Affliction

by Russell Banks

  HOME MADE COOKING. It should be Home Cooking, Wade suddenly realized. Or Home Made Pies, or some damned thing. Stupid. He is stupid. She is stupid. We are all stupid.

  9

  WADE WANTED ONLY to get rid of the grader, shuck it, cast it away and never drive it again—huge lumbering ridiculous machine. It humiliated him. It was only a thing, but he despised it. It was inept, and slow. It belonged to LaRiviere, and driving it made Wade feel that he belonged to LaRiviere too, as if he were painted the same wimpy shade of blue and had that dumb motto on his back, OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE!

  He had an excuse to get off the machine now. Let LaRiviere find somebody else to finish the plowing; Wade had official business to attend to. Thanks to Twombley. The state troopers might turn away Chick and Frankie and their crummy friends from Littleton, but they would have to let him through. Let Wade through, he’s okay. No matter if it was an accidental shooting, it still took place in his jurisdiction, and he was obliged to turn in a report to the Fish and Game Commission, so they would have to let him talk to Twombley, assuming Twombley could talk, and he would have to take statements from Jack and anyone else who happened to witness the shooting. Sonofabitch was probably half drunk or too hung over to handle his gun properly.

  But as he climbed back up into the cab of the grader, Wade sighed. No, he would end up spending the whole damned day driving that damned grader. Gordon LaRiviere the well driller was also Gordon LaRiviere the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, who hired and fired the town cop. LaRiviere would tell Wade to make his goddamned investigation on his own time and turn in his report later. For now, until five o’clock this afternoon anyhow, Wade Whitehouse the snow-plow driver belonged to Gordon LaRiviere the town road agent. Only then would he belong to the Board of Selectmen. And at no time would he belong to himself.

  It was a quarter to eleven when Wade drew the grader off the road onto LaRiviere’s parking lot. In the far corner near the shop, his own car sat huddled under a blanket of snow, and next to it was parked LaRiviere’s pickup, a 4 X 4 Dodge with a roll bar and running lights like Jack’s and a plow that LaRiviere made Wade repaint light blue after every major snow-storm, covering over the nicks in the paint made by stones and gravel scraped up while plowing.

  LaRiviere was crazy. No other word for it, as far as Wade was concerned. He insisted on having everything he owned look simultaneously ready to use and never used. When LaRiviere drove out to inspect a well-drilling job, he paced around the site with his hands on his hips and his upper lip curled as if he had just spotted a pile of cat shit on the toe of his boot. Then he would stop the work and make Wade and Jack or whoever was drilling police the area, restack the pipe, lay the wrenches and tools down side by side in order of size. Only when the trucks, rigs, stock, tools and site had been arranged as if for sale in a showroom would he allow the men to go back to work.

  Wade pulled the grader in next to the shop and shut off the motor and climbed stiffly down to the ground. The snow was falling lightly now, tiny hard particles that stung his face. He was cold, and it felt permanent. There was, he said to himself, no rational reason for a man to go on living in a climate like this when he did not have to. And Wade knew he did not have to. True, wherever he lived he would live just as badly, and true, in a perverse way he loved the town, but at least in some places he would be warm. He thought about it often, and usually he understood why he had not left Lawford and then left the state of New Hampshire and even left New England altogether. Sometimes, though, the only reason he had for not moving, even down to Concord, where Lillian had taken Jill, was that he no longer possessed the energy it would require. Perhaps he had never possessed it, even when he was young and freshly married, a high school kid, practically, or when he came back from Korea four years later and had a few bucks and was freshly married a second time. Lillian would have traipsed off with him, he knew, to Florida or Arizona, or maybe to one of those southeastern states like North Carolina. When he was in Korea he met men, Seabees, who told him that he could easily find a high-paying job using the same skills he had used drilling for water in northern New Hampshire drilling for oil instead in Texas or Oklahoma; if he had suggested that to Lillian—and had not kept the idea to himself, as if there were nowhere else on earth a man like him could find a job—she would have said, “How long do I have to pack?” And then everything would have been different. He thought the unaccustomed thing crossly: Oh, Lord, he was a fool! The others were stupid, maybe; but Wade was worse: he was a fool.

