The Cure (18 page)

Five thousand dollars. He remembered first hearing that figure and not understanding what it meant, alone that night in his garage apartment. He remembered people coming on the television to explain the implications. The rich would never suffer alcoholism again, but of course the poor would have no hope. A new class distinction would be born, a brave new world where the wealthy could purchase sobriety with its attendant virtues, while the poor remained addicted and exposed to all the sins that drunkenness inspired.

Five thousand dollars was the difference between salvation and slavery. The price of willpower. The cost of freedom. The value of a human life. Riley remembered hearing the people on the television say these things, and the weight coming down again as he began to realize what he had done. In his simpleminded eagerness to help Hope and Bree, and Dylan, and a world of broken people, he had failed to consider one simple, obvious detail: all the millions they were paying him had to come from somewhere.

At first Riley had assumed it must be a mistake. He knew Lee Hanks would make it right. Mr. Hanks was the fine Christian man who had sent him off to save the pagans of Brazil. So Riley had asked Dylan to make a call, to explain the problem, and the solution. Riley would cut his own price, cut it down to nearly nothing. Then Mr. Hanks’s company could sell the cure for much less, perhaps even give it freely to those too poor to pay.

But although Dylan had left many messages, Mr. Hanks had not replied.

As if the thought had conjured up the lawyer from below, Riley saw Hope’s lover come uphill along the sidewalk, approaching the crowd at the foot of the steps. Dylan did not pause but tucked his head and pressed right into the mass of them. Riley watched him nearly make it to the bottom step, then a man stubbornly refused to get out of his way. There was a little flurry of movement, and several other demonstrators moved to block his progress. He seemed to stumble, but then he straightened up and turned to go back through the crowd the way he came. A couple of men stepped up to block his retreat in that direction too.

“Uh, Chief . . .” said Riley.

“I see him.” The chief pointed at Dylan and said, “Hey, Dave, you and Ronny wanna go get that fool and bring him up here?”

With their black batons drawn, the two policemen hurried down the steps and muscled their way into the crowd, arriving at Dylan’s side and hustling him toward the steps. The protesters parted reluctantly before the three men, but they made it back to the stairs without the use of force. Soon a pale and nervous Dylan joined Riley and the chief in front of the town-hall doors.

“Seems like them fellas don’t like ya very much, counselor,” said Chief Novak.

“Ayuh. Been gettin’ that a lot,” said Dylan.

Riley glanced at his profile and saw his swollen black and purple left eye and felt a rush of sympathy. The man had been a target ever since CNN broke the story and the whole world learned Dylan was the legal representative of BHR Incorporated, the Delaware corporation that held the patent on the cure. People had vandalized his truck, thrown rocks at his house, and a homeless man had walked up to him in the street and socked him in the eye without warning. But in spite of everything, Dylan had not broached the subject of going public with Riley’s identity.

The chief said, “Bet they’d back off if ya told us who your client is.”

“We’ve been all through that,” said Dylan, carefully looking away from Riley.

“Ayuh,” said the chief. “But I still think your man mighta killed our Willa. Be a good thing if ya gave him up.”

“I just can’t, Steve. I can tell ya he’s no murderer, if that makes ya feel any better.”

“Won’t feel better till I have that fella in my jail.”

Riley stared at the angry faces in the crowd below, the ones who had slept with him in the shelter, who had remained in Dublin through the bitter cold winter, who had come here seeking a miracle and would not leave without it. If they would treat Dylan this way, what would they do to him? He remembered the giant’s rage in Henry’s pharmacy, and felt a new fear supersede his concerns about the police chief’s investigation of Willa Newdale’s disappearance. It was an awful thing to be the focus of such fury. If Dylan ever wavered under the pressure to reveal his client’s name, Chief Novak’s jail might be the safest place in town.

As if reading Riley’s mind, Dylan said, “Shouldn’t ya get more men up here?”

The chief nodded, his eyes also wary on the crowd. “Would if I could.”

“What else could they be doin’ that’s more important than this?”

The chief faced Dylan. “Well, counselor, let’s see. Five a my fellas are on riot alert down at the park already, and another couple of ‘em are handlin’ some of these people at the landin’, and for some reason these alkies keep wantin’ to break into Henry’s Drug Store again so I had to send some fellas over there. That there is the whole Dublin police force, including them that usually sits behind a desk. Like I keep sayin’, if you’d just gimme a name maybe we could settle a lot of these people down.”

Dylan sighed and said nothing, as Riley eyed the other two policemen. Three men at the top of the stairs, and a hundred at the bottom. He asked, “Are we safe?”

