The Devil in Silver (34 page)

He slid back on the beds now, using his elbows to move. And she slid off him so they lay side by side. They turned to each other and kissed again. He reached around and squeezed her thigh. Moved his hand up and felt her butt. Oh, that butt! He smacked it. The sound seemed hellaciously loud.

Stop.

His hand hung in midair.

They watched the door again.

Counted all the way to sixty, again.

Pepper brought his hand back down, lightly resting it on her thigh.

“I think spanking’s too risky,” he whispered.

They both took a moment to feel unhappy about that.

“Let’s get under the covers,” Sue said.

They clambered around on the two mattresses, trying not to make too much noise, and trying not to separate the makeshift double bed. It took a little work. Once they were under the sheets, they’d even worked up faint sweats. Each could see perspiration on the other’s forehead.

Pepper rubbed at his hairline and looked at his moist fingertips.

“This is just pathetic,” he said.

Sue couldn’t answer him because she was laughing. They were so ridiculous. But in the good kind of way she hadn’t enjoyed in too damn long. She covered her mouth, but that didn’t quite do it, so she rolled over and rested her face against a pillow and kept laughing.

Pepper touched her back firmly.

He rubbed between her shoulder blades, pressing against her spine, running his fingers down to her butt. But he didn’t grab her ass. He brought his hand up and down, kneading her spine.

Sue stopped laughing and relaxed. She breathed deeply. Her body seemed to fall deeper into the bed. She raised her feet slightly and dropped them again. She groaned. So Pepper slid closer to her, and he pressed his thumb into the muscles just below her neck. When he pressed there, her feet raised slightly again, and dropped. She shimmied
on her stomach, rubbing side to side, letting the good feeling of his touch pass throughout her body.

Now Pepper slid his hands under the sheets and plucked at the band of her underwear. He lifted the band and let it snap back against her skin. He then slid her panties down and lifted the sheets so he could really appreciate her posterior. He liked seeing it so much. Sue sensed this so she swayed it, side to side, while he watched. People compare that kind of movement to a clock’s pendulum or a metronome, but really they must be fucking joking. To compare a woman’s butt with anything man-made is to denigrate the first and elevate the second.

Pepper finally slid her panties down as far as he could. Then she kicked them off.

He rolled on his back now and she lifted her head from the pillow. Her face looked a bit darker because she was flushed. She smiled, and showed her small teeth. They were kind of gray, not even. He was so happy to see them that he smiled, too.

Sue lifted the covers so she could pull down Pepper’s underwear, but right then her hand stopped moving. His underwear was already gone.

“When did you take them off?” Sue asked. “When did you have time?”

Pepper jutted out his chin and smirked as if he’d achieved some great scientific breakthrough and could not be cajoled into sharing the secret.

“Never mind,” Sue whispered. She wanted to kiss that goofy look right off Pepper’s face. She climbed on top of him and began.

“
That
was good,” Pepper said.

The sun hadn’t risen yet. It was only a little after four in the morning. They’d fucked, then dozed, and now woke together as couples all over the world like to do.

“You’re right,” Sue said. “You’re right.”

Pepper smiled at the ceiling. He looked out the window, where he
could see only the tops of the trees, and a sky the color of cobwebs. It was going to be an overcast day.

“They’re not really deporting you, right?”

“No,” she admitted. “They’re
trying
to deport me. I have to stand before a judge one more time before it’s official.”

He rolled onto his side toward her. “Come on,” he said, sounding like a child whose older sibling is trying to scare him. “Stop playing. Tell me the truth.”

Sue said, “I went to Canada, from China, when I was four. Me and my older sister, together. We were inside a shipping container with another family. I don’t remember them. My sister said they weren’t very nice to us. We had buckets for the bathroom. A little generator inside so we had power. I don’t remember any of this. It’s all what my sister told me. She was fourteen.”

Sue lay on her back. She looked at the ceiling as if she could see this history playing up there, like a home movie.

“When we reached Vancouver, they took me and my sister out, and the
same day
they drove us into the U.S. I was so small they put me in a little suitcase.”

