The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  Willa ran around the counter and beat against the big one’s back, but although she hit him over and over as hard as she could with both her fists, although she shouted “Stop! Stop! Stop!” the big man did not seem to notice, preoccupied as he was with hauling the limp man down the hall. Then someone else laid hands on Willa, gripping her from behind and yanking back. She tried to twist away yet she was far too small and old and weak. The strong hands drove her hard against the wall. She heard the hollow sound of her own skull bouncing from the plaster. She saw the lights dim down for just a moment. Still, she tried to resist. She would stand against the violence this time. She reached out to push against the hands that pinned her to the wall. Someone laughed and ripped her precious necklace off.

  They dragged the poor man to the lobby and pushed him stumbling through the door. He was helpless before their concentrated will. Willa sank to the floor back in the hallway, abandoned now, watching everything as if it were happening elsewhere, knowing that the moment had come at last; she could no longer stay. She found it hard to see. She put her hand up to her eyes. When she removed her hand Willa saw the audacious scarlet of her own blood—not a little as if from a scratch, but a flood as if to fully baptize her in savagery again—and then she slipped away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LIKE ALL MOBS THEY DID NOT VALUE SECRECY. They pushed Riley down the center of the street as if he were the shameful one instead of them, a sinner of some kind to be paraded there in public humiliation. They drove him on before them just as he had seen his charges drive a sacrificial pig through the jungle on a feast day, laughing and making sport and certain of the beneficial outcome for themselves. Who was there to stop them? Because of them, downtown Dublin was deserted at that hour, fully half the businesses completely dead and gone, the others closed much earlier than usual for lack of customers. Because of them, no one would see Riley Keep’s ordeal. Because of them, the only witnesses to this outrage were Riley and the other ghosts.

  He tried to sit immobile on the frigid bricks. He stubbornly refused to go. In the best of all good humors they lifted him into the air and promised him he must. He floated over them, carried along above their heads by many upraised hands, adrift below the stars on a rising cloud of their collective steaming breath. There was hopefulness and lightness in the insult they performed, and they swore they meant no harm, but with Riley’s sobriety had come renewed powers of imagination, and he clearly saw an ugly moment coming when they learned he truly could not heal them.

  The accuracy of such visions was essential to survival. In another place and time he remembered lying on his back like this, staring at a different set of stars, floating far too high upon his narrow notions, believing he had testified and thereby healed The People. No more drunkenness, no more barbarism, all because of his good work.

  This imprecision in his dreams had made a ghost of him. He remembered lying underneath the equatorial array of lights, rejoicing in his value to the Lord. Floating on the breath of drunkards, he marveled at his monumental failure of imagination.

  In front of Henry’s Drug Store they paused and set him down. They looked to him expectantly. He remembered giving his professors that same look in seminary, expecting answers. He remembered that same expectant look from his students at Bowditch, and before that from The People. Their look was a temptation to him. He wished to give the answers they desired. He felt a flicker of ambition, an old familiar lust to be the cause of their advancement. But such desires were quickly crushed beneath the weight of Riley’s history. He shuddered.

  “I told you I can’t do this.”

  Laughing, they crashed right through the glass door.

  “What you need?” growled the big one who had started everything. The others went on laughing up and down the unlit aisles, filling their pockets with Henry’s inventory while the big one leaned in very close, unsmiling. “I come all the way from Houston, man. You gonna do it, or I gonna break your neck.”

  Like a pig before a pit of glowing coals, Riley would try anything to delay the final moment. Looking up he saw the metal bars around Henry’s dispensary. A desperate plan occurred to him. He would deal them death if necessary. “What I need’s in there.”

  “Hold him,” said the giant drunk from Houston.

  Riley stood surrounded by a dozen captors as the big man attacked the bars. Several others joined the man. The security cage had been designed to resist just such an assault, but they were determined. When their combined might did not prevail, the big one said, “We need something like a crowbar,” and they fanned out across the store, looking for the proper tool. A single streetlight cast its yellow glow a few feet through the storefront windows, whereas the sales floor toward the back remained dark. Riley heard the crashing of Henry’s merchandise as they knocked it from the shelves in a vain attempt to search by touch alone for something strong enough to get them to the cure.

  “We got to turn on the lights,” called one of them.

  “Don’t do that. Somebody gonna see us.”

  “At least we could see.”

  “Shut up and keep looking.”

  In the darkness Riley tried to slip away but many hands were quickly on him. “Relax, friend,” said a vague shape at his shoulder. Riley stood still and listened to them wrecking Henry’s store. He tried to think of a way to survive the night without doing harm.

  “Man, we’re not gonna find nothin’.”

  “Shut up! There gotta be something that’ll work!”

  Someone close by Riley in the darkness whispered, “Here, man. Heal me first, okay?” The unseen person pressed an object into Riley’s palm, which he barely noticed even as he slipped it in his pocket, since the unfamiliar work of making plans required his full attention.

