Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Wade said, “Aw, c’mon, I was only just saying that there’s something wrong with ’Home Made Cooking,’ that’s all. The sign’s fine. The sign itself. It’s just what it says that’s wrong.”

  “How? Why? Tell me what the fuck’s wrong with it. Jesus Christ. That thing cost me a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  “It don’t matter,” Wade said to Nick, and he clapped him on the shoulder. “It looks real … serious,” he said. “It looks like you’re in the goddamn restaurant business to stay. We’re proud of you, Nick, we the citizens of Lawford, New Hampshire, we goddamn salute you, sir!” he said, and he reached to open the door. “Now I think I’ll go in and have me some of that home made cooking you’re advertising, if you don’t mind.”

  Since that morning, every time Wade pulled into Wickham’s parking lot—every time, in fact, that he passed the restaurant, whether he stopped in or not—he examined the neon sign and tried once again to figure out what was wrong with it. The sign made him nervous, embarrassed him slightly, as if it were a mirror in which he had caught a glimpse of himself with a silly grin on his face.

  Nobody else seemed to find the sign peculiar or “wrong”; in fact, no one even spoke of it unless to compliment it. One evening Wade had leaned over the counter and asked Margie what she thought of Nick’s new sign, asked her offhandedly, as if he himself held no opinion on the subject, and she had said, “Oh, well, the sign’s terrific, I guess. But who needs it? Everybody who comes in here has been coming in here for years. They don’t need a neon sign to tell them where it is or what’s sold here. It’s nice, though,” she had said. “Better than what was there before.”

  “What was there before? I never saw anything there before.”

  She punched his arm and laughed. “That’s the point.” She patted his hand. “Nothing was there before,” she said, and she reached across the counter and with both hands squeezed his cheeks. Hands: Margie Fogg had hands that went everywhere, all over you, faster than you could think about and before you could decide whether you wanted her to touch you or not. From back in the kitchen, Nick hollered for her to pick up her orders, for Christ’s sake, before they froze, and she let go of Wade’s cheeks and, rolling her eyes, slouched toward the kitchen in a parody of obedience.

  Now Wade stood among the cars and pickup trucks in the snow-covered lot for a few seconds before going into the restaurant, and once again he studied the pink neon sign, pinker than usual in the falling snow, almost obscenely pink. Underwear pink, he thought, although he had never known a woman who wore pink underwear. Margie wore white cotton underpants and cream-colored bras. Lillian’s underwear was beige or sometimes bronze-colored or dark gray. Taupe, she once told him. Who knew what color she wore now? Surely not Wade. Ho, ho, not he. But the sign was bubble-gum pink. Wade figured that hookers, probably, were the only women who wore bright-pink underpants—prostitutes, B-girls—and then he remembered one who had, a girl in Seoul, he even remembered her full name, Kim Chul Hee, and he quickly looked down from the Home Made Cooking sign and entered the restaurant.

  Inside, clouds of cigarette smoke and intense chatter swirled from the booths along the wall, where men wearing luminous orange hunting vests and caps and plaid wool shirts were seated in groups of three and four. Coats, parkas and quilted jackets were strewn on chair backs and hooks around the room. A dozen or more men, their boots dripping puddles onto the floor, perched on stools with their elbows on the counter, smoking and talking intently, as if just before Wade entered something exciting had occurred here. Normally, the place was quiet as a tavern at this hour, no matter how many people were there.

  Wade looked around the crowded room, his eyebrows raised for a greeting, but no one seemed to notice him. Even Margie, standing at the booth at the far end with her empty tray propped against her outslung hip, did not notice him. She was listening to the conversation between the four young men seated before her: Chick Ward, whose purple Trans Am Wade had observed parked outside among the pickups and Wagoneers and Broncos like a fancy switchblade among sledgehammers; and two other guys, whom Wade did not recognize but who he assumed were from Littleton, where Chick often went to drive his car at night; and there was the kid Frankie LaCoy, who, like Chick, spent a lot of time up in Littleton, but for a different reason, because Littleton was where Frankie bought the grass he sold here in Lawford. All four were dressed for hunting and from the looks of their boots had been tramping through the woods since daybreak. There had not been any dead deer tied to the fenders of Chick’s Trans Am out front—Wade had registered that on the way in—but why should there be? Chick was no hunter, except for women. You’d expect to see a couple of naked women trussed up and lashed to the fenders of the Trans Am, not white-tailed deer, right? That Chick Ward, he was obsessed.

