Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Author:Percival Everett [Everett, Percival]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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