The Devil in Silver (23 page)

“My library was having a book sale,” Josephine said. “Getting rid of a lot of things. My mother and I went there on Saturday and Sunday. I found a bunch of stuff that I thought you might like. I had fifty dollars to spend and they were selling titles cheap.”

Dr. Barger snorted. “At least New Hyde spit up the cash for that!”

Josephine shook her head. “Actually, the money came from me.”

Dr. Barger looked back at her again and nodded. He didn’t offer anything more.

Josephine said, “You don’t have to wait for Book Group to pick something. If you come find me, I’ll let you borrow a title.”

Dr. Barger turned back to the table and looked at his copy of
Jaws
. He said, “How many of you actually read it?”

Every hand, including Josephine’s, went up.

Dorry said, “We’re ready.”

And Dr. Barger nodded, opened his copy of the book.

“We’re ready,” Dorry repeated, and the doctor waved to let her know he’d heard.

He heard but didn’t understand.

Dorry wasn’t speaking to him.

She watched Pepper who finally looked up from his book. The old woman stared at him.

“We’re ready,” she said.

But ready for what, exactly? The spirit was willing, but the flesh was a little … disorganized. They’d stopped taking their medications with the hopes that it would allow some clarity. So they could make their next decision—how to confront the Devil? And what to do when they released it?

That wasn’t a conversation for Book Group, though.

So they talked about
Jaws
and passed an hour. Dr. Barger shook each person’s hand before he had Josephine walk him to the secure door and let him out for good. She looked over her shoulder before sliding the key in the door this time. When Josephine returned to conference room 2, the four patients had left for the television lounge where they waited on the next smoke break. Miss Chris was the one who opened the way this time. She unlocked the shatterproof glass door and did a head count as the patients shuffled past.

“Eight out!” she shouted, for no one’s benefit. It’s not like one of the orderlies, or another nurse, or any of the higher-paid staff, was standing around with a clipboard, taking count. No. Miss Chris called out
the number only to alert the other staff members back at the nurses’ station that
she
had monitored this break and she better not be bothered to cover another soon.

Four of the eight patients spent their time smoking. Japanese Freddy Mercury and Yuckmouth, Wally Gambino and, of all people, the Haint. They stood around the tilted basketball rim and lit up. The other four gathered under the maple tree. The ground showed dozens of maple seeds, gone brown because they’d fallen and found only concrete. Nowhere to grow so they died. Dorry reached down and picked one up and twirled the stem between her thumb and forefinger.

“My son used to like playing helicopters with these.”

“He never visits you?” Coffee asked. He didn’t realize the line might sound harsh.

Dorry let the husk go and it fell without whirling. “I like to think he’s always near me. But my daughter visits.” She seemed glum but smiled after a moment. “And she brings my grandsons.”

Out here, away from the watchful eye of a moderately vigilant staff, Pepper dropped the droopy lip and straightened his left leg.

Loochie said, “Why are you acting like that?”

“I’m trying to make them think I’m still on my medication. We were all supposed to do that. Remember?”

Loochie said, “I
was
!”

Dorry and Coffee nodded, too. As if their chicanery had been clear. And Pepper understood that this, right now, was how they
thought
they appeared all the time, even when the medication had been wrecking them. Even Dorry, who’d been at New Hyde for decades, had never seen herself as she’d been seen by others.

And what about Pepper? Before he got all incredulous about the distance between the reality and the perception of Dorry, Coffee, and Loochie, maybe he’d better consider the difference between the man he believed he was and the man so many others encountered. His brother and sister-in-law. His mom and dad. The super of his building, once or twice when his apartment had no heat in the depths of winter. And, of course, Mari. He’d hoped she thought of him as a valiant knight, but from that phone call, she seemed to think of him
as, at best, a bother. He wondered if she’d ever found his brother’s number. So far Ralph sure hadn’t called or come by. Maybe nobody ever saw themselves completely objectively. Every self-image needs a flattering mirror or two.

Pepper said, “Well, let’s talk about
now
. Let’s talk about what’s next.”

Loochie, without thinking, crouched and found a half dozen pebbles there on the ground and as she gathered them up she said, “We let it out. Then we light it up.”

