Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Though he had never met the man, Wade remembered J. Battle Hand clearly, mainly because of his name, which struck him as a lawyer-like name, the name of a man who fought like a tiger for his clients, who believed in justice and in absolute right and absolute wrong and would not defend a person unless he first believed in that person’s innocence and in the righteousness of his cause. It was clear, too, that he had become wealthy this way. J. Battle Hand was precisely the kind of attorney Wade needed for bringing a custody suit against his ex-wife. He needed a good rich man. Or, better, a rich good man.

  He pulled in at Wickham’s, looked around for Margie and discovered what he had forgotten—she had worked yesterday, the first day of hunting season, and had today off. Nick told him that she had phoned in a message for Wade to call her if he came in. Half the booths and tables were filled with deer hunters, most of them local. These were not the fanatics and out-of-towners who had crowded the place yesterday morning. In one day the intensity of the hunt had been sufficiently diluted that here, along the sidelines, most of the observers and participants were able to affect little more than passive involvement with the killing still going on in the woods. It was not all that different from any other Saturday morning at Wickham’s. Two of the pickups parked in front had dead deer in the back, but they looked more like cargo than trophy. The town seemed to have settled into a seasonal rhythm, the deer-hunting season, which was as natural and unconscious an aspect of life as winter or spring: one simply went out and acted “natural,” and in that way one was able to behave appropriately too. Easy.

  Wade got Nick to change a dollar bill, and he headed through the nearly empty restaurant to the game room in back. Nick himself was serving at the counter this morning; he had a high school girl waiting tables, a plump girl with a uniform two sizes too small for her and a face made up to look like a Las Vegas showgirl’s. Back in the game room, where the pay phone was located, a pair of teenaged boys were playing donkey ball and smoking cigarettes. Wade dropped a coin in, got Concord information and the number of J. Battle Hand, attorney at law, and dialed it.

  It occurred to Wade that J. Battle Hand might not be in his office on a Saturday morning, he might be over in Catamount skiing, or lounging in front of a fire in his huge living room, so he was pleased and a little surprised to have a secretary ask him who was calling and then to say, “Just one moment, please, Mr. Whitehouse,” and then to find himself instantly and easily speaking with the man he wanted to represent him in what Wade regarded as the most complicated, ambitious, possibly reckless but nonetheless righteous thing he had ever undertaken: the attempt to gain regular and easy access to his own child. This might not be all that hard, after all, he thought, and he noticed that his hands had stopped shaking and his toothache had gone back to a dry rattle in his mouth. It had not bothered him much this morning anyhow, but it had been there nonetheless, like unpleasant background noise, a next-door neighbor playing his radio a little too loud.

  Hand’s voice was low, calm, authoritative, just as Wade had hoped he would sound. He said, “I see,” many times, while Wade quickly explained what he wished Hand to do for him. When the lawyer suggested that, before they do anything, Wade come in to his office and talk, Wade explained that he worked up in Lawford and had trouble getting off on weekdays; he would like to come in today, sometime this afternoon, if possible. Hand said fine, how was two o’clock, and that was that.

  No, sir, this was not going to be as hard or as confusing as he had expected. They had not talked about how much it would cost, of course, but Wade could tell from the sound of the man’s voice that Attorney Hand was a reasonable man. Whatever it cost Wade, it would be worth it to have Jill back in his life, and he could pay it out over years, if necessary. He could take out a bank loan, maybe, a second mortgage on the trailer, if he had to—and no doubt he would have to, for he had no savings whatsoever.

  Then Wade called Margie. As soon as he heard her voice, he wanted a cigarette. He patted his shirt pocket and found that he was out. “Shit,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Wait a minute, I got to get a pack of cigarettes. Can you hold on?”

  “Hurry up. I’m baking.”

  “Be right back,” he said. He was suddenly frantic for a cigarette; the need was as physical and immediate as the need to urinate. He placed the receiver on top of the phone box and hurried out to the cash register and bought a pack of Camel Lights from Nick. By the time he got back to Margie, he was already smoking, his lungs and face feeling soothed and familiar again.

