The Cure
Page 18
Hope understood why the car bothered people. No one gave a gift like that for nothing; someone somewhere wanted something in return. It had just about given her a conniption fit trying to figure out who it was. At first she lived in daily expectation of some fella from away dropping by her office, asking for a special-use permit to build a slaughterhouse or a paper mill or some such blight on the community. She fantasized herself saying “No sir, mister man, you just take these keys and get on back to whatever rock you crawled out from under.” But when weeks went by and nothing like that happened, she began to think the gift had most likely come from Dylan. At least Dylan was the only one who had the motive and the opportunity.
Three years ago, soon after Riley left town, Dylan had begun to come around. He was helpful and handsome, and he went to her church, and in her loneliness she might have encouraged his attentions. He had asked her to marry him last year, and she was pretty sure the thought was still never far from his mind even now, so yes, the car had probably come from Dylan, who had lots of motivation.
As for opportunity, incredibly, that had come along as well. Soon after the luxurious Mercedes so mysteriously appeared in her driveway, Dylan had purchased a new pickup truck for himself, an expensive one, with a big diesel engine and double tires on the back axle and a crew cab. He also put the Mary Lynn on the hard at McSweeny’s Yard for a complete refit, including a paint job. Meanwhile, every lobsterman in town continued to bemoan the unexplained migration of their livelihood to other waters, which only added to Hope’s worries. She had wondered where on earth Dylan’s money could have come from if not the sea, and why he didn’t speak of his sudden wealth. She wondered if he was hiding something. He had mentioned going back to practicing law, working for some company from away, but although she knew Dylan was as sharp as a tack she still questioned how a small-town lobsterman who hadn’t practiced law in years could attract such a client. Hope feared to ask her question because of the implied mistrust. She had opted instead to do her best to keep suspicion from her thoughts. But that had not been possible. She lost a lot of sleep over that Mercedes.
Then Bill Hightower had called to say her mortgage was paid off. Even after finding a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of car parked in her driveway, Hope had been shocked, but not too shocked to think of asking where the mortgage money came from. It seemed a private bank in New York City had wired the outstanding balance on behalf of an anonymous client. So, with nearly twenty years to go on her payments, suddenly Hope Keep owned her whole house, free and clear, and she had become . . . what?
Angry?
Frightened?
It was hard to put a name to the emotion. Frustration entered into it, certainly, because Bill Hightower of all people had handled the transaction, and of course it would give him just the leverage he had been looking for to force her hand about their homeless problem, more than a quarter million between the house and car, and her not knowing who it came from.
Then this news about a cure for alcoholism, and the astonishing announcement that Dylan was involved—was representing one of the companies, just as he had said—and while it certainly explained the money, it left her even more confused about her feelings. She had asked Dylan to take the car and money back in some public way that would clear her name, yet he refused to admit the gifts had come from him. He did assure her there was no law against accepting them, as if that would be a comfort. So long as she didn’t compromise her political integrity, and so long as the car hadn’t been stolen, in Dylan’s professional opinion as the world’s most successful part-time lawyer and lobsterman she could keep the Mercedes and the money, although she would have to pay income taxes on their value.
Until then she had not even thought of income taxes. Now she contemplated the injustice of that on top of all the rest as she counted homeless person number sixty-three, an old woman sitting on the curb. The old woman had as much chance of paying taxes on a quarter million dollars’ worth of gifts as Hope did, what with living check to check on a meager mayor’s salary in a shrinking town of four thousand hard-hit souls. Hope had a daughter on the verge of college, Lord willing, and payments to make on her new boiler. She had considered selling the Mercedes and using the proceeds to pay the taxes on the mortgage money, but what if the car really had been stolen? Wouldn’t someone want it back?
Homeless person number eighty eight stepped in front of her, stepped right out as if the Pontiac wasn’t coming, and staggered to the far side of the street all jerky knees and arms akimbo like some bit actor doing a zombie from Night of the Living Dead. As Hope braked to a halt, all her worries chased around and round her head. Why were these people still here? Why stay through the winter? Why did more show up every day? She had asked these questions of a homeless man that very morning and learned they hoped the “mystery man” would reappear, or some clue would be found in Dublin of his whereabouts. They all knew it would be years before the government approved the cure for sale, and even then no homeless drunk would have a prayer of paying what Hanks Pharmaceuticals planned to charge. Yet hopes of getting healed were all these people had, and those hopes were centered here, in Dublin, where a mystery man had healed a few of them last fall for free.
