The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  “Hang on a minute,” said the chief.

  The man left the room. The door clicked shut behind him. Riley stood awkwardly beside the table, which did not look as if it would support his weight. He wondered if they had some kind of hidden camera in the little room. There was no two-way mirror, no window, but just four bare walls, a recessed light in the ceiling, and the table. Riley wondered why the police chief had singled him out. A few had escaped, but they must have arrested twenty or thirty others at the drug store. Out of so many, why come for him first? And why the chief, in person? Why not let some detective or policeman conduct the interrogations? Riley waited. He began to wonder if this was supposed to make him nervous, the writing and the waiting. But why would they want to make him nervous? Riley’s legs grew tired so he sat back on the floor. Almost immediately the door opened and the chief entered again. This time the tall man held a brown paper bag.

  “Sorry to be gone so long,” he said. “Got a lot to deal with, what with all you fellas here.”

  Riley looked up at him, tucking his long hair back behind an ear. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “What ya want a lawyer for?”

  “It seems like there’s something going on.”

  “Naw. Just clearin’ up the paperwork. Ya know how it is.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Fact, I got your stuff right here. Stuff they took out of your pockets when we processed ya.” He put the paper bag on the table.

  “So I can go?”

  “In a minute. First tell me about this.” He opened the bag and stuck a hand inside, feeling around as if in search of something. “Let’s see . . . where is that pretty little thing?” He pulled out a plastic bag, small and transparent, and held it up. When Riley squinted, the man came closer to hold the bag right before Riley’s eyes. Riley stared at a string of tiny dark brown beads and small beige tubes and a little cross, primitively carved but elevated above the commonplace by a delicate golden inlay. In that barren room, with the light so strong and the policeman playing games the way he was, after a sleepless night on a metal chair and nearly getting killed at Henry’s Drug Store, Riley did not recognize the cross at first, but the chief was patient and continued dangling the bag ten inches from his nose until eventually Riley remembered.

  Without thinking he asked, “Where did you get that?”

  “So ya recognize it?”

  Riley thought of sitting under a tin roof as the ceaseless rain beat a loud staccato rhythm overhead. He saw a block of wood and a penknife in his hands, and remembered the peacefulness of that Sabbath day, whittling bit by bit, all alone below the open shed as the rain came down but did not touch him, the wall of jungle at the far side of the airstrip nearly lost beyond the blue-gray downpour. He remembered being filled with love as he fashioned the humble birthday gift for her, many years ago. He remembered cutting a pair of parallel grooves into the face of the small cross and carefully pressing the gold foil into the grooves with the blunt back of the knife, the foil he had saved from a box of chocolates purchased in a Brazilian village. He remembered the taste of chocolate, and now, standing in the jail, Riley remembered the much more recent taste of science on his fingertip and the way the two tasted the same. He felt disoriented, looking at the cross in a hard and empty room in Dublin, Maine, with all the lost time rushing back into the present. He asked again, “Where did you get that?”

  “Do ya recognize it or not?”

  Riley Keep said nothing. The chief of police waited, staring at him. Riley did not care. He was not there. He was in the jungles of Brazil. Finally the chief said, “Look, we both know ya had it in your pocket, and we both know it’s Willa’s. I just saw it on her a few days ago. She got it hung up on somethin’ in the kitchen at her shelter and I gave her a hand. I touched this thing myself.”

  Riley’s eyes were on the floor. The old woman at the shelter? She had worn the cross, here, in Dublin? How was that possible?

  There could only be one explanation.

  The chief said, “Why don’t ya just tell me how ya took it from her?”

  Riley continued to look down, saying nothing. It should not cause him pain to know she gave his gift away. He should not care. His newly resurrected imagination understood her reasons—the multileveled symbolism—and his guilty conscience whispered she had every right.

  “Where’s Willa, Stanley?”

