The Devil in Silver: A Novel

by Victor Lavalle

  He got close and pointed at Loochie’s head. There was something quite different about it. No more knit cap, no more towel. Loochie wore a wig.

  “You’ve got a new look,” Pepper said.

  Loochie touched the wig tentatively. “I told my mother what happened. She brought me one of her wigs until my hair grows back.”

  Pepper could tell it was her mother’s. A fifty-year-old woman’s style. Jet-black and shaped into a poof that screamed “legal secretary!” No doubt it suited Loochie’s mother at her job, but it had a different effect on the daughter. Not entirely negative. A fifty-year-old woman’s wig on a nineteen-year-old, it served to age Loochie by about ten years. That might sound flattering—and Pepper certainly wouldn’t say that to the kid—but it matured Loochie in a way that seemed fitting. All she’d experienced, just in the time Pepper had known her, she sure as hell wasn’t your average American nineteen. Better this way. She looked like a woman. Herself, but wiser.

  “It looks good,” Pepper said.

  Loochie smiled. “I wish I could argue with you.”

  Pepper laughed as he grabbed the free seat. “Can I sit?” he asked Loochie.

  Loochie’s mother huffed. “You ask her, but you’re the grown-up.”

  “She looks like an adult to me,” Pepper said.

  The brother leaned forward to introduce himself, but didn’t offer his hand.

  “I’m Louis,” he said.

  Pepper looked from mother to daughter to son. Funny when you see family members together like this and begin that job of detecting the traits that have been passed down. The tangible and the intangible. Both Loochie and Louis had their mother’s slim neck. Their mother’s narrow head and even the same shape to their eyes. Their mother had to be in her fifties but looked ten years younger. A little heavy but her face retained its beauty. Large brown eyes that were only more striking on the mother because the mother was black (dark brown, actually). Loochie and Louis were lighter-skinned so Pepper figured the dad was white or maybe a Latin guy. Mom wore a faint red lipstick and her eyes were done, but her black wig sat slightly too low on one side. The slanted wig made her look like she’d gotten dressed a little too fast. Like she hadn’t planned to come visit today. Maybe Mr. Mack’s suggestion, about getting one’s house in order, made Loochie push or plead. And now her mother and brother were here.

  “I owe you an apology,” Pepper said to Loochie’s mother. “About a month ago, I bumped into you. And your son. By mistake.”

  Loochie’s mother looked at her daughter.

  “This is the guy who knocked you down,” Loochie said. “And Louis.”

  Now her mother stared at Pepper again. “That was you?”

  He smiled because he liked the idea that she’d forgotten. Something so ridiculous on his part being hardly a blip in her life. But then he saw her scan down his unwashed hair and his tired face, the blue folder still clutched in one arm. His pajamas and bare feet. She didn’t recognize him. Had he really changed so much since then? Inside, he didn’t feel so different but the woman across from him showed otherwise. Pepper felt so embarrassed that his stomach clutched up and his thighs tensed and he wanted to get up, walk away. But he stayed.

  The brother, Louis, opened his carton of Chinese food, steamed vegetables, and picked up a piece of broccoli with his fork.

  “Well, I want to thank you for saving us from this game,” he said, motioning at That’s So Raven. “We’ve been playing it for six years.”

  Their mother laughed quietly and looked at Pepper with slight embarrassment. “Not that long,” she said.

  “Loochie was thirteen when we got this,” Louis said. “We took it to her when she was at Long Island Jewish.”

  “And why did you do that to her?” Pepper asked Loochie’s mother. Even he was surprised by his bluntness.

  All three members of the Gardner family snapped their eyes at Pepper. Louis stopped chewing his broccoli. Mom set the goofy game’s little chips down on the table.

  Loochie’s eyes narrowed. “Watch yourself now, Pepper.”

  He ignored her. “I’m really curious. What could she have been doing at thirteen that made you give her up like that?”

