The Donzerly Light (6 page)

So then, why were the coins moving?

Jay glanced at Jude’s profile, and at the backs of Steve’s and Bunker’s heads. All were intent upon their own parts of the show, on stage and off. None of them had set the coins to motion. So how had...

And then
that
wondering ceased to be very important at all as Jay’s somewhat numbed cognitive abilities clicked out of neutral and realized that, during the thirty or forty seconds that he had been pondering how coins could have been made to roll and spin and wobble as they were, they had
kept on
rolling and spinning and wobbling.

He stared at them through a storm of blinks and gave his head a quick shake to clear the sour mash cobwebs that had to be vexing his ability to see and think. But when the shudder had run its course, the coins were still there, and they were still moving.

Jay leaned close over the table and examined them. There were nine coins—two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, and two pennies. Eighty seven cents. The two dimes and the two pennies were whirling in circles, like pirouetting ballerinas on stage. The three nickels oscillated lazily, flatly, seeming on the verge of laying down, but did not. And the quarters, they rolled on their edges, one chasing the other in a repeated circuit around Jay’s whiskey neat.

Again his head shook, but slow this time, in disbelief. He eased one hand back toward the coins, one finger stretching out to touch one of the dancing dimes. Closer, closer, the coin waltzing back and forth, away from his hand, then closer, closer, and finally tapping gently against the tip of his finger and falling over.

As did the others. Instantly, as if in some connected sympathy with their sister dime whose revelry had been discovered, then stilled. All nine coins tipped to on side and came to rest where they had frolicked, small, quiet
clicks
rising from the tabletop.

And Jay’s eyes ballooned at them, at the sight, his hand recoiling once again. They had stopped, but they had all come up heads. All heads.

“Holy shit.”

“You got that right,” Bunker said, reacting to the exclamation uttered behind him, though to something altogether different than what was captivating his friend. “Man, would you look at her.” He had turned his chair away from the table like Steve’s, giving him the same easy angle of observation from which he could watch the dancers on stage, or spy Christine Mellinger where she now sat, alone and gorgeous, closer to the show than they were, her head moving gently to the music and her eyes savoring the near naked women almost within reach.

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, Jude. You sure she does guys?”

“Guys with green,” Jude answered, staring past Jay and watching the show in a portion of the mirrored wall at the back of the club. It took him a moment, but from the corner of his eye he noticed his friend fixated on something. Something completely devoid of breasts, large or small. Something on the table. “Yo,” he said over the lip of his drink. “What are you bug-eyed at?”

Jay glanced up at Jude, then back to the change. The nine coins. The eighty seven cents. The two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, and two pennies that had put on one hell of a spooky little show and were now laying there showing the profiles of four dead presidents. “Did you see...”

Jude kept his drink in hand but let it rest on the table. “Did I see what?”

Jay snapped another quick shake through his head. His face felt loose wagging back and forth, like the wet folds of a flag flapping in the rain. It did not have the desired effect. Nothing had changed. The coins were still there, still all heads, and the memory of what they had been doing a moment before was mostly fresh in his mind, fuzzing in and out some like a canyon echo. Not perfectly clear, but they
had
done what he saw. Hadn’t they?

So what was he supposed to say to Jude now, if even
he
wasn’t sure of the memory trapped in his head? What?
‘Hey, Jude, did you see the change dancing like I did?’
Yeah, right. That would be a
gooood
idea. Good for some serious razzing at S&M come Monday.

“Farmboy.”

“Yeah?” Jay looked up. “No. Nothing.” He shook his head for emphasis. “It’s nothing.”

Bunker and Steve, rapt with the sight of Christine Mellinger and wishful wonderings of just what a threesome with her and another chick would be like, weren’t catching any of what was happening behind their backs. Jude, though, was catching plenty from his friend’s suddenly detached demeanor. “Are you okay?”

Jay nodded and swept a hand over his hair. “Yeah. I mean...yeah Fine. Fine.”

“You sure? You were looking at the table like it was going to jump up and bite your face off.” Jude grinned wryly. “Not that that would be any great loss...”

“Was I?” Jay asked distantly. He was staring at the coins again. All of them heads. Nine coins that had come up heads! What were the odds of that?

