Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “That, and his reputation as a guide.”

  Wade laughed lightly. “I don’t know, Rolfe. It’s all a little too neat for me.” Then he turned serious again. “Nothing in life is ever that neat.”

  “Some things are,” I said.

  “Only in books.”

  This was a criticism of me, I knew, the bookish one, as Wade would have it, the one who did not know about real life, which he regarded as his area of expertise. He may not have been to college, as he was fond of pointing out, but he had been in the army and had been a cop, and he had seen some things that would surprise you about human nature. Whereas I, by his lights, had lived a privileged and protected and therefore, when it came to human nature, an ignorant life.

  “It is what happened,” I said. “And not because it’s so neat, but in spite of it. And I know you agree with me.”

  He stood up and walked to the door and stared down the driveway past the house to the road. “You’re trying to make me crazy with this, Rolfe. It gets me so fucking mad, when I think about Jack shooting this guy Twombley, and Mel Gordon paying him for it, to kill his own father-in-law, for God’s sake, the father of his own wife—it gets me so mad I can’t stand it. I feel like hitting something, pounding the shit out of it. You sit there, calmly laying it out like that—I don’t know how the hell you do it. Doesn’t it piss you off?”

  “No,” I said. “Not particularly.”

  “Well, it makes me crazy. And I can’t do a damned thing about it. The kid gets to kill the guy, and Mel Gordon gets to buy the death of his own father-in-law, and that’s the end of it. Nobody gets punished for it. It’s not right.”

  “You don’t care about that, do you?” I said. “Punishment?”

  “Sure I do! Right’s right, goddammit. Don’t you care about that, about what’s right?”

  “No, not when it has got nothing to do with me. All I care about is what really happened. What the truth is. I am a student of history, remember.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” We were silent for a few moments. Wade sat back down beside me on the tailgate and took another drink of whiskey. The truck sputtered, and then the motor coughed and stopped.

  “Out of gas,” Wade said in a low voice. He got up and turned off the ignition and returned. “Let’s go in,” he said. He sounded dispirited.

  “I should be getting on home. It’s a long drive, and I have school tomorrow.”

  “You coming in to say goodbye to Pop?” He lifted the chimney on the lantern and blew out the flame, dousing us in darkness.

  “You think he will notice one way or the other?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I’ll skip it.” I told him that I liked Margie, she was very attractive and seemed kind, and I suggested that he bring her with him the next time he came down to visit. He said he would and shook my hand, and I walked to my car alone. From the road, while my car warmed up, I watched Wade walk onto the porch and go inside the house, and I did not know it then, but when the door closed, it was the last time I would see my brother.

  During the long drive home, I played back to myself that odd eerily lit scene in the barn, troubled by it somehow and feeling vaguely guilty, as if in an important way I had misrepresented myself. It was as if I had cast myself in a role that I was unsuited for, a role that was better suited for Wade to play, and in doing so, I had thrown Wade off his lines and intentions, had changed his motives and thus, to the detriment of the play itself, had affected his actions. It was a usurpation of sorts, for me to speculate with such bland confidence about the cause of Twombley’s death, and though I did not realize it at the time, by reawakening and giving a hard focus to Wade’s involvement with that event, I was sending Wade off in a direction of inquiry that he should never have pursued.

  I know that now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. But back in November, the day we buried our mother and the night we dug our father’s truck out of the snow and stored it in the old collapsing barn, I myself must have needed Wade’s obsession with Twombley’s death, and I myself must have wanted Jack Hewitt and Mel Gordon, two men I had not even met, punished for killing him. I had no way of knowing what Wade would do with my highly speculative theory—let us face it, a hypothesis based on intuition and the flimsiest of evidence, fortified with little more than my pretended knowledge of how large unions function—but I did know that Wade would accept my version of events, that it would become the truth for him and that he would apply to that truth a range and intensity of emotion that was denied me.

