“I know it, sweetheart. Just thought it’d be easier for Steve. What are you guys doing here, anyway?”
“You forget we were coming?”
Willa turned to look at her, confusion in her tanned and wrinkled face. “Guess I did. Tell me why again?”
“We wanna talk about these alkies comin’ to town,” said the chief.
“Alkies?”
“The homeless people, Willa,” said Hope.
“Oh, I know what he means, dear. Let’s go to my office.”
The old woman led them down the hall, moving fast. She turned into a small room with a single bookshelf and a desk piled high with clutter. She sat behind the desk. The chief of police stood in the corner and crossed his arms, leaving the one remaining chair for Hope. No one said anything at first. Hope stared at the strange string of shells and wooden beads around Willa Newdale’s neck and wondered what hung out of sight beneath the woman’s shirt. Willa broke the silence. “Don’t suppose you guys want to donate to the mission?”
“Tried to at the door,” said Hope. “Couldn’t get a taker.”
“Well then.”
“Willa,” said the chief. “What we gonna do with all these alkies?”
“Feed ‘em. Bathe ‘em. Save their souls, if possible. And you shouldn’t call ‘em alkies, Steven.”
The chief said, “I remember when we called ‘em bums.”
“Times change,” said Willa.
“People don’t.”
“Steve,” warned Hope.
The police chief shrugged. “I’m just sayin’ . . .”
Hope turned to look across the desk at the old woman, meeting her remarkably dark eyes. “Here’s the thing. There’s too many of them. Must be thirty or forty now, and it seems like more come every week. They’re sleepin’ in the park by the landing, loiterin’ all over town, scaring everybody’s customers away. All the downtown business owners are worried.”
“Poor dears.”
“Well, yeah, actually. They’re gonna be poor. We’re all gonna be poor if we can’t figure out some way to get these people off the streets.”
“Can’t help you there. I’m already takin’ in as many as I can.”
“I can see that. We’re just hopin’ you can help us figure out why they’re here.” Hope paused, hating to go on. But she had a job to do, responsibilities to meet. She took a deep breath. “Maybe then we can find a way to make them leave.”
Willa stared at her in silence. Hope felt herself shrink beneath the awful weight of the old woman’s gaze, knowing she of all people shouldn’t be saying things like this. Hope thought about equivocation. She thought of saying “That’s not what I meant” or “We can reach some kind of compromise.” It was a word that she had learned too well these last two years—compromise, a word she hadn’t thought through nearly hard enough before she ran for office.
Just as she opened her mouth to make excuses a loud voice broke the silence, echoing down the hall outside the office. Someone shouted something, then shouted again.
“’Scuse me for a minute,” said Willa, rising from behind the desk and hurrying away with remarkable agility for a woman her age.
Hope turned to look at Steve, raising her eyebrows. He shrugged, hands deep in the front pockets of his trousers, jingling his keys and change. The shouting down the hall continued, although now Hope also heard Willa’s voice. It sounded like the old woman was trying to calm the person without much success.
“Should we see if she needs help?” asked Hope.
“Naw. She’ll holler if she wants us.”
The shouts grew louder.
“I don’t know, Steve.”
“Willa don’t take to interference in her business.”
Hope sat still, listening to the commotion. Echoes off the plaster walls robbed the shouts of meaning. She strained to hear, hoping to make sense of it. Steve’s jingling keys annoyed her. She wished the man would just be still, or else go to see if he could help, anything but stand there all a-fidget like he was. Between her lingering guilt about her mission and the shouts and the clink clink clink from Steve’s pockets, Hope suddenly had to do something. She stood quickly.
“I’m gonna go see.”
Outside in the narrow hall she heard the chief’s footsteps close behind. The two of them passed the kitchen and the bathrooms and approached seven or eight people crowded around an open door—a couple of the men she recognized from the card game in the front room and a few she hadn’t seen before. One of them, younger than the others, was weeping quietly.
Joining the back of the little crowd, Hope stood on tiptoes and craned her head, but she couldn’t see past the people. Someone in the room was talking. The rumble of a machine, a clothes dryer maybe, obscured the words. She thought she heard someone say, “I’m telling you the truth!” Another voice, probably Willa’s, replied in a much lower tone. Hope couldn’t make out those words. Then, very clearly, the man again: “Maybe he went outside to get it. How should I know?” The other voice replied, but still Hope couldn’t understand. Then a little louder, “No!” A few more quiet words, a sense of urgency in them as if Willa or whoever wanted to persuade the man of something. Whatever the dispute, he was unconvinced. He shouted now, saying, “You tryin’ ta say I killed him? That’s plum foolish! I didn’t give it to him!”
There was a loud metallic bang.
Suddenly Steve was past Hope, throwing his considerable bulk against the small crowd, pressing them aside to get into the room. Hope followed the chief instinctively, too intrigued by the unseen drama to consider that she might be moving toward some kind of danger.
At the front of the hallway crowd now, closest to the door, Hope smelled the unpleasant muskiness of a man on her left. Shifting to her right to get as much distance from him as possible, she caught a glimpse around Steve’s broad back, enough to see he was indeed standing in a laundry room and the loud machine was indeed a clothes dryer as she had suspected.
