Mortal Fear (16 page)

And this dependence led to conflict? Resentment?

Yeah. Ill skip five years of wasted time. The last band I was in had major-label interest. But by the time wed gotten that far, the group was ready to self-destruct. I was writing the best material, and the singera good friend of minecouldnt stand my getting that part of the glory. Forget that he got all the spotlight time. He wanted it to be him singing his stuff or nothing.

So?

So it was nothing. Hes still out there singing his stuff. The clubs are bigger, but hes on the same treadmill. When that group split, I decided Id never again put myself into a situation where my destiny was controlled to any degree by another person.

Now I understand the commodities trading, Lenz says. No messy humans to deal with.

You got it.

And you got rich.

Youre damn right.

You sound angry.

Good assessment.

Lenz drives silently for a half mile, and Im glad for the delay. Finally, he says, And?

Before all that, I went to college like most of my friends. Majored in finance, the whole thing. But Id wanted to play music since I was a kid. I used to ride up to Leland and Clarksdale and play blues with the old black catsSon Thomas, Sam Chatmon, those guys. When I got out of college, I went home and told my parents that before I got a job or went to graduate school, I was going to play music for a while.

How did they respond?

Not well. When I was a kid, they were really supportive of my music. But during my senior year of high school, things changed.

What happened?

The second act of a tragedy that started fifteen years before. Summer of sixty-four. The Freedom Summer. The year they killed those three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.

Lenz nods. Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. He says the names softly, as if those long-dead kids were friends of his.

For the first time I suspect Lenz might be Jewish. Right, I tell him. Buried them in that dam. Anyway, a New York college sent some civil rights workers down to Cairo County, where our farm is. My dad, being who he was, decided to invite a couple of them over

Excuse me? Being who he was?

He wasnt a native Mississippian. He was from Louisiana, down below the hard-shell Baptist parishes. He was raised strict, but not prejudiced, you know? He was a doctor, but he came from working class people. Grew up working right alongside blacks.

Go on.

These civil rights workers would come in from a day of running the back roads, teaching blacks how to answer the voting questionnaire or whatever, and my dad would feed them. Hed talk medicine, theyd talk politics. Or maybe theyd talk baseball. I got this from my mother, you understand, much later.

Keep going.

Anyway, the local yahoos, the Klan or whoever, didnt like my dad having these guys over to the house. They warned him, but Dad didnt pay any attention. Then this colored guy got killed at a church outside Itta Bena. They blew him up in his car. He was a patient of my fathers. Hed served in action in Korea. Dad put a lot of stock in a man serving his country in battle. Hed turned a blind eye to a lot that the Klan and the Citizens Council did in those days, like everybody else. But he couldnt stomach the murder of this black vet. He sat down and wrote an editorial that would blister the hide off a rattlesnake. He told it like it was, and he
named names
. He sent that piece to the Greenville paper, the liberal paper owned by Hodding Carter, the paper printed it, and lo, there came a shitstorm.

Lenz smiles in the dark. Ill be damned.

My mother just sat around the house waiting to be firebombed. But it didnt happen. Dad had been so public with his accusations that the Klan was afraid to do anything too soon after the piece appeared. The fact that my mother was from an old Delta family helped. It wasnt a wealthy family, but her peoplethe Grantshad been in the Delta about as long as anybody but the Indians. Quite a few white patients stopped coming to my father, but blacks took their places just as fast, so that didnt matter much. After about a year, it was all forgotten. At least by my family.

But not by the Klan.

I wouldnt necessarily say the Klan. The Klan doesnt even exist in Mississippi anymore. Not in any meaningful way. Its just a bunch of bitter old drunks now. Anyway, a lot of time passed. And during that time, another facet of my dads character emerged, though we knew nothing about it.

I wonder how far we are from Quantico, but I dont dare break the flow to ask. My dad was a doctor of the old school. All he cared about was treating peoples sickness. He never thought about money. Some years he didnt collect fifty percent of what he was owed. And hed accept anything as payment when he did collect. Green beans, catfish, peaches, venison, collard greens, whatever. He was still making house calls in 1987.

Lenz leans his head back and flips on the Mercedess headlights. A dying breed, he says softly.

A dead breed. And the countrys worse off for it. Anyway, his entire financial planning strategy was his belief that if a doctor worked hard in America, hed make enough money to raise his family and pay for his whiskey and cigars, and send in the next patient please. Get the picture?

A common failing among practitioners of his generation.

Yeah? Well, it didnt take long for that failing to get him into serious trouble. By 1968 he was a year behind on his income taxes. That meant that every April
every year
he had to go to the bank and borrow
the full amount of his taxes to pay off the governmentsomething like sixty or seventy thousand dollars at whatever the interest rate happened to be. And after hed paid, he would
still
be a year behind. He did that for twenty years.

My God.

Talk about pressure. But he didnt tell a soul about it. It was a secret between him and his banker, who was thrilled by the arrangement, of course. There was enough cash flow that nobody felt the pinch, but it was all an illusion.

What about an equity loan? Lenz asks. A home mortgage?

Not a chance. All he could have used as collateral was the farm or the house sitting on it, and both had been in my mothers family for generations. She didnt have any brothers, so hers was the first generation of Grants that hadnt farmed the land. They leased it out. Anyway, Dad felt the debt was his cross to bear. He just worked harder and harder.

