Mockingbird (23 page)

“No, I blew it,” I said gloomily. “It's like batting: even the best traders only get a hit three times out of ten. The books say that to make a living you have to cut your losses off short, but ride your winners as long as you can.”

“Hm,” Daddy said. “Slugging percentage.”

“That's about the size of it.”

I threw myself into trading. I took Schwager's
A Complete Guide to the Futures Markets
out of the library and studied it like Holy Scripture. When I couldn't absorb one more word about the intricacies of the soybean distribution system, or the role of the Japanese markets in the trading of copper, I reread Edwin Lefevre's classic, tragic, exhilarating
Reminisces of a Stock Operator
and hoped it would give me daring. I kept the TV on with the sound off all the time. I pored over the
Wall Street Journal
until past midnight, and then woke up every couple of hours through the night and stared at it from my pillow. I kept my transaction book by the bed, ready twenty-four hours a day in case an idea should present itself.

I started with a kitty of six thousand dollars of imaginary money. That was Mary Jo's savings plus all I could cash out of my IRA after paying the early withdrawal penalties. I had originally intended to go with only five thousand, but I began to see there was money to be made in coffee, and I wanted to be able to make a trade in it, should the opportunity present itself. It only cost $3,150 to buy a contract in coffee, but I found I was also required to keep a margin of a couple of thousand dollars in my account to cover possible losses. (Generally, the more volatile a commodity, the higher the price of the margin for a single contract.)

I agonized constantly over trades, but in fact I only had enough money to be in one or two contracts at a time, so I was only making five or six pretend trades a day. Still, over the next two weeks I traded an amazing range of things: coffee, copper, soybeans, pork bellies, Swiss Francs, Japanese Yen, Deutsche Mark—I had an affinity for Deutsche Mark—unleaded gasoline, and frozen orange juice products (each contract worth 20,000lb of frozen orange concentrate, the contents of an entire tanker truck!)

I was a nervous wreck, sleepless and exhausted. I was also incredibly exhilarated. Trading gave me a rush unlike anything I had ever done before. This, I imagined, must be how people felt at the roulette wheel or the racetrack. As an actuary, all I had ever done was assume the worst. An actuary's bottom line is death and taxes. But playing the market is like jumping into the whirlwind of life itself, a tornado that booms and buzzes as prices rise and fall, goods and money change hands, empires wax and wane. Each hour spun around with its load of panic and bloodlust and greed and fear. It was quite a trip.

I dithered for several days, trying to decide whether to go with a full-service broker or a discount house. Full-service brokers give you advice. They treat you well. You can leave them with instructions when you go on vacation, so they will sell or buy for you at given price points. They cover your behind for you. In exchange, they charge around $100 for each round trip; that is, for each time you get into and out of a market.

A discount broker doesn't treat you nice, nor will he cover your butt. A discount broker supplies a voice at the other end of the phone who will relay your buy and sell orders to a runner who will take them down to the pit floor in Chicago where some poor hollering sinner who can't get any other job will scream out your order until he gets the attention of a buyer or seller.

(The life of a Chicago floor trader is not a happy one. They spend all day on their feet screaming; their rates of laryngeal cancer are through the roof. The job is so conducive to hypertension that floor traders are insured at the same rates as skydivers; this I had noticed when studying mortality and claims tables for my actuarial exams. Floor traders also suffer excessively from pencil wounds, if you can believe it, delivered by people running around madly waving their arms.)

With the discount broker, you have to watch the ticker yourself and phone in every buy or sell in real time. If you fall asleep and lose your life savings, that's your lookout. But a discount broker charges $20 for a round trip.

I went with the discount broker. My profit margins required me to supply my own vigilance.

After two weeks of imaginary trades, my six thousand dollars of pretend money had become $9370. I was ready to take the real plunge. I picked my broker and pored over the fat
Global Futures Trading Handbook
he faxed me. I resolved to make my first live trade on Monday morning when the market opened.

Friday afternoon I decided to amuse myself by initiating a few last imaginary currency trades to hold over the weekend and liquidate Monday morning.

I hadn't realized how nerve-racking it would be to have a trade held across the weekend. Friday night I realized that a G7 meeting going on in Paris could have a huge impact on my speculation. I bought European newspapers to follow the progress of trade talks, hating the Brits for browbeating the German chancellor. The market in Germany opened late Sunday afternoon, Houston time, but a small player like me wouldn't have access until Chicago opened Monday morning.

Sunday night I lost eight hours of sleep and seven thousand dollars thanks to the resolve of the G7 leaders to attack the high value of the U.S. dollar. My imaginary stash was down to $2440. I could only take out one cheap contract at a time, currencies or unleaded gasoline. I was one mistake away from being out of the game.

So I sat in an agony of indecision all day with $2440 imaginary dollars in my notebook and $6000 real ones on account with my broker. I saw an opportunity in wheat that I would have taken in an instant the previous week, when I had been winning. Now, I didn't dare. All day Monday I watched the price of wheat wobble upward. If I had bought in the morning and sold at quitting time, I would have made almost six hundred dollars profit. But throughout the day there were six or seven times I could have lost substantially if I had bailed, and I would have bailed. I knew myself. Tapped out as I was, not daring to lose, I could not dare to win.

I turned off the TV and bought a paper to look through the want ads. Nothing for someone with my qualifications. Nothing for someone with
any
qualifications. If the job required any brain at all, you had to have seven years experience to apply.

I turned the TV back on to see what was happening with the Deutsche Mark.

I made chicken sopa for Dad and ate it myself when I remembered he was on the road again. I hadn't noticed him leaving.