  The question settled down into him slowly as his eyes searched the tiny pebbles of the terrazzo floor between his feet, clean and white and slightly out of focus. If this man asked where the old lady was, it meant she was missing. If this man claimed the necklace had been hers and claimed they found the necklace in his pocket, it meant he thought Riley caused her disappearance. Riley was glad he had been shocked to see the necklace, glad his shock had left him speechless. He decided to say nothing more to anyone.

  The chief asked him many questions, eventually turning angry at Riley’s silence, then left him alone in the little room. Riley had no way of knowing how much time went by after that. He sat against the wall at first, then lay down on his side and went to sleep. He had slept in harder places.

  He awoke when someone tapped the bottom of his shoe. Opening his eyes he saw a uniformed policeman standing over him. “Get up,” said the policeman. “You’re free to go.”

  The policeman led him down the hallway, past others still restrained in chairs on either side. The policeman stood him by a tall counter in the front room of the station and poured the contents of a paper sack before him and watched dull-eyed as Riley replaced the meager contents of his pockets: a plastic-wrapped peppermint, a nail clipper, and a thin roll of paper money, the pay he had received so far from Henry. Also, the folded note he had stolen from the church collection envelope. For some reason they had not asked him about that. Maybe they thought the notations on it were pure gibberish. Maybe they were right. The only thing they did not return was the necklace with the cross. Of course he did not ask for it. He would not have asked for it even if there had been no danger in the request. He had long since given it away, and did not want it back.

  On the other side of the counter stood Henry in his usual plaid flannel shirt and down-filled vest. With him was a very pale, gray, tall and skinny man in a putty-colored trench coat and a plain gray suit, who reminded Riley of someone he could not quite recall.

  Henry said, “Hi ya, Stanley. Doin’ all right?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “Glad to hear it. You wanna ride?”

  “You’re the one who got me out?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “Aren’t you mad at me?”

  “Way I heard it, this wasn’t your fault. Right?”

  “No, it wasn’t my fault.”

  “So, you wanna ride?”

  Throughout this exchange the tall and skinny man had not looked at Riley. Now he led the way outside the station, through a glass door and into the frigid late November air. Riley followed through the cold along a walkway around the side of the tall brick building. A hillside dressed in deep green spruce rose beyond the level parking lot in back. Riley raised his eyes to see a pair of sea gulls hovering in the onshore winter wind. He wished he had a coat. He had not been wearing one when they dragged him from the shelter. The pale man got behind the wheel of a white Mercedes Benz. Henry got in the front passenger seat. Riley got into the back. A man and woman ran up to the side of the car. The woman tapped on Riley’s window. She was wicked good-looking. He touched a button and the glass slid down a few inches.

  “Stanley Livingston?” asked the woman breathlessly.

  Riley did not answer. The man behind her had a camera on his shoulder with its lens pointed straight at him. Riley looked into the lens and blinked.

  The woman asked, “Are you the man who has a cure for alcoholism?”

  “I don’t have it anymore,” said Riley. “I gave it all away.”

  “So it’s true? You did have a cure?”

  “Uh, Stanley?” Henry looked ba
ck over his shoulder. “Pretty cold out there. Maybe you should roll up the window.”

  Riley did as he was told. The woman outside kept on speaking to him. She raised her voice. She seemed almost angry.

  “Where to, Pastor?” asked the pale man in the putty overcoat.

  “The shelter, I guess. Right, Stanley?”

  The very thought made Riley’s stomach roil, but he said, “Okay.”

  “Uh, I forgot to make the introductions. Stanley, this here’s Bill Hightower. He’s a volunteer at our church. A lawyer too. Thought it might be good to have him along. Bill, this is Stanley.”

  “Hello,” said the gray man at the wheel.

  The even hum of the car’s excellent heater and its faultless suspension blocked all external noise as they glided through the town. Riley saw the homeless everywhere: loitering in recessed doorways, behind O’Malley’s convenience store, near gas pumps, and curbside at every stoplight. It was as if all the summer visitors had returned without their cars or kids or money. Riley watched them through the fifty-thousand-dollar window as though he were watching television. Most of them ignored the passing Mercedes the way an actor might ignore the camera, but a few refused to maintain distance, staring back at Riley. Some of their stares were empty; some were greedy. Gazing through the tinted glass, Riley was one of them and he was not. He had been cured, and he had not. He had somehow become someone in between.