  That night Wade slept fitfully, floating in and out of dark dreams and barely conscious fantasies, and he woke gloomy, dour and in a hurry to get to work. He directed traffic at the school with impatience and a glower for everyone he saw, even the children. It was a sunny day, cloudless and relatively warm, but Wade held his head down and his shoulders hunched, as if pummeled by a northeaster. By the time he arrived at LaRiviere’s, he had fixed his mind onto a single question: What was LaRiviere’s connection to the killing of Evan Twombley?

  Where prior to our conversation in the barn Wade had viewed LaRiviere’s uncharacteristic benevolence and sudden generosity with some puzzlement and gratitude, he now clearly saw his boss as behaving suspiciously. LaRiviere’s putting Wade on salary and offering him an inside job, and his somewhat unctuous presence at the house before the funeral and his surprising offer to be the fourth pallbearer, when, after more than twenty years of being Wade’s employer, he barely knew our mother’s first name—all that had struck Wade at the time merely as odd but, in a sense, typical: he was used to thinking of LaRiviere as odd. My conversation with him in the barn, however, had created for Wade a new order, as it were, a microcosmic system in which all the parts now had to fit, especially the odd ones, the puzzling and inconsistent parts, and to Wade, LaRiviere’s recent behavior was exactly that. A mere symmetry, a small observed order, placed like a black box in a corner of one’s turbulent or afflicted life, can make one’s accustomed high tolerance of chaos no longer possible.

  Wade walked into the shop and saw Jack and Jimmy Dame ready to head out, the drilling rig loaded with steel pipe, gleaming and clean as if it were brand-new, straight out of a trade-journal advertisement. Jimmy was walking around the front of the truck taking swipes at real and imagined specks of dirt with a rag, while Jack sat up inside the cab, smoking a cigarette and reading the sports page of the Manchester Union-Leader.

  “Put out that fucking cigarette!” It was LaRiviere from the office door, and his face was red and swollen, like an angry frog’s.

  Jack grimaced, took one last deep drag and reached for the ashtray on the dashboard, moving slowly.

  “Not there, asshole. Flush it!”

  Jack swung down from the truck, saw Wade standing just inside the door and, expressionless, walked across the shop to the lavatory. Wade thought, This is a smart little piece of theater, everything normal, the usual craziness from LaRiviere, the usual surly response from Jack, who is probably half hung over, or at least trying tc look that way to me, the two of them going through their routines so that I will think that everything is normal. He could imagine them agreeing privately before he arrived: LaRiviere would catch Jack smoking in the shop just as Wade came through the door, and Jack would react with his everyday sour compliance.

  Wade knew that somehow LaRiviere was a part of the killing of Evan Twombley. He had to be: LaRiviere was the one who had provided Twombley with Jack as a guide in the first place, and he had advised Twombley to go hunting on his land up on Parker Mountain, to use his cabin up there if he wanted, and when Wade had told LaRiviere about the shooting, he had acted odd about it, making Wade drive him up to the mountain lickety-split and seeming almost relieved when he heard the state police version of the event. For a second Wade entertained the notion that the police captain, Asa Brown, was somehow involved, but then dismissed it: he only thought it because he did not like Asa Brown personally and wanted him somehow involved.

  It was ha
rder with LaRiviere and Jack: in a way, he loved LaRiviere, had worked for him since he was a high school kid, except when he was in the army, and at times had thought of him as the kind of father he wished had been his, the kind of father he thought he actually deserved; and Jack he viewed as a little brother, almost, a man who was a lot like himself twenty years earlier—a smart good-looking kid with a brash sociability, stuck in a small town, maybe, but making the most of it. No, he did not want LaRiviere and Jack involved in this sorry business, and when he looked at the two men, the one blustering about cigarette butts and cleanliness, the other dropping his butt into the toilet as if dropping a coin into a fountain, he felt a form of grief, a turbulent mixture of abandonment, rage and guilt. Toward Asa Brown, however, all he felt was the all-too-familiar cold-edged resentment that insecure people feel toward those who humiliate them. No way that Asa Brown was involved in this Twombley business.

  Wade said to LaRiviere, “Morning, Gordon,” and went to his locker and hung up his coat and hat.

