But then he realized he might as well have been.
Ricky turned back toward the river. In that second, he understood, he was closer to being what he appeared than he was to what he had been. He took a deep breath and recognized that he was in the most precarious of psychological positions. He had killed who he was in order to escape the man who set out to ruin him. If he went much longer being nobody, he would get swallowed by precisely that anonymity.
Thinking he was in as much danger in those minutes as he had been when Rumplestiltskin was breathing down the back of his every action, Ricky moved forward, determined to answer the first and primary question.
He spent the day, going from shelter to shelter, throughout the city, searching.
It was a journey through the world of the disadvantaged: an early morning breakfast of runny eggs and cold toast served in a backroom kitchen at a Catholic church in Dorchester, an hour spent outside a storefront temporary work broker on a nearby street, milling with men looking for a day’s work raking leaves or emptying trash bins. He went from there to a state-operated shelter in Charlestown, where a man behind a desk insisted that Ricky couldn’t enter without a document from an agency, which Ricky thought was as crazy an insistence as those delusions the truly mentally ill suffered from. He stomped angrily and went back out to the street, where a pair of prostitutes working the lunchtime crowd laughed at him when he tried to ask for directions. He continued to pound the pavement, passing alleys and abandoned buildings, occasionally muttering to himself whenever anyone came too close to him, language being the rough edge of madness, and along with his growing fetid smell, a pretty successful armor against contact with anyone other than the disenfranchised. His muscles stiffened and his feet grew sore, but he continued looking. Once a policeman eyed him cautiously, at one corner, took a step toward him, and then, obviously, thought better of it, and walked on past.
It was deep in the afternoon, with the sun still pounding down, making wavy lines of heat rise from the city streets, that Ricky spotted a possibility.
The man was rooting through a garbage can on the edge of a park, not far from the river. He was about Ricky’s height and weight, with thinning streaks of dirty brown hair. He wore a knit cap, tattered shorts, but an ankle-length wool overcoat that almost reached down to one brown shoe and one black, one a pull-on loafer, the other a workman’s boot. The man was muttering to himself, intent on the contents of the garbage can. Ricky moved close enough to see the lesions on the man’s face and the backs of his hands. As the man worked, he coughed repeatedly, remaining unaware of Ricky’s presence. There was a park bench ten yards away, and Ricky slumped into it. Someone had left a part of the day’s paper behind on the seat, and Ricky grabbed this and pretended to read while he devoted himself to observing the man. After a second or two, he saw the man pull a discarded soda can from the garbage and toss it into an old steel shopping cart, but not the type that one pushes, instead, the type one pulls. The cart was almost filled with empty cans.
Ricky eyed the man as closely as he could, saying to himself: You were the doctor just weeks ago. Make your diagnosis.
The man seemed suddenly enraged when he pulled a can from the trash that had some problem, abruptly throwing it to the ground and kicking it into a nearby bush.
Bipolar, Ricky thought. And schizophrenic. Hears voices, has no medication, or at least, one that he is willing to take. Prone to sudden bursts of manic energy. Violent, too, probably, but more a threat to himself than others. The lesions could either be open sores from living on the street, but they could also be Kaposi’s sarcoma. AIDS was a distinct possibility. So was tuberculosis or lung cancer, given the man’s wracking cough. It could also be pneumonia, Ricky thought, although the season was wrong for it. Ricky thought the man wore equal cloths of life and death.
After a few minutes, the man determined that he’d taken everything of value from the trash, and headed to the next canister. Ricky remained seated, keeping the man in sight. After a few moments dedicated to assessing that trash, the man strode off, pulling his cart behind him. Ricky trailed after him.
It did not take long to reach a street in Charlestown that was filled with low-slung and grimy stores. It was a place that catered to the disadvantaged of all sorts. A discount furniture outlet that offered in large letters written on the windows layaways and easy credit, spelling the word E-Z. Two pawnshops, an appliance store, a clothing outlet that had mannequins in the windows all of which seemed to be missing an arm or a leg, as if crippled or scarred in some accident. Ricky watched as the man he was following headed straight to the middle of the block, to a faded yellow painted square building with a prominent sign on the front: al’s discount soda and liquors. Beneath that was a second sign, in the same block print, nearly as large: redemption center. This sign had an arrow pointing to the rear.
