The Devil in Silver (46 page)

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 stayed 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.

She asked how he was doing. Pepper didn’t tell his mother where he was. He asked how she liked Maryland. She told him that everyone in the family had his or her own room with a few more rooms left over.

“I know I’m supposed to like it,” his mother said. “But all I do is worry if they can afford it. With the economy and the housing market. It’s always on the news. You know. Where are you living now? Still in the same apartment?”

“Still in Queens,” he said. This was true.

“Still moving furniture?”

“I gave that up for a little while.”

“Trying something else?”

He pulled away from the wall. Soon enough it would be time to take his evening meds. He didn’t want his mother to hear them calling him for that.

“You sound tired, Peter.”

“Maybe I’m a little tired,” he admitted.

His mother breathed on the line, in and out, and the next voice he heard was the damn electronic drone telling him to give more coins, but he was out.

“Mom,” he said so quietly it sounded weaker than a whisper. “I’m going to have to go.”

“Do you want to go?” she asked.

“No, but I’m out of money.”

“Are you at this new job now? Why don’t you give me the number and I’ll call you back? Ralph gets long-distance free.”

The number was right there under the phone’s cradle. He read it to her. A moment later they were disconnected.

Pepper set the receiver back down and waited. He counted to himself and hoped his mother had written the digits down correctly. When the phone rang he snatched it up.

“Anyway,” his mother said, as if they hadn’t been cut off, as if her son weren’t keeping all the particulars in his life mysterious. “I want to tell you a little story.”

Pepper leaned to the right, the receiver still to his ear, and saw the patients forming a line in front of the nurses’ station. As soon as those folks had been dosed, one of the staff would come looking for him. He’d rather hang up on his mother, in the middle of a sentence, than to let her get some clue about the state he was in.

“When your father and I still had the video store,” his mother began, “we used to take inventory of the tapes at the end of each week. You remember?”

“Siesta Sundays,” Pepper said, smiling faintly. Pepper and Ralph would have twenty dollars to spend on whatever dinner they pleased. Did Nehi orange soda and Rolos count as dinner? They did on Siesta Sundays.

“Raymond and I would close up at nine and spend three hours checking to make sure all our videos were accounted for. We were meticulous about keeping track. On the week I’m thinking about, you must’ve been about fourteen or fifteen, we discovered two tapes missing.” She made a faint humming noise as she tried to remember the titles.

Pepper leaned back again, the line of patients was moving forward. Half as long as it had been only a minute ago.

“
Tales from the Buttside
,” his mother said. “And … 
Chesty Murphy, Double-D Detective
.”

“Ma!”

She laughed on the line. “
You
remember.”

He felt suddenly exposed. As if his mother and father were in the alcove with him and he had no pants on.

“Your father wanted to turn your room upside down to find them,” his mother said. “Do you know how much the adult tapes were worth to us? This is before the Internet. Nothing made bigger profits for us.”

“I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” Pepper said. But he
could
believe it. His mother, bless her, had always enjoyed giving her sons a little hell.

Outside the alcove, he heard a staff member call out. “Who’s left?”

His mother, meanwhile, just kept raconteuring. “Raymond would’ve torn your and Ralphie’s room apart,
and
taken you to small claims court. But I told him to wait a week.”

“Where’s Loochie?” Scotch Tape called out.

“I’m here!” Loochie shouted. “I’m coming.”

“A week later
Tales from the Buttside
and …”

“Stop saying the titles, Ma,
please
.”

His mother chuckled again. “A week later those two films were right back where they were supposed to be.”

He brought one hand over his eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know what you might be going through right now, Peter. I wish you’d tell me, but I can’t make you. So I told you that story because there’s something I want you to always remember. You took those tapes, but you put them back.”

“Come on,” Pepper said. “What does that prove?”

“It told me something about your
character
, Peter. It might sound silly to you, but even those small indiscretions reveal so much.”

