Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Wade said he thought Merritt’s truck could get into the pond from Route 29 on the old lumber trail. He would not have to come down from the top.

  Jimmy said fine, he would break the news to LaRiviere himself, after he got the pickup safely into Merritt’s garage, and Chub Merritt would probably have it running by Monday. “Slicker’n shit. That Chub, he’s clever as a sheep when it comes to cars. Dumb as a stick otherwise.”

  Wade had stopped trembling by now. “I guess I owe you one, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy grinned. “I guess you do. But don’t worry, I’ll be putting my time in. Overtime.”

  “Yeah,” Wade said. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t

  it?”

  “Nope. But it’s enough to think about, ol’ buddy. Keeps a fellow out of trouble.”

  Margie was angry. She looked up at Wade when he came in, stared at him for a second as if he were a stranger who reminded her of someone she once knew, and went directly back to filling the napkin holders. Nick hollered from the kitchen, “We’re closed!” then, peering out the open door, saw that it was Wade who had entered and said, “Your father’s back here, Wade”

  And indeed he was. The fire was in his face, and the small shriveled man was now taut and reckless with energy. Wade knew instantly what had happened: Pop had stopped drinking several hours earlier: no doubt, when Margie took him from the house and brought him into work with her, she had insisted that he leave his bottle of whiskey behind. Then he had not been able to locate anything more to drink at Nick’s, and because of the cold and the snow earlier, had been forced to stay there in the kitchen with Nick, and slowly, like charcoal igniting at the edges and spreading into the center, he had started to burn, and now he glowed red, as if he were indeed, as Lena believed, possessed by a demon.

  He stood in the center of the small cluttered kitchen with a dish towel in one hand and a soup pan in the other, and when he saw Wade standing in the doorway to the kitchen, he waved the pan at him and shouted, “Aha! The return of the prodigal son!”

  “About fucking time too,” Nick mumbled, swiping at the counter with a sponge.

  “Look! I’ve got me a new job, second cook and bottle-washer, by God!” Suddenly Pop’s face went from glee to a sneer, and his voice switched timbre and pitch, hardening into a saw blade and dropping down a register: “So don’t worry yourself about me, you sonofabitch, I can take care of myself.”

  “Jesus Christ, Pop,” Wade said. “Come on, let’s go home. I’m sorry, Nick, I got waylaid. My car—”

  “I guess the fuck you got waylaid,” Pop said. “You follow your prick around like it was your goddamn nose. Don’t you? You’re a fucking hound dog, Wade. You always were.”

  “Can it, Whitehouse,” Nick said, and he looked at Wade and said, “Get him the hell out of here, will you? It was funny at first, but I’m tired.”

  “And let’s go home, you say, eh? What home are you talking about, my prodigal son? Your home? Or my home? Let’s have us a little talk about that one, eh? You been making some pret-ty sly moves lately, and don’t think I ain’t been watching you, because I goddamn well have been watching you. Your mother’s dead, Wade, so she can’t make any excuses for you anymore! You’ve got to deal with me now, mister! On your fucking own. Your mother can’t protect you anymore. No more sugar tit, asshole!”

  “Oh, Pop, for Christ’s sake!” Wade moved toward the man with both hands outstretched, as if reaching for a small delicate thing in the air, and Pop leapt backward knocking over a stack of pans.

  He laughed and stuck out his red tongue at Wade and said, “You think you can take me now, don’t you? Come on, try me! Come on.”

  Nick moved quickly between them and said to Wade, “Let me help you get him out of here, so nobody gets hurt.”

  Margie now stood at the door, her coat on, and she moved away from the door and held it open, as Wade and Nick each grabbed one of Pop’s flailing arms and scooted him across the floor and past her. Pop was shouting, denouncing Wade and Nick both, moving inside his body like a cat thrashing inside a bag, as the two men dragged the bag outside to the parking lot and shoved it into the back seat of Margie’s car.

