The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  On the third day at about lunchtime Dylan came into the diner. The man who was quite possibly not Hope’s lover took a seat up by the window and ordered coffee. He never touched the cup but remained sitting there an hour later. Riley knew exactly what he wanted, only it seemed too soon. Riley Keep had drifted off to sleep the last two nights with unresisted visions of his sweetheart in his head. For the first time in three and a half years, he had not shut his mind to her or compressed her down into a size he could more easily ignore. For the first time in three and a half years, Riley Keep indulged the hope that fantasies do come true sometimes, forgiveness does exist, and notwithstanding Mr. Wolfe’s lament, every now and then a fellow could go home again. He had counted 1,308 nights since the night she turned him out. Just two nights of sweet delusion out of all those others did not seem enough. A mere two nights to savor the possibility she might accept him back before he had to go and hear that she would not. But Dylan had no pity. He remained there as Riley worked the tables, saying nothing, watching with the patience of a fisherman.

  Finally, Riley stopped beside him, the leavings of a turkey and dressing supper on a plate in one hand and a soggy dish towel in the other. He said, “You don’t have to come and sit around like this.”

  “Half of it’s hers, Riley.”

  “I know it. I’m gonna tell her.”

  “When?”

  “I guess maybe tomorrow.”

  “How’s about tonight when ya get off?”

  “I can’t.”

  “How come?”

  “I have something planned already.”

  Dylan stared at him, and Riley knew he wasn’t fooling anybody. Then Dylan said, “She’s gonna find out anyway. I got a letter from a lawyer today. Bad news, I guess. Says ya stole this cure of yours. Says his client wants it back. Wants the patent for it, and everythin’ ya’ve made off of it so far. Says they’re gonna sue ya for it in a week unless ya sign it over. Gonna sue Hope too.”

  Riley stood facing Dylan’s table, dirty plate in one hand, dirty towel in the other, dirty apron covering his thighs and chest and belly, wondering how it could take so little time to ruin everything. He had inhaled, savoring the ripe fantasy of telling Hope she was a multimillionaire, and then exhaled into the stench of Hope without her car, her house, her job, her liberty.

  Dylan said, “I don’t know who this Dale Williams is, but I guess he did his homework pretty good. Can’t figure how he knows you’re behind BHR Incorporated, or how he knows you guys are married. Must of hired some real good lawyers.”

  Riley put the plate and towel on Dylan’s table and dropped into a chair. Dylan cocked his head and stared at him. “Did ya steal it from this fella, Riley?”

  A thought occurred to Riley. It made him feel tired. “If there’s a lawsuit, will people know it’s me?”

  Dylan continued to stare, his head tilted toward one shoulder.

  Riley said, “I didn’t steal it. Not from him. I never even heard of him.”

  “‘Not from him’? Ya make it sound like there’s somebody else ya stole it from.”

  Riley looked away. Across the room, the thin red second hand of Sadie’s giant wall clock swept round and round. Riley watched its steady progress, thinking. He breathed; good went in, bad went out, time passed, and there was nothing he could can do about it but stop breathing. Again he remembered twilight by the garbage bin behind Henry’s store. He could not escape the memory, the sunset somewhere back beyond the western hills of Maine, and cold creeping down, ravenous. He remembered waking up the next day, waking from one nightmare into another, although at the time it had seemed like something better. He realized he had been wrong to wake up. He should have kept on sleeping there forever, because now look what he had done.

  Dylan said, “I notice ya aren’t askin’ about me, or Hope. Ya just wanna know if people will find out it’s you.” Dylan leaned forward, closer to him, the one and only time Riley had seen the man get angry. “Well, they will. If this goes ta court, it’ll be in the public record, and everybody’s gonna know exactly who ya are.”

  Riley put his elbows on the table and his face into his hands. He thought of the police chief holding up the cross he had carved for Hope almost a decade ago, the chief claiming it belonged to Willa Newdale, asking what he had done with that old lady’s body. Riley looked out through his fingers like they were prison bars. Mumbling past his palms he said, “I thought about Hope first. I just didn’t say anything.”

  Dylan sat back. “You gonna go over there an’ tell her tonight, or am I?”

  Riley rubbed his face all out of proportion, then pulled his hands away, wiped them on his dirty apron, and stood. “You do it,” he said. “I have other plans.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL, Riley pressed against the springs and pulleys of his homemade exercise machine. He had stripped to his underwear so the sweat wouldn’t soil his last clean shirt and trousers. He was eleven minutes into a twenty-minute set. It was his third set that day. He might do two sets more, or even three. What else was there? Eating, sleeping, exercise, and television—a prisoner’s life, what he deserved. He had not left his upstairs garage apartment in eight days, except to purchase groceries. He could feel his muscles growing every minute, but that was not the point. He never looked into the mirror anymore. He only hoped to find that empty place a hard workout might get him to, “the zone” some people called it, a place to hide from thinking.