She stood again and shook the handful of small stones in her palm.

Pepper said, “That’s one vote for fighting.”

Coffee said, “I just want to get the right people in here so
they
can make this place work the way it’s supposed to.”

Pepper said, “That’s one vote for insane faith.”

Coffee cut his eyes at Pepper and Pepper corrected himself.

“That’s one vote for optimism. How about that?”

Coffee said, “Accurate.”

“I want to talk with him,” Dorry said. “He needs to hear us. We need to make him understand that he’s hurting us. Maybe he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. Have you considered that? Once you know someone, it’s a lot harder to remain enemies.”

Loochie shook her closed fist at Dorry. “So you want to make friends with the Devil? That’s your plan?”

“He’s a man!” Dorry shouted. The patients by the rim looked over quickly but soon returned their attention to their cigarettes.

“And I would think that if anyone should be able to feel a little sympathy for a person with troubles,” Dorry added, “it’s people like us.”

Loochie said, “People like you, maybe. People like me? We don’t shake hands with monsters.”

Dorry laughed. “What does that mean? ‘People like me.’ Teenagers? I’ve got
bras
that are older than you.”

Loochie scrunched her nose. “That’s nasty.”

Coffee poked Pepper in the arm. “What about you, then? What do you want to do?”

“I want to get out of here,” Pepper admitted. “I don’t want to open
that door or fight or have peace talks with that thing. I want us to
leave
. It’s like you people forgot what it’s like to live anywhere but here!”

Loochie and Coffee and Dorry flinched at that.

Dorry squinted at Pepper. “And where will we go once you open the big door? Will I stay with my daughter in Greenpoint? Where she’ll treat me like a burden every single day? Until eventually she calls an ambulance for me, because I just don’t fit into her life there, and I’m escorted back to New Hyde Hospital by the EMTs. That’s your plan?”

Pepper tried to speak, but Dorry reached across and touched Loochie lightly on the side of her head.

“And Loochie will go back with her mother and her brother, yes? At least until they call the police to come get her after one too many fights. And then she’ll be right back at New Hyde, you can bet.”

Dorry pointed at Coffee next. “And he’ll be free for as long as he doesn’t attract anyone’s notice. But as soon as he does, they’ll come talk to him about his
status
in this country. And when they find out that he’s overstayed his original visa? They’ll send him right back to Tora Bora.”

“Uganda,” Coffee said.

Dorry nodded. “You’re welcome.”

She stepped right up to Pepper, one shoulder bumping him in the gut.

“So when you say you want us to leave, who are you really thinking of?
We
can’t run from what’s coming. But if you want to go, you can go. Why don’t you climb that fence right now?”

Pepper looked at the chain link, the kind he’d been climbing since he was a kid, all around Queens. Even with the lingering ache in his rib cage, even with the barbed wire bundled along the top edge, he thought he could do it. Strip off his pajama top and toss it over the barbs to protect his skin. He’d get cut, but he could manage. With the meds out of his system for three days, he felt in so much more command of his body. He felt sure even his wounds had healed faster. He watched the fence line and the other three watched him. Until
Miss Chris opened the door to the lounge again and called the patients back in.

Miss Chris shouted, “Eight in!”

“If you’re going to stay with us,” Dorry said, calmer now, “I think we should wait until Saturday night.”

“Overnight weekend shift,” Coffee added.

Loochie said, “Only two staff on duty then. That’s smart.”

Saturday night.

Two days from then. Forty-eight more hours of dumping their meds down bathroom sinks; 2,880 minutes of gaining strength; 172,800 seconds before Pepper had to decide if he would fight alongside them, or flee.

SATURDAY MORNING, PEPPER
woke up to find himself alone in the room and its door halfway open. Since his bed sat right beside the hidden door in the wall, he’d taken to touching it at the bulge where the handle used to be. In the last two days, he’d probably rubbed the spot two dozen times. The motion had become reassuring, soothing, as he tried to decide what he’d do tonight. Pepper touched it now but, in a flash, saw this behavior as if watching himself from across the room. He thought of Coffee at the phones, dialing and dialing. Or Loochie, pulling out her own hair on so many nights. Obsessive ticks. Maybe he was developing one, too. Pepper pulled his hand away. He jumped out of bed. He needed to do something else, to focus on anything else.

