The Cure (3 page)

Her second look didn’t alter the facts. He was indeed who he had seemed to be, yet he was not as she remembered. He was different in his death.

Turning away, the mayor of Dublin Township fled before the awful fact of him. She stumbled into the small crowd outside the room, gaining momentum, shoving rudely in her haste to escape. Once free of them she ran without restraint, down the hall, through the lobby and out the glass door to the street. She glanced wildly left and right, found her car, and continued her headlong flight in that direction.

At the driver’s door she grasped the handle, but it wouldn’t open. She yanked harder, again and again, before she realized it was locked. With a low cry of frustration she swung her purse around in front of her and searched for her keys. She had never locked her car before, never locked the front door of her home until all these homeless people started showing up in Dublin, a stream of them, a flood of them, a plague of them, coming from everywhere and nowhere for no apparent reason, bringing Brice, and with him death—death and Riley Keep as sure as death would follow life—and with Riley, another kind of dying she had hoped was gone forever.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

A
BOUT TWENTY OTHERS SLEPT
in the bunk room near as Riley Keep could tell, some on air mattresses on the floor. It was an awful lot of fellas for such a small room, an awful lot for such a small town, especially at that time of year, but the room still felt empty without Brice.

With all the competition on the streets Riley had not been able to bum so much as a dime all day. It was worse than anyplace he’d ever been, much worse than the big cities like Boston and New York. All the best corners and intersections were taken by dawn, some people sleeping out there in spite of the cold for fear they’d lose their spot. He had tried the park, the landing, the bus stop—pretty much everywhere—but Dublin was a small town, and it didn’t take many men and women just like him to fill it, with everybody hungry for a miracle or, failing that, a handout.

It meant going to bed cold sober, which meant sleeping poorly, especially with a few of the others snoring like steam engines. It wasn’t the noise; noise was nothing when you generally slept under bridges. It was the way the snores reminded him of Brice. Brice had always snored loudly enough to wake the dead, and Riley had gotten used to his particular sleeping sounds. He found their absence deafening.

Riley told himself to change the subject. Brice would want him to get some sleep, get up rested and get out there and get a drink. Riley started counting to one hundred. It was a way he had to stop his mind from racing. Every time he got to a hundred he started over back at one, and after a while he started having trouble keeping count, and just as he began to drift away a fella somewhere in the bunk room started mumbling and then talking louder, and then he screamed to high heaven and kept on screaming until that old woman came to talk some sense to him.

Riley listened in the darkness as the woman told the fella to hang on, it was just the DTs and he would be okay. Riley figured it for a falsehood. He himself had seen some strange things sliding down the walls in times past. If he went much longer without a drink he’d be seeing them again. Ugly, terrifying things. The fella’s screams made perfect sense to Riley.

Well. At least Brice was past it now. A week gone almost, and Riley figured if the God he used to serve had any mercy whatsoever, Brice was up there with him now, happy as a bug in mud. Riley tried to take some comfort in it. He figured underneath it all he was still a Christian. He figured he himself would be with Brice again one day. He tried to focus on that, to make it mean something, but what with the poor fella in the grip of alcohol withdrawal right beside him, and so many others sleeping outside in the cold to save a spot where they could beg for cash to buy a drink, somehow Riley couldn’t conjure up much solace from the thought of heaven.

Lacing his fingers behind his head he stared dry-eyed at the bottom of the bunk above. He had decided long ago there was no value in the power of positive thinking. A lifetime of defeat could not be overcome by intangibles. Real change would take something outside him, something to come along and take control, just as death had taken Brice. Riley had no hope for that at all.

He knew where his hope lay.

Riley rose and pulled on trousers and a shirt and the old wool jacket that little woman found for him, and although it was still dark outside he left the shelter in pursuit of what would save him.

His skinny legs flexed on their own occasionally when it had been this long between drinks. He moved them to walk and they did what he wanted, but also they quivered now and then and he had to stop until they settled down. Even in the cold he sweated. His stomach felt caved in on itself, though the old woman had fed them all hot beef stew just ten hours ago. He was no longer thinking whiskey, or even beer or wine; he was thinking outside the box. In Washington, D.C., one time he and Brice had poured Sterno down their throats to stop the terrifying things from sliding down the walls. Mouthwash would do. Anything was better than those ugly, terrifying things. Even a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Even if it killed you. After they had carried Brice away someone said he did it on purpose. They said it because of the rubbing alcohol, but Riley knew better than that. You did what had to be done, was all.