“You’re doing it now,” Jude informed his friend. “Hey. Knock, knock. Farmboy, are you all there? Do you need to puke or something? ‘Cause puking can be good, man. Just go in the can and let it up. You’ll be good for a few more hours then.” Jay didn’t seem eager to take up the suggestion. Jude gave him a closer look. A closer, more concerned look. “Hey, seriously, are you okay?”

Jay thought on that question, his eyes wafting up after a moment. “Either I’ve had way too much to drink...”
Dancing coins, brother, dancing coins that all come up heads.
“...or nowhere near enough.”

“Well, which do you think it is?”

Jay eyed his untouched seventh drink and the change arrayed between it and him. Nine coins. All heads. Toss in the throbbing beat, and the sweet booze, and the pretty girls, and his good friends. Too much, he thought. Maybe it was just too much. “Whichever it is, I don’t think here is the place to find out.”

“Don’t be a pussy,” Jude chided, checking his watch, holding the slender timepiece close to his face for a moment to be sure of the numbers. “It’s only twelve thirty. C’mon.”

Jay stood, using the table to steady himself. “Late enough for this night.”

“You have big plans tomorrow, or something?” Jude asked, peeved.

In fact, if his whiskey-numbed brain wasn’t mistaken, he did. They did. “Carrie wants to go out to Floral Park tomorrow and look at houses.”

“Floral Park?” Jude cringed. “Grady, Long Island will be the death of you. If you start getting serious about a place out there, you’ll have a ring on your finger, two kids, a mortgage, and no time to make any serious green. You’ll be hawking mutuals by phone. Mark my word: if you want a green future, you need to be in the city. Close to the action. Near the Street.”

Jay grinned. “She just wants to look, Jude.”

“Right, like I just want to
look
at these babes here. Like Bunk and Steve just want to
look
at Miss Plastic Fantastic herself.” Jude chuckled knowingly. “To look is to want, my friend. And what’s the old saying? Be careful what you want, you just might get it.”

“You’re so quotable when you’re drunk,” Jay said, then he tapped the birthday boy on the shoulder.

Bunker tore his eyes from Christine Mellinger and turned toward his friend. “Where are you going?”

“Home, buddy.” Jay planted a friendly slap on Bunker’s cheek. “Happy quarter century.”

“You leaving?” Steve asked, having turned from the show as well.

“I am,” Jay answered, stepping back from the table and pushing his chair in. For a moment he stood there, holding onto the chairback, letting his legs adjust to being used again. When they felt less like mush and more like flesh and bone he said, “Until Monday.”

Jude took a drink of his GT and hefted his glass toward Jay. “Lightweight.”

“Maybe so,” Jay mostly agreed, and gave the change what he thought was a last look. Soon he let go the chair and wobbled in place for a moment until his confidence peaked. “Aloha, gentlemen.”

Steve and Bunker turned back toward the stage as Jay left the club, bobbing between table and reaching for the first wall near the exit. Jude watched him pause there for a moment near the coat check before he turned the corner and was gone, then he swung his chair around and focused his attention on a trio of Japanese nymphs closing in from the left on the turning stage. Steve and Bunker were back to their silent worship of the goddess of eleven once again.

A few minutes passed before Bunker spoke. “Jude.”

“What?”

“How much?”

“Are you asking about her?”

“Yeah. How much would a guy have to make to be in the running?”

“To lick her shoes, two hundred grand. To do what you want, half a mil.”

Bunker shook his head. “That’s a bunch of green.”

“I’ll tell you what, Bunk,” Jude began. “We’ll start a fund. Jay left his change, so we’ll seed the account with that. Call it the ‘Bunker Wants To Fuck Christine Mellinger’ fund. How’s that?”

“You’re a generous motherfucker, Duffault,” Bunker commented.

“No. Really.” Jude wanted to play the harassment out a little more, so he turned back to the table, and reached toward the center for the change but...

