The Cure (9 page)

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

D
UBLIN
T
OWNSHIP’S SIX JAIL CELLS
were too small to hold all the people arrested in Henry’s Drug Store. Riley greeted the morning in a hallway, along with more than a dozen other overflow prisoners, all of them uncomfortable on folding chairs lined up against the walls. His left hand rested in his lap, stained by the ink they had used to take his fingerprints. His right hand hung down at his side where his wrist had been bound to the chair leg by a narrow plastic strap. Throughout the night he had tried to sleep without success, nodding off for maybe fifteen minutes at a time before being awakened by the old-fashioned ringing of a telephone or the slap of shoe soles on terrazzo as policemen passed him by. Riley Keep was not concerned. Incarceration held no stigma for a man in his position, and having gathered some experience while in other jails for vagrancy, he knew it was no worse than the streets.

A policeman with a clipboard called out, “Stanley Livingston.”

Riley Keep said, “Here.”

The policeman used a pair of scissors to cut the plastic strap around his wrist and walked him to a small room down the hall, where Riley stood next to a metal table as the door behind him closed with a dull click of the lock. He and the table were the only objects in the room. Riley paced the room, stroking his bushy beard in thought. After five minutes of standing, Riley sat on the floor and leaned his back against the wall, stretching his legs straight out in front of him. Almost immediately the lock clicked again, the door swung open, and a tall man entered. He wore a starched khaki shirt and loose dungarees and had broad shoulders and a flat stomach in spite of his age, which Riley guessed to be around sixty. He looked down on Riley and said, “Sorry there’s no chairs.”

Riley shrugged.

“We had to use them all outside.”

“Okay.”

The man glanced at a clipboard in his hand. “Stanley Livingston, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You mind standin’ up?”

Riley rolled to his side to get a foot underneath himself and rose, using the wall for support, feeling stiff and sore after his night on the folding chair.

“Okay, Stanley, I’m Chief Steven Novak. Tell me what happened last night.”

Riley told him everything. There was no need to lie; anything he had done wrong was forced on him. The man listened carefully until Riley finished, then said, “So that pile of drugs all mixed together on the counter, you did that?”

“They made me.”

“’Cause they think ya know a cure for alcoholism.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why would they think that?”

Riley’s instincts warned him to be careful. What had happened in the alley would sound like it was crazy, or a lie. He had no proof except an empty plastic bag and a note that he himself could have written. He said, “I just came in the shelter for supper and the next thing I know they’re hauling me off to the drug store, like I said. I told them I couldn’t heal them. You can ask that lady who runs the place; she heard me.”

“Uh-huh.” The chief pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote something on the clipboard’s paperwork. He took his time. Riley began to worry as he listened to the slow, deliberate scratching of the pen. This was not like an arrest for vagrancy; it was more personal, more specific to him. They might try harder to learn his identity, and he did not wish to be known.

“Hang on a minute,” said the chief.

The man left the room. The door clicked shut behind him. Riley stood awkwardly beside the table, which did not look as if it would support his weight. He wondered if they had some kind of hidden camera in the little room. There was no two-way mirror, no window, but just four bare walls, a recessed light in the ceiling, and the table. Riley wondered why the police chief had singled him out. A few had escaped, but they must have arrested twenty or thirty others at the drug store. Out of so many, why come for him first? And why the chief, in person? Why not let some detective or policeman conduct the interrogations? Riley waited. He began to wonder if this was supposed to make him nervous, the writing and the waiting. But why would they want to make him nervous? Riley’s legs grew tired so he sat back on the floor. Almost immediately the door opened and the chief entered again. This time the tall man held a brown paper bag.

“Sorry to be gone so long,” he said. “Got a lot to deal with, what with all you fellas here.”

Riley looked up at him, tucking his long hair back behind an ear. “Do I need a lawyer?”

“What ya want a lawyer for?”

“It seems like there’s something going on.”

“Naw. Just clearin’ up the paperwork. Ya know how it is.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Fact, I got your stuff right here. Stuff they took out of your pockets when we processed ya.” He put the paper bag on the table.

“So I can go?”