  Wade ambled over to the booth and laid one hand across Margie’s broad shoulder and placed the other on Chick’s. He liked sometimes to try doing with his hands what Margie seemed compelled to do with hers: it looked good when she did it; it made her seem connected to other people in a way that Wade envied.

  Margie turned to him, and the four men ceased talking and looked up at him expectantly with sober expressions, even Frankie, who usually grinned and winked when he saw Wade, as if the two shared a delightful secret, which in a sense they did. Wade knew that Frankie was the only person who sold marijuana in Lawford, and Frankie knew that as long as he acted as if Wade did not know, Wade would let him alone.

  This morning, however, Frankie looked up at Wade as if he wanted the older man to explain something to him, to unravel an irritating mystery. Chick Ward too. Chick usually ignored Wade, except to grunt hello and, suddenly flush-faced, scowling, to stare at his feet, like a guilty child, which Wade understood to be the result of an encounter they had had years ago, when Chick was still in high school and liked peeping through windows at middle-aged women getting ready for bed. The other two men, both bearded, with long dark hair spilling over their collars, did not know who Wade was, but even so, they peered up at him eagerly, as if he had brought them important news.

  “Getcha deer yet?” Wade asked the group. He squeezed Margie’s shoulder. There was something off, a beat or a note missing. People were not acting normal this morning, Wade thought, or else he was not seeing things right, as if he had a fever or were hung over or his toothache were distracting him. It was like watching a movie with the sound track out of sync. “Whaddaya say, boys?” he tried. “Some kinda snow.”

  He let go of Chick’s shoulder, avoided his gaze and tapped a cigarette halfway loose of the pack and plucked it out with his lips. He squeezed Margie’s shoulder a second time. There were mornings like this—infrequent, six or seven times a year, but frequent enough to trouble him—when, after having lost all memory of the final hour of the previous night at Toby’s Inn, he strolled into Wickham’s for coffee, and it was instantly clear to him that whatever he had said or done during that last hour of total darkness the night before, whatever it was that he could not remember, was known this morning to everyone in the place.

  Margie said, “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, why not?” Wade said. His heart was pounding, as if he were frightened, but he was not frightened, not yet. He was only a little confused. There was a slight, almost imperceptible break in the pattern of greeting, that was all. No big deal. Yet he was sweating, and he was smiling oddly, he knew, making remarks that did not quite add up, driving the pattern of greeting further and further off with every passing second. He could not stop himself. He felt the way he believed Frankie LaCoy felt all the time, which put him on a kind of defensive alert.

  To no one in particular Wade said, “Good thing my kid went back down to Concord with her mother.”

  Frankie nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “How’s that?”

  “The snow and all.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Margie took a step back and looked into Wade’s eyes, and he instantly turned away. Nick Wickham
, wiping his hands on a towel, had come out of the kitchen and moved swiftly to refill several mugs of coffee for the men at the counter.

  “Gimme a big one to go!” Wade called. Too loudly, he knew. “Cream, no sugar!” Wade suddenly wished that he had not stopped at the restaurant, that he had gone on plowing the road, alone, cold and content inside his dreams. Margie’s concerned gaze and the slightly perplexed expression on Frankie’s face and Chick’s expectant look were all too uncomfortably familiar to him. Other people were in one world; he was in a second. And the distance between their worlds caused other people concern and perplexity and made them curious about him—for here he was alone in his world; and there they were gathered together in theirs.

