislodge the tons of construction debris and garbage that collected there, to move it all downstream, and they usually got to clear a few missing persons cases while they were at it.

  So, the first Sunday in May, I went downtown to see if my brother was coming up from the riverbed. There was a big crowd, people with picnic baskets and camera tripods, hundreds gathered on the same cliffs where I had watched Gig’s car burn. At noon, the explosives went off, a plume of water blasted into the sky, the boom came a half-second later, and a great cheer rose as bricks and logs and boards and random bits were vomited to the river surface and flushed downstream.

  Later, police identified three bodies in the risen tumult, none of them small enough to be the missing boy and none of them Gig or Early. There was a woman who had apparently committed suicide. And an old drifter who might’ve just fallen in the river drunk. And finally, there was the bloated, washed-out body of a private detective from Denver named Del Dalveaux, who had gone missing three months earlier, and who the coroner said had died of knife wounds to the chest and throat.

  That spring was bone dry, and summer was the hottest on record, and I read in the newspaper about a traveling preacher who portended that the Great Drought of 1910 was the beginning of the end of the world.

  It felt like it. Lakes dried up, cattle died, farms went bust, and all summer, trains sparked small brush fires. In August, when the great forests were tinder, a dry typhoon blew down through Canada and fanned a small fire into a conflagration that swept over three states, four mountain ranges, and nine national forests, burning three million acres in two days.

  They called it the Devil’s Broom, and it killed eighty-seven people and destroyed half of Wallace and parts of forty other towns. Seventy-eight firefighters died, crews giving up fire lines to run for their lives, only to be swallowed by flames. Tens of thousands were evacuated, fleeing in train cars that ran just ahead of the smoke, or waited out the fire in seething railroad tunnels that heated up like wood
stoves. Seven towns were burned completely to the ground and lost forever.

  On the second day of the blaze, a desperate fire crew retreated into the ragged old work camp of Taft, Montana, where they tried to rally the men in the dark wooden barracks to dig a break and set backfires to save the town. But the men were more interested in draining Taft’s booze stores, and as firefighters dug trenches, the residents trudged from saloon to saloon. By the time the last drunk staggered onto the evacuation train, hot embers were raining down on the faded wood buildings. The train wasn’t a half mile down the track when the inferno devoured Taft and wiped it from the earth forever.

  Not a lot of things that I wish I’d gotten to see in my life, but I’d have paid to see that one.

  I don’t know when I became convinced that Early Reston was still alive, but over the next year, I began to have nightmares about him. He’d be sitting on Gig’s cot or standing outside the house. And every time I read something terrible in the newspapers, I imagined he was out there, setting fires, causing avalanches.

  The way his car door had flapped open, I wondered, had I seen a body roll out just before the car went off the cliff? Then, that winter, someone shot big John Sullivan. The old police chief was sitting in his living room, and was shot right through the front window. “This world,” Gemma Tursi said at dinner that Sunday. I could do nothing but nod in agreement.

  His assassination dominated the news for weeks. The cops rounded up foreign tramps for questioning, and they arrested two labor men, but they let them go. They found a threatening letter from the Black Hand, so they arrested Italians, then they recalled the chief cracking down on the Tongs, so they arrested Chinese. Then a murderer in Seattle confessed, but that same man confessed to shooting President McKinley and being Jack the Ripper. A lawyer was quoted in the Press anonymously saying that Sullivan had been killed by a hired assassin because “certain forces” hadn’t wanted him testifying before the grand jury investigating police corruption.