The Devil in Silver: A Novel

by Victor Lavalle

  Mr. Mack’s face had a pillow crease from where he’d been sleeping just moments before. He had his sport coat on, but had only managed to get one arm through its sleeve. He pointed at Dorry and Loochie. “I am so tired of these two. Throw ’em both in lockup! It’s folks like them who make life hard in here for the rest of us. They’re enemies of the state! That’s how I see it.”

  Mr. Mack slapped to his right, reaching for Frank Waverly’s elbow. But Frank Waverly stepped away and Mr. Mack swatted the air. Mr. Mack looked up at his friend, but Frank Waverly didn’t return his gaze, and Mr. Mack sneered, “Well fuck you, too, then.”

  In a moment the orderlies would realize their mistake. They’d grabbed the wrong woman. They were about to be given unambiguous proof.

  Dorry leapt at Loochie, whose arms were still being held. She was defenseless. Dorry got hold of that last little knot of Loochie’s hair and she wrenched it so hard Pepper swore he heard the stuff tear out of Loochie’s head. It sounded like a siren wailing. Or maybe that was just the kid.

  Loochie’s body bucked forward so hard that Dorry knocked backward. The old woman stumbled and bumped against a wall. The orderlies let go of Loochie and she scrambled away to the opposite wall. The kid’s scream cut off immediately and she just sat there, holding her now totally bald head. Loochie’s mouth hung open, a terrible gasp in her throat. And a moment later she did cry. It was horrible and high-pitched, like a newborn’s night cries. And every person in the hall who’d ever raised a child felt the same stab of horror and sympathy and overwhelming anxiety, and suddenly they were nearly crying, too.

  The Haint slipped through the crowd. In her wrinkled purple pantsuit she got down beside Loochie and put her arms around the girl’s head. Pepper thought Loochie would pull away, but she didn’t. She rested her head against the older woman’s shoulder. Loochie wept.

  The two orderlies finally hemmed Dorry up. Each grabbed an arm and lifted the old woman who hardly seemed to notice them. Dorry hadn’t been softened by Loochie’s cries. She growled at Loochie even now.

  “You say it one more time. One more! And I’ll bite off your fucking tongue.”

  Loochie gulped and gasped. She kept one hand on top of her tender head. She watched Dorry for a moment. She pulled her head away from the Haint’s shoulder. Despite the pain, there remained another quality to Loochie Gardner, probably the most essential. That kid was stubborn. She sniffed and swallowed, clearing her throat.

  “Say it,” Dorry said, grinning with loathing. “Say it. Say it and see.”

  Loochie pulled away from the Haint. She sat straight. Met Dorry’s gaze. Then, as calmly as she could, Loochie spoke the phrase she’d been repeating for six weeks now; while Pepper was off falling in love, Loochie had been tormenting Dorry with this chant—in the lounge, in the hall, when passing Dorry’s room—anywhere and everywhere for a month and a half.

  “He’s my son,” Loochie chanted. “He’s my son!”

  Dorry strained forward and the orderlies holding her buckled. They gasped as they tried to keep the old woman back. They feared Dorry, just a little bit, right then.

  Dorry didn’t have any rage left. The orderlies held her arms up but the rest of her crumpled. “I told you I was sorry,” Dorry moaned. “I said it and I said it.”

  “And Coffee’s still dead.” Loochie spoke so evenly it was eerie.

  Then Nurse Washburn arrived.

  She waded through the patients. She’d finally unlocked the drawer. She carried a needle, full of the great immobilizer. Hearing Coffee’s name made Pepper remember his roommate. Coffee’s last moment. Pepper looked up. Kofi’s blood up there, on the ceiling. The nurse injected Dorry, in front of everyone. Then one orderly escorted her back to her room.

  After that, the nurse went to her knees and pulled bandages from a shirt pocket and administered to Loochie’s scalp.

  And at this moment, Pepper realized he had his chance.

  The nurses’ station sat empty; the staff were all occupied. The patients had yet to filter back toward their rooms. Pepper and Sue, at the rear of the crowd, were suddenly invisible.

  But it wouldn’t last.

  Sue stood on her toes, one hand against Pepper’s forearm for balance, taking in what she could. Pepper pulled away from her grip. He touched the small of her back. She looked at him. He nodded toward Northwest 2. She looked back at the nurses’ station, at the patients clustered in the hall. She understood. Pepper put his hand out and Sue took it.

  He walked her to his place.

  29

  THEY ENTERED HIS room. The lights were out. Only moonlight filtered in through the windows and clarified the space. Strange to come from the fight in Northwest 3 and step into this quiet room. When Pepper shut the door behind them, the distance seemed even greater. Their heart rates were still up. Their eyes still wide with surprise. So the two of them were out of place in here, too, at least for a moment. They stayed right at the lip of the room. They didn’t step in any farther yet. Sue raised her right hand and stuck out her pointer finger. She spun it in a little circle.

  “That was crazy,” she said.

  “So to speak,” Pepper added.

  They both laughed because what they’d just seen was terrible and surprising, and those feelings had to come out. Then they stopped laughing just as abruptly. They stood in silence a little while.

  Finally, Sue grabbed Pepper’s right thumb.

  “This is nicer,” she said.

  They were slowing down. Their shoulders loosened. Their jaws unclenched. They were finally ready. They walked farther into the room.

  They reached the beds, but didn’t sit down. Sue let go of Pepper’s thumb, and ran her hands across the top sheet.

  “It’s like we’re in a hotel,” she whispered.

  He scooped her up, swayed her in his arms, and settled her onto the mattresses. The metal frames creaked, but they weren’t very loud. Pepper looked down at Sue. She shut her eyes.

  “That’s much better,” she said.

  He climbed on top of her. He kissed her on the forehead. He kissed each of her closed eyes. As his lips touched her face, he imagined a fire in his belly, growing and growing. And each time he kissed her, the heat traveled from his lips to her skin. The more the fire grew, the warmer his kisses became. He wanted to put her hand on his stomach so she could touch his hearth. When he finally kissed her lips, she rose up to meet him.

  Her mouth full of embers, just like his.

  They undressed each other. Not fast and wild, not tearing off stuff. All that would make too much noise. They had to be cautious. They were passionate, but could still see the chain-link fence outside his windows. They couldn’t forget where they were.

  So they got off the bed and she undid the zipper of his pants. Slid the slacks down. He put one hand on her shoulder as he stepped out and kicked the pants away. He slid her sweater off and undid the buttons of her nightdress. She raised her arms and he pulled it over her head. Finally both were just in their underwear. Sue wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Pepper pointed at her chest.

  “I like those nipples,” he said.

  She forgot herself and jumped on him. He spun around as if he couldn’t handle her weight. They fell back on the beds together. Now the frames made a powerful squeal. Much more noise than when he’d laid her on alone.

  They stopped moving.

  Both watched the bottom of the closed door and waited for shadows to appear. The specters of the staff. Pepper and Sue gave it a minute. An actual minute. She counted to sixty in a quiet whisper. But no one came.

  Sue returned to climbing over Pepper’s body until those nipples he’d admired were right over his face. He kissed one while the other tickled his shoulder. Then he traded. He nipped at them very lightly.

  “Do you have gums?” she whispered. “Or teeth?”

  He bit her nipples harder. She wriggled with happiness.

  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.”