Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Ramona.The only woman among the terrible tribe, but one would hardly have known it. Stealth was in fact her first and most striking power. She was a creeper, having the annoying habit of materializing at one’s shoulder out of the crystalline blue. Ramona was of medium height and build and of a bit less than medium intelligence. It seemed that she ran with the boys because they were the only game in town, so to speak. In some raggedy village on the steppes of Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan, she might have been considered mildly appealing, what with her exaggerated but not so well-defined biceps and broad back. The K-Swiss gym shoes she wore were always impossibly white and unblemished, even after bouts of mopping up diarrhea, blood, or vomit. She wore a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, though I did not believe her to be married or even attached to another living human animal. When she spoke it was always a loud whisper, a deafening hiss that went unmissed by anyone within a range of thirty or more feet. Ramona spoke in apparent non sequiturs, but her utterances were actually always just a few minutes behind everyone else, if not her actions. Tommy and Cletus were once trying to get an administrative office door unstuck, having just come in from their smoking break with Ramona. Ramona watched for a few seconds and when asked for a flat-head screwdriver from the box, she said, I don’t have any cigarettes, but she passed along the tool without pause. The oddest thing was that from her cavernous mouth, a mouth that remained slightly open for breathing, came the warmest breath, breath one was prepared to find foul but it was not, yet neither did it smell good. It was merely warm.

Finally there was the unfortunately named Billy.The old Billy did call him Silly but also referred to him as Billy Dud, a more appropriate nickname, as Silly almost made him sound interesting. Billy Dud was so frightfully bland that mosquitoes refused to stick their proboscises into him, treated him as if he’d been soaked in DEET. He was pure, unadulterated background, complete camouflage, a sort of ninja of boredom. If he leaned against a wall, he became the wall. If he carried large cartons, he became a carton. His voice was white noise. He was a chameleon, fading, receding, into the back of any room as if on greased rails, smoothly, effortlessly, a complete forgettable slide to some corner or other. He was a member of the wicked crew only by passive attachment. It was not clear that the others were even aware of his membership or him. They probably wondered on occasion while smoking in the courtyard, just to whom did that sixth shadow belong? The strangest thing about Billy Dud was that once you did catch a glimpse of him you realized that he was beautiful, damn beautiful. But then he would open his mouth and then the mind-numbing, characterless, vanilla static would wash over you and the room and you would be left wondering what you had seen.

If you live long enough you come to understand that the only terrifying thing is not knowing when a thing is going to happen, whether good or bad. And the older you get, the more you count on knowing when things are going to happen. Bad things, uncomfortable things, death things, are only unsettling and dismaying when they fail to comply with the schedule, the scheme, the plan. The scariest thing about the Gang of Six, as Billy had dubbed them, was that they had no obvious schedule and no apparent goals. One evening, after dinner, after Billy Dud had blended into the salad bar of the dining hall, Harley came in to check the pockets of everyone for suspected illicit drugs. The only staff there were the orderlies, the food workers having been escorted out by the giant Leon. Many of the residents, especially the blue-haired old women at the next table, always accused old Billy of being paranoid and therefore a nuisance, but tonight all were on the same dismal page of shared humiliation. The Gang laughed when a condom was found in Sheldon Cohen’s pocket. Cohen had been a medical doctor and I did not know if he was having sex with anyone, but he wanted at least to be safe and prepared if the opportunity and other things arose. I never saw a man over seventy so embarrassed; it’s really not something we feel. Finding no banned substances, the goons left with whatever cash they could find. Billy stood and shouted out his displeasure. Do you hooligans know no shame!

Even I had to admit that his word choice was antiquated and therefore undercutting of any gravity he hoped to convey.

Hooligans? Harley smiled and stepped up face to neck with Billy. Sit down, old man.

I will report you.

