The Healer. Greg Hollingshead
Читать онлайн книгу.
them she’s finished with healing. You lay the hands of life on people left and right, and what do they do? Treat it like no more than their due, and heaven forbid anybody try to tell them they owe a goddamn thing to a living soul.”
“You weren’t there, Ardis,” someone put in from a table by the door, a man with blow-dried hair and Culligan stitched on his shirt. “The wife wasn’t out to Frank’s, she only heard what Caroline said on your steps. All Caroline said was, ‘It’s not me and it’s not you. Go home. There won’t be any more of this.’ It was about a dozen people, by the way, fifteen at the most, half of them kids, and half of them there to horse around. If there was a glow on her out at Frank’s, Doreen never saw it. When people ask her she doesn’t say there was or wasn’t, she just says she never saw it herself. People don’t glow, Ardis. They only seem to sometimes.”
Old Frank might have contributed something on the glow question, but he was engaged in retrieving his plate from Wakelin’s table and had stopped listening, or couldn’t hear. Ardis chose neither to accept nor to refuse the correction. While Culligan was speaking, her eyes remained on Wakelin, and when Culligan finished saying what he had to say, it was Wakelin she pointed her chin at. “Think you got enough yet?”
“Enough—?”
“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”
“No—” He cleared his throat. “I’m not, actually. I’m looking for a country place.”
“Well, isn’t that a convenient coincidence.” “What do you mean?”
“Country place, my ass. Ignorant hick superstition is what you’re looking for.”
Wakelin did a helpless shrug. “Not at all—”
“Well, she’s had it up to here. She’s quit healing, and she’s quit talking to reporters for free. Interview’s going to cost you five hundred an hour.”
“What?” Wakelin could only say.
There was a pause then, and Wakelin, though he was genuinely amazed, was also conscious of the amazed expression staying longer on his face than it would have were he being candid about his motives. And then the black Lab was swinging its head to see how to back up. Gail too was stepping away. Ardis lifted the chair. As she replaced it at Wakelin’s table she said, “This is for whoever it is you’re working for.” She did not wink as she said this. There was no twinkle from those hooded eyes.
Wakelin smiled, nervously, a little confused, and Old Frank’s head came around. “Only trouble is,” Old Frank said, “he don’t know if it’s Jesus or the Devil.”
“That’s right, Frank,” Ardis said, and she passed on, refilling cups.
Wakelin stared at his bill. As he did so the Grant Gemboree noise level made a rapid return to its former level. Finally Wakelin was able to take in what he owed: $2.99.
Why, it was nothing at all.
Gail was back. “So anyways,” she shouted, “Frank’s Caroline Troyer’s biggest fan, and no wonder, eh? Aren’t you, Frank?”
Old Frank had pushed away his plate. “I guess I would be that,” he acknowledged.
Gail stepped closer, gazing down upon the old skull. “Too bad she stopped, eh? She could still help a few more poor souls around here if she wanted to, I guess.”
“She never stopped,” Old Frank declared. “Nobody could stop that. I won’t be the last one that gets their health set to rights by that one.”
“Hey, maybe not, eh?” Gail said hopefully.
Old Frank’s head had come around once more to Wakelin. “It’s not every young lass can heal a man,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” Wakelin agreed.
But Old Frank had already turned back to Gail, indicating his plate. “Could you throw this in the microwave, darlin’? In all the excitement the cocksucker went cold on me.”
The establishment known in Grant as the Troyer Building was of ancient frame construction in brown shingle-brick pressed up against the heaved narrow sidewalk of the main street. Unlike most of the other buildings on the main street of Grant, it was not false-fronted but an actual two-storey, with a gable, separated from the shoebox IDA Drugs by a broad wooden staircase roofed and set back from the street and rising into darkness. Wakelin stepped into the shadows there. Immediately at his right hand was a dusty window covered on the inside with some kind of perforated board, the regimented holes shining sickly. Stepping deeper, he sighted up the staircase. At the top was a landing and to the right of that a door, which from his research he knew opened into the Troyer home, an apartment on the second floor. Was it from these stairs that Caroline Troyer had addressed a crowd of between twelve and sixty, speaking words of disputable import? It smelled like a urinal in here.
Wakelin walked back out into the sun and stood on the curb and looked up at the building. From the articles he had read he knew that the attic gable window was hers. Above it, in the apex, an oval plaque: Erected 1919. Lower down, at the second-storey level, two windows, larger. Sun-damaged brown drapes, their falls crushed by furniture against the sills. On the ground floor, the family enterprises. To the right of the single entrance from the street, one window only, no sign on the glass. Beneath that, in a row along the sidewalk and leaning at different angles against the front of the building, seven marble headstones. To the left of the door, where the window had been, a rectangle of shingle-brick a deeper shade of brown. Above the door a shingle, brown lettering on beige, divided left and right by a double slash. To the left of the slash, Crooked Hand’s Fine Jewellery and Tackle. To the right, Ross Troyer Realty.
The door was a full two steps above the level of the sidewalk. The steps were concrete, eroded to settings of polished stones. As Wakelin placed his foot on the lower step he was moved to reach over and lay his right hand flat against the ink-blank centre of the nearest marble headstone. A surface glassy and warm in the sun. Other stones were salmon and sand-colour. One was black. All with lapidary margins of maple leaves, lilies, Scotch thistles. Leaning across, Wakelin could also see, along the inside sill of the window, in a gap created by a shortfall of amber cellophane creased and bubbled against the pane, a row of bleached Polaroids, and he leaned farther to study those pale images, of frame cottages, aluminum-sided bungalows, waterfront lots and woodlots, all prices neatly inscribed in faded ballpoint across the bottom margins, and when he had finished this scrutiny he saw, higher up the glass, an octagonal silver sticker, lifting away around the edges: Monuments Sold Here. And he thought, Well, for your long-last home you’ve got your aluminum siding, and before it needs replacing you’ll be wanting the marble. For your long, last home.
He closed his eyes. From a public speaker down the street Roy Orbison was singing “Running Scared” in a voice undersea and pure as bel canto on an old seventy-eight. At Wakelin’s back, two pickups idled at a light. Overhead, a squirrel on a phone cable was turning one of last year’s acorns into a hail of shells, the fragments clicking and bouncing on the sidewalk. The sun was hot against the right side of Wakelin’s face and against the back of his hand on the headstone. He could smell the exhaust from the street, he could smell the scorched sugar fanblast from a doughnut shop somewhere. And he knew that he was right here, that he was nowhere but where he was.
Wakelin lifted his hand from the stone and straightened up. The door was dirty matte white, boot-scuffed along the bottom, an aura of grease around the knob.
Three to four thousand words. Anything he wanted to write on Caroline Troyer he could write. His editor, a buzz-cut beauty, was being kind to him because his wife had died only twenty-two months earlier. Try that again. His editor was being kind to him instead of sleeping with him. She was being kind, and she was being not dumb. She knew there would be three of them in the bed. The healing story he could take to a book if there was a book in it, though that did not seem likely. He was not here to do a hick superstition story. He was not here to put Caroline Troyer down. A little cultural anthropology for the instruction and delight of the readers of a national woman’s magazine. Allow them to make up their own minds.