  He lit his cigarette and saw that his hands were trembling. Look at the bastards, shaking like little frozen dogs begging at the door to be let inside. Wade felt fragile, about to shatter. When he was sixteen he had felt this particular kind of fragility for the first time, and he had gone on rediscovering it, suddenly, with no apparent cause, ever since. One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.

  Margie said, “Jill went home with her mother? I thought she was up for the weekend.” Then she said, “Oh-h,” and her hand reached out and touched his forearm. She put her tray down on the floor, leaning it against the side of the booth, and reached toward Wade as if to embrace him.

  He stepped back and stared at a spot on her shoulder, as if she were his girlfriend Lillian Pittman and he were sixteen again, stopping her with his movement and the sudden rigidity of his face. He had told her about his father’s beating him again, revealed it to her without planning or even wanting to, blurted out the information in the middle of a conversation about something else. “My father laid into me something wicked again last night,” he said, and Lillian, sweet innocent Lillian, made that same move toward him, just like Margie, hands reaching out, her long narrow lovely face swarming, it seemed to him, with pity and bewilderment, and with perversely detached curiosity as well, for she knew nothing of violence then, and it seemed both the most horrible and the most inexplicable thing she could imagine. Entranced as much as repelled by what he had told her of it, she nonetheless knew nothing of the light and heat he felt when his father beat him, nothing of the profound clarity of feeling that emerged from the center of his chest when it happened, nothing of the exquisite joining of all his various parts that he experienced when his father swung the boy’s lean body around and punched it and shoved it to the floor while his mother’s face howled in the distance. He could in no way tell her of these things; he could barely know of them himself. All he could know was that he had left out of his account something that was crucial and filled him with shame, which is why he simultaneously moved toward her for solace and pushed her away.

  “Just forget I said it,” he murmured. “Just forget I said anything about it.”

  Margie let her arms drop to her sides. “About what?”

  “You know. Jill.”

  She said, “C’mon, just a minute,” and moving swiftly, slipped her arm around Wade’s arm and turned him away from the booth toward the small pine-paneled back room where the video games and pinball machines were located, empty of players at this hour, shadowy and smelling of old cigarette smoke. Nick hollered, “Marge!” as she stepped through the door, and she shushed him with a wave.

  Wade leaned against the Playboy machine, exhaled noisily and said, “Listen, Margie, I got to take care of business. Christ. I got to get…” He trailed off, and he spread his hands, as if in actuality he had nothing to do. Looming behind him was a brightly lit picture of Hugh Hefner in silk pajamas and bathrobe, pipe in smirking mouth, forelock dangling, and four naughtily unclad adolescent girls with provocative leers and outsized breasts like pink balloons slinging themselves around him. Wade shifted onto one elbow and seemed to study the picture. “Don’t you shut these things off at night? Wastes a lot of electricity.”

  “Never mind that,” she said. “Chick and Frankie and those boys were playing already this morning. Anyhow, I don’t want to talk about that. And neither do you.” She paused and placed her large hands on both his shoulders, as if blessing him. “What happened to Jill?” she asked.

  “I got sick of arguing with her. Sent her home.”

  “Truth?”

  “Yeah. Nothing happened. Nothing ’happened’ to her.” He suddenly pictured Jill crumpled on the highway, broken like a pumpkin under the flashing yellow light by the school, the car that hit her, a black BMW, racing away into darkness. “I’m … I’m going to start up one of those custody suits. I don’t fucking give a shit,” he said. “You know?” He was aware that his eyes were filling with tears, but he was not weeping: he was not sad.

  “Don’t be a horse’s ass,” she said. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do mean it.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re pissed, Wade, that’s all. You ought to let yourself cool off from this one for a few days and then just sit down and for once have yourself a long talk with Lillian. Straight talk, I mean. You know? Work it out with her. Let her know honestly just how this kind of stuff makes you feel,” she said. Then she added weakly, “Lillian’s not out to get you, Wade. You know?”