  LaRiviere’s not knowing about Twombley surprised him. When Wade told him what had occurred up on Parker Mountain, the little he knew, LaRiviere’s normally red face went white, and the big man seemed to shrink inside his clothes.

  “I figured you’d already heard,” Wade mumbled. “Off the CB,” he said, nodding toward the front office, where LaRiviere kept a small unit on the file cabinet next to Elaine Bernier’s desk. “I thought you knew all about it.”

  “I hate that fucking squawk box!” LaRiviere said, glaring up at Wade from his chair. “I just use it to call out. What the fuck am I going to call Jack for, why would I call Jack this morning anyhow?” he snarled.

  “They knew about it over to Wickham’s, even.”

  “Forget that, for Christ’s sake. What’re you worrying me about that for? We got to get going, I got to get up there. Twombley. Jesus.” He was puffing himself up now, enlarging his abnormally large body, for action, movement, control. His hair bristled like an angry dog’s, and he rose from his chair and grabbed his blue down parka off the hook behind the door.

  “C’mon, you drive; we’ll take my truck. Put that fucking cigarette out, will you?” he said to Wade. He pushed past him and headed out the door.

  Wade followed, flipping the key to the grader onto Elaine’s desk. Outside, as they crossed the parking lot, he tossed his cigarette into a snowbank.

  LaRiviere saw him and said, “Not there, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Where, then?” Wade reached down and retrieved the still smoldering butt and held it out to LaRiviere as if offering it to him.

  “Oh, Christ, Wade, how the hell do I know? Go inside, go use the fucking ashtray, but hurry the fuck up, I’m in a hurry. Jesus,” he said, and he started trotting toward the pickup.

  Wade ducked back into the office, rubbed the cigarette out in the large ashtray on the counter, directly under the No Smoking sign, and smiled uneasily at Elaine, who did not smile back. Elaine Bernier disliked Wade because she knew Gordon LaRiviere did not like Wade but needed him and thus was not free, as she was, to show his dislike. She considered her scowls and snide remarks a vital part of her job.

  In the truck, Wade drove, while LaRiviere, grim and silent beside him, continued to puff himself up, tightening the last few creases in his broad flat face, swelling his chest and arms. Wade reached for the CB receiver and flicked it to the police channel as they sped north past Wickham’s and passed out of town. They heard static and gibberish for a few seconds, then the gravelly voice of the dispatcher from Littleton telling car 12 to stay where it was, situation under control, ambulance already arrived.

  “Fuck,” LaRiviere said. “Turn it off.”

  Wade obeyed.

  “All you heard was there was some kinda accident up there, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s all you heard?”

  “Well, no,” Wade said. “Twombley was shot. I heard that. Not Jack. He’s okay.”

  “Fuck.”

  “No, Jack’s okay. I assume.”

  “Fuck. You don’t know how bad or anything?”

  “You mean Twombley.”

  “Yes, Wade, I mean Twombley.”

  “No.” Wade switched on the wipers. “I don’t know how bad.” The snow was spitting at them, but the sky had lightened to a creamy gray color. It would not last much longer.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “He’s probably okay. He more than likely just shot himself in the foot or
something. That’s what usually happens.”

  “I should have sent you out with him instead of Jack.”

  Wade was surprised. He glanced at LaRiviere, who was chewing his thumbnail. “Yeah, I wish you had,” Wade said. “I’d rather be deer hunting instead of riding around freezing my ass on that fucking grader.” He reached over and opened the ashtray in front of LaRiviere, who promptly deposited a sliver of thumbnail and went to work on the other one. Wade slid the ashtray closed.

  “You ain’t the hunter Jack is. And he can’t drive the grader worth shit.”

