Desmond used the money to buy food at the small grocery store in town. The owner helped him count out the money and stretch it as best he could. His diet consisted of beans and canned meat. Still, he ran out of money a few days before his uncle returned. At the grocery store, he didn’t ask for credit. He asked where he could find a job.

“For a six-year-old?” The skinny man with small glasses laughed.

Desmond looked at his shoes.

“I’ll give you some things on credit, Desmond. You can settle up when your uncle gets back.”

“I’d rather not,” he said quietly.

Thankfully, the grocer told him to sweep out the supply room and stock some of the shelves and sent him home with enough food to get him through a few more days.

When his uncle returned, the first thing he said was: “How much have you got left?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You spent it all? On what, boy? A new Barbie doll?”

He stormed off, muttering that Desmond would eat him out of house and home.

The man was obsessed with money. He would work on whatever rig paid him the most. He didn’t care how dangerous it was or how bad the camp conditions were. He wanted the money. And he kept it all to himself. He deeply distrusted banks.

“They’re all crooks,” he said, one night when he was into the second half of the bottle. “Fools, too. They’ll loan any Tom, Dick, or Harry money—your money, that is, the same dollars you put in the vault. The thrifts are the worst. They’ll be busted soon, you watch.”

Desmond was actually quite surprised when, a few years later, over a thousand savings and loans—thrifts, as they were known—collapsed, costing American taxpayers over one hundred and thirty billion dollars to bail them out. It was perhaps the only one of his uncle’s predictions and conspiracy theories that came true.

His uncle continued to leave him home alone after that first time, and Desmond soon figured out how to make the money last: he supplemented it with meat from animals he killed. Some he took out of season, but he figured the game warden probably wouldn’t fine a six-year-old boy slowly starving to death.

He made sure to have a few dollars left over, waiting on the counter when his uncle returned—and sometimes he managed to have a bit more, which he saved for himself.

When he’d saved enough, he visited the pawnshop at the edge of town. He had stood outside this shop at least two dozen times, gazing through the window at the bike, imagining himself riding it, all the places he would go.

Now he went inside, laid his money on the glass-top display case, and said, “I’ll take the bike in the window.”