Affliction

by Russell Banks

  From all the corners and back roads of the district, huge lumbering pumpkin-orange school buses passed north and south through the town, then slowed at the town center, as if by prearrangement, blinked red warning lights and waited for Wade Whitehouse, standing in the middle of the road, to wave them one by one into the schoolyard.

  Wade did not enjoy this part of his job—for one hour a day five days a week he was the crossing guard at the school—but it was required. Wade’s annual police pay, $1,500, one tenth of his total income, was a line item in the school budget that got authorized every March at town meeting. LaRiviere, who had been a selectman for over a decade, allowed Wade to come into work at eight-thirty, a half hour later than anyone else who worked for him, so that he could claim that he personally saved the school board the extra fifteen hundred dollars a year they would have to pay someone else to do the job if Wade had to be at work at eight o’clock. That way, the town was able to pay for its police officer from the moneys allotted to the school budget, and half those moneys came from the state and federal governments. Gordon LaRiviere was not selectman for nothing.

  In the years when his daughter Jill was one of the children riding the bus to school, Wade had loved being the crossing guard. Especially after he and Lillian had got divorced and he moved out and he no longer saw Jill at the breakfast table. Every morning he waited out there in the middle of the road for her bus to round the downhill curve on Route 29, and when the bus finally reached him, he held the driver up for a long time and let all the buses coming the other way turn in first, giving Jill time to get to the window, so that she could see him and wave as, at last, he permitted her bus to pass into the schoolyard. Then he waved back and smiled and watched until the bus stopped by the main entrance and let the kids tumble out, kids alone, kids in pairs, little knots of friends, when a second time he got to see his daughter, with lunch box and book bag, silvery-blond hair freshly braided, clean clothes and shoes, red scarf swinging in the crisp morning air.

  She always looked for him then too, and they smiled and waved their hands like banners at one another, and she ran with her friends around to the playground in back, happier with her day, he was sure, than if he had not been there to greet her. Just as, for Wade, those few golden moments every morning were the zenith of his day and colored his attitude toward everything that followed, all the way to the end of the night, and even his sleep was more peaceful because he and his daughter for a few seconds had seen each other’s faces and had smiled and waved at one another. Then something completely unexpected had happened: Lillian had sold the little yellow house in the birch grove and had moved down to Concord. And now the school buses only reminded Wade of his loss.

  This morning, because of the snow, which had accumulated rapidly and was several inches deep and drifting already, the buses and the rest of the early morning traffic were moving with special care. Wade held them at the crossing longer than usual before letting them turn off the road into the schoolyard, giving the drivers extra time to see through the windblown snow and ease their precious cargoes, the children of the town, around each other and the occasional batches of kids who walked to school and crossed the road from the far side when Wade directed them to cross. Lined up behind the buses were cars and pickups with people hurrying to work and late-rising deer hunters. Their motors idled, windshield wipers clattered, and now and then, when a car passed him, the driver glowered at Wade, as if he had delayed them for no good reason.

  He did not care. He was pissed this morning anyhow, and it almost improved his mood that people were mad at him. The faces of the children peering out the windows of the buses seemed to mock him, as if they were still wearing their Halloween masks—little demons, witches and ghosts. None of them was his child; none of them was Jill, eager to wave at him.

  He made everyone wait, held long lines of buses, cars and trucks back, letting one child at a time cross the road as he or she arrived, instead of making a group of them gather there first. And he did not permit a single bus to enter the schoolyard until the bus ahead of it had unloaded all its passengers and had pulled out at the far end and was back on the road again, heading north to Littleton.

  Now even the bus drivers, who normally acknowledged Wade not at all, as if the discipline it took to keep them from being rattled by the noise and play of their passengers kept them from perceiving Wade as anything but a traffic signal, were staring sullenly at him as they passed, a few shaking their heads with disgust. He did not care. I don’t give a rat’s ass you’re pissed, he thought. One driver, a flat-faced woman with red hair, slid her window open and hollered, “For Christ’s sake, Whitehouse, we ain’t got all day!” and the kids in the seats behind her laughed to hear it.

