The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  His fingers wrapped around the money in one pocket and the formula for the cure in the other. There in the north woods with only crows for company Riley thought about his ex-wife and child. He thought about Brice with his own fingers wrapped around an empty plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol. He thought about a little wooden cross with golden insets, carved by another man in another life in another land. He thought of that old woman’s blood and all her things still up there in her room and all the questions they had asked in jail and all those ghostly hands lifting him below the stars, and he shivered in the cold and thought again about the reason he had returned to Maine, and then he set out walking.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY bus pulled to the curb with squealing brakes. The door slid open and Willa Newdale stepped down to the sidewalk, picking her way around a stinking heap of plastic garbage sacks. Some kind of animal had been at the litter around the bottom edges of the pile, ripping through the plastic to drag out cans, soiled cardboard containers, and chicken bones. Stepping over the mess, Willa glanced at a small piece of paper in her hand to check the Boston address written there against the numbers on the nearby buildings.

  She hoped she had hit on a strategy they would not expect. Although her hair was shorter and the gray was now coal black, Willa knew a professional could penetrate her pitiful disguise with a glance. Survival lay in unpredictability. As she had so many times before, she had to find a place that would not cross their minds.

  She had escaped from Dublin with very little: a simple denim coat, white cotton shirt and blue jeans, and the items in the bulky purse she carried with the strap secure across her chest. She clutched the piece of paper in her left fist. An oblong stain of red marred the bandage on her forehead. She walked with a slight limp, and it caused her pain to breathe, but she refused to let it slow her down. She knew it was unwise for a woman to walk alone in that neighborhood, especially a white woman, when the sun had already fallen well below the clapboard buildings on the west side of the road, throwing deeper shadows on a narrow street where buildings stood too close to let the sunlight ever fully reach the ground.

  As if in confirmation of the danger, Willa heard someone emerge from an alley and fall into step behind her. She gave a single backward glance and took in a pair of teenaged boys, their baggy trousers low around their hips, their jackets open to reveal the top few inches of their underwear. Both wore Red Sox caps on closely shaven heads, one cap low with the bill cocked sharply to the right, the other high in back with the bill pointed toward the pink and turquoise slice of sky above the street. The dark skin of their necks revealed the uppermost extremities of even darker patterns, etched there permanently with needle and ink. The shorter of the two had one black teardrop tattooed just below each eye. All of this she absorbed with that single glance. She had learned well in the jungle.

  Willa did not let them know she realized they were enemies. She did not let them see her fear in any way. She pretended to ignore them, searching the facade of every building, checking the scrap of paper in her hand now and then as if she did not trust her memory.

  Ahead, a darkened streetlight flickered and then came fully on to cast a yellow circle on the sidewalk. She passed through this cone of light, then back into the gloaming beyond. She heard the teenaged boys pass through it right behind her. “What you got in that big bag, lady?” called one of the boys. The other one laughed and said, “Big bag lady.” She did not turn or pause or move any faster. She simply kept on walking. “Hey, big bag lady,” called the boy again. “You got somethin’ for us there?”

  The boys’ heckling brought back images she longed to forget, the taunts of a little girl’s tormentors and the little girl herself, dark of skin like the two boys behind her but much younger, and completely innocent. Willa knew she should be thinking of the boys, preparing herself, but sometimes she couldn’t control the memories, the terror from her past. She couldn’t stop the image of her colleague rising to the little girl’s defense, only to be beaten to the ground. She could not help comparing the tears on the little girl’s broad cheeks to the tattooed mockeries of grief on the boy behind her now. She saw the yellow cords that bound the girl and remembered her own shameful ineffectiveness, remembered aching to come to her defense but sitting like a spectator, crippled by the sight of the doctor bleeding on the soil. She remembered all the other blood that came soon after. The memory was strong enough to take her over, even now.

  Willa heard the two boys picking up their pace. For the first time it occurred to her they might not be what they appeared; they might have been sent specifically for her. Willa’s hand began to tremble. She slipped it in her purse.

  They caught up with her, one on either side. One laid a hand on her purse. Instantly she yanked it away and took one step back. Unprepared for the speed of her reaction, both boys took another step forward past her. She felt a flood of relief. These were not professionals. They were simply muggers.

  By the time they turned to face her, she had removed the little automatic from her purse. The gun shook as she pointed it in their direction, yet she managed to speak steadily. “You fellas see this bandage on my head?”

  Neither said a word. Their eyes were wide and focused on the vacillation of her weapon.

  “I have a real bad headache and I am not in a mood to put up with your nonsense. Understand?” When both boys remained silent she said, “Do you understand me or do you not?”

  “Yes’um,” mumbled one of the teenagers.

