SULLY’S SOLUTION

Kelly Swails

Kelly Swails is a clinical microbiologist by day and a writer by night. Her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. When she’s not working or writing, she and her husband wrangle a houseful of cats. She was born and raised in the boonies of west central Illinois, and no matter where life takes her, a part of her will always be a country girl. You can find her on the web at www.kellyswails.com.

The old bell above the door jangled as I entered Maddie’s Diner. The smell of grease and cooked meat and biscuits hit me like a nose full of heaven, and my stomach rumbled. A bunch of farmers nursed their coffee at the big table by the window while a teenage girl waited tables. One of the farmers greeted me by tipping his chin as I slid onto my usual seat at the counter.

“Mornin’, Sheriff,” he said. His skin had that baked-potato look, brown and wrinkled and rough. It wasn’t that long ago that I played high school football with his son. It still sounded weird to hear him use my title.

“That it is, Tom,” I said. I felt tired in a way that couldn’t be cured by extra shuteye, and I resisted the urge to rub my eyes. “How about that rain we got last night?”

Tom snorted. “Gauge said two inches,” he said. “Might as well have been six for all the corn that’ll get picked this week. My fields are swamped.”

“Shoulda had your crops out last week like the rest of us,” another farmer said.

“Might have if I didn’t have twice the land,” he said, and the table began to bicker.

The farmers around Rockton might be a quiet bunch, but a comment about the weather always made for a good debate. I made a sympathetic noise and turned to the menu on my placemat.

“Your usual, Randy?” Amanda said as she poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of me. Amanda was a redhead on the plump side of average with the sort of features that belonged on a fifties pin-up girl. In grade school I used to pull her pigtails and tell her she had cooties, secretly wishing the whole time she’d kiss me on the cheek. It never happened, but it didn’t stop me from trying.

“Sure,” I said, then changed my mind. “Wait. How’s the gravy this morning?”

“Darn near perfect,” she said. “Maddie must have been in a good mood.”

“Biscuits and gravy, then.” I put my thumb into the waistband of my pants. Too much room. Bet I’ve lost another five pounds since I checked. “Full order.”

“Oh, stop pretending you need to watch your figure,” she said as she walked to the kitchen window to slip my order to Maddie. Her expression turned serious. “You need to keep up your strength.” Her eyes moved to my bald head.

“Yeah,” I said as I ran a hand over my smooth scalp. Cancer and its treatment was no walk in the woods, but losing my usual high-and-tight haircut had been rougher than I thought it’d be. I cried as I watched the little hairs circle down the drain during my morning shower. Some of the guys said it made me look badass. I thought it just made me look sick.

“Didn’t see you at the game Friday,” she said.

“I was there,” I said. If Rockton football were a religion, the Rockton-Ford game was a high holy day. Nobody on the force gets that night off work, least of all the sheriff.

“So you saw Wharton break the passing record,” she said.

“I heard about it. I was too busy keeping seniors from selling joints to eighth graders under the bleachers to see it.”

She laughed as Maddie handed her a steaming plate heaped with food. “Josh is a hell of a quarterback. I’m glad he got out of his slump. For a while there I thought this season would suck, but his mom came in the other day and said he’s getting scholarship offers, so I guess whatever he’s doing is working.” She set it in front of me and wiped her fingers on the towel that permanently hung over her shoulder. “You hear about Sully?”

I sighed. Jim Sullivan lived in a well-kept trailer out in the country between Rockton and Minford. He kept to himself and didn’t come into town much, but even so, he managed to have a fair amount of traffic around his place. Put it all together and you get a rumor factory that made my job that much harder. Two more acres to the south and he’d be another county’s problem.

“What about him?” I tried to keep my words modulated.

“Had a bunch of kids out at his place last night,” she said. “His neighbor Trina was in here this morning and said the racket got so bad she almost called you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She thinks Sully’s running a meth lab.” Her tone told me that she agreed.

I blew on a bite of breakfast before eating it. I moaned as the fat and carbs mingled on my tongue. “My God, Maddie,” I called around the mouthful of food. “Amanda was right, this is perfection.”

Maddie peered out the window. Even though she scowled and said “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she sounded pleased.

“So what about Sully?” Amanda said.

