“They make a cleaning solution for turbine blades.”
Jude nodded. “Really. Sounds small.”
“It is,” Jay confirmed. He ran a hand over his mouth. It came down damp from perspiration that had sprouted suddenly on his upper lip.
“Is this Illinois Cumberland thing your call for the day?”
“Yeah,” Jay answered. ICUJ was his ‘call’, that one speck of input a junior broker had into the managing of Stanley & Mitchell’s fifteen hundred accounts. Every morning each junior broker would submit to their supervising account broker one stock which they had determined in the S&M way to be worthy of investment by the firm’s clients. It was the account broker’s responsibility to examine and sign off on these calls, but as a matter of practice they did so with hardly a look. It was only one stock, after all, and only a fraction of the brokerage’s daily allocation for purchases would be directed to these selections, and, hell, the young guns had to get their feet wet somehow.
“Where’d you dig this thing up?” Jude asked.
“It just kind of...presented itself,” Jay said, a faint smile rising, like the hint of sun through a misty dawn.
“Well, you never know about these no-names,” Jude said. “Maybe it’ll hit.” He turned back toward his terminal. “Weirder things have happened.”
“Right,” Jay said in agreement. In total agreement.
Six
Return Engagement
The soup of the day at Greenie’s Diner was broccoli cheese, and the Monday night special was meatloaf, but Jay had ordered neither, and now, near eight o’clock in the evening, he sat at the counter amongst the thinning dinner rush and picked at the remnants of his chicken fried steak, scribing with his fork the letters I C U J in the puddle of thick white gravy left on his plate. He had tried to eat, but thinking had gotten in the way. And there was plenty to think about.
Illinois Cumberland Jet had hit, and hit big. It had finished the day up a full point on word of a contract it was negotiating with Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, the venerable behemoth known as 3M.
It had started the day at three fourths.
Jay took his sweating water glass in hand and sipped. Sipped and digested the reality that anyone buying the little-known stock that morning had more than doubled their money in seven hours.
Stanley & Mitchell, acting on his call, had purchased ten thousand shares of the stock for seven thousand five hundred dollars at 9:45 in the a.m. At 3:40 in the afternoon, again acting on his call, the firm dumped its entire position, reaping seventeen thousand five hundred dollars in the sale, for a profit from the one day investment of ten thousand dollars.
Jay sucked a cool round of ice into his mouth and felt it melt to nothing. This, however, was far from nothing. Sure, ten grand sounded like small potatoes when considering the amount of money made and lost on the Street in any one day, or any one hour for that matter. But it wasn’t the dollar amount that mattered. The stock market wasn’t a game of sum totals; it was a game of percentages. Return on investment. And a one hundred and thirty three percent return on investment in seven hours was, well, a pretty damn good return.
A pretty remarkable return, Jay decided, tracing the I and the C and the U and the J again and again. A pretty remarkable return that he had known would be. Known in the most remarkable of ways.
Except, who in the hell could he remark to about it?
“Warm your coffee, sir?” The question came in a sultry, suggestive voice, and Jay looked up to see Carrie standing behind the counter, an orange-necked pot of decaf in hand.
He quickly scratched out the letters, erasing them with the tines of his fork. “You pour that unleaded crap in my cup and I’ll spank you, sister.”
She shuddered playfully. “Oooh. Promise?”
“Off at eleven?”
Carrie nodded and wiped the counter near his water glass, drying the condensation it had shed. “And not a minute earlier—the boss is in tonight. Which reminds me...” She took a customer check from her apron and laid it in front of Jay. “No freebies tonight, babe. Sorry. Not with Mr. Maranescu here. Unless, of course, you are ready to take me away from all this and provide for me a life to which I can become accustomed...”
Jay chuckled dryly and fished a twenty from his wallet. “Is that the line you use to get big tips? ‘Cause if it is, you may be asking a little much. The gravy’s a bit gooey tonight.”
She snatched the money from his hand and slapped the limp bill across his face twice. “Maybe
I’ll
spank
you
later, funny man.”