Sue raised both hands and held them apart. A piece of carry-on luggage, no larger than that.

“They got us through the border and drove us down to a city called Everett. They let us out right on the street. In front of a place called the Imagine Children’s Museum. Maybe they thought that was pretty funny. Our family had paid to get us to San Francisco, but we didn’t make it that far. What could we do? The driver told us to get out, so we got out. We didn’t know what San Francisco looked like. And we weren’t with that other family anymore. There were just two of us. Two girls. Four and fourteen.”

Sue pulled her covers down until her whole upper body was exposed. The small brown nipples hardened in the morning’s slight chill. Pepper put his hand on one breast and touched the nipple with the tip of his thumb.

“My sister was strong. She found Chinese like us.
Hakka
Chinese. In
Everett
. They helped us contact our aunt and uncle back in China.”

“What about your parents?” Pepper asked.

“They both died in a hard winter,” she said matter-of-factly. “I never really knew them.”

A pair of footsteps passed in the hallway. Pepper and Sue stayed quiet until they were sure the person had moved on.

“We got as far south as Portland. That’s where we stopped. No more money. So that’s where we found people to stay with. My sister took a job right away. I started working a couple of years later. By the time I turned sixteen, I’d been working for eight years. I went to school during the day and worked most evenings until midnight. In restaurants and markets, always with my sister. She never went to school. It was a lot, but it was okay.”

She slid Pepper’s big hand down from her chest to her belly and held him there.

“Once I got much older, we split up. It had to happen eventually. My sister found me a job in Florida. I was already thirty-four, but I was more scared of making that trip than the whole journey from China! Or maybe I just
remember
how scared I was because I was older. Plus, I was going alone.”

“Why did you have to leave her at all?” Pepper asked. He found himself spinning, right there on the bed. What had he ever complained about? A brother who didn’t get along with him? Being raised by a decent mom and dad in Queens?

“You have to go where there’s work. We didn’t leave China because we wanted a long boat ride!”

“Sorry,” Pepper said. “So Florida. For a job.”

“Yes. But that’s when it all went really bad. When I had my sister around, I don’t know, she could help me if I got confused. If I made some mistakes of thinking. They were nice at the job in Florida. In West Palm Beach. I was a waitress. But they had their own problems to worry about. They couldn’t help me every time I got
confused
. And it kept happening to me, more and more. I basically lived alone.”

Sue pressed her hand down on Pepper’s. He squeezed her soft stomach. She liked the hold.

“I lived like that, four years. Five years? I worked. I sent some money to my sister, who sent more money back to my aunt and uncle in China. I talked with my sister a lot. I even dated a little bit.”

Sue looked over at Pepper and pinched his chin.

“Don’t be jealous.”

Pepper hadn’t brushed his teeth last night; they’d leapt right into bed. And he’d slept for a few hours. So by now he had a little
wolf breath
going. After she let go of his chin, he blew in Sue’s face, and she waved one hand in front of her nose. “That’s not attractive,” she said.

He kissed her more tenderly, and she returned the kiss.

“Then what?” Pepper asked. “I still don’t see how you got here.”

“After five years, I had enough. Anyway, Florida had exploded. Nobody had jobs, nobody had money. On the block where I lived, four different families just abandoned their homes. Where did they go? I saw one family; they moved down the road and were living out of a motel room. It was hard times in Florida and I didn’t want to stay there anymore. The restaurant was probably going to close anyway, just like everything else. I told my sister I was coming back to her in Portland.

“I spoke good English. Even you noticed that. I picked it up fast because I was so young when we came. I could find another job. I told her all this. She was my sister. She
knew
me. Maybe she could hear in my voice that I was having trouble with my thoughts. Maybe I sounded more confused than I thought. She said okay, take the bus. Cheap and you don’t always need to show ID.

“I was waiting for that bus when they picked me up. Immigration cops who spend their whole day at the Greyhound station! I never knew there was such a thing. They asked to see my visa and I laughed at them.”

“Why did you
laugh
?” Pepper fell back on the bed, as if she’d made such an obvious and stupid mistake.

