The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  “He’s come out of retirement to fight for a hundred thousand dollars,” said a familiar voice behind me, “that’s what he’s come back for.”

  I turned and there was Early Reston in the doorway. He had grown a beard and was wearing a new-looking rain slicker. Otherwise, it was him, that welcome plain stalk of wheat. “Hello, Gig,” he said. “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

  We had a drink and a good clap of the shoulders. I told him about the riot, about jail, about Clegg beating us, about the hunger strike by the union leaders.

  “That must’ve taught them quite a lesson,” he said, “you fellas starving yourselves that way. Did you think of knocking yourselves in the heads, too?”

  “They had that part covered pretty good.”

  He said he’d gone to Idaho and Montana with my brother and with Gurley Flynn, and I said yes, so I’d heard.

  “I gave your union a shot,” he said, “but it wasn’t for me. Too much traveling preacher in that business, and I’m not sure I believe in Gurley Flynn’s religion any more than I believe in the others.”

  I said, “I’ve become something of a union agnostic myself.”

  He considered the whiskey in front of him and then turned to me. “And how are you with an automobile, Gig?”

  I told him I’d operated a truck once or twice in log camps and farm jobs. “I’m no mechanic, but I know my way around a wheel.”

  We paid up, Slim nodding goodbye at Early without ever having said a word to him. My clothes were dry and I settled into my coat, buttoned it to my neck. Outside, the rain had stopped.

  Early went straight to a Tin Lizzy parked on the street, the cover and front glass on it.

  “This your Ford, Early?”

  “For the time being,” he said. He climbed inside, set the hand brake, and adjusted the float while I primed and cranked the handle under the grille. The first pull nearly broke my forearm, but then the engine caught.

  When I came around, Early was in the passenger seat. “Let’s see what kind of driver you make. That’s the only opening I got right now.”

  It took me a moment to reacquaint myself with the instruments. “Switch over the magneto,” he said, and I said, “Uh-huh,” and tested out the three pedals on the floor, brake on the right, reverse in the middle, and clutch on the left. A hand brake was between my legs, the up-down hand throttle next to the steering wheel.

  “Clutch all the way down for first. Up for high, and neutral in the middle.”

  “How long you had this car?” I asked.

  “Just got it,” he said.

  I lurched it a block but had it smooth by the time we left Lind. I veered us off an old wagon road, northeast toward Spokane. It was icy cold, even with the top and front glass on, and we had to yell over the wind. I worked the accelerator with my hand, got us up to top speed, and it felt good to be gliding at pace, flying under our own power.

  On such a black night, the two lamps in front of the car cast an unsettling cockeyed glow, lighting up a tree here, a basalt column there, like we were tunneling into the earth. The two-track road crossed a shallow creek bed, ice crackling under the tires, but the car handled the rough terrain. We shadowed the railroad tracks awhile, driving at an angle below the humped ties. We passed the lights of Ritzville and I thought of old Schulte and his wife and his son just up that creek north of town. I wondered if I could ever manage a life like that—or if it was another jail.

  We skirted Sprague Lake and caught a lumber path that spilled us out on the state road. On good gravel, we could hear each other speak.

  “You’re a natural driver, Gig.”

  “Thank you.” I had to say, I did like piloting that Ford and thought I ought to learn the mechanical side of it. Maybe that would be the job for me—a way to be on the road but not jumping trains or sleeping in fields.

  We rattled an hour on that state road, until the lights of Spokane began to show over the horizon. We stopped to refill the tank from a five-gallon can he kept on the floorboard of the backseat.

  “You’re living in Spokane?” I asked as I poured the gas. “Why the hell did I go all the way to Lind looking for you?”

  He said, “Why the hell did you go looking for me?” There was a real question in it, perhaps even some suspicion.

  “Well,” I said, “I almost died in that jail, or thought I would. Singing and refusing to eat or work. We were doing nothing in there but irritating the cops and their rich bosses. Like flies at a picnic. And lying there, starving, I thought back to the last time I felt anything like a man. And it was that day on the river, when you knocked that cop back and I hit the other man with my shoulder. That was the last time. So I came looking for you.”

