The Pager on the Shelf

The pager sat on the shelf by the door where it always sat, and I had picked it up and put it down maybe forty times by the time the sky went purple over the mesa. I paced that little station like a cat in a box. Desk, bookshelf, cot, window, desk again. Six steps each way.

"Come on," I said to nobody. "Page me."

You got to understand the setup. Every year the community center over in town does a play, and every year the ranger station gets asked to keep a radio open in case anything goes sideways, parking, crowds, some grandma fainting in the folding chairs. And every year I sit out here on my birthday eve holding a pager that never goes off until the thing is already over. Last year it buzzed at nine forty. The year before it buzzed twice and both times it was the coordinator fat-fingering the number.

So there I was, twenty-nine years old as of midnight, walking a hole in the floor of a one-room station in the high desert of New Mexico, and the pager was quiet as a rock.

Then headlights. Then a truck I recognized, because I'd helped buy it. Leroy climbed out with his toolbox in one hand like he was coming to fix something, which was funny, because the man is a bowling alley mechanic and there is not a single pinsetter within fifty miles of this place.

"What are you doing out here?" I said through the door. "It's your night off."

"Got a call," he said. "Said a chair out here's busted."

"Who called?"

"Somebody." He set the toolbox down on the porch and looked at me over it. "You going to let me in or do I work on the chair in the dark?"

I let him in. He set the toolbox by the desk, opened it, pulled out a wrench he clearly had no use for, and looked around for a chair to pretend at. There's one chair in the station. It's fine. He wiggled it like it had told him a lie.

"Leroy," I said. "The chair is fine."

"Wheel's loose," he said.

"It doesn't have wheels."

He grinned at that and gave up the whole act, and I'll say this for the man, he doesn't sulk when he's caught. He just sat down on the fine chair and patted his knee like he expected me to be twenty-four and weightless, which I am not, and I sat on the desk edge instead.

"Tell me about the pager," he said.

So I vented. I told him about the coordinator, about how I'd been sitting here since four, about how the whole thing felt like a countdown to nothing. Twenty-nine coming tomorrow, if you count midnight as tomorrow, and what had I done with twenty-eight? Fixed a culvert. Wrote a report about a coyote. Sat in this room with a pager that never paged on time.

"It feels like the countdown's for something that never shows up," I told him. "Like the store's open and the truck never comes. You know?"

He didn't say much. That's Leroy. He's a mechanic, he listens to an engine before he touches anything, and he does the same with me. I went on a while. I said some things about how I felt like I was waiting for my own life to page me, and I heard how that sounded and got embarrassed, but he didn't laugh.

"That's real," he said finally. "Keep going."

So I kept going, and he kept listening, and somewhere in there I realized he had his hand in his jacket pocket and wasn't just keeping it warm.

"What's in your pocket?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said, way too fast.

"Leroy."

He sighed like a man whose wife is too good at her job, and pulled the thing out. It was a pager. Not mine. Same model as mine, the old gray brick they issue, but his had the back plate off and a mess of solder inside it that I could tell was not factory work. He'd done it himself, at his bench, with his little iron and his little coils of wire.

"So the chair story was about this," I said.

"The chair story was about getting in the door, yeah." He turned the thing over in his hands. "Took me three weeks. Don't laugh."

"Why would I laugh?"

"Because it's a dumb thing." He held it out flat on his palm. "It's got a receiver in it now. Little radio, short range. And I've got the transmitter here in my pocket. I can buzz it any time I want. Any pattern I want."

I looked at it. I looked at him. Thirty years old, grease still under his thumbnail from the shop, sitting in a chair he drove ninety minutes to pretend to fix.

"You built me a toy out of a pager," I said.

"Built it for you, yeah. Hadn't decided if I'd give it to you or bury it in the desert." He shrugged. "It sounded better in my head at the bench than it does out loud."

"Show me."

That's all I said. Show me. And my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

He took it off his palm slow, like it might spook me, and I took it. It was heavier than mine, or it felt like it, knowing what was inside. The metal was warm from his hand. He kept his other hand in his pocket, on the transmitter, and I watched his face while I waited, because I know all his faces now, four years of them, and I could see the one where he's counting in his head.

Then it went. A low buzz, long and slow, right in the meat of my palm, and it was nothing, it was a pager buzzing, it was a hundred work nights of nothing, and my breath still caught in my throat like the first cold drink of winter air.

"There it is," he said, quiet.