The Donzerly Light

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “What’s your point, Carrie?”

  She drew the back of her hand across her nose. “My point is it’s not perfect anymore.”

  “We’re adults, Carrie,” he informed her, taking a sip of Jack. “Things aren’t always perfect all the time.”

  “I know,” she agreed. “But you don’t seem to care that it once was.”

  Frustrated, Jay took a long belt of whiskey and set the glass down hard on the two thousand dollar leaded glass coffee table. “This is stupid, okay? All right. I’m sorry the photographers had to tramp in here, and I’m sorry the ones on Sunday knocked over a lamp, and—”

  “Dammit, Jay!” She shouted, her fist thumping the chair by which she stood. “It’s not about the photographers or the reporters or the damn lamp they broke! I don’t care about that lamp! I hated that lamp! I hate everything in this place! I hate this place!”

  And she stopped there, and closed her eyes for a moment to regain some calm, some composure. She hadn’t wanted to yell, to lose control. But she had. And Jay had heard her, loud and clear.

  “Go on,” he said after the ringing of her outburst had died. “Am I next? Does your hate extend to me?”

  “Hate you? I don’t know you enough to hate you anymore.”

  “So what the fuck is this all about then, Carrie?”

  “You, you blind, money hungry fool. It’s about you.”

  He nodded dismissively. “Right. I see. I’m a fool because I want to do well. This is why you’re pissed off at me?”

  “This has nothing to do with doing well, or being successful. It’s all about money to you. Money to buy things. This place, these...” She sneered at the room and its contents. “...ugly things you’ve put in here. Money for the sake of having money.”

  He pointed harshly at her wrist. “Money bought you that bracelet, Carrie!”

  She glared at him and ripped the gift from Tiffany’s off her wrist and threw it at him. It missed, sailing past his ducking head and crashing against the balcony window. “I didn’t want that! I didn’t need that! You gave it to me because it cost five thousand dollars!”

  “Six thousand,” he corrected her as he sat straight again.

  “You see, that’s it. I don’t care what it cost, but to you all it is is cost.” She stepped toward him, her face an imploring mask. “Jay, don’t you see what you’re doing? You have money, more money than you’ll ever need, but it still won’t be enough.”

  “Enough? What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said, and from the blank look on his face he had either learned how to act far better than ever or...or he had truly forgotten. But how could that be? How could he forget who he was? “I’m talking about the fact that being rich now can’t erase being poor when you were a child.”

  He glared at her, his fists bunching against the sofa’s leather cushions. “You’re delusional.”

  “Am I?”

  “I want to be a success and you...you want to make all kinds of shit out of it.”

  “A success?” she challenged. “Measured how? By character? Respect?” She shook her head at him. “No, by dollars. By the stuff you call ‘green’.”

  “So what?”

  “So...” But she couldn’t communicate with him. Not who he was now, who he had become. But maybe she could touch what he was. The old Jay Grady. She went to him and knelt close to his feet and took one of his hands in hers. “Was poor all that bad, Jay? Was it? You had your mother, your father. You were together. It was tough, sure, but you had a family.”

  He pulled his hand from her tender grasp. “What do you know about being poor?”

  “My family didn’t have much money either, Jay. Times were hard for everyone.”

