Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “Fuck,” LaRiviere said. He exhaled loudly and looked off toward his cabin. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  Wade reached down and patted the German shepherd on its wide head. “How you been?” he asked the tall black-haired trooper, a captain, Asa Brown, whom Wade had dealt with before. Wade did not particularly like Brown, and he was sure that Brown did not much like him, either. Actually, Wade thought Brown a dishonest braggart, and he believed that Brown thought Wade incompetent.

  “Not bad, Wade. Not bad. Had me a run-in the other day with one of them Kennedy types. I was just telling Jack here. Watch the dog, Wade. He takes a mind to, he’ll tear your fucking hand off.”

  “Oh, he likes me,” Wade said, but he withdrew his hand and shoved it into his coat pocket. “Doncha?”

  Still regarding the view, LaRiviere said, “Twombley shot bad?”

  “I’d say so,” Jack said.

  “Thirty-thirty at close range,” Brown said.

  “Jesus.” LaRiviere whistled.

  The men were silent for a few seconds. Then Wade said, “Will he make it?”

  “Nope,” Brown answered. “DOA. Dead on arrival.”

  The trooper with the dog, a burly blond kid in his early twenties wearing a pimply shaving rash on his throat like a pink ruff, said to Brown, “You want me to head on back now?”

  “Yeah, might’s well. Get started on the paperwork. I got to talk to the next of kin, I suppose.”

  LaRiviere looked at Jack. “You see it?”

  “Nope. Heard it, though. We wasn’t very far apart. I’d spotted this big buck, and then I heard the gun go off and turned around, and Twombley was gone. Disappeared. Then I looked over the little cliff we was using for a stand, and there the fucker was, deader’n shit.”

  “Blew the poor bastard wide open,” Brown said. “Thirty-thirty. Soft-nosed bullets. He had a bigger hole in back than in front, hole you could put your head in. And he had a pretty big hole in the front too. You could’ve put your fist in that one.”

  “Well,” LaRiviere said. “Well.” He paused. “Think the snow’s done?”

  “Looks like it to me,” Brown said, and he peered up at the creamy sky. “For today.”

  Jack looked straight ahead and at no one in particular. “It’s a real early winter,” he offered.

  Wade said nothing. He was staring into Jack’s impassive face, catching glimpses of light in the darkness there, flashes and glints of heated metal whirling in a blackened pit. The bits of light that he saw, the heat that he felt, he had never seen or felt in Jack before, and they surprised Wade. He had known the tall angular youth since the boy first showed promise as an athlete in grade school, that one summer Wade coached the Lawford Pony League team and, thanks to Jack, they went all the way to the state semifinals down in Manchester.

  The trooper with the dog and his partner with the camera crossed the road and got into the lead cruiser, turned it around carefully and headed back down the mountain. The third trooper stood at ease a short ways behind Brown, as if awaiting further orders.

  LaRiviere looked at his watch and said, “Well, shit. This’s gonna be one fucking mess to clean up. Twombley’s son-in-law and I suppose his daughter are up for the weekend. Didn’t you say you seen him already this morning, Wade?”

  “Yeah. I did. I seen them.”

  “You know where they’re staying?” Brown asked LaRiviere.

  “The family’s got a place on the lake, out on the point on Agaway. Nice place. They come up summers and during the winter on weekends for skiing. You know, they go to Water-ville mainly, and over to Franconia and Loon, for skiing. Nice place. Sauna, hot tub, the works. Cost a fucking penny, I’ll tell you. Fellow from Concord built it for him. I dug the wells.”

  “I dug the wells,” Wade said. “Over three hundred feet apiece, fourteen gallons a minute each.”

  LaRiviere stared at Wade with obvious irritation and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it.

  “You know the place?” Brown asked the trooper behind him, ignoring Wade.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, I don’t think you do, either,” Brown said. “You want to talk to them, Gordon?” he asked. “Tell them about the old man’s tragic demise? You know them. You knew the old man.”

  “Sure. What the fuck. My day’s already ruined,” he said. “Gimme the keys,” he said to Wade. “You can go back with Jack.”

