Mockingbird (24 page)

I thought of my daughter, the little voyager in my womb I had come to call the G, and I was seized with panic. What kind of mother was I, to let myself go so long without sleep and food? Too weak to stand, I crawled downstairs to the kitchen. I dragged some milk out of the refrigerator and ate a bowl of raisin bran. Pregnancy books are very keen on raisin bran: extra iron in the raisins, bran to ease your constipation. Probably some cereal company could make a killing off pregnant women if they were to offer New Improved Raisin Bran—Now With Wheat Germ!

Halfway through my second helping the words of the phone call jumped back into my brain. “18628, you bought one June S & P at 649.50, ticket number 126.”

That had been my broker calling to confirm an order to buy. I had
bought a contract for the S & P!
Minimum margin: $14,000. A perfectly normal dip in the market could be costing me thousands of dollars while I sat stupidly on the kitchen floor eating breakfast cereal.

I scrambled upstairs to the TV and stared at the CNBC ticker. It was listing mining and lumber stocks, no use to me at all. I nearly screamed. Back over to the desk. Nothing showing on the computer, but my transaction book was lying next to the mouse pad with a pencil in it. I grabbed it off the desk.

Oh my God. There were four transactions noted, all occurring after the time Mr. Copper had mounted me, all listed in a cold, neat script that was not my handwriting. I stared at the notes, trying to understand them, my heart about to burst inside my chest—and then I made a long, strange noise, halfway between a moan and a laugh.

Mr. Copper had been perfect. Of course. He had made money. A lot of money. I forced myself to look at the entries in the transaction book more carefully, pulling the terse numbers into the story of what had happened while I had been banished from my own head.

At 9:20 a.m. Mr. Copper had bought one July coffee at the market, filling it at 129.00/lb. The exit fill at 9:55 was at 133.80. A single contract controlled 37,500 pounds of coffee. The Rider who told Momma once that all cash was cold had made a profit of $1800 in just over thirty-five minutes.

Now, with more money in my account to cover contracts and margins, he could afford to buy two contracts, this time in unleaded gasoline. At 10:25 a.m. he picked up positions at 70.20. One hour and ten minutes later he sold at 72.10. Total profit for that seventy minutes' work: $1596.

He had made his next move immediately, probably on the same phone call, also marked for 11:35 a.m. This time he shorted July coffee, selling two positions at 131.50. The market promptly burst like a popped jellyfish. When he made his exit fill just over an hour later, the price had dropped to 122.50. Time elapsed: eighty minutes. Total profit, a staggering $6750.

In three transactions Mr. Copper had realized a profit of $10,146. Which, added to my starting $6000, had given him just enough to cover his margins while picking up the S & P future at an entry fill of 649.50.

I scrambled across the room and died a thousand times waiting for the market index ticker. When it finally came at 1:40 p.m., the S & P was trading at 651.25. Up one and three quarters.

I thanked God, all the gods, Mr. Copper in particular, and crawled to the phone. I dialled my broker as fast as I could, made a mistake, hung up, dialed again, made another mistake, dialled a third time and let it ring. Someone at the other end picked up. “Account number?”

And I didn't speak.

“Account number?” said a woman's voice impatiently. Still I said nothing. She hung up. Discount brokers don't have time to waste.

Slowly I put the receiver down. Mr. Copper had put me in a position to win, and all I was doing was trying not to lose. That was the actuary in me. But I could never make a living as a speculator by playing it safe. The key to the art was to cut my losers and ride my winners out. Just for once, I had to try and ride my winner out.

Knowing it would be ten minutes before the S & P scrolled by, I forced myself downstairs for another bowl of cereal and a glass of water. By the time the 1:50 ticker ran I was feeling less shaky. Dreadfully tired in my body, but my mind was alert, humming with a keen adrenaline buzz.

The S & P had climbed to just over 652.

I watched it rise that whole afternoon. Finally at 2:20 it started to dip, giving me an excuse to sell. Tension had coiled me up like a mattress spring and I was only too grateful to end my trading for the day. The ticker read 655.25, but by the time my sell order was executed in Chicago, the price had dipped to 655 even. As luck would have it, the S & P immediately rallied, and went on to reach a high of 656.50 at New York closing time. I had bailed too early after all. Even so, I had made a profit of $3000 on the S & P ride.

My day's take exceeded $13,000, leaving me with more than $19,000 on account with the broker. I could take ten thousand out to cover the cost of fixing Mary Jo's roof and still have almost 10k left. A fierce exaltation gripped me, wringing out my poor exhausted body like a rag. I had found a way to make a living. I had found a way to combine my head for numbers with Momma's gift for prophecy. What more perfect job could there be for a woman one-half accountant and one-half fortune-teller? If I was cautious and I paid attention, if I picked the best trades I could find and was willing to make just a hundred or two a day, I could twist a living from my own precious art, my own secret magic.

For the first time, the Riders had done me a favor in exchange for mounting me.

For the first time, we were even.

To believe the Riders and I might be partners felt so good it was almost immoral. Ever since I could remember, they had been cruising like alligators just below the surface of my life, but now I could point to a moment when one of them had done right by me.

Candy, perversely, chose this of all times to lose her cheer and get suspicious. “Mr. Copper was just playing, Toni. That's what he does,” she said when I told her about our winnings. “He doesn't mean anything good by it. He just likes to win.”

“But sometimes it is personal, Candy. We're tied together, the Riders and us. They have to look out for us, or when would they get a chance to walk the world? Look at what happened with Angela when she was a baby. Momma was about to hurt her, or go crazy, or God knows what. So the Widow stepped in and removed her from the situation.”

