The Talker. Mary Sojourner
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to the dust on the last nickel. Then she said, “Jenn, I hope you’ll get a part-time job. Otherwise I don’t know how we’ll make it.” I’m sixteen so there’s not a whole bunch of jobs out there—especially in Yucca Valley where lots of people sleep in their cars. But my best friend Liana’s mom works as an aide at Hopecare, a local nursing home. She talked with the head nurse. They said they needed somebody three to seven to help out with meals and visit the residents. And could I start right away? Almost the next thing I knew I was being given a blue and white striped Hope Helper’s apron, handed a vase of silk flowers and a card and told to head down the hall to Room 136 to get it ready for the new resident.
I read the card as I walked down the hall. Welcome to your new home. We hope you’ll like it as much as we do. Nobody had signed it and I wondered if the new patient would wonder if anybody here actually liked it at Hopecare. I set the flowers and the card on the dresser, tugged the bedspread tight over the blankets and sheets and sat in the La-Z-Boy chair next to the window. I could look out on the Vons parking lot behind Hopecare. I watched a couple shaved-head kids playing Bash a Shopping Cart. I remembered when Liana and I had done that. We got caught and had to clean up the parking lot for a month. When the store manager told my dad, my dad had tried to look like he was mad. Later, I heard him talking with my mom and the two of them were laughing their asses off.
I wondered if I would ever be able to look at anything in our town and not think about my dad. He’d been gone three months. There was no warning. One morning my mom woke up next to him in bed and his skin was cold. She shook him and when she knew it was hopeless, she called 911. She woke up me and my brother and sister and sat us down on the bed in my brother’s room. “Something really sad has happened,” she said. I knew right away. “Your father died sometime in the night.” She waited and gave us time to let the words go all the way into our brains. Chris broke first. He threw himself into her arms. Stacy grabbed my hand. I’m the oldest of all of us, so I just looked into Mom’s eyes. She nodded. I knew in that instant my childhood was over.
I watched the kids in the parking lot be kids and cried a while. I was wiping my nose with a corner of my apron when there was a tap at the door. “Incoming,” a wheezy voice said. I looked up and saw a little old guy with a long gray braid being wheeled into the room. He had on a faded black leather vest with patches on it. He wore a silver hoop in his right ear and a string of turquoise beads around his neck. “Hey, little sister,” he said, “where’d you get those flowers? Are they for me?”
“Isn’t that nice, Mr. Guidry,” the aide said. “You’ve got a welcoming committee.” The guy snorted. The aide parked the wheelchair next to me. “I’ll just leave you two alone so you can get to know each other,” she said, set a duffle bag on the bed, fluffed up the pillows and left.
The old guy shook his head. “Ah jeez,” he said, “what a bummer. Not you, missy. Just what the hell am I supposed to do now.” He picked up the card. “My new home? I liked the old one just fine.”
“That vest is so cool,” I said because I couldn’t think of what else to say.
The guy looked down. “I earned every one of them patches,” he said. “I was a real biker, not one of those yuppies you see riding around on fancy-ass—’scuse me—Harleys. I rode with the Half Moon Hellers. You ever heard of them?”
“Nope,” I said. “But my dad was going to get a bike.” I heard myself and wanted to take back the words. The guy shook his head. “‘Going to’ and ‘got’ are two different things. You tell him that. He buys himself a bike, he’ll wonder why he waited so long.”
“Okay,” I said. No way was I going to spill my guts to a grouch.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I forgot my manners.” He reached out his hand. He had a big old skull ring on his thumb and a silver snake around his little finger. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Red Billy. Red Billy Guidry.”
I shook his hand. “I’m Jenn Martin. I just started work here.”
“Well then, that makes us both newbies, right?”
I laughed. “Yep. Red Billy—that’s a great name. If you don’t mind my asking, where’d you get it?”
Red Billy undid the braid and shook his hair loose. “See all this hair. It used to be red, not carrot red—goldy red like Robert Plant. You know who he is?”
“Led Zep,” I said. “My boyfriend Travis says they’re gods. I’m more into stuff like My Chemical Romance.”
Red Billy faked taking a hit off a joint. “Tell me about it.”
“Oh jeez,” I said. “You better be careful.”
“What are they going to do?” He laughed. “Bust me and send me to jail? That’d have to be better than here.”
Just then the aide looked in. “Hey, Jenn, Karen wants to orientate you. She’s at the nursing station.”
“You go on, missy,” Red Billy said. “I gotta get me and all my possessions settled in.” He nodded at the duffle bag. “Should take me about five minutes.”
I got off work at seven and called Liana on my way home. “I have to talk,” I said. “The weirdest thing happened at my job.” She and Trav drove over and we headed up Old Woman Springs Road to get high. I love where I live. It’s big old desert and you can do what you want and nobody ever finds you. Travis parked and we climbed down into a little wash that snakes past the landfill. Somebody had hollowed out a little cave in the side of the wash and set a piece of old carpet on the sand. We crawled in and hunkered down. Liana pulled out her pipe. “So, Jenn,” Travis said, “how’s the new job?”
“Pretty cool,” I said. “First off, all I have to do is take supper trays in to people and talk with them for a few minutes. Some of them are pretty weird, but nobody’s mean. I don’t really have a boss. It’s mostly aides on in the evening and all they want to do is get their jobs done and hang out at the nurses’ station and bitch.”
“Awesome,” Travis said. Liana handed me the lit pipe and I sucked in a good hit. You can’t smoke but one hit of this dope. It would rip out your brain. Travis’ brother has a little greenhouse in his back bedroom and grows some deadly weed. We’re too young for medical marijuana so it’s a good thing Trav and his brother are pals.
I passed the pipe on. “But, what’s the most amazing thing of all is that there’s an old hippie just got brought in to live there. His name’s Red Billy. Guess why, Trav.”
“He’s a socialist? Fuck that.” Travis’ dad hates the president and anybody else he thinks isn’t a patriot. He’s always going on about libtards and socialists and reds and how if they want his gun, etc. etc. Sometimes Travis hates socialists and sometimes he hates his dad.
“Duh,” I said. “No way. He’s got this long gray braid down his back. So when he told me his name was Red Billy, I was like, ‘Huh?’ and he said that his hair used to be all goldy red like Robert Plant and then he asked me if I knew who Robert Plant was and I was like, ‘Of course,’ and then—”
“Whoa,” Liana said, “you’re getting all a thousand miles an hour like you do. Slow down. I do not know why I smoke with you. You might as well as be a tweaker.”
I giggled. Trav giggled. Liana glared at us. “Come on, Jenn, take a deep breath. So the guy is called Red Billy because he once had red hair which he doesn’t anymore because he’s old but he likes Led Zep?”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Now who’s tweakin’?”
Liana whacked my arm. “Okay, smart-ass, but you gotta watch out for one thing.”
“What?”
“What if he’s one of those dirty old men?” she said.
For a second I felt a little sick. Then I thought about how Red Billy hadn’t checked out my boobs, which I have some pretty terrific ones, and how his eyes were so gentle