“I’m not allowed to say his name, not out loud or where someone might hear me, shhhh! But he says that you will know why I’ve come, if you’re the right one, and I won’t have to explain any further.”
The man seemed to hesitate, trying to sort through this nonsensical command.
“Me?” he asked.
Ricky nodded in the darkness. “If you’re the right one. Are you?”
“I don’t know,” was the reply. Then, after a momentary pause, the addition, “I thought so.”
Ricky moved swiftly to buttress the delusion. “He gives me the names, you see, and I am supposed to seek them out and ask them the questions, because I need to find the right one. That’s what I do, over and over, and that’s what I have to do, and are you the right one? I need to know, you see. Otherwise this is all wasted.”
The man seemed to be trying to absorb all this.
“How do I know to trust you?” the man slurred.
Ricky immediately slipped the small flashlight out and held it underneath his chin, the way a child might when trying to spook his friends around a campfire. Ricky flashed the light up, illuminating his face, then instantly swung it over at the man, taking seconds to survey the surroundings. He saw the man was lying with his back up against the brick wall, the bottle of wine in his hand. There was some other debris, and a cardboard box to his side that Ricky guessed was home. He switched off the light.
“There,” Ricky said as forcefully as he could. “Do you need more proof?”
The man shifted. “I can’t think straight,” he moaned. “My head is hurting.”
For an instant, Ricky was tempted to simply reach down and take what it was that he needed. His hands twitched with the seduction of violence. He was alone in a deserted alley with the man, and he thought, the people who had put him in that location wouldn’t have hesitated to use force in the slightest. It was only by the greatest sense of control that he was able to fight off the urge. He knew what he wanted, only he wanted the man to give it up. “Tell me who you are!” Ricky half whispered, half shouted.
“I want to be alone,” the man pleaded. “I didn’t do anything. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“You aren’t the right one,” Ricky said. “I can tell. But I need to be sure. Tell me who you are.”
The man sobbed. “What do you want?”
“Your name. I want your name.”
Ricky could hear tears forming behind every word the man spoke. “I don’t want to say,” he said. “I’m scared. Do you mean to kill me?”
“No,” Ricky said. “I will not harm you if you prove to me who you are.”
The man paused, as if considering this question. “I have a wallet,” he said slowly.
“Give it here!” Ricky demanded sharply. “It’s the only way to be sure!”
The man scrambled and scratched, and reached inside his coat. In the darkness, his eyes barely adjusted, Ricky could see the man holding something out in front of him. Ricky grabbed it and thrust it into his own pocket.
The man started to cry then. Ricky softened his voice.
“You don’t have to worry anymore,” Ricky said. “I will leave you alone, now.”
“Please,” said the man. “Just go away.”
Ricky reached down and removed the bottle of cheap wine that he’d purchased at the liquor store. He also grasped a twenty-dollar bill from the lining of his coat. He thrust these to the man. “Here,” he said. “Here is something because you weren’t the right man, but that is no fault of your own, and he wants me to compensate you for bothering you. Is that fair?”
The man clutched the bottle. He didn’t reply for a moment, but then seemed to nod. “Who are you?” he asked Ricky again, with a mingling of fear and confusion still riding every word.
Ricky smiled inwardly and thought there are some advantages to a classical education. “Noman is my name,” he said.
“Norman?”
“No. Noman. So, if anyone asks who came to visit you this night, you can say it was Noman.” Ricky presumed that the average cop on the beat would have about the same patience for the tale that Polyphemus’s cyclops brothers did, and the fiction created centuries beforehand by another man adrift in a strange and dangerous world. “Have a drink and go to sleep, and when you wake up, all will be exactly the same for you.”
The man whimpered. But then he took a long pull from the bottle of wine.
Ricky rose, and picked his way gingerly down the alleyway, thinking that he had not exactly stolen what he needed, nor had he purchased it. What he’d done was what was necessary, he told himself, and was well within the rules of the game. Rumplestiltskin, of course, didn’t know that he was still playing. But he would, soon enough. Ricky moved steadily back through the darkness toward the weak light of the city street just ahead.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ricky did not open the man’s wallet until after he’d reached the bus station, a trip across the city that required him to change subways twice, and after he’d retrieved his clothes from the locker where he had stored them. In the men’s room, he managed to get at least partially cleaned up, scrubbing some of the dirt and grime from his face and hands, and rubbing a paper towel soaked with lukewarm water and thick-smelling antibacterial soap in his armpits and across his neck. There was little he could do about the slick greasiness that matted his hair or the overall musty odor that only a long shower would repair. He dumped his filthy bum’s clothes into the nearest wastebasket and climbed into the acceptable khakis and sport shirt that he’d kept in the backpack. He inspected his appearance in the mirror and thought that he’d crossed back over some invisible line, where now, once again, he appeared to all to be a participant in life, rather than an occupant of the nether regions. A couple of strokes with a cheap plastic comb aided his look, but Ricky thought that he still was located on some edge, or close to it, and far distant from the man he once was.
He exited the men’s room and purchased a ticket for a bus back to Durham. He had nearly an hour’s wait, so he bought himself a sandwich and a soda and repaired to a corner of the station that was empty. After looking around to make certain that no one was watching him, Ricky unwrapped the sandwich on his lap. Then he opened up the wallet, concealing it with the food.
The first thing he saw brought a smile to his face and a sense of relief flooded him: a tattered and faded, but legible, Social Security card.
The name had been typed: Richard S. Lively.
Ricky liked this. Lively was what, for the first time in weeks, he felt. He saw an additional good fortune; he wouldn’t have to learn to accommodate a new first name, the common nickname of Richard and his own Frederick, being the same.
He put his head back, staring up into the fluorescent ceiling lights. Rebirth in a bus station, he thought. He supposed there were far worse places to reenter the world.
The wallet smelled of dried sweat, and Ricky quickly searched the contents. There was not much, but what there was, he realized, was something of a gold mine. In addition to the Social Security card, there was an expired Illinois driver’s license, a library card from a suburban system outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and a Triple A auto service card from the same state. None of these was a photo ID, except for the driver’s license, which Ricky noted, gave details such as hair, eye color, height and weight, next to a slightly out-of-focus picture of Richard Lively. There was also a hospital clinic identification card from a Chicago facility that was marked with a red asterisk in one corner. AIDS, Ricky thought. HIV positive. He’d been right about the sores on the man’s face. All the various pieces of identification had different addresses listed. Ricky removed all these and thrust them into his pocket. There were also two yellowed and tattered newspaper clippings, which Ricky unfolded carefully and read. The first was an obituary for a seventy-three-year-old woman, the other was an article about workforce layoffs in an automobile parts manufacturing plant. The first, he guessed, was Richard Lively’s mother, and the second was the job the man had had before launching into the world of alcohol that had delivered him to the street where Ricky had spotted him. Ricky had no idea what had made him travel from the Midwest to the East Coast, but recognized this was a propitious shift for his purposes. The chances of someone making a connection to the man diminished sharply.