  “Hard? Were they?” He stood and walked away from her, seething, then faced her once again, his face a rising tide of old pain and anger. “Tell me, when you were eleven did most of your folks’ farm get sold off at auction by a bunch of men in suits?” He waited briefly for a response, but none came. “No? Well, did a man from the Madison Merchants Bank tell your father he should have been a little less farmer and that much more businessman? Hmm? When you were eleven going on twelve was there still power coming down the pole at Christmas? Was it colder outside than inside at your house? Did you have to start killing the chickens that laid the eggs, just to eat? Hmm, Carrie Elizabeth Stiles, did any of that happen to you?” She rose from her knees and stood. “Did your father have to take a job sweeping up at the Miracle Dairy to try and hang onto the five acres the bank hadn’t foreclosed on? Did you have to go into town with your mother to try and barter some eggs for the back medicine your dad needed?” He paused, his eyes puddling with wet rage. “Did...did you ever have to wait in the car behind Chuck’s Filling Station while your mother went in to ‘talk’ with old Chuck about getting a few gallons of gas for the old Buick? Did you ever have to wonder how it was she got him to pump those few gallons with no eggs to barter and no money to pay, or why she always wiped her mouth a lot with the back of her hand and swallowed again and again and stared glassy-eyed at the road after driving away from the station?” A tear spilled down his cheek, then another. “Did your parents argue all the way into town one day while you sat in the back seat, wishing they would stop? Did your parents ever argue like that, Carrie, about little nothings because they were so damn embarrassed about having to go to the County Relief Office to ask for the first Goddamn bit of charity either of them had in their whole lives?” There was something in his gaze now, a distant madness glinting off the tears. “Tell me, were your parents driving home with that first fifty dollar relief check when a police car broadsided them in an intersection? Were your parents killed, Carrie? Did the front half of their car get sliced off in a collision and spin into a light pole? Hmm?! Did it?! Did your parents burn to death in the front of their old Buick while you screamed from where you’d been safely buckled in the back?! Did you?!” And she was crying now. Crying with him, for him. “Did your parents die for fifty damn dollars? Did they?”

  And he stopped then for a moment and wiped his eyes. Breathed and regained some composure as he stared at Carrie’s tear-streaked face.

  “Were you that kind of poor, Carrie? Was it like that for you, too?”

  She wanted to go to him, but she knew that she could not. That he would turn away from her. All she could do was pity him with sad and empty eyes. “You see the bad, Jay. That’s all. You don’t even see the love they had for you, for each other, to do what had to be done.”

  “They died virtually penniless, Carrie. When that police car plowed into them, two people with empty pocket and broken dreams were erased from God’s little ledger.”

  She shook her head at him, lost at what she was seeing and hearing. “Why are you like this now? What has happened to you?”

  “I’m getting ahead, that’s what. Far enough ahead that I won’t have to die for fifty dollars someday.”

  “You think that,” she said, her head shaking again. “But you’re really losing yourself. That’s what’s really happening.” She chanced a step toward him, just one. “My God, Jay, we used to lay in bed and talk about getting married, and baby names, and how many boys and how many girls, and would there be shutters on the windows. Green shutters, remember?”

  “The shutters were your idea,” he said, then turned his back to her and looked out to the buildings rising on the far side of the park.

  “You crave something that I hardly care about, Jay,” she said to his back. “You need it more than anything now. More than anyone.”

  And to that he crossed his arms and said not a thing.

  “Is there love in your wallet, Jay Grady?”

  And said nothing still.

  “Part of me will always love you,” she said. “The rest will try to forget.”

  Then he heard her walk away, and heard the bedroom closet door slide open, and heard clothes being yanked from their hangers. And as he walked onto the b
alcony and into the summer night’s air, he closed the door on the sound of weeping coming from inside.

  Fourth Interrogation

  August 15...1:50 a.m.

  “It wasn’t a surprise,” Jay said, his voice resigned to things that had come, and gone, and could not be changed. A cold and guilty sadness filled him, and in a punishing way he thought it nowhere near cold enough. “I saw the signs.”

  “Really?” Mr. Wright asked, mocking obviously. “You were one observant fellow, weren’t you? So what tipped you off, Sherlock? The way she withdrew when you shoved some new lifestyle she never wanted down her throat? Was that it?”

  Jay hesitated, some anger holding him back, an animus toward this man who seemed to jar and jab him at every opportunity. Who seemed to revel in testing him. But his hesitance at that moment came less from that than from the sudden realization that this man reminded him so much of Jude, in so many ways. His surety, his command of the moment, his ability to toss desultory monikers about as easily as a less refined person might spit vulgarities—though the old Judester could play that game as well, Jay remembered. God, Jay thought, how similar they were. In another life Jude Duffault might never have shot for broker, instead choosing to do what this man did. Whatever the hell that was.