I took a sip of coffee. I didn’t really think that Sully cooked anything except food at his trailer, but I knew if I ignored Amanda by tomorrow morning I’d be labeled as the Sheriff Who Looked the Other Way. “I’ll go check it out,” I said.

 

The drive out to Sully’s was a quiet one, the only noise being my tires splashing through an occasional puddle. Last night’s rain had washed the fall pollen out of the air and chased every cloud from the sky. The beauty of the day didn’t keep me from ruminating about Sully.

He’d been a year ahead of me in school. He was a loner and didn’t play football or any other sports. That had bugged me. What kind of guy doesn’t like sports? He always had his nose buried in a book or was squirreled away in the library. He attracted the girls, including my junior-year girlfriend Laura Winkle. She broke up with me to go out with Sully, saying something about sensitivity and intellect and my lack thereof. Looking back, she’d been right.

Anytime I saw Sully in town now, he looked uncomfortable and out-of-sorts, as though he couldn’t wait to get back to his place. I didn’t know if it was being around people or if he just didn’t like Rockton. Why would someone who clearly didn’t like a town or its people choose to live there?

I pulled into his driveway and let the engine idle as I looked around. Several deep tire tracks in the mud on the front lawn told me there had been cars in and out of here during or after the rain. Sully’s trailer had a clean exterior free of rust or loose bits, and a large garden took up most of the back yard. Mums with blooms the size of my fist grew by the front steps, and a decorative post that read “Sullivan Manor” stood by the mailbox. Everything looked so meticulously groomed that I wondered if Sully was gay. Best not to voice that concern. Rockton’s rumor mill would have him hung out to dry before lunch.

My joints creaked as I left my cruiser. Cancer’s a funny thing—I’d felt fine before my diagnosis, but now that I was in the middle of treatment, I felt like an eighty-year-old. I picked my way through the muddy yard, taking care not to turn an ankle, before knocking on the door. “Police,” I said as though he hadn’t seen me coming down the road.

Sully opened the door, his tall frame filling the space. “I might have known you’d be here before noon,” he said, not unkindly.

“Got a minute, Jim?” I said.

“Like coffee?”

“If it’s hot and black, then yes.” I followed him inside to the kitchen and looked around in that casual way they can’t teach you at the training institute. Jim owned a double-wide, so the living room and kitchen were spacious by trailer standards. The carpeting had been vacuumed recently, and none of the shelves or electronics showed any dust. The clean and tidy kitchen counters held only a knife rack and a coffee pot just finishing a brew. Either Jim expected company or he always kept his place neat. I’d seen a few meth labs in my time and they didn’t look like this. I let out a small breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

I helped myself to a seat at the small kitchen table as Jim handed me a cup of coffee. I took a sip and then another. “Damn, Sully,” I said, forgetting I was there more or less on official business, “This is perfect.”

He shrugged as he joined me at the table. “Been experimenting with some beans,” he said.

I waited for him to elaborate, and when he didn’t, I set my cup down. “Listen, Jim, there’s been some talk around town about a lot of traffic at your place some nights.” I paused to give him a chance to speak up. Silence. “What do you have here that attracts so many folks?”

Sully met my gaze. “Nothing special.”

I let my silence fill the kitchen for a bit, but Sully didn’t fidget or sweat or hold his breath. I decided on a direct approach.

“Are you selling drugs?”

“No.”

“Cooking them for someone else?”

“No.” Steady gaze, steady breath.

“Tell you what.” I took another sip of coffee. It really was perfection in a cup. If he could cook as well as he made coffee, he could open a place and put Maddie out of business. “Why don’t you show me what brings so many cars to your place on a rainy Sunday night?”

Jim gave me an appraising look, and I got the feeling he had studied me just as I had analyzed him. “You really want to know?”

“I could come back with a warrant,” I said.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Follow me.”

He left the kitchen and led me down the hall to the back. The corridor was wider than in most trailers I’d seen, which meant that even though I didn’t feel claustrophobic, there wasn’t room to do a jig, either. We passed a tidy guest bedroom and clean bathroom. When we reached the end of the corridor, Sully put his hand on the doorknob and paused.

“Once you come in here, there’s no going back. Understand?”

What did he mean by that? I became aware of the weight of my firearm in its holster and resisted the urge to rest my hand on it.