  Willa paused, calming just a little as she realized she could handle this, considering them abstractly. “Just look at the two of you. Supposed to be a couple of tough guys, I imagine. Chasing after little old ladies’ purses with your pants falling down. Can’t even wear a ball cap like a proper man. You embarrass yourselves. Straighten up those caps. Go on! Have you no dignity at all?” She covered them with the small gun as the boys rearranged the caps on their heads, shifting the bills to more normal positions. “Pull up your pants while you’re at it,” she said, the automatic firmer in her grasp as it shifted back and forth from boy to boy. She watched their eyes, wide and white against the darkness of their skin, as they followed the movement of the barrel, each of them forced to keep one hand on the front of his trousers to hold them up. She thought about their mothers, wondering if they had given up, or ever cared. She thought of all the walking dead that she had known in her two years at the shelter, and she thought of a jungle clearing filled with dark-skinned bodies, and she knew these boys, like all the others, were most likely doomed. She pitied them. She said, “Oh, go on home before I shoot the both of you just to teach you manners. Go on. Get.”

  Hands at the waistbands of their trousers, the boys began to edge away. After three backward steps they turned and ran. Willa watched them go and sighed. Yet her actions had restored her flagging courage.

  She replaced the weapon in the bulky purse and resumed her walk, searching the facades along the way. Half a block farther down the street she reached a door and stopped. Above the door a hand-painted sign read, Sisters of Mercy Home for Troubled Women. Surely they would not think to find a woman who had run one homeless shelter among the homeless population of another. Willa stared up and down the street. Satisfied no one was watching, she reached for the door handle. She paused. Her hand was shaking again. She felt a rush of anger. She should be stronger. But then, that had been the problem all along.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE EASTERN SKY BLUSHED with dawn’s first glow as Hope emerged from the side door of her house wearing a fur hat, flannel robe, and tall black rubber galoshes. Drawing the robe tighter against the cold, she hurried along the gravel driveway toward the street where her copy of the Bangor Daily News lay perilously close to an ice-fringed puddle. She bent to pick it up. She straightened with the paper in her hand and saw a man step from the darkness of the tree line just across the road. Her heartbeat doubled in the time it took to back up two
paces toward her house. Clutching the newspaper to her chest, Hope’s mind raced to thoughts of Steve’s report yesterday: Willa gone missing and the awful riot at poor Henry’s store and nearly thirty people in the jail. She remembered Steve’s belief that some of these people from away were bound to be hardened criminals, his concern that Willa had been murdered, his prediction that someone else would get hurt sooner or later. She asked for God’s protection. Then she remembered her daughter still asleep inside the house and she revised her prayer, thinking, better me than her.

  The silhouetted man across the street came slowly closer through the darkness.

  She backed farther up her driveway, afraid to turn and run.

  “Hello, Hope.”

  She stopped. She processed the voice, and knew it, and felt release from one kind of dread even as another kind rushed in.

  “Hello, Riley.”

  They stood that way a moment—him in the middle of the street, her in the middle of the driveway, both at a loss for words. Then she turned abruptly, striding toward the house with gravel crunching under her galoshes. Behind her, Riley did not move. After Hope had taken several steps she called, “Come on,” but she did not pause to see if he would follow.

  She went inside. She dropped the newspaper on the scarred pine kitchen table. She took a mug down from a cupboard. She was already pouring him a cup of coffee and trying not to spill it when he finally stepped in, hesitantly, through the mudroom off the driveway. She said, “Still take a lot of sugar?”

  “Ayuh.”

  She stirred it into the coffee and turned to look at him, rage and pity vying for control. But the rage died without a whimper at her first clear view of him, a stranger standing in her kitchen’s incandescent light, much older than her memories, emaciated, filthy, shivering from the cold. He peered out cautiously from behind his bushy hair and beard, just an upper sliver of his face revealed, as if he wore a mask. If she had not heard his voice, she would not have known him. But she had heard him speak her name, and now there seemed to be two people standing there: this shaggy old drunk come in trembling off the street, and the beautiful young man whom she had married nearly twenty years ago.

  Hope crossed the kitchen and put the steaming mug into his shaking hands. “Take a seat, Riley. I’ll go get a blanket.”

  Still shivering, moving with a strange hint of reluctance, he did as he was told.

  Hope walked to the linen closet in the hall as if dreaming, removed a fleece blanket, and bunched her fists within it. She shut her eyes and stood motionless.

  Through the darkness just behind her eyelids Hope saw the birth pains of that dead man in her kitchen, a clearing filled with bloated, stinking corpses where abundant life had been, and Riley fallen to his knees in supplication to his grief, a young and naïve Riley giving birth to doubt and cynicism then and there, shaking both his fists at heaven in the midst of awful labor, his lamentation’s long assault upon her ears as clear as yesterday.

  Hope opened her eyes again and wiped them with a corner of the blanket and took it to the kitchen and draped the thing around his shoulders. Riley continued to shiver as she topped off her own cup of coffee and sat down opposite him. They both took a sip. She swallowed. “You look awful.”

  “I walked all night to get here.”

  “How come?” She asked without any real interest in the answer. She knew he was lying anyway, knew he had no need to walk all night, knew he had been in town at least a week, knew he was only there for money. She remembered how it had been toward the end, when money was the only mutually acknowledged connection left between them. She remembered, and knew she had to steel herself to tell him no. She would not pay for Riley’s booze.