The horizon had begun to glow out on the Atlantic when he reached the little parking lot beside the wharf, what Mainers called the town landing. It was lit and busy, the lobstermen with foggy breath in coats and gloves and rubber boots, rowing out to their boats, unloading traps and whatnot from their pickup trucks or standing around drinking steaming cups of coffee and talking together. A couple of them saw him coming. He stepped into a pool of yellow from a streetlight and they looked away. They could see what he was, even with a shower and clean clothes. Some things don’t wash off.

Riley stood and watched the sun come up, dreaming ghostly waking dreams of wooden bars with padded stools and signs with Clydesdales hitched to huge beer wagons and rows of beautiful bottles on glass shelves and a cunnin’ girl to pour. Dreaming of heaven, in other words, but willing to settle for a little mouthwash if need be. He watched the sun rise, and for some reason he got mad. Not because of Brice, exactly. It was more that he hadn’t had a drink in maybe two whole days. A deadly serious situation. And there was God, pulling the sun out of his pocket like it was nothing. It made him mad to think how simple it would be for God to give him what he wanted, and how little he wanted compared to most people. The lobstermen, for example, who were constantly buying new pickup trucks and houses and clothing for their wives and children, and steaks and television sets and bowling balls and popcorn at the movies. And him, what did he ask? Nothing but a drink. It made him mad to think how stingy God could be, until he realized he had not asked for what he needed. Riley Keep had lost most memories, but he was pretty sure he had never asked the Lord for alcohol.

The clouds out on the ocean glowed golden now, with jewel-like pinks and royal purples, and rays of sunlight like a crown. Riley didn’t care. He turned and walked back up the hill, hoping for a garbage bin behind a restaurant. Sometimes they threw out wine bottles with a little something left. Why not be optimistic? If you thought in terms of mouthwash, that was what you got. Why not think in terms of a nice Merlot or a Rioja or something along those lines? He was desperate enough to hope there was a power in positive thinking after all.

Passing a parked truck he saw a bumper sticker in the gathering light that said
Jesus Loves You
. He thought about that, and about Brice’s last few moments on the floor in a homeless shelter laundry. He thought about what you did when you loved someone. You tried to make them happy, right? You tried to give them what they wanted, like those lobstermen buying popcorn for their kids. Riley put that together with the power of positive thinking, and the fact that he had never actually asked God for a drink, and thought, why not? What’s he going to do, kill me? So he paused there by the bumper sticker and spoke out loud. “All right. In that case, give me something good to drink.”

Nothing happened, of course.

Riley set out again, still thinking garbage bins, across the street and into a park area where the frost beneath his feet lay brittle on the grass. No snow yet, but he could sense it in the air, coming to make a lie out of that sunrise.

He blew into cupped hands as he walked. Why was he here? He should be in Miami. He
would
be in Miami except for Brice. As the urge rose ruthlessly within him, Riley had to fight to cling to Brice, the reason he had come, the thing that made this sacrifice worthwhile. He had tried to save his friend. That should make some difference. He had failed, but he had tried. If ever there had been an ounce of truth in what they taught him about God, that should make some difference.

Crossing the park, looking down as usual, searching for things people dropped—a dollar would buy a swallow—not looking ahead, Riley nearly walked into a tree. An ancient oak, he thought; it was hard to tell with the leaves down. He was a linguist and a missionary and an English teacher after all, not a botanist. He saw only giant roots writhing in the sod, smooth on top where people had stepped on them, and nestled among the gnarled roots a brown paper bag of familiar size and shape. Riley bent to pick it up and his legs gave a quiver and he stumbled, hitting his forehead on the tree trunk but ignoring that, reaching for the bag, lying beside it in the roots and lifting it, feeling the heft of it, the gravitational wallow of the liquid as it sloshed back and forth, and reminding himself it could be anything, yet swelling up to the edges of himself with hope.