  LaRiviere smiled broadly, tossed Wade a wave and retreated to the office.

  As Wade picked up his clipboard and inventory sheets and prepared to resume counting wrenches and fittings, Jack passed him and said, “I’m fucking out of here, man.”

  “Catamount?”

  “No, I mean this fucking job. This job sucks. Working outside in winter sucks. I’m fucking out of here.” He stalked to the truck and climbed back up into the cab, where Jimmy waited in the driver’s seat. Jack cranked down the window and hollered to Wade, “Open the garage door, will you?”

  Instead, Wade strolled around to Jack’s side of the truck and in a smooth low voice said, “Why don’t you quit now, Jack, if you want out so bad?”

  Jack sighed and leaned his head back against the seat. “Wade, just open the door. We’re already late, and Gordon’s got a hair across his ass.”

  “No, I mean it—why don’t you quit this job? You‘ve got enough money now, don’t you? Head out to California, my man. Start over. Surf’s up, Jack, but you, you’re back here digging wells in the snow.”

  “What do you mean, I’ve got enough money? I’m as broke as you are.”

  Wade smiled broadly, then turned and ambled across the shop and hit the electric door opener, and the door lifted with a rattle and slid overhead. As the truck exited from the garage, Jack leaned out the open window and shouted to Wade, “You’re looney tunes! You know that? Fucking looney tunes!”

  “Like a fox!” Wade hollered after, as the truck lumbered across the parking lot toward the road. Wade started to turn back to the switch, when he saw the familiar black BMW enter the parking lot from the road, and as the truck passed on its way out, the BMW stopped. The truck stopped, and Jack lowered his window again, and Wade saw him exchange a few words with the driver of the BMW, then move on.

  Wade stood at the garage door and watched Mel Gordon park his car next to the building and walk briskly around to the open door, where the man saw and recognized Wade.

  Their eyes met, and then (significantly, Wade thought) Mel Gordon looked away at once and passed Wade by. Wade turned and followed him with his gaze as he headed straight for the office door. The door opened for a second, and Wade saw Elaine Bernier, seated behind her desk, greet Mel Gordon with a delighted smile.

  “Mr. Gordon!” she exclaimed.

  “The boss in?” he asked in a cheerful voice.

  “Yes indeedy!”

  Mel Gordon turned and drew the door closed behind him, catching Wade’s glare as he pulled it to, returning it with a glare of his own, then slamming the door shut.

  With a smile and a whistle, Wade punched the button, and the overhead door slid down and slammed against the concrete floor. His chest was warm and filled with what felt peculiarly like joy, the way it felt when he discovered Lillian meeting her lover in Concord. The world was full of secrets, secrets and conspiracies and lies, plots and evil designs and elaborate deceptions, and knowing them—and now he knew them all—filled Wade’s heart with inexpressible joy.

  18

  BY MIDMORNING, the sky had clouded over, and then snow fell again—large flakes, like bits of paper, that got smaller as the front moved in and the temperature dropped. Wade continued with the inventory, counting and listing fittings, pipe, tools and equipment in careful order—boring tedious work, much of it performed while squatting in front of undercounter wooden bins half filled with loose copper trees, galvanized ninety-degree elbows or brass gate valves. It was warm inside the shop, however, and brightly lit and, of course, spotlessly clean, and Wade would much rather have been here than down in Catamount, drilling a well in half-frozen ground. Which, without LaRiviere’s sudden and still puzzling change of attitude toward him, is exactly what he would have been doing.

  Once an hour or so, he went into the closet-sized lavatory, shut the door and smoked a cigarette, and it was evidently during one of those breaks that Mel Gordon, having finished his business with LaRiviere, had departed from the shop: when Wade quit for lunch and walked out to the parking lot to drive over to Wickham’s, the BMW was gone and its tracks had disappeared.

  He got into his car and turned the key in the ignition, thinking at that moment mainly about his toothache—promising himself, yet again, that he had to get the damned thing fixed, drilled, pulled, whatever the hell it took, because this was ridiculous, a grown man walking around with a perpetual toothache in the age of modern dentistry, for God’s sake— when he realized that he was getting no response from the car. He turned the key again, heard a faint click, then nothing, except the tick of the new snow falling on the roof and hood.

