Well, all right! Joe thought. He left and walked toward the Holiday Inn. Every once in a while, things work out the way they should. He felt his resolve to keep going. It was in him like a fist. "I, too, am a hard man," he said.
16
Sunny Honolulu . . . Joe was relieved to be back. He wrote to Kate, enclosing her inheritance check and explaining his father's stipulation concerning the money. "No problem," she e-mailed back, "we're out every weekend looking at houses." Joe paid his Montpelier tuition and put some money in the bank, but he couldn't resist buying 4000 shares of a company that he'd been following on the Internet.
An Italian, whose father was well-known in the steel business, had developed a new type of composite steel. Stainless steel tubes were packed with crushed recycled carbon steel and then rolled under heat and pressure, bonding the whole together. The resulting composite, or cladded, steel had the outer resistance of stainless but was much cheaper. There was a huge market for non-corroding rebar to be used in concrete exposed to the weather, particularly in marine environments and in roads that were salted during the winter.
The Italian joined forces with a British financier who had a good reputation. They entered a joint venture with a Korean firm that subsequently withdrew support for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the product. Their venture went bankrupt, but the two hung in there and repurchased the mill that they had established in Wales. They issued stock for operating capital and began to produce test quantities of the new steel. Joe bought the stock at .75, roughly the value of the existing mill and property (if the .75 were multiplied by the number of shares outstanding). His thinking was that he was getting the life's work of the Italian for nothing and that the product was bound to catch on eventually. For a small added expense, the life of a bridge could be effectively doubled. The Brit had a track record of success. He owned a significant fraction of the company, and hadn't sold a single share. The company would either license the process to a steel giant or be bought outright. Joe was fairly sure of this. The question was when. He had learned his lesson with Southwest Precious Metals, and he bought for the long haul, an investment, not a trade. "Definitely fun," he said in the direction of Maine and his father whom he thought of as still being somewhere near the barn.
On Thanksgiving, after his second annual dinner of parrot fish and black bean sauce, Joe returned home and pushed the play button on the answering machine. He heard piano chords, an intro, and then Isabelle's rich low voice. "Joe, where are you tonight?" A few bars of melody followed. "Joe . . . " She broke off with a strained laugh and hung up.
"Uh, oh," Joe said. She sounded drunk and far away, as though she were trying to sing across an ocean. He didn't think that she was on the island. "Good thing," he said to himself. But he was sad for her. The old Johnny Cash song went through his mind: You've got to walk that lonesome valley. You've got to walk it by yourself . . . She was in trouble for sure. The phone rang. He hesitated and picked it up on the third ring.
"Hello, Joe."
"Jason?"
"Yup."