Love for a Deaf Rebel - Derrick King (top 100 novels .txt) 📗

Pearl saw flashing lights in her mirror, pulled over, and rolled down the window.

“Turn the radio up. Tune it between stations, and shut up,” said Jeff.

A policeman approached. “Your license, registration, and insurance, please.” The car radio roared static noise.

“I’m deaf,” Pearl signed.

The policeman looked at Jeff and me. “Are you deaf?”

“Deaf,” we signed, nodding.

The policeman wrote in his notebook and showed it to Pearl. Slowly, Pearl unlocked the glovebox, removed the papers, and passed them to the policeman. Jeff and I discussed the weather by fingerspelling.

The policeman had written a note to tell Pearl she was speeding, but he would give her a warning. She wrote a note promising to slow down. After he drove away, I turned the radio off, and we all roared with laughter.

“You were wonderful actors,” Pearl signed, laughing, as I interpreted.

“Cops give deafies a break,” said Jeff. “Most are safe drivers—when you can’t hear, you keep your eyes open!”

“I never had a ticket. But deafies have to be careful with police not to be shot reaching for a notepad because he thinks we are reaching for a gun,” signed Pearl.

“I travel with a cop, so I don’t get tickets. When Leo and I ride our motorcycles, they can’t give me a ticket but let him off a warning.”

We drove off. I stopped interpreting so Pearl could concentrate on driving.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve gone shooting. I’ve got a 30-06 hunting rifle,” said Jeff.

“Why didn’t you bring it today?”

“It’s up north—disaster planning. My friend and I are stocking up.”

“You’re a survivalist?”

“I’ll do whatever I need to do to survive.”

Pearl pulled into the Barnet Rifle Club parking lot. The sound of gunfire crackled through the air. I took my rifle out of the car.

“An AR7,” said Jeff. “The US Air Force survival gun.”

Jeff rented a rifle, and we all rented hearing protectors. We sat at a table in the gallery. With the hearing protectors on, Jeff and I fingerspelled to each other and to Pearl, who was the only woman on the range. We jumped from an explosion at the next table. A shooter in a red quilted shirt had fired a hunting rifle.

“I heard that, and I felt that, too,” Pearl signed.

I fired two shots at the 100-meter target, hitting it on one side. Jeff took two shots, missing the target. I helped Pearl to use my gun. She fired and hit the target, and when she saw the hole in it, she grinned. She fired again and hit a bull’s-eye. We all took turns, Pearl using both rifles.

“Let’s try the 300-meter target,” I signed.

Jeff and I hit the distant target occasionally, but Pearl hit it often.

The hunting rifle next to us roared again. We turned to the shooter.

“Do you want to try this one?” the shooter signed to Pearl.

Jeff and I were astonished he could sign, but not Pearl.

“Fine,” signed Pearl.

He lifted the heavy rifle into her arms. “Hold it firmly,” he signed.

Pearl raised it, sighted the target, and fired. The recoil knocked her shoulder back. She lay down the weapon and checked the target through the spotting telescope. “The center.” She beamed with pride.

“My cousin is deaf, and he’s a good shot, too,” signed the shooter.

After an hour, we ran out of ammunition. During the cease-fire, we gathered our targets, returned the rented items, and walked outside.

“A souvenir,” signed Jeff, handing the bull’s-eye to Pearl.

While Pearl drove, Jeff continued talking from the back seat. It is awkward to sign while driving, so my drives with Pearl had little conversation except at traffic lights.

“Pearl’s at home on the range,” said Jeff. “Lock up your ammunition, and don’t mess with her. She’s incredible—I hope it works out. Listen to her dreams. Help her finish things she starts. Did you see the crochets at her place? Did you ever see a finished one?”

“No.”

“You see? Her relationships, too. You would expect her to be tough after what she’s been through, but she’s not. She’s a sucker. Ever heard of est?”

“Vaguely. What’s est?”

“Werner Erhard’s feel-good factory, the biggest scam on the planet. Pay $300 to forget your personality, find your new self, and set yourself free.”

Pearl noticed we were speaking more quietly. I turned on the radio and tuned into a station, trying to feign disinterest in what Jeff had to say.

“Did you try to talk her out of it?”

“It didn’t work. Pearl invited me, so I saw it myself. You share your life in four-day seminars, fourteen hours at a stretch, with wristwatches removed. You listen to crap like facts have no meaning—our stories give facts meaning. Ride your horse in the direction it’s going. If you keep saying it the way it is, your word is law in the universe. Sign up for special courses! Bring your friends! Pearl is keeping it a secret from you because participants swear that they will not tell anyone the contents because that would spoil the show for others when they take the course—and make it unlikely anyone else would sign up. Then they get the participants to volunteer to work for free for a corporation as if it were a church. Pearl did.”

Pearl dropped Jeff off and then drove us to my place. When I opened my door, the aroma of beef stew wafted out. I pointed to my slow cooker.

“This is how I welcome myself home as a single man.”

After a beef bourguignon dinner with baguette and wine, I put a box on the kitchen table. I opened it to reveal a .32 caliber Walther PPK pistol. It was a collector’s item—a gun used by the Gestapo and James Bond. It had been decommissioned by the German police, and the German eagle was on it. I took the empty magazine out of the pistol, pulled the slide back to prove it was unloaded, and handed my toy to Pearl.

“Why do you own a gun?”

“For shooting with Leo. I just bought it.”

“Why didn’t you bring it for shooting today?”