She left him, working her way down the counter, filling and wiping. He watched her, smiling to himself for a moment, but the expression slowly tempered, mirth draining from it. It became a hollow smile, a confused smile, and very soon he found himself looking once more at his plate, at the swirled mess where the four letter symbol had been. His thoughts drifted from Carrie. Far from her, to what had transpired that morning. To the knowing.
Why? was the natural question that came to mind. That
raged
in his mind. Why him? Why now? Why had it come, and then gone? And it had gone. Of that he was certain, because when he woke Saturday morning he’d checked it. He’d come from the bedroom to the kitchen and zapped himself awake with a half dozen fast sips of coffee, then he’d noticed the coins on the counter where Miss Neat-and-Tidy herself must have moved them, and he went to them as Carrie flitted about the living room with a dust cloth in hand. Picked the nine coins up as his dear one polished and shined and reminded him of their trip to Floral Park in an hour or so. Held them as her voice droned to a small, pesky hum, like a fly buzzing about, and dropped them on the counter to see heads and tails, the random touch of the universe upon them again. He’d even flipped the tails to heads just to see if maybe there was more to be seen in them, but there hadn’t been. Just rounds of metal they were. It was through, just a tiny, fleeting miracle in the grander scheme of very ordinary things.
And so he wondered—why?
He smeared the gravy some more as the question nagged. And a pisser of a question it was. Enough of a pisser, in fact, that after a moment Jay started to think that Mr. Jude Duffault might have been right about him. That maybe he did spend too much time on irrelevant shit.
But then, wasn’t it a pisser itself to think that Jude might know him better than he knew himself?
He put the water glass down and raked his fingers through his hair, thinking. Irrelevant? Sure, now that the come-and-go mind trip was gone, now that he’d had a fleeting little taste of mystic happy pie, yeah,
now
it was irrelevant. Hell, without at least a hint of an explanation, irrelevant was all it could be.
Still, he had to marvel at it. At what had been, and been his, for so very short a time. Every broker’s wet dream come true. Knowing, man. Fucking
knowing
! How could he not be in awe of it?
But so what? It was over. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before, and would surely never happen again.
“So, did you think about it?”
Jay snapped out of the pointless, grating thoughts that had gripped him. Carrie was back, filling his water glass now and eyeing him eagerly. “Huh?”
“The house we saw? In Floral Park? Have you thought about it?”
He stared at her for a moment, Jude’s warning suddenly ringing sharp and jumbled in his head (
the death, man, the death, man, of you, man, the death, man, of you
), then shook his head.
“It would be great, don’t you think?”
He nodded absently, the bulk of his thoughts still elsewhere. Still mining for rhyme and reason. Still wanting,
craving
, to know. To know how and why he
knew
.
“I loved the back yard,” Carrie said, reaching right to top off the glass of an old, thin man sitting next to Jay, taking it right to the rim without spilling a drop. “It was plenty big enough for a dog. Or two dogs. And a swing set...”
“Yeah,” was all Jay could say, in a decidedly dismissive tone that was not lost on Carrie.
“Aren’t we Mr. Enthused?” she observed coldly, drawing the pitcher close. It sweated a chill dampness to the front of her pale pink uniform. “Didn’t you like it?”
“I...”
death of you, man, the death of you
“...don’t remember too much about it, Carrie.” But he remembered Jude’s prophecy...and why was that? Another question that would nag—terrific! “I’m sorry. I was out of it.”
“Is that the fashionable term for hung over?” she asked/corrected/needled him.
“I know. I know.”
She eyed him severely. “You still don’t sound very interested—even in talking about it.”
