The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(57)

I understood. Wheeler used to be notorious for weekend bar traffic—thousands pouring in from reservations or rural towns. A core group of alcoholics never left. At night, cops would round them up and haul them to the drunk tank at the edge of town to sleep it off. Come morning, they’d be sober enough to straggle to the nearby soup kitchen run by Catholic nuns. After that, they hit the streets again—panhandling, petty theft, pawning their blood—to score more alcohol.

When the weather was good, the system worked—even when officers couldn’t find everyone who’d passed out in the bed of a pickup or collapsed in a dark doorway.

But in winter the temperatures could drop to freezing at night, and it wasn’t that unusual to find someone dead of hypothermia by sunup. The city kept a running tally. Jim called them popsicles.

Reuben leaned close. “You know Mother Teresa?”

“Of course,” I said.

“She came to the mission once. One morning we were sitting there with our cheese sandwiches and heard a ruckus. I looked up and there was this shrunken little woman in white robes, face like a walnut and the saddest eyes. My first sober thought that day was, ‘Holy shit, it’s Mother Teresa.’ She was walking through, nuns at her heels. Photographers, TV cameras. An hour out of the drunk tank, this is the last person you expect to see, right?”

I knew about that day—Mother Teresa had come to town several years before Jim brought me to Wheeler. It was her Sisters of Charity that ran the soup kitchen. People still talked about that visit.

But that happened—what, fifteen years ago? Twenty? If Reuben had seen her in town, he would’ve had to be around Laurel’s age at the time . . .

“So she’s passing my bench,” Reuben continued, “and I stagger to my feet. Then I drop to my knees, holding my arms up like I’m a referee and somebody just nailed a field goal. And I’m not even Catholic. She totters over and for a second or two lays her hand on mine. Then she goes on her way.”

He shook his head slowly. “It was one of those moments, you know?”

I nodded. “Life-changing.”

“Hell, no! I went out, pawned some stolen hubcaps, bought myself a bottle—business as usual. Things didn’t change till that winter. I was in an alley one cold night, massively stoned, thinking how strange it was that I couldn’t feel my arms or legs anymore. And that if I wasn’t careful, I could lose everything. That was my wake-up call.”

Bree was giving him a small, consoling smile.


*

After dessert, Bree suggested a walk to Schiavone’s bakery down the block to cap off the evening with genuine Italian coffee. It was mid-September by my best guess and the air had chilled considerably. It felt like the first bite of autumn, and I chafed my arms against the cold.

Simon peeled off his sport coat and, before I could object, draped it over my shoulders. It was warm and smelled of cedar wood.

“But now you’re in shirtsleeves,” I protested.

“I’m fine. We mountain men defy the cold.”

“I thought mountain men defied the cold by wearing animal pelts, not by shucking their clothes.”

He chuckled and fell in beside me on the sidewalk.

Bree and Reuben were a few paces ahead, arms linked. Bree was leaning into Reuben, whispering in his ear. Now and then she glanced back at us, her expression conspiratorial.

Lampposts were lit all along the main street and strings of lights were wound around tree trunks and branches. Most stores had already closed for the day, but others remained open: a fifties-style malt shop, its counter packed with young people; a steakhouse and saloon, the kind with swinging doors and frisky piano music inside. The Wild Rose had a candle burning in each window, and the pub looked like it had been transported stone by stone from an Irish village. I imagined it was there that Bree had punctured Reuben’s boot with the dart.

Schiavone’s had a half dozen café tables on a patio, and most were taken. Bree and I found an empty one while Reuben and Simon went inside for the coffees.

The lights were still on at the town hall across the street, and Bree explained it doubled as a community center for plays and concerts; some evenings they hung a screen for a movie projector.

At the next table sat three older men with intense, angular features, wearing worn cloth coats and drinking from espresso cups. They were deep in conversation in a language I couldn’t begin to place.

“This is like nothing I’ve ever seen in Wheeler,” I murmured.