FOUR
This morning at eight o’clock, another pretty severe shock of an earthquake was felt. Those on the 16th ult. and since done much damage on the Mississippi river, from the mouth of the Ohio to Little Prairie particularly. Many boats have been lost, and much property sunk. The banks of the river, in many places, sunk hundreds of acres together, leaving the tops of the trees to be seen above the water. The earth opened in many places from one to three feet wide, through whose fissures stone coal was thrown up in pieces as large as a man’s hand. The earth rocked— trees lashed their tops together. The whole seemed in convulsions, throwing up sand bars here, there sinking others, trees jumping from the bed of the river, roots uppermost, forming a most serious impediment to navigation, where before there was no obstruction— boats rocked like cradles— men, women and children confused, running to and fro and hallooing for safety— those on land pleading to get into the boats— those in boats willing almost to be on land. This damning and distressing scene continued for several days, particularly at and above Flour island. The long reach now, though formerly the best part of the river is said to be the worst being filled with innumerable planters and sawyers which have been thrown up from the bed by the extraordinary convulsions of the river. Little Prairie, and the country about it, suffered much— new lakes having been formed, and the bed of old ones raised to the elevation of the surface of the adjacent country. All accounts of those who have descended the river since the shocks give the most alarming and terrific picture of the desolating and horrible scene.
Account of Zadock Cramer
“Hey,” the kid said. “Heard you got arrested.” He slid into the seat opposite Jason at the cafeteria, plopped down his plastic tray with his plastic-looking sloppy joe.
“Not arrested,” Jason said. “Not exactly.” He was trying to remember the kid’s name. All he could think of, for some reason, was “Muppet,” which did not seem likely. Could it be Buffett? Moffett? He had curly dark hair and a compact, strong body, and wore a striped shirt, boots, and jeans.
The cafeteria juke box, which had been playing something by Nirvana, switched to Garth Brooks. One of the little cultural contrasts that came with the neighborhood.
“What did you do to get Eubanks after you?” Muppet asked. His two friends, one of whom was the son of the Epps who ran the feed store, plunked their sloppy joes down on either side of him.
“Took a ride down the water tower on my skates. Down the rail, I mean.”
“Cool,” said Muppet. “I’d like to do that.”
Young Epps grinned at him. “If you did that, Muppet, you’d break your neck.”
His name actually was Muppet, Jason thought. How about that?
“You would have died,” Jason confirmed. “I’ve been skating for years, and it was a rough ride.”
The others looked at him with a degree of admiration. Jason realized that they thought he had ridden the whole tower, all the way from the top.
He thought about telling them the truth, then immediately dismissed the idea. After all, he would have ridden the entire rail if he had the chance.
“What did Eubanks do to you?” asked Epps.
“Yelled at me some. Took me home so my mother would yell at me, too.”
“That bastard,” said Muppet. “He’s so wack.”
“Wack,” Epps agreed. “He spends his day following teenagers around hoping to catch us at something. If he followed grownups around that way, he’d get his ass kicked off the force.”
Jason looked at the dark-haired kid sitting across from him. “Is your name really Muppet?” he asked.
Muppet gave an embarrassed grin. “That’s what everyone’s been calling me all my life,” he said. “But my name’s really Moffett. Robin Moffett.”
“Robin?” His other friend, the one who wasn’t Epps, seemed surprised. “Your name is really Robin?”
“Yeah.”
“Robin Hood? Robin Redbreast?”
“Robin Lawrence, Moffett” Muppet said.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Jason.
Muppet looked at Jason. “What did your mom do?” Muppet asked. “Did she ground you or anything?”
“No. She took away my skates, and she said I couldn’t use the Internet for the rest of the month.”
“That’s tough. ’Course, there’s no place to skate anyway.”
“I know. And I can sneak some online time when my mom is at work, at least for email, but I can’t stay online too long, because if she calls there’ll be a busy signal, and if the busy signal goes on too long, she’ll know what I’m doing.”
“You and me can come over to the store,” said Epps, “and use the computer there. It would have to be after hours, though.”
Jason looked at him. “You’ve got an Internet connection?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Jason smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
His future, suddenly, did not seem quite so bleak.
And all he had to do to secure a place in the community was to take a little ride in a police car.
*
Seven Indians were swallowed up; one of them escaped; he says he was taken into the ground the depth of 100 trees in length; that the water came under him and threw him out again— he had to wade and swim four miles before he reached dry land. The Indian says the Shawnee Prophet has caused the earthquake to destroy the whites.
Lexington Reporter
“Verily I say unto you,” said Noble Frankland, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” He nodded into the microphone as if it were a member of an audience. “That’s Matthew 24:2. What could be plainer than that?”