“I tried to get Bill Hightower to call this off, but the pigheaded . . .” The chief’s voice trailed off as Riley saw him make a deliberate effort at self-control. After a moment, staring down at the protesters, the chief continued, “I told ‘em a while ago not to set foot on the steps, and so far they’re stayin’ back. You fellas stop your worryin’ and go on in. We can handle this out here.”

Riley watched the giant from Houston chanting angry slogans with a massive raised fist beating time above his head. Riley thought about leaving Dublin. Probably with all his money there was a way to go someplace where people couldn’t find him. But he didn’t know how to use money in that way. What if he did it wrong and made things even worse? Everything he did made things worse. It might even be better to vanish without the money, go back to what he was before. Riley knew exactly how to disappear into the midst of those he had betrayed. He could head south to the overpasses of Florida and no one would ever find him. He could be Stanley Livingston again. Given all his failures here in Dublin, the prospect had appeal—a simple life, beholden to no one and responsible for nothing.

Then Riley thought of the naïve girl who had shared his dream to save the world. She had followed him so willingly into danger, followed in a dugout canoe, and after four long years she had dragged him home insensate. He remembered going through the motions here at home, and Hope’s apparently unending patience until that final night, was it four years after they came home from Brazil? Yes, at least that long. One did not go from holy man to homeless alcoholic overnight. Four years of steady decline from failed missionary to failed professor, failed husband, failed father. And the final form of danger he inflicted on her that last evening in their kitchen when he had raised his hand to Bree and Hope had charged between them, suddenly a tigress, furiously driving him out into the street, into his native element once and for all, back into the jungle where she should have left him in the first place.

“Riley?”

He turned to find Hope’s lover standing there, battered and bruised on his behalf, a good man, the kind of man Hope and Bree deserved, holding the imposing hand-carved door open and staring at him curiously.

“I was just thinking,” said Riley.

“Sure.”

With Dylan following, Riley entered.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

W
ITH HER CAR WINDOW DOWN
in honor of the beautiful spring afternoon, Hope cruised aimlessly, counting desperate people, passing numbers thirty-eight and thirty-nine, two men combing through a trash can. She was in the old Pontiac because the opulent Mercedes made her nervous. She had driven it only once or twice since learning that it caused so much suspicion. Other than that, she left the expensive car in her backyard out of sight.

Hope understood why the car bothered people. No one gave a gift like that for nothing; someone somewhere wanted something in return. It had just about given her a conniption fit trying to figure out who it was. At first she lived in daily expectation of some fella from away dropping by her office, asking for a special-use permit to build a slaughterhouse or a paper mill or some such blight on the community. She fantasized herself saying “No sir, mister man, you just take these keys and get on back to whatever rock you crawled out from under.” But when weeks went by and nothing like that happened, she began to think the gift had most likely come from Dylan. At least Dylan was the only one who had the motive and the opportunity.

Three years ago, soon after Riley left town, Dylan had begun to come around. He was helpful and handsome, and he went to her church, and in her loneliness she might have encouraged his attentions. He had asked her to marry him last year, and she was pretty sure the thought was still never far from his mind even now, so yes, the car had probably come from Dylan, who had lots of motivation.

As for opportunity, incredibly, that had come along as well. Soon after the luxurious Mercedes so mysteriously appeared in her driveway, Dylan had purchased a new pickup truck for himself, an expensive one, with a big diesel engine and double tires on the back axle and a crew cab. He also put the
Mary Lynn
on the hard at McSweeny’s Yard for a complete refit, including a paint job. Meanwhile, every lobsterman in town continued to bemoan the unexplained migration of their livelihood to other waters, which only added to Hope’s worries. She had wondered where on earth Dylan’s money could have come from if not the sea, and why he didn’t speak of his sudden wealth. She wondered if he was hiding something. He had mentioned going back to practicing law, working for some company from away, but although she knew Dylan was as sharp as a tack she still questioned how a small-town lobsterman who hadn’t practiced law in years could attract such a client. Hope feared to ask her question because of the implied mistrust. She had opted instead to do her best to keep suspicion from her thoughts. But that had not been possible. She lost a lot of sleep over that Mercedes.

Then Bill Hightower had called to say her mortgage was paid off. Even after finding a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of car parked in her driveway, Hope had been shocked, but not too shocked to think of asking where the mortgage money came from. It seemed a private bank in New York City had wired the outstanding balance on behalf of an anonymous client. So, with nearly twenty years to go on her payments, suddenly Hope Keep owned her whole house, free and clear, and she had become . . . what?

Angry?

Frightened?