  Wade said okay and handed over the keys. Then he said, “I’m still going to give that bastard a summons, you know.”

  LaRiviere looked at him hard and was silent. His stare said, What the hell are you telling me now, you dumb stubborn bastard?

  “I mean, it’s too bad about Twombley and all, but shit, right’s right,” Wade said. He turned to Jack. “The fucking son-in-law, whatzizname, Mel Gordon, practically ran me over this morning, passed a stopped school bus and everything. In front of the school. He’s goddamned lucky he didn’t kill somebody’s kid.”

  Jack didn’t respond. He seemed to see straight through Wade to the snowy woods beyond.

  Brown smiled his thin smile, like a garter snake. “I didn’t know you was such a hardass, Wade,” he said. “Give the guy a break. If you want, I’ll tell him that by the way the local sheriff’s pissed off, but because of the circumstances and all, he’s letting this one go.”

  “I’m not a sheriff, Asa.”

  “I know.”

  LaRiviere said, “You still got a shitload of plowing to do, Wade.”

  “It ain’t done, if that’s what you mean.”

  For a few seconds everyone was silent. “Something bugging you, Wade?” LaRiviere said.

  “A few things. Yeah.”

  “A few things. Well, right now we’re not too interested. And as for a few things, there’s a few things need taking care of first. Then you can be bugged all you want. On your own time, though, not mine.”

  LaRiviere wheeled and started across the road toward his truck. Brown and the other trooper followed, heading for the cruiser.

  When LaRiviere had got his truck turned around, he drew it up next to Wade; he reached across the seat and cranked down the window. “I expect I’ll see the grader gone by the time I get back to the shop, Wade. And for Christ’s sake, forget giving a fucking ticket to Mel Gordon. His father-in-law’s just killed himself. Use your fucking head,” he said.

  Wade said nothing.

  In a low almost whispered voice, Jack asked, “You want me to do anything in particular at the shop?”

  LaRiviere hesitated a second, then said, “You might’s well take the rest of the day off. You look sort of fucked up to me. Which I can understand. You’ve already been paid for the day anyhow, right?”

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, he never paid me.”

  “You’ll get your money,” LaRiviere said. “I’ll see you get your money. Go on home. Get drunk or something. Start over tomorrow,” he said. “And don’t talk to any newspapers about this,” he added. “Twombley’s a big deal down in Massachusetts, you know.”

  “What’ll I say?”

  “Just tell them the truth, for Christ’s sake, it was an accident. But forget the details. Tell them they should talk to the state police about it, if they want details. Tell them if they want details your lawyer says you shouldn’t comment.”

  “My lawyer? I don’t need no lawyer, do I?”

  “No. No, of course not. Just say it, that’s all.” Then he rolled up the window and drove off, with the cruiser following close behind.

  The two vehicles disappeared, and it was suddenly silent, except for a light wind sifting through the pines, the ragged call of a crow in the distance, the squeak of Wade’s boots in the snow as he shifted his weight. He lit a cigarette and offered Jack one.

  “I got my own,” Jack said. He rummaged in his shirt pocket for his pack, got it out and took a light from Wade’s yellow Bic.

  “Did you smoke when you was playing ball?” Wade said.

  “Why’s that?”r />
  “I dunno. Just asking. I keep thinking about quitting.”

  “Yeah. I smoked since I was a kid. Sure I did.”

  “No shit? Even in school you smoked? I don’t remember you smoking till you come back from New Britain.”

  “Sure. Coach never knew it. They had a rule. Not in the pros, of course, but in school.”

  “Even in Pony League? You were smoking then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit. You was only—what?—twelve then.”

  “I started when I was eleven.”

  “No shit. I never knew that. I was coaching Pony League then, remember? I didn’t have no rules about it, but I didn’t think I needed them.”

  Jack smiled slyly. “Sure, I remember.” Then he laughed. “You were a shitty coach, Wade. Pretty good left fielder, but a shitty coach. You oughta play some Legion ball next summer.”

  “I know it.”

