Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “Wade,” I said, “it’s very late. Not for you, maybe, but we have different habits, you and I. You’re at Toby’s, and I’m in bed reading.”

  “No, no, no. Not tonight. I’m at home tonight, Rolfe. I’m not reading, maybe, but in fact I’m in bed too. Anyhow, I’m calling because I need you to listen. You’re supposed to be such a smart guy, Rolfe. I’ve got a theory about this guy Twombley, and I need you to check me out on it.” He was excited, more than usual, and that alarmed me, although I was not sure why, so I did not cut him off. I half listened to what he called his theory, which struck me as slightly crackbrained, the alcohol talking. It was a theory unsupported by evidence and full of unlikely motives and connections. It also did not take into account—since Wade had not seen the Boston news, and the New Hampshire stations had not mentioned the shooting at all (it being only one of so many hunting accidents that day)—the fact that Evan Twombley had been scheduled to testify before a congressional subcommittee that was investigating links between organized crime in New England and the construction industry. I remembered that much from the news and had my own theory.

  I mentioned the investigation to him anyhow, and he said, “No shit,” and went on as if I had offered nothing more than Twombley’s middle name. For Wade, there was no connection, because he seemed to want badly to believe that his “best friend” had shot Evan Twombley—accidentally, of course— and was hiding the fact, which, he insisted, was what worried him. “What’ll happen is, it’ll come out that the bastard didn’t shoot himself, Jack shot him. And then lied about it. And the kid’ll get hung for it, Rolfe. They hang you up here for murder, you know.”

  “He won’t hang if it was accidental,” I said. “But you do think Jack Hewitt shot him, eh? Why?”

  “Why do I think it, or why did he shoot him?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, it was an accident,” he said. “Naturally. But who knows how it happened? It happens all the time, though. You play with guns, somebody’s going to get shot. Eventually. But as to why I myself think Jack did it. That’s not so easy to say. It’s like it’s the only way I can see it happening. The only way I can imagine it. I think about Twombley getting shot, and all I see is Jack shooting him.”

  “So where’s this theory of yours?”

  He admitted that it was not so much a theory as a hunch. I could tell that I was disappointing him. Again.

  I apologized for sounding so skeptical and explained that it seemed likely to me that if Twombley’s death was not in fact self-inflicted, then he surely was killed by someone other than the local boy Jack Hewitt, who probably never even saw it happen anyhow. “They were out deer hunting, right? In the woods. Jack probably heard the gun go off, then came back and found Twombley’s body and concluded the obvious, that the man had shot himself. And if he did not shoot himself, then whoever did it took care to use Twombley’s own gun. Just in case.”

  Yes, yes, Wade agreed, grumpily, and then he started to drift a bit, and soon he was recounting another small humiliation at the hands of his ex-wife. This story, too, I had heard before, or a close version of it, but now, to my surprise, I was listening as if it were fresh and new to me. It was his account of Halloween and his quarrel with his daughter Jill, and I was fascinated by it. There was some odd connection in my mind between the two stories, between his version of Twombley’s death and his version of Lillian’s driving up to Lawford and removing Jill from his care. I did not then know how powerful the connection was, of course, but it was there, to be sure, just below the surface of the narrative, and I felt its presence strongly and responded to it, as if it had the power of logic.

  I closed my history of mankind and sat up straight in bed and listened closely to Wade, while he slowly told of his adventures of the night before, presented them with a sad mournful slightly puzzled voice, his sentences ending pathetically with phrases like “You know?” and “I guess.”

  And then, finally, he closed the conversation—it was more monologue than conversation—by telling me how tired he was, just exhausted, beat. “I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days, Rolfe,” he said. “And some night I’m going to bite back. I swear it.”

  I said, “Haven’t you already done a bit of that?”

  “No. No, I haven’t. Not really. I’ve growled a little, but I haven’t bit.”

  We said good night then and hung up. I tried to resume reading but could not, and when I tried to sleep, I could not do that, either. I lay awake for hours, it seemed, with visions of whirling suddenly in the snow, aiming down the barrel of a gun, firing.

