The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  She did not let go.

  A siren detached itself from the cacophony in the distance, growing stronger than the others. Through the mist, Riley saw an ambulance careen around the turn into the parking lot. It stopped at the edge of the illegally parked cars at the emergency entrance, and the driver emerged, running back to throw open the rear ambulance doors and pull a gurney down along with his partner, who had been riding in the back. A woman large with child lay on the gurney with her eyes closed. Riley held his daughter’s hand as they watched the men rush the woman across the parking lot and in through the emergency room doors. Bree’s fingers felt impossibly small in his hand.

  “If you decide to keep the baby,” said Riley, “I’ll take care of everything. I’ll buy you a house and a car and pay all your expenses, and pay for a baby-sitter so you can finish high school and I’ll set up a college fund for you and the baby both, and . . . everything.”

  “I knew you’d say that.” She squeezed his hand and let go.

  “So?”

  “No thanks.”

  “But, if you decide . . . you can’t earn much money, Bree. Trust me, it’s not good to be poor. If you have a baby, it’s gonna need things. I’m just tryin’ to do right—to help you do what’s right. Don’t you think?”

  “No,” she said again. “I think sometimes the right thing is the wrong thing. I made a bad mistake. I need to live with this, you know? Not take the easy way out this time. I think that’s how God shows you the way to be a person.”

  A new kind of sound joined the chaos in the background, a distant popping.

  “What is that?” asked his daughter.

  Riley knew but did not want to frighten her. “Maybe we should take these forms inside and ask if they have any news about your mom.”

  “You’ll get hassled by those people,” she said, taking the clipboard from him. “I’ll go.”

  She took three steps away from him and paused beside a trash can. Reaching into her hip pocket she removed a pack of cigarettes. She crushed the pack in her fist and threw it in the garbage.

  Riley thought, if only it were that easy, and suddenly a moment came to mind, a terrible memory of a morning five or six years before when he awoke in the bedroom beside Bree’s mother and realized he was already thinking about a drink before any other waking thought, the first thing on his mind, a drink, and the fog inside his mind had parted just for one brief moment and he had clearly seen his situation, known beyond all doubt that he was gripped by something inescapable. He remembered feeling utterly alone while lying there. Yet he had been beside his sleeping wife would not divorce him even after three long years abandoned, utterly alone with a daughter sleeping down the hall who would stand with him against an angry mob in spite of his abandonment of her. A thought occurred to him, the least that he could do for Bree and Hope. He said, “Hey, Vachee. Maybe you should call Dylan. Let him know about your mom.”

  Bree stopped and turned, searching his face, her coal black almond eyes a mystery. She said, “Okay,” and Riley watched her back until the electric doors whispered shut behind her. Then he gazed up at the top of the pillar of fire and smoke, at the high place where the jet stream lopped the top off of it. He thought about people’s expectations, including his own, and wondered if the right thing could ever be the wrong thing, and he did his best to ignore the popping sound of gunfire in the distance.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  IT COULD ONLY BE THE LAWYER. In spite of her dire warnings he had obviously been careless somehow. Maybe it had been a note in a desk drawer, or a file on the computer in his office, or maybe they had tapped his phone line or bribed his secretary. It did not really matter. After seven years of hiding very well, she was in the back seat of a black Cadillac on Maine State Highway 1A, heading south across the short steel bridge in Frankfort, and all that really mattered was the duct tape on her wrists and mouth.

  One of them had held her down on her hotel bed at the Bangor Keystone Suites while the other applied the tape, already inside her room and covering her mouth before she even knew she wasn’t dreaming. Apparently they had left her ankles free so she could walk out to their car. She tried to tell herself that was a hopeful sign, since they could have killed her then and there if that was their intention. But the tape across her mouth was something else again. Her allergies had been acting up—the spring pollen season in the northeast always had caused havoc in her sinuses—and she found it extremely difficult to draw in enough air through her nose alone. It was okay if she stayed very still, but any movement that increased her respiration made her dizzy. Once, as she bent down to get into their car out in the hotel parking lot, she had nearly slipped into unconsciousness.

  Now they were a mile below Frankfort, the full moon’s reflection dancing on the ripples in Marsh River on their left as the Cadillac continued south. Glowing numbers on the dashboard clock read 3:15 a.m. The young man in the back seat beside her and the driver up front talked baseball as if she were not there. The driver—who was also young—claimed someone named Garcia should be fired, while the man beside her disagreed, quoting batting averages and RBIs and listing other players’ percentages of this and that as if he were a statistician instead of what he was. She watched the moon out on the river and focused on her breathing. She hoped they would not hurt her, reminding herself again that they could have killed her much more easily back in her room, but of course she was sitting there in a cotton shift, they hadn’t even let her put shoes on, and she was bound and gagged, so she supposed realistically it was best to assume the worst.

  The old woman began to think of certain things. Her mother and father, who had both been dead for nearly half a century. Her brother, Jimmy, lost to alcohol. That boy she knew in college, that beautiful boy, whom she had thought might last forever. A swan she saw somewhere, was it the Adirondacks? Yes. When she was seven or eight, when her parents sent her to that summer camp. Her first wild swan, the most graceful thing, gliding across the pond with the strangest sense of permanence, as if it were possible to move and yet not move, with all time here and now and the fallen world a lie.