  As the threatening letter’s week of grace had passed, Riley strained against his pulleys and his springs, seeking a clear mind. Decisions must be made. Time was short. So as he worked on biceps, triceps, latissimus dorsi, and deltoids, of course he thought again of leaving. Once the word got out, he knew the chief would pounce on the weakling, Stanley Livingston. He ought to run while there was time. But the weight of pulleys and springs and car and cash and wooden cross had pressed him down right where he was, no matter how he strained. He had a wife and child to think about—a wife, although she might deny it—and a strange sense that he must stay to lift his own weight there in Dublin.

  In the background as he exercised, a newscaster on the television spoke of Maine National Guard troops in the streets of Dublin, sent by the governor to control at least a thousand homeless people who had gathered there. Then the anchorperson got around to Riley again. They had been flocking to the lawsuit story since it broke the night before. How they loved to talk about the giant corporation buying the medical miracle of the century from a small-town waiter! For increased resistance to his actions, Riley hooked another spring to his contraption. There was just one problem with the contrivance he had built. It gave him no way of measuring the force applied against him, no way to know if he could lift his own weight now. He only knew he had to keep on trying. He began to push again. As the pulleys whined, the news continued.

  They were showing the same video clip over and over, the one with Hope, or “Mayor Keep” as the reporters called her in their effort to connect the lawsuit to her job. They kept hinting at political corruption, as if things weren’t bad enough. Riley didn’t need to watch the clip again to see it in his mind—Hope at her front door, blinking against their camera lights, saying she had just found out herself about the lawsuit, saying she knew nothing about anybody stealing any formula, really, nothing whatsoever, and then falling in their trap, saying yes, that new Mercedes in her driveway was hers, and yes, her mortgage had been paid off, but that had nothing to do with any formula or lawsuit, her face going blank in the instant that she said it, Riley and the whole world watching as she realized live before the cameras how it looked, and then she had no comment, looking small and helpless in the glare, obviously confused as she backed away and closed her door.

  Riley groaned with effort, doing his dead-level best to pull the hooks right out from the wall. No one could have built a better exercise machine, one more suited to his needs. He had been up all night, thinking of that video clip and of carving H
ope a little wooden cross, and golden chocolate foil, and buying her a car for cash, paying off her house, curing hopeless men in shelters, curing himself.

  Would he never learn?

  Someone knocked on Riley’s door. He had been expecting it, of course, waiting since the news broke on the television, wondering why he was still free. He figured maybe the chief didn’t watch the news. Or maybe it had taken them this long to find out where he lived. Dublin was a small town, but he was just a waiter, after all. Before yesterday, probably the only people in town who knew both his name and his address were Dylan Delaney and Mrs. Harding, his ancient landlady. Still, it had been twelve hours since the news broke, so he was ready when they knocked.

  He took his time, toweling off the sweat and slipping into his last clean pair of trousers and his last clean shirt—the outfit he had kept unsoiled for Hope— and he went downstairs to the door, wondering who had found him first, the police or the reporters.

  At first Riley did not recognize the bald man standing in the dewy grass outside his weathered door, not until the man said, “It’s been a long time, Reverend Keep.”

  Riley knew him then. “Mr. Hanks.”

  “How have you been?”

  “Good.” An automatic lie.

  “Glad to hear it. Mind if I come in?”

  Riley looked past the man. A fog had settled in during the night, but he could still see a gleaming black Cadillac parked in the gravel driveway that ran around Mrs. Harding’s house from the street to the garage below his apartment. A pair of young men in dark suits leaned against the Cadillac. Riley stepped back from the door, holding it open and saying, “Sure.”

  The bald man gave the two beside the car a little wave and stepped onto the concrete stoop, where he paused to wipe his flawless shoes on the threadbare mat Mrs. Harding had provided for that purpose. He entered past Riley, paused, and went up the narrow stairs since there was no place else for him to go. As the treads and risers creaked beneath his visitor’s ascending weight, Riley cast a last look at the men outside, closed the door and followed.

  Up in the little room where Riley cooked his meals and exercised and watched TV, the most powerful man in the pharmaceuticals industry stood waiting.

  Riley said, “Would you like something to drink?”

  “A cup of coffee would be nice.”

  “I only have instant.”

  “That’s just fine.”

  Riley put some water in a scorched pan and set it on the two-burner stove as Lee Hanks glanced around at the sagging sofa with its stained chenille bedspread cover, the small dinette set, the raw boards on concrete blocks below the small television, and the oblong braided rug on the battered pine floor. The man took a step closer to Riley’s homemade exercise machine, examining the cables, springs, and pulleys hanging from hooks on the plaster wall. Riley did not want to talk about that. He said, “You can sit there on the sofa.”

  “Thank you.”

  Hanks settled onto a cushion on one end, next to a little table where Riley kept his reading material—a cheap Bible and a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous or The Big Book, both of which he had received at Willa Newdale’s shelter, plus a few paperbacks from the used-book store downtown.

  Riley went to the cupboard beside the window and took down a mug and a small jar of freeze-dried coffee. On the side of the mug were the words World’s Greatest Dad. Like the furniture, the mug had come with the apartment. It was thick and held heat well, otherwise Riley would have thrown it out.

