“The stocks never came back to you?”
Jay shook his head. “It was time for tails. Death on parade.”
“Whenever the coins came up tails,” Mr. Wright said. “Why didn’t you just not look?”
Jay sniffed a gleeless chuckle. “I lost everything, mister. Apartment. Possessions. Money. Stocks. Bonds. Do you know how hard it is to live in that kind of state without ever having to be in the presence of a few measly coins? A few quarters for a cup of coffee, some nickels and dimes for a donut? It’s impossible not to have to look.”
“Could you have?” Mr. Wright asked, the question visibly troubling Jay as he considered it. “Not looked if it had been possible? If you hadn’t needed the change.”
Uh, sir, your change. I believe you are going to need your change.
Could he have? Or did he need the change?
Or did it need him?
Still so much he didn’t know, didn’t understand, after all these years.
“I don’t know,” Jay answered, wondering what reason it was that slunk around this bit o’ his existence, afraid or unwilling to show itself. Why couldn’t he not look? Why couldn’t he have run from the bum? Why, why, and why again? More why’s than you could shake a stick at, and not an answer to be had. “I really don’t know.”
“So you looked, and you saw,” Mr. Wright recounted. “You saw death coming. The death of a lot of innocent people coming.”
Jay was quiet for a moment, thinking how difficult it was to make words convey what his life had been. How vile some parts of it had been. “I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I tell? Why didn’t I warn? Why didn’t I try to stop what I saw from happening?”
“You tried that first time, you said. To get to the bridge to stop it. What about after that? Did you ever think of maybe making a phone call? Of warning someone?”
Jay jerked his head at the file. “If you have in there what you say you have in there, then you know I did, and you know what I got for my trouble.” Six months in the Fairfax County Detention Center was his reward for attempting to avert a tragedy, the crash of a corporate Learjet into a Baptist church in Virginia. He had tried to warn of that, had run into a police station on a Sunday yelling at the desk officer that a jet was going to crash into the Zion Fellowship Baptist Church, and that it was going to happen soon, God, soon. Told the sergeant that he could already smell the stench of jet fuel spraying over the congregation, and could taste the acrid black smoke that would be stealing life from seventy-eight people so very soon unless someone did something, and did something NOW! And to his ranting, and his wild refusal to leave the premises, the police put him in cuffs and dragged him off to a cell, where he lay for ten minutes before feeling his skin tighten and crack and crinkle, and his lungs gulp for air that had become fire and soot and things unbreatheable. Where he died and dissolved into that unimaginable nothingness, tasting its screamless terror for the eternity of an instant before gagging back to life on the cold concrete floor.
Death had come, and it had left, taking near four score lives with it, leaving Jay to answer the inevitable questions, the sorts of inquiry directed at one so plainly suspect. How did you know, Mr. Grady? That plane went down; did you do something to it to make it crash? Had you been to that airport that day? Near it? Had you known the crew? Seen them? Been close to them? The mechanics? The fuelers? Did you have a grudge against the company that owned the plane? Operated it? Cleaned it? Painted it? Do you like fire, Mr. Grady? Did you like fire as a child? Do you like to see things burn? People burn?
And without answers to satisfy, one more thing had been said. You’ll be staying with us for a while, Mr. Grady? Until we nail you or clear you.
They could do neither, and it was a judge that had finally ordered his release.
But not before those six months behind bars. With criminals. Real criminals. Killers. Rapists. Molesters. Robbers. Eating with them, sleeping with them, showering with them. Running from them, from what they wanted from him. From what they were willing and capable of taking from him. What they took from others whose screams Jay had listened to as their bodies and minds were violated. A hundred and eighty four days he had been locked in with the animals, fearing death at their hands, dreading the death that did come twenty one times during those terrifying days and nights, dragging him down to nothingness only to surface again, ready for more.
“I had my fill of jail, mister,” Jay said. “If I was going to die again, and again, and again, I wasn’t going to do it in there. I tried telling, but who listens to a crazy man?”
“Some might say I am,” Mr. Wright offered, but the barb was mild.
“Then you’re member of an exclusive club,” Jay responded.
Mr. Wright opened the file and moved through a few pages, scanning the contents with a downward look as if reading through nonexistent bifocals. The aging process had got him somewhere, Jay thought. But not in those hands, unless years could chisel muscle and bone into those menacing mounds of dexterity.
“What happened to your friends?” He looked up. “Your girl?”
“I never saw them again,” Jay answered. “I heard nothing about Bunker or Steve. Christine? I suspect she hitched herself to another star.” After all, that’s all he’d been to her: a rising star she could ride to earthly heavens. “In fact, I’m sure she did.”
“And Jude?”
“Before I left the city a few weeks later I was buying a cup of coffee, and there was a radio playing behind the counter of the diner I was in, and I caught a blurb on the news that said some guy had put a gun in his mouth and jumped out a window of a building on Wall Street, and that he pulled the trigger just before he hit. They told his name, and I wasn’t surprised.”
“Interesting way to go,” Mr. Wright commented.
