The Speculist

The waitress was not amused.

“Look,” she hissed, “I don’t have time for this. You kids already owe for what you ate and you’ve been here a long time. This isn’t the damn bus station, you know.”

We all looked uncomfortably around the table.

“Well,” said Todd, “why don’t we just settle for what we owe you already? Before we order anything else.” He reached into the brown paper bag positioned snugly on the seat between himself and Judy and produced a crisp twenty dollar bill.

“I think this will cover everything,” he said. “and keep the change for yourself.”

The waitress was taken aback. But that didn’t slow her down in accepting the money.

“You see, ma’am,” Todd continued, “we’re in an unusual situation. We’re meeting my mother later. She works near here and she’ll be getting off in about…”

“An hour,” said Judy.

“Right,” said Todd. “An hour. We appreciate your patience in letting us wait here until then. And we thank you for the good service.” He glanced just ever so briefly at the twenty as he said this. The message was clear: be nice to us and you’ll get more of the same.

The waitress nodded and then turned to Grace with a smile that couldn’t have been sweeter or more sincere had it actually been sweet and sincere.

“How ‘bout strawberry ice cream, honey? That’s pink.”

Grace nodded enthusiastically.

“Oh yes, please,” she said. “Pink ice cream.”

“One cheeseburger, one strawberry ice cream.” She began collecting our plastic glasses. “I’ll just refill those sodas for you. And you kids let me know if you need anything else.”

And with that, she departed.

“Grace, why do you always want everything to be pink?” asked Todd.

“Because pink is yummy.”

She turned to me.

“ ’Member, Corey, when you made the pink cake?”

I nodded. I did remember. It was the first time I had thought about that incident that day. I hoped that eventually there would be time to be appropriately mystified by the many strange things that I had done. Both before and after coming to the home. This was not the day for that. But when that day came, and when I had a the chance to reflect upon what I had wrought, I knew that the cake episode would stand out, somehow. There was something different about it.

“How can it be yummy?” Todd persisted. “Pink isn’t a flavor; it’s a color.”

Grace shrugged.

“Pink things are yummy,” she said. “They taste yummy. They taste pink.”

“I can see that,” said Judy. She turned to Todd. “But what’s the idea with the 42% tip?” she asked. “I thought we were supposed to be inconspicuous?”

“You round 41.449 up to 42?” he scoffed. “Where did you learn math?”

“At the John Mackey Home, same as you,” said Judy. “With a little help from Corey. But don’t change the subject. What’s the idea flashing the money?”

Todd smiled.

“I think I’m learning to communicate,” he said.

Judy looked puzzled.

“Take this morning. We visited Miss Baker with a very simple objective in mind, and yet I lost her with my explanation.”

Judy nodded.

“That’s for sure.”

“Yes. I was disappointed in how that worked out. So I watched what you did in explaining the situation to her, and while you were talking…something occurred to me. I don’t know how else to say it. I kind of…embraced the whole idea of communicating with somebody. I got it. I’d never had it before. But I saw you do it and it looked so straightforward, like you didn’t even have to think about what you were saying.”

Judy considered this.

“Well, I didn’t, really.”

“Exactly. I think that’s how it is for most people. Talking is kind of like…walking. You don’t think about it, you just do it. But I have to approach it from another place. I think this is something that Corey and I have in common. I don’t think we were designed for language.”

Todd looked at me. I considered what he said. Maybe this was why I couldn’t talk. Or write. Maybe my brain couldn’t handle language. But that made no sense. I could understand what they were saying, after all. And I could read. But it was somehow a one-way street.

Somehow, Angela was the key to all this. I needed to get to the city on the mountain. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not now.

Todd turned back to Judy.

“Then as I watched you persuading Miss Baker, and I saw how easy it was — and I actually saw what it was that you were doing — I got it. I could see that getting a message across is like solving any other problem. Right? And talking somebody into something…that’s just another kind of problem to solve. A harder one, maybe. A specialized instance. But in the end, it’s all just like calculating the percentage of the tip.”

Judy looked doubtful.

“I guess,” she said.

“Anyway, I’m starting to think I have the knack for it. You just have to listen to what other people are telling you. Not necessarily their words, but everything else they say. This morning, Miss Baker didn’t want to know that there was no other choice, that giving us the check was the one and only way to go. But that’s what I was telling her. She wanted to know that she could help us. And get at Jepson. And be assured that she was doing the right thing. That’s all she wanted. And you gave it to her.

“This situation just now, that was different. The waitress wants to come out ahead. She doesn’t want to feel like she’s being taken advantage of. She needs to know that she’s getting the better end of the bargain. So I gave that to her. And now if her boss yells at her for our being here all this time, she doesn’t care. She understands the situation better than he does and she gets the money. It’s exactly what she needed.”

The waitress reappeared with Grace’s ice cream.

“Here you go, honey,” she said, setting the dish before her.

“Thank you, ma’am.” She dug into it.

With the waitress safely gone, Judy continued.

“I think you might be on to something,” she said. “This could really help us.”

Todd nodded.

“I think it already has,” he said. “Some people need to know who is in charge, believing themselves to be. When they find out they aren’t, you can get almost anything you want from them.”

Todd was referring to what had happened that afternoon after we left Miss Baker’s. And I was quite certain he was right. We would never have come to where we were without his newly amplified powers of persuasion.

As soon as I heard it, I knew the big plan that these two and Lucinda had come up with that morning was flawed. I just had no way of telling them. As they saw it, the only real obstacle they had to overcome was getting the check from Miss Baker. But I knew the real difficulty lay in the next step.

Cashing it.