  They were silent and both looked toward LaRiviere’s cabin in the pine grove on the rise beyond the snow-covered muskeg—the tall angular young man in the orange hunting vest and quilted jacket and the shorter man in the dark-blue trooper’s jacket and watch cap, both men with hands stuck in pockets, cigarettes in mouths, eyes squinted against the bright light reflected off the snow. They looked like cousins or a younger and an older brother, blood relations separated by two decades, one man favoring the mother, the other favoring the father, two very different men connected by thin but unbreakable ties to a common past. They stood free of the truck and seemed to be waiting for someone to emerge from the cabin, a person bringing them important news—of a birth or a death or the arrival of the absolute truth.

  Without looking at Jack, Wade said, “Where’d Twombley get shot?”

  “In the chest.”

  “No, I mean whereabouts.”

  Jack pointed to his left, downhill through the scrub. “About a half mile in, along the old lumber road, down there where it looks out over the lake.”

  “You bring him up yourself? That’s a steep climb.”

  “No, no. The ambulance guys, they lugged him up.”

  “He was dead right away?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Jack turned to him and smiled. “What’re you doing, playing cop?”

  “No. I got to make a report to Fish and Game, of course, but I was just wondering, that’s all. What’d he do, to shoot himself, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Fuck, I was watching a fat old buck with a rack like a fucking elk or something stroll past. I guess Twombley slipped on the snow or something, fell over a rock. Who the fuck knows? It’s rough ground down there, and he wasn’t used to the woods. With the snow and all, he could slip easy. Who knows? I just heard the gun go off. Bang! Like that, and he was gone, blown away.” Jack flipped his cigarette butt into the snow a few yards in front of him.

  The light breeze had shifted and was blowing into their faces. Now there was a pair of crows calling to each other, and Wade could see one of them, glossy purple-black and nervous, perched near the top of a red pine to the left of LaRiviere’s cabin.

  Wade said, “I’ve never seen a man shot and killed before. Not even in the service. It must be something. I saw plenty who’d already been shot, you know, shot dead or wounded, all fucked up in all kinds of ways. When I was an MP, mostly. Same as when I come back here. Even here I’ve seen a couple guys after they’d already been shot, but I never actually saw it. You know? It must be something, to see a man shoot himself.”

  “Well … I didn’t actually see him do it. Like I said.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “What?”

  “Saw him do it.” Wade studied the crow as it leapt from branch to branch of the scraggly red pine. “Of course you did.” Wade put himself behind Jack’s eyes and turned from the sight of the huge buck in the draw below to look along the ridge at Evan Twombley twenty feet away, just to make sure, like a good guide, that Twombley could see the buck, too, and was ready to shoot it; he saw Twombley take a tentative step toward the edge of the drop-off, saw him flip off the safety of his .30/30 with his thumb; he saw him slip on a small rock or stick hidden under the snow, toss one hand, the hand with the gun in it, damn it, out to break his fall, twisting the rifle as he went down, his fingers somehow tangled around the trigger guard or even brushing the trigger as he tried both to keep himself from falling and to protect the rifle, and before he hit the ground, the gun went off, and the force of the bullet exploding into his chest sent him flying into the air backward and down into the draw—a rich and powerful fat man blown clean off the earth.

  “What the fuck are you telling me, Wade? I never seen the guy get shot. I told you that.”

  Wade watched again as Twombley caught sight of the deer below, stumbled and turned his back in the direction of his fall; this time he fell with both hands shoving the fancy new rifle away from his chest, to keep it from being damaged or covered with snow, turning it somehow so that the tip of the barrel passed over his chest—when it fired straight into his chest, smashing his lungs and heart and backbone, splashing blood and bits of flesh over the snow and sending the body of the man tumbling this time, like a broken dummy, like trash, into the gully below.

  “You must’ve seen him get shot,” Wade said in a low voice. “I know you did.”

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jack said. “You’re not making sense, man. This whole thing has got me rattled anyhow.” He passed in front of Wade and climbed into the truck, slammed the door as if angry and started the engine.