  “Like hell,” Wade said, although he knew LaRiviere was right on both counts. Jack hated the grader even more than Wade did and drove it with a careless anger that twice had got the thing turned onto its side in a ditch. And while Jack had not failed to kill a deer the opening day of every season since he was twelve, Wade had not taken a single shot at a deer in over a decade. For the last four years he had not bothered even to try. Not since Lillian and he split up the second time. Lots of things had gone out of him after that, among them the cheerful stubbornness that a man needed to keep on trudging into the woods with a gun year after year, despite the pattern of frustration and failure, in search of a flash of fur, a flag of a tail switching through the trees. Wade always made too much noise when he walked, as if warning the animals, a heavy-footed man with a body made more for carrying than for stalking, and he always figured the movement of animals wrongly, figuring them to move left instead of right, uphill instead of down, away instead of near: he would see the deer, look to where he thought it was going, and it would be gone. Then he would fire his gun at a stump four or five times, just to fire the damned thing, and scare every deer in hearing range deeper into hiding.

  They passed the school, and Wade said, “You know that guy Mel Gordon, Twombley’s son-in-law?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fucker almost ran me over this morning. Passed a stopped school bus.”

  “Big deal.”

  “I’d say so. I plan to nail the bastard.”

  LaRiviere shifted in his seat and studied Wade’s profile for a second, then went back to working on his thumbnail. “Forget Mel Gordon,” he said, reaching forward to open the ashtray. He slipped the sliver of fingernail in and closed it again, patting it once afterwards as if with approval.

  “Like hell. I was standing there in front of the school, holding up traffic to let the buses in, you know, like I do, with kids crossing the road there and all, and this sonofabitch in his BMW gets impatient and cuts around the line and tear-asses right at me and then blows by like I’m not even there. Could’ve been a little kid crossing right then, for all he knew. Sonofabitch oughta lose his fucking license for something like that.”

  “So what are you gonna do, give him a lecture?”

  “Shit, no. Summons him. Summons the bastard for a moving violation. I’d sure as hell call that a moving violation, wouldn’t you?”

  LaRiviere didn’t answer. They had turned off Route 29 onto Parker Mountain Road, which was still unplowed, and were following in the tracks left by the half-dozen or so vehicles that had preceded them. Wade threw the truck into four-wheel drive, and the truck adhered to the rutted surface of the road as if magnetized by it. Drooping snow-covered pine trees whipped past. The remnants of ancient stone walls smoothed and softened by the snow drifted alongside the truck like loaves of new bread as it wound its way toward Saddleback Ridge, then out along the ridge and back and forth along the switchbacking road to the top of the mountain itself.

  Both men were silent now, deep in their thoughts. Wade was replaying Mel Gordon’s offense against his dignity and the law, but who knew what LaRiviere was thinking? When he is not fussing the world into neat little piles and squares and rows, you cannot know what is going through his mind. He is a man who plots and schemes, a secretive man with a bluff exterior who plans his moves way ahead of time and rarely makes one that he has not already made a hundred times in his imagination. He thinks of life more or less as a strict and, for the winners, highly rewarding contest. In LaRiviere’s world, you win and win big, or you lose and lose everything. Survival, mere survival, does not exist for him, except as a dismal loss, which is one of the several reasons he despised Wade. As far as LaRiviere was concerned, Wade merely survived, which meant that his life had no purpose other than to facilitate LaRiviere’s. Either you are able to use people or they use you. Nothing in between. People who think they are in between and believe they are safe there are laughable. Like Wade.

  They saw it before they heard it—all at once it loomed up in front of them, a huge white emergency vehicle with red lights flashing, and Wade wrenched the wheel hard to the right and drove the truck off the road into the shallow ditch, up onto the bank, and into a stone wall, where the plow clanged against the rocks and the truck stalled.

  The ambulance flashed past without slowing and was gone. Snow filtered down from the trees like flour onto the windshield and broad hood of the truck. Wade said, “Sorry,” and restarted the engine, shoved the truck into reverse and backed slowly onto the road.

  “That must’ve been Twombley,” LaRiviere said in a low almost reverential voice, as if he were in church. “Jesus. I bet that was Twombley.” He sounded frightened and stared after the ambulance for a few seconds. “I hope you didn’t ding the fucking plow,” he said absently.

  “You want me to follow them into Littleton, to the hospital?”

  “No, not now. They probably won’t let us see him right off”

  “Probably.”

