The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  Riley stripped down for his shower and stood naked in the center of the room, feeling the cold air on his body. It had been months since he was naked. The absence of the pressure of his clothes felt strange, the way the empty space in his mouth felt during the first few days after losing a tooth. He had lost too many teeth. Thinking of that, he looked in the mirror over the sink. The beat-down man he saw there cocked his head up toward the light and bared his teeth and let him count the empty spaces. There were now five, three of them in front, which was why he seldom smiled. Riley did not want to show his empty places.

  He noticed the darkness of his forearms, face and neck—everywhere he stuck out from his clothes. Some of that was from the sun. Most of it was dirt. He turned away from the reflection of himself and stepped into the shower and twisted the knob. The water was freezing. He jumped back out and stood trembling just beyond the plastic curtain. He had forgotten that you waited for the water to get hot. When it started to steam, he stepped back in. Now the water felt good. He bowed his head beneath it, letting it weave its way through his matted hair. He saw dark brown rivulets running from his feet down to the drain, carrying the filth of him into the sewers. He thought of the pile of reeking clothes out on the floor and remembered something without warning, maybe it was something from a Roman play.

  Bad conduct soils the finest ornament more than filth.

  Was that Plautus? He couldn’t remember. He seemed to recall it had some influence on Shakespeare, but maybe that was wrong. Maybe it was Proverbs.

  Such unwelcome fragments surfaced to plague Riley Keep at times, disconnected from their context, the flotsam of another life. It was all but impossible to tell from whence they came. He had been so many things in other lives. Minister. Missionary. Educator of New England’s finest young men and women at Bowditch, that little college with the far-flung reputation on the eastern edge of Dublin. Failed protector of an entire people. Weakling of a husband. Incompetent father. Drunkard. Friend as best he could.

  Riley shook his head, flinging water from his shaggy hair like a dog. He rubbed himself roughly in the luxuriously warm flow. He had forgotten to bring soap into the shower stall and didn’t want to step out to the chill of the bathroom to get it. He did his best with nothing but his hands. When the hot water started to fade he shut it off and used the threadbare towel, leaving streaks of brown on the white cotton. It was a poor imitation of a proper shower, but still he was much cleaner than before.

  Outside in the bathroom Riley looked at Brice, still lying on the bench. He smiled to hear his friend’s contented snores. He felt something swell within his chest, and quickly looked away. He didn’t like to think of losing Brice.

  Someone had left a pile of folded clothes on the bench at Brice’s feet: a pair of olive-colored work pants, underwear, a plaid flannel shirt, and a pair of white crew socks, all secondhand but clean at least. Only Riley’s shoes and a few black bits of soil lay on the floor where his other clothes had been. He dressed and stepped up to the mirror again to run his fingers through his hair and beard, making a token effort to separate the tangled strands that grew out of him. By accident, Riley caught his own eye in the mirror. Startled, he looked away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BRICE SAT AS STILL AS HE COULD on a hard plastic chair, watching a housefly buzz furiously against the inside of the shelter’s storefront window, hurling itself against the glass again and again in its eagerness to soar out into the crisp November morning. His rusty hair and beard smelled like soap, he had slept as well as possible on the unfamiliar softness of the bunk bed’s mattress, he had a little oatmeal in his concave belly, and he had special dispensation from the woman in charge, who had decided to let him remain indoors all day instead of running him off to look for work as she had run off Riley and the others. Brice knew he should be a contented man. Yet although he was much better now, his bowels were still not right. An unrelenting pressure lingered, and he couldn’t help but see much of the housefly in himself, restless and dissatisfied, ceaselessly casting himself against an invisible barrier with impatience to be gone.

