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In that moment, writing my address for them, on a desk in the hangar, I remembered the .words to the tune that had been bebopping through my head since a moment after the crash.
Sh-boom, sh-boom . . . and a lot of ya-t-ta ya-t-tas.
Why should I be humming that song? I wondered. After twenty years, why now?
The song didn't care why, it rattled on: Life could be a dream/Sh-boom/If I could take you to paradise up-above/ Sh-boom ...
The song! It was the ghost of the Mustang singing, complete with sound-effects!
Life could be a dream, sweetheart . . .
Of course life is a dream, you tin witch! And you near did take me to paradise up above! Sh-boom, you shredded hulk!
Is there nothing goes through our mind that has no meaning? That airplane, it never could take me seriously.
The jetliner taxied past the sagebrush on its way to take-off. From the window by my seat I watched.
The foam-slopped Mustang body was already on a flatbed truck; a crane lifted torn wing-sections.
You want to play games, airplane? You like to have something break every flight, you want to have a clash of wills with me?
You lose! May you find someone who will forget your past and nail you back together someday a hundred years from now. May you remember this hour, and be nice to them! I swear, machine-for you I got no nails.
First the parachute failure, now an airplane-crash. I thought about those, flying west, and after a while decided that I had been divinely guided, protected without a scratch through moments turned a little more adventurous than I had planned.
Anybody else would have seen the opposite. The crash wasn't my protection at work, it was my protection running out.
nine
M. WAS drowning in money. People around the world were reading the book, buying copies of other books I had written. Money from every book-sale came from the publisher back to me.
Airplanes I can handle, I thought, but money it makes me nervous. Can money crash?
Palm fronds waved outside his office window, sunlight warmed the reports on his desk. "I can handle this for you, Richard. There's no problem here. I can do it if you want me to." He stood an inch over five feet tall; his hair and beard had turned from red to white over the years, changing a gifted elf to an all-knowing Santa.
He was a friend from my magazine-writing days, editor turned investment counselor. I had liked him from the first story-assignment he had given me, admired his calm sense of business from the first day we had met. I trusted him
completely, and nothing he had said all afternoon had flickered that trust.
"Stan, I can't tell you how glad ..." I said. "It's got to be done right, but I don't know what to do with money; and paperwork and tax-things, I don't know about it, I don't like it. Effective now, Financial Manager, it's your business, full-time, and I'm out of it."
"You don't even want to know about it, Richard?"
I looked again at the graphs of his investing performance. All the lines went straight up.
"Nope," I said. "Well, I want to know if I ask, or if there's any huge decision you're about to make. But so much of what you're doing is so far over my head ..."
"I wish you wouldn't say that," he said. "It's not magic, it's simple technical analysis of commodity markets. M
ost people fail in commodities because they don't have the capital to cover a margin call when the market moves against them. You-that is, we-don't have that problem. We start investing cautiously, with a large capital reserve. As we earn money with our strategies, we then become more speculative.
"When we walk into something as obvious as a head-and-shoulders in a commodity, we can move a lot of money and make a fortune. And we don't always go long, a lot of people forget that. There's just as much money to be made short." He smiled, noticed I was lost already.
He touched a graph. "Now you take this chart, which is plywood prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. You see right here's the head-and-shoulders starting, the warning that the bottom is about to fall out, this is last April. At that point we would have sold plywood, sold lots of plywood. Then when the price tumbles way down here, we would
have bought lots. Sell high and buy low is the same as buy low and sell high. See that?"
How could we sell . . . "How can we sell before we've bought? Don't we have to buy before we sell?"