“In a minute. First tell me about this.” He opened the bag and stuck a hand inside, feeling around as if in search of something. “Let’s see . . . where is that pretty little thing?” He pulled out a plastic bag, small and transparent, and held it up. When Riley squinted, the man came closer to hold the bag right before Riley’s eyes. Riley stared at a string of tiny dark brown beads and small beige tubes and a little cross, primitively carved but elevated above the commonplace by a delicate golden inlay. In that barren room, with the light so strong and the policeman playing games the way he was, after a sleepless night on a metal chair and nearly getting killed at Henry’s Drug Store, Riley did not recognize the cross at first, but the chief was patient and continued dangling the bag ten inches from his nose until eventually Riley remembered.

Without thinking he asked, “Where did you get that?”

“So ya recognize it?”

Riley thought of sitting under a tin roof as the ceaseless rain beat a loud staccato rhythm overhead. He saw a block of wood and a penknife in his hands, and remembered the peacefulness of that Sabbath day, whittling bit by bit, all alone below the open shed as the rain came down but did not touch him, the wall of jungle at the far side of the airstrip nearly lost beyond the blue-gray downpour. He remembered being filled with love as he fashioned the humble birthday gift for her, many years ago. He remembered cutting a pair of parallel grooves into the face of the small cross and carefully pressing the gold foil into the grooves with the blunt back of the knife, the foil he had saved from a box of chocolates purchased in a Brazilian village. He remembered the taste of chocolate, and now, standing in the jail, Riley remembered the much more recent taste of science on his fingertip and the way the two tasted the same. He felt disoriented, looking at the cross in a hard and empty room in Dublin, Maine, with all the lost time rushing back into the present. He asked again, “Where did you get that?”

“Do ya recognize it or not?”

Riley Keep said nothing. The chief of police waited, staring at him. Riley did not care. He was not there. He was in the jungles of Brazil. Finally the chief said, “Look, we both know ya had it in your pocket, and we both know it’s Willa’s. I just saw it on her a few days ago. She got it hung up on somethin’ in the kitchen at her shelter and I gave her a hand. I touched this thing myself.”

Riley’s eyes were on the floor. The old woman at the shelter? She had worn the cross, here, in Dublin? How was that possible?

There could only be one explanation.

The chief said, “Why don’t ya just tell me how ya took it from her?”

Riley continued to look down, saying nothing. It should not cause him pain to know she gave his gift away. He should not care. His newly resurrected imagination understood her reasons—the multileveled symbolism—and his guilty conscience whispered she had every right.

“Where’s Willa, Stanley?”

The question settled down into him slowly as his eyes searched the tiny pebbles of the terrazzo floor between his feet, clean and white and slightly out of focus. If this man asked where the old lady was, it meant she was missing. If this man claimed the necklace had been hers and claimed they found the necklace in his pocket, it meant he thought Riley caused her disappearance. Riley was glad he had been shocked to see the necklace, glad his shock had left him speechless. He decided to say nothing more to anyone.

The chief asked him many questions, eventually turning angry at Riley’s silence, then left him alone in the little room. Riley had no way of knowing how much time went by after that. He sat against the wall at first, then lay down on his side and went to sleep. He had slept in harder places.

He awoke when someone tapped the bottom of his shoe. Opening his eyes he saw a uniformed policeman standing over him. “Get up,” said the policeman. “You’re free to go.”

The policeman led him down the hallway, past others still restrained in chairs on either side. The policeman stood him by a tall counter in the front room of the station and poured the contents of a paper sack before him and watched dull-eyed as Riley replaced the meager contents of his pockets: a plastic-wrapped peppermint, a nail clipper, and a thin roll of paper money, the pay he had received so far from Henry. Also, the folded note he had stolen from the church collection envelope. For some reason they had not asked him about that. Maybe they thought the notations on it were pure gibberish. Maybe they were right. The only thing they did not return was the necklace with the cross. Of course he did not ask for it. He would not have asked for it even if there had been no danger in the request. He had long since given it away, and did not want it back.

On the other side of the counter stood Henry in his usual plaid flannel shirt and down-filled vest. With him was a very pale, gray, tall and skinny man in a putty-colored trench coat and a plain gray suit, who reminded Riley of someone he could not quite recall.

