The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  In a little while the church doors opened, and he watched as fuzzy people started coming down the steps. It was too far away, and he was far too richly blessed with whiskey to see the congregation clearly. Might two of them be his wife and child? Might they see him there, in his native element? Had they witnessed his ignoble ejection?

  It did not matter.

  Riley only knew he had returned to fail them at the first temptation, as always. Beneath the well-known rafters of that church the truth had overwhelmed him, unavoidable. They said some people hit a bottom and then they turned and found themselves, but clearly he was bottomless.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the pleasant sounds of Christian greetings to disperse. Eventually the silence of a Sunday afternoon in Dublin settled in. Three filthy strangers approached him, hungry eyes on his bottle. Snarling, he waved them away. An hour or two later some pathetic woman came and meekly asked him for a drink. In reply he curled himself around his golden blessing, shielding it as he took another sip, husbanding the Scotch, tragically aware that it would soon be empty of its beauty.

  One did not find such whiskey every day. It was the finest he had known in three long years out on the street. He would not share it with the strangers crowding round him in the park, but oh, how Riley wished to share it! The thought of three more years without Brice and without another bottle like the one God had given him that day began to weigh as heavily upon him as the weight of all the years that he had stolen from his precious wife and child.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. “The wheel is come full circle.” Yet it was not Kent or even Lear who spoke that line. No, it was the liar, Edmund. There was no circle. History was the story of a headlong rush in one direction, straight down to the grave.

  Riley rose and stumbled farther up the hill, cradling his answered prayer with both arms like it was the baby Jesus, looking for a place to sleep, perhaps forever. Downtown was nearly empty, most of the shops closed for Sunday or the season. He turned into a narrow dead-end alley and nearly fell. He leaned against a garbage bin to take another drink. His was a simple plan. Half a quart of good Scotch whiskey all at once would grant him sweet oblivion. He would drink as quickly as he could, and sleep, and let the cold come have its way, and greet the morning’s sunrise stiff from freezing or from rigor mortis; it did not matter which.

  Riley tipped the bottle up and, swallowing, lost his balance and fell down to the bricks. Miraculously, the bottle did not break and not a drop was spilled. The answered prayer made sense to him at last. This was no gift for his trivial enjoyment; it was a final act of mercy, a divine coup de grâce. Retrieving the bottle, he crawled across the alley to the wall behind the garbage bin, well out of sight of the street and anyone who might come to try to save him before the cold had settled in.

  There against that wall he sat up like a man. He stripped off his coat. On further reflection he removed his shirt and undershirt as well, determined as he was to hasten the effect. With the bare flesh of his back pressed against the alley wall, he thought of Dylan Thomas, Kerouac, Fitzgerald—all great minds gone from alcohol. He was in good company here in this hallowed hall, prostrate before this altar, this back alley, this garbage bin. Again he brought the divine blessing to his lips.

  As the bottle tilted, Riley saw an envelope beside him on the bricks. He paused. He picked it up. On it was the name of the church, preprinted. Apparently it had fallen from his pocket when he pulled off his coat. Apparently he had stolen something from the basket after all. He often did such things without remembering.

  Two great gifts in one day seemed impossible, so of course the envelope must contain a check, which would be useless to him. But he noticed it was bulky, not light and slender as one would expect. Carefully, he set the Scotch between his legs and peeled away the flap. Inside was not a check, nor cash, but two folded scraps of paper and a little plastic bag containing pure white powder, enough to fill a bottle cap or two.

  Could it be cocaine? Heroin? Amphetamines? Riley had never used such things, but his life the last few years had often brought him into contact with drug addicts. Could it be the twisted offering of some such person?

  What kind of man put drugs into a church collection envelope? Forgetting how it came to be in his possession, Riley swelled with indignation. This outrage made him want to preach! Then he thought of some befuddled addict taking biblical admonishments literally, tithing ten percent of all the drugs he had, only to have a befuddled drunkard come and steal his profane tithe from the house of God. Rescued from the brink of hypocrisy by that thought, Riley laughed aloud. Who but God could manage such a thing? Who but God could make it work on so many levels? Because of course one couldn’t steal from God, not really, so this was obviously yet another gift from the divine. How merciful of God to grant him laughter in the end.

  To prolong the joke, Riley removed the note. Unfolding it he raised the first page close, three inches from his eyes so he could read:

  May the Lord forgive me, I should have done this long ago. Whoever opens this, please give it to the pastor. He’ll know what to do. Tell him it will cure alcoholics, and I want everyone to have it. Tell him if they ever drink again, the urge will return stronger than ever. I used to think there was a way to fix that too, but now I know there isn’t. Anyway, this will cure them so long as they never drink another drop.

  Riley read it one more time. Then lifted the second page up to his bloodshot eyes. It seemed to be a list of chemical equations and instructions couched in symbols Riley did not comprehend.

  He let the hand that held the note and bag fall onto his lap. Some of the powder spilled out on his trousers. Ignoring it, propped up against the freezing alley wall much as they had found his old friend Brice against the dryer, Riley stared at nothing.

  This will cure them.