  She remembered the beautiful boy in college saying no.

  The moon leapt along the river, keeping pace with her. She strove to forget swans and focus on her predicament. She started off thinking about how to get away but ended up remembering how this had begun—with Mr. Hanks talking that night around a campfire, promising big bonuses for everyone, stock options, he and a couple of the others speculating about what an alcoholic would pay to get the cure, like it was a game for them, like a funny bidding war. Mr. Hanks saying, “A thousand dollars for a dose,” and someone else, “I’ll raise you two hundred.” Keeping it up until Mr. Hanks got to five thousand dollars, and everybody laughing as if it was absurd, but she remembered seeing calculation in his face and knowing he was serious.

  They said your whole life flashed before your eyes. For her it was just bits and pieces. She remembered lying on her cot beneath a hot Brazilian moon, thinking of her alcoholic brother, Jimmy, and Mr. Hanks planning to charge so much more than poor Jimmy could afford, and all the poor people in the world who suffered like her brother, and rising in the middle of the night and taking the dried tubers that Waytee had given her and walking terrified into the jungle to hide them.

  Would she do that again, knowing it would lead to this?

  She tried to breathe past the tape across her mouth, feeling her heartbeat rise, and the panicked, dizzying sensation of too little oxygen. She should turn her mind to peaceful things, yet the memories persisted independent of her will, visions of rage and violence, of Mr. Hanks the next morning, storming into the village with eight men at his back, demanding the plants that he called “his,” and The People’s elders telling him there were many plants—so much lost in the translation—Mr. Hanks making threats, the elders’ faces passive as one of Mr. Hanks’s hard men spoke the words in Portuguese, a language lost on most of them. She remembered the way The People’s non-
reaction had angered Mr. Hanks, and his “translators” coming back a second time, eight of them with rifles.

  Her thoughts knew no chronology, dashing forward, up to Dublin, to the last two years and a tattooed girl with metal in her nose. Then back again, Lee Hanks’s men returning to their camp with the little one, maybe nine or ten back then, her wrists conjoined with yellow nylon rope, a savage on a leash. Staring through the window of the Cadillac she saw them out there on the river, leading her around the tent and barking at her like she was a dog, laughing, mocking, terrifying in their utter lack of empathy. She looked to the stars above the river Marsh and saw a fellow doctor there, a man of conscience rising up to aid the little girl, and Lee Hanks speaking to his translators, then the doctor in the dirt, jaw collapsed and bleeding. She heard Mr. Hanks in all his confidence insist the Indians would trade to save the girl, assuring everyone he would not mean it when he went to tell The People he would kill the child at sunset if his plants were not returned.

  Back inside the car she turned her head and stared at the young baseball fan beside her. How troubled he must be to break into an old woman’s room and bind her, to drag her out against her will, sixty three years old and looking much, much older. She stared at this problem solver on the corporate payroll and remembered understanding Mr. Hanks was crazy, knowing she would get the same treatment as the doctor with the broken jaw, but knowing he had given her no choice but to make her full confession—it was not The People; it was she who hid the cure inside the jungle—and she remembered being marched toward the dreadful tree line at the edge of the camp, forced to lead them to the hiding place, and sensing hidden savage eyes on her. She had been prodded by the threat of rifles in the hands of problem solvers much like these young men in the Cadillac, and the latent violence of their muzzles at her back had most likely saved her because the rifles made it obvious she wasn’t on their side. Oh, she would not wish it on these youngsters with her in the car, to take ten steps into a jungle far from home and be speared without a sound. She remembered Mr. Hanks’s men falling all around her, and she herself standing still with eyes closed waiting for the pain of penetration, wondering if she would quickly fade or linger underneath the broad leaves of the canopy, and then Waytee’s breath against her eyelids, Waytee there before her somehow without one single sound, slipping his necklace over her head as a sign to all the others.

  Well. She had no necklace for protection here. Just silver tape across her mouth, a bleached white moon above the valley of the shadow, and an old pair of strong eyes to watch the treetops on the far side of the passing river, their jagged crowns in silhouette against the infinite beyond, the stars and planets merely whispered hints of what the cosmos really was. She closed her eyes and tried to think of heaven instead of watching from the jungle as The People crept up to the camp, the silence just before the end, every one of them attacking in one moment, even the women and the children, and most of her colleagues going down beneath The People’s spears and clubs before Mr. Hanks’s young problem solvers started shooting and every single Indian was slaughtered in mere seconds. She squeezed her old eyes shut much tighter, shaking just a little, hating the image of herself there in the brush, hiding like the coward she had been as Mr. Hanks’s young men walked among the fallen People in the clearing, firing down into their bodies, and her two surviving colleagues tried to stop them and got murdered for their trouble before her very eyes, leaving her the last one living somehow.

  The hot Brazilian moon that night had risen red and angry. She remembered backing into the underbrush, and eventually, some sleep. What woke her the next morning had been the sound of Lee Hanks shouting in the distance, promising not to hurt her, promising they would both get rich together. Just bring out the tubers.

