Full Spectrum 3 Part 25

She set one hand lightly on his shoulder; the other was balled in a tight fist in front of her mouth, a gesture he didn't recognize. He couldn't tell if she had grasped everything he said, or whether she was still thinking it through.

"Jessica, nothing is pure chance. There are variables we haven't discovered yet. But they exist, and if I find them I can control any situation."

She wrapped her arms around him now, slowly, and set her head on his shoulder. He again found himself annoyed by her touch, by her breath against his neck; he again felt guilty for feeling annoyed. He couldn't decide exactly what to do with his own arms. He continued to think about it. He had nothing else to say, he realized.

She pushed herself from him and ran into the house. She slammed the door. Ronald stood outside for two more hours, throwing the stone, seeing where it landed, throwing it again.

Jessica's Uncle Luke stepped into the back office at the garage during Ronald's lunch break. Fumes from the cigar he clenched in his teeth filled the small room; Ronald looked up from the morning newspaper. He had been reading the article about the pair of teenagers in upstate New York who had just broken the world crawling record.

Luke hiked up his trousers across his belly. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and squinted at the writing. "I think we might be getting low on spark plugs and brake pads. Could you order us some?"

"Sparks are due in at two o'clock today, Luke. Pads will be good for another twelve days. I've also ordered halogens for Chevys. We'll run out of those next Thursday."

Luke took off his John Deere cap and scratched his scalp, mussing the little hair he still had. He chuckled deeply. "Ronnie, it's too bad you hate this place."

Ronald sat up. "No, Luke, I don't-"

"Don't try to kid me, son. I understand. This just isn't your sort of job." He leaned on Ronald's desk and flicked a cigar ash into an empty coffee cup. "h.e.l.l, if I were in your shoes, I'd feel stupid too."

Ronald sat up a little straighter. "Stupid? Well, I-"

"Tell you what, though," Luke went on, looking philosophical. "Don't know how the h.e.l.l you manage to run inventory so tight. You've cut down stock so much that I've got room to set up a fifth grease pit. Before I lose you to some corporation, you gotta show me how you figure it all out."

Ronald leaned forward and pulled a manila file from the careful stacks on the desk. "Well, I used invoices from the past three years to plot control charts. It has to be done for each of our high-volume parts. Then I pick out the variations in each system, and I calculate upper and lower control limits. I can plot..." He glanced at Luke, whose intent expression resembled pain more than concentration.

"Well, anyway," Ronald said, "I use math to guess what we'll need."

Luke nodded and set a hand on Ronald's shoulder. "You'd be a millionaire at the racetrack," he said.

Ronald set the open file on his desk. Of course it wasn't just the math; that was the simpler part of it. The difficulty was developing a feel for the way things were linked in the universe, the hidden causes that were almost absurd. A b.u.t.terfly flaps its wings in Beijing, gale-force winds result in Albany; a NASA technician throws his sandwich wrapper away in his partner's wastebasket, a junk sinks off the coast of Taiwan. Finding the links, tracing the patterns... that was the formidable task.

Bernie rushed into the office, a five-dollar bill in his hand and Stan in tow. The smell of gasoline and body odor overpowered the cigar fumes, and Ronald felt the office closing in on him. Resotech had been a lot more s.p.a.cious.

"Ronnie, how many air filters have I put in during the last six weeks?" Bernie asked, grinning. He turned to Stan and said, "Now listen close, wise a.s.s."

Ronald shook his head. Stan was the third sucker Bernie had taken on this bet. "Twenty-seven," Ronald said without checking the back sales invoices.

Bernie stepped out a peculiar victory dance he saved for this particular bet and stuffed the five dollars in the breast pocket of his greasy blue coveralls. The two of them, Stan and Bernie, were a mismatched pair, Stan as bulky and awkward as Bernie was handsome and smooth.

Stan looked incredulous. "Hey, you guys set me up."

Luke stepped back and rested an elbow on the file cabinet as Ronald pushed his chair from the desk to sit facing the two. He folded his hands on his lap and feigned patience while Bernie went through part two of the wager.

"Fine," Bernie said, putting his hands in his coverall pockets, a devil-may-care stance. "Double or nothing he can do it with any part you've used."

