Rabbit is rich (47 page)

He says, "I see him, I
see
him, shut up and let me concentrate." He intends, with that heavy Chrysler's veloured steering wheel -a ratio on the power steering you could turn a cruise ship with to snap the car into its slot slick as a skater stopping on ice. God, figure skaters' costumes are sexy, the way their little skirts flip up when they skate ass-backwards, and he remembers, straining to see the Honda's rather low little headlights, how that girl's slit skirt fell away to show a whole long load of shining thigh before she arranged herself on the barstool, having given Nelson a brief shy smile of recognition. Mom-mom's ponderous Chrysler slips into reverse and his anticipation of ideal liquid motion is so strong he does not hear the subtle grinding of metal on metal until it has proceeded half the car's length and Pru is yelping, Jesus, like she's having the baby now.

Webb Murkett says gold has gone about as far as it can go for now: the little man in America has caught the fever and when the little man climbs on the bandwagon the smart money gets off. Silver, now that's another story: the Hunt brothers down in Texas are buying up silver futures at the rate of millions a day, and big boys like that must know something. Harry decides to change his gold into silver.

Janice was going to come downtown anyway to do some Christmas shopping, so he meets her at the Crépe House (which she still calls Johnny Frye's) for lunch, and then they can go to the Brewer Trust with the safe-deposit key and take out the thirty Krugerrands Harry bought for $11,314.20 three months before. In the cubicle the bank lets you commune with your safe-deposit box in, he fishes out from behind the insurance policies and U.S. Savings Bonds the two blue-tinted cylinders like dollhouse toilets, and passes them into Janice's hands, one into each, and smiles when her face acknowledges with renewed surprise the heft, the weight of the gold. Solid citizens by this extra degree, then, the two of them walk out between the great granite pillars of the Brewer Trust into the frail December sunlight and cross through the forest, where the fountains are dry and the concrete park benches are spray-painted full of young people's names, and on down the east side of Weiser past two blocks of stores doing scattered Christmas business. Underfed little Puerto Rican women are the only ones scuttling in and out of the cut-rate entranceways, and kids who ought to be in school, and bleary retirees in dirty padded parkas and hunter's hats, with whiskery loose jaws; the mills have used these old guys up and spit them out.

The tinsel of the wreaths hung on the aluminum lampposts tingles, audibly shivering, as Harry passes each post. Gold, gold, his heart sings, feeling the weight balanced in the two deep pockets of his overcoat and swinging in time with his strides. Janice hurries beside him with shorter steps, a tidy dense woman warm in a sheepskin coat that comes down to her boots, clutching several packages whose paper rattles in this same wind that stirs the tinsel. He sees them together in the flecked scarred mirror next to a shoestore entrance: him tall and unbowed and white of face, her short and dark and trotting beside him in boots of oxblood leather zippered tight to her ankles, with high heels, so they thrust from her swinging coat with a smartness of silhouette advertising as clear as his nappy black overcoat and Irish bog hat that he is all set, that they are all set, that their smiles as they walk along can afford to discard the bitter blank glances that flicker toward them on the street, then fall away.

Fiscal Alternatives with its long thin Venetian blinds is in the next block, a block that once had the name of disreputable but with the general sinking of the downtown is now no worse than the next. Inside, the girl with platinum hair and long fingernails smiles in recognition of him, and pulls a plastic chair over from the waiting area for Janice. After a telephone call to some far-off trading floor, she runs some figures through her little computer and tells them, as they sit bulky in their coats at the corner of her desk, that the price of gold per ounce had nearly touched five hundred earlier this morning but now she can offer them no more than $488.75 per coin, which will come to - her fingers dance unhampered by her nails; the gray display slot of the computer staggers forth with its bland magnetic answer - $14,662.50. Harry calculates inwardly that he has made a thousand a month on his gold and asks her how much silver he can buy for that now. The young woman slides out from under her eyelashes a glance as if she is a manicurist deciding whether or not to admit that she does, in the back room, also give massages. At his side Janice has lit a cigarette, and her smoke pours across the desk and pollutes the relationship this metallic temptress and Harry have established.

The girl explains, "We don't deal in silver bullion. We only handle silver in the form of pre-'65 silver dollars, which we sell under melt value."

"Melt value?" Harry asks. He had pictured a tidy ingot that would slip into the safe-deposit box snug as a gun into a holster.