  We climbed back in the Ford and kept on. I could feel him looking over at me. We rounded a corner and came onto the Sunset Hill, overlooking the valley that contained Spokane, all those electric lights and the brick and steel and wood and smoke and, through the center of it all, the deep river gorge.

  “You want that feeling again,” Early said.

  “Christ, Early.” I looked over. “You bet I do.”

  The rest of the drive, he explained what he was doing. He’d put together a small crew, three men. They were making two bombs, to be planted the same day. Meeting up with me and hearing my story had given him a new idea for the targets, he said. He’d been thinking the police chief, Sullivan, “but we’d probably have better luck getting to your friend Sergeant Clegg.”

  “And the other?”

  “Lem Brand.”

  I thought of what Ursula had told me—and maybe what she hadn’t told me—about getting a stake in Brand’s hotel. I got a tightness in my chest but said, “Well, I can’t think of two men who deserve it more.”

  We skirted the north end and drove along the ridge below Beacon Hill east of town. There was an outcrop of boulders, an old Indian site where a natural spring burbled up. Early had a place just beyond that. An old spa had burned down there in the ’90s, in an area too rocky for grading or farming. That was where he’d been hiding out, in the spa’s old outbuildings, not five miles from Mrs. Ricci’s place.

  He had me pull off the road onto a faint drive, trees on both sides, the car rattling over rocks and dry brush. We drove through a windrow of aspens toward what appeared to be a simple block bunkhouse next to a small shop, smoke curling from a tin chimney, the door propped partly open with a brick. Early had me park the Model T next to the shop, and I killed the motor. We were close to town but separated by a wisp of river and those clusters of boulders.

  We climbed out and I could hear the gurgling water beyond the trees. Two men came out of the shop. One had been at the riot in November—a thin Negro who introduced himself as Everett, then shook my hand and said, “I remember you and your brother from the free speech day.”

  “You get a month for disturbing?” I asked.

  Everett nodded. “In the brig at Fort George Wright. Got fired from the hotel where I was working.”

  The other man, white and thin-lipped with small pinpoint eyes, stuck out his hand and said simply, “Miller.” I got a cold chill off of that one.

  “Miller I knew from Montana and Colorado,” Early said. “He’s a top powder man. Knows his way around a fulminating cap, too.” Before I could say anything, Early patted me on the back. “And this is Gig, our driver. And a good man to have in a row. Assuming you can get him to shut up.”

  I followed the three of them inside the shop. There was a woodstove heating the place and a lantern lighting this front room. But no bombs. The whole room was covered in pelts—deer and moose and bear and raccoon and skunk and beaver and some smaller animals I couldn’t name. There must have been a hundred dead animals in various states, their fur and hide mounted, stacked, tacked to boards, hung on walls. The tables were covered with knives and pliers and fleshers and other tools for skinning and tanning and stretching. I stared into the black eyes of a lynx, stretched flat and mounted on a board.


  Early pushed the wall at the end of the hide room, and a section opened into a narrow room with no windows. We squeezed in. Everett brought a lantern, and now I could see why they needed a top powder man. There were loose sticks of dynamite, some cotton balls and medicine stoppers, and what I recognized as mercury and silver blasting caps, all spread out on a wooden workbench. Next to it were two old carpetbag satchels, the kind a salesman might carry.

  Early explained that the bombs would be small and portable, each contained in a satchel, to be delivered to two locations at the same time—the police station and the Spokane Club. The cases would be packed with four sticks each, about two pounds, enough to kill but not so heavy as to raise suspicion, like, say, a twenty-pound case would. “It needs to feel like someone’s work satchel,” Early said. Because of that, they were carving out any extra weight from the cases—metal frames, hinges, even thinning the leather.