  But let us return to the morning Twombley died, to Lawford, twelve or fifteen hours earlier. After Wade and Jack rode down from Parker Mountain together in Jack’s truck, Jack dropped Wade off at LaRiviere’s and, as LaRiviere had suggested, went home, while for the rest of the day Wade drove the blue grader. By the time he parked it back at LaRiviere’s garage, it was late afternoon and dark, and the temperature was falling toward zero again.

  He scraped his windshield and then, while he waited for his car to warm up, decided that it would be best for everyone, especially for Wade himself, if he drove straight home, if he cleaned up his trailer, for God’s sake, and cooked a simple supper and went to bed sober and alone. He was right: his mood and his afflicted view of the events of the day promised nothing but trouble for anyone who happened to join him at bar, table or bed.

  Then, as if to verify the wisdom of his decision, his tooth flared up again. Over the afternoon, it had gradually turned into a throbbing knot of pain below his right ear. As usual, the pain got worse and spread quickly across his face, until its center was as large and as definable a shape as a man’s hand, with the heel and thumb of the hand running along his jawbone to his chin, the little finger tucked up behind his ear, the palm smack against his cheek and the other three fingers pressing against the bony ridge that encircled his right eye. The pain was yellow, it seemed to him, neither hot nor cold, and lay in a thin zone between his outer flesh and the bone, radiating woe in both directions.

  He groaned aloud all the way home.

  The place looked even worse to him now than it had when he left that morning—a midden heap, as if a motorcycle gang had been camped here all fall.

  He shucked his coat and set to work, bagging all the trash and garbage, old newspapers, TV Guides, beer cans and bottles, food containers, empty cigarette packs, crusts of bread, tin cans, apple cores and milk cartons. He moved all the caked and crusted dishes, pots and pans in the general direction of the kitchen sink and all the dirty clothes to the hamper in the bathroom, where he paused for a second, shuddered at the sight, ran the faucets briefly and dumped a layer of Comet into the tub, toilet and lavatory, to be scrubbed later, after he finished cleaning the kitchen.

  In his shirtsleeves, he lugged two large green plastic bags outside and shoved them into the barrel at the end of the driveway. Un-fucking-believable, that a grown man could let things get this bad! The cold air made the toothache shriek, so he raced back inside, where it lapsed swiftly back to a steady low-key whine, which distressed him, but at least the pain was steady and he could make mental adjustments to it that did not have to be undone and remade every fifteen or twenty seconds.

  It was not long before he had the kitchen clean—dishes washed and dried and put away, counters wiped down, moldy and decomposing food removed from the refrigerator and tossed out, floor mopped. And then he was off to the bathroom, scrub-a-dub-dub, and to the bedroom, where he hauled from the closet the portable Hoover he had picked up the previous spring at a flea market down in Catamount, his first vacuum cleaner, and even though it seemed to suck dirt weakly, as if through a single bent straw, he was proud of owning it and enjoyed using it—a good thing, too, as it took him nearly an hour to vacuum the entire trailer.

  At last, his home was clean. It smelled like water and soap, looked symmetrical and square, felt smooth, cool and dry to fingertips brushed along the kitchen counters. His t
ooth went on aching, but the privacy it gave, the way the pain walled him in, somehow comforted him, and although several times he thought of aspirin—Why not, for Christ’s sake, Wade, do yourself a favor and take a couple aspirins, maybe even pack a second pair between your cheek and gum—he quickly dismissed the thought, as if ending his toothache, or even easing it somewhat, would expose him to a flurry of faces, voices and questions that he preferred not to meet right now. Or ever, for that matter. Although he did not like to think of the toothache’s lasting forever.

  In the refrigerator there were three bottles of Rolling Rock and no other beverage. He had thrown out the curdled milk, and the orange juice had soured. He thought: if he drank all three beers, he would still be going to bed sober tonight. Good: he would drink all three: if there had been six or eight, he would have been forced to drink tap water. He cracked open one of the beers, took a long pull from it and poked through the permafrost of the freezer compartment, disinterring a package of baby lima beans and a chicken breast shrouded in several layers of Saran Wrap. Then he started a pan of rice, dropped the Baggie of baby limas into a saucepan of boiling water and melted a chunk of butter in a skillet. He held the chicken breast under warm running water to get it unwrapped and tossed it into the skillet. The food smelled good: domestic, orderly and constant—a warm bright spot in the middle of the cold dark forest.