The salesgirl is patient, with something sultry about her dispassion. Some of the silky weightiness of precious metals has rubbed off onto her. "You know, the old-fashioned cartwheel" -she makes an illustrative circle with daggerlike forefinger and thumb - "the U.S. Mint put out until fifteen years ago. Each one contains point seventy-five troy ounces of silver. Silver this noon was going for" - she consults a slip on her desk, next to the vanilla push-dial telephone - "$23.55 a troy ounce, which would make each coin, irrespective of collector value, worth" - the calculator again "$17.66. But there's some wear on some of the coins, so were you and your wife to decide to buy now I could give you a quote under that."

"These are old coins?" Janice asks, that Ma Springer edge in her voice.

"Some are, some aren't," the girl answers coolly. "We buy them by weight from collectors who have sifted through them for collector value."

This isn't what Harry had pictured, but Webb had sworn that silver was where the smart money was. He asks, "How many could we buy with the gold money?"

A flurry of computation follows; $14,662.50 would convert to the magical number of 888. Eight hundred eighty-eight silver dollars priced at $16.50 each, including commission and Pennsylvania sales tax. To Rabbit eight hundred eighty-eight seems like a lot of anything, even matchsticks. He looks at Janice. "Sweetie. Whaddeya think?"

"Harry, I don't know what to think. It's your investment."

"But it's our money."

"You don't want to just keep the gold."

"Webb says silver could double, if they don't return the hostages."

Janice turns to the girl. "I was just wondering, if we found a house we wanted to put a down payment on, how liquid is this silver?"

The blonde speaks to Janice with new respect, at a softer pitch, woman to woman. "It's very liquid. Much more so than collectibles or land. Fiscal Alternatives guarantees to buy back whatever it sells. These coins today, if you brought them in, we'd pay" she consults the papers on her desk again -"thirteen fifty each."

"So we'd be out three dollars times eight hundred eighty-eight," Harry says. His palms have started to sweat, maybe it's the overcoat. Make a little profit in this world and right away the world starts scheming to take it from you. He wishes he had the gold back. It was so pretty, that little delicate deer on the reverse side.

"Oh, but the way silver's been going," the girl says, pausing to scratch at some fleck of imperfection adjacent to the corner of her lips, "you could make that up in a week. I think you're doing the smart thing."

"Yeah, but as you say, suppose the Iran thing gets settled," Harry worries. "Won't the whole bubble burst?"

"Precious metals aren't a bubble. Precious metals are the ultimate security. I myself think what's brought the Arab money into gold was not so much Iran as the occupation of the Great Mosque. When the Saudis are in trouble, then it's really a new ballgame."

A new ballgame, hey. "O.K.," he says, "let's do it. We'll buy the silver."

Platinum-hair seems a bit surprised, for all of her smooth sales talk, and there is a long hassle over the phone locating so many coins. At last some boy she calls Lyle brings in a gray cloth sack like you would carry some leftover mail in; he is swaying with the effort and grunts right out, lifting the sack up onto her desk, but then he has a slender build, with something faggy about him, maybe his short haircut. Funny how that's swung completely around: the squares let their hair grow now and the fags and punks are the ones with butches. Harry wonders what they're doing in the Marines, probably down to their shoulders. This Lyle goes off, after giving Harry a suspicious squint like he's bought not only the massage but the black-leather-and-whip trick too.

At first Harry and Janice think that only the girl with the platinum hair and all but perfect skin may touch the coins. She pushes her papers to one side of her desk and struggles to lift a corner of the bag. Dollars spill out. "Damn." She sucks at a fingernail. "You can help count if you would." They take off their coats and dig in, counting into stacks of ten. Silver is all over the desk, hundreds of Miss Libertys, some thinned by wear, some as chunky as if virgin from the mint. Handling such a palpable luxury of profiles and slogans and eagles makes Janice titter, and Harry knows what she means: playing in the mud. The muchness. The stacks proliferate and are arranged in ranks of ten times ten. The bag at last yields its final coin, with a smidgeon of lint the girl flicks away. Unsmiling, she waves her red-tipped hand across her stacks. "I have three hundred and ninety."

Harry taps his stacks and reports, "Two forty."

Janice says of hers, "Two hundred fifty-eight." She beat him. He is proud of her. She can become a teller if he suddenly dies.