Henry said, “Hi ya, Stanley. Doin’ all right?”

“Ayuh.”

“Glad to hear it. You wanna ride?”

“You’re the one who got me out?”

“Ayuh.”

“Aren’t you mad at me?”

“Way I heard it, this wasn’t your fault. Right?”

“No, it wasn’t my fault.”

“So, you wanna ride?”

Throughout this exchange the tall and skinny man had not looked at Riley. Now he led the way outside the station, through a glass door and into the frigid late November air. Riley followed through the cold along a walkway around the side of the tall brick building. A hillside dressed in deep green spruce rose beyond the level parking lot in back. Riley raised his eyes to see a pair of sea gulls hovering in the onshore winter wind. He wished he had a coat. He had not been wearing one when they dragged him from the shelter. The pale man got behind the wheel of a white Mercedes Benz. Henry got in the front passenger seat. Riley got into the back. A man and woman ran up to the side of the car. The woman tapped on Riley’s window. She was wicked good-looking. He touched a button and the glass slid down a few inches.

“Stanley Livingston?” asked the woman breathlessly.

Riley did not answer. The man behind her had a camera on his shoulder with its lens pointed straight at him. Riley looked into the lens and blinked.

The woman asked, “Are you the man who has a cure for alcoholism?”

“I don’t have it anymore,” said Riley. “I gave it all away.”

“So it’s true? You did have a cure?”

“Uh, Stanley?” Henry looked back over his shoulder. “Pretty cold out there. Maybe you should roll up the window.”

Riley did as he was told. The woman outside kept on speaking to him. She raised her voice. She seemed almost angry.

“Where to, Pastor?” asked the pale man in the putty overcoat.

“The shelter, I guess. Right, Stanley?”

The very thought made Riley’s stomach roil, but he said, “Okay.”

“Uh, I forgot to make the introductions. Stanley, this here’s Bill Hightower. He’s a volunteer at our church. A lawyer too. Thought it might be good to have him along. Bill, this is Stanley.”

“Hello,” said the gray man at the wheel.

The even hum of the car’s excellent heater and its faultless suspension blocked all external noise as they glided through the town. Riley saw the homeless everywhere: loitering in recessed doorways, behind O’Malley’s convenience store, near gas pumps, and curbside at every stoplight. It was as if all the summer visitors had returned without their cars or kids or money. Riley watched them through the fifty-thousand-dollar window as though he were watching television. Most of them ignored the passing Mercedes the way an actor might ignore the camera, but a few refused to maintain distance, staring back at Riley. Some of their stares were empty; some were greedy. Gazing through the tinted glass, Riley was one of them and he was not. He had been cured, and he had not. He had somehow become someone in between.

How long had he been back in Dublin? A week? Two? In that short time it seemed to Riley Keep the homeless must have doubled in the streets. It might have been a trick of his unpracticed imagination, but he believed Henry saw the increase too. There was a sadness in the preacher’s profile as he stared out his own window. Or maybe the man was only thinking of the damage done to his store. With mournful eyes on the indigent people out beyond the Mercedes Benz, Henry said, “What they’re sayin’ ‘bout you, healing alcoholics . . . anything to that, Stanley?”

Riley felt this man deserved the truth. But as he opened his mouth he remembered his sobriety had been stolen from this man’s church, and with that memory came a sudden recognition of the pale one driving, the usher who had seen Riley swill Communion wine as if it were mere alcohol, and with righteous indignation thrown him out onto the street.

“No,” said Riley. “I can’t heal anybody.”

They turned a corner and glided to a stop across the street from the shelter. Several strands of yellow tape barred the front door. A police patrol car sat at the curb and a man in uniform loitered on the nearby sidewalk.

“Huh,” said Henry. “Look at that. Hang on a minute, fellas. I’ll go see what’s goin’ on.”

Riley watched as the preacher/pharmacist crossed the street and approached the policeman. They shook hands. Henry said something. The policeman said something back. The man behind the wheel of the Mercedes Benz said nothing. Riley said nothing. A pair of ragged men came wandering along the sidewalk. As they approached the Mercedes, one leaned down next to the driver’s closed window.