Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (35 page)

“Maybe you should charge him,” said Cap, as she was about to walk away.

“I ain’t on the game,” said Maggie.

“Didn’t say you were. But you’re providing a service. Shrinks charge, don’t they? And they got more money than you, Maggie dearest.”

She shrugged. “Some things aren’t about money.”

“Well, if money is no object with you, you can leave early tonight. You might as well. It’s dead in here.”

He said it too loud. Devlin Robey heard him, and she saw his face light up. No use telling him she was stuck here now. Thanks a heap, Cap. At least Richie was gone—sleeping over at Kevin’s tonight. Devlin Robey was already putting his coat on by the time she reached his table. “Boy, am I glad we can get outta here! I’m afraid I might have company tonight.”

His face was even more like a fish belly than usual, and his eyes sagged into dark pouches. “What do you mean, company?” asked Maggie, glancing toward the door.

“Tell you later.”

They went to a different Italian restaurant, but it had the same oilcloth table covers, and the same vino, which he drank in equal quantities to the usual stuff, and she had the angel-hair pasta, less rubbery than that of the old place. He wouldn’t talk about
company
, while they were eating, but he kept looking around, and he whispered, even when he was just talking to her. She had to get him back to her place—in a cab, because he was scared to walk—and get two cups of black decaf down him, before he’d open up.

“Tell me,” she said, and she wasn’t being Fantasy Girl this time.

“It’s okay.” He took a thick brown envelope out of the breast pocket of his suit, and laid it on top of the stacks of
Redbook
and
Enquirer
. “I got it covered, see? Most of it anyhow. I think it’s enough to call the dogs off.”

“You’ve been gambling again,” she said.

“Hey, sooner or later
seventeen
will sing for me again, right?”

“So you owe some pretty heavy people, I guess.”

He shrugged, palms up. “It’s Atlantic City. They’re not Boy Scouts. I was supposed to meet them tonight with
the cash, but I was a little short. Had to come up here, hock some things. Borrow what I could from a homeboy, and hope I got it together before they came looking for me. Now I’m okay. I can take the meeting. It’s not all there, but it’s enough to keep me going. I wrote a note with it, promising more next week. I got record royalties coming.”

Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “Why’d you want to see me?”

“Not for money!” He laughed a little. “Maggie, this is way out of your league, doll. You just keep your stash in that cookie jar of yours, and let me worry about these gentlemen. I just came to see you ’cause I love you.”

He probably does, Maggie thought sadly as she led him to the bedroom. He can see the reflection of the record album poster in my eyes.

It was past two when she got up to take a leak. Robey had been asleep for hours, sated with sweat and swearwords. She saw the envelope lying on the coffee table, and scooped it up as she passed. Might as well see how deep he’s in, she thought. Was saving a fallen idol part of the deal? Maybe she could talk him into getting counseling. Gamblers Anonymous, or something. She wondered why dead and famous were the only two choices some people seemed to want.

She didn’t go back to bed. When Robey woke up at nine, she gave him aspirin and Bloody Mary mix for his hangover, and a plastic cup of decaf for the road, but no kiss. He was headed back to Atlantic City, still too sleepy and hungover for pleasantries.

Devlin Robey was not a morning person. Neither was Maggie Holtz, but this morning she was wide awake. She sat in front of the television, listening to the game shows, but watching the phone. It rang at five past noon. The answering machine kicked in, and after it said its piece, she heard Devlin Robey’s famous, not-so-velvet voice, now
shrill in the speaker. “Maggie! Are you there? Pick up! It’s me. Listen, you know that envelope I told you about? The one with the cash in it. Listen, I must have left it at your place. There are some gentlemen here who need to know I had it. Could you just pick up, Maggie? Could you tell them about the cash in the envelope, please? It’s important.”

She heard another voice say, “Real important.”

Maggie picked up the phone. “I never saw any envelope, Devlin,” she said. “Can’t you just stall those guys like you said you would? Till you get some money?”

She heard him cry out as she was replacing the receiver. She set the brown envelope back on the table. There were a lot of hundreds inside it, but that wasn’t the point. Some things aren’t about money. It was the letter that mattered, the one he wrote to the gamblers asking for more time to pay in full. That wasn’t anything like the handwriting she’d seen on his other letter, the one she’d received so long ago containing an apology from
Devlin Robey
. So she really didn’t owe him anything. She owed herself a lot of years. She wondered how much it would cost to go to trade school, and if the bills in the brown envelope would cover it. Maggie wanted to learn to fix things.

W
ORKING AT
N
ORTHFIELD
Nursing Home isn’t nearly as boring as you think, even if it is a building full of old people. It’s not like I’m a volunteer or anything, all right? I mean, they pay me. Less than I’m worth, I admit, but it’s enough to keep me in video games and halfway decent sneakers.

Ever since my dad died of cancer last year, money has been a little tight at home. My mom went back to work full-time. She’s a registered nurse, and now she works as the nursing supervisor at Northfield, and when she told me that the home was short on orderlies, and suggested that they might be able to use a responsible twelve-year-old for a few hours a week, I jumped at the chance. It made me feel good to know that I was helping out with expenses, even if they were mostly
my
expenses. Now I work part-time, late afternoons and weekends, with time off during soccer season. We almost made it to the playoffs last year.

Working at Northfield isn’t exactly taxing labor. I load the dishwashers, and I go down to the basement laundry and gather up the clean sheets and towels and deliver them to the four residential floors for the housekeeping staff. Everybody told me that there was a ghost in the basement, because the morgue is right next to the laundry,
but I always turn all the lights on when I go down there, and I don’t waste any time, so frankly I’ve never seen anything weird down there. But Kenny Jeffreys swears he once saw the top half of a guy in a Confederate uniform. Just the
top
half. Too strange for me, man. The live ones around here are bizarre enough.

