Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Wade pulled back onto the road and slowly moved ahead and stopped just behind where Jack had been parked, illuminating his tire tracks and footprints with the headlights. He could see that Jack had gone beyond the spot twenty or thirty feet, had stopped his truck and backed up, and had got out and walked around on the side of the road by the snowbank. Very peculiar, Wade thought. What the hell was he looking for? Incriminating evidence? Shell casings? Was this the scene of the crime? The woods beyond the frozen marsh on both sides of the road were dark and impenetrable. Wade knew the land rose abruptly just beyond the woods and that he was in a draw between a pair of long ridges that ran off the mountain toward Saddleback: there was nothing to see from here, except woods, even during the day.

  Puzzled, he put the truck in gear and drove on, moving faster now and not as cautiously as before, because he knew Jack had spotted him, although he probably had not identified the truck as LaRiviere’s. Still, Jack might be trying to elude him: there was no more reason for Wade or anyone else to be out here on a Thursday night than there was for Jack, unless you happened to be pursuing Jack.

  Which Wade now knew he was indeed doing, pursuing Jack. He switched on the running lights and his high beams and turned on the CB scanner, in case Jack was using it— whom would he call? LaRiviere? Mel Gordon?—and pressed down on the accelerator, moving swiftly and skillfully through power slides on the curves, the plow blade rising and falling out in front of the truck, like the steel prow of a boat in a storm, when the road dipped and pitched and rose again, higher each time, as it neared the top of Parker Mountain.

  It had stopped snowing altogether now—Jimmy was right: it was too cold to snow—and Wade could see clearly ahead of him. The tracks of Jack’s truck still extended out there in front of him, but he saw no lights in the distance: it was as if Jack had passed by an hour ago and not mere seconds; as if Wade were out here on the mountain road alone; as if he had made the whole thing up, had not seen Jack pass by his house and had not come upon his truck parked by the side of the road back there at the marshes, had not seen him hustle back into the truck and race away. There was nowhere to go up here. The road would gradually narrow, and just this side of the crest it would pass LaRiviere’s cabin. Then, on the other side of the mountain, where the land descended through dense spruce and pine woods toward a spatter of small shallow ponds and lakes, the road would turn into a lumber trail switchbacking down the mountain, connecting eventually to Route 29, ten or twelve miles south of Lawford, where the road crossed under the interstate through a cloverleaf.

  A few hundred yards before LaRiviere’s cabin, Wade slowed and cut back his lights again, relying only on his low beams, and as he neared the turnoff by the muskeg in front of the cabin, the very place where Jack had parked the day he shot Twombley, where the ambulance and Asa Brown and the state troopers had parked, he saw Jack’s truck, backed off the road on the left, with all its lights out, ready to head out and blow by him. Fifty yards from the muskeg, Wade moved his truck over slightly to the left and filled the road, so Jack could not pass him when he pulled back onto the road—when suddenly Jack’s truck seemed to leap onto the road. But it turned the other way, toward the top of the mountain, full speed, with all its lights on.

  Wade hit the gas pedal, and his tires spun, and the truck jumped to speed, and now the pair of trucks were separated by only a few yards, as they raced along the narrow winding road, up to the top of the mountain, flashing past the low stunted trees that grew up here, and then they were over the top, beyond the road. They were on the rocky switchbacking lumber trail, scrambling and leaping downhill, into gulleys and back out, lurching from side to side as the trail twisted and pitched through fallen trees and great heaps of brush. Both trucks were four-wheel-drive vehicles with oversized snow tires, their chassis kicked high with extra-long shackles, and they navigated the difficult terrain rapidly and with relative ease, though at this speed it was dangerous, and they had to dart out of the way as huge snow-covered boulders and tree stumps suddenly appeared out of the darkness before them. With the plows out in front slashing through the brush, the trucks lurched rapidly downhill, and soon they were in deep woods again, and the slope was not so steep. Where the trail switched to avoid a deep gully, Jack braked, and Wade clipped the rear bumper of Jack’s truck with his plow and sent the vehicle spinning to the edge of the gully. Somehow, Jack regained control of it, the wheels crunched into the frozen soil, tossing clods of dirt and snow into the air, and he was gone again, racing ahead, with Wade drawing up right behind, his plow just a few feet from the dangling bumper of Jack’s truck.

