Jay nodded crisply. This wasn’t where he’d wanted the conversation to go. Hell, he hadn’t really wanted much of a conversation at all. Just a few words, here’s some change, and stay warm, fella. That was all he wanted, so couldn’t they just get on with things and be past this already. “It was a long time ago. History.”
“I see,” the bum said. Clearly the lad wanted to be done with that. But...
...but was there something else the lad might want?
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Wisconsin,” Jay told the bum. He could still think of Wisconsin. Of his boyhood home. There was still good in those memories, as long as all recollection ceased before the summer of his tenth year. Before then there were still happy times to be recalled. Things like...like Donzerly Light. “Ever been there?”
“I’ve been most places,” Sign Guy replied with scattergun precision. And then, before the exchange could progress another step this way or that way, he swung things in a different direction entirely. “You’re not rich, are you?”
“Me?” Jay chuckled breathily, glad that the subject had moved far from the fallow fields of old memory, but still bemused by the tack this bum was able to manage. Wind this way? Well, he was going thataway. “Rich? I wish.”
“I didn’t think so,” Sign Guy said, the nod coming again as though a certainty had just been confirmed. “But you want to be.”
“Well, I know for sure I don’t want to be poor,” Jay said, and for a moment his eyes fixed on the change he was about to give. He grinned sadly at the meager pile, and, despite his earnest desire not to, he remembered a time when the few coins mounded in his palm would have seemed a fortune. Would have
been
a fortune. Yes, he remembered poor. Looking poor. Smelling poor. And worst of all, feeling poor. He’d been that kind of poor not so many years ago, had seen poor drive good people down. Had seen it steal the hope from their hearts. Had seen it take more than that, even. And from that experience he had learned one true and concrete thing—that he wanted to be as far from the economic bottom as his gumption and any bit of luck could get him. “So, yeah, I’d like to give rich a try.”
The admission seemed to please the bum. “That’s a reasonable expectation.”
He spoke it as if approving a transaction, a trade, but what of that could there be? Jay was the one doing the giving. Or
trying
to do some giving.
“Some people would say it’s a selfish way of thinking,” Jay told the bum. “Wanting money for money’s sake.”
“I say, the more rich people in the world the better,” Sign Guy shared, and glanced briefly up Wall Street. “The more rich people here the better.” He looked back to his would-be donor. “Why not you?”
“Why not,” Jay agreed, mostly for the sake of conversation, and hopefully ending it. He wondered if whatever questioning, testing, sizing-up that the bum required before accepting a handout was finally complete. He sensed that maybe it was. That the bum was...what?...satisfied. That he had given Jay his stamp of approval. Weird. Plenty weird. “So, can I give you this now?”
Sign Guy nodded serenely.
Jay bounced the mound of change in his palm once, closed his hand around it, and reached toward the Yuban can, bending until his hand was just about over the slitted lid.
That was when the bum grabbed him.
His hands came with surprising speed, a graceful blur that Jay hardly noticed until both were clamped around his fist, tight like the gummy maw of some toothless pitbull. The action caught him off guard, enough so that his instinctive reaction—which would have been to yank away and run—was momentarily suspended. Long enough for the bum’s words to quiet any rising fears.
“I thank you.”
Jay stood there, almost motionless, his right arm levered in Sign Guy’s firm grip like the handle of an old fashioned well pump, the hands squeezing as one might before releasing a warm and friendly handshake. Compressing Jay’s fist around the coins so that he could feel their thin edges press into the tactile folds of his palm.
“I give you my...” the bum began to say, but his words stopped suddenly there. His gaze broke briefly, looking down to sample the hand encased in his, and when it rose again the ever-present smile was sparkling in his eyes, bright like fireworks frozen at their moment of brilliance. Radiant as though some grand and pleasing truth had just presented itself. “Oh, my.”
Jay puzzled at the odd and sudden shift in the bum’s reaction. “What?”
“Oh, yes,” Sign Guy said, releasing what Jay thought was an amazed breath. “Isn’t this going to be interesting?”
“What?”
“Yes, yes, interesting,” the bum said further, savoring all about the young man whose touch connected them right now. Gazing fondly at him, so deeply that it seemed he might be looking through him, to someone or something else altogether. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess.”
Jay’s head shook slightly as he puzzled at the bum’s weird words. “Surprised at what?”
To that inquiry the bum only smiled. “Fate is a clever ringmaster, I must say.”