“Now you think the Widow is a kindly grandmother?”

“Well, all right, not that exactly. But she has the best interests of the family in mind.”

“What
she
thinks are the best interests. She's like La Hag Gonzales, Toni. They want what they want. Just because your interests and Mr. Copper's were the same for one afternoon, don't think that suddenly the Riders care about you.”

“I didn't think Momma could do it to you.”

“Do what?”

“I hoped you would escape. I hoped you could believe that something beautiful was true. That not everything real was ugly.”

Candy said, “I don't want you to get hurt.”

She was not alone in her opinion that the Riders were not to be trusted. Expecting to get a big hug and a coffee-stained smile, I had gone to Mary Jo in triumph with the news that Mr. Copper had come through with the money to fix her roof. I had been disappointed. Immediately she began to fret at the thought of workmen cracking her little home open and letting the light into its dim corners. The morning the crew arrived from Sears, Mary Jo refused to open the door for them. I had to drive over and unlock her house using the spare key Momma kept on a hook above our kitchen sink.

Mary Jo was huddled in her bedroom with the blinds drawn, refusing to speak. I talked to the Sears guys and then brought Mary Jo to our house, where she spent the next four days, sleeping in Momma's bed while Daddy slept in a cot on the first floor. I felt sad to see her so upset. With Momma gone, the spark seemed to have fled from Mary Jo. I wished, helplessly, that I could be the friend to her that Momma had been, but that could never happen. Elena and Mary Jo had been blood-sisters, cronies, conspirators and accomplices. When Mary Jo's husband left her, Momma had been there, offering to put a curse on him free of charge. When her son, Travis, had left home to wander America, sponging off relatives rather than finding an honest job, Momma had listened to Mary Jo explain how he really wasn't a bad boy at heart. Chainsmoking, she had looked at baby pictures and nodded as Mary Jo tried against all the evidence to imagine a future in which her boy might make good.

At best I was Mary Jo's grateful goddaughter. I am ashamed to admit I was a little bit glad when the work was done and she could return home.

When Momma died, Mary Jo lost her last link to life outside her little house. She had some money coming in from her pension, some from Social Security, and some from a part-time job stuffing envelopes. Taken together, it was enough to buy her loaves of Wonder Bread and pay for her cable TV. If Momma had kept her promises and put Mary Jo down for some meaningful dollars in her will, things might have been different. She was bitter about that, but not surprised. Mary Jo had known my mother too long to be surprised when her promises broke like soap bubbles in the sun.

On the twelfth of July, Mary Jo called to complain about one of her dizzy spells just as I was heading out the door to pick Angela up at the airport. “What it is, is that new roof,” Mary Jo finished. “I think there's some radon or asbestos or something in those new shingles, got my head in a whirl.”

“Mary Jo, I have to go now. Angela is visiting from Canada. I have to pick her up at the airport and I'm fixing to be late. Maybe you should call a doctor about this dizzy spell of yours.”

“What? Oh. Oh, sure then.” Another long pause. “Your momma's dead, isn't she?”

“Yes, ma'am. She is.”

“Yeah.”

Another long pause. “Mary Jo, I have to go. Promise you'll call the doctor, all right? This isn't like you. I'll call when I get back to see how you're doing.”

“It's just a dizzy spell, dear. You don't have to call . . . Tell you what, you get Travis to give me a call,” she said with a sudden burst of bitterness. “You get that boy to give me a call and I'll tell him how I feel.”

“Call Dr. Richmond, Mary Jo. You like her,” I said, glancing at the clock on the kitchen stove. I was ten minutes behind schedule.

“You know, I still think he would amount to something if he got himself a good wife. If he knew what was good for him, he'd come back home and marry you, Toni Beau-champ. You're a good girl, Toni, but you could use a bit of a spark. One thing about Travis, he's lazy but he's got a spark. Just like his daddy.”

“I'll call you later,” I said, and I hung up the phone before I could hear her say anything else.

(Momma is lying on her chaise three months before her death. “They should rename this the Grandmother State,” she says. “We're always hip-deep in hunchbacked little old ladies who never complain. That's horseshit,” she says to me. “Don't be fooled. Getting old is hell. I just wish my brain had given out first. I don't think I'd mind dying so much if I were senile. God damn, but there's a lot of things I would be glad to forget.”)

I promised myself I would call Mary Jo when I got back from the airport and prayed her dizzy spell was a temporary thing, brought on by the sweltering July heat. I had been in her house many a summer afternoon, and without air conditioning it was a furnace.

At least my mother had been spared the humiliation of losing her mind. At least she had gone to her grave with her wits intact.

As I grabbed my purse and dug around for my car keys I found my hands were shaking and I was on the verge of tears. The sound of Mary Jo's voice, and the memory of my mother, shaking and bald in the chaise longue on the patio . . . Lord, I wished I could have made life easier for my mother. For all my resentments, I could see now how hard it must have been for her. How hard. Gods whispering inside her head and a little girl lost in the cold cold north. And me, who should have been some comfort to her. But instead I was the hatefulest child. And no way now to make it up to her.

I arrived just in time to catch Angela at the gate. We had exchanged pictures, but I would have recognized her without the photograph, so much did she look like the mother I remembered from my childhood. It took my breath away. Angela spotted me and her smile broadened as our eyes met. She strode past the other passengers, purse bumping at her hip, and stuck out her hand when she got to me.