  He concentrated on sitting as still as the persistent urge allowed. He tried to think of something else: philosophy, perhaps. A philosophic plumber, that was what Riley used to call him. He remembered a conversation they once had about water, about how it never really went away. It flowed hot and cold through the pipes that he installed, and down into the drain or toilet, and so on through the sanitary system, cleansed of its impurities to eventually emerge in nature, where it flowed into the sea and evaporated up into the atmosphere and soared back over land to fall again as rain and gather into streams and reservoirs and so back into the pipes that he installed, and on and on it went forever, yet not one single molecule was lost.

  Brice wished it could have been that way for him.

  He wished his life could be an unending cycle where the problem was the cure—drinking to resolve the difficulties caused by drink—but if his failing body taught him anything it was that no philosophy could make it so. He could only hurl himself against these invisible barriers so many times before the final part of him was lost.

  He remembered Riley trying to tell him this a long time ago, Riley preaching in his cups about the linear nature of human history and time. He remembered they were someplace warm; he remembered firelight from the fractured pieces of a shipping pallet burning in a metal trash can. Was it Tampa? Sarasota? Oh, the fine debates he and Riley had enjoyed down in the tropics! How pleasant it had been to annoy his friend with stubborn disagreement.

  Alone now in a hard plastic chair, watching the housefly hurl itself against the window, Brice smiled to think of Riley springing up with eagerness to explain almighty God to half a dozen fellow drunks around a trash can, as if they had not heard it all before. He remembered Riley shouting “The Bible says, `Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth!’ Well now, think about that. Aren’t we the meek? Why of course we are!” Riley laughing and shouting and dancing around in front of them, Riley harking back to his seminary days, pointing a finger toward the heavens and shouting, “We are the meek! I’ve studied it! I’ve been trained and ordained! I know what I’m talking about! We’re not suffering here for nothing, fellas! This whole earth is ours!”

  No one knew the gospel like the homeless.

  An education in it was the price of admission to most shelters, this one included. But Brice remembered Riley’s preaching anyway, belly filled with some kind of spirit although it was unlikely to be holy, inflicting the old arguments on them when he knew very well they would sleep beneath the stars that night and gain no benefit from listening. Still, Brice couldn’t recall anyone complaining about Riley’s preaching. Maybe that was because he preached so well, or maybe it was because Riley so clearly needed to get those words out of himself.

  Riley still believed in everything in spite of everything.

  Watching the housefly, Brice wondered if the irony of belief in spite of their condition was Riley’s own invisible barrier. Perhaps he shouldn’t have egged Riley on. Thinking of it now he felt a twinge of guilt. But misery loved company of course. Wasn’t that the reason he and Riley set out on the road together in the first place?

  Brice found a slight comfort in his friend’s surviving faith. At least someone had salvaged something from the endless cycle that contained them. Occasionally that slight comfort tempted him to wonder if Riley might be right, and maybe there was a linear quality to life after all, a reason or a purpose. But inevitably the urge swelled up inside his chest and all philosophy was forgotten in the irresistible succession of difficulties that could only be cured by a generous application of their own cause, and with that self-fulfilling double curse Brice knew that Riley was mistaken. He might be near the end, but it was a circular life that had gotten him there.

  Brice shifted his position and winced at the spike of pain in his lower back. Earlier in the morning the old woman had told him he was lucky to be alive and lucky
to have a friend like Riley, as if that was new information. Brice was well aware Riley had saved his life and well aware he had been saved at no small cost to Riley. Brice was not a fool. He didn’t believe for a second Riley had actually stopped drinking, but his friend had not taken a drink in front of him for almost a month now, and how Brice loved him for that sacrifice. Only another drunk could appreciate the gravity of it. Brice couldn’t imagine feeling anything but guilt if any other person offered such a gift on his behalf, but with Riley it seemed normal. He watched the housefly hurl itself against the glass again and thought back to that torturous time below the bridge. He remembered very little, just scraps of conversation and snapshot images of Riley holding something liquid to his lips, Riley wiping his forehead with a rag, Riley cleaning excrement from him, Riley with encouraging words, Riley begging him to live as if his life really mattered. Throughout that time Brice didn’t remember once awaking without Riley there.