“Pardon me?” Jay asked, missing whatever the bum’s meaning was. Did that just ‘mean what it means’, too, he wondered?
For a moment Sign Guy was quiet, simply admiring his visitor lingeringly, as though in awe, then finally he said, “How rude I am. I was offering my gratitude, and then I ramble on. I apologize.”
Whatever
, Jay thought. The weird-o-meter had notched up a piece right then, and he was ready for this little interlude to be over.
The bum clutched Jay’s hand and the offering it bore a bit tighter right then, and he said, “I give you
my
thanks.”
This intonation drew Jay’s interest. The way Sign Guy had offered his appreciation, as if literally handing it over. As if it were more than a word and more than a feeling. As if his thanks were a thing, Jay thought as he looked into the bum’s eyes, the night’s artificial glow dancing on the sheen that surfaced them. But more thought on that would not come, for right then he felt the grip upon him finally ease. Not pull completely away, but slowly go gentle, both hands sliding off together to form a cup beneath his fist. Waiting. Waiting to receive.
Jay’s pinkie moved first, flexing open to let a few coins drop into the fleshy bowl below, then his ring finger and middle finger, letting the bulk of the change fall, and finally his index finger straightened and his hand opened fully, dropping the last bit to join the rest, the entire offering jingling like the meager winnings of some slot machine jackpot as it tumbled piecemeal into Sign Guy’s hands.
Jay drew his hand slowly back and turned the palm up, staring at it. The wrinkled pinkish skin was striped with the thin indentations of the coins’ edges where they had temporarily left their mark. He flexed the fingers in and out, fisting, relaxing, fisting, relaxing, watching as Sign Guy maneuvered his cupped hands directly over the Yuban can and let the change just given him drain coin by coin through the slit in the lid. Muffled
tings
and
clonks
rose from within the receptacle as the coins fell through the paper money and gathered at the bottom of the can, Sign Guy beaming at Jay throughout the uneven metallic timpani.
The moment hung between them like the lasting resonance of a bass note played perfectly. Impossibly long. Penetrating. Palpable.
Jay’s hand closed to a loose fist, his fingertips tracing over the palm, exploring the mesh of tiny, squared-off channels pressed into it. “I’ve gotta,” he began, and Sign Guy was nodding already, “be going.”
The smile bobbed up and down as Jay took a few steps backward and started to turn. But before he was facing away he saw Sign Guy’s now empty left hand come up into the light, two fingers spreading as before to make the V.
“Peace, brother.”
“Yeah,” Jay said softly, then showed the bum his back and headed down Broadway. Twice he glanced back and saw that the bum’s beaming gaze was trailing him, and that he was still showing the peace sign, but after that he looked no more. He simply walked on, night shadows a thick black cloak upon him, thinking about the bum for a few minutes, then about work, then about grabbing a free Reuben or some chicken fried steak at Greenie’s on his way home (Carrie waitressed there, and if the occasional gratis meat wasn’t a good enough reason to have her as his girl, there were plenty more), but not at all did he muse about what he could not know. About the change that had already started, a change that had its own shadows, its own solitary cadence in the night. A change that was already in step with its host, a few paces back like the ever ready servant, or like some cunning beast in slow and steady pursuit. A change that was what it was.
And not that at all.
Two
Change
Maybe it was the hour, late on a Friday night, or maybe it was the familiarity of the company, friends and co-workers that he was pretty sure he could say just about anything to. Or maybe it was the drink, their sixth round in three hours; beer at first, but now the hard stuff was working on their moods, their inhibitions. Whatever the reason, Jay just up and said it, just let it out, and even with the throbbing beat to which a half dozen topless Japanese nymphs were gyrating on Buffalo Kabuki’s slowly rotating stage, it was apparent that his three buddies had heard him, as all were suddenly staring at him as though he’d sprouted a third, winking eye.
“You did what?” Jude Duffault asked incredulously. “You did fucking
what
?”
Steve Lederer and Bunker Wallace said nothing, leaving it to the defacto leader of their gang of four to get the lowdown on what the fourth of their number had just tossed then out of left field.
“I talked to him,” Jay said again, his whiskey neat held in one hand. His eyes drifted sluggishly between the drink and his friends.
A quick shudder moved Jude’s face. His short black hair trembled. “Hold it—you talked to the bum? To Sign Guy?”
Jay nodded. Nodded and sipped.
Steve considered his friend with raised eyebrows. “If Old Man Mitchell had been cruising by in that big black limo of his, man, your ass would be in the can.”