The calculator is consulted: 888. "Exactly right," the girl says, as surprised as they. She performs the paperwork, and gives Harry back two quarters and a ten-dollar pill in change. He wonders if he should hand it back to her, as a tip. The coins fit into three cardboard boxes the size of fat bricks. Harry puts them one on top of another, and when he tries to lift all three Janice and the girl both laugh aloud at the expression on his face.

Y "My God," he says. "What do they weigh?"

The platinum-headed girl fiddles at her computer. "If you take each one to be a troy ounce at least, it comes to seventy-four pounds. There are only twelve ounces troy measure in a pound."

He turns to Janice. "You carry one."

She lifts one and it's his turn to laugh, at the look on her ,face, her eyelids stretched wide. "I can't," she says.

"You must," he says. "It's only up to the bank. Come on, I gotta get back to the lot. Whaija play all that tennis for if you don't have any muscles?"

He is proud of that tennis; he is performing for the blonde girl now, acting the role of eccentric Penn Park nob. She suggests, "Maybe Lyle could walk up with you."

Rabbit doesn't want to be seen on the street with that fag. "We can manage." To Janice he says, "Just imagine you're pregnant. Come on. Let's go." To the girl he says, "She'll be back for her packages." He picks up two of the boxes and pushes the door open with his shoulder, forcing Janice to follow. Out in the cold sunlight and shimmering wind of Weiser Street he tries not to grimace, or to return the stares of those who glance wonderingly at the two small boxes clutched so fiercely in his two hands at the level of his fly.

A black man in a blue watch cap, with bloodshot eyes like marbles dropped in orange juice, halts on the pavement and stumbles a step toward Harry. "Hey buddy you wanna hep out a fren' - ' Something about these blacks they really zero in on Rabbit. He pivots to shield the silver with his body, and its swung weight tips him so he has to take a step. In moving off, he doesn't dare look behind him to see if Janice is following. But standing on the curb next to a bent parking meter he hears her breathing and feels her struggle to his side.

"This coat is so heavy too," she pants.

"Let's cross," he says.

"In the middle of the block?"

"Don't argue," he mutters, feeling the puzzled black man at his back. He pushes off the curb, causing a bus halfway down the block to hiss with its brakes. In the middle of the street, where the double white line has wobbled in summer's soft tar, he waits for Janice to catch up. The girl has given her the mail sack to carry the third box of silver in, but rather than sling it over her shoulder Janice carries it cradled in her left arm like a baby. "How're you doing?" he asks her.

"I'll manage. Keep moving, Harry."

They reach the far curb. The peanut store now not only has porno magazines inside but has put an array of them on a rack outside. Young muscular oiled boys pose singly or in pairs under titles such as DRUMMER and SKIN. A Japanese in a three-piece pinstripe suit and gray bowler hat steps smartly out of the door, folding a
New York Times
and a
Wall Street Journal
together under his arm. How did the Japanese ever get to Brewer? As the door eases shut, the old circus smell of warm roasted peanuts drifts out to the cold sidewalk. Harry says to Janice. "We could put all three boxes in the bag and I could lug it over my shoulder. You know, like Santa Claus. Ho ho."

A small crowd of pocked dark street kids mixed with shaggy rummies in their winter layered look threatens to collect around them as they confer. Harry tightens his grip on his two boxes. Janice hugs her third and says, "Let's push on this way. The bank's only a block more." Her face is flushed and bitten by the cold, her eyes squinting and watering and her mouth a detennined slot.

"A good block and a half," he corrects.

Past then the Brewer Wallpaper Company with its display rolls stiffening in the dusty windows like shrouds, past Blimline's Sandwiches and Manderbach Wholesale Office Supplies and a narrow place jammed with flat boxes called Hobby Heaven, past the cigar store with its giant rusting Y-B sign and the ornately iron-barred windows of the old Conrad Weiser Oyster House that now promises
Live Entertainment
in desperate red letters on its dark doors, across Fourth Street when the light at last turns green, past the long glass-block-inlaid facade of the Acme they say is going out of business at the end of the year, past Hollywood Beauty Supplies and Imperial Floor Coverings and Zenith Auto Parts and Accessories with its sweetish baked smell of fresh tires and window of chrome tailpipes they go, man and wife, as the wind intensifies and the sparkling sidewalk squares grow in size.