Ricky read through the two clippings swiftly, committing the details to memory. He noted that there was only one other family member listed among the woman’s survivors, apparently a housewife in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A sister, Ricky thought, who’d given up on her brother many years ago. The mother had been a county librarian and onetime school principal, which was the modest claim on the world that had prompted the obituary. It said her husband had passed away some years earlier. The plant that had once employed Richard Lively had manufactured brake pads and fallen victim to a corporate decision to shift to a location in Guatemala, which made the same item for far less in wages. Ricky thought that created a not uncommon bitterness, and was more than enough reason to let drink take over one’s life. How the man had acquired the disease, he couldn’t tell. Needles, he suspected. He stuffed the clippings back inside the wallet, then he tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. He thought about the hospital identification card with its telltale red marking, then reached into his pocket, pulling it out. He bent it until it tore, then ripped it in half. He stuck this in the wrappings from his sandwich, and also stuffed it down to the bottom of the wastebasket.
I know enough, he thought.
The announcement for his bus came over the loudspeaker, spoken in nearly unintelligible tones by some clerk behind a glass partition. Ricky rose, swinging his backpack over his shoulder, and putting Dr. Starks deep within some hidden crevice inside himself, and took his first step forward as Richard Lively.
His life began to take shape rapidly.
Within a week, he had acquired two part-time jobs, the first manning a register at a local Dairy Mart for five hours a day in the evening, the second stocking shelves in a Stop and Shop grocery store for another five hours in the morning, a time frame which gave Ricky the afternoons for his other needs. Neither place had asked too many questions, although the manager of the food market pointedly asked whether Ricky was in a twelve-step program, to which he’d replied affirmatively. It turned out the manager was as well, and after giving Ricky a list of churches and civic centers and all their scheduled meetings, he’d handed Ricky the ubiquitous green apron and put him to work.
He used Richard Lively’s Social Security number to open a bank checking account, depositing the remainder of his cash. Once that was accomplished, Ricky found that sorties into the world of bureaucracy were relatively easy. He’d been issued a replacement Social Security card by filling out a form, one that he signed himself. A clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles hadn’t even glanced at the picture on the Illinois license when Ricky turned it in and obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license, this time with his own picture and signature, his own eye color, height, and weight. He also rented a post office box at a local Mailboxes Etc. location, which gave Ricky a viable address for his bank account statements and as much other correspondence as Ricky could produce rapidly. He welcomed catalogs. He joined a video rental club and the YMCA. Anything that provided another card in his new name. Another form and a check for five dollars got him a copy of Richard Lively’s birth certificate, mailed by a thoughtful county clerk outside of Chicago.
He tried not to think about the real Richard Lively. He thought it had not been a particularly difficult task to delude a drunken, sick, and deranged man out of his wallet and his identity. While he told himself that what he had done was better than beating it out of him, it was not much better.
Ricky shrugged off the feelings of guilt as he expanded his world. He promised himself that he would return Richard Lively’s ID to him when he’d managed to truly extricate himself from Rumplestiltskin. He just didn’t know how long that would take.
Ricky knew he had to move out of the motel kitchenette, so he walked back to the area not far from the public library, searching for the house with the room for rent sign. To his relief, it was still in the window of the modest, wood-frame home.
The house had a small side yard, shaded by a large oak tree. It was littered with brightly colored plastic children’s toys. An energetic four-year-old boy was playing with a dump truck and a collection of army figures in the grass, while an elderly woman sat on a lawn chair a few feet away, occupied mostly with a copy of that day’s newspaper, occasionally glancing at the child, who made engine and battle sounds as he played. Ricky saw that the child wore a hearing device in one ear.
The woman looked up and saw Ricky standing on the walkway.
“Hello,” he said. “Is this your house?”
She nodded, folding the paper in her lap and glancing toward where the child was playing. “It is indeed,” she said.
“I saw the sign. About the room,” he said.
She eyed him cautiously. “We usually rent to students,” she replied.
“I’m sort of a student,” he said. “That is, I hope to be working on some advanced degrees, but I’m a little slow because I have to work for a living, as well. Gets in the way,” he said, smiling.
The woman rose. “What sort of advanced degree?” she asked.
“Criminology,” Ricky replied off the cuff. “I should introduce myself. My name is Richard Lively. My friends call me Ricky. I’m not from around here, in fact, only recently arrived here. But I do need a place.”
She continued to look him over cautiously. “No family? No roots?”
He shook his head.
“Have you been in prison?” she asked.
Ricky thought the true answer to this was yes. A prison designed by a man I never met but who hated me.
“No,” he said. “But that’s not an unreasonable question. I was abroad.”
“Where?”
“Mexico,” he lied.
“What were you doing in Mexico?”
He made things up rapidly. “I had a cousin who went out to Los Angeles and got involved in the drug trade, and disappeared down there. I went down trying to find him. Six months of stone walls and lies, I’m afraid. But that’s what got me interested in criminology.”
She shook her head. Her tone of voice displayed she had some large and immediate doubts about this abrupt outlandish tale. “Sure,” she said. “And what got you here to Durham?”
“I just wanted to get as far away from that world as possible,” Ricky said. “I didn’t exactly make a great many friends asking questions about my cousin. I figured it had to be someplace far away from that world, and the map suggested it was either New Hampshire or Maine, and so this was where I landed.”
“I don’t know that I believe you,” the woman answered. “It sounds like some sort of story. How do I know you’re reliable? Have you got references?”
“Anyone can get a reference to say anything,” Ricky replied. “It seems to me that you’d be a lot wiser to listen to my voice and look at my face and make up your own mind after a bit of conversation.”
This statement made the woman smile. “A New Hampshire sort of attitude,” she said. “I’ll show you the room, but I’m still not certain.”
“Fair enough,” Ricky said.
The room was a converted attic area, with its own modest bathroom, just enough space for a bed, a desk, and an old overstuffed armchair. An empty bookcase and a chest of drawers were lined on one wall. It had a nice window enclosed by a girlishly frilly pink curtain, with a half-moon top that overlooked the yard and the quiet side street. The walls were decorated with travel posters advertising the Florida Keys and Vail, Colorado. A bikini-clad scuba diver and a skier kicking up a sheet of pristine snow. There was a small alcove off the room which contained a tiny refrigerator and a table with a hot plate. A shelf screwed into the wall contained some white, utilitarian crockery. Ricky stared at the efficient space and thought it had many of the same qualities as a monk’s cell, which is more or less how he currently envisioned himself.