  He heard the school bell ring and saw the kids come racing around from the schoolyard behind the low light-green cinder-block building to line up in messy formation, girls separated from boys, at the main entrance. The principal, Lugene Brooks, his buttoned sports jacket barely able to contain his round belly, his collar turned up, his thin gray hair fluttering in the wind, had come outside and was mouthing commands at the children, marching them inside like a drill sergeant. He glanced toward Wade, saw that there was still one more bus to turn off the road and unload, and he shouted, “Wade! Hurry up! They’ll be late!”

  Wade kept his arms straight out, one aimed north and one south, with both hands up. Motionless, expressionless, he held his post in the middle of the road. The yellow caution light directly over his head blinked and bobbed on its wire, and the remnants of last night’s smashed pumpkins, half covered by snow and slush, lay scattered at his feet. He looked like a demented scarecrow.

  He felt like a statue, however: a man made of stone, unable to bring his arms down or force his legs to walk, unable to release the one remaining school bus and the dozens of vehicles lined up behind it and the dozen more facing it. Someone way in the back hit his horn, and at once most of the others joined in, and even the bus driver was blowing his horn. But still Wade held his arms out and did not let anyone pass.

  He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus. Simple. It was his only thought. Oh, how he wanted to see his daughter’s face. He longed to look over as the vehicle passed and see Jill’s pale face peer out the window at him, the palms of her hands pressed against the glass, ready to wave to him. Daddy!Daddy, here I am!

  He knew, of course, that she would not be there, knew that he would see instead some other man’s child staring at him. And so he refused to allow the bus to move at all. To release that one remaining bus and all the cars and trucks lined up behind and in front of it, horns blaring, windows rolled down and drivers hollering and gesturing angrily at him, to let them pass, would instantly transform his desire to see his daughter into simple loss of his daughter. Somehow he understood that the pain of enduring a frustrated desire was easier to bear than the pain of facing one more time this ultimate loss. He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus; it was his only thought.

  Then suddenly, from near the end of the long line behind the bus, a glossy black BMW sedan nosed into the second lane and started coming forward, passing the other cars and trucks and gaining speed as it approached Wade. There was a man driving and beside him a woman in a fur coat and in back a pair of small children, boys, staring over their parents’ shoulders at Wade, who behaved as if he did not see them at all or as if he fully expected the BMW to come to an abrupt stop when it drew abreast of the bus.

  But it did not. The BMW accelerated, changing gears as it flew past Wade and on down the road and disappeared around the bend beyond the Common. Wade still did not move. As if the flight of the black BMW had been a countermanding signal to the signal Wade’s position and posture gave, the last yellow schoolbus drew quickly off the road and entered the schoolyard, and at once the rest of the cars began to move again, north and south, passing Wade on both sides.

  Slowly his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood there starkly alone in the exact center of the road.
It was only after all the vehicles had passed him by and the road was once again empty and the bus had unloaded the thirty or forty children it carried and had pulled out of the schoolyard and headed back toward Littleton that Wade himself departed from the road. He walked slowly in the blowing snow toward his own car, which was parked just beyond the main entrance to the school.

  Standing at the door to the schoolhouse was Lugene Brooks, his arms folded over his chest more as protection against the cold and snow than as a gesture of disapproval, his round face, as usual, puzzled and anxious. Wade walked heavily past the man without acknowledging him and yanked open the car door.

  “Are you okay, Wade?” Brooks called to him. “What was the matter out there? Why were you holding everyone up?”

  Wade got in and slammed the car door and started the motor. Then he backed up a few feet and rolled the window down and shouted, “That sonofabitch in the BMW, he could’ve killed somebody.”

  “Yes. Yes, he could have.” The principal paused. “Did you get his number?” he asked.

  “I know who it is.”

  “Good!” the principal exclaimed. Then he said, “I still don’t understand—”

  “I’m going to nail that bastard,” Wade muttered.

  “Who … who was it?”