  She had remained in hiding of course, even as he shouted to her off and on all day while walking back and forth between the carnage at the clearing and The People’s empty village. His surviving men had searched for her around the camp and village, but she had learned a thing or two about moving through the jungle in her weeklong walk with Waytee. She eluded them, as she had ever since. Until this night.

  It had taken seven years, but they had found her now.

  She saw the peculiar flickering on the underbelly of the looming cloud bank long before they reached the edge of Dublin. She understood it fifteen minutes later when they slowed to turn onto a residential street and she smelled the acrid smoke. Twisting in her seat, she saw gigantic flames leap high beyond the rooflines of a residential area. The young man sitting there misunderstood her movements and gripped her by the forearm.

  “Sit still,” he said.

  She turned her eyes forward again. She found to her surprise that she was thinking of these two young men in something like the way she had so often thought of homeless alcoholics. As with all those others, these were two more cases of “there but for the grace of God go I.” She knew a lot of people thought themselves beyond this kind of barbarism, and she knew that for an ignorant conceit. She remembered listening to Lee Hanks shouting in the clearing, remembered the thoughts passing through her mind, what she would have done to him, if possible. Anyone could murder, given enough cause.

  A military truck pulled onto the street ahead of them. The Cadillac’s headlights lit up soldiers riding in its canvas-covered bed. The soldiers sat on a pair of benches facing inward toward each other, the color of their uniforms and helmets unidentifiable in the starkness of the Cadillac’s headlight beams, their weapons standing upright between their knees, ugly and lethal. The first soldier on the right turned to look back at the Cadillac, then leaned forward, saying something to the man across from him.

  “Think they got a curfew in this town?” asked the driver.

  “Absolutely,” said the baseball fan beside her.

  “What if they wanna stop us?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Hey. I’ll handle it, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  The transport slowed ahead of them, with all the soldiers in the back now turned in their direction.

  The driver started cursing.

  “Settle down,” said the one beside her. “I was in the Rangers, ya know? I know how to talk to these guys.”

  Her heart began to soar. She thought of rolling to her side and kicking at the door, making all the noise she could as soon as one of those beautiful young soldiers came up close. She knew the man beside her would not hesitate to strike her, but it would be worth the risk.

  The truck slowed nearly to a stop, and she became convinced her nightmare would be over soon, even though the man beside her had removed a gun from underneath his jacket and now pressed it hard into her ribs. She did not believe he would really shoot her there in front of ten or fifteen witnesses holding automatic weapons. She felt her plan would surely work; her delivery was almost certain.

  The truck stopped in the middle of the street. One of the men in it waved to the Cadillac, clearly indicating his desire for them to stop as well. The men in the truck began dismounting. She was seconds from salvation. Then popping sounds came from the direction of the burning homes. One of the soldiers shouted something to the others, and all of them went running off into the darkness, leaving her and her two captors sitting in the Cadillac, alone.

  “Must be doin’ somethin’ right,” said the driver as he rolled two wheels up on the curb to inch beside the truck.

  “Absolutely,” said the one who held the gun against her ribs.

  The Cadillac slipped quietly on across the little town. Everything seemed strangely dark until she realized most of the streetlights were not working. She saw a pair of shadows step out through the shattered glass of a business storefront and then quickly disappear into an alley. She heard sirens wailing all around. She saw small groups of soldiers standing here and there along the road. As they drove through one intersection, she looked up the cross street and saw two fire engines parked at angles nea
rly half a block away. Firemen lit in pulsing shades of orange and red and yellow aimed streams of water high into an entire row of houses lost in flames. The bitter scent of burning wood and plastic swelled the linings of her nostrils. Already short of breath, she had to focus hard on breathing. The worst thing she could do was panic, get her heart rate up, her body needing more oxygen. Whatever was about to happen, she wanted to be conscious.

  They rolled on, and once a soldier tried to wave them over. “Yeah, right,” said the driver without pausing.

  Another few blocks passed and then, “It’s the next left,” said the one in back with her. To her surprise they turned into the parking lot of Dublin’s small hospital. She knew her surroundings well, having spent many hours there attending to her charges when they overdosed or hurt themselves in all the foolish ways that alcoholics will. She had expected her captors to take her someplace private and secluded, someplace they could question her, or do whatever it was they had in mind. Although she felt exposed beneath her cotton nightgown she never considered rape, being far past the age when she believed young men like these might think of her that way. But she did know certain things, and expected their employer would want to know them too.

  The parking lot was just as dark as all the streets had been. She supposed marauding bands of rioters had amused themselves by smashing out the pole lights. The Cadillac pulled into a parking stall quite near the street, on the far end of the lot from the hospital building. The driver killed the engine, saying, “We must be early.”

  The man beside her checked his wristwatch in the moonlight through the window. “Maybe a few minutes.”

  The two men sat in silence. She prayed, and did her best to breathe.

  Another car pulled into the parking lot. It stopped a short distance away, its headlights aimed at them the way theirs had lit the military transport just a little while before.

  “All right, lady,” said the young man beside her. “You’re on.”