  “Haven’t we paid you something like twelve million dollars so far?” asked the man on Mrs. Harding’s sofa.

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Why are you living like this?”

  The water in the pan began to rumble. Riley poured it into the mug too fast, sloshing a little bit of coffee out onto the counter. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’d sure like to hear it.”

  They were the very words the police chief had used when speaking to him at Teal Pond, asking why a minister and professor worked a job at Sadie’s diner, except this time Hope was not around to change the subject. Riley stirred the coffee with a plastic spoon and then dropped the spoon in the sink. He brought the mug to Mr. Hanks, who reached up with both hands to receive it. Riley noticed a drop of coffee quivering on the bottom of the mug. He watched it apathetically, his mind on other things. He said, “The money’s not for me.”

  “No? Who’s it for, then?”

  “My wife. My daughter. A friend of theirs. You.”

  “Me?”

  Riley walked to the window at the top of the stairs. Through the fog he saw the men in coats and ties down by the Cadillac. One paced back and forth, talking on a cell phone and using a lot of hand gestures. The other leaned calmly against the hood, whittling on a stick with a pocketknife. The one with the knife was pretty large, his shoulders even broader than Dylan Delaney’s. He had a short, military-looking haircut and a way about his movements with the knife that made Riley think he was something other than a driver or a businessman.

  “Is that big guy a bodyguard or something?”

  Lee Hanks said, “I’ve been getting death threats.”

  Riley turned. “Since that fella leaked the news about the formula? About the price you plan to charge?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t understand, Reverend. You said the money is for your family and me?”

  “Don’t you think five thousand dollars is too much?”

  “We have very high expenses.”

  Out on the misty street beyond the Cadillac, Riley saw ten or twelve ragged figures pass by Mrs. Harding’s gravel driveway, walking toward downtown. Two uniformed National Guardsmen with ugly black rifles emerged from the fog behind them, keeping pace on the far side of the road. The homeless men reminded Riley of his own days on the streets with Brice. That led to thoughts of his old friend dead on the floor with a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol cradled in his hands. Biting his lip to stop the pain, Riley said, “What about the poor?”

  Lee Hanks sipped his coffee. Turning toward him Riley saw the way the totally bald man’s eyebrows came together above his nose, one bushy black line across his face. Riley noticed the man’s clothes, casual but expensive, a raw silk sweater and linen slacks, the kind of thing a billionaire might wear to a country club. He saw the drop of coffee clinging gamely to the bottom of the mug. He thought of mentioning it again, but did not want to distract the man from answering his question.

  Lee Hanks swallowed. “That’s not half bad.”

  “Do you remember what you said to my wife and me? That day when you and the others on the board approved us for the mission to Brazil?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “You said you envied us because you don’t usually get to see the fruits of your own labor for the Lord. You said you had nothing to offer but money. You said most of us must be content with one isolated part of the harvest. You said your role was to pay the workers and purchase the tools, but Hope and I were going out to virgin soil, to clear it, plow it, plant it and reap the harvest, all ourselves.”

  Lee Hanks nodded. “It’s a blessing to be involved in everything the way you were.”

  “But the money. You said your role was to help with the money.”

  “That’s the gift I’ve been given.”

  “So how can you talk about charging homeless alcoholics five thousand dollars?”

  “Look, I understand what you’re saying. I really do. I wish there was a better solution. But how do you think I got all that money to spend on missions work? I live in the real world, Reverend. I make compromises. Sometimes it seems as though people think we lie about expenses, but they really are extremely high. We have to maintain enough cash flow to pay for research and development of new medicines, for clinical trials, marketing, production, distribution. Not to mention legal defenses against everyone who sues us. Do you have any idea how many lawsuits were filed aga
inst our company in the last twelve months alone?”

  “But—”

  “Now along you come, refusing to reveal the source of your discovery, trying to hide your identity. I look around this little place of yours and I don’t see so much as a high school chemistry set, and I feel like a fool. You send us this formula from out of nowhere in the mail, and our chemists and medical researchers think it’s going to work, and I just go along with everything, hook, line, and sinker, and here we are, getting sued again in a very high profile way, thanks to you.”

  Riley noticed a small round stain on Lee Hanks’s perfect linen slacks. The drop of coffee had fallen. He should have mentioned it before, or wiped the mug more carefully. He should not have offered coffee in the first place, if he couldn’t do it properly. He said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, thanks, but ‘sorry’ and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee, as they used to say. Except it costs more like two-fifty these days, doesn’t it? And you think five thousand dollars is too much to cure an alcoholic.” The bald man shook his head and set the mug of instant coffee on the table next to The Big Book.

  Looking at the book, Riley thought about the fourth step. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. He remembered his delight in the apparent symmetry of selling the development and marketing rights to this man—believing with that one act he would cure all alcoholics everywhere, and help Hope and Bree get past the chaos he had caused, and offer something back to this stranger who had also suffered at his hands. But here the stranger sat, offering yet more evidence that Riley left a stain on everything he touched.