  By the time he sat down at the table to eat, it was after ten. He chewed slowly, carefully, with his left and front teeth only, and managed to avoid antagonizing the rotted tooth, which growled quietly in the right corner of his mouth’s cage.

  The table, a card table, actually, with four folding chairs placed around it, was situated in the middle of the kitchen. While he ate his solitary meal, he looked down the length of the trailer and admired the place. Before sitting down, he had turned off all the overhead lights in the trailer—overhead lights always made Wade feel he was still at work in LaRiviere’s shop—and now to all appearances he was at home and there could have been two or even three moderate adults just out of sight in the living room having a quiet reasonable conversation about money, and in the near bedroom, his own, there could have been another such adult, reading in bed, maybe, the way his brother Rolfe liked to end his day, while in the farther bedroom a child did her homework. The bathroom door was ajar and the light was on, as if a woman who had just finished brushing her hair were touching up her lipstick before going out.

  There was nothing wrong with this place that a little tender loving care could not fix, he thought, and he nibbled his lima beans with his incisors, like a rodent.

  He got up and went for another beer, lit a cigarette and walked back to his bedroom and turned on the radio. He moved the tuner up and down a few times until he found the easy-listening station in Littleton: Carly Simon was singing about a man who really knew how to make love good, so good that nobody did it better.

  Jesus, that woman knows things, Wade thought, and he strolled back to the table and sat down again. Then he saw that he was smoking without having finished his meal yet and hurriedly rubbed the butt out in the ashtray. He resumed eating and thought, Whoa. This man’s got to start thinking seriously about quitting cigarettes. Maybe this spring, after things settle down. The chicken was a little tough and dry, but it tasted fine to him, and as long as he cut it into tiny pieces and kept it on the left side of his mouth, he did not have any trouble chewing it.

  Wade welcomed evenings like this; they were rare, and he almost credited it to the toothache. As if locked inside deep meditation, he was profoundly alone. His conscious mind, walled around by physical pain and the trailer and the snow and darkness beyond, was cleared of everything but the filmy shreds of a few simple fantasies, and though it was a long ways from happiness, it seemed as close to happiness as he had been able to get in weeks. Maybe longer. But he did not want to think about that right now; so he didn’t.

  When he had finished eating, he cleaned his dishes, dried them and put them away, and while standing by the sink, looked past his reflection in the window at the darkness outside and smoked a cigarette all the way down and drank off the third bottle of beer. He turned the thermostat back to sixty and went into his bedroom, shutting off the lights one by one behind him. He undressed and draped his clothes neatly over the back of the chair, got into bed and switched off the radio and the bedside light.

  It was at this point in his evening, in bed, his home cleaned, a dinner cooked and eaten, relaxed and content and physically comfortable—relatively little toothache pain—that he suddenly sat up straight in the darkness and clapped his hands loudly against one another, as if applauding his own performance. He turned the light back on and picked up the telephone and dialed his brother Rolfe’s number. Rolfe would understand, and he might have some useful information as well. Rolfe was a little weird, but he was plenty smart, and he was logical.

  But, as we know, Wade’s conversation with his younger brother did not go quite as he hoped. Two or three minutes into it, Wade was once again going on about Lillian and Jill, the kind of story that always left him angry and exhausted. And his tooth was raging again. He finally hung up the phone and snapped off the bedside light.

  In seconds, he was asleep and dreaming.

  Hours later, Wade dreamed this: There is a baby in his arms, swaddled like Jesus, only it is not Jesus, it is a girl baby, but not Jill, either, thank God, because it is blue with the cold, and it may be dead. Oh no, do not let it be dead! he pleads, and he examines the tiny puckered face and discovers first with relief and then with irritation that it is a doll, one of those lifelike dolls, with its face all screwed up as if about to cry, and as Wade comes up from under the water to the hole in the ice, he breaks the surface and thrusts the doll out ahead of him and throws the thing right at his Pop, who is fooled and thinks it is a real baby; Pop sticks out his drunken hands to catch it, his pale eyes wide open with fear that he will drop it, but by the time Wade has climbed out of the freezing water to stand dripping in his underwear on the ice, Pop has discovered that it is only a doll Wade has brought him; he shoves it back at him and stalks off, heading for the distant shore, where Wade can see the trailer park and Pop’s old red Ford pickup next to the blue trailer at the end. Wade looks down at the thing in his arms and wonders whose baby is this, when he realizes suddenly that it is Jack Hewitt’s baby. A son! Imagine that! Jack had a son! God damn! Wade observes that there are no women in this dream and that the girl babies are dolls. There must be something wrong with that. Men do not have babies, women do. But what about men?