  He thought of all his prayers for strength to stand against the urge. He thought of all the silence in response, and he remembered God had never cared about his tears. Why should he think God might care about his laughter? Losing Brice and visiting the place where he had married and seen his daughter christened had made Riley lose focus. The powder was no gift from heaven. Neither was the Scotch, of course. Those things were mere coincidence, random substances encountered in his headlong rush to death. He had not dared admit the truth in quite a while, but in the hallowed hall of that back alley, beside the altar of the garbage bin, the truth must be confessed.

  Riley had no faith whatsoever in an unseen god of miracles.

  Yet the note said he held a cure, and science was a different matter. Science was the sovereign of cause and effect, a provable kind of god that could not be denied. The teacher in him thought, consider what we know . . . a village hacked to pieces, devastation and despair, despair and drink, drink and drunk, drunk and deadbeat, deadbeat and divorce, divorce and devastation and despair and drink and cause and effect and cause and effect and . . . could this powder be a new kind of cause, come to break the pattern?

  With that Riley realized there was just a chance that he and Brice had both been preaching lies. What if the history of life was neither circular nor straight? What if it was neither ceaseless cycle nor headlong rush down to a predetermined end? What if he could take control, change his course, turn away, just by making this one choice? Could redemption rest in his own hands?

  In his last stand of consciousness Riley cast his hopes upon a different kind of god, licking a filthy finger and dabbing it in the powder to collect just a bit on the surface of his skin. He touched it to his tongue and tasted something sweet, impossibly sweet, yet not in the cloying way of saccharine. It reminded Riley of a little shop somewhere down in Brazil, and his wife beside him buying chocolates. How could he have forgotten that day; how happy they had been, how warm it was back then? Riley smiled a little at that memory as the dimming sun declined beyond the western hills of Maine and the cold began to stalk him with its claws extended, and then he shivered and he settled in to wait for one end or the
other, willing to be cured by his own choice but unwilling to survive one moment longer otherwise.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CONGREGATION PRESSED AND FLOWED around the columns of the portico high above the broad church stairs. In the midst of all the movement, Dublin’s mayor paused to look down at her town. She saw the landing at the bottom of the hill to the right, the old gray wharf piled high with traps, the riotous display of multicolored floats on the shingled harbormaster’s shed. She noticed a new For Sale sign in the window of the McPherson building, and thought about Simmons Marine Chandlery going out of business after nearly eighty years in that location.

  She wondered who was next.

  Then she shook her head, denying entry to that train of thought, and she whispered words that had become a kind of mantra to her in the past few awful years, “‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”

  Turning away from the empty building by the landing, Hope stood in that high place and stared at the littered lawn in the park across the street. She made a mental note to mention it to the township’s head of maintenance. She saw six or seven dirty strangers sitting by the fountain and a man with shaggy hair and a long beard lying at the base of the old town-meeting oak, sprawled out right there in plain sight, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. The sight made her think again of Brice, dead on the shelter floor, and the likelihood that Riley Keep was back in town.

  The mayor sighed and searched for someplace pleasant to rest her eyes. It wasn’t hard to find. In spite of the homeless people’s litter, downtown Dublin was still very pretty, or “quaint” as the tourists liked to call it. She admired the antique black and gilded signage above Jefferson’s Art Gallery across the way, the golden leaves clinging to the mature birches lining both sides of the street, the lovely verdigris patina on the copper dome of town hall at the top of the hill, and the township’s cheerful Thanksgiving banners hanging from cast-iron antique streetlights up and down Main Street. Then, as she had so many times before, Hope considered all the blank windows above the foursquare red brick businesses and wondered if there was a way to make some use of all those vacant second floors. After all, a good mayor thought in terms of possibilities. The only thing was, these days there were many empty first floors too, with some buildings vacated altogether.

  As Hope’s eyes traveled up the street she spied Dylan on the sidewalk talking to another man. He stood beside her car. She forgot her burden for a moment and wondered if the handsome lobsterman was waiting there for her.

  “Mother? Will you please come on?”

  Summoned from her reverie by the frustration in her daughter’s voice, the mayor looked down at a swarthy, compact girl standing at the bottom of the steps with her arms crossed. Hope had a fleeting impression of her daughter as if seen through a stranger’s eyes: lifeless hair as black as midnight, stainless piercings through her tongue and her right nostril, a dull tattoo along her neck between her left ear and the top of that horrible alpaca sweater. It was like looking down on one of the many homeless people who had begun to fill Dublin’s streets for some mystifying reason, a pierced and tattooed Indian. The mayor forced a smile. “Coming, dear!” she called, with a shrug to Margie Seavey, who stood beside her, and just the tiniest roll of her eyes as if to say, what’s a single working mom to do?

  She began making her way down to where Bree waited so impatiently, but someone back behind her called, “Hope?” She put on her brightest smile and turned to see Bill Hightower coming through the crowd toward her, shoving past the people in between like they were weeds out in a field.