  How long had he been back in Dublin? A week? Two? In that short time it seemed to Riley Keep the homeless must have doubled in the streets. It might have been a trick of his unpracticed imagination, but he believed Henry saw the increase too. There was a sadness in the preacher’s profile as he stared out his own window. Or maybe the man was only thinking of the damage done to his store. With mournful eyes on the indigent people out beyond the Mercedes Benz, Henry said, “What they’re sayin’ ‘bout you, healing alcoholics . . . anything to that, Stanley?”

  Riley felt this man deserved the truth. But as he opened his mouth he remembered his sobriety had been stolen from this man’s church, and with that memory came a sudden recognition of the pale one driving, the usher who had seen Riley swill Communion wine as if it were mere alcohol, and with righteous indignation thrown him out onto the street.

  “No,” said Riley. “I can’t heal anybody.”

  They turned a corner and glided to a stop across the street from the shelter. Several strands of yellow tape barred the front door. A police patrol car sat at the curb and a man in uniform loitered on the nearby sidewalk.

  “Huh,” said Henry. “Look at that. Hang on a minute, fellas. I’ll go see what’s goin’ on.”

  Riley watched as the preacher/pharmacist crossed the street and approached the policeman. They shook hands. Henry said something. The policeman said something back. The man behind the wheel of the Mercedes Benz said nothing. Riley said nothing. A pair of ragged men came wandering along the sidewalk. As they approached the Mercedes, one leaned down next to the driver’s closed window.

  “Hey, mister,” called the homeless man, tapping on the glass. “Can you spare some change?”

  The pale man at the wheel looked away and Riley heard his answer in the loud click of all four car doors locking at once. Shivering, the homeless man bent to peer in the back window at Riley.

  “’Scuse me, sir, can you . . . Hey, ain’t you that guy?”

  In unconscious imitation of the church usher, Riley turned away, stroking his long beard as he watched Henry and the policeman at the shelter across the street. Outside, he heard the man call to his companion, “Ain’t this that guy?” Riley remembered how it was to be lifted from the ground and carried off against his will. His palms began to sweat in the car’s dry heat. He refused to acknowledge their existence as the other homeless man said, “Yeah, that’s him!” and they both began tapping on the widow. “Hey, mister! We need help! We come all the way from Mobile to get cured! Come on, mister! Won’t you help us out?”

  Across the street Henry and the cop shook hands again, and the preacher came back toward the car. The homeless men began to beat their palms on the glass. Riley flinched at every blow, thinking of his utter helplessness with all those hands on him, some lifting him up, some pressing him down to murder. Riley wished he was back in the harsh safety of the jail.

  The policeman across the street finally noticed the unruly men and strode toward the white Mercedes, a few steps behind Henry. At the sight of his approach the men cursed Riley and hurried away. Hightower unlocked his door, and the preacher slipped into the passenger seat, bringing a gust of icy air along with him. He said, “Man, that’s bad.”

  “What?” asked Bill Hightower.

  “Willa’s gone.”

  “Good riddance,” said the gray man at the wheel. “Now maybe we can do something about all these bums.”

  “No, seriously, it’s bad.” Nodding toward the policeman, Henry said, “Sammy said there’s a lot of blood and her stuff is still up in her room.” Riley sat in silence on the leather seat, thinking about the woman trying to stop them, standing up for him. Then Henry said, “You mind givin’ me and Stanley a lift to my place?”

  “How come?” asked Hightower.

  “Well, it’s a ways to walk.”

  “I mean how come you want to take him there?”

  “The shelter’s closed. He’s gotta have someplace warm to sleep.”

  “We don’t know him. We don’t know a thing about him, except he doesn’t mind spoiling Communion.”