  What do men do? he cries, and he woke up, tears streaming down his face in the darkness of his trailer, his body as much as his mind cold to the bone, the toothache gone.

  Early the next morning, but not too early, for he did not want to have to wake them, especially this morning, Wade drove out to Lake Agaway on the north side of town. He figured he would have to say something nice about Twombley, express his condolences to the next of kin, that sort of thing, and then get down to business with the son-in-law. Asa Brown and Gordon LaRiviere be damned: it wasn’t their job to protect the children; it was his.

  He passed Wickham’s, noted that the parking lot was almost filled and that most of the cars were out-of-state. There was that stupid sign, HOME MADE COOKING, pale pink in the bright morning light. A few cars had the bodies of shot deer tied to roofs and fenders, and Wade decided that he would stop for breakfast later, after he had paid his visit to Mel Gordon, when there would be only a few people still at the restaurant and he could talk to Margie and make his important phone calls. That was how he thought of them—important. This morning at eight, Wade Whitehouse was a man with several important tasks, legal matters, by God, and he wanted Margie to see him, a competent man, engaged in completing them.

  He would have liked to take her out to Twombley’s place on Lake Agaway, so she could see him deal with Twombley’s son-in-law, and he had almost called her when he first got out of bed, but he remembered
that Margie worked Saturday mornings. That was okay; she would get off at noon and could ride down to Concord with him this afternoon to see the lawyer. Maybe she could even be with him when he talked to the lawyer. Although that might not look so good, he thought. Well, she could wait in a restaurant or do some shopping, and he could tell her all about it afterwards.

  A quarter mile past Merritt’s Shell Station, at the old mill, where there was a cluster of shanties huddled together as if for warmth, Wade turned left onto the winding narrow dirt road that led down to Lake Agaway. The sky was bright blue and cloudless, and patches of blinding sunlight flashed over the hood and windshield as he passed between stands of tall spruce and pine—trees that should have been cut and sold.

  Wade made the observation every time he drove this road: these tall lovely blue-black trees should be lumbered on a regular rotating basis, and would be, too, if rich people did not own the land and did not prefer the decorative use of the trees to any other. It pissed him off.

  The lake itself is not especially large, maybe two miles long and a half mile wide, and you cannot see it from the road, even though it lies only a few hundred yards off to your right and slightly downhill. It is a picturesque deep-water lake nestled between two ridges, with a north-looking glimpse of Franconia Notch and a south-looking view of Saddleback and Parker Mountain. Nice.

  Five families own all the shoreline and acreage between the two ridges, summer people from Massachusetts—a physician, two manufacturers, one of whom was supposed to have invented the salt-and-pepper packets used on airplanes, a judge recently appointed to the Supreme Court and now spending most of his time in Washington, and Evan Twombley, the union official. The five families who preceded this five entered long ago into polite but legally precise association with one another to keep the land from being subdivided and to keep the five properties from ever being purchased by Jews or blacks—an agreement appended to the deed and called a covenant, as if made between Christians and a conservationist Protestant God who, only three years before, when Twombley bought his place from the last of the original five, had decided finally to recognize Catholics. Then, predictably, a problem arose. Though it was Evan Twombley, as the first Catholic so recognized, who had signed the deed with the covenant attached, it troubled folks that his son-in-law, Mel Gordon, once people got sight of him, was thought to be Jewish. It was too late by then, of course, to do anything—one could not withdraw the covenant—but as long as the place did not pass to the son-in-law, no one would worry. They did enjoy talking about it, however, giving themselves little frissons of anxiety.