The Donzerly Light Read online

  “Give me your wisdom, Bunk,” Jay said with a waiting grin.

  “Listen to him, Grady,” Jude chided his friend, choosing not to call him ‘farmboy’, a sure sign that he was serious about this. Drunk, yes, but serious.

  “I’m listening.”

  Steve frowned as his head moved to the beat that the two Japanese honeys were getting nasty to. “If it’s so fucking profound, say it already.”

  “The point is this,” Bunker began, his eyes slitting at Jay. “Do you think my sister was the first person not to give that sack of garbage—”

  “Don’t be a prick,” Steve said without looking back.

  Bunker turned to face his buddy. “Oh, you can call them scum and I can’t call them sacks of garbage?”

  “I was repeating a rule,” Steve answered. “You’re just getting vile as you go along.”

  “Pardon moi, Mother Theresa,” Bunker said, looking back to Jay. “This homeless individual was probably ignored, or turned down, by a hundred people in the four hours before my sister came along. But when she did—whammo!” He lifted his glass to his lips, only to discover with a downward glance that it was just a pile of ice cubes melted to smooth rounds. He put the disappointing empty down and ran a hand over his head. “And that’s the lesson. You don’t know, you can’t know, what these crackheads are going to do. God only knows what kinda shit they’ve got up their sleeve.”

  Jay thought on Bunker’s words for a moment, then told them, “Sign Guy’s not a crackhead.”

  “How the hell do you know?” Jude challenged. “How? Did you get a urine sample? Get him to piss in that can of his and run it to a lab?”

  “I just...know,” Jay said, believing he did know (and why was that? he wondered to his drunken self). The bum was different. The bum was pretty far out there, sure, but dope wasn’t his thing. His sign is his thing, Jay thought suddenly, and how true that was.

  “You just know,” Jude parroted doubtfully, studying his friend hard until revelation deflated his stare. “You gave him money, didn’t you?”

  Jay didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

  “You can’t give money to people like that,” Jude said. “You can’t.”

  “I can’t be a nice person?” Jay asked him, puzzled. Blitzed and puzzled in concert.

  Jude slumped back from his friend. “What the hell happened to the farmboy who was gonna make it big on the Street? Where the fuck did he go?” His head shook with minor disgust at the transgression, and he leaned close to Jay again. “You want to be successful in this business, in this world—sure you can be a nice guy.” Now he nodded. Too big, too emphatically for it to be sincere. “Sure you can—to the people that matter. Your friends, your family, and sometimes to the people who trust you with their green. But not, not, NOT to deadbeats that this city would be better off without.”

  Jay shook his head, in surprise at the depth of his friend’s harsh cynicism, handy though it could be. “You’re gonna be a rich motherfucker someday, Duffault.”

  “You may be, too, if you curb some of your wayward charitable activities.”

  Jay snickered, the topic of Sign Guy finished to death, it seemed. He’d tired of it, as had they all, his hand coming up to stifle a yawn as the waitress made it to their table. She was a young and pretty Japanese girl, with bright eyes and barely budded breasts showing as subtle, pointed mounds beneath a loose white tank top. A primo slice of the scene that Buffalo Kabuki’s offered. Just off Broadway, the midtown club catered to those who shunned the nuclear nosecone look, whether God given or silicone enhanced, in favor of mini-mammaries of the Orient. The great American plains, Japanese style.

  “Another round?” the waitress asked in flawless, unaccented English. There was a crispness about her words, a confidence beneath them. She might be a student at NYU just doing what it took to make ends meet. Or, possibly, a moonlighter out to meet certain ends and service them at a premium in some dark, out of the way corner. Jude had said you could get that at BK’s if banging a babe with tiny tits was your thing, if you said the right thing to the right girl and had the right amount of Mr. Green on hand. Or you could simply watch the little boobs bob and bounce with the music. Just sit, watch, and drink away the night or the day or the week gone by.

  “Fellas?” Jay asked, and got three certain nods in reply. No dissent at all. And why should there be? It had been a shitty week (were there any good weeks for junior brokers at S&M), and such a week deserved to be drowned properly. “Whose turn is it?”

  “I bought the last one,” Steve said.