The man towing the cart filled with cans marched directly around the corner of the building. Ricky followed after.
At the back of the store was a half door, with a similar sign above the lintel: redeem here. There was a small doorbell button to the side, which the man rang. Ricky shrank back against the wall, concealing himself.
Within a few seconds a teenager appeared at the half door. The transaction itself took only a few minutes. The man handed in the collection of cans, the teenager counted them, and then peeled off a couple of bills from a wad he pulled from his pocket. The man took the money, reached into one of the large pockets of the overcoat, and pulled out a fat, old leather wallet, stuffed with papers. He put a couple of the bills into the wallet, and then handed one of them back to the teenager. The kid disappeared, then returned moments later with a bottle, which he handed to the man.
Ricky slunk down, sitting on the alley cement, waiting while the man walked past him. The bottle, which Ricky assumed was some cheap wine, had already disappeared in the folds of the overcoat. The man cast a single glance toward Ricky, but they made no eye contact, as Ricky hung his head. He breathed in hard for another few seconds, then rose, and continued to follow the man.
In Manhattan, Ricky had played the mouse to Virgil, Merlin, and Rumplestiltskin’s cats. Now he was on the opposite side of the same equation. He hung back, then sped up, trying to keep the man in sight at all times, close enough to follow, distant enough to remain hidden. Armed now with the bottle concealed in his coat, the man marched ahead with purpose, like some military quick march with a destination in mind. His head pivoted about frequently, glancing in all directions, unmistakably afraid of being followed. Ricky thought that the man’s paranoid behavior was well founded.
They covered dozens of city blocks, winding in and out of traffic, the neighborhood they traveled through growing seedier with every stride. The day’s dwindling sun threw shadows across the roadways, and the peeling paint and decrepit storefronts seemed to mimic the appearance of both Ricky and his target.
He saw the man hesitate midblock, and as the man turned toward where Ricky was, Ricky dipped against a building, concealing himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man abruptly lurch down an alleyway, a narrow crevasse between two brick buildings. Ricky took a deep breath, then followed.
He came up to the entrance to the alleyway and cautiously peered around the edge. It was a spot that seemed to greet the night well in advance. It was already dark and closed in, the sort of confined space that never warmed in the winter, nor cooled in the summer. Ricky could just make out a collection of abandoned cardboard boxes and a green steel Dumpster at the far end. The alleyway abutted the back of another building, and Ricky guessed that it was a dead end.
A block away, he’d passed both a convenience store and a cheap liquor store. He turned, leaving his quarry, and headed in that direction. He slid one of his precious twenty-dollar bills from the lining of his coat, gripping it in his palm where it was immediately damp with sweat.
He went first to the liquor store. It was a small place, with advertised specials smeared in red paint on the front window. He stepped up and put his hand on the door to enter, only to find it locked. He looked up and saw a clerk sitting behind the register. He tried the door again, and it rattled. The clerk stared his direction, then suddenly bent forward and spoke into a microphone. A tinny voice came out of a speaker near the door.
“Get the hell out of here, yah old fuck, unless yah got some money.”
Ricky nodded. “I’ve got money,” he replied.
The clerk was a middle-aged paunchy man, probably close to his own age. Ricky saw, when he shifted position, that he wore a large pistol holstered on his belt.
“Yah got money? Sure. Let’s see it.”
Ricky held the twenty-dollar bill up. The man eyed it from his spot behind the register
“How’d you get that?” he said.
“I found it on the street,” Ricky answered.
The door buzzer went off, and Ricky pushed his way inside.
“Sure yah did,” the clerk said. “All right, you got two minutes. Whatcha want?”
“Bottle of wine,” Ricky said.