  “Let’s get to the top and talk to Jack first,” LaRiviere said, gathering himself together again. “Jack’ll know what happened,” he said. “He fucking better. Oh, if this could’ve been avoided, Wade, I’ll put that kid’s ass in a sling.”

  Wade started driving again, more cautiously this time, as if he expected a second ambulance to charge out of the snow and appear suddenly in front of them. He was puzzled by LaRiviere: what was Twombley to him anyhow, except a now-and-then business buddy? Wade, like most people in town, knew that LaRiviere had been buying and occasionally selling patches of real estate for years, on his own or in partnership with others, and no doubt Twombley had been one of his sometime partners in the purchase of pieces of land, overgrown hilly farmland, mostly, some of it with enough timber to harvest, but most of it nearly useless and apparently unprofitable, except for where it adjoined a road, and a trailer park could be set up or a small house built on it and sold. Even so, despite any business connections they might have had, Twombley and LaRiviere were hardly what you would call asshole buddies. Besides, it was not like LaRiviere to show any feeling for another person, especially another man, unless it was anger or his usual impatience—except when he wanted something from the man, in which case he exuded charms more suited to a Moroccan rug bazaar than to the northern New Hampshire real estate market.

  But this was not anger or impatience or phony affection he was expressing for Twombley; it was almost tenderness, protectiveness, concern. Wade liked it: he did not know why and maybe did not even know it was a fact, but he had loved crazy old Gordon LaRiviere since he was a kid, practically, when he first went to work for him right out of high school, and he always needed new reasons to explain his love of the man. LaRiviere’s love of someone else, even a man like Evan Twombley, might be one.

  They were silent the rest of the way. By the time they arrived at the top, where there were two cruisers drawn in neatly at the right side of the road opposite Jack’s truck, it had stopped snowing altogether. Three troopers, one talking to Jack, a second with a German shepherd on a leash, the third with a Polaroid camera in his hand, stood at the front of Jack’s truck, and a fourth trooper walked through the snow toward them from LaRiviere’s cabin on the rise beyond.

  To Wade, as he pulled in behind the cruisers, all the men looked oddly happy. They wore sly smiles on their faces, as if they had just won a bet with a fool. Jack had both fists placed against the hood of his
truck and was shaking his head slowly back and forth, while two of the troopers, hands in pockets, watched and listened to the third talk to him. The talker glanced across the hood of the truck at Wade and LaRiviere as they came up to them, and went on talking.

  "So I says to her, ’Lady, I don’t give a shit if you’re John F. Kennedy himself. I didn’t vote for him when he was alive and I ain’t voting for him now.’ “ The trooper was a tall wiry man in his late forties; his hair looked dyed with black shoe polish, and his high flat cheekbones gave his gray eyes a permanent squint. He had a low rumbling voice that stroked itself as he spoke. “Hello, Gordon,” he said to LaRiviere. “Wade.” Then he went on, “ ’I clocked you at a hundred and five between Lincoln and Woodstock,’ I says to her, and she reaches into this little leather bag she’s got on the seat there and pulls out this fucking hundred-dollar bill, so I says to her, ’Ma’am, unless you’re just trying to show me a picture of the late president, you better put that back, because up here bribing a police officer’s a criminal offense.’ “

  Jack stood up straight and faced the man, smiling. “A hundred and five,” he said. “That’s wicked fast. What was she driving?” he asked. “Hey, Wade. Hello, Gordon,” he added, casting a quick look their way.

  “Maserati. One of those hundred-thousand-dollar wop cars you can’t even get your feet into. Must be like driving in a condom.”

  Jack laughed and folded his arms over his chest and turned to face LaRiviere. “Well, Gordon,” he said. Then, suddenly serious, he sighed. “You heard the news,” he said.

  “Some. I heard some. I heard Twombley got shot.”

  “He did,” Jack said somberly, but almost as if he were merely announcing the man’s departure, Wade thought. Though there was a slight note of regret in Jack’s voice, it was as if Twombley had left early for lunch or a meeting in town before they had a chance to get their deer this morning. It was a serious event they were discussing: men from this region, when something disastrous happens and the thing must be spoken of, talk aslant and sometimes even joke in order to talk about it at all.