“Nothing ordinary for Jude,” Jay agreed, surprised for just a moment at the concurrence that had just occurred between them. Yes, something was different about his captor now. A captor—if the cuffs hadn’t been on still—that he might have begun considering some sort of host. “I guess he thought I was his ticket to the top, and without that there was only the grind. I don’t think he could handle the grind after having what we had.”
Mr. Wright nodded through a thought right then. “You ever think of it, Grady? Checking out? Ending heads, and tails, and the visions? Saving yourself the agony? Did you ever consider it?”
“I thought about it,” Jay replied. “But I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“That’s the golden question, isn’t it?”
“It appears to be,” Mr. Wright asked. “Still, to see death again and again and not be able to prevent it? Some might say that was an exercise in futility.”
“Do you?”
Mr. Wright did not answer. He glanced down at the file again, briefly, moving on. “You said you left the city. Why?”
“You can’t run away in place.”
“Running from death, were you?”
“I though maybe I could,” Jay admitted. “I was wrong. It wasn’t in a place. It was in me. When I figured that out after a few dozen more times dying, I just went searching.”
“For what?”
“A place where I could be a nobody. Not noticed. Not cared about.” Jay snickered dryly. “A place to die in peace, you could say.”
“And you found it in Plainview,” Mr. Wright prompted.
Jay nodded. “I wandered for two years after they released me from jail. Passed through just about every noplace east of the Mississippi.”
“So, was it a success?”
“Being a nobody? For almost six years it was. I lived with my nightmare. I died and I lived again. And again. And again. I swam in that nothingness so many times that I prayed one of the times it would just swallow me up and keep me. But it never did.” Jay paused. “Then, a week or so ago, something happened.”
“What?”
“A fat woman wouldn’t take my dollar.”
Mr. Wright’s
brow bunched down. “Come again?”
“She wanted something else instead,” Jay said.
Mr. Wright closed the file and leaned forward. “What?”
Part Two
Round Trip
Twenty Seven
Hit
“Exact change, please.”
Jay Grady looked up and saw that it wasn’t Doris working the counter at Plainview, Missouri’s small and sweltering post office, and that was how it began, this change, with a strange woman’s refusal of the dollar he’d put down for his purchase.
“Sir, exact change,” the woman repeated when Jay didn’t respond, seeming annoyed though there was no line behind him. No customers in the place at all, in fact, but then there were only nine hundred and seventy three people left in Plainview, hardly enough to support the mini-mart on Carson Street, or the gas station at the intersection of Traction and Wells, and surely so few people that, in the hundred or so times Jay had come in to buy his stamps and pick up his mail, he had seen less than a dozen other people. Other than Doris, of course, and this fiendishly hot August morning her familiar face was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Doris?” Jay asked, scanning the woman’s non-regulation floral blouse for a name tag like Doris wore, which was how he’d learned her name. Not that he’d spoken more to her than his usual ‘One stamp’, and then a meek and proper ‘Thank you’ once the little square of gummed paper was passed over. Still, it was somehow comforting to know her name, and equally disconcerting to not find some identifier on this new lady who was not supposed to be here.
“What?”
“Doris is here on—”
“She’s out today, okay,” the woman said sharply. She was thirtyish and thick and as bitter looking as a dying tree, withering in barren soil and unable to do much about it. Likely she had worked at the Air Force base outside of Plainview, and that would explain it, her sour countenance and manner. One day a good government job unpacking thousand dollar toilet seats for the transport planes that used to come and go, or maybe sweeping and swabbing the halls of the base hospital, and the next thing you know there’s no more evil empire, and then you’re a second string postal clerk stuck in a dying town because of family or finances or whatever her damnable anchor to this place was. In any event, regardless of reason, this woman was here and not happy and was glaring at Jay as sweat glistened on her pale and pink face. “And I ain’t got no change, so if you want just one stamp you better cough up thirty two cents.”
Jay looked to the counter, to where his fingers still rested upon the one dollar bill he’d put there when voicing his request (and expecting Doris to hear it and fill it, as usual), and he knew what the strange woman was asking him to do. His gaze rose to her once again and he said gravely, “But...I just need one stamp.”
She gave him a look like he was some sort of dumbshit and said, “Look, mister, I ain’t got no change, okay? Your pal Queen Doris had to tootle off last night because her poor dear brother got hurt, or so she says. And whether that’s the gospel or not, whether she’s playing blackjack on the river boats, I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is that she is not here and wherever she is the key to the damn safe is with her, so I can’t get you or no one any change.”
Jay could only stare back at her for a moment, his heart throttling up. “But...”
“Jesus Criminy, mister, it’s only thirty two damn cents. Ain’t you got any change?”
