The Devil in Silver (18 page)

Book Group ended and they all fled. They were running from Sam, even if they wouldn’t put it that way. She stank of desperation and loss. Dr. Barger couldn’t stay because he had another job, late-afternoon patients at his private practice, a half hour drive from New Hyde Hospital. (You didn’t think Dr. Barger was living solely on the salary he earned serving the practically destitute population of Northwest, did you?)

Last out of the room was Josephine, whose heart felt sore as she wheeled the book cart. She’d had to evict Sam before locking up. Sam didn’t even argue as she walked out, head down again. Josephine watched her leave and wanted to grab Sam’s hand. Just hold it. But she wanted to be a professional. Best to get back to work or Josephine would soon feel overwhelmed. The cart had to be returned to the supply closet in Northwest 1. Then back to the nurses’ station to log on to the computer, continue transferring information from the charts. Who else would do it? Most of the staff couldn’t handle an automatic transmission.

Pepper and Coffee walked together. Coffee had his binder and his copy of
Jaws
tucked under one arm. Pepper held his copy of the novel in one hand. They looked like schoolboys just then, walking home from class.

“You think she’s right?” Pepper asked. And he had to repeat himself
because Coffee didn’t answer him. He realized he must’ve whispered.

“You think she’s right? It took Sammy when it couldn’t get me?”

They reached the nurses’ station and Coffee said, “I wish I could tell you yes or no. But I can only say I’m happy you’re all right.”

Pepper touched his own chest lightly. “Not that good.”

Coffee waved away any self-pity. “Better than Sammy, I bet.”

It was almost dinnertime and all the staff, besides Josephine, were busy dropping pills into little white plastic cups. Preparing for the dinner rush. Coffee eyed the phone alcove.

Then Pepper reached over and slipped the blue three-ring binder from under Coffee’s arm. The copy of
Jaws
fell to the floor with a smack, but Coffee didn’t pay it any attention.

“What’s in here?” Pepper asked.

But he didn’t even have time to playfully flip through the pages. Coffee reached up and
thumped
Pepper directly against his wounded sternum, and Pepper hopped on one foot and his hands flew out and he huffed out one big breath. And Coffee’s binder fell from Pepper’s hands and Coffee caught it. Then he stooped and picked up his copy of
Jaws
. By the time one of the orderlies looked up from the tray of pills, Coffee was walking toward Northwest 2 and Pepper seemed to be doing some kind of interpretative dance.

The orderly said, “Go get ready for dinner.”

Pepper steadied himself and breathed deeply as he walked. Trying to catch up to Coffee, who was already halfway down Northwest 2, almost at their room. First Loochie, then the staff, the Devil and now even Coffee. What was the point of being as big as he was if no one respected it? He didn’t realize how much it would rattle his confidence to lose the power of his size. Besides that, what did he have? Other things, surely. But what?

He caught up to Coffee, standing in the doorway of their room.

Pepper stopped right behind Coffee and said, “What’s the holdup?”

Coffee pointed. Up.

Pepper said, “Ah, shit.”

The ceiling had sprung a leak.

Right over Pepper’s mattress.

A rust-colored stain, about the diameter of a coffee mug, could be seen in the ceiling tile above his bed.

They watched as a drop fell from the ceiling and landed directly on Pepper’s pillow. It wasn’t the first. There was a reddish blot about as big as a half-dollar.

Pepper put one hand on Coffee’s shoulder, for balance. His chest throbbed, his throat tightened. He whispered, “Should I report this?”

Coffee looked up at the ceiling and down at the pillow. Sadly, he knew this place much better than Pepper. He’d been at New Hyde a year.

Coffee said, “You should just move your bed.”

The spot in the ceiling seemed to darken for a moment, then a bead of moisture gathered and dangled and descended. They watched it fall. As if they hadn’t already seen what would happen. They watched it hit Pepper’s pillow. The reddish blot grew.

“That’s disgusting,” Coffee said.

True. But how disgusting? What was it? Pepper took his hand off Coffee’s shoulder. He looked down at Coffee with a look of pleading. Would Coffee go in first? But Coffee just shook his head. Coffee sure wasn’t going in to investigate on Pepper’s behalf. He wasn’t about to be
that
black guy. (You know, the one who scouts ahead and gets his ass sliced in two. Somewhere near the first ten minutes of the horror movie. Although, to be fair, moviemakers have largely stopped that practice. Now there’s usually one amiable but forgettable white person who dies first,
and then
they kill off all the nonwhite cast members.)