  “The hell she isn’t. Lillian’s been trying to nail me to a cross since the day I met her. Since fucking high school. No. I’m gonna hire me a fucking lawyer from Concord and get this thing, this divorce thing, rearranged. I am. I been thinking about it, a lot. I was too fucked up and all, when we got the divorce, so I just hid out and took whatever crumbs they were willing to toss me, her and that goddamned lawyer of hers.” He held his nose with thumb and forefinger and yanked. “I didn’t even have a regular divorce lawyer, that’s how dumb and fucked up I was. I’m embarrassed to say it, but it’s true. And now she can do any goddamned thing she wants, anything—move to Concord, get married. Move to fucking California, if she wants. Meanwhile, I still got to send her three hundred bucks a month child support or go directly to jail, do not pass go. Only, when it comes to actually being with my own kid, being a real father and all, I don’t have a single say-so,” he said. “It’s like she owns Jill or something and only loans her out to me or something, and then only when she feels like it. And when she wants her back, she comes and gets her. Like last night. That’s not right,” he pronounced. “People aren’t property. Nobody owns anybody, especially not kids. Right’s right.”

  He stood up straight and drew Margie’s hands off his shoulders and smiled. “Look, I got to get out of here. I got to get my coffee and climb back onto that goddamned grader. Mr. Gordon LaRiviere’s going to be royally pissed at me. Nick the Wick’s probably pissed at you already.”

  “Nick the Wick,” she said, smiling.

  He looked directly into Margie’s face. “That goddamned woman,” he said. “Lillian thinks she and her goddamned husband can just drive up here and cart Jill off like that and leave me … leave me all alone like this. It’s more than pissed, Margie. I’m a whole lot more than pissed. No shit. I been that plenty, and I know the difference. This is different.” He spun around and headed for the door.

  Margie shook her head sadly and followed him. As he approached the cash register at the end of the counter, Nick looked out from the kitchen and said, “Your coffee’s by the register, Wade. What do you hear about Jack Hewitt and that guy he found? Who the fuck is the individual?” He called out, “Hey, Marge, for God’s sake, honey, you got two orders sitting there getting cold!” Nick held a trio of white plates like playing cards in one hand and with the other rapidly shoveled pancakes off the griddle. “You hear anything more about that guy that shot himse
lf? You talked to Jack?”

  All along the counter, men looked up at Wade and waited for him to answer. Wade glanced beyond them and saw that most of the men in the booths were waiting too. “No. No, I mean, not since last night,” he mumbled. “He took a guy named Twombley up to Parker Mountain early.”

  Nick handed the three plates of pancakes to Margie and came down the counter to Wade and rang up his coffee. “You heard, didn’t you?” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  “About the fucking guy shooting himself.” Nick pointed an index finger at one temple and pulled the trigger and said, “Bang. Least that’s what it sounds like. Not on purpose, I mean. I assume accidental.”

  “Where … how’d you hear that?”

  “CB. Little while ago. One of the boys on the way in, Chick, I think, picked up Jack on the CB calling for the state troopers. Jack told the staties he was up to Parker Mountain with a guy who shot himself, and wanted help. Couple of the boys started over from here to give him a hand, but the troopers were already all over the fucking place up there and sent them on back. I figured you’d know the whole story,” he said. “I figured you’d know what really happened, I mean. The fucking guy kill himself? This Twombley, who the fuck is he, anyhow?”

  “No. I … I didn’t know. I was … Jesus, where was I? I was out plowing—I been out in the grader all morning,” Wade said. “And up the school before that,” he quickly added. He felt vaguely guilty, as if he were somehow lying and were struggling to find an alibi, when all he was trying to do was answer the man’s simple innocent question. He took a deep breath and tried again. “Twombley … Evan Twombley is summer people, from Massachusetts. He’s got a place over on Lake Agaway. Friend of LaRiviere’s or something, which is how Jack come to take him out hunting. For Gordon. It was his idea. Gordon’s, I mean.” Wade started for the door. “I shouldn’t say any more about it. I was out plowing the whole time,” he said, and he swung the door open and stepped into the blowing snow, where he paused for a second, as if to clear his head, turned and saw the pink neon sign on the low roof of the restaurant.