  “You better sit back there with him,” Nick said in a low voice, “and let Margie drive. He’ll cool out. Won’t he?”

  “Yes,” Wade said. He reached into the back seat and grabbed both his father’s wrists, and holding them tightly, he climbed into the car and situated himself next to the man. “He’ll cool out when he gets hold of his fucking bottle. His sugar tit.”

  Margie walked to the car from the restaurant, carrying Pop’s coat and hat, and as she passed Nick, he stopped her and touched her cheek and saw that she was weeping. “Jesus, Marge,” Nick whispered. “Get out of this. Fast.”

  She nodded and pulled away, got into the driver’s seat and started the car. Inside, in the darkness of the back, Wade had clamped his hands on his father’s bony wrists, and the two men stared silently into each other’s eyes while Margie backed the car from the lot and headed north out of town. When she reached the Hoyt place and turned onto Parker Mountain Road, Wade leaned in close until he could feel his father’s hot breath on his face, and he whispered, “I wish you would die.”

  The old man spat directly into Wade’s face, and Wade let go of one wrist for an instant and slapped him hard on the side of his forehead, then grabbed the wrist again. Margie shrieked, “Stop it! Stop it! Just stop it!”

  And they did. They glared into each other’s face all the way home, but Pop did not struggle against Wade, who nonetheless kept the man’s wrists locked firmly in his grip until Margie had parked the car in the yard and had rushed inside the house. Then, finally, Wade let go of Pop—first one wrist, then the other, like releasing snakes—and got out of the car, walked up onto the porch and went inside, firmly shutting the door behind him. A few seconds later, Pop came in too.

  Wade clumped up the stairs, saw that Margie had shut the bedroom door. He went into the bathroom. He peed, zipped up and then stood before the sink and washed his hands slowly and deliberately, lathering them gently with soap and warm water as if they were small dirty animals he felt tenderly toward. When he had finished and was wiping his hands dry on a towel, he looked into the mirror and startled himself with the image of his own face. He told me, the following morning, that he looked like a stranger to himself, as if someone had sneaked in behind him and got caught accidentally by the mirror. “No shit, Rolfe, I just glanced up and there he was, only it was me, of course. But it was like I had never seen myself before that moment, so it was a stranger’s face. Hard to explain. You fly on automatic pilot, like I was doing all night, and you disappear, you go off to God knows where, while your body stays home. And then you accidentally happen to see your body, or your face, or whatever, and you don’t know who the hell it belongs to. Strange. It was the business with the old man, I know, and how incredibly pissed at him I was, and also chasing Jack Hewitt like that, and then the goddamned truck going through the ice, not to mention Margie’s being so upset—one thing piled on top of another, until there I was, standing in front of a mirror and not knowing who the hell I was looking at.

  “So I went back downstairs and saw that Pop had gone into his room and closed the door, and then in a sense I was alone in the house, which was fine with me. I had had enough of other people for one night. Sometimes other people are hell, pure hell. Sometimes I think you’ve got the right idea, Rolfe, living alone as far from this damned town as you can and never coming back here except when you have to.

  “I got me a beer and stoked the fire in the stove and turned off all the lights and sat there in the kitchen for a while, trying to calm myself down a little, trying to forget about Jack and Twombley and all that, trying to forget about LaRiviere’s truck. I tried not to think about Margie, even, and Pop, I tried not to think about him. But in that house, where we were all raised, knowing that Pop was in the next room, it’s impossible not to think about Pop and abou
t Ma’s dying. That’s the trouble with being in that house now. You can understand that.”

  I allowed that I could, indeed, understand, but he did not hear me, really; he just rattled on. He had called me late in the morning, a Friday, which was unusual, and had caught me at home, and he was in a manic mood, it seemed, calling me, I surmised, because he needed to talk about all this and no one else would listen. I listened, and, yes, I did understand, for I myself have felt as he did then, although not in nearly fifteen years. But I could remember all too easily how it felt to be filled with strangely powerful information—dark fears and anger and dangerous obsessions—with no one to reveal them to. I remembered how it felt to look at yourself in a mirror and see a stranger looking back.