  “You’re up, farmboy,” Jude told him.

  Jay nodded sluggishly and fished a twenty from his wallet. He laid it on the tray the waitress balanced on her forearm. “Fill ‘em up...uh...what’s your name?”

  The waitress beamed at him. Through the drunken haze it looked sincere. “Suzy.”

  “Fill ‘em up, Suzy,” Jay said, and she gathered their empties and headed for the bar. He watched her wiggle away, though how much was her and how much was the drink working on his eyes wasn’t clear. “I’m getting really fucked up.”

  Steve lifted his empty hand toward the spinning stage. “To getting fucked up.”

  Jude and Bunker raised their hands, each mimicking a glass where none (sadly) was, and then Jay pushed his fist into the mix, joining the toast.

  “Hear-fucking-hear,” Jude seconded.

  “To bathing in booze,” Bunker suggested, and his fist thrust out and up again, the others responding in kind.

  But quickly on the heels of that, Jude offered his own toast. His own, yes, but one he knew they could all concur with. Would concur with, because he knew their dreams. Dreams that were the same as his. “To rolling naked in dirty green paper, my friends—fifties if times are good, and hundreds if they are better.”

  They were about to raise their glassless fists when Jay amended the toast, his words coming wet and thick, like golf balls rolling into his mouth. “To better times, I say then.”

  “Here-fucking-here,” they chorused, smiling wryly, cockily, sincerely, each with his own mask of gladness at that hopeful thought, each the willing keeper of a common want smoldering madly in their hearts.

  “Righteo,” Jude said, punctuating the moment, marking it like a point of convergence where travelers met on disparate journeys to the same destination, then he looked left toward the stage. Bunker looked right. And Jay, he lifted his eyes as best he could and watched the show with his friends.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Steve wasn’t looking at the dancers anymore.

  “Oh my God,” Bunker exclaimed quietly. He had seen it, too. Who could have missed her (them) in here.

  “What?” Jay asked. He was staring at Bunker and Steve as they gawked at something, though his drink-numbed brain couldn’t quite make the connection that maybe he should look that way as well.

  “Christine Mellinger,” Steve said, and that made the connection. Jay’s head turned toward the club’s entrance.

  She was blonde, built, and beautiful; the perfect package of legs and tits, with the sweetest meaty ass in between. Stanley & Mitchell was on the fourteenth floor. Christine Mellinger was on eleven. The reception desk for BrainTrust Investments faced the elevator lobby on that floor, and there she could be found, answering phones, greeting visitors, and generally putting a pretty face on a...well, just putting on a pretty face. She did well at ignoring the elevators that always seemed to stop on her floor, their doors sliding open to reveal one man, two, maybe five or six, none of whom would exit. And often no one would get on. Someone would simply keep a finger on the DOOR OPEN button until her eyes came up and casually signaled that the show was over. Yes, Christine Mellinger had become a regular stop on the otherwise mundane ride.

  “God Almighty,” Bunker said, staring openly and nearly drooling as the woman of his dreams made her way through the club, her own eyes sampling the action on the stage. “To be crushed between those thighs.”
/>
  “Here-fucking-here,” Steve agreed. Most definitely.

  Jay didn’t add any commentary. He just let his drunken eyes follow Christine Mellinger as she skirted the stage, her black mini riding high. Every step she took, every wiggle that shimmied through her body, was both an invitation and a slap back to reality. It said: You want me, but wanting is all you can do.

  “What is she doing here?” Bunker asked, tempting whatever benevolent god had brought her to them this night. “She’s never come before.”

  “What the fuck does it matter?” Jude responded. He was the only one not looking, seeming more than disinterested. There was disgust in there as well.

  “It matters ‘cause she is here, man,” Bunker explained.

  “Fucking A, Jesus,” Steve exclaimed with calm and total awe. “Would you look at her. If those are real, I believe in Creation. I swear.”

  “Yeah, well, you can just check your boners at the door, boys,” Jude told them. “She only fucks big green.”

  “You’re an authority on this?” Bunker asked.

  “Jude’s an authority on everything,” Jay ribbed, and they all chuckled. All but Jude.

  “I know,” Jude assured them.