"Okay, you twerp b.a.s.t.a.r.d." Stan grinned with confidence as he pulled another five from his wallet. "Double or nothing." Bernie reached for the bill, but Stan balled it in his fist and glared. "How many PCV valves have I used?" he asked Ronald.

"Since when?"

"Uh... six weeks."

"What type of PCV valve?"

Luke laughed; Stan was frowning. "All right, pal, just 892-C's."

Ronald sat back. Stan, six weeks, ninety-one invoices, 2.8 liter V6 autos only; piece of cake. "Fifteen."

Stan looked blank. He unballed his fists and started counting on his fingers. Bernie s.n.a.t.c.hed the second five, laughing. "You're a f.u.c.king computer, Ronnie," he said, slapping Ronald on the back. "Break down and join us at McCollough's Pub and the first beer's on me."

Ronald nodded. "Yeah. Maybe."

"All promises, but you never show," Bernie said, shrugging. He grabbed Stan by the shoulders and pushed him out the door.

"Those boys won't ever learn not to bet against Bernie," Luke said. "Never seen the guy lose, but they'll bet anyways. Never learn." He sat on Ronald's desk and put his cap back on. "So, tell me how my little Jessica's going."

Ronald looked down at his inventory control charts and traced an index finger along an upper control limit. "Great. Great."

Luke rubbed a hand over the bristles on his chin. "Must be a happy little girl," he said, his voice edged with something like suspicion and understanding improbably combined. "Every time I ask you that, I get two 'greats' in a row."

Ronald felt the muscles tense in his lower back. "Well, she's still teaching. She likes it."

Variables. He'd exhausted the obvious. It wasn't a standard correlation. Employee theft and hot cocoa. School boards and crawling records. Time away from home. And...

"Yeah," Ronald said, retracing the inventory control lines. "She likes it."

He bolted upright in bed. "My G.o.d!" he said aloud, almost shouting.

Jessica stirred next to him but didn't wake. He could barely make out her form in the darkness; he could hear her breathing and smell the wine.

He crawled from bed as quietly as he could and made his way downstairs. The numbers had been rearranging themselves in his head, balancing, contrasting, screaming for his attention until he awoke.

Once he turned on the living room lights, he arranged the minutes table for Jessica's time away from home next to the inventory control parts for Luke's garage.

Scattergram: an x/y axis chart that would show the correlation inherent in two recurring events, even if that correlation were improbable. Absurdly Hidden.

Fan belts showed no correlation.

Nor air filters.

Nor oil sales.

Spark plugs did, a correlation coefficient of .92, close to perfect. Then a T-test to be sure. As spark plug sales rose, Jessica's time away from home lengthened; as they fell, so did her time away.

Spark plugs. And.

Bernie leaned casually against the office doorway, flipping the last spark plug in the garage off his thumb, up in the air, and catching it. Replace the spark plug with a 50-cent piece, Ronald thought, and he'd look like an old-time con man.

Uncle Luke, on the other hand, was livid.

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean you sent all the spark plugs back?"

Ronald shrugged and tried to ignore the feeling of a fist in his stomach. "I had to send them, Luke. The whole shipment was defective."

Luke began pacing tight circles on the concrete floor, scratching furiously at his left armpit. "Well, Christ, Ronnie, how the h.e.l.l do you know they were all defective? You didn't test any of them. You wouldn't even know how to put one in!"

Casual. Control. "They had some kind of, uh, goop. It was all over them and they smelled like acid or burnt rust or something. Any idiot could see they were useless."

Luke had stopped pacing and was shifting helplessly from one foot to the other. "Aw, Christ, Ronnie. If we had extras in inventory there'd be no problem."

Bernie broke in. "Boss, if you want me to go down and buy a load from Mobil-"

Ronald gripped the arms of his chair.

"Jesus," Luke said. "Buy the G.o.dd.a.m.ned things retail at triple markup? All right, all right, but just one case. Christ, Ronnie, I hope like h.e.l.l you put a rush order on the new shipment."

Ronald resumed breathing-he'd just realized he'd stopped. A single case would get Jessica home at 3:43. "Of course I ordered more, Luke. Should be here in two days."

Luke winced, but seemed to be holding his temper. He turned around to Bernie. "Get Harris to rearrange the schedule. Move up everything he can that he knows needs sparks. Aw, Christ, customers are gonna be p.i.s.sed." He shuffled out of the office, muttering.