  “It was Mel Gordon. From Boston. Evan Twombley’s fucking son-in-law—he was the one driving. I know where they’re headed, too. Up the lake, Agaway. Up here for the weekend, probably. The old man’s out deer hunting with Jack Hewitt, so they probably got a big weekend party planned,” he said. “Oh, I’m gonna nail the bastard, though. Spoil his fucking weekend for him.”

  “Good. Good for you, Wade. Well …, ” Brooks said, stepping halfway inside the school. “I’m the guy who’s got to make things run around here, so I better hop to it.” He smiled apologetically.

  Wade stared at him, remaining silent, so the principal said, “I was just wondering … you know, about why the big holdup out there, why you were keeping everybody stopped like that. You know?” He smiled feebly.

  “You probably think I got an answer for that question,” Wade growled. “You ask more dumb questions than anybody in town.”

  “Well, yes. No, I mean. It just… seemed odd, you know. I figured, holding the bus like that and all the cars, you’d had a reason for it. You know.”

  “Yeah,” Wade said. “It’s logical for me to have a logical reason for things. Everybody else I know does. You, for instance. You got a logical reason for everything you do?” he suddenly asked the principal. “Do you?”

  “Well, no … not really. Not everything, I mean.”

  “There you go,” Wade said, and he quickly closed the car window and started moving away.

  He left the schoolyard and turned right onto the road, flipped on the CB and started listening to the squawks coming in from all over—truckers out on 1-95, hunters up in the hills plotting their coordinates, a wife in Easton telling her husband he forgot his lunch bag. The snow was coming down with fury, in white fists, and as he drove slowly through the stuff, Wade thought, I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it.

  In the lot outside Wickham’s Restaurant, a half-dozen pickup trucks and as many cars were parked side by side. The corpses of large male deer were lashed to front fenders, slung onto roof racks, stretched out in the corrugated beds, carcasses gutted and stiffening in the cold, tongues flopping from bloody mouths, fur riffling in the light breeze, snowflakes catching in eyelashes. It gave the impression not of the aftermath of a successful hunt but of a brief morning respite in an ongoing war, as if the bodies of the deer were not chunks of meat but trophies, were proof of individual acts of bravery, dramatic evidence of the tribe’s rage, courage and righteousness and a cruel warning to those of the enemy who still lived. Counting coup. One half expected to see the antlered heads of the slain deer severed roughly from the bodies and stuck onto poles tied to the rear bumpers of the vehicles. One expected crow feathers tipped in blood.

  Out on the highway, cars with out-of-state plates hurried south with the trophies on the roof and lashed to the front fender freezing solid in the wind, the drivers and passengers passing a bottle back and forth while they whooped and detailed in compulsive repetition the story of the kill. And in Lawford, in backyards, deer hung from makeshift gallows, in dark barns on meat hooks, in garages from winch chains or rope tied to I beams; and behind fogged-over kitchen windows, hunters shucked their coats and boots and sat down to tables and ate hearty breakfasts, eggs and bacon, pancakes smeared with butter and covered with maple syrup, huge steaming mugs of coffee: men and women, their blood running, excited in ancient ways, proud and relieved and suddenly ravenous for food.

  Jack led the way from the truck onto the flat beside the road, circled the frozen patch of high-country marsh, then angled left on the sloping lumber trail, over rocks and low brush. Immediately, Jack started playing his gaze back and forth across the rough snow-covered ground in front of him, searching for tracks and sign. Whenever Twombley, wrapped like a huge infant in red bunting, trundled close and attempted to come up alongside him, Jack seemed to walk a little faster and put the man behind him again.

  He moved smoothly, a natural athlete, long-legged, broad-shouldered, lean and loose—a ballplayer. “I’m a ballplayer,” he always said, “no matter what else I ever do.” He never said “baseball player” or even “pitcher,” and in fact he had been slightly disappointed when the Red Sox turned out to be the only team that wanted to sign him, despite the fact that since early childhood the Sox had been his favorite team, because that meant the American League and the designated-hitter rule: as a pitcher, if he ever made the majors, he would not be allowed to hit. And back in those days he fully expected to make the majors. Everybody in town and even across the state and into Massachusetts expected the kid Jack Hewitt from a hill-country village in New Hampshire to make the majors. “No way that kid won’t be pitching in Fenway a couple years from now,” people said when Jack with his big-league fastball was drafted in his senior year of high school. “No fucking way. The best ballplayer to come out of New Hampshire since Carlton Fisk.” People thought he even looked a little like Fisk, square-jawed and nobly constructed in all the ways an unformed boy of eighteen can be said to be constructed—the kind of boy a town is proud to send out into the world.