“I don’t have a permit to carry it there, so it has to stay here.”

Later, we continued signing in a bubble bath. It was great not to need the notepad anymore. In bed, she turned off the lights, wrapped my hands around hers under the sheets, and formed signs. We usually left a night-light on so we could keep chatting side-by-side with our arms above the sheets, even though it was slower to sign when looking at the signs from the rear instead of the front; now, in the dark, I had to trace the shape of each sign in her hand with my fingers.

“I love you,” Pearl signed.

“I miss you when you aren’t visiting,” I signed, cooking a breakfast of huevos rancheros with tortillas and beans. “These are called refried beans. Mexicans say that’s because they never do anything right the first time.”

“I understand that joke,” signed Pearl, smiling.

“Live with me. You can stop paying rent. I will share everything.”

Pearl hugged me. “We can be together every day.”

We were in love, but we had made a practical decision: it would save both of us money. We didn’t discuss the timing for starting a family or when I might divorce and we might marry. It was the same casual way that Eugénie and I began living together.

“We can store your furniture in your condo until it sells. I can swap my car for Eugénie’s bicycle that matches mine so we can cycle together. Your car is enough for both of us. I have the motorcycle. We can share a bank account. I know I can trust you.”

“That isn’t the sign for trust—it’s the sign for penis. Those two signs are similar: trust-penis-trust-penis.”

I laughed. “Never trust a penis.”

“You can teach me computers to manage our bank account.”

“Fine. How much notice do you have to give your landlord?”

“What do you mean, ‘notice?’”

“You have to tell the landlord before you go—how many months?”

Pearl looked puzzled.

“Show me your lease, and I will write your notice letter for you.”

Pearl kissed me.

Our lives changed quickly. Pearl moved in with me six months after we met. I reserved a U-Haul truck, collected cartons from the supermarket, and bought Pearl a negligee as a welcome gift. We measured our furniture and planned which piece would fit where and which leftovers would be stored in her condominium.

On moving day, I collected the truck and parked it next to her apartment. When I rang the bell and entered, I found Pearl distraught—angry at the world, furious with herself.

“Blender, camera, suitcase, vacuum, the pictures my sister painted, all gone. I put them in my car last night to be ready to move today. Thieves broke into my car. Why always me?” I hugged Pearl as she started to cry. “They dumped my diving equipment all over the parking lot.”

“Cheer up; we don’t need two vacuum cleaners. Get a police report to make an insurance claim, and get some money back.”

Pearl pulled a folder labeled “Insurance” from a cardboard carton and handed it to me.

“It’s expired. You filed an expired policy from your old address.”

Pearl resumed crying. I handed her a key. “My home is our home. This will not happen again.”

It took most of the day to move her surplus furniture to her condo. I set up Pearl’s TTY, telephone and doorbell flasher, caption decoder, and silent alarm clock.

Pearl made the bed, tucking the end of the sheets under the mattress in a perfect 45-degree angle at each corner.

“No wrinkles, like at school.”

I lay down on the bed to test Pearl’s alarm clock.

“A back massage instead of a bell to wake me up. I like it! Let’s eat at the Kamei Sushi.”

As we walked to the restaurant, holding hands, a panhandler crossed our path. “Spare change?”

“We’re deaf. We don’t understand you,” Pearl signed.

“Ears like shit—not work,” I signed.

The beggar held out his hand. Pearl and I shrugged and walked off.

“Fucking dummies!” the panhandler shouted behind us.

In the restaurant, I told Pearl what he said, and we burst into laughter.

Our shared telephone line turned out to be a nuisance. I could respond to hearing or TTY calls, but a hearing caller who called when I was out would hear only beeping tones, and Pearl would become annoyed picking up voice calls she couldn’t answer. She worried this created a security risk because hearing callers would learn she was at home alone.

I bought an answering machine and put voice and TTY greetings into its outgoing cassette tape, which were played sequentially. “Please wait for the message after the tones” in my voice was followed by “Please leave a message for Pearl” in TTY tones followed by “I am not available to take your call right now, so please leave me a message after the beep” in voice. A hearing caller would ignore the tones, and a deaf caller would ignore the voice. If Pearl was home when a TTY message came in, she could see the text in the TTY and take the call. If we had both been out and a caller had left a message, she would play it back when she returned. A TTY message appeared as text on the TTY, but when a voice message was played, her TTY screen displayed a blinking light; Pearl would then put her hand on the speaker and feel the vibration to confirm it was a voice message.

It worked great, and Pearl was impressed. I loved to find solutions like this for her.

Pearl, Jeff, and I took scuba diving lessons from Jeff’s friend. Pearl easily mastered the theory and pencil-and-paper calculation of the decompression tables.

My face mask leaked, so our instructor suggested I shave off my mustache for a more watertight seal. Pearl agreed, saying it made me look gay. I shaved it off and never grew one again.

During our first open water dive, we discovered that the drysuit Pearl bought from Elizabeth was too large, so it trapped air and Pearl floated like a balloon. While we stood in chest-high surf, our instructor added weights to her belt while Jeff pressed the air release valve, and I hugged her to squeeze the air out of her suit. At last, Pearl sank, and the three of us submerged to join her underwater. As we swam into deeper water, the remaining air in her drysuit shifted to her boots. Pearl struggled to stay level, so the instructor ordered us to surface.

When I surfaced, I saw two neoprene legs and fins pointing at the sky. Pearl was floating upside down,