  Then, unexpectedly, the ground leveled off, and the trucks were running alongside a shallow beaver pond, with sumac and chokecherry flashing past. At the far end of the pond, the trail swerved left, away from the beaver dam and the brook beyond, too abruptly for Jack to make the turn, and his truck crashed through a stand of skinny birches straight onto the pond, its momentum carrying it swiftly over the surface of the thick ice, its headlights sending huge pale swirls out ahead of it. Wade pulled up at the shore, and he watched Jack’s truck slide across the ice like a leaf on a slow-moving river, until it came to a stop halfway across the pond, facing Wade’s truck, with its headlights gazing back over the snow-covered surface of the glass-smooth ice. Wade dropped his truck into first gear, edged it to the shore, then down onto the ice, and slowly he drove directly into the glare of Jack’s headlights, drawing carefully closer as if toward a fire, until finally the vehicles were face to face, plow blade to plow blade.

  Jack opened his door and stuck his head out and shouted, “You crazy sonofabitch! You’ll sink us both! Get off the fucking ice! Get off!” he cried, waving Wade away frantically.

  But Wade refused to budge. Jack backed his truck away a few feet, and Wade came forward. Behind Jack, on the far side of the pond, was an impenetrable pinewoods; he could not retreat there. And he could not push Wade out of the way; both trucks were the same size, and neither had traction on the ice.

  Again Jack swung open his door, and this time he stepped down to the ice. He was clearly enraged, but he seemed almost in tears with frustration, and he swung himself in circles with fists balled, while the ice creaked and groaned under the weight of the two trucks.

  Slowly Wade stepped down from LaRiviere’s truck and stood beside it for a few seconds, watching Jack twirl in rage and pain. It was cold, close to zero, and a sharp wind had come up, slicing through the pine trees and over the ice, lifting the light snow into low swirling curtains, and Jack passed in and out of Wade’s line of sight as waves of blowing snow passed between them. He seemed to be clothed in gold, glowing in the strange vibrating light, there and then not there, like a ghost or a warrior from a dream, when suddenly Wade realized that Jack was holding a rifle. He disappeared behind another cloud of the windblown snow, and when he appeared again, he was aiming the rifle at Wade, shouting words at him that Wade could not at first make out—then he heard him—he wanted Wade to close the door of his truck and move away from it, to walk out onto the ice into the darkness. He cried in an unnaturally high and very frightened voice, “I’ll shoot you, Wade! I swear it, I’ll fucking shoot you dead if you don’t move away from the truck!”

  Wade closed the door to the truck and backed away from it a few steps. The ice was dry, and with the snow blown off it was too slippery to walk on except with extreme care, and he moved slowly, gingerly, so as not to fall. Jack shouted for him to keep moving, keep moving, goddammit, and he obeyed, step by step, until he was outside the circle of light that surrounded the two vehicles. Then Jack climbed back up into his truck. Quickly he opened the window on the passenger’s side and switched a flashlight beam into Wade’s eyes. “Don’t move!” Jack shouted. “I’ll shoot you dead if you move!” He backed his truck carefully away from the other, then moved around it and drove across the pond toward the lumber trail at the edge, clambered up onto the bank, and was quickly gone.

  Wade stood in the darkness
, listening to the wind rush through the pine trees behind him and to the low rumbling sound of the truck motor, and then he heard a third sound, like dry sticks broken over a knee, the snap of the ice under the truck starting to let go. Instinctively, Wade backed away, until he was only a few feet from the shore, where he stood and watched the ice out in the middle of the pond break into thick sheets and huge tipped planes all around the truck, when, as if a gigantic hand were reaching up from under the ice and yanking the chassis from underneath, the truck sank, front end first, then the entire vehicle, descending slowly, as if through ash, until it settled on the bottom, leaving the top of the cab, the roll bar and the running lights exposed, silent but with the headlights still glowing under the water, as if a chemical fire were burning there.

