Any persistent idiot, like Hero, can strain away at the door-frame isometrics and build impressive wads of chunky fibrous muscle with which you can lift the front end of any sedan to make the girls say Oooo. But if you want the kind of muscle structure that will move you from here to there very very quickly, that will enable you to slip a punch, snatch a moving wrist, turn a fall into a shoulder roll that will put you back on the balls of your feet, balanced and ready, then you’d better be willing to endure total expenditure over long, active and dogged periods. I was going to be slowed down by time and attrition, and maybe it had begun, but not to a degree as yet for me to notice, nor to a degree to make me doubt myself-and doubt, of course, is more fatal than slowed reflexes.
I had the heat going aboard. Meyer drank coffee and worked on his investment figures while I hotshowered the salt away, dressed in ancient, soft, treasured, threadbare checked shirt, gray Daks, and a pair of Herter’s Two-Point woodsman’s shoes, of oiled, hand-treated bull hide, worn to a condition as flexible and pliable as an Eskimo wife. In the shower I had begun to raise tentative voice in song, but had remembered another day, another shower, when that same song had been interrupted by a lady named Puss handing me in a well-made sample of the drink known as a McGee. So that song clogged and died, and I dressed and made the drink myself and took it into the lounge.
Meyer looked up from his work and said, “You look grotesquely healthy Travis.”
“And your eyes look grainy, and you look tired, and how long do you have to go five days a week and sit and watch the board like a great hairy eagle?”
“Not as long as I thought.”
“Indeed?”
“Sit and listen. Without a glaze in the eyes, please.”
“Proceed. I’ll try to understand.”
“These Fletcher Industries earnings statements. Look, accounting is flexible. There are choices. Each one is legal. However, say there are fifteen ways to handle different things to make earnings look a little bit better. So this outfit uses all fifteen, right up to the hilt. The last published quarter, it looks like they made forty percent more money than the quarter before that. I rework the statement and I come out with earnings not even flat. But down a little, even.”
“So?”
“At fifteen dollars a share it looked as if Fletcher was a bargain for a growth stock, selling at maybe twelve times anticipated earnings for this year. So on top of that which you call the fundamental picture, then there is the technical picture of the stock in the market. This buying pressure improves the technical picture. It becomes very desirable. Big volume attracts attention. Today I saw how it was going, how it was reacting, and so I took the risk, and I committed her all the way. Here is where her account stands. She’s got seventy-four hundred shares. Average cost per share is eighteen dollars. Today it closed at twenty-four and a quarter. So, right now, a short term gain of forty-six thousand dollars.”
“Of what!”
“She holds shares worth right now a hundred and eighty thousand, less the margin account debit. The supply is shrinking and the demand is increasing. It is moving too fast. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a statement from management saying they don’t know why all the big interest in their stock all of a sudden. It got out of hand too fast. I made this projection about where it is going to go next week. I have a used crystal ball an old gypsy gave me. I say a minimum eight points next week, so it will close between thirty-two and a half and thirty-seven. Traders will grab profits and get out. Usually I would wait, buy on the correction, and ride up with it again. But we get a trading suspension, maybe an investigation of corporate books. I think they used all the accounting gimmicks they could, and then they lied a little. It went up too fast and next week will be faster. So I start moving her over into that nice one I found for her to keep.”
“You’re telling me or asking me?”
“Telling you. What else? You are the expert on pigeon drops. I am the expert on the biggest crap game in the world.”
“But you have to talk to her and explain all this.”
“I do? Why?”
“Because she ought to come down here.”
He cocked his head. “Connie suggested?” I nodded. “I should discuss all this with her. It is only fair to her.”
“And she should sign some papers, maybe?”
“Very important-looking documents.” He scratched his chin, tugged at his potato nose. “One part of your thinking I don’t understand. That lousy fellow, that LaFrance, it makes some sense he should go to Santo to see if he can get bailed out by maybe peddling him the option he’s got on the Carbee land. So doesn’t he mention you?”
“If he mentioned me, it’s the same as telling Santo that he was a damned fool. If he admits he’s smashed and trying to salvage something; the price from Santo will go way down.”
“How can you be sure of how that idiot will react?”
“I can’t be sure. I just make my guess and live with it.”
The freeze hit low spots well to the west and north of the To-Co Groves, hit them hard enough so that all the smudge pots and airplane propeller fans and bonfires of old truck tires failed to save the dreams of a lot of the smaller growers. They expected the same on Saturday night, but the upper winds changed and a warm, moist breath began coming up from the lower Gulf and the Straits of Yucatan, moving across the peninsula from out of the southwest, and after some unseasonable thunderstorms, the afternoon was clear and warm and bright on Sunday when Janine Bannon arrived in the car Tush and I had fixed a quarter of a year ago.
I was watching for her, knowing when she had left the groves, and went and took her small suitcase from her and brought her aboard. She had been aboard before, when I had taken the Flush up the Shawana River, back when the Boatel was doing well, and they had told me their plans with an air of pleasure and excitement, so she knew the layout.
She looked trim and attractive in her green suit and yellow blouse, but thinner than she should have been. The difference in her was the way the vitality had gone out of her, deadening her narrow and delicate face, making her move like a convalescent, takIng the range and lilt and expression out of her voice. Even her dark hair had lost luster, and there were deep stainings under her eyes, fine lines around her mouth.
I took her back to the guest stateroom and she said, “I don’t want to be a bother. I should have found a place.”
“Which would be a very good trick right now. No bother. You know that. Get yourself settled in. Meyer will be over in a while for drinks and talk, and then we’ll go out and find some beef, or Chinese, or whatever you feel like.”
“Oh, anything is all right. Trav, it’ll just be for overnight. I have to get back.”
“That will depend on what Meyer has set up for you to take care of.”
A little while later I heard some small clatterings in the galley and the chunk of the refrigerator door. I went forward and found her bending over and frowning into the little freezer. She turned and said, “I’d feel a lot better about all this if you’d let me earn my keep, Trav. Connie has all that help, and they have their own ways of doing things, and I feel like a parasite. You have lots of stuff here. Honestly I like to cook.”
“Never volunteer, lady. Somebody will take you up on it. So you’re hooked.”
She smiled. “Thank you. You know things, don’t you? Like you know what people really want to do. Now go away and let me just potter around and find out where everything is and how everything works, all by myself.”
I went in and looked at the tape labels and picked out one of a lot of classical guitar with Julian Bream and started it rolling, adjusting it to that level that is not quite background and not quite for listening only. It wasn’t until Meyer was aboard and I called Janine in from the galley that it occurred to me that they had never met.