Mockingbird
I dithered for several days, trying to decide whether to go with a full-service broker or a discount house. Full-service brokers give you advice. They treat you well. You can leave them with instructions when you go on vacation, so they will sell or buy for you at given price points. They cover your behind for you. In exchange, they charge around $100 for each round trip; that is, for each time you get into and out of a market.
A discount broker doesn’t treat you nice, nor will he cover your butt. A discount broker supplies a voice at the other end of the phone who will relay your buy and sell orders to a runner who will take them down to the pit floor in Chicago where some poor hollering sinner who can’t get any other job will scream out your order until he gets the attention of a buyer or seller.
(The life of a Chicago floor trader is not a happy one. They spend all day on their feet screaming; their rates of laryngeal cancer are through the roof. The job is so conducive to hypertension that floor traders are insured at the same rates as skydivers; this I had noticed when studying mortality and claims tables for my actuarial exams. Floor traders also suffer excessively from pencil wounds, if you can believe it, delivered by people running around madly waving their arms.)
With the discount broker, you have to watch the ticker yourself and phone in every buy or sell in real time. If you fall asleep and lose your life savings, that’s your lookout. But a discount broker charges $20 for a round trip.
I went with the discount broker. My profit margins required me to supply my own vigilance.
After two weeks of imaginary trades, my six thousand dollars of pretend money had become $9370. I was ready to take the real plunge. I picked my broker and pored over the fat Global Futures Trading Handbook he faxed me. I resolved to make my first live trade on Monday morning when the market opened.
Friday afternoon I decided to amuse myself by initiating a few last imaginary currency trades to hold over the weekend and liquidate Monday morning.
I hadn’t realized how nerve-racking it would be to have a trade held across the weekend. Friday night I realized that a G7 meeting going on in Paris could have a huge impact on my speculation. I bought European newspapers to follow the progress of trade talks, hating the Brits for browbeating the German chancellor. The market in Germany opened late Sunday afternoon, Houston time, but a small player like me wouldn’t have access until Chicago opened Monday morning.
Sunday night I lost eight hours of sleep and seven thousand dollars thanks to the resolve of the G7 leaders to attack the high value of the U.S. dollar. My imaginary stash was down to $2440. I could only take out one cheap contract at a time, currencies or unleaded gasoline. I was one mistake away from being out of the game.
So I sat in an agony of indecision all day with $2440 imaginary dollars in my notebook and $6000 real ones on account with my broker. I saw an opportunity in wheat that I would have taken in an instant the previous week, when I had been winning. Now, I didn’t dare. All day Monday I watched the price of wheat wobble upward. If I had bought in the morning and sold at quitting time, I would have made almost six hundred dollars profit. But throughout the day there were six or seven times I could have lost substantially if I had bailed, and I would have bailed. I knew myself. Tapped out as I was, not daring to lose, I could not dare to win.
I turned off the TV and bought a paper to look through the want ads. Nothing for someone with my qualifications. Nothing for someone with any qualifications. If the job required any brain at all, you had to have seven years experience to apply.
I turned the TV back on to see what was happening with the Deutsche Mark.
I made chicken sopa for Dad and ate it myself when I remembered he was on the road again. I hadn’t noticed him leaving.
The Astros middle relief blew a game to the Cubs.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I went back over all my paper trades. I plugged data points into an Excel spreadsheet to get a better picture of what the markets had done in the two weeks I had been taking notes. I watched the ticker and tried to build an hour-by-hour profile of all the majors: currencies, coffee, cocoa, copper, soy, unleaded, wheat, corn, pork bellies, orange juice…Dawn came as I graphed the movement of the S & P stock index. At $14,000 for a contract, the S & P was far out of my reach, but a lot of people traded in it.
Still I could not sleep.
(It’s 9:30 at night. Momma has just come back from a meeting with Bill Friesen. These late meetings only happen when Daddy is out of town. Momma looks tired and her makeup is smeared. “Where’s your sister? Did you give her dinner? What is she yelling about?”
“I locked her in our room. Why do you have to work so much?” I am nine. “Why do you leave us alone?”
Momma takes her purse off her shoulder. “If there is a God—which I pray there is not—I will go to hell knowing that whatever I did wrong, at least I provided for my children.”)
Even Momma—haunted, god-ridden, laughing Momma—had done that much for her children. And I, who was so smart, who did so well in school, who played by all the rules, who wore the clothes she was supposed to wear and said the things she was supposed to say—I could not do so much. I was a woman now and I had a daughter and I could not provide for her.
I wept. And wept more when I found, deep down, that it wasn’t my daughter I felt guiltiest about. It was Momma I had failed first. I let her live and I let her die and I never made her life easier, my mother, who suffered so much.
Dawn Tuesday. CNBC’s morning show came on. I made a pot of coffee and drank it all before I remembered that pregnant women weren’t supposed to use caffeine.
I realized I was starving.
I went down to the kitchen and stared into the fridge and the pantry and then walked to the patio to look out at the garden. Let the kid eat me hollow from inside.