  Loochie’s mother looked at Loochie, then at Pepper. She sat up in her chair as tension ran through her back and into her shoulders. “Do you have children?” she asked.

  “Are you going to tell me that if I don’t have children I can’t understand?”

  Louis finished chewing his food. “I used to have a plant,” he offered.

  Loochie, surprisingly, had dropped her head and sat back in her seat. As if she was getting out of the way of Pepper and her mother. As if she actually wanted to hear her mother’s answer to Pepper’s question, too, but never could’ve mustered the courage to ask.

  “I ask you that,” Loochie’s mother said, “because I want to know if there’s anyone you ever really cared for. Not just loved, but looked after.”

  “I’ve tried to be there for people,” Pepper said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “Okay. And what happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How are they doing?” she asked.

  Pepper pulled the blue folder against his belly.

  “I don’t know.”

  Loochie’s mother nodded. “That’s the worst part, isn’t it? You try, you really mean well, but you still don’t know what’s going to come of it.”

  She placed her hand on the top of Loochie’s wigged head, very lightly, then pulled it away. “I tried to get help for my daughter. But the help she needed was more than I could give. So I searched everywhere, I asked everyone. What do I do? I don’t want to embarrass my daughter, so I’m not going to say how she was acting. But we checked her health. Blood tests. Scans. The best that Medicaid could provide!” She laughed bitterly. “And finally we ended up at Long Island Jewish. They spoke to me about her mental health. And I didn’t want to hear that.” She was quiet a moment. “But eventually I had to.”

  Pepper said, “But she’s just locked away in here. A kid her age. All she knows about the world is these five hallways and what she sees on that television. That’s her whole life!”

  Loochie’s mother reached for the little round game chips and squeezed a few of them in one hand. She opened and closed that hand, feeling the faint pain of the shape against her palm and squeezing harder so she felt the pain even more. She didn’t speak.

  “You asked me if I ever cared for someone,” Pepper said. “There’s a woman I met here that I really cared for. If I’d had to, I would’ve died for her. That’s how much I wanted her to be safe.”

  Loochie’s mother looked at Pepper. Her eyes were dry. She wasn’t going to cry because of what Pepper said. Think she hadn’t said much worse to herself already? But it was Pepper’s last words that made her speak.

  “That’s the funny thing,” she said. “Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.”

  Loochie’s mother had reached out for Loochie’s arm. Her fingers were held tight around her daughter’s wrist. Loochie was crying quietly.

  “Once Lucretia asked me why I didn’t just let her die. Can you imagine it? She was fourteen years old. ‘Why don’t you just let me die?’ I told her that my life without her wasn’t worth living. As long as she lives, I live. Those words are written on every good mother’s heart.”

  She pressed her forehead to the side of her daughter’s face. “As long as you live, I live,” she whispered to Loochie.

  The brother had watched all this quietly. Now Louis sat up in his chair and grinned at Pepper. His face looked
tight, faintly gray, like he felt sick. Do you know that this grown man, twenty-nine years old, was jealous? Not in a way he could name, or explain, but it was real. So Louis wanted to change the atmosphere. Otherwise he imagined his sister and mother doing a lot more hugging and loving while he sat there poking at a carton of steamed vegetables.

  “My sister tells me that you all think there’s a monster in the hospital,” Louis said.

  “The Devil,” Loochie said, pulling her arm away from her mother’s hand. “That’s what I said. And I told Mom.”

  But Louis didn’t look at his sister. He kept his gaze trained on Pepper.

  “You believe that?” Louis asked.

  Loochie’s mother lost her pensive air and looked at her son with a frown. “All right,” she said. “Don’t start something.”

  “I’m asking the man a question,” Louis said.

  Pepper assessed this guy. He was short-ish and fat-ish and wore thick glasses in stylish frames. His hairline was receding and he already had a fair amount of ear hair. And yet this guy was obviously so pleased with himself. Pepper always marveled at this kind of man. Who calculated his value based on some mystery math. Simple addition would assess this man a dud but Louis was using calculus plus.