Bunker’s head tipped quizzically at his friend and fellow junior broker at S&M, as they quasi-affectionately referred to their place of employment. “You’re talking about the nutcase down by the church?”
“He didn’t seem like a nutcase,” Jay countered calmly, though he could see some penned frenzy stirring in two of his buddies. Steve, always the calmest of their number, had already tired of this spike in the evening’s conversation and, his cigarette glowing short between his lips, had turned his attention back to a pair of small-breasted dancers doing a pretty mean grind hardly a spit away. Sipping the last of his drink, Jay motioned for the waitress. “It was a little strange, but he wasn’t wacko or anything.”
“My God,” Jude reacted, his head shaking. “You brought more than the dairy queen with you from old Madison, Wisconsin; you also forgot to scrape some of that Midwestern naïveté off your shoes when you entered the city.”
“Her name is Carrie,” Jay reminded his friend.
“Right,” Jude acknowledged, though he knew it wouldn’t have mattered what he called Miss Carrie Stiles. She didn’t like him, and he didn’t much care for her either. “My mistake.”
“And I’m not from Madison.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Jude said, mocking serious reconsideration of his statement. “You hail from a more cosmopolitan place on the outskirts of Madison. West Podunk, isn’t it?”
“West Porter,” Jay corrected, trying not to smile at his friend’s ribbing. The best he could do was twist his coming grin into a tight pucker.
“Right. Pardon me, Mr. West Porter, Wisconsin. Your home town may be a big fucking place, but it ain’t
this
big fucking place. I figured you knew that by now. You’ve been here three months—not three hours. There are rules of survival in this urban wasteland.” Without missing a beat, Jude snapped his fingers toward the least interested of their group. “Steverino, rule number one.
His eyes fixed on madams A cup and B cup as their g-stringed crotches thrust at each other, Steve puffed smoke and answered without hesitation. “Don’t talk to scum.”
“Right,” Jude agreed. He leaned a bit onto the circular table they were gathered ‘round near the stage and looked very seriously at Jay, as he might have at a wayward younger brother if being an only child hadn’t made that quite impossible. “Grady, those people
are
scum. For Christ’s sake, they piss on themselves to get warm for a minute. Don’t you understand? They are weirded out in the most revolting ways.”
Bunker was nodding emphatically. “He’s not shitting you, Jay. One day, this raggedy old motherfucker threw a handful of his own shit at my sister in Soho. Dropped his pants, did a squirt in his palm, and heaved it at her. Just because she wouldn’t give him a buck.”
Jay listened, swirling a red and white swizzle stick in his empty glass, glad now that he hadn’t mentioned anything about giving the bum some money. And especially not about the weird moment when Sign Guy had actually touched him. Man, wouldn’t Jude have a field day with that!
“There’s a lesson here, farmboy,” Jude said. “Go on, Bunk.”
“What Jude wants you to get out of this is profound,” Bunker explained.
“Profound?” Jay asked, his eyes batting rapidly at his friend and the fingers of his right hand scratching absently against the palm.
“Profound,” Bunker confirmed, with excess intensity. His words weren’t slurring, but Jay knew that his friend was a few pisses past drunk. Bunker Wallace, the man whose twenty-fifth birthday they had come to Buffalo Kabuki’s to celebrate after one more late night at the office (though it was more the truth to say that his birthday had conveniently fallen on a night when they were all at BK’s, which was every Friday night in fact), showed his liquor in his eyes. In the narrowing seriousness of his stare. Jude, on the other hand, showed it in his words. He talked louder, as if someone was cranking his volume up a notch with each drink. For Steve it was a slow slide to Mellowtown, and not long after that, while his cig bobbed up and down as he talked (Steve wasn’t a take-it-out-and-put-it-back-in kind of smoker—once lit, his cig stayed between his lips, slightly off center to the left, until it had burned down to the filter), he was likely to tell you for the fiftieth time about the sweetest piece of ass he’d ever had, Miss Glynis McChord, whom, to use his terminology, he’d devirginized after the prom in 1982. All the more impressive, he would surely add with a subsequent tabletop drum roll, considering she wasn’t his date. And Jay? He would get fuzzy—tired fuzzy—a state whose border was marked by signs he could just make out ahead. The sudden onset of the blinks was one of those signs, and at the moment they were hitting him pretty good, so he figured he could stand whatever inane insight Bunker was going to share with him since it would likely have faded in memory by morning.