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.
Ricky moved cautiously toward the noise. To his side he heard some animal, he guessed a rat, scuttling away with a scratching sound. He fingered the small flashlight in his hand, but tried to let his eyes adjust to the pitch-black in the alleyway. This was difficult, and he stumbled once or twice, his feet getting tangled in unrecognizable debris. He almost fell once, but kept his balance and continued moving forward.
He sensed he was almost on top of the man when the singing stopped.
There was a second or two of dark silence, and then he heard a question: “Who’s there?”
“Just me,” Ricky replied.
“Don’t come any closer,” came the reply. “I’ll hurt you. Kill you, maybe. I’ve got a knife.”
The words were slurred with the looseness that drink provides. Ricky had half hoped the man would have passed out, but instead, he was still reasonably alert. But not too mobile, Ricky noted, for there had been no sounds of scrambling out of the way or trying to hide. He did not believe the man actually had a weapon, but he wasn’t completely certain. He remained stock-still.
“This is my alley,” the man continued. “Get out.”
“Now it’s my alley, too,” Ricky said. Ricky took a deep breath and launched himself into the realm he’d known he would have to find in order to communicate with the man. It was like diving into a pool of dark water, unsure what lay just beneath the surface. Welcome madness, Ricky said, trying to summon up all the education that he’d gained in his prior life and existence. Create delusion. Establish doubt. Feed paranoia. “He told me we’re supposed to speak together. That’s what he told me. ‘Find the man in the alleyway and ask him his name.’ ”
The man hesitated. “Who told you?”
“Who do you think?” Ricky answered. “He did. He speaks to me and tells me who to seek out, and this I need to do because he’s told me to, and so I did, and here I am.” He rattled this near-gibberish out swiftly.
“Who speaks to you?” The questions came out of the dark with a fervent quality that warred with the drink that clouded the man’s already crisscrossed mind.