The clerk reached behind himself to a shelf and picked out a bottle. It wasn’t like any bottle of wine that Ricky had ever drunk before. It had a screw top and was labeled Silver Satin. It cost two dollars. Ricky nodded and handed over the twenty. The man put the bottle in a paper bag, opened the register, and removed a ten and two singles. He handed these to Ricky. “Hey!” Ricky said. “You owe me a couple more.”
Smiling nastily, placing a hand on the butt of his revolver, the clerk replied, “I think I gave you some credit the other day, old man. Just getting my previous kindness paid back.”
“You’re lying,” Ricky said angrily. “I’ve never been in here before.”
“You think we ought to really have an argument, you fucking bum?” The man clenched a fist and thrust it in Ricky’s face. Ricky stepped back. He stared hard at the clerk, who laughed at him. “I gave you some change. More ’n you deserve, too. Now beat it. Get the fuck out of here, before I kick you out. And if you make me walk around this counter, then I’m gonna take my bottle back and the change back and I’m gonna kick your ass in the process. So what’s it gonna be?”
Ricky moved slowly toward the door. He turned, trying to think of a proper rejoinder, only to have the clerk say, “What? What is it? You got some problem?”
Ricky shook his head and exited, clutching the bottle, hearing the clerk laugh behind his back.
He walked down the block to the convenience store. He was greeted there with the same, “You got some money?” demand. He showed the ten-dollar bill. Inside, he purchased a pack of the cheapest cigarettes he could find, a pair of Hostess Twinkies, a pair of Hostess Cup Cakes, and a small flashlight. The clerk in this store was a teenager, who threw the stuff into a plastic bag and said, “Nice dinner,” sarcastically.
Ricky walked back onto the sidewalk. Night had swept the area. Wan light from the stores that remained open carved small squares of brightness from the darkness. Ricky crossed back to the alley entrance. He dipped as quietly as he could just inside, putting his back up against a brick wall, and sliding down to sit and wait, all the time thinking he’d had no idea before this night how easy it was in this world to be hated.
It seemed as if the darkness slowly enveloped him in the same way that the heat during the summer day did. It was thick, syrupy, a blackness that reached within him. Ricky allowed a couple of hours to pass. He was in a semidream state, his imagination filled with pictures of who he was once, the people who had come into his life to destroy it, and the scheme he had to build to regain it. He would have been comforted, sitting with his back against the brick in the darkened alleyway in a section of a city that he was unfamiliar with, if he could have pictured his late wife, or perhaps a forgotten friend, or maybe even a memory of his own childhood, some mental picture of a happy moment, a Christmas morning, or a graduation day or perhaps wearing his first tuxedo to a high school prom, or the rehearsal dinner on the eve of his wedding. But all these moments seemed to belong to some other existence, and some other person. He had never been much for reincarnation, but it was almost as if he had returned to earth as someone new. He could smell the growing fetid dank stench from his bum’s overcoat and he held up his hand in the darkness and imagined that his fingernails were clogged with dirt. It used to be that the days his nails were filthy were happy days, because that meant he’d spent hours in the garden behind his house on the Cape. His stomach clenched and he could hear the whomping sound of the gasoline spread throughout the farmhouse catching fire. It was a memory in his ear that seemed to come from some other era, pulled from some distant past by an archaeologist.
Ricky looked up, and pictured Virgil and Merlin sitting in the alleyway across from him. He could make out their faces, envision each nuance and mannerism of the portly attorney and the statuesque young woman. A guide to Hell, that’s what she told me, he thought. She’d been right, probably more right than she had any idea. He sensed the presence of the third member of the triumvirate, but Rumplestiltskin was still a collection of shadows, blending with the night that flooded the alleyway like a steadily rising tide.
His legs had stiffened. He didn’t know how many miles he’d walked since his arrival in Boston. His stomach was empty, and he opened the package of cupcakes and ate them both in two or three gulps. The chocolate hit him like a low-rent amphetamine, giving him some energy. Ricky pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the pit of the alleyway.
He could hear a faint sound and he craned toward it, before recognizing it for what it was: a voice singing softly and out of key.