  “How do you know?” Bunker pressed, unwilling to let his dream die so quickly, so completely.

  “Research, research, research,” Jude said, smirking at the tabletop as he borrowed the cardinal rule by which all Stanley & Mitchell brokers were supposed to live when making their decisions on which stocks to buy, and which to avoid. Research, research, research, a blatant and intended rip-off of the real estate mantra of location, location, location, meant simply that hunches, gut feelings, or whatever non-definable indicators that might exist did not, in fact, exist for anyone who worked at the firm of Stanley & Mitchell. You crunched the numbers, you read reports, you learned about the companies behind the stocks. That was how you made decisions at S&M. Either that, or Old Man Mitchell’s driver and bodyguard Alonzo would be showing you the door.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Bunker practically demanded, sneering at his cryptically roundabout friend.

  “It comes from reliable sources on eleven,” Jude explained.

  “You and your fucking sources,” Bunker said. It seemed that for every point of fact that Jude Duffault might throw at you, he had a source. Shit, he probably even knew Deep Throat guy from Watergate. Probably called him ‘Deep’, Bunker mused sometimes. On a first name basis with all his ‘sources’.

  Still, sources or not, Jude did tend to be right about most things, and nothing bothered the hell out of Bunker Wallace more than that sad reality right then. “So are you saying I don’t make enough green for that...goddess to share her womanly pleasures with me?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Bunk. That’s just the way it is.”

  “You just don’t like her tits,” Steve said. Something he thought was an impossibility as he watched her sit, her back arching and heaving those magnificent mounds up and out, baby, up and way out.

  “Anything more—”

  “—than a mouthful is a waste,” Steve said, finishing Jude’s mammary mantra. Staring at Christine Mellinger he said, “Whatever you say, buddy. Whatever you say.”

  Jude finally looked toward her, his drunken eyes surprisingly crisp with an almost hateful glare. This was his place. He had brought them here, had initiated them into the world of Buffalo Kabuki. He was the one with the thing for less than ample bosoms. And here, walking right into this place, was Miss 40D herself. And even worse than her just being here, she looked to be enjoying the show.

  “Fucking bi bitch,” Jude muttered, wanting to say more and to say it louder. And he could think of plenty more to say, gloriously hurtful things that he might have let fly if pretty little Suzy hadn’t reappeared right then with their seventh round of drinks.

  “I’ll take that,” Jude said, taking his GT before it could be properly placed on a fresh cocktail napkin. He took a long swig of it and looked away.

  Suzy put the three remaining drinks on the table and gathered the change—a couple of ones and some coin—from her tray.

  “Keep the paper, Suzy,” Jay said, though her name came out pretty thick, sounding something more like Sthwoozee.

  “Thanks,” she said in a polite and robotic way, then stuffed the tip in the front pocket of her very small apron and deposited the remainder of the change on the table next to Jay’s whiskey neat before heading back toward the bar.

  “You are very, very welcome,” Jay said to the air where she had been, his eyes savoring pretty Suzy’s departing wiggle once more until he became aware of something.

  A sound.

  And odd sound which his ears strained to define. It was not the music, not even some subtle part of it—if the euro-techno beat that blared from BK’s sound system could have had any subtle undertones. Neither was it chatter, though there was a jointed freneticism about it. Like many voices blathering away at once, low and quick, but without being voices at all. Small sounds. Sounds of...movement.

  Motion.

  He caught sight of it not out of the corner of his eye, but low in his vision. Low and right before him. On the table. His gaze peeled off Suzy’s ass and angled down toward the movement.

  Jay’s hands gasped back from the sight.

  What the hell...

  Near the center of the table, where the waitress had left the change he hadn’t kicked back to her, the coins were moving. Rolling like tires and spinning like tops and wobbling like garbage can lids blown aground by a gust of wind. All moving like coins would when dropped on a hard surface. Except...

  Except Jay couldn’t remember pretty little Suzy dropping them. He blinked back the few seconds to when she had been there and tried to see that moment again. Had she dropped them? Or laid them gently?

  She had laid them gently, he remembered. Right. There hadn’t been any clatter of coins raining upon the table. She’d just laid them there. She had.

  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?