Bernie flashed an overly composed smile from the doorway. "Stan!" he called over his shoulder, and Ronald swiveled his chair to face the door.

Stan lumbered over from the garage floor. "Yeah? What ya need?"

"Look," Bernie said, putting a hand on Stan's shoulder, "how about a little sales bet? Ten bucks says that in the next three days combined we sell less fan belts than just yesterday." With his other hand he continued to flip the spark plug.

Stan looked astonished at first, but then frowned. "You're suckering me again. What, did Ronnie tell you something about fan belts? I'm not stupid, Bernie."

Bernie exuded nonchalance, kept flipping the plug. "Hey, if you don't want to play-"

Stan grabbed the spark plug at Bernie's next flip. "Okay, pal, I'll play your game. But my rules this time. Not fan belts. Spark plugs."

Bernie did a flawless imitation of someone turning pale. "But, Stan-"

"No buts! Take the bet or I tell everybody you're a swindler." Bernie nodded weakly, and Stan left laughing.

Bernie leaned in the office and gave Ronald a wink. "Break down and join us at McCollough's, Ronnie. First drink's on me."

Ronald smiled. "No promises at all, Bernie. Tonight's a definite home night for me."

The number of b.u.t.terflies in Beijing increased 3.24 percent. In Albany, eighty-seven telephone poles toppled.

"How was school?" He met her at the door. It was quarter to four in the afternoon.

She looked at him as she set a stack of papers on the kitchen table. "It was fine," she said, her voice wary.

"Anything fun happen?" He felt the confidence and spoke easily.

Jessica leaned with one hand on the kitchen table, the other hand in the pocket of her blue cardigan. "A few things, yes."

He walked from the sink and stood beside her, drying the dishwater from his hands with a towel. "So tell me some of them. I haven't heard a funny school story out of you in two months."

She took off her sweater and sat down slowly, never taking her eyes off him. "All right," she said, "I'll tell you one."

"Great," he said. "Do you want a cup of coffee?"

She didn't go out that evening.

After dinner she excused herself to the bedroom, and he heard the phone being dialed and her whispers. He smiled. The living room stereo was tuned to an easy-listening station. He turned the lights low and waited for her to come downstairs.

The next day there was still only Bernie's case of spark plugs at Luke's garage. He made dinner for her that night, a London broil, one of three dishes he knew how to prepare. They laughed when the cooking meat set off the smoke alarm. She stayed home.

"You really don't mind I'm a blue-collar worker?" he asked.

She unb.u.t.toned his shirt and removed it from his shoulders. The collar, of course, came off with it.

The evening after, they went out for ice cream after supper and walked through Setterman's Park until sunset.

On the third day, the next shipment of spark plugs arrived.

He dashed from behind the dumpster to the brick retaining wall and fell, face forward, from the weight of the case of spark plugs. For a second all he could see were elusive, peripheral stars and the capital C of the Champion logo.

Last one, he thought. His breath came in barely audible squeaks. Last one.

He made the run to his car, popped the trunk, and heaved the case in. Twelve boxes, total.

"If you need spark plugs," Luke's voice said from behind him, "I'll just give you a G.o.dd.a.m.n set."

The little breathing squeaks all pulled together into a strained squawk of surprise, and every bit of energy and tension drained from Ronald's limbs. He felt like a puddle.

Luke strolled out from the far side of the retaining wall. He was there, Ronald thought. He was right there watching.

"They were bad!" Ronald yelled, and he realized he sounded just as guilty as he was. "They were just like the last shipment. I was going to drive them back myself and get some good ones because I knew how upset you were the last time"-while he was saying this, Luke had opened one of the boxes and removed a ring case of six perfectly healthy spark plugs-"and even though some of them look good they're all defective and won't make any sparks, so what good are they as spark plugs?"

Luke stared at him.

Ronald realized what he needed more than anything else in the world at this moment was some of Bernie's fast talk and charm.

"I'll buy them!" He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and began digging out credit cards. "See? MasterCard, Luke, and it has a $2000 limit with just $58.69 on it. I wasn't stealing them. We can ring up the sale right now. You can call the number and check. It only has $58.69 on it."