Lost and Found

1 Marcus Walker loved Chicago, and Chicago loved him, which is why he was in Bug Jump, California. Well, not in Bug Jump, exactly. As even the locals would admit, one was never actually wholly within Bug Jump. One sort of hovered around its tenuous periphery, much as the peripatetic mosquitoes of midsummer zoned around Cawley Lake, where Marcus had pitched his tent. One of innumerable splashes of impossible blue that spotted the northern Sierra Nevada like shards of a scattered lapis necklace, Cawley Lake lay at the terminus of a half-hour drive up a road that had been coaxed from reluctant Sierra granite by the judicious application of hard-rock drilling, well-mannered explosives, and much road-crew cursing. The bumps and ruts of the road were hell on Walker's Durango four-wheel drive, but that didn't worry the commodities trader. It wasn't his SUV; it was Hertz's. Slamming up and down the steep grade to and from Bug Jump, the 4X4 accumulated scrapes and dings the way Marcus's forehead collected sunburn. All in all, he reflected with satisfaction as he heard the SUV complain through another grinding downshift, it had been another very good year for Marcus Walker. Even if he had reached the ripe old age of thirty. Unlike some of his rambunctious yet dismayed colleagues, he did not think it was All Downhill From Here. Having despite several promising opportunities resolutely put off applying for admission to the institution of marriage, he retained certain enviable options that were no longer open to most of his friends. It wasn't, as he repeatedly and patiently explained to the curious, not all of whom were his relatives, that he did not want to get married; just that he was pickier and in less of a hurry than most. Sprung as he was from a home whose parents had split when he was a teenager, he was understandably warier than the average successful young man of committing himself to a similar mistake. The money he made helped. He was not rich, but given his age and experience, he lived comfortably. For that he could thank hard, hard work and perspicacity. That quick killing he had made in Brazilian OJ concentrate, for example. He gritted his teeth as the SUV was outraged by a pothole, threatening his insurance rider. Among the other traders who worked out of the office, only Estrada had followed the Brazilian weather closely enough to see the possible late frost looming. When it had struck, only the two of them had been properly positioned to deliver the necessary futures at a favorable price to their customers. Then there was cocoa. Not only had trading in cocoa futures done wonders for his bank account, it had unexpected social benefits as well. Tell a girl who asked what you did for a living that you were a commodities trader and she might shrug, make a beeline for the next bar stool, smile vacuously and change the subject, or tentatively try to find out how well it paid. The usual reaction was for their eyes to glaze over as thickly as the sugar on a Christmas fruitcake. Telling them you were in chocolate, however, fell somewhere between saying that you had just inherited fifty million dollars and that you had a brother who was a wholesale buyer for Tiffany's. Aside from the beguiled expressions such an admission produced, you could smell the concomitant rise in hormone production with one nostril pinched shut. He chuckled to himself at the various images mention of his vocation engendered among members of both sexes: everything from dashing world-traveling entrepreneur to stultifyingly dull owl-eyed accountant. Nothing he could say ever changed another's perception of his profession. Though the wooded slopes flanking the narrow, winding road were growing dark, he was not concerned. He'd made the drive from his isolated encampment down into Bug Jump half a dozen times during tFoster, Alan Dean is the author of 'Lost and Found', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345461254 and ISBN 0345461258.