He leaned closer to the microphone, raised his voice. “Not be left one stone upon another! That is the voice of our Lord! And what he said came to pass, for in the Year 70 a.d. the Temple was thrown down!”
Frankland scanned the rows of dials and potentiometers before him. His station, steel-walled, bolted down to a concrete foundation he had poured himself in Rails Bluff, had been designed so as to be operated by only one person. He and his wife Sheryl were the owners, the chairmen, the programming directors, the disk jockeys, the talk show hosts, the advertising managers, the engineers, the electricians, and usually the janitors as well. They did it all, together with a little volunteer labor from Frankland’s parishioners.
Money rolled in, from the syndication of his daily Radio Hour of Prophecy program, and from the Tribulation Club members across North America. But it was all spent as soon as it arrived, on maintaining the station and his small church, on the supplies necessary to survive till the arrival of God’s Kingdom, and on the weather-proof, disaster-proof bunkers he’d dug on his ten Arkansas acres in which to house the supplies till the Tribulation Club members needed them.
Frankland leaned closer to the mic again.
“And what else did our Lord tell us that came to pass?” he asked. “Wars and rumors of wars!— verse six. Famines, pestilence, and earthquake!— verse seven. Betrayal!— verse ten. False christs and false prophets!— verse twenty-four. And that’s only the Book of Matthew! You want more? Let’s look at Luke 21:10!”
His stubby, powerful fingers ran down his notes, ticking off the quotations one by one. Citations spilled from his lips in a cascade of verses, interpretations, commands. The Spirit was rising in his heart.
It usually took him a while to get warmed up. It was harder when he was talking on the radio, because he didn’t have the feedback from a live congregation before him. Alone in the steel-walled studio, Frankland had to imagine the audience before him, imagine their responses to his calls, the love they sent him, a love hot as a flame, that he used to kindle the Spirit.
“The Word of God isn’t hard to understand!” he said. At his sudden burst of volume the needles jumped on the peak level meters, but this was no time to drop his voice. “It’s in plain language. Just read it, Mr. Liberal God-just-wants-us-all-to-get-along! I’ve got news for you— God doesn’t want us to just get along! God doesn’t want us to be nice! God doesn’t think that obedience to the Antichrist is just another lifestyle choice! God wants us to obey his word!”
The needles on the level meters had just about maxed out, and Frankland, concerned that some of his listeners’ speakers, if not their eardrums, might be about to explode, decided it was time to attempt sweet reason. He lowered his voice.
“But let’s just look at the evidence,” he suggested. “Let’s look at Matthew 24:29. ‘Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light. ..’ And then afterward, in verse 30, the Son of Man appears in the heavens, in clouds of glory, to bring His Kingdom!”
“What do you think of that, Mr. Pre-Tribulationist Rapture Wimp!” Frankland realized he was shouting again. “The Tribulation happens first! It’s right there in plain English! And if you don’t believe that, if St. Matthew isn’t good enough for you, let’s look at the Book of Revelation!”
The hell with his listeners’ eardrums! What was more important, eardrums or God’s Word?
The Spirit had taken command, as the Spirit so often did. And as the Spirit rolled on, the words flowing from his mouth without his conscious thought, he wondered if his colleague, Dr. Lucius Calhoun of the Pentecostal Church of Rails Bluff, was by any chance listening and resented the characterization of “rapture wimp.” He hadn’t meant to offend Dr. Calhoun, to whom he sold air time at a bargain rate and with whom he agreed on just about everything but the timing of the Rapture in relationship to the Tribulation. But when the Spirit took hold, Frankland just couldn’t hold back. It was all so obvious.
“The arm of prophecy smiteth the wicked,” he said, “and exalted shall be the prophet among his kind.”
In the back of his mind, Frankland wondered if that last phrase was actually in the Bible. The unfortunate truth was that he was not very good at memorization, a fact that put him at a serious disadvantage as a preacher. The stock of biblical quotes he could summon from memory, without the notes he usually kept handy, was not very large.
Perhaps that is why he had not made it to the big time. His Radio Hour of Prophecy did well enough, and he was thankful that he had been allowed to bring people to God in this way, but he had always hoped to graduate to television, to gain the huge audience that worldwide syndication could bring. Yet despite several attempts to make the leap to video, he’d never quite managed it. He looked all right— he was a big sandy-haired man, and his overbite wasn’t too large a problem, even though it did have the tendency to make him look the least bit like a rodent— but the sad fact was that he and television had somehow never connected.
The closest he’d come had been a three-month stint as a TV preacher in El Dorado, Arkansas, before his move to Rails Bluff. First, the program director had asked him to vary his message a little, to talk about something other than the end of the world. Frankland had tried to comply, but somehow when the Spirit seized him, the Spirit swerved right back to the Apocalypse.