  “Hey, how’s this?” called someone else in the darkness. Moments later the big man was at the bars again, this time with the long metal pole Henry used to crank out the storefront awning. The giant slipped it between the bars beside the cage’s lock and stepped back to apply the force of leverage. With his plan now fully formed, Riley waited. The long pole in the big man’s hands didn’t move at first, although he strained against it mightily. Then a pair of smaller men applied themselves beside him and Riley saw the pole begin to dip. The lock gave. The gate moved up with a screeching protest as the mob cheered.

  One of the smaller men who had a hand in prying the gate open was the first into the dispensary. He went straight back to the shelves where he began a frantic search. Riley assumed the man desired amphetamines or sedatives, even though the mob had brought him there to free them of all that.

  The big one called, “Bring that guy,” and Riley felt several hands against his back, pressing him toward the pharmacy counter. The one who had given him the unseen bribe leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Remember, man, I’m first,” as Riley went without resistance. He entered the dispensary. Another man squeezed past to join the first one at the shelves. The giant from Houston followed and in one smooth motion clubbed a looter to the floor. Turning to the other he said, “Cut it out.”

  “What’s your problem, man? They got Quaaludes!”

  “We not here for that.”

  “Come on, man. It’s the mother lode!”

  The big man’s arm shot up like a rocket, catching the second looter below his jaw to drop him where he stood. The plastic bottle in the thief’s hands rolled across the floor to stop at Riley’s feet. The big man said, “Drag them outta here, somebody. This guy need some room to work.” When the two limp forms had been removed, he turned to Riley. “Go ahead.”

  Hoping to attract someone’s attention out on the street, Riley said, “I need light to read the labels.”

  The big man turned and flipped a switch. A fluorescent tube above them flickered on and off and on and off again before illuminating the small work space with its bluish hue. Riley disappeared between two shelving units, pretending to search for necessary ingredients. He removed a large white plastic jug, made
a show of scanning the label, took it to the countertop in front and then went back. He found a smaller plastic container, and another, dragging out his search as long as possible, harvesting the elements of death. He felt as if a great force pressed him down to murder. He felt ghostly underneath its weight. He felt surprised, having dared to hope he had been cured of everything that pressed him down.

  When Riley had assembled ten or twelve ingredients he began to fear the mob would see through his delay, so he sat at Henry’s work counter to begin. Before him was a small tray he had seen Henry use to count out pills, and near it was a box with little measuring spoons individually sealed in plastic. With the big man watching closely over his shoulder, Riley opened one of the medicine containers. He shook several capsules out onto the tray. He removed one of the sanitary measuring spoons from its plastic wrap and made a show of opening the capsules one by one and delicately tapping their contents into the spoon.

  “Hurry up!” said the man from Houston. “We don’t got all night.”

  “It’s gonna take a while,” replied Riley, looking up. “Believe me, we don’t want to get it wrong.”

  “Why? What happen if it wrong?”

  Riley bent back to his work.

  Some of the plastic bottles at his elbow contained powder; some of them held tablets. The powder he simply measured out by the spoonful, being careful to delay even this by opening a new packaged spoon for each new bottle. The tablets he dropped into one of Henry’s antique mortars and ground down with a pestle. He made a show of doing this with grave attention, saying it was essential for the powder to be very fine.

  “This taking too long,” said the big man. “Just wait till you got everything together, then grind it all at once.”

  “That won’t work,” replied Riley. “I have to measure everything after it’s already ground or I won’t get the mixture right.”

  He moved with infinite care; he delayed in every way he could imagine, but in spite of Riley’s inertia the moment came when there was nothing left to add. The giant from Houston drew close. “That it?”

  Riley stared down at the little pile of powder on the tray before him. He had no idea what was in the random mixture of narcotics, but it was bound to kill them. He said nothing.

  Impatiently the big man said, “Come on, man. You finished or not?”

  Thinking that he did not want to do this, thinking they had forced it on him, Riley Keep said, “Yes.”

  The mob outside the dispensary tried to press through the gate, thirty trying to fit where there was not room for three. Throwing his huge palms against the chests of the ones in front, the giant held them back. In a matter-of-fact way, he said, “I’ll break your neck, you come in here.”

  “I paid him to be first!” shouted someone.

  “We got a right to that stuff too!” shouted someone else.

  “You gonna get it,” said the big man calmly. “Just not all at once. Line up by that window yonder. We gonna pass it out like you was here for something regular.”

  While the grumbling crowd did as they were told, the big man grabbed the back of Riley’s chair and rolled him off to the side. Kneeling in Riley’s former place until his face was very near the powder, kneeling right down at desktop level before it, the giant drunkard from Houston stared intently at the little mound of poison and said, “I’ll never wanna drink again?” His tone no longer hinted of violence. In his voice was only hope and reverence, as if Riley had become his god, and the cure his saving grace.

  Riley closed his eyes. It was all too familiar, this salvific role. He said, “Yes.”

  “How much should I take?”

  “One spoonful ought to do it.”

  “Ought to?” Something in his voice warned Riley, but it was too late. Before he could open his eyes the giant had already turned. They faced each other. Riley quickly looked away.