  Then had come the day when Brice realized he might live. He awoke and remained awake, unbeknownst to Riley, who was nearby cooking something on an open fire, and Brice had watched his friend and thought of what it meant to travel to the places he had been below that bridge and come back there alive, and he had said, “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” their old joke given fresh new meaning; and his doctor Riley had been startled at the sound of his voice, and turned and seen his wide-open eyes, and smiled and spoken in his awful so-called English accent, saying only, “Hello, Mr. Stanley.”

  A few days after that had come the crazy, impossible idea to go home to Dublin. Riley had tried to explain it, had spoken in terms of miracles, and Brice had done his best to humor him. It was the least that he could do. He never thought the man would really take him, not until the morning when Riley packed up their few belongings and stooped to lift him on his back.

  Oh, the pain! Every step his friend had taken jarred his insides like the twisting of a knife. Brice had done his best to bear it, but soon a moan had escaped him, and Riley laid him down again to rest. That became their pattern: a long rest, followed by a short burst of motion. It took a week just to get from Jacksonville to Georgia, but Brice began to find he could bear the pain a little longer so they went a little farther between rests, and it seemed perhaps a miracle might actually be possible. Sure enough, one day Brice found he could walk some without help, and Riley hailed it as a wonder beyond measure. Now, with perseverance and the passage of a month and the incredible sacrifices of his dear old friend, here Brice sat in a hard plastic chair watching a housefly at a homeless shelter in Dublin, Maine, which was indeed a kind of miracle when you thought about it.

  How he wished it could go on and on in a straight line ending someplace unexpected and miraculous. But life was what it was. Sooner or later he would have to drink to keep the cycle going, even if it killed him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOPE DAWDLED IN HER OLD PONTIAC outside the shelter, searching for a way to pretty up what must be said. Nothing decent came to mind. She tried speaking a few lines aloud. They made her sound like some other person, someone she did not want to be. She was thinking of leaving when Steve pulled his new truck into the space beside her and the die was cast.

  Glancing over, Hope saw a deep gouge in the front fender of the truck. She thought about the insurance deductible for repairs to police department vehicles. It was fifteen hundred dollars, if she remembered right, so that was just great. Yet another conversation she didn’t want to have. Sighing, she opened her car door.

  “Hi ya, kid,” called the chief of police, already out of the Ford Explorer and waiting on the sidewalk. He always called her “kid,” probably because she looked younger than she was, maybe thirty instead of forty. It wasn’t something she could take credit for, just the pure dumb luck of good Italian stock, a hint of olive in her clear complexion, huge clear eyes, a total lack of gray in her short black hair and her lanky, athletic build. Hope approached the chief, who stood with one hand in the pocket of his faded dungarees, jingling his coins as usual. The chief was a perpetual-motion machine, which probably explained why the big man in his sixties also didn’t look his age.

  Stepping over the granite curb, Hope made herself smile like a good little politician. “Looks like you got your fender kinda stove up there.”

  “Had to chase a fella through some brush yesterday.”

  “How old is that truck again? Three whole weeks?”

  “Hey, sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.”

  “Tell it to the council when the bill comes up.”

  Steve grinned. “That’s what we got you for.”

  Hope didn’t return the smile. “Don’t need the aggravation, Steve. Not on top of dealin’ with all these people from away.”

  Her point made, she gave the chief a playful little punch in the arm in passing and headed down the sidewalk toward the shelter, where nearly a dozen unkempt strangers loitered by the door. She felt their eyes on her as she approached, felt the cool assessment of their stares and took comfort from Steve’s looming presence at her back. Just before she reached the door, one of the homeless men spoke. “’Scuse me, miss. You got any spare change?”

  Hope started fishing in her purse, but Steve stepped between them. “It’s against the law to panhandle, friend.”

  “Sez who?”