“We got one more missing!” Scotch Tape called out. “Don’t make me come looking for you.”

Pepper spoke softly into the receiver, looking over his shoulder for an orderly or nurse. “I had to return those tapes, Ma. I wasn’t being noble. I stole them from you and Dad. Anyone would’ve put them back.”

“Really?” His mother laughed quietly. “Because Ralph never did.”

PEPPER LEFT THE
alcove feeling like gold bullion. So good that he didn’t mind taking the meds. As soon as he was done, Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters crowded around him. Standing so close they could’ve picked his pockets. (If his pajamas had pockets, that is.)

“What’s this?” he asked.

Redhead Kingpin looked at Still Waters. “Show him,” she said.

Still Waters carried her manila folder, “No Name” on the flap. She opened it.

“I don’t want to know,” Pepper said. They were carrying the terrible folder that only housed the terrible news. Whatever they were going to pull out from there would only wreck his mood. He moved around them and started toward Northwest 2. If he made it to the threshold of the men’s hall, the pair, and their news, would be left behind.

But the pair double-teamed him. Redhead Kingpin squaring off in front of him, while Still Waters dug through the crowded folder. Before he could bob and weave around the redhead, Still Waters had found the article in question.

“Read,” she said.

Pepper scanned the top of the page. This one had been torn out of the newspaper quickly. One edge uneven and ragged. It was from
The
New York Times
. The byline read “Nina Bernstein.” It was accompanied by a picture of two women sitting in a train car.

Reluctantly, Pepper read aloud.

“ ‘Holding tight to her sister’s hand in the bustling streets of Oakland’s Chinatown, Xiu Quan Hong looked a little dazed, like someone who has stepped from a dark, windowless place into a sunny afternoon.’

“ ‘In a sense, she has. For a year and a half, Ms. Hong, a waitress with no criminal record and a history of attempted suicide’ ”—Pepper stopped there a moment, then began again—” ‘was locked away in an immigration jail in Florida and then held in a psychiatric unit in Queens, New York.’

“ ‘With no lawyer to plead for asylum on her behalf, she had been ordered to be deported to her native China, which her family had fled when she was only four years old. She was trapped in an immigration limbo: a fate that detainee advocates say is common in a system that has no rules for determining mental competency and no obligation to provide anyone with legal representation.’ ”

Pepper found his hand was shaking, but he read on.

“ ‘Then, through a fluke, her sister discovered her whereabouts in New York only three days before her deportation order was to be executed. Her sister, Yun Hong, a cashier at a supermarket in Oakland, found Theodore Cox, a New York immigration lawyer, through an Internet search and convinced him to take her sister’s case for free.’

“ ‘Now Ms. Hong, 41, is free on bail and living with her sister in Oakland.’ ”

That’s where he stopped.

He looked up at the picture again. Two women sitting in a train car. He didn’t know the woman on the right. He knew, but didn’t recognize, the one on the left. “That’s Sue?” he whispered.

Her hair had been cut short and now framed her face, where before, her face had been hidden. She didn’t look at the camera but her head was held up. She seemed to be looking out the window behind the photographer. She wore a pink short-sleeved T-shirt and black slacks. In her lap sat a big stylish yellow purse. The woman on her
right, her sister, was caught in profile because she looked at Sue. In the snapshot she had one hand up and was gently fixing Sue’s hair.

Still Waters pulled the paper away from Pepper’s face.

At least that’s what seemed to happen next.

In reality Pepper had staggered backward and came to a stop only when his back touched the wall behind him. And his legs trembled, they were about to give out, so he slid down the wall until he smacked the floor.

Now Ms. Hong, 41, is free on bail and living with her sister in Oakland
.

Pepper spread his legs and lifted his knees and leaned forward so his head faced the floor. His shoulders trembled, and, to his great surprise, he sobbed openly. It sounded like he was choking. He felt Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters come down to the floor and surround him. Still Waters actually put one hand on his back and patted him there.