The Cure (10 page)

“Hey, mister,” called the homeless man, tapping on the glass. “Can you spare some change?”

The pale man at the wheel looked away and Riley heard his answer in the loud click of all four car doors locking at once. Shivering, the homeless man bent to peer in the back window at Riley.

“’Scuse me, sir, can you . . . Hey, ain’t you that guy?”

In unconscious imitation of the church usher, Riley turned away, stroking his long beard as he watched Henry and the policeman at the shelter across the street. Outside, he heard the man call to his companion, “Ain’t this that guy?” Riley remembered how it was to be lifted from the ground and carried off against his will. His palms began to sweat in the car’s dry heat. He refused to acknowledge their existence as the other homeless man said, “Yeah, that’s him!” and they both began tapping on the widow. “Hey, mister! We need help! We come all the way from Mobile to get cured! Come on, mister! Won’t you help us out?”

Across the street Henry and the cop shook hands again, and the preacher came back toward the car. The homeless men began to beat their palms on the glass. Riley flinched at every blow, thinking of his utter helplessness with all those hands on him, some lifting him up, some pressing him down to murder. Riley wished he was back in the harsh safety of the jail.

The policeman across the street finally noticed the unruly men and strode toward the white Mercedes, a few steps behind Henry. At the sight of his approach the men cursed Riley and hurried away. Hightower unlocked his door, and the preacher slipped into the passenger seat, bringing a gust of icy air along with him. He said, “Man, that’s bad.”

“What?” asked Bill Hightower.

“Willa’s gone.”

“Good riddance,” said the gray man at the wheel. “Now maybe we can do something about all these bums.”

“No, seriously, it’s bad.” Nodding toward the policeman, Henry said, “Sammy said there’s a lot of blood and her stuff is still up in her room.” Riley sat in silence on the leather seat, thinking about the woman trying to stop them, standing up for him. Then Henry said, “You mind givin’ me and Stanley a lift to my place?”

“How come?” asked Hightower.

“Well, it’s a ways to walk.”

“I mean how come you want to take him there?”

“The shelter’s closed. He’s gotta have someplace warm to sleep.”

“We don’t know him. We don’t know a thing about him, except he doesn’t mind spoiling Communion.”

Watching out the rear window Riley saw the two homeless men accost three others half a block away. The five of them turned as one to stare at the Mercedes. Wiping sweating palms on his threadbare trousers, Riley would have given anything to avoid walking through the streets of Dublin in broad daylight.

“Come on, Bill,” said the pastor. “You gonna give us a ride or not?”

To Riley’s great relief, the man started the nearly silent engine of the car.

Five minutes later they rolled to a stop in front of a small Cape Cod style house on the hill above downtown. Henry got out. Riley did not. He did not even notice they had stopped. He lingered in the back seat, lost in contemplation of debauched Communions and stolen tithes. He flinched when Henry tapped on the glass beside him. He looked out at the man, certain for an instant that the ghosts had come for him again. But he need not have worried. Before Riley could respond the pale man at the wheel stepped on the gas and drove away, with Riley in the back.

Riley turned to look through the rear window at Henry, who stood staring after them, his mouth open in surprise. Watching Henry standing there, Riley said, “What are you doing?”

“Giving you a ride,” replied Bill Hightower.

Riley tried to think of ways to make him stop. Perhaps an apology. “I’m sorry about Communion,” he said.

“You should be.”

The man followed the winding lane below the ridge of the hill overlooking Dublin and the harbor below, past Bowditch College and up a short half block and onto Route 1, turning right, down east. Three miles along the highway Hightower turned left onto a narrow blacktop road, and the big car ascended through dense woods, gliding effortlessly below the shadowed canopies of pine and spruce and hemlock, past a hulking lichen-covered granite outcropping and into a grove of stark-white naked birches. Now and then they passed the brown and wilted remnants of a fern dell. A little stream appeared along the right and came and went beyond the trees as the car rolled farther inland. Ice had begun to form, threatening and end to the trickle’s merry downhill dance.

At a gentle curve they passed a homestead, the white clapboard house and barn connected by a long room with a side porch, smoke curling skyward from its brown brick chimney, and two silos in the back with metal hoops around their middles like a pair of giant barrels. As the Mercedes rolled along beside the fallow fields Riley suddenly remembered the name of the road, Green’s End, named for the family that had lived there since the eighteenth century. He began to look ahead with interest. Soon they would come to a turnout where he and his sweetheart had sometimes sought privacy during their high-school courtship. He smiled to think of foggy windows and passionate kisses and long, earnest conversations about everything beneath the sun.

The Mercedes rolled right past the turnout, with Riley looking back now at the spot that held such happy memories, then it was lost behind them as the car went on for what must have been another twenty miles, until finally the gray and tall and skinny man slowed and stopped at an intersection with another road, which was somewhat wider than Green’s End and had gravel shoulders.

“Do you have any money?” asked the man. He did not bother looking back at Riley.

“A little.”

Hightower shifted in his seat, reaching for his hip pocket. He removed his wallet and counted out five twenty-dollar bills. He turned to pass them back to Riley. “Here’s a hundred. You’re a good thirty miles from Dublin, but about ten miles that way, there’s Liberty. They have a bus stop at the Shamrock station. That’s enough money to get you clear to Florida. Now you listen to me. I know some guys who would have taken care of you a different way for half that much. I didn’t have to be this nice, understand? Get out of my car.”

Riley opened the door and stepped into the shadow of the woods. It was wicked cold without his coat. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers and heard the lonely rushing sound of wind high in the pines. The Mercedes pulled up onto the crossroad, made a U-turn and came back to pause near Riley, who stood just off the asphalt on a soft bed of rust-colored needles. The pale gray man spoke through his open window, saying, “Don’t come back,” and then he sped away.

The mocking caws of crows pierced Riley’s thoughts as he watched the taillights disappear around the first bend in the shadowed wood. He turned to stare up the other road. Ten miles to Liberty. Three hours’ walk, maybe two and a half if he hustled. He could be there before dark, buy a little food and a ticket south, stay warm and dry on the bus until he felt like getting off. He thought about the reason he had come home to Maine. He was sober now. Brice was beyond hope. What more could he want?

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.

C
HAPTER
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WELVE

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UTHORITY
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.