  “I got to quit these things,” he said to her, but he could not imagine being able to endure for more than a minute the agitated unfamiliarity that smoking eliminated. It was a singular and specific kind of psychic pain, which had been caused by the cigarettes in the first place, and they were the singular specific remedy for it. If there were available to him a similar remedy for the general pain, a wide-body potion that eliminated the overall agitation and unfamiliarity that he believed he suffered every waking moment of his life, and if that potion were programmed to kill him in an even shorter and more exact time than the cigarettes were, Wade surely would have taken that remedy too. The final result may be death, but addiction is about eliminating pain with what causes the pain in the first place, and death was coming along anyway, so what the hell. But there was no such general remedy that he knew of, and though he did not always think so, he was probably lucky there was none. It was perhaps sufficient that at present it was only the cigarettes that were killing him.

  While he spoke to Margie, he kept thinking of Mel Gordon’s wife, the dead Evan Twombley’s living daughter, standing between him and Mel Gordon like an angelic shield, protecting him from Gordon’s dark fury, and when Margie said that she could not spend the afternoon with him in Concord, she had to finish baking pies for Nick Wickham, Wade was almost glad. For the moment, his image of Margie Fogg could not compete with his image of Mel Gordon’s wife.

  “It’s probably just as well,” he said. “I got to see my lawyer at two anyhow.”

  “So. You’re really going to do that. The custody thing.”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh, God. I think you’ll be sorry. I think you’ll wish you had never opened this whole thing up again, Wade.”

  “Maybe. But I’d be a hell of a lot sorrier if I just let it go. Kids grow up fast,” he said. “And then it’s over. You get old, and the kids are grown into strangers. Look at my old man and me.”

  “Your father,” she said. “Your father was not like you. That’s why you and he are strangers.”

  “That’s the whole point. My father … well, I don’t want to get into that.”

  “And Lillian, she’s not like your mother, either. Lillian’s going to fight this like a she-bear. Believe me.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. But that’s the whole point too. If Lillian was like my mother, I wouldn’t be doing any of this in the first place, you know.” He lit a second cigarette off the first and inhaled deeply. “Besides, me and my old man, we aren’t really strangers.”

  “No.”

  “In fact,” he said, “I was kind of thinking of going up there tomorrow. I haven’t been by to see them in months. You feel like coming?”

  “Sure,” she said in a flat voice. She was giving up on Wade: his inconsistency was patterned and self-serving, and there was no way in for her. She might as well just let him be who he is and enjoy him for that as much as possible. More and more often these days, she found herself regarding Wade from a distance. She knew what it meant: sooner or later she would not want to sleep with him anymore. Right now, however, she was lonely, she was, and she felt imprisoned by her body, she did, and she wanted out, badly, and sleeping with Wade, even if only on occasion, provided her with brief reprieves, like conjugal visits, and she was not about to give that up. She was not.

  “Wade,” she said, and she said his name in a low voice that was instantly meaningful to him, like the start of a cate
chism, and they began their old ritual sequence:

  “Yes.”

  “Can you come by my place tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What will you do with me, Wade?”

  He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and cast a glance at the teenagers playing donkey ball in the corner of the room. In a low voice, he said, “I’ll do everything you want me to do.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. And a few things you don’t want me to do.”

  “Ah-h-h,” she said. “You’re not at home now, are you?”

  “No.”

  “So we can’t do it over the phone,” she said.

  “No. We can’t. I’d look… I’d look pretty silly if we did. I’m in Nick’s back room.”

  “You wouldn’t look silly. Not to me you wouldn’t. I love to see you do that,” she said. “You know what I’m doing now, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. I surely do. But I’m not going to listen anymore,” he said. “Besides, I thought you were baking.”

  “Ummm. I am.”

  “I’m gonna hang up on you. Before I make a fool of myself in public. I’ll come by later,” he said. “I’ll come by and make a fool of myself in private. If that’s okay by you.”

  She assured him that, yes, it was fine by her, and they said goodbye and hung up. Wade sighed heavily, and the two boys looked over at him and stared for a second.