He looked away, wishing that somehow he could tell her. That he could lay it out on the table for he and say, look,
make me understand
. Carrie was good that way. She was the budgeter, the checkbook balancer, the grocery list maker, the coupon clipper, the rent check writer. She was all those perfect and precise things, those logical and ordered things, and despite his want of an explanation he knew that those same qualities meant he could
not
share with her the wondrous thing that had come and gone and now troubled him to no end. Life to his Carrie was a process, a very tangible way in which things happened. Wake up, make the bed, shower, dress, eat, work, marry, buy a house, have kids, rock on the porch and wave at the neighbors. Those things she could understand. Those things she could explain. But a bunch of coins that came up heads over and over until some knowing in them up and presented itself in the form of a
stock symbol
for Chrissakes?! A stock symbol that he just plain
knew
would be a mover the next trading day? How would his love take hold of that? She wouldn’t, he knew, and she would think something wrong with him for believing what certainly could not have been, would not have been, only a hallucination, you see, because you were quite drunk after all... No, this battery of questions that vexed was his, and his alone, so he looked back to her and said, “My mind’s on something else right now, sweetie.”
She puzzled briefly at his disinterest, but very soon she made sense of his mood. The paper the other night with the writing on it, his distance all weekend, the way he’d rushed out this morning for the office. She understood. “It’s work, isn’t it?”
His head tipped acquiescently to the side, not a nod, not an affirmation. An ambiguous non-lie, at best.
She set the pitcher of water down and leaned elbows on the counter, coming close to him. “If we lived in Floral Park you’d have a place to relax after work. You’d be away from the city after a hard day. Hmm?”
He managed a smile, but it was as barren as the sentiment behind it.
Carrie straightened, and for a moment the pouty little girl that still lived deep inside almost surfaced. But she did not let her. This was all part of the bargain, she knew. The bargain she’d made with herself. Support him. Understand him. Love him. That was what she had done, and would continue to do. Floral Park, or some place like it, would exist for them someday soon. It didn’t have to be right now. Right now her man needed his thinking space, for whatever matters, work or otherwise, required it. He would bull through it like the Jay Grady she knew so well, maybe brood a little in the process, and he would come out of it, just like he always did.
And, God, wouldn’t it be fantastic when they did have a place like Floral Park where he could decompress. Sit in the backyard and pet the dog and sip iced tea, with her by his side in the lazy embrace of an Adirondack chair. It would be so perfect, and he would love it. She just knew that he would.
“You know,” she said tenderly, stealing a wary glance over her shoulder to check for Mr. Maranescu before leaning close once more to plant a kiss on the tip of his nose, “when you retire with your first ten million before forty, I ain’t lettin’ you out of my sight, Jay Grady. That’s a promise.”
Carrie tapped his nose where she’d kissed him and left, moving down the counter to fill where filling was needed. He watched her for a moment, but a moment only, because the questions returned. The ‘why’ and the ‘why me’ and the ‘how’ and the ‘what’, and the void that spun from each unanswered query seemed so very...so very...
His thoughts stopped abruptly, old memory surging at him like black water, cold and heavy.
...so very
familiar
.
Yes, familiar. The futility, it was. The questions that could never be answered. Questions like ‘why did the coins do what they did?’ or ‘why did they do what they did for
me
? or...or the other question.
The old question.
‘Why did my parents have to die?’
No answer there, he knew. No
tangible
answer, that is. He’d come to believe in his own approximation of reason since then—they had died because they were poor—but no ironclad explanation had ever made itself known. He’d longed for it, but what had that gotten him? Nothing. Nothing then. Nothing ever.
Sometimes—then and (maybe) now—you just had to accept things, painfully inexplicable things, and go on. Now matter how much it hurt. No matter how much it nagged. This he believed. He hated the lopsided compromise of the concept, but still he believed.
“Babe?”
“What?” Jay’s eyes ballooned out of the state that had swum over him and he saw Carrie again, standing just across the counter.
“Are you okay? You looked really...sad there for a minute.”
“No. Yes. I’m fine. Just...work stuff.”
“Are you sure?” she asked with sweet doubt.
“I’m fine,” he assured her, not lying, because
was
there anything wrong? Hell, he could think of a thousand guys on the street who would give their right nut to have the fleeting kind of knowing that he had had this day. The girls on the street? Well, they’d give something else, but they would give, too, baby. Without a doubt.
A broker’s wet dream was right, he thought. If only it hadn’t ended. God, what would have come of that?!