“Open the door,” I said.

He did, and an enormous wave of energy pushed over my body. I felt Sully’s hand guide me to a chair as I closed my eyes against the onslaught. Dizziness overcame me, and as soon as my butt hit the cushion my whole body shook. Sully rested his hands on my head and murmured a few words. The vertigo and shakes passed and I opened my eyes.

“What the hell was that?” I wanted to sound forceful, but my words came out as a whimper. I felt like I’d just gone through two rounds of back-to-back chemo. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do first: vomit or lie down and sleep for two days.

Sully answered by handing me a bottle of water. I drank it down in big gulps, the cool liquid sliding down my swollen throat like nectar. Once I emptied it I looked around. I had suspected Sully was taking me to the master bedroom, but now I knew Sully slept in the other room. Thick purple velvet curtains covered the bay window on one wall, and Walmart shelves bending under the weight of hundreds of books lined two others. A worktable covered with tiny marble bowls and jars filled with powders ran along the forth wall. From where I sat I could see bundles of flowers and herbs hanging upside-down in the shower. There wasn’t a bag of fertilizer or a box of decongestant in sight. This was no meth lab.

“What is this?” I said, thankful that some of the strength had returned to my voice.

“My workroom,” Sully said as he pulled a chair from a corner and sat next to me.

I stopped inspecting the room and looked at him. Sully’s large frame and his beard and his intelligent eyes looked at peace. It wasn’t that he hated folks or the town. He belonged here, in this room.

“And what work do you do, exactly?”

Sully examined his knuckles for a moment before looking me in the eye. “I sell solutions.”

“Solutions.” I said.

“To problems. Remember Vicky Moss? When her son died she had a rough patch and came to me. I made her an ointment to help take her pain away.”

I scratched my bald head. This didn’t make any sense. “Her pain wasn’t physical, Jim. Not sure how an ointment can take that away. Seems to me she needed Zoloft or something.”

Sully smiled and nodded as though he’d explained himself hundreds of times.

“Not all pain is the outside, Sheriff.”

You got that right. “So explain why your place is the sudden weekend hotspot. Making some concoction to make ‘pain’ go away?” I cocked a brow.

“Not exactly.” He said. “A few weeks ago Josh Wharton came to me because he had trouble throwing.”

It took a moment for my mind to switch gears. “Rockton’s quarterback.”

“Yeah. He’d been getting heat from the coach and his dad about interceptions and missing receivers. He was desperate and wanted something to make him throw better.”

My face turned hard. I’d heard enough about Josh’s recent turnaround to put two and two together. “You gave him something like a steroid.”

Sully looked taken aback. “No. Nothing like that. From what I could tell his body worked fine. It was his mind getting in the way that was the trouble. He agreed that might have something to do with it. I made a pill to help quiet all the voices. His coach, his dad, the other players, him. When those settled down he could concentrate on playing his best game.”

“And the others—”

“Some of his teammates found out he got stuff from me. Guess Josh wouldn’t tell them what it was, but they figured if it was good enough for him they needed it too.”

“And you sold them some hand lotion, told them it’d make their muscle grow, and sent them on their way?”

Sully shook his head. “Left here empty-handed. I don’t deal with folks who aren’t interested in what’s broken.”

“So your drugs are really—what’s the word? Placebos? Medicine that works because you think it does?”

“Yes and no.”

I blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Lucky you don’t need to understand for it to work.” He stood and placed both hands on my head. Once again I felt a rush of energy, this one smaller than the last, but enough to make my head spin. “You’ve got cancer.”

“Yes,” I said. Word spread around Rockton faster than a sixteen-year-old in a Mustang, but I got the feeling Sully hadn’t gotten his information from the grapevine.

“Advanced.”

I swallowed and hoped my voice wouldn’t shake. “Yes.”

Sully peered into my eyes for several moments. I felt that gaze all the way to my toes. Then he turned to his worktable and mixed several powders in one of the small glass bowls. He moved with the confidence and grace of someone who’d worked one job for twenty years. After he mumbled a few words, he poured the mixture into a little baggie and handed it to me.

“Put a teaspoon of this into a hot drink once a day. Not cold, not warm, hot. Like tea or coffee.” He pursed his lips. “Coffee’d be better, I think.”