  The world in this case turned out to be New Britain, Connecticut, but after a season and a half playing double A ball, Jack was back in Lawford, unable to lift his right hand above his right shoulder, where he wore two long white scars that Hettie Rodgers loved to touch with her tongue. Beneath the scars he wore a ruined rotator cuff, ruined, he liked to say, by trying to do what man was not meant to do, throw a slider, and by surgical attempts to repair the damage.

  He did not complain, though. At least he had a shot at the big time, right? Most guys never even got that far. He knew lots of pitchers in the minors who had ruined their arms the first year or two, so he did not feel especially unlucky. His story was not all that unusual. Not for someone who had got as close to the big time as he did. That was the unusual story, he felt, getting as close as he did in the first place. More worldly than his neighbors, he took the statistical view and gained comfort from it.

  Or so it seemed. Every once in a while, his disappointment and frustration would break through with the force of grief and rage, and he’d find himself beer drunk and weeping in Hettie Rodgers’s arms, crying into her soft white neck ridiculous things, like, “Why did my fucking arm have to be the one to go? Why couldn’t I be like those other guys who’re pitching in Fenway, for Christ’s sake? I was as good as those fucking guys! I was!”

  Then the next day, after digging wells with Wade all day for Gordon LaRiviere, he would land back at his stand at Toby’s Inn, watching the game on the TV above the bar with the regulars and explaining the finer points of the game, dropping bits of gossip and rumor about Oil Can Boyd, Roger Clemens and Bruce Hurst, guys he’d known and pitc
hed against in the minors, diagramming on a napkin the difference between hit and run and run and hit, anticipating managerial moves with an accuracy and alacrity that pleased everyone who heard him, made them proud to know him. “That Jack Hewitt, he’s fucking amazing. Only difference between him and that guy Clemens up there on the TV is luck. That’s all, shit luck.”

  Slipping and sliding downhill behind Jack came Evan Twombley, carrying his rifle, lugging it first with his right hand, then with his left, sticking one hand and then the other out for balance as he tried to follow Jack’s footsteps in the snow and tripped on a rock or a slick piece of trash wood. Finally, he slung the rifle over his shoulder, like an infantryman, and used both arms for balance. Overweight, out of shape, he was soon puffing and red-faced from the effort of keeping up with the younger man; he began to curse. “Sonofabitch, where the fuck’s he think he’s going, a goddamn party?”

  When Jack had eased twenty yards ahead of Twombley and had actually disappeared from view around a stand of low spruce trees, Twombley hollered at him, “Hey, Hewitt! Slow the fuck down!”

  Jack stopped and turned and waited for the man. A look of disgust crept across his face, but when Twombley came lurching awkwardly around the spruce trees, Jack smiled easily and in a soft voice said, “Deer’s got ears too, you know.” The falling snow spread like a veil between them, billowing from the wind, and Twombley might have looked like a fat red ghost approaching. As if suddenly frightened by him, Jack turned and moved on, a little slower now than earlier, but keeping the distance between them constant.

  They were switchbacking down the north slope of Parker Mountain, walking in the direction of Lake Minuit through woods that were lumbered out five or six years before, past stumps and piles of old brush among young pine and spruce trees. The sky seemed huge and low, smoky gray and spewing white ash over the valley. Now and then the sound of gunfire from below drifted all the way up the long tangled side of the mountain, as if skirmishes were being fought down there, isolated mopping-up actions and occasional sniper fire. Out in the open now, they could see in the distance the oval shape of the frozen lake, a white disk with a crystallized roughening at the farther edge that was LaRiviere’s trailer park, as Jack thought of it, where Wade Whitehouse lived.