  “Was that the sign that tipped you off?” Mr. Wright asked again, grinning superiorly, not knowing just how far off the mark he was in his thinking at the moment.

  “No,” Jay said, shaking his head. “Not those kind of signs. His signs.”

  And then the man who called himself Mr. Wright got it. “The bum.”

  “Yes,” Jay confirmed, and he might have felt somewhat the big dog right then, but there was no juicy bone to gloat over. There was only bleak memory.

  “There was something on his sign?”

  Jay nodded. “The day before mine and Carrie’s blow up I was—”

  “Monday?”

  “Yes,” Jay said, replying to the interruption. “Monday. I was heading home after work. Jude was walking with me. He was talking about something. Probably money, I think it’s safe to say. I was listening. Until we got to the corner I was listening.”

  “The corner?” Mr. Wright checked, then answered his own question. “Across from Trinity Church. And him.”

  “When we got to the crosswalk and were waiting for the light, I could see his sign.”

  “What did it say?”

  “The same thing it said when I gave it a glance on my way into work. And then some.”

  Fourteen

  Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign

  “Twenty percent, man, can you believe that?!” That’s what Jude was saying. It was one of the things he was saying. Exclaiming, actually, as the excitement over their weekly ROI was driving him. Sure, it was impressive, but impressive was the norm now. At least to Jay, it was. An expected part of happenings no more exciting than...no more exciting than every so often seeing a bunch of coins all come up heads. Of course from that there would come this thing that made this sweet ROI possible, that was making them rich and their clients a shitload of green to boot. Both things that hardly held Jay’s interest anymore, and not at all at the moment as he looked across Broadway to where his friend?/benefactor? sat on his upturned five gallon bucket and showed the world his sign for that day.

  C A S H

  ‘N

  C A R R Y

  A rather simple one, Jay found himself thinking, critiquing, as the traffic noise and Jude’s euphoric rant blended to a singular background hum. Cash ‘N Carry. Well, there was plenty of cash these days, and none of them—he, Jude, Steve, or Bunker—were having any trouble whatsoever carrying whatever fell into their lap. Yes, Cash ‘N Carry it was, Jay agreed, wondering if maybe his take on it was what the sign meant.

  It means what it means, Jay recalled, so of course it meant that. It meant just about whatever he wanted it t—

  And that was when the airport van cruised by, passing between him and Sign Guy, between him and the sign leaning against the bum’s knees, then continuing down Broadway, leaving the way clear a second later again to see...

  C A S H

  O R

  C A R R I E

  Jay blinked, once, twice, then a third time to clear his eyes. To make his vision right again, because that wasn’t what the sign had said just a minute—

  And another vehicle passed between them, a blank-sided bobtail delivery truck, its flat yellow cargo box a bright square flash that was there and then gone, leaving...

  C A S H

  I N

  C A R R I E

  Jay stared at the sign for a few seconds, and then he shook his head. Gave it a good, solid shake to snap this little thing that was not dancing coins, or knowing stocks, or even a placard announcing his waitress’s forgotten name, from his head. And when his head stilled and his gaze set upon the sign once again, another vehicle drove by, slower than the flow of traffic. A tour bus with Asian faces gawking out, taking in the grandly bland sight of Wall Street from its terminus. And when that, too, had passed there was left the grunt of a big diesel throttling away and the drone of Jude prattling on, and across Broadway...

  C A S H

  ‘N

  C A R R Y

  Just that innocuous sign. And above it the bum’s happy face, smiling and nodding right at Jay.

  Fifth Interrogation

  August 15...1:59 a.m.

  “Thinking on it now, that was probably the beginning.”

  “Of what?”

  “The change,” Jay answered. “When things turned...different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Bad,” Jay told him.

