Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “No brag. Just fact.” Jack tossed the rifle to Wade, who caught it expertly, snapped it into his shoulder and sighted down the barrel for a few seconds. Then he examined the gun more carefully, turning it in his hands as if it were the corpse of a small unfamiliar animal. It was a Browning BAR .30/06 with a scope.

  “What’d it set you back?” Wade asked. “Four fifty, five hundred bucks?” Jack just smiled, so Wade turned and handed the gun on to Hector, a towering grim man in overalls and solid-red wool shirt and plaid cap with the earflaps down.

  Hector weighed the gun in his thick hands and aimed it at his huge distant feet. “Nice.”

  Jack had taken up a position next to Hettie Rodgers, the girl in jeans and blue down vest who had been Jack’s girlfriend since the spring of her sophomore year in high school, the spring Jack got cut by the Red Sox organization and came back to Lawford and went to work drilling wells for LaRiviere with Wade. Jack slung his arm around Hettie’s shoulders and watched proudly as the men passed his rifle back and forth and examined it.

  Wade studied Hettie, who seemed distracted, lost in thought, her long dark hair half covering her heart-shaped face. He might have been thinking that Lillian used to look like that, when she was a kid and she was fresh-faced and happy just from being present and accounted for when Wade was around. Lillian would stand next to him thinking God knows what, off on her own, while Wade and his friends drank and laughed the night away, and there never seemed to be anything wrong with it, so long as he pulled away from his friends when she wanted to go. Then they would drive home and after they got married make love in that first apartment they rented and later they would do it in the bedroom of the house he built out on Lebanon Road. Just like Jack and Hettie—who will head out of here in a little while in Jack’s burgundy truck for his parents’ place on Horse Pen Road, or else, if that kid LaCoy keeps hanging around here at the town hall with Hettie’s roommate, they will pop over to Hettie’s apartment above Golden’s store and make love there.

  There was nothing wrong back then, nothing, or so it seemed then. And for Wade, looking back from a point twenty years later and then studying this young couple in front of him, it still seemed that nothing had been wrong. Those were wonderful times, he thought, truly wonderful times. After that, things all of a sudden started going wrong. They were only kids, he and Lillian, and they did not know how to repair anything, so when something in the marriage broke, they just went out and got divorced, and then came the army and his getting sent to Korea instead of Vietnam like he wanted, and all the rest followed—their getting married again, Jill, more troubles, getting divorced a second time: the long tangled painful sequence that had brought him, at last, aged forty-one, to where he was now. He was a man alone, hands jammed in pockets against the cold, while his only child, against her mother’s wishes, grumpily spent one weekend every month or two with him. The rest of the time his thoughts were mostly locked on his work, day in and out, drilling wells for Gordon LaRiviere—which he found boring, difficult and, because of the low pay and LaRiviere’s peculiar personality, demeaning—and being the part-time police officer for the town as well, which seemed to him almost accidental, an automatic consequence of his solitary condition and of his having been made an MP in the service.

  Wade still believed in romance, however. That is, he had somehow managed to sustain into his forties a romantic view of love. Thus he looked back upon those few brief years when he was in his late teens and early twenties, when he and Lillian were happy just from being in the same room with each other, as the model against which the rest of his life had to be measured. And held against that warmly golden glow, his present life looked grim and cold and terribly diminished to him, and increasingly he found himself regarding men like Jack Hewitt—handsome young men in love with handsome young women who loved them back—with something like envy and, to avoid rage, sorrow. He had made the connections himself many times late at night lying in his bed alone—between rage and sorrow, and between sorrow, envy and romance—and he had tried to dispel his painful feelings by changing his view of love. But he could not. There was the love he had known with Lillian when he was very young, and that was perfect love, and there was the rest, which was a diminishment.

  But by God none of that sadness kept him from being a good cop. Abruptly, he passed Jack’s rifle back to him. “Don’t leave your truck there,” he said.