Change? Hell, yes, he had change. A pocket full of it. He’d just fed three sacks of cans into the aluminum recycling machine out front of the Super Suds Laundromat, and was planning, like usual, to stop by the Rev M Up mini mart to dump his take blindly into the change sorter they had next to the ATM machine right inside the door. The sorter would take it, chewing and eating the rounds of metal like some favorite meal, and dutifully spit back what bills he was due, and what change there was that didn’t quite take the total to the next multiple of one hundred. He could scoop that change up without a look, like he could here most days when Doris would slide his sixty-eight cents across. But exact change? Did this woman know what that meant? That he would have to reach into the hidden depths of his pocket and pull out some change, and that he would have to count out thirty two cents, and that to do so he would have to look at the change, and very possibly stare death in the eyes yet again? And weren’t there enough (no, too many, too, too many) times when he could not avoid having to look. Like at the truck stop up off the once thriving business loop (which served now no more a purpose than a stubborn vein feeding blood to a gangrenous appendage) where the cashier insisted on counting out one by one into his palm what change he had coming from the occasional burger he purchased there, the collection of which he would often close his fist quickly around, but not before glimpsing what was there. Before knowing what was coming. Death again.
The Plainview Grill was another difficult arena in which to tread. There he might see the tails on the lunch counter, a tip left by another or change just returned by Chloe the waitress. An errant glance there could do it. Could bring the damning vision on. And though he tried not to look, try was all he could do, because the dull glint of an old penny, or the bright spark of a newly minted dime caught his eye, there was no point in not looking, because if they were tails (and, God, so many times they were) there was no turning back. The die had been cast.
But here, in this box of a place where he came for his stamp, where he often came to buy that stamp and mail his letter and retrieve his mail, where he came to make the record which had to be made, here he had been free of the worry of dying that plagued him most every other place, and had for eight years. Here Doris would serve him, holding her hand out and he his, making the return blindly, and he would be safe. As safe as one could be with death waiting at every place where money changed hands.
But not this day.
“Hey, do you want a damn stamp or not?” the woman asked brusquely, her hands planted on her side of the counter, fingers drumming impatiently on the old wood.
Yes, he did want it. He had to have it. To make the record. To continue making the record. But...
“In about three seconds I’m gonna turn my back on you and you can go wish yourself a stamp.” Her lips pursed tight now, and the drumming grew louder on the counter. “One.”
Jay eased the dollar bill off the counter and pushed it into his back pocket. He could feel the envelope there, all ready to go but for the stamp. His hand came forward and slipped into the front pocket of his jeans, slithering down deep to where a bulge of change lay thick against his thigh.
“Two,” the woman counted, fingers thumping all together now, eight fleshy drumsticks beating at once upon the counter.
Jay’s own fingers worked together in his pocket, gathering several coins and pulling them into his palm before folding down around them, a fist coming out. A fist he stared at while the woman glared at him.
“You waitin’ for your hand to rot away, mister?” she berated him.
One finger, two fingers, a quarter, a nickel, three fingers, a penny, four fingers, a penny.
“Well howdy damn doody,” the woman said, seeing what she’d been waiting for. “Why that was so hard, mister, I don’t know.”
She held her hand out, but Jay only stared at the coins in his hand. Four coins. Thirty two cents. Exact change. And all...
...heads? Heads again? Yes, heads. Heads and...
...more.
32
It came that clear, that defined. A number. A vision of a number. Not death, but a number. More than the sum value of what lay in his palm. Not the count of cents gathered there. More. A number.
32
And...and still more from the heads, more that was not a dread wave of death rushing at him. Another number.
25
The quarter.
5
The nickel.
1
A penny.
1
The other penny.
But not
four numbers. Not the parts in sequence. No.
25 5 1 1
Parts of one number.
25511
A large number.
25,511
And still the other one.
32
Two numbers. Numbers he saw, numbers he knew, and from heads this time, from old heads that were telling new tales, and a breath left his chest, one that felt as if it had been there an eternity, because the tale being told right then was not death. Was not death.
Something had changed. Something was different. Heads like the ones that had shown him riches were speaking to him, but they were not the ones that had brought him wealth. These were speaking a language he did not understand. A language of numbers. Their song right then two numbers.
32
25,511
“Oh, what the hell is it now, mister?” the woman demanded, exasperated. Her open hand turned and planted itself loudly on the counter.
An old habit bubbled up, and Jay tipped his hand to the side and spilled the coins to the counter, one, two, three, and four, and it was no shock when they finally settled that the test had been passed. All were still heads. And all were still telling him 32, and 25,511. Two numbers that meant nothing to him, but that must mean something. That he knew would mean something.
“It’s about friggin’ time,” the woman said, and swept her pudgy hand across the counter and pulled the coins into the empty cash drawer, her first sale for that day. Now she had change, and boy was she going to give Doris hell for taking the damn safe key. Boy, was she ever, she thought as she ripped a single stamp from its parent roll and slapped it on the counter right before her very strange customer. One she remembered a bit now, having seen him scrounging for cans and bottles out by the truck stop, and sometimes down where the school bus picked up the kids to take them to Drucker (where there was a school still open), shoving the discards into a gunny sack that he’d sling over his shoulder like some down and out version of Santa Claus. Yeah, well, he wasn’t that, she knew. He was nothing but a bum, and she would be glad when he had his shiftless ass away from her counter and out of the damn post office. “Is there anything else you need, mister, ‘cause I got mail to sort.”
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