  In a few seconds, the lights went out altogether, and Wade stood on the shore of the pond in total darkness. The wind blew steadily from behind him, the only sound in his ears. He knew he was maybe four miles from Route 29, if he followed the lumber trail out to the road, where Jack had gone. He could get up onto the interstate there, and maybe hitch a ride back to town, and if he was lucky he would get to Nick’s before nine. A half moon had appeared from behind the clouds and seemed likely to stay and able to provide enough light for him to follow Jack’s tire tracks in the snow. Wade did not want to think about anything more than that, getting back to town, and for the next few hours, although his tooth ached and his ears and hands felt as if they had turned to crystal in the cold, that is what he thought about.

  19

  IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT to imagine later how the rest of that night went for Wade: he left evidence behind him, a trail of sorts, and among the people he saw or spoke with that night and during the next two days (I myself turned out to be one of the latter), there was not much disagreement.

  He made his way from the pond out of the woods by following the tire tracks of Jack’s truck in moonlight and, once up on the interstate, hitched a ride from the second car that passed him heading north. It was a new Bronco with a hearty pair of deer hunters from Lynn, Massachusetts, who had taken Friday off and had driven up after work, as they did every year, for the long last weekend of the season.They took him to Toby’s Inn, where they had reserved a room weeks earlier, which is how, with considerable effort, I was able to locate them down in Lynn months later and learn about the strange man they had noticed back in November standing on the shoulder of the highway, hitchhiking in the cold night in the middle of nowhere. He scrambled into the back of the car and shivered, and when he spoke his teeth chattered, and when they pulled into the lot at Toby’s to drop him off, he was still suffering from the cold, it seemed. He said little, blaming his presence out there on a car breakdown, and added that he had to meet his wife at Wickham’s Restaurant in Lawford by nine or he would be in big trouble.

  The two deer hunters laughed knowingly, as married men will when another married man reveals his status in a way that makes a wife sound like a nagging mother and a grown man like a mischievous boy, and suggested that he join them for a drink at Toby’s, where he could phone his wife, if he wanted to, and have her pick him up there. They did not want his company so much as they wanted to ask him where the locals were finding deer this year: they came to the area every year to hunt and knew that the natives in these upcountry villages had a much better notion of where to hunt than they themselves ever could, but they did not know that such information never left town. Their view of country people was that they like to please strangers, which of course was flattering to themselves. I did not disabuse them of this notion: I was interested only in obtaining from them as complete a picture of Wade that night as was available to me, and the hunters’ high opinions of themselves, in spite of their eventual failure to sight a single deer over that long weekend, kept them from censoring their memories of their brief encounter with my brother.

  He was not dressed for the weather, they thought; he wore no gloves or boots, but that was consistent with his story about his car’s having broken down and his having to hitch a ride into town to meet his wife, who apparently had her own car. He seemed more than cold, however, and huddled shivering in the back of the warm Bronco like a man who was terrified of something. Like a man who had seen a ghost, was the phrase both men used.

  When they pulled into the parking lot at Toby’s Inn, a guy in a dump truck was plowing, and Wade ducked his head and turned deliberately away from the guy, as if he did not want to be seen by him. He hung back in the car when the others got out, and they thought at first that he had changed his mind about having a drink with them, so they asked him again to join them. He mumbled, “Maybe one,” and slowly got out of the truck, hunkering his head down behind his collar, as if still hiding from the man plowing out the lot, but then suddenly he said no, and without saying so much as thank you or goodbye, walked straight toward the plowman and climbed up inside the truck as if they had agreed to meet there.