Still counting, still driving slowly around town, Hope remembered when the newspapers and television first announced the whole thing was connected to a lawyer in the little town of Dublin, Maine—Dylan, of course. She was so surprised by this she had barely noticed that Hanks Pharmaceuticals was also mentioned. It took her almost a day to associate the company with another man she knew, Lee Hanks, the billionaire whom they said would sell the cure when it was ready. Of course she didn’t really know him. She had only met Lee Hanks the one time, during an interview with the missions board that sent her and Riley to Brazil. But when Hope remembered that interview, and thought about the fact that she and Dylan were . . . whatever they were, and she had a top of the line Mercedes in her backyard and the title to her house all free and clear, she sensed some kind of disaster coming, especially when it finally occurred to her that Riley had apparently not had a drink in half a year.
How that possible?
She remembered heady days of long ago, leaving that missions board interview with everyone’s best wishes, Mr. Hanks among them. She had pictures in her head of Riley a few weeks later, pausing in his headlong rush along the jetway to smile back at her, and she herself a little later sleeping with his shoulder for a pillow on the TAM flight direct from Miami, Florida, to Manaus, Brazil, and waking beside him to look down from ten thousand feet on the mighty river, a golden ribbon in the sunrise, draped haphazardly across the black forbidding wilderness below.
Hope remembered another thing, the memories tripping over each other now, a riot of multicolored rope hammocks hanging everywhere on the riverboat— the Tartaruga, or “Turtle” as she later learned, which was a poor name indeed, for any turtle Hope had ever seen could easily outpace that rusted hulk— and the diesel fumes, and the smoke of cooking fires on the deck, and Riley swaying in his hammock right beside her, tickling her through the webbing, and a dozen deep bronze third class passengers laughing at her helpless giggles. Now as she drove past the blazing cherry branches on the Bowditch College campus, Hope remembered a glorious ipe tree aflame with pink in Mãe do Deus, that stilted village of roughhewn boards and woven thatch and corrugated metal roofs far beyond the remarkable confluence of the black-and-white waters of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimões—kilometers and kilometers beyond container ships and riverboats, where Riley had transferred their meager possessions to motorized dugout canoes so they could venture upstream into the shallows, always upstream, beyond the last vestiges of everything they knew and understood except for Jesus and each other, and the whine and rattle of the ancient outboard motor, and the unsmiling man who sat behind her steering, and the river streaming past, and Riley sitting up in front of her, twisting to reach back and hold her hand, smiling wide and unafraid, and she, therefore, also unafraid.
She would have followed Riley anywhere, or so she thought back then, back before she knew where they were really going, the price of failure after four years in the jungle, four long years and then a mass grave in the clearing where the village used to stand, and Riley certain everything was all his fault.
Hope remembered arguing with him from behind her own thick veil of grief, the understanding growing in her that the horror was not finished; it had simply moved to him, the boy she married who had never touched a drink before, now dead drunk to the world. Two weeks drunk that first time if her memory served, two weeks of raving, of “doing penance” as he called it, taking their affliction deep inside himself.
How she had argued! How she tried to make him see no man could bear so much responsibility. But the thing in Riley that had led them to the deepest Amazon had then led him deeper still. Two weeks drunk after a lifetime without drink was further up into the shallows than even she could follow. She had radioed for help, and help had come, a pair of missionaries in a bright yellow Cessna, from another village down the river.
Hope’s heart had soared to hear their airplane’s engine. Two weeks there alone with Riley had been a harder trial than all the years before, harder than the language, harder than the loneliness and apparent lack of progress in the early days, harder than all the Western things she had learned to do without. Riley drunk and weeping for the dead had nearly broken Hope before the brothers came.
She remembered standing by the clearing as they landed, waving and trying to smile. She remembered the hugs, smelling soap on one of them when they walked up close. She remembered how the compassion in their faces changed when they laid eyes on Riley, snoring in the dirt. The abruptness of their choices, telling her to pack no more than fifty pounds and be prepared to take off in two hours. Carrying Riley to the Cessna, looking at each other but not at him, and not at her. Sending them away. After four years in the jungle with The People, sending them away.
She remembered looking down from high above as the little airplane banked, seeing fresh-turned soil at one end of the clearing, a common grave for everyone, and the river like a golden ribbon in the sunset, draped haphazardly across the black forbidding wilderness below as the engine rumbled up ahead and Riley snored beside her.
That had been, what? Seven years ago? Maybe seven and a half. Then had come four more years with Riley slowly sinking here in Dublin, and three more after that with him gone in body as he had already gone in spirit.
Hope drove past the gorgeous cherry trees of Bowditch College, feeling the burden of all those years, Riley in his full retreat, running back to Dublin and a teaching job, the gradual disintegration, late nights, hung-over mornings, unremembered rides in township squad cars, regurgitation on the front lawn, a month before he told her he had lost the college job, a year before he stopped pretending he would find another, ridiculous attempts to hide it from their neighbors, another year of solitary drinking in the garage, losing dignity and dreams, losing home, losing the one thing the two of them once were.