  The colorless man stood head and shoulders above most everyone. He wore a gray suit and gray military haircut. His skin clung tightly to his bones. Even at six feet four inches, Hightower was probably not much heavier than Hope. She had always been intrigued by the little white ridges of cartilage showing underneath the flesh of his nose and ears, looking for all the world as if they might burst through the surface any minute. A lawyer and a banker both, the son and grandson of lawyers and bankers, Bill Hightower held the paper on Hope’s house and most of the others around Dublin. No doubt this explained his position as a councilman. But Hope knew the power of money was not limited to town hall. Hightower also had a lot of influence in the Congregational church.

  “Bill,” she said, extending her hand as he approached her. “How ya doin’?”

  “I’ve been better.” Hightower gave her hand an awkward shake, grasping just her fingertips. “What are you doing about all these bums hanging around?”

  “Bums?”

  “Panhandlers. Whatever.”

  She lowered her hand. “Ah. Well, we’re workin’ on that problem, Steve and me. Went over to see Willa about it just this week.”

  “She won’t do a thing.”

  “I think she does a lot.”

  “You know what I mean. If Willa had her way, we’d be building them houses.”

  “Well, I guess prob’ly. She does have a soft spot for the homeless.” Hope smiled.

  “You need to get them out of town.”

  “It’s a free country, Bill.”

  Hightower pointed a long and bony finger toward the park across the street. “Not when they infest our parks and interfere with business and interrupt our church services.”

  Following his gesture, Hope squinted toward the man on the ground below the meeting oak. His long, unkempt hair draped down, concealing his face like a hood. “Interrupt church services?”

  “You didn’t see me kick that fella out just now?”

  “No. Why’d you do that?”

  “He was chugging the Communion wine like it was shots in a bar!”

  She peered closer at the man across the street. “Well now.”

  “They’ve got to go, Hope.”

  “They have rights, Bill. We can’t just run ‘em out of town for sittin’ in the park.”

  “He chugged the wine! Five or six glasses of it, like it didn’t mean a thing!”

  “Not sure there’s a law against that.”

  “There oughta be!”

  “Ayuh, but I still don’t think we have that kinda law.”

  “What about God’s law?”

  Hope took a step away from Bill Hightower toward her daughter. “God’ll have to handle that himself, Bill. It’s not my area anymore.”

  “You’re saying you won’t do anything?”

  “Not at all. Like I said, we’re tryin’ to work something out with Willa. Find some way to keep ‘em all fed and get ‘em someplace warm to sleep.”

  “You want to feed them and keep them warm? That’ll just encourage them to stay!”

  She spoke slowly and distinctly. “Bill. Again. We can’t make ‘em leave town. And since they’re here, I’m sure you agree we can’t let ‘em starve and freeze.”

  “Who’s going to pay for all this food and shelter?”

  It was an excellent question, but Hope refused to let him see her worries. “We’ll find the money somewhere.”

  Hightower drew himself up to his full height, and Hope thought, oh boy, here it comes. Then, as if thinking better of whatever he was poised to say, the man exhaled slowly and seemed to shrink again. “I’m sorry. Guess I’m still a little upset about what that fella did.”

  Hope nodded. “Sorry you had to kick him out, Bill. That must of been hard.”

  “Ayuh.” The tall man nodded earnestly. “I hated to do it. And I’d like to help these people too, if we could. But look around, Hope. We’re barely hanging on here. We’ve got to get them out of town, not keep them here by making them more comfortable.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.”

  The usher sighed. “I don’t want to go against you. But it seems like you’re leaving me no choice.”

  With that, the tall man turned and stalked off.

  Hope did her best to hide her emotions beneath a politician’s smile as she walked toward her daughter, yet her annoyance proved too strong to
conceal. At the bottom of the stairs she gripped Bree’s upper arm with a bit more forcefully than necessary and, leaning close, whispered, “I told you to stop wearin’ that thing in your nose, young lady.”

  Bree’s broad features revealed no emotion. She shook her arm free, spun on her heel and strode away as fast as her odd bowlegged gait would carry her.

  With all the people watching, Hope could only follow.

  Up ahead, she saw Dylan, still standing by her car. The man watched Bree approach and said hello to her, but the pigheaded girl went straight to the passenger side without a word. As Hope drew near, her daughter got in and slammed the door. Dylan turned and raised his eyebrows. “Somethin’ I said?”

  “Naw,” said Hope. “She’s all spleeny-Jeanie ‘cause I won’t let her run around like a heathen with a bone in her nose.” Dylan chuckled, but she said, “It’s not funny. I can’t get her to do anything.”

  Dylan’s huge brown eyes softened at the worry in her voice. “She’ll be okay.”

  “Did you get a look at her? It’s like she wants to get back to her roots. I wouldn’t be surprised if she came home one of these days with earplugs and a spear.”

  “Ayuh. I’m just glad tattoos weren’t cool when we was her age, or we’d be sportin’ a few ourselves.”

  “I never was that wild.”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” He grinned widely, his straight teeth white against his beard. “I’m rememberin’ a graduation party at O’Leary’s and a wicked little dance up on the balcony and—”

  “Stop your lies, Dylan Delaney! My girl’s just right there in the car.”

  “And she’s gonna be just fine, is all I’m sayin’. You turned out okay.”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re the mayor for crying out loud.”