  He hated this car. Hated it. He was supposed to be a cop, on call twenty-four hours a day, but he had to rely on an unreliable eight-year-old Fairlane with a slippery clutch, a throw-out bearing that constantly chattered and now, he was sure, a bad starter motor.

  LaRiviere’s new Dodge 4x4 sat next to Wade’s car, and he decided to take it: what the hell, why not? Let the man show him just how far he could go. Pull his chain, rattle his cage, shake the man up a little.

  He got out of his car and reached for the door handle of LaRiviere’s pickup, when he saw the motto OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! and as if Wade were programmed, old habit kicked in, and he found himself walking into the office to ask LaRiviere for permission to use the truck.

  He told LaRiviere about the starter motor, it had been giving him trouble on and off for the last month, but before he had a chance to make the switch and ask for the use of LaRiviere’s own vehicle, LaRiviere flipped Wade the keys. “Take my pickup. I can use the Town Car; it needs some use anyhow. Tell you what you ought to do, is have Chub Merritt tow your shitbox in this afternoon, and you drive the pickup until he gets yours fixed. You ever think of buying a new car, Wade?” he suddenly asked, squinting over his desk at him, drumming his fingers as if sending messages through the wood.

  “On what you pay me?”

  LaRiviere ignored the remark. He pressed his intercom and hollered into it, “Elaine! Call Chub Merritt and have him come tow Wade’s car in and check out the starter motor.”

  “What?” her high hard voice came back, the tone colored more by disbelief than by not having heard him.

  LaRiviere repeated his order and added that he wanted Chub to bill the company for the job. “Consider it a company expense, Wade. Better yet, I’ll bill the town. We’ll charge it against the police budget. You ever think about buying a new car, Wade? You’re the town police officer, you know, and the town police officer ought to have a decent vehicle, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would.”

  “Maybe we could sneak that through the budget next town meeting, a new car for Wade Whitehouse. Get you a full-sized Olds or something, or a Bronco, not one of them little K-cars that fucking Lee Iacocca makes. That guy gets to me, you know?” he went on, swiveling his chair around and swinging his legs up onto the desktop. “First he goes broke, then he gets the taxpayers to bail him out, then
he comes on like Captain Capitalism, like he’s running for fucking president. Him and that guy Donald Trump. Fucking guys feed at the public trough, and when they get rich from it, they turn into Republicans. I always liked it that you’re a Democrat, Wade. You and me,” he said, smiling broadly and, to Wade, looking a whole lot like Lee Iacocca himself. “It’s good talking politics now and then. So what do you say, you want a new car or not?”

  “Sure I do. What do I have to do for it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing you‘re not doing right now, Wade. I been thinking lately, you don’t get enough appreciation around here, and it’s time we changed things a little, that’s all.”

  “I saw Mel Gordon here this morning,” Wade said.

  “So?”

  “He say anything more about that summons I gave him? Tried to give him, actually. Sonofabitch wouldn’t accept it.”

  LaRiviere sighed and furrowed his brow with large concern. “Wade, that was not smart, going out there right after the man’s father-in-law shot himself. Let’s let that one go, okay? Call it a favor to me.”

  “To you? Why?”

  “Mel’s doing some business with me. It’s nice to do favors for people you do business with. Besides, he was all upset that day. He was in a hurry, and the way I understand it, you were holding everybody up at the school. No big deal, Wade.”

  Wade had a cigarette out and was tapping the end against his watch crystal. “That was before Twombley was shot.”

  “Don’t light that in here. I’m allergic.”

  “I won’t. Wasn’t that before he could have known about Twombley?”

  “What the fuck difference does it make, Wade? Just lay off, will you? Try to be sensible, for Christ’s sake.” He shifted in his chair, brought his legs down and picked up a pencil, as if going back to work. “Look, take my truck, enjoy yourself, and stop worrying about Mel Gordon, will you?” He smiled. End of interview.