  Wade watched Twombley die a third time.

  First, from behind Jack’s eyes, he saw the huge buck emerge from its hiding place in the birch copse at the left side of the draw and walk slowly along the draw directly into his and Evan Twombley’s line of sight. Now Twombley could see the animal too, and suddenly excited, he patted the younger man on the shoulder, demanding, with gestures, his rifle back, for he had been unable to walk through the snow with it and had already dropped it once, and finally he had made his guide carry it for him. Wade brought the tip of the barrel up, shoved the stock against his right shoulder, aimed through the scope so that the bullet would hit the meat of the right shoulder from above, pass through the chest and exit from the left side of the animal’s belly, killing it instantly and very cleanly with one shot. Twombley, mad with greed for the shot and the sudden knowledge that he was not going to get it, that his guide was taking it himself, grabbed the rifle with both hands and tried to tear it free, and the tip of the barrel swung around, and the gun went off. Twombley was tossed backward and over the precipice, his already dead body tumbling over the rocks and snow to the bottom, where it lay with its legs and arms splayed, as if it had been hurled from the sky, gushing blood into the snow. The echo of the gunshot died, and then the sounds of the huge buck leaping through the dense tangle of brush farther down drifted back, the clatter and crash of flight growing fainter and fainter, until the woods were silent again, except for the sigh of the wind through the trees and the mocking call of a crow somewhere above and behind, up by LaRiviere’s cabin and the road.

  Wade was startled by the blat of Jack’s horn from the truck. He had already turned the vehicle around and was waving angrily for Wade to get in.

  Slowly, Wade walked over to the truck and climbed up into the passenger’s seat. He pointed at the three rifles in the rack attached to the window behind him. “Those’re yours, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One of them must be Twombley’s, though.”

  Jack didn’t answer.

  “That there’s your old twenty-gauge,” Wade went on, laying his hand on the shotgun, “and that there’s the new Browning you was showing off last night at the town hall.” Then he placed his hand on the barrel of the third gun and held it tightly, as if he had captured it. “This must be Twombley’s gun. Brand-new, almost. Very fancy tooling,” he murmured. “Thirty-thirty, and only been fired one time,” he said. “It’s a beautiful piece of work, Twombley’s gun. But
what the hell, Jack, I guess you deserve it. Right’s right.”

  Jack said, “Yeah, right’s right,” and started to drive slowly downhill, following in the tracks left by the police cruisers and LaRiviere’s truck and before them the ambulance carrying Twombley’s body to Littleton.

  “Twombley sure as hell won’t be shooting it again, will he?” Wade said.

  “No,” Jack said. “He sure as hell won’t.”

  10

  LATE THAT SAME NIGHT, Wade telephoned me to ask if the Boston TV stations had reported Evan Twombley’s death. Yes, I told him, they had, but I had barely noticed: the death by gunshot of someone about to testify about union connections to organized crime, even though disguised as a New Hampshire hunting accident, was a common enough news item and was sufficiently distant from my daily life not to attract my attention.

  “There was something,” I said, “but I missed it. Why, did it happen up your way?”

  “Yeah, and I know the guy. And the kid with him, Jack Hewitt. Who you probably know too, incidentally. He works for LaRiviere with me. That kid, he’s my best friend, Rolfe,” Wade said.

  It was close to midnight, and Wade sounded slightly drunk, calling me, I imagined, from the phone booth at Toby’s Inn, although I could not hear the jukebox thumping as usual in the background. I was in bed reading a new history of mankind, and this was not a conversation I found enthralling.

  I had heard from Wade a half-dozen times that fall, and I had seen him twice; both times he had driven down suddenly on a Saturday night. He had stood around in my kitchen drinking beer, rambling on about Lillian and Jill and LaRiviere—his problems—then had fallen like a tree onto my couch, only to return to Lawford the next morning after breakfast. I was sure, as we talked about Twombley, that I knew Wade’s whole story by now, the way you do when you have heard a drunk man’s story, even your drunken brother’s—perhaps especially your drunken brother’s—and did not require any new chapters.