  Watching out the rear window Riley saw the two homeless men accost three others half a block away. The five of them turned as one to stare at the Mercedes. Wiping sweating palms on his threadbare trousers, Riley would have given anything to avoid walking through the streets of Dublin in broad daylight.

  “Come on, Bill,” said the pastor. “You gonna give us a ride or not?”

  To Riley’s great relief, the man started the nearly silent engine of the car.

  Five minutes later they rolled to a stop in front of a small Cape Cod style house on the hill above downtown. Henry got out. Riley did not. He did not even notice they had stopped. He lingered in the back seat, lost in contemplation of debauched Communions and stolen tithes. He flinched when Henry tapped on the glass beside him. He looked out at the man, certain for an instant that the ghosts had come for him again. But he need not have worried. Before Riley could respond the pale man at the wheel stepped on the gas and drove away, with Riley in the back.

  Riley turned to look through the rear window at Henry, who stood staring after them, his mouth open in surprise. Watching Henry standing there, Riley said, “What are you doing?”

  “Giving you a ride,” replied Bill Hightower.

  Riley tried to think of ways to make him stop. Perhaps an apology. “I’m sorry about Communion,” he said.

  “You should be.”

  The man followed the winding lane below the ridge of the hill overlooking Dublin and the harbor below, past Bowditch College and up a short half block and onto Route 1, turning right, down east. Three miles along the highway Hightower turned left onto a narrow blacktop road, and the big car ascended through dense woods, gliding effortlessly below the shadowed canopies of pine and spruce and hemlock, past a hulking lichen-covered granite outcropping and into a grove of stark-white naked birches. Now and then they passed the brown and wilted remnants of a fern dell. A little stream appeared along the right and came and went beyond the trees as the car rolled farther inland. Ice had begun to form, threatening and end to the trickle’s merry downhill dance.

  At a gentle curve they passed a homestead, the white clapboard house and barn connected by a long room with a side porch, smoke curling skyward from its brown brick chimney, and two silos in the back with metal hoops around their middles like a pair of giant barrels. As the Mercedes rolled along beside the fallow fields Riley suddenly remembered the name of the road, Green’s End, named for the family that had lived there since the eighteenth century. He began to l
ook ahead with interest. Soon they would come to a turnout where he and his sweetheart had sometimes sought privacy during their high-school courtship. He smiled to think of foggy windows and passionate kisses and long, earnest conversations about everything beneath the sun.

  The Mercedes rolled right past the turnout, with Riley looking back now at the spot that held such happy memories, then it was lost behind them as the car went on for what must have been another twenty miles, until finally the gray and tall and skinny man slowed and stopped at an intersection with another road, which was somewhat wider than Green’s End and had gravel shoulders.

  “Do you have any money?” asked the man. He did not bother looking back at Riley.

  “A little.”

  Hightower shifted in his seat, reaching for his hip pocket. He removed his wallet and counted out five twenty-dollar bills. He turned to pass them back to Riley. “Here’s a hundred. You’re a good thirty miles from Dublin, but about ten miles that way, there’s Liberty. They have a bus stop at the Shamrock station. That’s enough money to get you clear to Florida. Now you listen to me. I know some guys who would have taken care of you a different way for half that much. I didn’t have to be this nice, understand? Get out of my car.”

  Riley opened the door and stepped into the shadow of the woods. It was wicked cold without his coat. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers and heard the lonely rushing sound of wind high in the pines. The Mercedes pulled up onto the crossroad, made a U-turn and came back to pause near Riley, who stood just off the asphalt on a soft bed of rust-colored needles. The pale gray man spoke through his open window, saying, “Don’t come back,” and then he sped away.

  The mocking caws of crows pierced Riley’s thoughts as he watched the taillights disappear around the first bend in the shadowed wood. He turned to stare up the other road. Ten miles to Liberty. Three hours’ walk, maybe two and a half if he hustled. He could be there before dark, buy a little food and a ticket south, stay warm and dry on the bus until he felt like getting off. He thought about the reason he had come home to Maine. He was sober now. Brice was beyond hope. What more could he want?