  “Hello, Wade,” the taller one said. “Getcha deer yet?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I give up hunting five years ago, boys. Give it up for women. You oughta try it. Great for your sex life,” he said, and he hitched up his pants and headed out the door, his mind refilling with the golden light cast by his image of Mel Gordon’s wife.

  The office of J. Battle Hand was on the first floor of a white Federal town house on South Main Street in Concord. It had snowed only a few inches in Concord the day before, and then it had rained, which had washed away the accumulated snow, but it was cold under a low dark-gray midafternoon sky, as if it were going to snow again, and the sidewalks were smeared here and there with half-frozen puddles.

  Wade was unused to sidewalks and made his way carefully from his car to the steps of the building, up the steps and in, where he passed a door that announced the presence of a women’s health center, whatever the hell that was, and an accountant’s office, and walked to the back, where he entered a carpeted outer office and was greeted by a smart-looking young woman with a boy’s haircut and one dangling earring and long thin arms. She looked up from her red typewriter and smiled at him.

  He took off his cap and wished suddenly that he had changed his clothes before coming down from Lawford. Maybe he should have worn his sport coat and necktie and his dress pants. He felt huge and awkward in the room, all thick neck and wrists. Country.

  The young woman raised her eyebrows, as if expecting him to tell her what he had come to repair. The furnace? A broken water pipe on the second floor?

  “I… I got an appointment,” Wade said. “With Mr. Hand.”

  “Your name?” She stopped smiling.

  “Whitehouse.”

  She checked a pad on the desk, punched a key on the phone and said into the receiver, “A Mr. Whitehouse to see you.” Then silence, and she hung up and got up from her desk and motioned for Wade to follow her.

  She was tall, as tall as he, and wore a black-and-white-checked miniskirt and smoky stockings that made her legs look slender and firm. Wade followed her calves and the backs of her knees, and they led him into a second office. The woman told him to take off his coat and sit down and said that Mr. Hand would be right with him. She offered him a cup of coffee, but he declined, because he knew his hands were trembling. Then she left him, closing the door behind her.

  There were two dark-green leather chairs and a matching sofa in the windowless room, and the walls were lined with the red and blue spines of thick books. There was a second door, in the far corner of the room, and Wade settled into the chair that faced it and waited. His toothache was clanging away, but he felt pretty good.

  After a few seconds he began to hope that Mr. Hand, for unknown reasons, would not appear and that somehow Wade could sit right where he was forever, outside of time, safely beyond his past and just this side of his future. He was warm enough and comfortable enough, and there was an ashtray on the low table next to him, so he could smoke. Which he did.

  He was halfway through the cigarette, when he heard a click, and the door swung open and in, and to his astonishment a person in a wheelchair entered. It was a rubber-tired wheelchair with a tiny electric motor powering it, all chrome bars and spokes. The man driving the chair was slumped off to his left, flicking buttons on a control box with the fingers of his left hand. He brought the chair swiftly through the doorway, turned it abruptly, as if it were a remote-controlled toy car, toward Wade, then drove it forward to within a few feet of Wade’s chair, where it stopped suddenly and parked.

  The driver looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy dressed in a dark pin-striped suit. His head was disproportionately large, and his face, in alarming contrast to the slumped inertness of his body, was bright and expressive. He had dark hair, gray at the temples, a square sharply defined forehead and brow and large pale-blue eyes. His skin was waxy white and taut, like paper-thin porcelain, the skin of a person who has long endured great pain, and when he smiled to greet Wade, it was almost a grimace, which seemed to require a mighty and consciously engaged physical exertion, as if he had to will his facial muscles to move one at a time.

  But move they did, and when they did, his face lit up with intelligence and, Wade thought, humor. Maybe the man had deliberately prepared this surprise, had costumed and masked himself and sat in his wheelchair for hours behind that door waiting for Wade to arrive. Wade wanted to laugh out loud, to say, “Wow, hell of a getup there, Mr. Hand! Happy Halloween and trick-or-treat and all that, eh?” He wanted to reassure the man that the masquerade had worked, that he was indeed surprised, and he was scared too.