  But of course he was too smart to ask so soon. “Where’s Bree?”

  “Asleep.”

  He nodded, his red-rimmed eyes wandering around the room from behind his shaggy mask, taking in everything but Hope. “I saw her a few days ago.”

  “Where?”

  He started to answer, then seemed to think better of it. Instead he said, “She looks beautiful.”

  “So you’ve been here a few days?” It had always been so easy to catch him in his lies.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you said you walked all night to get here.”

  “I . . . uh.” He took a sip from the mug. “It’s complicated.”

  Hope watched him. He had yet to look at her directly. She said, “I’m sorry about Brice.”

  He did not seem surprised she knew. He nodded, looking down.

  “Did you go to his funeral?” Setting yet another a trap for him, knowing the answer, knowing because she herself had been there, all alone at the potter’s field except for the sparrows and the impatient gravedigger.

  “I, uh, I was too drunk.”

  Surprised, she set her coffee down and stared. It was not like the man she remembered to confess to such a thing. Before he left, they had not even been able to agree he was an alcoholic.

  He said, “But I’m not drinking anymore.”

  He spoke these last words in a rush and for the first time looked into her eyes. There was a challenge in his gaze, a strange intensity. With a wisdom born of hard experience, Hope saw he was indeed sober at that moment, and saw he was nonetheless still broken and would therefore drink again as soon as possible. She failed to keep sarcasm from her voice. “Congratulations.”

  He looked away.

  “I don’t have any spare cash, Riley. My new job doesn’t pay much.”

  “I heard you’re the mayor now.”

  “Yes.”

  He said, “That’s really something.”

  “Thank you. But I still can’t spare you anything.”

  He seemed to shrink beneath her words. “That’s okay. I have some money.”

  “You do?”

  “I just . . .” He paused, the blanket still around his shoulders, looking gaunt and weak. “I just wanted to see you. And Bree.” He rose unsteadily and shrugged off the blanket, draped it over the back of the kitchen chair and stood there swaying slightly. “Maybe . . . around town.”

  “Sure,” she said, still sitting.

  He turned, took one step toward the mudroom and stopped, his back to her. He wavered, and then fainted dead away.

  Hope was kneeling at his side when Bree entered the room a minute later, her shiny black hair skewed from her pillow. Rubbing sleep from almond eyes, the girl opened the refrigerator, unaware of Riley and Hope on the floor beyond the table until Hope said, “Honey, I need your help over here.”

  Bree turned and took one look and dropped the orange juice carton to the floor. “Who is that?”

  “Help me get him to the sofa.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Come over here and help me, honey.”

  Together they were barely able to lift the unconscious man and drag him out into the living room and lay him on the sofa. Hope went back to the kitchen to get the blanket. When she returned to the sofa she saw her daughter standing there, short and broad and brown and sturdy, gazing down at Riley’s form. Bree said, “Is that Daddy?”

  Hope leaned across the back of the sofa and spread the blanket over him.

  Bree said, “Is he drunk?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t want him here.”

  Hope thought of all the Christian things she ought to say, words of kindness and forgiveness—whatever you do to one of the least of these you also do to me—yet she would not lie to Bree. She said, “Me either.”

  They stared down on him together. In the quiet of the little house that she and Riley had once bought together, Hope heard her grandmother’s clock tick loudly and the refrigerator’s whir. Then Riley Keep began to snore, a sound she remembered well, and in it she heard echoes of a different Riley—or this same one
in the infancy of his addiction—curled in on himself on the dirt beneath his hammock, snoring just like this and reeking with the awful stench of vomit and that homemade alcohol The People concocted. Riley, who had never touched a drop before, a minister of God, a missionary, drunk for fourteen days. The first time.

  Distant voices brought her to the present. Hope crossed the living room in her pajamas and her robe and black rubber galoshes. She parted the curtains beside the Christmas tree at the front window. She peered out toward the street.

  The sun had nearly risen back behind the tree line. She saw a gang of strangers clearly as they passed by her front yard, ten or twelve of them at least, walking down the middle of the road with big sticks in their hands. One of the men turned to meet her eyes. She pulled her robe close around herself and backed away from the window, letting the curtain fall back into place.

  Should she call the police? What would she tell them? Men were walking past her home? She did not know them but they were too dirty? Too many? Too poor? She turned back toward the wasted man who had surrendered to their cause so long ago.

  “You need to get him outta here,” said their daughter.

  “Let’s wait to see what’s wrong, honey.”

  “What’s wrong? He’s a drunk.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not drunk right now.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Hope sighed. “I know.”

  “But—”

  “Go get ready for school.”

  “You’re just gonna leave him there?”

  “Let’s just get dressed, honey. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

  Riley’s snoring did not pause, even when Hope felt his forehead to satisfy herself that he had no fever. He rumbled in the background as she dressed and prepared breakfast for her daughter. Bree ate sullenly and said little, but that was not unusual. Left to her own thoughts, Hope tried to imagine what it must be like to be so tired you fell asleep while standing and did not awaken when you fell. If she had not seen it happen she would not have believed it possible.