  Mr. Wright hung on that one word for a silent moment. On its singular meaning, on how his prisoner had spoken it, clear eyed, clear voiced, as if bad was a bedfellow he had come to know and detest. “What turned bad?”

  “The dream.”

  “Your green dream?” Mr. Wright asked, his manner quieted, the antagonism he could wield deftly suppressed now. “How did it turn bad?”

  “I heard someone say something somewhere—on a talk show, or maybe I read it—that when your dreams come true, your nightmares get jealous. Maybe the nightmares had been put on hold long enough.”

  Mr. Wright nodded, in that way that meant, ‘Go on’.

  “It started to change the day after the blow up,” Jay began, then specified before his captor sought clarification. “On Wednesday. At lunch.” Italian, Jay recalled. It had been years since he’d had good Italian food, but back then it had been good. Damn good, even considering the day, and what had been spinning about in his head. Even considering what began next. “With a phone call it started to change.”

  Fifteen

  Planting The Bad Seed

  Jay sat at their table, a primo spot near a window that one could look out and see Liberty Island, and thought to himself as he carved off little bites of Grazi’s manicotti that he had come a long way from Reubens at Greenie’s. He’d come a long way from many things.

  “So what’s up?” Jude asked him between bites of lasagna.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With you? All you’re doing is eating.”

  “We are at lunch,” Jay said.

  “No, I’m at lunch. You’re somewhere else.” Jude took a drink of Jack and Coke. Even at lunch he was doing Jack, now. “So where the hell are you?”

  “Wherever it is, don’t go there,” Jay mildly warned his friend, and forked a bite of manicotti into his mouth.

  Jude stopped eating and stared at his friend for a moment. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  Jay chewed, swallowed, and carved another bite without replying.

  “Is she busting your balls aga—” Then Jude was grabbing for his hip to shut the pager’s beep off. He took modern technology’s equivalent of the leash in hand and read the number. It was the office, and there was a 911 appended to it. “Bunk must need something bad. I’ll be right back.”

  “Take your time,” Jay
said wishfully as Jude got up and headed for the phones. He could take all the time he wanted, Jay thought, because he was not going to think of Carrie this day. No, not this day, and not this night. That he had decided upon waking alone in bed for the first time in recent memory. She was out of his life, and out of his mind. Out of the way, too, of further possibilities. So Jude and his nagging could just stay away for as long as he wanted, a span of time that turned out to be not long at all Jay realized as he saw his friend hurrying back to their table, his face edged with that tight anger he could muster.

  “Let’s go,” Jude told him, not sitting down. He took a hundred from his pocket and tossed it next to his unfinished plate of lasagna.

  “What’s wrong?” Jay asked.

  “Not here,” Jude said quietly but firmly. “Let’s walk.”

  * * *

  They walked briskly up Albany to Broadway and turned right there, heading for Wall, Trinity Church and its cemetery just ahead. Jude hadn’t said a thing yet, having seethed with silent fury all the way from Grazi’s. And Jay had just let him be, because he could see that something had really gotten to his buddy. Gotten to him and stoked his fire. But as they approached the church the boil within Jude settled to a high simmer and he started to talk.

  “That was Steve who paged me. He got word from someone inside S&M that Mitchell is going to sue us.”

  “For what?”

  “Remember those agreements we signed that you were afraid of breaking? Well, inside there were some very proper non-compete clauses. And Teddy Malone, well, he was Mitchell’s prospect first, so it’s lawyer time.” And right then Jude thumped a fist against his leg and muttered, “Fuck!”

  They walked in silence to the crosswalk and waited for the light, but once there Jude started up again, complaining about the effect a lawsuit could have on their fledgling business, what it could do to their potential client base. All sorts of ominous things that Jay heard without really hearing, his friend’s words fading to a drone that hummed along with the rough song of traffic, because over Jude’s shoulder there was something quite interesting unfolding.