Go ahead. Tell them what the big bad hooligans did. He looked around the room, Just remember, all of you, that it will be weeks before any action is taken. Weeks. With that he pressed his meaty palm into Billy’s chest and forced him back down into his chair.

Had you followed Billy back to his apartment after the abovedescribed confrontation with Harley that took place at the end of the insane ratification of his rants against the Gang, you would have seen him open that briefcase that he kept stowed on the bottom shelf of his bookcase and take out hand-drawn maps of the community complex and grounds that he had composed and amended over his ten-year residency at Teufelsdröck h. Then, as he placed himself over the spread-out papers, you would have seen him scratching crazily at the back of his head and pulling on his thumbs the way he always did when excited or nervous. But it was not specifically this night that had Billy pondering over his charts. He did so every night, his pencil making slight and subtle alterations to tables and diagrams and even graphs, tracking the comings and leavings of the Gang members, their combinations, what they were carrying. Billy never seemed to know just what he was looking for, but that night, he pointed at me with end of his number two pencil. It’s up to you, he said.

What’s up to me?

You have to sneak into the break room and take Cletus’s keys.

Excuse me?

I would do it, but I’m old.

I’m seventy-eight.

I’m glad we’re on the same page. This is how it has to go.

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Except that the sun had set hours ago and no rest was to come to my storm-tossed heart. I was to put on my darkest clothes and time it all just right.

12

The orderlies’ break room was set at the southeast corner of the central building on campus, a square, characterless block of palered bricks that housed the dining facilities and the administrative offices, such as they were. That the break room was on that particular corner was hardly of any consequence, since I had no sense of directional orientation, but to Billy it was the linchpin of the entire operation. He reasoned that as I was setting out at dusk the fact that that side of the building would be darker would be to my advantage. In fact, it did not matter at all, and I didn’t point it out to him that the whole perimeter of the building was fairly well lit. What was useful were Billy’s markings of the security guard’s nightly rounds, of which there was essentially one. At six, upon arriving for his shift, he would make a leisurely circle about the building and then settle in behind his desk at the front door and watch blue movies on his player under the counter. He thought he was being covert in his activity, but he was hard of hearing and so the sound was turned up just loud enough that even we, those with a bit of deafness, could hear the moaning. I imagined the movies to not be hard-core, as they said, but rather the kinds of movies I had see advertised in my town newspaper when I was a kid, the ads saying to call the theater for the title. Billy and I had agreed, read Billy had explained, that entry into the break room was to be best achieved through the window on the south wall that seemed to always be open and also offered the cover of some star jasmine bushes. That was reasonable enough. My mission, my assignment, was to collect as many keys as I could find, we would figure out to which locks the keys matched and how to best use them later, and to bury them behind the azaleas outside my apartment. My heart was racing as I leaned against that exterior wall, not so much out of fear but because I had just performed my version of a sprint across the hundred-yard lawn. The sprinklers came on just as I slapped my back against the bricks, either luck or bad timing because I had told Billy that I could make the run in a third the time. A look into the room confirmed that it was empty and the sound of the sprinklers covered my prying of the screen loose from the window. The plan was working beautifully. However, there is nothing quite so inelegant as an old man climbing through a window. A thousand sprinklers could not have masked the noise I made knocking over a table with a hot plate and plastic dishes and a chair on which had sat a large metal mixing bowl that now served as a bouncing gong. Luckily the guard could not hear it or was otherwise engaged, an image I tried to instantly expel. At any rate, I stood there, frozen, wondering why I would choose to freeze in plain view instead of hastily trying to hide or to crawl right back out the window through which I had just come. But I paused there for many seconds, as much to let my back ease into uprightness as anything else, until I was satisfied that no one was coming. I put back the table and chair and bowl and then I searched surfaces, lockers, and pockets and found a ring with eight keys, seven rather conventional and one old skeleton type. I was just about to exit when I heard movement in the corridor. I ducked into a corner beside the row of lockers and behind a chair draped with an orderly’s white uniform.