After we left Miss Baker’s, we headed straight for the bank. Having been confined all our lives, walking around was a new experience for us. (As I mentioned, I had spent a good deal of time on the bus years before. But my mother never walked anywhere.) We used a map of town torn from the phonebook to guide us. Fortunately, Greenwood was still a pretty small town at the time: Miss Baker lived only fifteen blocks from the home; the bank was nine blocks from her house; then it was seven more blocks from there to the diner. Judy had been concerned over whether Grace would be able to handle all the walking, but there was no choice about taking her. Her presence had been crucial in dealing with Miss Baker, and we expected that it would be even more important in the meeting we had planned next.

Anyway, about the bank. It’s important to note that this all took place a number of years ago. I guess it’s easy to imagine that things were somehow simpler when we were kids. But in some ways they really were. The town was smaller. Twenty dollars was all it took to pay for dinner for four and bribe a waitress. And a nine-year-old kid could walk into a bank and a cash a check for $8,000.

Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple.

Todd had assumed rightly that our best bet for cashing the check would be to take it to Greenwood Security Bank. This was the bank where the home had its account, the bank from which the check would be drawn. Miss Baker had left the home more than a year before, but her name was still on the home’s bank statements. Even the most recent ones. (These statements had been a little troubling to look at. There was a blank space under the name Myra Baker where another name seemed to belong.) Todd concluded that the presence of Myra’s name on the statements meant that she was still listed at the bank as a signatory for the account. So the check would be valid, and the signature could be verified against a signature card on file.

Again, he was right on both counts.

Now I don’t know where Todd got the idea of having the check made out to cash, or for that matter where he got any of his information about how banks work. It must have been from TV; there were certainly no reference books on the subject in the home’s library. But he knew that if the check was made out to cash, the person cashing it would not need to show any identification. Which was good, because we had none.

Alternative plans had been discussed that morning in which we got Miss Baker to make the check out to the Mission Lady or to Sheila. But it seemed unlikely that we could get either of them to go along with the idea. And even if we got one of them to cash the check, we doubted either of them would then give us the money and let us do with it what we had planned. Plus, for her trouble, our accomplice would probably end up in jail.

That was not acceptable.

So Todd’s idea was simpler and better, and that was the idea we went with. When we got to the bank, I stood with him in line while the girls waited in the lobby. When Todd reached the front of the line, he handed the check to the teller and said

“I’d like cash for this check, please. Tens and twenties.”

The teller was a young guy in a crisp blue suit. He looked at the check. Then he looked at us. Then he looked at the check again. Then he looked back up.

“I’m sorry, boys,” he said. “Is this a joke or something?”

Todd got very stiff.

“It is not. Please cash the check.”

The teller shook his head.

“This doesn’t make any sense. Where did you get this check?”

Todd glared at the man. His tone of voice became very lofty.

“Sir, I’ve been watching you work for the last twenty minutes or so. Four people were in this line ahead of me with checks they either cashed or deposited into their accounts. Not once did you ask any of them where they got their check.”

The teller frowned. This didn’t seem to be going well. I wondered why, after the trouble Todd had talking to Miss Baker, it hadn’t occurred to us that Judy should cash the check.

“Don’t get smart with me,” the teller said. “Let’s just see what Mr. Carter has to say about all this.”

The teller walked away, check in hand, and returned a few minutes later with a fat bespectacled man in black pin stripes. He looked us both over for a moment before speaking.

“What’s your name, son?” he asked.

“Todd. Todd Alpert.”

“And what about you?” he asked me.

“He’s my friend, Corey.”

“Boys, I don’t know what this is all about, but we’re going to have to hold onto this check and have a word with your parents. Please follow me to my office.”

Todd looked coldly at the man.

“We will not,” he said, loud enough for the people behind us in line, and standing in the two adjacent lines, to hear. “By what right are you confiscating this check? And placing us under arrest? Are you even remotely aware of the legal implications of what you’re saying?”

Mr. Carter blinked. The he cleared his throat.

“Now nobody said anything about confiscating or arresting,” he said uncertainly. “And I don’t think there’s any need for you to take that tone of voice…”

“Mr. Carter, let’s keep this simple, shall we? You’re holding a valid check written on an account in this bank. I will endorse it any way you like. But if you can confirm that the check is properly made out and signed — which I assure you it is — and that there are sufficient funds in the account to cover the check — which I assure you there are — then I don’t understand what the hold-up could possibly be.”

At this point, Mr. Carter began to turn quite red.

“Now you look here. You don’t take that tone of voice with me. You think you can just waltz in here with a check for eight thousand dollars and cash it. I have an obligation to make sure this is a legitimate transaction.”

“Then check the signature and see if it’s valid. Or call Miss Baker if you like and confirm that she wrote the check and sent me here to cash it. We came here straight from her house.”

Mr. Carter looked perplexed.

“But why would she have given you this check?” he asked.

“That is none of your concern, sir. I’m sure you’ve heard about what’s happening at the home she runs. Doesn’t she have enough trouble without being harassed by the bank?”

Mr. Carter suddenly calmed down.

“All right, now,” he said in a placating tone. “Nobody is harassing anyone. I just want to understand why she would…”

“That is quite simply none of your concern,” Todd said again. “Call her if you like, but I hope you don’t expect that she owes you an explanation. She does not.”

Mr. Carter walked away, shaking his head and mumbling something under his breath. We knew that we were in a dangerous position. Miss Baker had left the home some time before. Her name was still on the statements, but wasn’t it strange for her to be writing this check? Even if she was legally entitled to do so? Plus, even though she had written the check, would she stand by the decision to do so when called by the bank? It was a risk.

Mr. Carter returned less than two minutes later. He huddled with the teller for a moment and then walked away again.

“Please sign the back,” the teller said, passing the check back to Todd.

Todd did so, and then handed the teller a brown paper shopping grocery bag.

“Tens and twenties, please,” he said.