Steve said, “That fella drunk?”
Willa replied, “I’m afraid not.”
At that, the stinking man beside Hope whispered, “It’s murder, that’s what it is.”
The entire crowd began to murmur. Unable to restrain her curiosity, Hope pressed a palm against Steve’s back. He glanced around, saw it was her and moved aside to give her space to squeeze into the little room.
In the harsh fluorescent light beyond Steve stood Willa and another man Hope had never seen before. The expression on the old woman’s face shocked Hope. She would not have believed such heartbreak was possible for the fierce little defender of the broken people in the shelter. Willa’s grief embarrassed Hope. It confused her. It made her want to take the woman in her arms. It made her want to look away. She shifted her eyes to the fourth person in the room, a skinny man slouched on the floor at everybody’s feet.
Propped against the vibrating clothes dryer, hands clasped around an empty plastic bottle in his lap, the man’s head lay cocked toward his shoulder like a robin considering an earthworm. His long and untrimmed beard did nothing to conceal the beatific smile on his face. Hope smelled the sickly death-room scents of rubbing alcohol and urine and felt the breath rush from her lungs at the sight of him, felt light flee from her eyes almost as it had from his. She reached out to support herself against the doorjamb, willing herself to stand, to remain upright until the dizziness had passed. After a moment, when she could see again, she refocused on the skinny man.
Her second look didn’t alter the facts. He was indeed who he had seemed to be, yet he was not as she remembered. He was different in his death.
Turning away, the mayor of Dublin Township fled before the awful fact of him. She stumbled into the small crowd outside the room, gaining momentum, shoving rudely in her haste to escape. Once free of them she ran without restraint, down the hall, through the lobby and out the glass door to the street. She glanced wildly left and right, found her car, and continued her headlong flight in that direction.
CHAPTER FOUR
ABOUT TWENTY OTHERS SLEPT in the bunk room near as Riley Keep could tell, some on air mattresses on the floor. It was an awful lot of fellas for such a small room, an awful lot for such a small town, especially at that time of year, but the room still felt empty without Brice.
With all the competition on the streets Riley had not been able to bum so much as a dime all day. It was worse than anyplace he’d ever been, much worse than the big cities like Boston and New York. All the best corners and intersections were taken by dawn, some people sleeping out there in spite of the cold for fear they’d lose their spot. He had tried the park, the landing, the bus stop—pretty much everywhere—but Dublin was a small town, and it didn’t take many men and women just like him to fill it, with everybody hungry for a miracle or, failing that, a handout.
It meant going to bed cold sober, which meant sleeping poorly, especially with a few of the others snoring like steam engines. It wasn’t the noise; noise was nothing when you generally slept under bridges. It was the way the snores reminded him of Brice. Brice had always snored loudly enough to wake the dead, and Riley had gotten used to his particular sleeping sounds. He found their absence deafening.
Riley told himself to change the subject. Brice would want him to get some sleep, get up rested and get out there and get a drink. Riley started counting to one hundred. It was a way he had to stop his mind from racing. Every time he got to a hundred he started over back at one, and after a while he started having trouble keeping count, and just as he began to drift away a fella somewhere in the bunk room started mumbling and then talking louder, and then he screamed to high heaven and kept on screaming until that old woman came to talk some sense to him.
Riley listened in the darkness as the woman told the fella to hang on, it was just the DTs and he would be okay. Riley figured it for a falsehood. He himself had seen some strange things sliding down the walls in times past. If he went much longer without a drink he’d be seeing them again. Ugly, terrifying things. The fella’s screams made perfect sense to Riley.
Well. At least Brice was past it now. A week gone almost, and Riley figured if the God he used to serve had any mercy whatsoever, Brice was up there with him now, happy as a bug in mud. Riley tried to take some comfort in it. He figured underneath it all he was still a Christian. He figured he himself would be with Brice again one day. He tried to focus on that, to make it mean something, but what with the poor fella in the grip of alcohol withdrawal right beside him, and so many others sleeping outside in the cold to save a spot where they could beg for cash to buy a drink, somehow Riley couldn’t conjure up much solace from the thought of heaven.
Lacing his fingers behind his head he stared dry-eyed at the bottom of the bunk above. He had decided long ago there was no value in the power of positive thinking. A lifetime of defeat could not be overcome by intangibles. Real change would take something outside him, something to come along and take control, just as death had taken Brice. Riley had no hope for that at all.
He knew where his hope lay.
Riley rose and pulled on trousers and a shirt and the old wool jacket that little woman found for him, and although it was still dark outside he left the shelter in pursuit of what would save him.
His skinny legs flexed on their own occasionally when it had been this long between drinks. He moved them to walk and they did what he wanted, but also they quivered now and then and he had to stop until they settled down. Even in the cold he sweated. His stomach felt caved in on itself, though the old woman had fed them all hot beef stew just ten hours ago. He was no longer thinking whiskey, or even beer or wine; he was thinking outside the box. In Washington, D.C., one time he and Brice had poured Sterno down their throats to stop the terrifying things from sliding down the walls. Mouthwash would do. Anything was better than those ugly, terrifying things. Even a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Even if it killed you. After they had carried Brice away someone said he did it on purpose. They said it because of the rubbing alcohol, but Riley knew better than that. You did what had to be done, was all.