  Then he turned and went back inside, where he saw right off that LaRiviere had already chosen the winners of the costume contests and was parading them up onto the stage at the far end of the hall. People were clapping their hands, some more enthusiastically than others, for some were the parents of the joyful winners and others the parents of hard losers. Pearl Diehler’s daughter, the fairy godmother with the wand, was among the winners, but her son, writhing in agony next to Pearl and directly in front of Wade, was a hard loser. Pearl clapped with energy for a few seconds, then turned her attention to the vampire at her side.

  Wade looked for Jill up on the stage with the winners. There was a boy dressed like a hobo up there, and next to him a clown of undetermined gender, and scowling and clawing the air behind the clown came a larger more theatrical version of Pearl Diehler’s vampire, and bringing up the rear, no doubt the winner of Best Costume, was a tall kid covered with feathers and wearing a huge yellow cardboard beak, a reasonably successful attempt to look like a popular television-show character.

  Jill was not there, Wade observed, and he began to search for her in the crowd of children who had not won a prize. Most of them had remained in the loose circle LaRiviere had herded them into while he made his selections, but a few had wandered toward the additional amusements, the apple-bobbing tank, the long white table where refreshments were being set out, the ring games. But Wade could not find Jill anywhere among them.

  Maybe she went to the bathroom, he decided, and he made his way through the crowd in the direction of the rest rooms to the right of the stage, when suddenly there she was, standing alone in the corner next to the pay phone, looking forlorn, tiny, abandoned. She had kept her mask on but had unbuttoned the top half of her costume, exposing the green-and-white ski sweater underneath, and she looked oddly disheveled.

  At once Wade realized that he should not have left her alone without first making sure that she had found a friend among the kids, and he said to her in a hearty way, “Hey, sweet stuff! How’s it going? What’re you doing way over here by yourself?” He put his arm around her and drew her to his side and peered out and scanned the room as if looking for an enemy to protect her from.

  “Some party, huh? Sorry I lost sight of you for a few minutes,” he said. “I just had to step out for a smoke. You find anybody you know here? There must be some kids here you used to know from school. They got school here tomorrow,” he added. “You want to go in with any of them? See your old teachers?” he said. “Want me to take you by? Be more fun than hanging out with me all day.”

  “No,” she said in a low voice.

  “No what?”

  “No, I didn’t see anybody I know here. And no, I don’t want to go to school here tomorrow,” she said. “I want to go home.”

  “C’mon, Jill, will you? You are home. There’s lots of kids you still know. You were playing with a whole bunch of kids Labor Day, don’t you remember?”

  “They’ve changed,” she said. “They’re different.”

  “Kids don’t change that fast. Any more than you do.”

  “Well, I’ve changed a lot,” she declared.

  Wade looked down at her. She was staring at her feet.

  “Hey, what’s the matter, honey?” he asked quietly. “Tell

  me.”

  She said, “I don’t want to be here, Daddy. Don’t worry, I love you, Daddy, I do. But I want to go home.”

  Wade sighed heavily. “Jesus. You want to go home.” He looked at the ceiling, then at his feet, then at his daughter’s feet. “Listen, Jill, tell you what. Tomorrow morning, you st
ill want to go home, I’ll drive you down,” he said. “Okay? But not tonight, not now. It’s too … it’s too late, for one thing. Tomorrow, we’ll see. What the hell,” he said, perhaps warming to the idea. “I’ll tell LaRiviere I’m sick or something. He owes me one. Maybe we can find something to do in Concord tomorrow afternoon, maybe we can go to the movies or something. And if you really and truly still want to stay down there, then I’ll drop you off and come back up here alone,” he said somberly. “And we’ll just wait till the next time or something. Though by then it’ll be Thanksgiving …” He trailed off. “Well, anyhow, we’ll work that one out when the time comes,” he said, chopping the air above her head with his right hand. “Right now, okay. If tomorrow you want to stay down there in Concord, it’s okay.”

  She was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, “I called Mommy.”

  “What?” Wade stared down at her in disbelief. “You called her? You called Mommy?” He glanced over at the pay phone as if checking the evidence. “Just now you called her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus. Why?”