And the other problem was the biblical quotes. “You can’t go on making this stuff up,” the program manager had told him. “People in Arkansas know their Bible.”
It had been useless to explain that it had been the Spirit talking, not Frankland. Who was the program manager to question the words of the Spirit? But Frankland’s Video Half-Hour of Prophecy was canceled anyway.
“The seals produce the trumpets and the trumpets produce the bowls!” he proclaimed. “What could be clearer? What do you have to say to that,” he demanded, “Mr. Roman go-to-confession-once-a-week-and-every thing-will-be-fine Catholic?”
People needed to wake up, that was for sure. The signs were all around. The world was going to come to an end, practically any second, and the people were going to need instruction as to what to do, how to behave.
He didn’t know how long he would be permitted to continue. Once the Tribulation started, the servants of Satan were bound to try to silence him.
“And who is this prince?” he asked. “The prince is the little horn of Daniel! It’s all so clear!”
Frankland was ready for the servants of Satan when they came. He had a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun clipped under the desk in the front office. There was a pistol in a drawer here in the studio, and another in his truck.
And, in the concrete bunkers he’d poured for the members of the Tribulation Club on the back of his property, there were a lot more surprises for Satan.
Cases and cases of them.
He brought his hand down on the control panel in front of him, thumping it with his fist as if he were banging a pulpit. Needles leaped on the displays.
“What more do you people need to know?” he demanded.
*
Charlie sipped at his Cohiba, letting the smoke of the Cuban cigar roll over his tongue. He let the taste soak into his palate for a moment, then tilted his head back and exhaled.
“And the hell of it is,” he said, “we’re going to make a fortune while the economy of the entire world goes straight down the tubes. Firms will go bankrupt. Careers will be wrecked. Millions of people will lose their jobs. We may even see a war or two when economies crash in the Third World.”
“You mean like in Arkansas?” Megan said.
Charlie grinned and sipped his Remy Martin. Under the water of his spa, he slid the bottom of his foot along her smooth bare thigh. She smiled back, then took a taste of her own cigar.
They were sitting opposite one another in the spa on Charlie’s second-floor deck, overlooking his yard and pool. Pulsing jets of water massaged their backs, feet, and legs. Wind chimes rang distantly over the throb of the spa’s pumps.
Charlie tilted his head back against the plastic headrest, looked at the few stars visible through high banks of cloud. “There’s a market in everything nowadays,” he said. “Currency, commodities, metals, bonds. There’s a market in markets.” He tilted his head down and looked at her. “With all our short positions, we’ve just placed our bets on the market in catastrophe.”
Megan gave a low laugh. She leaned forward, held out her crystal glass. “Here’s to catastrophe,” she said.
He bent toward her, touched his glass to hers. A crystal chime sang out, hung for several seconds in the air.
Charlie leaned further, pressed his lips to hers. Her lips were moist, tasted of smoke and desire.
A throb of pure lust pulsed through his nerves. For a half-second he considered flinging his drink and cigar off the edge of his patio and throwing himself on Megan, but on reflection he decided to wait.
Timing, he found, was everything.
He leaned back, let the water jets pulse against his back, sipped again at his drink. Megan rescued a strand of her pinned-up auburn hair that had trailed into the water, then looked back at him with dark eyes.
Charlie adored Megan, and it was because he could look into her and see a reflection of himself. Someone who had come from nowhere— from worse than nowhere— and turned herself into someone else by talent, by energy, and by pure force of will. And the process wasn’t over. Megan was improving her vision of herself all the time.
Charlie loved Megan not for herself, but for her potential.
Megan was born in the Ozarks— Charlie didn’t know just where. Her father was a trapper, for God’s sake, someone who spent most of his life in the woods and mountains looking for animals to skin. Her mother was an alcoholic, abusive when she wasn’t drinking herself unconscious. Megan had clawed her way out of that environment through pure courage and determination, got her college degree, worked her way up in the TPS back room to the point where she was in charge of the whole settlements office. Changed her hick accent to the smooth tones of a Southern beauty queen— now he could only hear the Ozarks in her voice when she got excited. Megan had remade herself.
And so had Charlie. The son of an East London machinist, the product of the local Mixed Junior School, he had ridden a talent for maths to London University, to a first-class degree in mathematics, to jobs at Morgan Stanley in London and Citi in New York— both American firms where his lowly origins and Cockney accent were not a liability— and now to head of the front room at Tennessee Planters Securities. Along the way he’d had his teeth capped, his jaw-line reshaped, and his straight, mousy brown hair had gone blond and wavy.
He hadn’t managed to lose his Cockney accent the way Megan had lost the tones of the Ozarks, but he’d worked out ways of turning the accent to his advantage.
In Megan he had found a kindred soul, someone who understood that sometimes a person just needed to be someone else, could decide who that person was to be, and then become that person.