The ceiling dripped again. The drop fell. The pillow caught it. The reddish blot bloomed.

Coffee stepped aside and Pepper cautiously moved toward his bed, his eyes on the stain. He reached the pillow and pulled it away from the bed. He looked back at Coffee, who hadn’t stepped any farther into the room. His roommate looked poised to book back down the hall.

Pepper lifted the pillow to his face. Up close the stain looked almost the color of a sunset, reddish brown. He thought of Sammy. Was her body right there on the other side of the ceiling tiles? Had
that thing dragged her body into the darkness and done to her what it had meant for him? And brought her husk back to Pepper, like a cat presenting a dead bird?

Pepper brought the pillow to his nose.

He sniffed the fabric.

“Rainwater,” Pepper said. “I think it’s rainwater.”

He wasn’t just saying this. That’s really how the pillow smelled. Musty, with a faint whiff of corroded metal. A backed-up rain gutter maybe. This was a worthless old building that hadn’t been well maintained even when it was an ophthalmology ward. Standing water and poor construction and a rusty metal rain guard equals orangish musty water backing up, leaking through the ceiling. Onto his pillow. Obviously he didn’t
know
that this was true, but it did make sense. Also, it was the preferable explanation. It wasn’t blood.

Rainwater.

Pepper dropped his pillow on the floor. At the very least, they’d have to give him a new one, right? Then he moved to the foot of his bed, clamped one paw around the bed frame and pulled. It hardly moved. He tried again and his rib cage filed a protest. It sent shock waves of pain up into his skull. He actually saw small flashes of light in his eyes. Pepper let go of the bed and breathed and patted his chest and let the pain subside. Then he looked to his roommate—his friend?—Coffee.

“Will you help me?”

Pepper grabbed the bottom end of the bed again and waited there. Coffee watched Pepper for a moment and finally tossed his copy of
Jaws
onto his mattress. Coffee walked to the head of Pepper’s bed and grabbed the frame with his
one
free hand.

Pepper gestured at the three-ring binder and said, “I won’t swipe that from you again.”

Coffee nodded. “Okay.” But he didn’t put the binder down.

And Pepper, still aching, decided not to push it. He and Coffee lifted and together they got the bed off the ground. Pepper nodded toward the opposite wall and they moved together, kind of crab-walking.

Picture it: Pepper’s end of the bed tilted up about six inches higher
than Coffee’s, and he’s popping a sweat because, even with the help, his injuries have made him weaker. And at the other end, you’ve got Coffee, concentrating more on the book in his right hand than the bed in his left. As a result, the frame wobbles and the legs at his end occasionally bump against the floor. Pepper wanted to give the man a few moving tips. (Paramount being: Use two damn hands!) But no one ever listens to a know-it-all so he tried a different tack.

“You ever reach that guy? The controller?”

“Comptroller,” Coffee corrected. “I spoke to a guy who worked for the man. A ‘fund-raiser.’ ”

“And what did this guy say?”

“He thought I was calling
for
New Hyde Hospital. Like maybe I was someone high up. He said I could probably talk to the comptroller if …”

“If?” Pepper couldn’t suppress a grin. Though with the trouble he was having holding up the bed it looked more like a grimace.

“If I was interested in donating to the campaign fund. I laughed when he said that and explained that I was a patient.”

The bed bonked the floor again, then screeched as the legs scratched the floor. Pepper wondered if the staff heard, but then he wondered if they would even care. Were patients allowed to rearrange?

“What did this guy do when you said you were a patient?” Pepper asked.

“He hung up.”

They reached the opposite wall and Pepper lowered his end. Coffee just dropped his. The whole frame twanged. Pepper’s chest heaved a bit from the labor. A month without work was like a month without exercise. He felt a little ashamed to have lost so much strength so quickly. But his mind wasn’t quite as weak. He’d taken his midday dose with lunch when he came in from the smoker’s court, but missing the morning dose still had made a difference. His mind felt more vigorous than it had in weeks.

“Where are you from, anyway?” Pepper asked.