My junior year of high school, things came to a head. The people we leased the farm to had had two bad harvests in a row. Dads income was stretched to the breaking point. And when he went into the bank and asked for his annual tax loan, they said no. Theyd never demanded collateral before, because they knew he could cover the debt. But this time they did. He was stunned. He went to another bank and got the same story. After a while he figured it out. The chickens from 1964 had come home to roost.

Lenz is shaking his head.

You can see the rest. Dad had to put up the farm as collateral. Carter was president; interest rates were twenty percent. When Dad finally told my mother how things stood, she didnt hesitate to sign the papers. But it almost killed her. Her father had never believed in borrowing money, and she didnt either. I mean
never
. Dad worked harder that year than he ever had in his life. He was nearly fifty then, and he was working hundred-hour weeks. Seventy-two-hour shifts in emergency rooms out of town. Seven months into it, he had a coronary. He
survived, but the cash dried up. I worked, my mother worked, but it wasnt any good. The people we leased to had their third bad year, and we lost the farm.

All of it?

We managed to keep the home place. Where my wife and I live now. Everything else the bank took. They put it up for auction, but somehow the bank president himself bought it for about half what it was worth. He was a smug, redneck son of a bitch named Crump. He
loved
taking that land. He was about sixty-five then.

How did this affect your mother?

The memory of my mother in those years is something I would prefer to forget. She became a ghost, I say softly.

I beg your pardon?

A ghost of herself.

Lenz nods silently.

So you can imagine what happened when I arrived home from college four years later with my honors degree in finance and announced my intention to roam the country playing guitar. They werent exactly thrilled.

Yet you did it anyway.

Not immediately. For a couple of weeks I just moped around. Then I got mad. I saw that their whole view of the world had been warped and beaten down by bastards like Crump. And worse, that it was going to affect my whole life if I let it.

Did you confront Crump?

What good would that have done? I had no leverage, no power. I packed up my clothes, my textbooks, and my life savingsfive grandand took the Amtrak to Chicago. One of my professors wangled me a job at a company with seats on the Board of Trade. After a week of trading for the company, I started trading for myself. And I was
fearless
. I cant explain it. I was trading like I played music, purely on instinct. Balls to the wall, sometimes risking everything on single trades. Id have a stroke if I tried that now. Im a system traderI cover every conceivable angle before I make a move. But back then I was high on rage. Everything Id ever learned had
somehow been recalled and slaved to my anger. I was like Mr. Spock possessed by a pissed-off Captain Kirk. A fucking superman.

My pulse races just remembering that rush.

The market was different then too. Especially the S&P index. You could leverage your position to an unbelievable point. It was like showing up at the Indy 500 with a Ford Pinto, handing them your keys, and them saying, Son, these Pinto keys qualify you to drive a Maserati for the duration of the race. Of course, if you wreck the car, youll have to pay for it, but well worry about that when it happens. Please try not to kill yourself. And then they let you drive out onto the track.

And you won the race?

I kicked ass, Doctor. After five months, I resigned from the firm, and a twelve-hour train ride later I was back in the Delta. I went straight to the bank and asked to see Crump. I must have looked like shit on a stick after that train ride, but he didnt bat an eye. He was past seventy by then.

I told him I wanted to buy back our farm. Crump said the land wasnt for sale. I told him Id give him a good price. He told me not to let the door hit my ass on the way out. I knew what fair market value was, so I named a figure double thatfour times what hed paid for it. Crump said no sale. I was starting to lose my temper, but I didnt show it. I told him he ought to be sensible, that everything had a price. He told me that wasnt always the case.

That stumped me. Id been relying on his greed, and hed made a statement that indicated I might have misjudged him. He was staring at me the way a hunter looks at a treed coon, and I decided then that my only chance was to go for broke. I told that son of a bitch Id pay him four times market value for the farman
eight hundred percent profit
but that the offer was good for only sixty minutes. I said Id be back in one hour and if he wanted the money hed better have the papers ready. I walked out to a cafe, had three slow cups of coffee, took a leak, and walked back to the bank.

And?

And Crump had his lawyer and two witnesses and the contract sitting there waiting for my signature. After I signed the papers, he told me I was the dumbest egg sucker that ever walked through his door. I said maybe I was, but that I had ten thousand bucks left and Id have given him that and the shirt off my back for that land, and I hoped he died a damned lonely death.

Lenz has turned his head to me. He is staring with new eyes. Is that story true? It sounds like something from
Its a Wonderful Life
.

An R-rated version, maybe. Its true all right. Life doesnt give you many chances like that.

He nods. Life didnt give you that, Cole. You took it.

A barber drove me out to the farmhouse. Mom was in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cold cup of coffee. When I laid that deed down on the table in front of her, she stared at it for nearly a minute. Then she looked up and asked me if it was real. If it was
real
. When I told her it was, she broke into pieces. She just... it was too much. She was shaking and crying and trying to hug me, and right then... goddamn it, I knew what it felt like to be a man. You know? I finally understood that being a man means taking care of the people you love, no matter how you do it. Even if you have to die to do it.

How did your father take the news?

I guess relief was the main thing. For four years hed lived knowing hed failed my mother and would never be able to make it right. My getting back the land changed things for the better, but a lot of damage had already been done. Dad had spent four years thinking he was worth more dead than alive to the people he loved. Business-wise, his life insurance policy was about the only thing hed done right. He figured dying was the only way he could take care of his own. Hed started drinking heavily. It wasnt a perfect happy ending or anything.

Lenz raises a finger and points to a turn in the road at the limit of his high beams. But the best ending possible under the circumstances, in my view. You have my respect, Cole.