  In the tops of the satchels would be loose papers, and beneath, sticks of dynamite strapped to the bottom of the case with blasting caps pressed into them, the caps covered with cotton soaked in a cyanide of potassium and sugar. A small medicine bottle of sulfuric acid would be secured above the blasting caps, sealed with a cork. When the valise was opened, a wire attached to the latch would pull the cork out, leaking acid and soaking the cotton, causing the caps to detonate and the dynamite to explode.

  “Two pounds won’t take down a building,” Early said, “but I would not want to be in the room where it’s opened.”

  Early said the packages would be delivered by Everett, who had saved his porter’s outfit just for this. They would be left at the police station and the Spokane Club when the recipient wasn’t there but was expected soon. We would be well on our way out of town when the valises were opened and then—

  “Boom,” said Miller.

  Early watched me to make sure I was up for it. Was I? He said there was one thing they needed from me. Miller wanted sharp metal to pack around the dynamite, to make the small bombs more lethal.

  “We could use nails, of course,” Miller said. “But something even lighter would be better. Metal shavings.”

  “I told them you know someone who works in a machine shop,” Early said.

  I looked down at my shoes. “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  I had once tried to get a day job at a tin shop east of downtown, where they did pressing and metal shearing, and that night I took a bucket and walked the hobo highway until I got to their warehouse along the river. They had a slag and scrap pile behind the shop, and I picked through it for the thinnest, lightest pieces. I nicked up my hands pretty good on those sharp metal bits. The thought of those pieces flying around into mens’ bodies made me feel sick. But I knew what Early was asking—someone who works in a machine shop—and there was no way I was going to let him involve you, Rye.

  Miller picked through the bucket and said the pieces were perfect, and he packed them in the sides of the valises, underneath the compartment with the fake paper. He was careful not to get them near the wire or the stopper holding in the acid. “Accidentally cut that stopper and—”

  “Boom,” said Everett.

  Finished, the two valises looked harmless: thin leather upright carpetbags with two straps and a locking latch on top. There was a small key for each.

  The plan was simple. Everett would deliver the first satchel to the police department, for Sergeant Hub Clegg. He would deliver the case at eleven, three hours before Clegg’s night shift started, and would tell the cop at the desk that it was from one of the saloons where Clegg made his usual pickups.

  “And how do we get the other one to Brand?” I asked.

  “I had an idea about that,” Early said. “I was thinking maybe your friend the lion tamer—”

  “No,” I said, “no way. I’m not going to involve her. I’ll take it myself if I have to, and open it in front of him.”

  “Okay. That’s fine.” Early patted me on the arm.

  “And it’s a cougar,” I said.

  “We’ll come up with something else,” Early said.

  It was quiet. We sat around drinking and playing cards, and Early came and went a few times in the Ford in the ensuing days. I wasn’t sure what we were waiting for or what he was doing on those trips. Miller said he was likely out stealing, that Early was a master thief. Finally, on the last Sunday night, he returned with a bottle of whiskey. “Tomorrow,” he said. The verdict was being read in the big IWW case. It would be the perfect day.

  He shook our hands and patted us on the shoulders. He gave each man thirty dollars to make his escape.

  “Where’s this from?” Everett asked, fanning the money.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Early said.

  We poured a glass of whiskey and toasted each other, talking about what we’d do next. Early said not to get too specific in sharing our plans, for if one of us was picked up, he didn’t want that man to be able to implicate the others.

  Everett said he was headed south. “Too cold up here. I’m gonna get me a girl and winter her up.” Miller, too, said he would head for warmer parts.

  “And what about you?” Everett asked me.

  “He’s coming with me,” Early said. “We’re gonna outlaw a little.” He winked at me and I thought it sounded fine, the two of us flying around the west in that Ford, the world quivering at our approach.

  But that night I couldn’t sleep. As a kid, I had thought for a while that I might become an actor, travel the country doing monologues and playing characters. Was that what I was doing now—acting? Playing outlaw? Anarchist? Or was I becoming the real thing, maybe losing my mind like the madman who shot McKinley?