Coffee seemed to stiffen, a conversation coming that he didn’t enjoy. “I’m from Uganda,” he said.

The glaze on Pepper’s eyeballs could’ve been used to coat a turkey.

“Uganda,” Pepper said. “Of course. I see.”

Coffee sighed. “It’s in East Africa.”

Pepper nodded as if he’d known all along. “Where else would it be?”

(Pepper had actually thought it was an island in the Caribbean.)

But then Pepper snapped a finger and said, “Idi Amin!”

At this Coffee seemed to deflate. “Still our most famous export.”

Coffee looked at the front door, and Pepper could tell this guy was about to run away. Maybe Idi Amin, the murderous dictator, wasn’t the best way to talk about Coffee’s homeland. Or maybe that just wasn’t what Coffee cared about most now. Pepper needed to bring the talk back to their situation
here
. They could talk about the glorious history of Samoa (Uganda!) later on.

“The mayor,” Pepper said. “The
comp
troller. Who are you going to try next? Department of Sanitation?”

“At least I’m trying something!” Coffee yelled back.

Pepper and Coffee pushed the bed up against the wall here. Coffee and Pepper’s beds were in the same position, lining the same wall, on either side of the room’s door.

Only problem now was that Pepper’s bed sat right below the ceiling tile that had cracked and fallen in the night before. Thankfully, someone on staff had come through and removed the pieces of tile (though they hadn’t swept up the dust) but the hole remained. Instead of sleeping under the stain, he’d be sleeping here? Pepper climbed on his bed slowly and rose to his toes. Slipping his head into the crawl space felt like he was slipping it into a tiger’s mouth. The top of his head felt hot. He remembered those two feet dangling down from the darkness. He tried to see to the other end of the room, where his bed had just been. Trying to make out the silhouette of Sammy’s body. But he couldn’t tell. Soon enough the dust floating in the air up there coated his forehead, his eyelids, his lips. He couldn’t stay up there any longer and he hopped down off his bed. He winced and clutched his chest.

“This isn’t going to work,” Pepper said. And he wasn’t just talking
about where he’d rest his head. He meant maintaining. He meant facing whatever came next.

Then Coffee walked over to Pepper’s dresser and said, “Help me move this.”

The dresser looked like wood but wasn’t. Didn’t even seem to be some kind of plastic. It might almost have been made of cardboard, that’s how cheap it felt. If they’d painted fake drawers on the back of a refrigerator box, it wouldn’t have been much worse than this.

Pepper pushed the dresser and it slid so easily the move almost seemed graceful. He slid it until it was at the far end of this wall. Now it sat adjacent to the two windows in the room.

“You’ll make fun of me if I tell you who I’m really hoping to reach,” Coffee said.

Pepper tapped the top of the dresser. “Yes,” he said. “I probably will.”

When Coffee said the name it was unintelligible.

“Try again, my friend.”

Coffee set his three-ring binder down on Pepper’s dresser. He opened the cover and flipped through the pages. Columns had been drawn on every page, by Coffee’s own hand. It looked like a ledger. Page after page filled with surprisingly readable script. Coffee had the most elegant handwriting Pepper had ever seen.

“These are my notes,” Coffee began. “Every person I’ve reached in the last year. Their names and numbers, the offices they represent. What they said they would do. What they said they wouldn’t do. What was actually done. You’ll see there’s nothing in that column. Council members. Lawyers. Reporters. Clerks. Secretaries. Everything goes in here. So I can prove my story.”

“Prove that you’ve been ignored?”

Coffee flipped through a series of blank pages until he reached the very last page in the book. This one had two words written at the top.

“Prove that I tried everything. So when I finally reach
him
, he’ll know I’m a serious man.”

The two words at the top of the page were “Big Boss.”

Pepper touched the letters. “You mean God?”

Coffee laughed, it was a soft sound, and his eyes narrowed when he smiled. “I don’t appeal to God for man’s mistakes. I just have to reach the man who will make things right down here. I don’t write his name because when people see his name, hear his name, they go
crazy
. They get so angry. They get scared. Or disappointed. But it doesn’t matter. His name means more to them than it does to me. His name could be anything, it’s his power that counts.”

Pepper stepped back and looked at Coffee’s serious round brown face.

“Don’t tell me.…”