In spite of everything that had happened down among The People, Hope sometimes thought the mighty Amazon had been kinder than those dark jungles of Maine where she had writhed for years in the quicksand of despair as Riley floundered and sank below the surface, and was gone.
Returning downtown now, still counting on the left and right, Hope turned onto Main Street and looked up the hill and felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. A small army of vagrants in tattered clothing milled aimlessly around the park above her like survivors at a bomb site, sprawling on the grass, standing, running, shouting, sleeping, young and old, calm and rowdy, strewing garbage indiscriminately and waiting for something she did not believe existed.
Hope rolled slowly past the park in her old Pontiac and tried not to hate them. She tried not to dream of better days with Riley as he once had been. She had to focus on this, right here and now. She had to think the problem through. She was the mayor. The responsibility was hers, and there were so many problems to be solved.
For instance, what were all these people going to eat?
And where were they going to the bathroom? (She winced at the thought.)
And where would they take shelter if there was a bad spring storm?
And most of all, how could they be controlled, so many of them, when they began to realize they could simply take the things they wanted?
Hope had covered only half of Dublin and already she was up to 137 obvious indigents out on the streets. There was no reason to assume she would find any fewer if she drove the other side of town as well. Add all of them to these people at the park and Hope believed there might be five or even six hundred homeless men and women now. Last autumn had been bad enough, with maybe fifty of them roaming through her little town, but they had kept trickling in all winter, and spring had brought the promise of survivable temperatures for the next six or seven months, and then came the news story about this alleged cure of Mr. Hanks’s with its Dublin connection, and they had swarmed up the coast like locusts. So on top of everything else—half the downtown businesses closing, population shrinking, lobsters vanishing, costly gifts from who knows whom for who knows what reason and all the painful memories Riley’s return had thrust on her—on top of all of that had come this plague of biblical proportions.
Hope had called to ask the governor to send the Maine National Guard. Someone at his office said he would get back to her as soon as possible. That had been three days ago. She figured at least fifty more homeless men and women had come walking into Dublin in that time. According to Steve Novak, in the last twenty-four hours alone the police department had received two reports of stolen vehicles, eight burglaries, and three separate assaults, which was more than the number of criminal offenses Dublin might see in half a normal year. There were nearly constant complaints of graffiti everywhere, garbage everywhere, vandalism everywhere, elderly folks afraid to sleep with their windows open, women frightened to walk outside in broad daylight. Landry’s Sporting Goods over on Highway 1 had sold out of handguns, shotguns and rifles, then restocked, and then sold out again. And it was not just her townsfolk getting armed; in two of last night’s burglaries, firearms and ammunition had been stolen.
The shelter had been overtaxed all winter, so that was nothing new, but Reverend Reardon was now turning them away from the sanctuary of the First Congregational Church. Imagine all the pews full every night, and the floor too! Hope would not have believed it had she not stopped by last Friday evening to see for herself. The stench of unwashed bodies in the church had been horrible, far worse than the smell of passengers sweating in their hammocks on the third-class deck of the riverboat Tartaruga.
Hope drove past the swarm of homeless people at the park, rolling up Main Street toward town hall, where Bill Hightower had called an emergency mee
ting. She dared not be late, not if she wished to keep her job. And in spite of everything, Hope did want to keep her job. The pay was lousy, the pressure sometimes nearly overwhelming, but she had important work to do. She had to save this town from surviving at the cost of hatred. She had to save herself from that same mistake. So she would not run away and she would not hide. Riley Keep might be that weak, but she was not. She would drive on toward the top of the hill, toward the trouble that surely lay in wait, and she would leave her memories at the bottom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
INSIDE DUBLIN’S TOWN HALL, Riley crossed a vestibule with dark wood paneling and a marble floor. He entered a large meeting room with a two-story-high ceiling. The walls were rounded at the far end and square at the entrance where he and Dylan Delaney stood. A central aisle sloped down from their position between rows of seats. At the far side of the room, seven people faced the audience from behind a long and richly varnished desk or counter that followed the curvature of the rounded wall. Hope sat in the middle of the counter, with three town councilors to her left and three more to her right, including Bill Hightower. At the center of this semicircle stood an ornate podium. Rising up from there, about a dozen rows of fixed wooden seats had been arranged along the sloping floor. Riley remembered eager hours listening to lectures on soteriology and ecclesiology in a hall arranged like this during his seminary years. But the walls at seminary had been painted sheetrock and the seats had been built of plastic and aluminum. This hall, with its elegant wood furnishings and soaring multi-paned windows, was an unusually fine council chamber for such a small town, a testimony to the days two hundred years before when the builders of mighty clipper ships and whalers had created wealth far in excess of any other time in Dublin’s history.