  Loochie’s mother picked up a card from the game deck and waved it over the purple crystal ball twice. An electric whoosh played, a sound like water crashing on rocks or a hundred plates smashing against a floor.

  A moment later Raven Symoné’s voice played loudly.

  “I don’t think so, girlfriend!” Raven shouted.

  Mom was trying to distract the table from the line of conversation, but it wasn’t enough to stop her bullheaded boy.

  “Come on,” Louis pressed. “Do you believe that, too?”

  “There’s something going on behind that silver door,” Pepper said.

  “Yeah,” Loochie said, looking at Pepper with mild disgust because he wouldn’t just come out and say its name. “The Devil.”

  Now Louis slumped back in his chair, his mouth hanging open slightly. He looked incredulous.

  “What do you know about the history of silver mining in this country?” Louis asked.

  Aha. Now Pepper understood the source of this man’s massive overconfidence. He thought he was brilliant. Pepper remembered a quote he’d read once, it was attributed to James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica. Hetfield was asked the difference between himself and Sting. (Why that comparison? Who can say?) Hetfield said the difference between him and Sting was that he read a lot of books, too, but he didn’t need you to know that. Now, whatever Louis might say next, Pepper couldn’t help but hear dreadful late-era Sting music being strummed (on a fucking lute, no doubt) in the distance.

  “Silver mining in the United States didn’t start, like hard-core, until the mid-1850s,” Louis said. “And only really got big when the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in California.”

  “Okay,” Pepper said. He kind of hoped that was it.

  “My brother thinks he should have been a scientist,” Loochie said.

  Louis grinned. “Everyone at my job does call me the Professor.”

  “Not behind your back,” Loochie said.

  Their mother waved another card over the purple crystal ball. It was her only defense, really, when her grown-ass children reverted like this. Would it work?

  “Not gonna happen!” Raven Symoné shouted.

  “I’m a manager at Hertz at JFK Airport,” Louis explained. “And when I have downtime I read. Unlike everybody else there.”

  That lute playing got a little louder.

  “Anyway,” Louis continued, “the silver deposits found at the Comstock Lode only caused people to go digging around for it everywhere. Silver mines popped up in Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Montana. People thought they were going to find more and more silver, so whole towns were built to accommodate them. And not some little wooden shacks. Luxury homes and fine businesses. People were sure the good times would only get better.”

  “But they didn’t,” Pepper offered, trying to beat him to the point.

  Louis grabbed his mother’s hand and pulled it away from the purple crystal ball when she moved toward it with a card for the third time.

  “No, you’re right,” Louis agreed. “It didn’t. Lots of people went bust. But I’m really trying to tell you about what happened to the miners during the silver rush.

  “It was bad work. Dangerous. Like any mining. But silver also lets out fumes when it’s mined. Even Pliny the Elder wrote about how harmful the fumes were, especially to animals. You know Pliny the Elder?”

  Pepper nodded. “Moroccan guy who ran the bodega around the corner from my apartment?”

  Neither Loochie nor her mother laughed because, hell, they thought that might be who this person was.

  Louis smiled without mirth.

  “The problem with the silver fumes,” Louis continued, “is that, over time, they gave the miners delusions. Bad enough that they had to stop mining. Their health deteriorated. And a bunch of them even died.”

  Hard to make fun of something like that, so Pepper didn’t.

  “Do you know what people would say, in these mining towns, when they saw one of these miners falling apart? Walking through town muttering and swinging at phantoms? They said the Devil in Silver got them. It became shorthand. Like someone might say, ‘What happened to Mike?’ And the answer was always the same. ‘The Devil in Silver got him.’ ”

  Louis sat straight and crossed his arms and surveyed the table. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  “You’re saying we’re just making this thing up,” Pepper said quietly.

  Louis seemed disappointed. He dropped his hands into his lap and folded them there. He looked at his sister and Pepper. He turned his head to take in the other patients gathered with their family members there in the hospital.