It was hard to put a name to the emotion. Frustration entered into it, certainly, because Bill Hightower of all people had handled the transaction, and of course it would give him just the leverage he had been looking for to force her hand about their homeless problem, more than a quarter million between the house and car, and her not knowing who it came from.

Then this news about a cure for alcoholism, and the astonishing announcement that Dylan was involved—was representing one of the companies, just as he had said—and while it certainly explained the money, it left her even more confused about her feelings. She had asked Dylan to take the car and money back in some public way that would clear her name, yet he refused to admit the gifts had come from him. He did assure her there was no law against accepting them, as if that would be a comfort. So long as she didn’t compromise her political integrity, and so long as the car hadn’t been stolen, in Dylan’s professional opinion as the world’s most successful part-time lawyer and lobsterman she could keep the Mercedes and the money, although she would have to pay income taxes on their value.

Until then she had not even thought of income taxes. Now she contemplated the injustice of that on top of all the rest as she counted homeless person number sixty-three, an old woman sitting on the curb. The old woman had as much chance of paying taxes on a quarter million dollars’ worth of gifts as Hope did, what with living check to check on a meager mayor’s salary in a shrinking town of four thousand hard-hit souls. Hope had a daughter on the verge of college, Lord willing, and payments to make on her new boiler. She had considered selling the Mercedes and using the proceeds to pay the taxes on the mortgage money, but what if the car really had been stolen? Wouldn’t someone want it back?

Homeless person number eighty eight stepped in front of her, stepped right out as if the Pontiac wasn’t coming, and staggered to the far side of the street all jerky knees and arms akimbo like some bit actor doing a zombie from
Night of the Living Dead
. As Hope braked to a halt, all her worries chased around and round her head. Why were these people still here? Why stay through the winter? Why did more show up every day? She had asked these questions of a homeless man that very morning and learned they hoped the “mystery man” would reappear, or some clue would be found in Dublin of his whereabouts. They all knew it would be years before the government approved the cure for sale, and even then no homeless drunk would have a prayer of paying what Hanks Pharmaceuticals planned to charge. Yet hopes of getting healed were all these people had, and those hopes were centered here, in Dublin, where a mystery man had healed a few of them last fall for free.

Still counting, still driving slowly around town, Hope remembered when the newspapers and television first announced the whole thing was connected to a lawyer in the little town of Dublin, Maine—Dylan, of course. She was so surprised by this she had barely noticed that Hanks Pharmaceuticals was also mentioned. It took her almost a day to associate the company with another man she knew, Lee Hanks, the billionaire whom they said would sell the cure when it was ready. Of course she didn’t really know him. She had only met Lee Hanks the one time, during an interview with the missions board that sent her and Riley to Brazil. But when Hope remembered that interview, and thought about the fact that she and Dylan were . . . whatever they were, and she had a top of the line Mercedes in her backyard and the title to her house all free and clear, she sensed some kind of disaster coming, especially when it finally occurred to her that Riley had apparently not had a drink in half a year.

How that possible?

She remembered heady days of long ago, leaving that missions board interview with everyone’s best wishes, Mr. Hanks among them. She had pictures in her head of Riley a few weeks later, pausing in his headlong rush along the jetway to smile back at her, and she herself a little later sleeping with his shoulder for a pillow on the TAM flight direct from Miami, Florida, to Manaus, Brazil, and waking beside him to look down from ten thousand feet on the mighty river, a golden ribbon in the sunrise, draped haphazardly across the black forbidding wilderness below.

Hope remembered another thing, the memories tripping over each other now, a riot of multicolored rope hammocks hanging everywhere on the riverboat— the
Tartaruga
, or “Turtle” as she later learned, which was a poor name indeed, for any turtle Hope had ever seen could easily outpace that rusted hulk— and the diesel fumes, and the smoke of cooking fires on the deck, and Riley swaying in his hammock right beside her, tickling her through the webbing, and a dozen deep bronze third class passengers laughing at her helpless giggles. Now as she drove past the blazing cherry branches on the Bowditch College campus, Hope remembered a glorious
ipe
tree aflame with pink in Mãe do Deus, that stilted village of roughhewn boards and woven thatch and corrugated metal roofs far beyond the remarkable confluence of the black-and-white waters of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimões—kilometers and kilometers beyond container ships and riverboats, where Riley had transferred their meager possessions to motorized dugout canoes so they could venture upstream into the shallows, always upstream, beyond the last vestiges of everything they knew and understood except for Jesus and each other, and the whine and rattle of the ancient outboard motor, and the unsmiling man who sat behind her steering, and the river streaming past, and Riley sitting up in front of her, twisting to reach back and hold her hand, smiling wide and unafraid, and she, therefore, also unafraid.