  “I… because I want to go home. She said she’d come and get me.”

  “Come and get you! Shit! It’s a damn hour and a half drive up and another hour and a half back,” he said. “Why’d you make her do that? Why didn’t you talk to me about it first, for

  God’s sake?”

  “See, I knew you’d be mad,” she said. “That’s why I called her to do it, because I knew you’d be mad, and I was right. You are mad.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, right, I am mad,” he declared. “It’s … it’s spoiled,” he said. “It’s just being spoiled, this kind of stuff. Your ma doesn’t want to come all the way up here just to get you when you’re supposed to be spending the damn weekend with me. What’d you tell her, for Christ’s sake?” He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. “Jesus.”

  “I just told her I wanted to come home. Daddy, don’t be mad at me.” She slowly drew off her mask and turned to him.

  He said, “Well, I guess I am. It’s hard not to be mad at you, for Christ’s sake. I planned this, I planned all this, you know. I mean, I know it isn’t much,” he said. “It’s sort of pathetic, even. But I planned it.” He paused. “You shouldn’t have called your mother,” he announced, and he grabbed her hand and said, “C’mon, we’re gonna call her before she leaves.”

  “No way, José,” she said, and she stepped back.

  Wade sealed her hand in his huge one and pulled her toward the stairs and up to the long narrow unlit hallway on the second floor. They walked rapidly past the frosted-glass doors that led to the Office of the Selectmen, Office of the Town Clerk and Tax Collector, to the end, where the sign on the door said simply POLICE. Wade pulled out his keys and opened the door and snapped on the light. It was a small efficient cubicle with pegboard walls and a large window, a file cabinet and a gray metal desk and chair, with a straight-backed chair beside it. There was a locked glass-enclosed rifle rack with two shotguns and a rifle on one wall and on the other a geological survey map of the forty-nine square miles of Clinton County that made up the township of Lawford, New Hampshire.

  Wade closed the door solidly behind him, flicked on the overhead neon light and sat down in his chair facing the desk; Jill plunked herself into the chair beside the desk, crossed her legs and rested her chin on one fist, as if lost in deep thought. Quickly he dialed the number, put the receiver tight to his face and waited while it rang. I will just tell her, he thought, that she should forget it, stay home, Jill’s only acting up a little because she has not kept up with any of her friends here and she is kind of shy and this is her way of dealing with shyness, that’s all. Simple. Nothing to worry about, nothing that was Wade’s fault, nothing to be mad at, and certainly no reason to drive all the way up here to Lawford, for Christ’s sake. She should stay home in Concord in her fancy new house with her fancy new husband and watch TV or something and forget about him, forget about him and Jill, forget about everything that had happened.

  The phone buzzed like an insect, over and over, and no one answered, until finally he concluded that Lillian and her husband had already left for Lawford, and at once he felt flooded by anger, overwhelmed by it.

  “She’s gone already!” He slammed the receiver into the cradle and stared at it. “Fucking gone already. Couldn’t wait.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all you got to say, ‘Yes.’ “

  “Yes.”

  “She won’t be here for at least an hour,” he said. “Think you can stand it that long?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Where do you expect to wait for her? Obviously downstairs with the other kids isn’t good enough for you.” Wade was locked into an old familiar sequence: his thoughts and feelings were accelerating at a pace that threw him into a kind of overdrive, a steady high-speed flow that he could not control and that he knew often led to disastrous consequences. But he did not care. Not caring was only additional evidence that he was in this particular sequence again. But there was not a damned thing he could do about it, and not a damned thing he wanted to do about it, either, which was yet a third way that he knew he was in this particular gear again.

  “You can sit right here, dammit, sit right here in the office and wait for her all by yourself,” he told his daughter. “That’s fine with me. Dandy, just dandy. I’m going downstairs,” he said, and he stood up.