I felt as if I would never sleep again. I could have been a Rider puppet myself, made of sticks and strips of threadbare cloth, buttons and hanks of leather. It was seven in the morning, June 4. Already the thermometer on the patio read 85°. My hair was greasy and I smelled dirty. The sky was cloudless and the heat oppressive. From somewhere in the live-oak tree above me a mockingbird began to sing, beautiful liquid songs. It didn’t know about me, that I was broke and pregnant, that after a whole life of being the responsible one I was failing everyone around me, my daughter and my daddy, Mary Jo and Momma most of all. It just sang.
Hard to believe that any creature born into this world could have such a beautiful song. She may be a mimic, she may steal her songs from others, or change them, or forget them, but I still say there is no creature that does more honor to God than a mockingbird. If she is inconstant, it is her nature. If her songs are stolen, well, there is nothing false in the moment of her singing.
Back upstairs I picked up a pregnancy book and read the section on caffeine and wondered how I would feel if I gave birth prematurely to a low birth-weight baby. I imagined my daughter in an incubator, her tiny head sallow, struggling to draw air into lungs still wet with amniotic fluid. Tiny fingers curling and uncurling like flower petals.
I previewed the seventh month of pregnancy and found I should be prepared for heavy white vaginal discharge, constipation, heartburn, indigestion, flatulence, bloating (there it was again), occasional headaches and dizziness, nasal congestion and possibly nosebleeds as my blood volume soared; bleeding gums, leg cramps and backaches, swelling ankles, varicose veins in my legs, hemorrhoids, shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping (they weren’t wrong about that), clumsiness, and just possibly leaking breasts.
There was also a chance, they said, that I might be feeling “increased apprehension about the prospect of motherhood.”
I cried some more.
Back at my desk I printed out graphs and studied them. The stock market was opening in New York. Pretty people who never made the grades I did appeared on CNBC to chat over coffee and croissants on the morning show. Every one of them was perky and well-groomed, no doubt eager to spend another day c
elebrating all the little ways the rich were getting richer. Afterwards they would drive off in their wonderfully engineered foreign cars to families of sleek children in the suburbs.
The clock crawled on. It was hot. My hands were shaking badly with caffeine and exhaustion.
I thought about Candy’s magazines. They say one girl in four is subjected to some kind of sexual abuse before the age of twenty-one. One in twelve is the victim of rape or attempted rape.
How do you live in a world like that? How do you even look at it?
How do you look at Mary Keith, stepping off that building in Phoenix with her daughter in her arms? How do you look at the ads in Candy’s magazines? Sexy girls cut! How do you get up in the morning in that world? How could you ever think to bring a child into such a slaughterhouse?
A stink of gasoline and hot dust came through the balcony door, thick enough to make me gag. The smell filled me with terror. I think I might have screamed.
A long, brindled snake slid across the floor toward me. I jumped to my feet—too fast. Blood drained from my head, my vision went black and I staggered, tripping over my chair. I fell heavily to the floor, head swimming, vision gone, the room a blackness spangled with stars. I threw myself to the side, grabbed the edge of my bed and pulled. I screamed again as a nail of ice split through my left foot.
I grabbed at the bed but the covers slipped off, leaving me with an arm full of blankets. Something dry and smooth and terribly cold slid around my foot. It coiled around my ankle; paused; and then inched up my calf. The skin where it passed screamed and then went dead. I could no longer feel my foot. The room stank with the smell of dust and gasoline.
I struggled for breath. My leg went dead from the knee down. The snake’s cold head wound around the inside of my thigh. I cried, shaking uncontrollably. My vision came back for a moment and I saw Mr. Copper wrapped around me.
Then frost flowered across my eyes and I was gone.
TEN
I woke up cold and stiff with the sound of a telephone still echoing in my ears. I was holding the receiver. The voice at the other end of the line said, “18628, you bought one June S & P at 649.50, ticket number 126.”
I was sitting at my desk, utterly destroyed. My head ached fiercely and the stench of gasoline made me blind and dizzy. “What?” I whispered, but whoever was on the other end of the line had already hung up.
I put the phone down. I had been possessed. That’s what had happened. Mr. Copper had mounted me. I felt a quick memory of the skin on my calf going numb. A tree roach the length of my thumb scuttled across the top of my computer monitor. I didn’t have the strength to kill him. Tree roaches are so big they don’t squish when you step on them, they crunch. Another aspect of Houston I hadn’t mentioned to Angela when I was trying to get her to visit.
My eyes were watering and I was hollow with hunger. The computer’s clock said it was 1:02 P.M. I had been gone from my body for at least five hours. I remembered the cold press of Mr. Copper’s skin against mine. I had never heard Momma talk about meeting a Rider outside her head.
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: $1596.00.
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 $10,146.00. Which, added to my starting $6000.00, 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 dialed my broker as fast as I could, made a mistake, hung up, dialed again, made another mistake, dialed 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 fortuneteller? 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.”