The Astros middle relief blew a game to the Cubs.

That night I couldn't sleep. I went back over all my paper trades. I plugged data points into an Excel spreadsheet to get a better picture of what the markets had done in the two weeks I had been taking notes. I watched the ticker and tried to build an hour-by-hour profile of all the majors: currencies, coffee, cocoa, copper, soy, unleaded, wheat, corn, pork bellies, orange juice . . . Dawn came as I graphed the movement of the S & P stock index. At $14,000 for a contract, the S & P was far out of my reach, but a lot of people traded in it.

Still I could not sleep.

(It's 9:30 at night. Momma has just come back from a meeting with Bill Friesen. These late meetings only happen when Daddy is out of town. Momma looks tired and her makeup is smeared. “Where's your sister? Did you give her dinner? What is she yelling about?”

“I locked her in our room. Why do you have to work so much?” I am nine. “Why do you leave us alone?”

Momma takes her purse off her shoulder. “If there is a God—which I pray there is not—I will go to hell knowing that whatever I did wrong, at least I provided for my children.”)

Even Momma—haunted, god-ridden, laughing Momma—had done that much for her children. And I, who was so smart, who did so well in school, who played by all the rules, who wore the clothes she was supposed to wear and said the things she was supposed to say—I could not do so much. I was a woman now and I had a daughter and I could not provide for her.

I wept. And wept more when I found, deep down, that it wasn't my daughter I felt guiltiest about. It was Momma I had failed first. I let her live and I let her die and I never made her life easier, my mother, who suffered so much.

Dawn Tuesday. CNBC's morning show came on. I made a pot of coffee and drank it all before I remembered that pregnant women weren't supposed to use caffeine.

I realized I was starving.

I went down to the kitchen and stared into the fridge and the pantry and then walked to the patio to look out at the garden. Let the kid eat me hollow from inside.

I felt as if I would never sleep again. I could have been a Rider puppet myself, made of sticks and strips of threadbare cloth, buttons and hanks of leather. It was seven in the morning, June 4. Already the thermometer on the patio read 85°. My hair was greasy and I smelled dirty. The sky was cloudless and the heat oppressive. From somewhere in the live oak tree above me a mockingbird began to sing, beautiful liquid songs. It didn't know about me, that I was broke and pregnant, that after a whole life of being the responsible one I was failing everyone around me, my daughter and my daddy, Mary Jo and Momma most of all. It just sang.

Hard to believe that any creature born into this world could have such a beautiful song. She may be a mimic, she may steal her songs from others, or change them, or forget them, but I still say there is no creature that does more honor to God than a mockingbird. If she is inconstant, it is her nature. If her songs are stolen, well, there is nothing false in the moment of her singing.

Back upstairs I picked up a pregnancy book and read the section on caffeine and wondered how I would feel if I gave birth prematurely to a low birth-weight baby. I imagined my daughter in an incubator, her tiny head sallow, struggling to draw air into lungs still wet with amniotic fluid. Tiny fingers curling and uncurling like flower petals.

I previewed the seventh month of pregnancy and found I should be prepared for heavy white vaginal discharge, constipation, heartburn, indigestion, flatulence, bloating (there it was again), occasional headaches and dizziness, nasal congestion and possibly nosebleeds as my blood volume soared; bleeding gums, leg cramps and backaches, swelling ankles, varicose veins in my legs, hemorrhoids, shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping (they weren't wrong about that), clumsiness, and just possibly leaking breasts.

There was also a chance, they said, that I might be feeling “increased apprehension about the prospect of motherhood.”

I cried some more.

Back at my desk I printed out graphs and studied them. The stock market was opening in New York. Pretty people who never made the grades I did appeared on CNBC to chat over coffee and croissants on the morning show. Every one of them was perky and well-groomed, no doubt eager to spend another day celebrating all the little ways the rich were getting richer. Afterwards they would drive off in their wonderfully engineered foreign cars to families of sleek children in the suburbs.

The clock crawled on. It was hot. My hands were shaking badly with caffeine and exhaustion.

I thought about Candy's magazines. They say one girl in four is subjected to some kind of sexual abuse before the age of twenty-one. One in twelve is the victim of rape or attempted rape.

How do you live in a world like that? How do you even look at it?

How do you look at Mary Keith, stepping off that building in Phoenix with her daughter in her arms? How do you look at the ads in Candy's magazines?
Sexy girls cut!
How do you get up in the morning in that world? How could you ever think to bring a child into such a slaughterhouse?

A stink of gasoline and hot dust came through the balcony door, thick enough to make me gag. The smell filled me with terror. I think I might have screamed.

A long, brindled snake slid across the floor toward me. I jumped to my feet—too fast. Blood drained from my head, my vision went black and I staggered, tripping over my chair. I fell heavily to the floor, head swimming, vision gone, the room a blackness spangled with stars. I threw myself to the side, grabbed the edge of my bed and pulled. I screamed again as a nail of ice split through my left foot.

I grabbed at the bed but the covers slipped off, leaving me with an arm full of blankets. Something dry and smooth and terribly cold slid around my foot. It coiled around my ankle; paused; and then inched up my calf. The skin where it passed screamed and then went dead. I could no longer feel my foot. The room stank with the smell of dust and gasoline.

I struggled for breath. My leg went dead from the knee down. The snake's cold head wound around the inside of my thigh. I cried, shaking uncontrollably. My vision came back for a moment and I saw Mr. Copper wrapped around me.

Then frost flowered across my eyes and I was gone.