I took the bag and held it like I would a lady’s purse. “This is for ... what? Pain management? Fatigue?”

“It’s a solution for your tumors,” he said.

I stared at him until it became evident that I’d heard the only explanation I would get. I sighed as I shoved the packet of powder into my breast pocket. “What do I owe you, Jim?”

Sully shook his head. “I only ask that you believe.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said as I stood. “I can find my own way out.”

Sully didn’t follow me as I left the trailer or watch me as I drove away. After I left his place, I felt stronger than I had earlier in the morning. The spells in his workroom had knocked the wind out of me, but now I felt more energetic than I had since starting chemo. I looked at the bulge in my pocket and thought about Josh’s two hundred passing yards.

 

I warred with myself the rest of the day.

How gullible does Sully think I am?

What’s the harm of trying it?

Well, for one thing, it can mess with my chemo.

Chemo’s not working, champ. If just sitting in Sully’s room can make me feel better, taking this powder can’t be a bad thing.

Quit being a moron and flush the stuff.

Quit being a pansy and drink it already.

The doc’s words at my last appointment did it for me: they’re not getting smaller, Mr. Howard. I’m sorry.

When I got home, I started a pot of decaf and changed out of my uniform. I didn’t know what to expect from Sully’s powder—would it make me sweaty or barfy? He didn’t tell me, and I felt funny about calling him up to ask. If the side effects were important, he would have said so. Just to be safe I slid into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. I’d been through enough to know that vomit is hard to wash out of denim.

I poured a cup of coffee, sat at the table, and sifted a spoonful of powder into the liquid. It dissolved so fast I would have sworn nothing had been added. The steam coming off its surface looked normal and it smelled like coffee. It tasted the same as it always did. I had expected it to taste bitter or chalky or something—any medicine worth anything tasted like crap—but apparently Sully didn’t operate that way. Or maybe it’s just his cure for cancer that’s tasteless. I caught my laughter before it sent coffee through my nose. Yeah, Sully’s got a cure for cancer right here in Rockton. Talk about gullible. Still, I swirled my coffee and downed the rest in three burning swallows.

 

A week later I walked into Maddie’s Place, tipped my chin to the table of farmers. Tom mumbled something about the ground being too dry. I made a sympathetic noise as I slid onto my usual stool at the counter.

“Morning, Randy,” Amanda said as her smile widened. “Hey, you look great today,”

“Thanks,” I said. “I feel better than I have in months.”

“Well, you look it.” She got that expression that people get when they want to ask something uncomfortable but don’t know how to do it. I saved her the trouble.

“Saw my doc on Friday. Labs look good.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded and found I suddenly had a lump in my throat. “Tumors are shrinking.”

Amanda smiled even wider. “Oh, Randy,” she said as she rested her hand on my arm and gave it a squeeze. “That’s great news.”

“Not out of the woods yet,” I said. And I took the last of Sully’s powder yesterday. What if the tumors come back? Guess I’ll have to pay Sully another visit, now won’t I?

“No,” she said. “But still. Breakfast is on me.”

“I can’t let you do that,” I said.

Amanda stopped me with her hand. “I don’t want to hear another word. The day I’m too broke to buy a friend with awesome news breakfast is the day they put me in the grave.”

Before I could say anything she walked to the kitchen and returned with a plate of biscuits and gravy. I dug in and moaned. “Maddie gets better at this every day,” I said.

“Keep your voice down, she’ll get a big head,” Amanda said as she poured my coffee. “Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did you ever check out Sully’s?”

I nodded. “Yup.”

“And?” Amanda had that gossipy look that said she expected to hear some juicy news.

“Nothing to report,” I shrugged. “Sully’s not making or dealing meth. Or anything else illegal, as far as I know.” That was the truth. I hadn’t researched the laws on homemade “solutions.”

“Really?”

I couldn’t decide if she looked disappointed or relieved. Probably a little of both. “Really. Sully might be unconventional, but he’s no criminal.” More like a miracle worker.

Amanda nodded and walked down the counter to help another customer. I smiled. If I knew her as well as I thought I did, my assessment of Sully would be old news by suppertime. A small payment for my solution, maybe, but somehow I knew that I would have plenty of time to think of something better.