As Hope drove through the campus counting heathens—counting number one hundred seventeen, a man on hands and knees without a shirt, vomiting in a doorway as she passed—she thought of weaving slowly through a massive flooded forest, the
igapó
, and leaning back against her bundles to trail her fingers through the jet black waters, home to the
tambaqui
, a fish that lived on fruit, and the water in the air so thick, the air so hot, she sometimes felt a pot of tea could be brewed without a fire or kettle, just drink the pollen-infested air, the sullen, sodden, smoldering air. Although it had now been eleven years, she could still see herself and Riley just like it was yesterday, drifting among silent giants three times taller than the tallest building back in Dublin, the canopy above so thick and dark it felt like blue instead of green, the ancient trunks mottled with lichen and moss, the limbs exploding with scarlet bromeliads and purple orchids and interwoven strangler figs as thick as her sunburned thigh, passing by those towering columns, passing by like ants on a floating leaf, and Riley’s sweat-drenched back before her. Riley, her dear husband, always going first, eager to be the first among The People, eager to be about his Father’s business.

She would have followed Riley anywhere, or so she thought back then, back before she knew where they were really going, the price of failure after four years in the jungle, four long years and then a mass grave in the clearing where the village used to stand, and Riley certain everything was all his fault.

Hope remembered arguing with him from behind her own thick veil of grief, the understanding growing in her that the horror was not finished; it had simply moved to him, the boy she married who had never touched a drink before, now dead drunk to the world. Two weeks drunk that first time if her memory served, two weeks of raving, of “doing penance” as he called it, taking their affliction deep inside himself.

How she had argued! How she tried to make him see no man could bear so much responsibility. But the thing in Riley that had led them to the deepest Amazon had then led him deeper still. Two weeks drunk after a lifetime without drink was further up into the shallows than even she could follow. She had radioed for help, and help had come, a pair of missionaries in a bright yellow Cessna, from another village down the river.

Hope’s heart had soared to hear their airplane’s engine. Two weeks there alone with Riley had been a harder trial than all the years before, harder than the language, harder than the loneliness and apparent lack of progress in the early days, harder than all the Western things she had learned to do without. Riley drunk and weeping for the dead had nearly broken Hope before the brothers came.

She remembered standing by the clearing as they landed, waving and trying to smile. She remembered the hugs, smelling soap on one of them when they walked up close. She remembered how the compassion in their faces changed when they laid eyes on Riley, snoring in the dirt. The abruptness of their choices, telling her to pack no more than fifty pounds and be prepared to take off in two hours. Carrying Riley to the Cessna, looking at each other but not at him, and not at her. Sending them away. After four years in the jungle with The People, sending them away.

She remembered looking down from high above as the little airplane banked, seeing fresh-turned soil at one end of the clearing, a common grave for everyone, and the river like a golden ribbon in the sunset, draped haphazardly across the black forbidding wilderness below as the engine rumbled up ahead and Riley snored beside her.

That had been, what? Seven years ago? Maybe seven and a half. Then had come four more years with Riley slowly sinking here in Dublin, and three more after that with him gone in body as he had already gone in spirit.

Hope drove past the gorgeous cherry trees of Bowditch College, feeling the burden of all those years, Riley in his full retreat, running back to Dublin and a teaching job, the gradual disintegration, late nights, hung-over mornings, unremembered rides in township squad cars, regurgitation on the front lawn, a month before he told her he had lost the college job, a year before he stopped pretending he would find another, ridiculous attempts to hide it from their neighbors, another year of solitary drinking in the garage, losing dignity and dreams, losing home, losing the one thing the two of them once were.

In spite of everything that had happened down among The People, Hope sometimes thought the mighty Amazon had been kinder than those dark jungles of Maine where she had writhed for years in the quicksand of despair as Riley floundered and sank below the surface, and was gone.

Returning downtown now, still counting on the left and right, Hope turned onto Main Street and looked up the hill and felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. A small army of vagrants in tattered clothing milled aimlessly around the park above her like survivors at a bomb site, sprawling on the grass, standing, running, shouting, sleeping, young and old, calm and rowdy, strewing garbage indiscriminately and waiting for something she did not believe existed.

Hope rolled slowly past the park in her old Pontiac and tried not to hate them. She tried not to dream of better days with Riley as he once had been. She had to focus on this, right here and now. She had to think the problem through. She was the mayor. The responsibility was hers, and there were so many problems to be solved.