  “Get over here,” said the big man.

  “Why? I did what you want.”

  “Get over here.”

  Sighing with a pretense of impatience, Riley rose and crossed the narrow distance.

  The big man handed him the spoon. “Go ahead.”

  “What?”

  “You first.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not supposed to take it if you’re already cured.”

  “Didn’t hurt you none the first time.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Shut up and take some.”

  “No, really, I—”

  “Shut up!” roared the man, sinking his huge right fist in Riley’s belly, driving his diaphragm up into his lungs. Riley dropped to the floor, gasping wide-mouthed at the air like a fresh-caught cod down on the landing. It took nearly a minute for his lungs to fill again.

  “Better now?” The big man bent over him. “Ready for your medicine?”

  He grasped Riley’s upper arm and jerked him to his feet as if he were a feather. He put the spoon in Riley’s hand and stood him up at the counter where the pile of powder loomed. He wrapped his massive fingers around the back of Riley’s neck, pressing him down over the powder. He spoke the way a man might talk about a cloudy day.

  “Take it or I’ll break your neck.”

  Riley looked down at the poison he had made. He had not wanted to do it; that was the thing; they had made him do it. And as his death drew near he thought about the chain of cause and effect that had brought him to this moment. A village hacked to pieces, devastation and despair, despair and drink, drink and drunk, drunk and deadbeat, deadbeat and divorce, divorce and now a huge hand pressing him into the deadly trap he himself had set. Riley recognized the perfect symmetry of his punishment, the natural result of lives that he had wasted starting with his own, of wife and child abandoned, stained-glass radiance forgotten, golden sunrise diadems ignored. He closed his eyes and saw the last sunrise he could remember, the one he had scorned on the morning of the day he stole the cure from God’s own house, the pink and purple of it, the red and blue bursting from beyond the horizon, the colors in Riley Keep’s mind flashing on the insides of his squeezed-shut eyelids, red and blue, red and blue until the giant’s hand relaxed on his neck to let him rise and see four squad cars pulled nose-in at the curb outside the shattered storefront glass of Henry’s Drug Store, their red and blue lights whirling round and round to shine on six policemen pointing weapons at the mob of ghosts who merely wanted to be cured.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DUBLIN TOWNSHIP’S SIX JAIL CELLS were too small to hold all the people arrested in Henry’s Drug Store. Riley greeted the morning in a hallway, along with more than a dozen other overflow prisoners, all of them uncomfortable on folding chairs lined up against the walls. His left hand rested in his lap, stained by the ink they had used to take his fingerprints. His right hand hung down at his side where his wrist had been bound to the chair leg by a narrow plastic strap. Throughout the night he had tried to sleep without success, nodding off for maybe fifteen minutes at a time before being awakened by the old-fashioned ringing of a telephone or the slap of shoe soles on terrazzo as policemen passed him by. Riley Keep was not concerned. Incarceration held no stigma for a man in his position, and having gathered some experience while in other jails for vagrancy, he knew it was no worse than the streets.

  A policeman with a clipboard called out, “Stanley Livingston.”

  Riley Keep said, “Here.”

  The policeman used a pair of scissors to cut the plastic strap around his wrist and walked him to a small room down the hall, where Riley stood next to a metal table as the door behind him closed with a dull click of the lock. He and the table were the only objects in the room. Riley paced the room, stroking his bushy beard in thought. After five minutes of standing, Riley sat on the floor and leaned his back against the wall, stretching his legs straight out in front of him. Almost immediately the lock clicked again, the door swung open, and a tall man entered. He wore a starched khaki shirt and loose d
ungarees and had broad shoulders and a flat stomach in spite of his age, which Riley guessed to be around sixty. He looked down on Riley and said, “Sorry there’s no chairs.”

  Riley shrugged.

  “We had to use them all outside.”

  “Okay.”

  The man glanced at a clipboard in his hand. “Stanley Livingston, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You mind standin’ up?”

  Riley rolled to his side to get a foot underneath himself and rose, using the wall for support, feeling stiff and sore after his night on the folding chair.

  “Okay, Stanley, I’m Chief Steven Novak. Tell me what happened last night.”

  Riley told him everything. There was no need to lie; anything he had done wrong was forced on him. The man listened carefully until Riley finished, then said, “So that pile of drugs all mixed together on the counter, you did that?”

  “They made me.”

  “’Cause they think ya know a cure for alcoholism.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  Riley’s instincts warned him to be careful. What had happened in the alley would sound like it was crazy, or a lie. He had no proof except an empty plastic bag and a note that he himself could have written. He said, “I just came in the shelter for supper and the next thing I know they’re hauling me off to the drug store, like I said. I told them I couldn’t heal them. You can ask that lady who runs the place; she heard me.”

  “Uh-huh.” The chief pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote something on the clipboard’s paperwork. He took his time. Riley began to worry as he listened to the slow, deliberate scratching of the pen. This was not like an arrest for vagrancy; it was more personal, more specific to him. They might try harder to learn his identity, and he did not wish to be known.