  Jill looked toward the window. “That’s fine with me too,” she said in a low voice. “I can wait up here fine. When Mommy comes, just tell her I’m up here.” She uncrossed her legs and stood up too, and putting her mask back on, she grabbed the chair with both hands and dragged it over to the window. “I’ll wait here. That way I’ll see her when she comes and can come downstairs myself.” She lined the chair up against the window and sat down again, and with the mask still covering her face, she peered out the window into the darkness.

  “Jesus, Jill, you really are tragic,” Wade said. “No kidding, tragic. Sitting there in your tower like some kind of fairy princess or something, waiting to be saved from a fate worse than death.”

  Jill turned toward him and said calmly, “I’m a tiger, Daddy, not a fairy princess. Remember? You bought the costume.” Then she went back to looking out the window.

  “Yep, that’s my doing, all right,” he said, and he wrenched the door open and stormed out. He slammed it behind him, rattling the glass, and stalked down the hallway to the stairs.

  Passing through the crowd in the hall, ignoring the noise and the faces, the few waves and nods tossed toward him, Wade made his way across the room to the door. He arrived there just as Margie Fogg entered. She wore a dark-green down jacket over her white waitress’s uniform and was probably hoping to see Wade here. Not wanting it to seem so, however, to him or anyone else, she had come with her boss, Nick Wickham, despite his usual designs on her. The same age as Wade, Margie had been one of his girlfriends back in high school, before Lillian—though it was not until years later, when both he and Margie were married to other people, that they had actually ended up in bed with each other. They were old friends by now, however, and possibly too familiar with each other ever to fall in love, but in the absence of particular strangers, there were many cold and lonely nights when they depended on each other’s kindness.

  She touched Wade’s shoulder as he brushed by her, and when he turned, Margie surely saw at once, as we all did with Wade, that he had gone to someplace deep inside himself, a place where he was kept from doing more than merely recognizing her. His deep-set dark-brown eyes had a membrane laid over them, and his thin lips were drawn tightly over his teeth, as if fighting to hold back huge and derisive laughter. Over the years, Margie Fogg, like many of us, had seen that expression enough times to know how to respond intelligently, which was simply to get out of the way and stay out of the way until he came looking for her again.

  She pulled her hand back as if she had t
ouched a hot stove and went directly into the hall, with Wickham coming along behind her, toothpick slanting jauntily from under his dark drooping mustache.

  She should have known, she later told me. Wade was out of it that night, the way he can get, but with his daughter Jill in town with him, and with him stone sober, it was strange, and she should have known that something important had gone sour for him, one more thing, maybe the one that finally, truly, because of what it added up to, mattered in a way that none of the others had, not the divorce itself and all that ugly business with the lawyers, not losing his house the way he did, and you know how he loved that little house he built, and not Lillian’s moving down to Concord. “I just should have known, that night at the town hall. Not that it would’ve made any difference,” she said.

  She reached across the table and took my fork from my hand and cut a bite off my slice of raisin pie and popped it into her mouth. “Sorry. I love Nick’s raisin pie. Let me get you another fork.” She laughed. “I can’t help myself.” She is a tall large-boned woman with a broad Irish face, downturned green eyes and pale skin. Due to her size, perhaps, and the suddenness of her movements, she looks awkward, but she is in fact uncannily graceful and a pleasure to watch move. Her frizzy hair is the color of cordovan, and she had it tied back in a loose thatch with a piece of black ribbon, showing to advantage her long and handsome white neck.

  “No, that’s okay, we can share,” I said, but she got up from the table anyhow and brought a clean fork from the counter. We were at Wickham’s, and Margie had served me coffee and pie. It was a slow Thursday night, and I was at the moment the only customer. Wickham was out back in the kitchen, watching the Bruins game on a portable TV, ignoring my presence, by now used to my showing up alone at odd hours once or twice a week to ask questions of him or Margie or the odd customer, questions about Wade, about Jack and all the others, asking what happened, what was said, what was thought and imagined, asking what was true. Was it true that on Halloween Eve down at the town hall party Wade was acting strange? Or was he the same old Wade, all knotted up, to be sure, but no different than usual? How did he act? What did he say? What do you think he was thinking?