The Laid-Back under this new name is such a success that parking along Pine is hard to find; he wants to spare Pru at least a long walk in the cold, though the doctor says exercise is good. He hates the cold. When he was little he had loved December because it had Christmas in it toward the end and he was so excited by all the things there were to get in the world that he never noticed how the dark and cold closed in, tighter and tighter. And now Dad is taking Mom off for this fancy holiday on some island with these putrid other couples, to lie there and bask while Nelson freezes and holds the fort at the lot; it's not fair. The girl doesn't always wear white slacks, the last time he saw her she had on one of that new style of skirt with the big slit down the side. There is a space in front of the long low brick building that used to be the Verity Press, between an old two-tone Fairlane and a bronze Honda station wagon, that looks big enough, just. The trick of tight parking is to swing your back bumper square into the other guy's headlights and don't leave yourself too far out from the curb or you'll be forever jockeying in. And don't be afraid to cut it tight on the left, you always have more room than you think. He pulls so close to the Fairlane Pru speaks up sharply, "Nelson."
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."