The horizon had begun to glow out on the Atlantic when he reached the little parking lot beside the wharf, what Mainers called the town landing. It was lit and busy, the lobstermen with foggy breath in coats and gloves and rubber boots, rowing out to their boats, unloading traps and whatnot from their pickup trucks or standing around drinking steaming cups of coffee and talking together. A couple of them saw him coming. He stepped into a pool of yellow from a streetlight and they looked away. They could see what he was, even with a shower and clean clothes. Some things don’t wash off.
Riley stood and watched the sun come up, dreaming ghostly waking dreams of wooden bars with padded stools and signs with Clydesdales hitched to huge beer wagons and rows of beautiful bottles on glass shelves and a cunnin’ girl to pour. Dreaming of heaven, in other words, but willing to settle for a little mouthwash if need be. He watched the sun rise, and for some reason he got mad. Not because of Brice, exactly. It was more that he hadn’t had a drink in maybe two whole days. A deadly serious situation. And there was God, pulling the sun out of his pocket like it was nothing. It made him mad to think how simple it would be for God to give him what he wanted, and how little he wanted compared to most people. The lobstermen, for example, who were constantly buying new pickup trucks and houses and clothing for their wives and children, and steaks and television sets and bowling balls and popcorn at the movies. And him, what did he ask? Nothing but a drink. It made him mad to think how stingy God could be, until he realized he had not asked for what he needed. Riley Keep had lost most memories, but he was pretty sure he had never asked the Lord for alcohol.
The clouds out on the ocean glowed golden now, with jewel-like pinks and royal purples, and rays of sunlight like a crown. Riley didn’t care. He turned and walked back up the hill, hoping for a garbage bin behind a restaurant. Sometimes they threw out wine bottles with a little something left. Why not be optimistic? If you thought in terms of mouthwash, that was what you got. Why not think in terms of a nice Merlot or a Rioja or something along those lines? He was desperate enough to hope there was a power in positive thinking after all.
Passing a parked truck he saw a bumper sticker in the gathering light that said Jesus Loves You. He thought about that, and about Brice’s last few moments on the floor in a homeless shelter laundry. He thought about what you did when you loved someone. You tried to make them happy, right? You tried to give them what they wanted, like those lobstermen buying popcorn for their kids. Riley put that together with the power of positive thinking, and the fact that he had never actually asked God for a drink, and thought, why not? What’s he going to do, kill me? So he paused there by the bumper sticker and spoke out loud. “All right. In that case, give me something good to drink.”
Nothing happened, of course.
Riley set out again, still thinking garbage bins, across the street and into a park area where the frost beneath his feet lay brittle on the grass. No snow yet, but he could sense it in the air, coming to make a lie out of that sunrise.
He blew into cupped hands as he walked. Why was he here? He should be in Miami. He would be in Miami except for Brice. As the urge rose ruthlessly within him, Riley had to fight to cling to Brice, the reason he had come, the thing that made this sacrifice worthwhile. He had tried to save his friend. That should make some difference.
He had failed, but he had tried. If ever there had been an ounce of truth in what they taught him about God, that should make some difference.
Crossing the park, looking down as usual, searching for things people dropped—a dollar would buy a swallow—not looking ahead, Riley nearly walked into a tree. An ancient oak, he thought; it was hard to tell with the leaves down. He was a linguist and a missionary and an English teacher after all, not a botanist. He saw only giant roots writhing in the sod, smooth on top where people had stepped on them, and nestled among the gnarled roots a brown paper bag of familiar size and shape. Riley bent to pick it up and his legs gave a quiver and he stumbled, hitting his forehead on the tree trunk but ignoring that, reaching for the bag, lying beside it in the roots and lifting it, feeling the heft of it, the gravitational wallow of the liquid as it sloshed back and forth, and reminding himself it could be anything, yet swelling up to the edges of himself with hope.
Eagerly, he pulled the bottle from the sack. It was full, the seal unbroken, its contents golden like the sunrise but much more beautiful, a complete quart of the finest single-malt Scotch whiskey. He held it a few inches from his face, squinting without his long-lost eyeglasses, recognizing the label from when he was a college professor with a wife and daughter, and his friend Brice was a plumber and they could both afford such things, and he pulled away the cap (it had a cork!) and thrust the bottle to his lips and took the Scotch into himself.
He sighed and closed his useless eyes. After the first swallow always came the best moment, when he felt the warmth go down and knew relief was on its way, not yet there, but coming, the anticipation better than reality would be. Some preferred the moment when the rosy feeling rose and anything was possible and you were a giant and all was well and would be well forever. But while that was indeed a fine thing, Riley Keep had always thought it second to the first anticipation because, of course, the promise in your mind surpassed the truth inside your body, and the solace of a bottle nearly full was lost to those who rushed headlong toward emptiness to come.
The Cure Page 3