...it was gone. His face flushed briefly with anger, thinking that some penny ante thief had pocketed it while their backs were turned, but that accusatory thought faded quickly when he caught sight of Jay walking away for the second time in as many minutes. He must have come back after first leaving and, without letting on that he was there, taken the few coins he’d left. Why the fuck he’d bother with that, Jude hadn’t a clue, but there his friend was, once again strolling unsteadily toward the exit, his left hand grabbing empty chairs for balance and his right fisted around something.

Three

Heads

It was three thirty in the morning, and he should have been in bed, sleeping off the night’s revelry, but instead Jay Grady sat at the small round table in his dining room, the din of the inside night surrounding him, thinking it best that he take stock of the previous few hours’ odd happenings.

And some odd shit there had been.

So his mind trolled backward through the wee hours of the morning, and his first thought was: what really
had
happened?

Not quite sober yet, and deserted by the weaker of his wits after seeing what had come to pass on the table before him, Jay settled himself with a deep breath and took his time with the chronology.

What was first? Okay, first. First was whatshername, the waitress; pretty little thing with a wiggle whose name escaped him at the moment. She had brought them their seventh round and put the change on the table. Jay kicked her back the paper, and that was when he saw the coins doing their thing. Dancing, spinning, rolling, all for an impossibly long time before plopping down with all nine of the suckers showing heads. Weird.

Weird indeed. He could remember something that by all rights should have been dismissed as a hallucination, but right here and now he couldn’t tell a soul what the name of their very cute waitress was. And he’d asked her. He could recall asking her her name, and he knew she had answered, but he could not for the life of him remember what the hell it was.
Cindy? Sara? Stacy?
Yeah, weird and a half, he thought.

Okay, so that was number one on the queer events hit parade. And number two?

No problem there, Jay knew. Going
back
for the measly eighty seven cents whatshername had brought with the paper. He was...where? By BK’s front door, about to hand a couple bucks to the big round woman manning the coat check, when a strange, compelling certainty overwhelmed him. It was as if some transparent force had come up behind, cleared its throat with a mild
ahem
, and whispered covertly in his ear:
Uh, sir, your change. Your
change
. I believe you are going to need your change.

‘Need’
the change. He moved tens of millions of dollars every day the market was open with a few strokes on a keyboard. Real money. That kind of money was needed. Even coveted. But eighty seven cents? How could
that
be ‘needed’?

How? Standing at the coat check with the fat lady staring at him, Jay had had no idea how those nine coins could be needed, but he was absolutely, positively, cut-his-pinky-finger-off-if-he-was-wrong certain that the change
was
needed, and that
he
was the one who needed the two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, and two pennies. Needed them like air to breathe.

Mucho weird.

So he had gone back to the table, gathered up the coins without a word to his buds, and slipped unsteadily away once again, this time getting his coat and briefcase and making it outside into a chilly mist. He’d hailed a taxi and half dozed as it took him home.

Where and whence weird happening number three, the topper of them all, occurred.

The funny thing about it was (funny in a mostly humorless sort of way, thinking back upon it now), by the time he’d made it up the three flights of stairs to his and Carrie’s apartment and gotten his key into the first lock on the second try, he had pretty much decided that what was happening was, well, he was shit faced. Royally and completely plowed. The booze was making him see things like dancing coins, feel things like the need to have said dancing coins, and forget things like whatshername’s name—
Kelly? Janie? Mary?
In other words, the booze was doing what booze did when consumed in mass quantities.

The booze. It was the booze. A perfectly logical answer. A good answer.

But five steps into his apartment, Jay had become pretty sure that as good as it was, it was likely the wrong answer. A very, very wrong answer.

One step in and his briefcase was on the floor by the door and his keys were on the narrow counter that sat gut high and separated the compact kitchen from the living room. Two steps, and his right arm was out of his overcoat. Three, and the left was out as well and with a toss the charcoal colored garment sailed a short distance and landed limply over the back of the sofa. Four steps, and Jay’s right hand went into his pant’s pocket as he came into the cramped dining room off the kitchen. It came out again on step five and reached out over the dining room table, opening to let the change that had accumulated that day—after lunch, and dinner, and drinks at BK’s—drain from his grip. It rained down upon the second-hand table’s slightly marred surface, bouncing with a sound that was half sharply metallic, half dully wooden.