Eagerly, he pulled the bottle from the sack. It was full, the seal unbroken, its contents golden like the sunrise but much more beautiful, a complete quart of the finest single-malt Scotch whiskey. He held it a few inches from his face, squinting without his long-lost eyeglasses, recognizing the label from when he was a college professor with a wife and daughter, and his friend Brice was a plumber and they could both afford such things, and he pulled away the cap (it had a cork!) and thrust the bottle to his lips and took the Scotch into himself.

He sighed and closed his useless eyes. After the first swallow always came the best moment, when he felt the warmth go down and knew relief was on its way, not yet there, but coming, the anticipation better than reality would be. Some preferred the moment when the rosy feeling rose and anything was possible and you were a giant and all was well and would be well forever. But while that was indeed a fine thing, Riley Keep had always thought it second to the first anticipation because, of course, the promise in your mind surpassed the truth inside your body, and the solace of a bottle nearly full was lost to those who rushed headlong toward emptiness to come.

Riley Keep lay among the ancient roots and drank again, less urgently this time, but still deeply. As the sunrise spread out on the Atlantic, he realized it was gorgeous. The rosy feeling rose and Riley thought of Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn.” Ah, the irony, if only blind or drunk men truly saw the sunrise. Riley was proud of this cleverness, the professor returning, summoned from across the Styx by the warmth expanding in his caved-in belly. All was well in the fading rays and paler pinks and purples. He resolved to slow it down, the rising, to make it last as long as possible, and so began to sip instead of drinking as if bottomless.

Time passed, time to savor, time for deep reflection. He considered the beauty of the scene below, the harbor in the virgin light, lobster boats alert and at attention, all pointing the same way, deep green spruce on the far hill across the water, the comic complaints of wheeling gulls, the perfectly proportioned church facing this little pocket park, its brick facade in exact conformance to the golden mean, the bell in its steeple ringing now, calling in the faithful. Riley’s lacy rising breath reminded him of his wife in her white gown, walking toward him down the aisle of that very church, sunlight streaming through the stained glass, sunlight come a billion miles to dance on his bride in that multicolored moment. He thought that memory might mean something. He thought there might be something in it of the reason he now lay among the ravenous teeth of a Maine winter, something of why he was not in Miami, a reason he could add to Brice, although the memory was frayed and hard to hold and very doubtful, as was the future and every other moment but the one that he was living then and there, if one cared to call it living.

Riley took another careful sip, and ungrateful wretch that he was, not till then did it cross his mind that this was an answered prayer. He had asked for something good to drink, and look what he was holding. The finest kind, the absolute best Scotch in the world. He thought of something from the Bible, that most enduring work of literature, something about man’s inability to imagine what God has in store. The exact words had long before dissolved in spirits with a hundred thousand others, but he seemed to recall it applied to God’s beneficent plans for those who love him, as opposed to the wrath awaiting those God hates.

Why had God granted his request? Riley did not love God. Riley had once thought he did, had once even tried to serve him, had asked for many things in return, and receiving no answers, had become sure God was not there, or not interested, so Riley had stopped asking. You could no more love a god who didn’t answer than you could love a ghost. But if Riley did not love God, it was also true he did not hate God. He felt nothing except a little anger at the sunrise. He had no expectations whatsoever, and maybe that explained the Scotch. Riley tried to imagine what it must be like to be God, everybody always asking for something, pretending love when what they wanted came and angry when it didn’t. Maybe God was glad to give a little Scotch to a fella who asked for very little and expected nothing.

Riley remembered asking to be freed of his addiction, years ago right there in Dublin. He remembered asking that a thousand times to no effect. But never had it crossed his mind to ask for something good to drink, never but this once, and look at the immediate result. Clearly, it had been a matter all along of asking for the proper miracle.

Riley Keep lifted the bottle to the risen sun, offering a toast. “Thanks,” he said, and took another drink. His second prayer that morning, his second prayer in years. It did not seem enough and so he added, “Thanks a lot,” and took another sip. But such casually expressed gratitude seemed insufficient. The Scotch was a thoughtful gift. He should go and thank God properly.

Looking around, Riley saw a hedge. He rose unsteadily and slipped the bottle into the branches, making sure it was completely hidden, and then filled with happy feelings, knowing anything was possible, knowing he was a giant and all was well and would be well forever, Riley crossed the street and climbed the steps and went to church.