  There were satchels with bombs in them. People would be killed. Innocent people, maybe. Clegg and Lem Brand, I bore them as much ill will as one human could bear another, but there was no guarantee someone else wouldn’t get hurt, too. Early kept saying this was a message we were delivering, that things were broken, that this was the only way to fix it, that we weren’t delivering bombs but ideas.

  You’re fooling yourself, I thought as I lay there, trying to sleep in the front room of that little blockhouse. You aren’t some actor, some learned man. Some kind of traveling philosopher.

  This is what you are.

  My last thoughts before sleep were about you, Rye-boy. I became rather melancholy, worried that I would never see my brother again. And the hardest part was knowing it was the best thing for you.

  We rose quietly Monday morning in that little house, everyone alone with his thoughts except Miller, who whistled cheerfully. We all dressed plainly except Everett, who put on his porter outfit.

  At nine, Early and I drove Miller to the train station and Everett to a café across the street, where he would eat his breakfast with the first satchel. Everett had just jumped out of the car when Early thought of something and chased him down with some last-minute instructions. He came back to the car. “I forgot to give him the key.”

  After breakfast, Everett would deliver Clegg’s case to the police department, the key sealed in an envelope with Clegg’s name on it. The case would hopefully sit under the night sergeant’s desk until he started his shift in the afternoon. After Everett had delivered that first case, he would meet Early and me at the county courthouse at eleven-thirty, and we would give him the second case, which he would deliver to Lem Brand at the Spokane Club, where one of the waiters had told Everett that Brand ate lunch every weekday at two p.m.

  Everett would then go back to the train station, where Miller would be waiting with a change of clothes and a ticket for him. Everett would change and he and Miller would leave on trains in opposite directions. Early and I would head west in the Ford. If all went well, we’d be long gone by midafternoon, when the cases were opened.

  Back at the house, Early grabbed the second satchel and placed it gently in the backseat. I smoked as far from the Ford as I could get, while Early cleared the shop and the bunkhouse of any signs
that we had been there. He burned our garbage in the woodstove, and I watched the gray smoke roll out into the sky. It was one of those startlingly clear days for February, cold endless blue.

  I filled the Ford’s tank with enough gas to get us back to Lind, and filled two more gas cans in case we needed to drive farther. I put our packs in the backseat, between the gas cans and the satchel.

  “It’d be a good day to not crash this machine,” Early said. I cranked the Lizzy and climbed in. A northeasterly had blown into the valley, and gusts rocked us as I drove toward downtown. “Watch the bumps,” Early said, and he checked his pocket watch. Eleven. The first satchel would have just been delivered.

  We drove past the train station. If there was any problem, Miller was supposed to be standing outside. But he wasn’t there. I drove up Howard Street, past taverns and theaters, and although it was a quiet morning, it made me think of Ursula and wild old Spokane.

  I thought of you, too, Rye-boy, and I wished I’d gone to see you once more, to apologize for the way I was after I got out of jail. These last days, I wanted to say goodbye. You’d be working up at the machine shop all day. Even if the cops figured out I was involved, there’d be no way to tie you to it. And then, when things calmed down, six months, a year from now, maybe I could come back. Maybe Early and I would have outlawed our way to such wealth that I could buy that little orchard behind Mrs. Ricci’s house for us. Or hell, maybe I’d buy her whole block.

  At Riverside, we turned west, pausing for a horse and carriage. Early tipped his hat to two women waiting on the corner. They smiled and I wished I had a minute to get out of the car and charm them up in my old manner.

  “Take Monroe,” Early said.

  The Monroe Street Bridge was a high steel span on the west side of downtown, crossing the deepest part of the two-hundred-foot gorge, just past the waterfalls. The deck was strung with power lines, and down the center ran two sets of streetcar tracks. It was a swaying, shaking old bridge that the city was planning to replace in the spring with a new concrete span. We rattled across it and landed on the north side of the river, the massive Spokane County Courthouse rising on our left. It looked like a French castle, cream brick, with a dozen spires rising from its red gabled roofs and, in the center, a 120-foot tower with American and state flags on top. It always looked so out of place across from downtown, alone on that north bank like the citadel of some neighboring kingdom.