  “I’m saying they were dying,” Louis said. “They definitely weren’t making that up. But it wasn’t a monster that was killing them. It was the mine.”

  Visiting hours continued and Pepper stayed at the table with Loochie and her family. They didn’t keep talking about the Devil in Silver, about slow death and delusions, because that shit is grim. Instead, they spent the last half hour of visiting playing Raven Symoné’s game. If it never became fun, it did pass the time. (Pepper also learned that someone liked liked him, which is always nice to hear.)

  At the end of the visit, Loochie’s mother gave her a handful of change as per custom. Then she took Pepper’s hand, and dropped two dollars’ worth of quarters into his palm.

  “Call your mother,” she said. “I’m sure she’d like to hear from you.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Pepper said, laughing.

  “I do,” Loochie’s mother said.

  “I don’t even have her number,” Pepper told her.

  Loochie’s mother pointed at Louis. “You’re always bragging about your little phone, aren’t you?” she asked. “Show me what it can do.”

  Louis probably hadn’t looked more pleased at any point that afternoon. He made his mother and sister watch while he used his Smartphone. A quick search, not more than two minues, and he had Pepper’s brother’s number. He beamed at his mother. “See?”

  “Very nice,” she said, patting her son’s back. Then she looked at Pepper. “Well?”

  Rather than dithering, he walked straight into the phone alcove. It sat empty. He didn’t hesitate.

  He dialed the Maryland number, and Ralph picked up on the second ring. It seemed so simple, so normal, that it almost couldn’t be real. After all his time, his younger brother was on the line.

  As soon as Pepper heard his brother’s voice, he wanted to hang up. He was so scared. But he remembered Loochie’s mother and that he wanted to speak with his own. He couldn’t just stand there breathing heavily and expect to be put on with her.

  “Ralph S. Mouse!” he said, a bit too loud.

  The line s
tayed quiet.

  “Peter Rabbit,” Ralph finally answered.

  “Did my friend Mari ever call you?” Pepper asked. Instantly, he wished he hadn’t said it; two sentences into the conversation and he sounded critical.

  “I think she spoke to Maureen,” Ralph said. “But that was awhile ago. I’m sorry I didn’t call; we’ve just had so much going on here. Denny got sick so we all got sick. He had to stay out of school.”

  He wondered what Mari might’ve told Ralph’s wife. Maybe just that Pepper was in some trouble, since Ralph didn’t mention the hospital. Was there any point in telling him now?

  “How’s Mom?” Pepper asked.

  Pepper realized he still had the blue folder under his arm and he was choking the poor thing just now. He balanced it on top of the pay phone.

  “Mom’s going to outlive both of us,” Ralph said, sounding lighter for the first time.

  Pepper rested his forehead against the cool wall. He’d been a little afraid that Ralph would tell him their mother had died while he’d been in here. Something irreversible.

  “Is she there?”

  “Yeah,” Ralph said, sounding relieved to hand off the baton. “Let me bring the phone to her.”

  Then a little jostling as Ralph walked from his bedroom, off to find their mother. Pepper heard the creak of different doors being opened, Ralph calling their mother’s name in room after room. So much space, Pepper thought. Then Ralph’s voice on the line again. “Listen, man,” he said. “I just want to say …”

  Then quiet again.

  Pepper spoke instead. “Ralph,” he said. “Thanks for taking care of Mom, yeah?”

  Ralph sighed and Pepper could almost see his kid brother, six or seven years old, actually blushing because his big brother had, in some way, acknowledged him. “It’s okay,” Ralph said quietly. “You take care of yourself.”

  And then his mother’s voice on the line.

  “Is that Peter?”

  “Ma.”

  “Peter Rabbit,” she said serenely.

  The automated voice on the phone piped in telling him to add more coins or the call would be cut off. He did. First, the quick little bleeps and bloops, then he was permitted to speak with his mother again.