I see them every evening when I push the meal trolley around the halls, delivering dinner. It doesn’t take you long to get the residents scoped out: there’s senile ones, who barely notice you; feeble but chatty ones that treat me like a grandson, which is nice; and then there are a few space cadets scattered about. Mrs. Graham in room 239 always has to have
two
dinner trays taken to her. One for her and one for her husband Lincoln. That’s her late husband Lincoln, you understand. Mr. Graham left the planet in ’85, but he still gets a dinner tray. And, no, he doesn’t eat it. I go back at seven to pick up the trays, and his is never touched. And Mrs. Whitbread in 202 has an evil twin. Yeah, in the mirror. She’s always scolding the mirror twin, telling her what a hag she is, and how she ought to behave herself. I swear I’m not making this up. You can ask Kenny Jeffreys, the orderly who works the same hours I do. He’s in his second year at the community college, majoring in health care, so he’s working for tuition and car insurance money. Plus, of course, the experience he can get in the health care field, which does not seem to excite him too much most of the time. He talks about changing his career to TV anchorman, but as far as I know he’s still in health care.

Northfield has its share of oddities, from ghosts to dotty old folks, but the patient that really got to me was the white-haired guy in 226. He was weirder than all the others put together. Kenny calls him Typewriter Man. The name on his door is
Mr. Pierce
, and you never see him out of his room, or wearing anything except a robe and pajamas. Every time I go into his room with the meal
tray, Mr. Pierce is sitting in front of his nonelectric typewriter, tapping away like mad. He must be doing fifty words a minute. Never stops. Never looks up when you set his food down. Just keeps typing, like it’s some urgent report he’s got to finish.

Only there’s no paper in the typewriter. Ever.

And he just keeps typing away.

“What do you think Mr. Pierce is writing that’s so important?” I asked Kenny one evening, when I had delivered the supper tray through another burst of paperless typing in 226.

Kenny shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“He never looks up. He never stops typing, or even notices that I’m there.”

“Guess you’ll never know then, kid,” said Kenny, wheeling the laundry cart toward the elevator.

But I wasn’t willing to give up. And I had just come up with an idea that might work.

The next afternoon when I showed up for work, I dropped by my mom’s office and took about twenty sheets of typing paper from the bottom drawer of her desk. She wasn’t there at the time, and I knew she’d never miss it. Then I went upstairs to room 226, and tapped on the door before I let myself in. Mr. Pierce was asleep in front of his television, snoring gently, which didn’t surprise me, because not even weird people can type twenty-four hours a day. I tiptoed up to his desk, and stuck a sheet of paper in the empty typewriter.

“Pleasant dreams, Mr. Pierce,” I whispered as I crept away. “I’ll be back to check on you at mealtime.”

Two hours later, I was pushing the dinner trolley from room to room, tingling with excitement. I told the grandmotherly types about my history project, and I asked Mrs. Graham how her invisible husband was
doing, but all the time my mind was on Mr. Pierce and his typewriter.

Finally, I reached room 226. I heard the familiar tapping sounds through the door, and I knocked once, and let myself in, calling out, “Suppertime, Mr. Pierce!” just like I always did, despite the fact that Mr. Pierce never, ever answered back.

I set the tray on the empty desk space beside the typewriter, moving as slowly as I could, so that I could see what he was typing. The paper was still in place, and it was covered with words. I didn’t have to take the paper, because I could memorize the whole thing in thirty seconds. It was the same line over and over:
Alva, please come back. I’m sorry. Please come back
.

I looked over at Mr. Pierce, but he was hunched over his plate, shoveling in food and ignoring me, the way he always did. I wished him a good evening, and went to find Kenny.

“He just keeps typing the same sentence,” I told him. “He’s telling someone named Alva to please come back, and he says he’s sorry.”

“Maybe it’s his wife,” said Kenny. “I wonder if she knows where he is.”

“Somebody had to sign him in here,” I pointed out.

“Maybe it wasn’t her, though. Maybe they got divorced, and his kids put him here. Maybe she misses him now. A list of his relatives would probably be entered on his records folder.” Kenny reads a lot of paperback mysteries while he’s doing the laundry in the basement. He says it keeps his mind off the ghosts. He looked at me slyly. “Of course, I couldn’t look in those folders, but since they’re in your mom’s office …”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I muttered. I felt sorry for Mr. Pierce, typing that same sad sentence day after day with no hope of getting an answer. Maybe there was hope, though.

*  *  *

The next evening I pushed my meal cart up close to Kenny’s trolley full of towels. “So much for your theories, Sherlock,” I told him. “I read Mr. Pierce’s folder while Mom was at the photocopy machine. She almost caught me, too! Anyhow, his wife’s name was Rosalie, and she died the year he was admitted to Northfield. They didn’t have any children, which is probably why he is here. There was no mention of anyone named Alva in his folder.”

“Has he always lived around here?”

“I think so. Why?”

“You could ask one of the local old ladies if she knew Mr. Pierce before he came here, and if there was ever anyone named Alva in his life. It’s not a very common name. Sounds old-fashioned to me.”

I couldn’t think of any better idea, and Mr. Pierce certainly wasn’t talking, so the next evening when I delivered the meals I got into a conversation with all the residents who weren’t gaga. I asked if they’d always lived around here, and then asked about Mr. Pierce. It was Mrs. Graham who knew him from the old days.

“Francis Pierce!” she said, smiling. “Yes, we’ve known him forever, haven’t we, dear?” That last remark was addressed to the invisible (deceased) Mr. Graham, and I am happy to say that he did not reply.