  Steve pointed a finger back and forth between himself and Hope. “The mayor and police chief.”

  Panic flashed across the man’s face. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  “And I’d hate to hafta run ya out of town.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s come to that,” said Hope, extending a dollar bill toward the raggedy man. He held both hands up, palms out, leaving Hope standing there with her gift in midair. “Go ahead and take it,” Hope said, smiling. “It’s okay this one time, I think. Right, Chief?”

  “If ya say so,” replied Steve.

  Still the man refused to take her money. “I come a long way to get here, ma’am. Ain’t about to take no chance on gettin’ kicked out now.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Atlanta, ma’am.”

  She said, “What brings you to our town?” Asking like he was a tourist, giving the man a little respect.

  He glanced nervously at the chief of police. “I . . . uh, I need to get a little problem taken care of.”

  Hope didn’t need to ask him what his problem was. As the man’s eyes shifted, she followed his gaze to see another group of ragged people gathered outside Sam Williams’s printshop on the far side of the street, one of them in a wheelchair. The awning on the storefront above them had not yet been rolled up for the season. It cast a shadow on the top half of their bodies. Only the man in the wheelchair remained untouched by the darkness. Beyond them, beyond the glass, Hope saw the vague white smudge of Sam’s face staring out from his shop. He must have seen her looking, because he moved closer to the glass. Their eyes met across the distance. He did not look happy. Sensing movement on her right, Hope turned to see two more disheveled strangers coming up the street, their shaggy appearance a strange contrast to the pristine New England townscape with its overhanging birches, red brick, white clapboard storefronts, and granite curbs. It suddenly occurred to Hope that standing right there she could count more homeless people than she’d seen in Dublin in all her years combined. As if speaking to herself, she asked, “What are all you people doin’ here?”

  The homeless man said nothing.

  “Friend,” said Steve. “We also got a law against loiterin’.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m moving on now. We all are. Right, boys?”

  The others mumbled their assent and started shuffling across the sidewalk. Watching them go, seeing them merge with the group across the street, Hope thought of old black-and-white photographs she had seen of the Great Depression, of stooped men wearing threadbare suits in soup-kitchen lines, of children using bits of garbage as playthings, and women staring out of tenement windows with stark surrender in their eyes. Ho
pe suddenly wished the man had taken her dollar bill. She wished she had offered more. She also wished the filthy men were not in her town, and she hated that and felt again that she was turning into someone other than herself.

  She closed her eyes, and opened them, and went into the shelter.

  In the front room Hope saw four more ragged people she had never met. They sat in mismatched plastic chairs playing cards on a little table.

  “Where’s Willa?” asked Steve, behind her.

  Only one of them bothered to look up from the game. “Who?”

  “Woman runs this place.”

  “Back there somewheres prob’ly.” The card player waved a grimy hand toward the rear of the building and refocused on his cards.

  They passed down the narrow hall and found Willa Newdale in the kitchen, standing on her toes beside a wire shelving unit with a stack of dishes in her hands. Hope thought she looked kind of masculine with her stiff gray hair cut very short and her usual starched khakis and her long-sleeved white shirt with the tail hanging out and the collar buttoned down. The old woman glanced over at them when they entered. “Steven,” she said without moving. “Hope.”

  “Hey there. Need a hand?” asked the chief.

  The woman laughed. “Actually, I do. I got hooked on something here, and I can’t put these plates down to get unhooked.”

  Hope looked more closely and realized Willa was stuck in place with her necklace somehow caught up in the metal shelving. “Hang on,” said Hope. “I’ll get it.”

  “No!” The woman nearly shouted the word. “Steve, you do it. These plates need to go way up on the top.”

  Hope watched as the chief walked around the steel worktable to take the dishes. He placed them up on the top shelf while Willa freed the necklace, which she quickly dropped inside her shirt.

  Hope said, “I could’ve done that for you, Willa.”