  “Mr. Whitehouse,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Good to meet you.” It was the same voice Wade had heard on the phone, a deep baritone, smooth and cultivated.

  Wade shifted his cigarette from his right hand to his left and started to extend the right, then plopped it back onto his knee. He swallowed and said, “Howdy.”

  “I heard you had some serious snow up your way yesterday.”

  Wade nodded, and the man went on. “There’s practically two different climates between here and there. What is it, forty, forty-five, fifty miles, and when you get snow, we get rain. At least till mid-December. Then we both get snowed on. I think I prefer the snow, though, to this dreary rain,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Wade said. “Yeah, I prefer the snow.” He lapsed into silence again.

  “Do you ski?”

  “No. I never did. I never did try that.”

  “Well,” the lawyer said, suddenly looking serious. “Let’s talk about this suit you’re proposing, shall we?” With his right hand he wrestled a yellow legal pad from a slot on the side of his chair onto his lap, drew a pen from his shirt pocket and prepared to write.

  But Wade was not ready to talk about Lillian and Jill yet; in fact, he had almost forgotten why he had driven down here in the first place. He wanted to know what was wrong with Hand, what injury or disease had made off with his body. He wanted to know what the man could and could not do, how he could work as a lawyer, for God’s sake, or how he managed to drive a car, get dressed, cut his food. How he was with a woman.

  He had never seen a man like this up close, and now he was about to hire him to do a very complex and mysterious job for him. Wade was about to place himself in a dependent relation to a man who said he preferred snow to rain but surely could not go out in the snow, a man who, even with his fancy rubber-tire
d battery-powered chair, could not get around in the stuff, but who nonetheless had built a huge vacation house on the side of a mountain where it snowed six months a year. He was a cripple who lived on a goddamned ski slope!

  He suddenly thought of Evan Twombley, an overweight city fellow with his new gun up on Parker Mountain in the snow, hunting for a deer to kill and then getting killed himself. He thought of Jack Hewitt, lean and in all the necessary ways expert, moving swiftly, silently, through the drifts and brush and over the rock-strewn trails of the mountain, with the fat red-faced man struggling along behind. This man, J. Battle Hand, in the world of normal men and women, was like Twombley in the snowy woods, and Wade was like Jack somehow.

  Maybe here, though, among these books, it was J. Battle Hand who was the lean mean expert, and Wade who was like Twombley, red-faced and puffing to keep up and, unless he was damned careful, likely to shoot himself. Or get shot. For less than a second, like a slide inexplicably shown out of order, Wade saw Jack Hewitt shoot Evan Twombley, a wash of falling snow, the abrupt tilt of the hill, the fat man going over, blood against the white ground.

  Then he was in Attorney Hand’s office again, wondering how the man was able to plead cases in court. Actually, Wade thought, if I was sitting on a jury and this guy wheeled up in front of me and started defending his client, I would be inclined to believe whatever he said. It was hard to think that a man with so little use of his body, a man whose body was such an undeniable truth, could lie to you about anything. This man, J. Battle Hand, could say anything he wanted and be believed.

  Wade brightened a little: Lillian would hire some slick gray-haired guy like that lawyer she hired for the divorce, tall and good-looking, smooth as a goddamn presidential candidate, and Attorney Hand would roll back and forth in front of the judge and make mincemeat of the guy. Not like last time, when Wade had entered the courtroom with Bob Chagnon from Littleton, all rumpled and nervously sweating and talking too fast in his north-country French-accented English, until even Wade felt embarrassed for him. Lillian had looked down and smiled. Wade had seen her and had suddenly wanted to tell his lawyer to shut the fuck up, for Christ’s sake. Stop talking, now, before everyone in the room ends up believing what Wade himself already knew, that in this twice-destroyed marriage Lillian had been the smart and competent one, and Wade had been dumb and out of control, an uneducated irresponsible irrational man prone to violence and alcoholism. Look at his lawyer, for Christ’s sake, look at the man he hires to represent him—a half-assed half-drunk Canuck who can barely talk English and ends up telling the judge that when Wade hit Lillian those times it was because she deserved it! “Your Honor, the woman egged him on,” Chagnon had said.