The way Charlie figured it, there was a kind of empty space, a virtual space in the world where a successful person was destined to be. He planned to occupy that space.
So far, it was working very well.
Charlie adjusted his body to the massaging jets that throbbed behind his back. He tasted his cigar again and looked at Megan over the smoke that curled from his mouth. “Life is good, innit?” he said.
Megan blew a kiss at him over the rim of her brandy snifter, and gave voice to the two words that were her motto. “No guilt,” she said.
“Why be guilty?” Charlie sipped his cognac. “We’re not going to cause the recession.”
“For every winner in the market,” Megan said reasonably, “there is a loser. For every fortune we make, a fortune is lost somewhere else. People who aren’t as smart, or as quick, or are just unlucky.”
Charlie smiled. This was the settlements officer talking. In the end, for Megan everything had to balance.
It was her job to catch his mistakes. Trading was fast and manic, and sometimes in the heat of action traders placed the wrong orders or entered the wrong figures. It was not unknown for traders to attempt fraud and deception. It was the task of the settlements office to catch those mistakes on the fly, to make sure that all the accounts were balanced at the end of the day. The job required skill, intelligence, instinct, and tact.
All skills that Megan possessed in abundance. But her instinct to bring columns of figures into balance did not necessarily encompass all financial reality.
“That’s not exactly true, is it?” Charlie said. He leaned back and waved his cigar at the sky. “The market isn’t a zero-sum game,” he said. “Because wealth isn’t limited. The market can be used to make more wealth. And then everyone benefits. As that great statesman John Fitzgerald Kennedy used to say, a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Megan examined her cigar. “That’s not what’s going to happen in this case, Charlie. We’re fast and smart, and we’re going to take money from the people who are slow and stupid.”
Charlie shrugged. “They can afford to lose,” he said, “or they wouldn’t be betting at all.”
“No guilt,” she said.
He rolled the firm gray ash off the end of his Cohiba. He and Megan had formed their— they called it a “partnership”— about three months before, after dancing around their mutual attraction for the better part of a year. They kept their relationship a secret from the others at Tennessee Planters, not because there was a company policy against it, but because people might begin to wonder what an overly intimate relationship between the front and back offices of TPS might mean in terms of what Megan actually reported to their superiors about Charlie’s trades. She had, theoretically, the power to suppress information about his activities. If he was in hot water, she could cover for him.
She hadn’t ever done any such thing, of course. But Charlie liked to think that, if he ever really needed it, he could count on her to do just that.
He knew that she trusted him. He was managing her portfolio for her, had made her some money. Was about to make her enough money so that she could retire on her capital now, at the age of twenty-eight.
“I keep thinking of my dad,” he said. “What he’d make of all this.” He made a gesture that took in his house, the spa bubbling on the deck, the swimming pool glowing on the lawn below, the cigar and the cognac and the money in the bank.
“We lived in a little semidetached, you know?” he continued. “Recessions always hit us hard. When I was growing up my dad was laid off half the time. And even when he was working, my mum would meet him at the factory gate at five p.m. on Fridays, so she could get her week’s allowance before he could spend it at the boozer. All the wives did that. Imagine what it was like for the men— walk out of your place of work into this mob of women, all waiting for the money you’ve had in your hand for only a few minutes. Dad got to see his money for the length of time it took him to walk to the gate, and then it was gone. Year after year.”
“At least your dad had a paycheck,” Megan said. She shifted in her seat so that her foot could slide along his inner thigh. Pleasure sang along his nerves, and he caught his breath. He could see a wicked little smile touching the corners of Megan’s lips.
She wasn’t interested in his family history, in fact thought his affection for his family improbable. She hated her own family and saw no reason why anyone else should like his. And so, to avoid the topic altogether, she was playing a game of distraction. But Charlie preferred to demonstrate that he could not be distracted so easily. Other men might be led by their dicks, but Charlie’s moves were more calculated.
Despite the fire that quickened his blood, he leaned back and kept his voice deliberately casual.
“My dad’s a union man,” Charlie said. “Always votes Labour. Gets tears in his eyes whenever he hears the ‘Internationale.’” Charlie shook his head. “I’d buy ’em a nice place in the suburbs, but what would my dad do? He’s still at the factory, still doing his job—doesn’t want to commute to work. I’d buy them a car, but they don’t drive.”
Megan’s foot slid up one thigh, crossed his abdomen— Charlie’s belly muscles fluttered at the touch— and then her foot descended the other thigh. Charlie felt heat flowing into his cock. By a pure act of will he kept his voice from breaking.
“So,” he said, “I got my family some nice furniture, and in case I stroke out on the trading floor, I’m leaving them a packet in my will. God knows what they’ll do with the money. Buy a new telly, maybe. Take a trip to Disney World.”