“I thought they were kidding! Do you know how many times people said something like that to me in Florida? ‘Where’s your papers?’ ‘Show me your passport.’ The white people and the black people and the Puerto Ricans. They thought it was so funny. So when these two men said it, I thought it was just another joke. Being mean. But they didn’t like me laughing. They took me, just like that. I spent a year in a Florida jail. A psychiatrist saw me and prescribed medication, just
like this place. But the guards weren’t used to people like me. Or they just didn’t care. They refused to give me the medication unless I cooperated with all their rules first. But without the medication, I was too confused to cooperate! By the time I got out, I couldn’t even say my own name.”

“Your lawyer got you out?”

Sue shook her head. “If I had stolen something or stabbed somebody, that would put me in criminal court. Then I would have a right to an attorney. You don’t get an attorney in immigration court. That’s not your right. They give you a translator. But I didn’t need one of those. I understood English fine. Even the translator could see I was just having trouble with my thoughts. But she would just hold my hand and tell me how sorry she felt about it. Sometimes she cried.

“But in the courtroom, whenever I tried to answer the judge for myself, like if he asked my name or something, he would yell at me to wait for the translator. I said, ‘I don’t need the translator. I need my lithium.’ But that only made the judge mad. When I tried to speak again, to explain, he finished with the case. I remember the words exactly: ‘The respondent, after proper notice, has failed to appear.’ I was right there when he said it but they put it in the record. And if I don’t ‘appear,’ then they don’t have to have a trial. The judge can just make his verdict. He ordered them to deport me back to China. That’s it. The end.
I will die now
. That’s what I thought when he gave the sentence.
I will die
.”

Pepper tried to imagine Sue inside that courtroom. Standing alone before that judge, who refused to see her.

“I spent another six months being held in Glades County,” Sue said. “Waiting for them to throw me across the water. All this time, and my sister never knew what happened. For her, it’s like I just stepped into a hole and disappeared. I’m scared for me, but I feel so bad for her. Every day she must be crying.”

Pepper climbed over Sue, out of the bed, and went to the bathroom. He had a plastic cup in there and he filled it with cold water. He came back to the bed, sat on the edge and gave it to Sue. “What’s this for?” she asked.

“I thought you could use a drink.”

Sue sat up, the covers bunching right over her waist. She took the cup gratefully and smiled.

She sniffed it. She grimaced.

“This is water.”

“Well, what did you think?”

“The way you said it, I thought you had some beer or something.”

“Sorry,” Pepper whispered. She shrugged. She sipped.

“So that’s Florida. How’d you get to New York? How’d you get in here?”

“The police took us to church one day. Maybe for Easter. I didn’t even ask to go, but they made everyone attend. It was a big church. So many people. Like
thousands
. We sat in the back. They only left two guards near us. Two men. I asked to use the bathroom. One guard came with me, but he couldn’t go inside. Not at a nice church. So I went in, washed my face, and climbed out the window. Easy. I even went back to the same Greyhound station after I borrowed money from my old boss at the restaurant.

“I took a bus to New York because I thought there was enough Chinese here for me to hide. And maybe it was true. But when I came to the Port Authority, the immigration police were waiting for me! I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes the world is broken and sometimes it works too well. I slipped right out of a church bathroom, no problem. I come to one of the most crowded cities on earth, and they pick me out five minutes after I get off the bus. But by then it had been a long time since I had my medication. I wasn’t doing good. Laughing out loud for no reason. Shouting. Maybe the bus driver turned me in just because he was tired of me. They stuck me here until they can send me back to Florida. I’m a
fugitive
, Pepper. You just had sex with a fugitive.”

Pepper took the plastic cup from Sue. “You’re not a fugitive once you get caught. Then you’re just a prisoner again.”

Now, he wanted to go get her another cup of water, or maybe one for himself. Or to offer her the Cocoa Puffs, but that hardly seemed like enough. He wanted to do
something
. But what? Honestly. Dawn
light hadn’t crept into the room yet, but soon enough it would. The next day was arriving and their night together felt so brief.