Pepper closed the door. He went across the room to Coffee’s dresser, and slid it away from the wall. He wanted to see if there was a door outlined under the paint here, too. But when Pepper moved the dresser, he found all these small black droppings on the floor. Rat turds. Wonderful.

Pepper rested one arm on Coffee’s dresser, which made the flimsy thing slide toward Coffee’s bed. When it connected, he heard a rattling sound. Pepper stooped and pulled open the bottom drawer and found pills. Handfuls of them. He’d seen Coffee dump some of his
meds down the bathroom sink for the past few days, but who knew how many were assigned to the man each day? Pepper had been kept on a steady diet of two pills, three times a day, so he’d assumed that was about normal. In fact, there were patients on the unit who took six, seven, nine pills
per meal
. Imagine that. Twenty-seven doses a day. Coffee was one of those. This drawer full of pills represented just five days of abstaining.

The sight made Pepper downright nostalgic for the days of Coffee pestering him for coins. It was a wonder Coffee had been able to do that much with this many pharmaceuticals in his blood. Nickels, dimes, and quarters. For a moment Pepper was reminded of the simple—stupid!—pleasure he used to take in gathering up his coins and going to a Coinstar machine at the Key Food near his apartment. Feeding the change into that swiss-cheese grill and listening to it all rattle as the machine counted up the currency. Sometimes he’d even forget to take the slip to the register and redeem it for cash right away. The joy had been in finding out how much he’d collected. That’s the kind of thing that being inside the unit made a person miss.

As Pepper slid the drawer shut again, he wondered if, and when, the police would ever return for him. When they’d bring him before a judge. When he’d receive sentencing. Or was this the sentence? Not what they’d intended when they picked him up but just as good. He wondered where he might be in the NYPD’s system. How long after the paperwork was filed before Huey, Dewey, and Louie would return for him? In books, movies, television, the justice system worked with a ruthless efficiency. Arrest, arraignment, trial, and verdict, all in forty-six minutes and forty-eight seconds.

Not here.

Since the conversation under the maple tree, Pepper had been evading the other members of his revolutionary cell. When Coffee went out to “take” his meds and get breakfast, Pepper pretended to still be sleeping. Yesterday, he didn’t eat one meal with Coffee or Dorry or Loochie. If they’d noticed, they didn’t stress him about it. All that mattered, for their purposes, was what he’d do tonight. But he still didn’t know.

Before leaving the room, Pepper went to his dresser and took out
his street clothes. The slacks and socks had dried. They were a little stale, but they didn’t stink. They now showed large orange splotches where the dirty water had soaked through and stained. On the right butt cheek of his slacks, and in spots down both legs. The heels of both socks, too. And yet Pepper put them on. His shirt had been ruined so he still had to wear the pajama top.

With those spotted clothes on he almost looked like a man wearing desert camouflage pants. He even put on his boots again.

Pepper walked to the nurses’ station after all the other patients had been there and gone. Miss Chris and Josephine had been on duty together, but only Miss Chris stood waiting for him now. Josephine sat in front of the computer again. The screen glowed slightly green, and she stared at it with an expression beyond confusion, beyond frustration. Josephine almost looked serene as she watched the screen. Her arms were crossed, as if waiting for the computer to address her. As if it might offer an ingot of wisdom if she sat there long enough.

Miss Chris, on the other hand, waggled the clipboard at Pepper when he entered the oval room. “This the one I waiting on.” She took one look at his stained, spotty slacks but said nothing. At least he wasn’t walking around without them.

Pepper reached the nurses’ station and stretched out his right hand for his pills.

“Eh-heh, just like that? You come late-late and don’t even
apologize
?”

She gave Pepper the sharp eyes. But he’d been on the unit for a month and a half and felt less intimidated by her now. It wasn’t that he thought she was harmless, he just couldn’t hide that he also found her to be a pain in the ass. Pepper kept his hand out and did not apologize. He looked her directly, defiantly, in the eye.