  What the deer hunters did not realize is that they had parked beside a burgundy 4x4 pickup truck, a fancy new vehicle with the rear bumper half torn off, and that when they went into the dark pine-paneled bar and restaurant, the young good-looking kid they saw at the bar, talking wildly to a couple of young women and two or three local men about some nut chasing him through the woods, was Jack Hewitt. Nor did it occur to them that the nut who had chased him was the gray-faced trembling man they had just let off outside. They took a booth, ordered “Toby-burgers” and beers, and studied with optimistic envy the stuffed and mounted heads of antlered deer and moose hanging on the walls. Tomorrow, by Saturday at the latest, they were sure they would have their own trophies strapped to the roof of the Bronco, racing back south to Lynn, Massachusetts, where they knew a taxidermist over in Saugus who could stuff a whole deer, if you got it to him quickly enough, could mount it in a lifelike re-creation of the way it looked at the very instant you shot it, hind feet kicking the air, white tail flagged, eyes wild with terror and pain, and you could put it in your basement recreation room if you wanted to.

  Wade yanked shut the door of the dump truck and said, “You headed back to town now?”

  “Yep. I’m headed to the shop. Want a lift to the shop?” Jimmy asked. He shoved half a cubic yard of packed snow hard against the head-high bank at the end of the parking lot, banged the truck into reverse, lifted the plow and backed away from the snowbank and stopped.

  “No. Wickham’s.”

  “Margie over there?”

  “Yeah. And my old man,” Wade added.

  “Thought he was going out with you in Gordon’s pickup.”

  “She brought him in with her.”

  “You cold? Heater’s on full blast.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Heard about you chasing Jack over-the backside of Parker Mountain.”

  Wade was silent. He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. Then, like a child, he put his fingers into his mouth and sucked them.

  Jimmy moved the truck out onto the road and dropped the plow again and headed south into town, scudding the un-plowed snow on the right lane off the road. “You got folks pretty scared, Wade. And pissed. More pissed than scared, actually. Jack, I mean he’s wicked bullshit.”

  “I expect so.”

  “What the hell did Jack do, to get you on his case so hard? He’s a decent kid. A little bit cocky, maybe, but—”

  “He happen to tell you what he was doing up there tonight?”

  “He might’ve. It wasn’t so bad; maybe just looking to jack himself a deer was all. Not something to chase him all over the damn county for. Considering.”

  “Jacking deer, eh? He said that?”

  “Might’ve. Maybe he was just checking tracks, for later. You know, when he gets his license back. He knows them woods pretty good up there; maybe he was just checking out some deer trails in the fresh snow, see if his big ol’ buck was still up there.”

  “Maybe he was up to something a little more interesting than that.”

  “Well,
it don’t matter a rat’s ass to me. You’re the cop, you can do the worrying about who does what and where and when. All that. Course, it’s none of my beeswax, Wade, but if I was you, I’d cool it on Jack for a spell. Gordon’s going to—”

  “Just drive, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Okeydokey.”

  They rode in silence for a ways, past the school, past Merritt’s Shell Station, and as they entered the village center, a few hundred yards from Wickham’s, Wade said, “Jack tell you about Gordon’s truck going through the ice?”

  Jimmy whistled a single long descending note. “Well, no, Wade, he did not. He did say you was out on the ice, said he had to pull a fucking gun on you to back you off him.” He paused, then said, “Gordon’s truck went through, eh?”

  Wade did not answer.

  “Guess it’s still too early for ice fishing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know Gordon’s going to want your ass in a sling for this one. If I was you, Wade, I’d move to Florida. Tonight.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “Nope, I’m not. Thank Christ.”

  “You think Gordon knows yet?”

  “Wade, you’re the only one to tell it, and so far, it looks like nobody but me knows. Unless they heard it from you. Except for the business about chasing Jack around the fucking mountain, and by now probably everybody in Toby’s knows that part of the story. If I was you, Wade, I wouldn’t tell Gordon about this in person. Course, I’m not you. Like you said. But I‘d let him find out on his own, let him blow his stack for a while, and then come around later, when he’s cooled off some.”

  They pulled into Wickham’s parking lot, where there were only a few cars, including Margie’s gray Rabbit. What Wade should do, Jimmy said, was stay out of sight for a few days. Don’t even answer the phone. He himself would go down and get the truck out of the pond in the morning. “Can I get in there with Merritt’s tow truck? If I can do that, I can put the winch on her and yank the fucker out from the shore.”