  “Anyhow,” he went on, “I was sitting there in the dark, watching the fire glow through the cracks in the stove, you know how it does, and I suddenly remembered that summer when we didn’t have a water heater and had to take our baths in the kitchen, in that big galvanized tub, with water heated on the stove. You were maybe five or six. I think I was sixteen, because I was in high school then and on the baseball team; that was the first year I made all-state, and I got special privileges, so I could drive by the school and say I was working out and use the showers there. I think Elbourne and Charlie did the same as me, took their baths someplace else. But you and Lena and Ma and Pop, you all had to bathe in the kitchen so we wouldn’t have to lug big tubs of hot water up the stairs to the bathroom. The water heater was broke, or some damn thing, but we didn’t have enough money to get a new one till that fall, and I guess because it was summer and the house was warm, nobody really minded too much. Do you remember that?”

  I had no memory of it, which is not surprising: the machines we lived with—water heaters, furnaces, pumps, cars, trucks and refrigerators—were always old and decrepit, held together with tape and baling wire, and were always breaking down, and we frequently got along without one or more of them for months before we had enough money to fix or replace them. As a child of six, I would have been neither inconvenienced nor thrilled by having to bathe in a galvanized tub in the kitchen once a week. A forgettable experience.

  “Well, I remember one afternoon, it must have been a Saturday, because Pop was home and that was when you took your baths anyhow, and you and Lena had already taken your baths. You got sent upstairs, as usual, while Ma took hers. I don’t know where I was, probably working for LaRiviere by then. Yeah, that was the summer I went to work for Gordon the first time. Anyhow, it was just you two and Ma and Pop who were at home. And you got it into your head to sneak down the stairs and out the door, the door off the living room, without anyone seeing you, except Lena, of course, who probably knew what you were up to. And you tippy-toed around the outside of the house to the porch and peeked through the window there into the kitchen, where Ma was taking her bath. It wasn’t exactly innocent, of course, but what the hell, you were only a little kid. ”

  I tried to interrupt him, but he just rolled on with his story, so I let him finish.

  “Well, Pop, he must have seen you from the living room or something, because he went out the back door himself and tippy-toed right up behind you, while you were staring at Ma, getting a real eyeful, probably, and he reached down and grabbed you right off the ground. Scared the bejesus out of you.

  “And the old man, he lugged you screaming back into the house, by the living room door, of course, and he whaled on you, he truly lost it. You were only a little kid, and he knocked you around like you were me or Elbourne or Charlie, although by then he had laid off those two. He just lost it. I came home later, but I didn’t know anything was wrong, except that you had been a bad little boy and were upstairs in your bedroom being punished for it.

  “But the next day I noticed that you weren’t around for breakfast, and then later in the day it came out, what you’d done, and what Pop had done. Ma was as usual real confused and upset, and Lena was scared shitless and wasn’t talking, but by afternoon Ma was worried because you were actually spitting blood and breathing funny. It was obvious the fucker had broken your ribs or something. I told Ma we had to take you into Littleton to the hospital, and she said okay, but we first had to concoct a story about your falling from the hayloft in the barn. We told the doctor you’d been playing in the barn, where you weren’t supposed to be, and you’d rolled off the loft to the floor and had banged yourself against some old boards or something out there when you fell. I don’t think the doctor bought it, but he bandaged you up, and you were okay by the end of the summer.”

  “Wade, I hate to disappoint you,” I said quietly, “but it never happened. Not to me.”

  “Of course it happened! Why would I lie about it?”

  “You would not lie, necessarily. But you have got the story confused somewhat. What you described certainly did happen, but before I was born, and it happened to you, not to me. At least, that is how I heard the story, which I heard when I was about five or six, from you, or maybe it was from Charlie or Elbourne and he was telling it about you. Yes, it was Elbourne—it was he who told me. And you are right about the broken water heater and the baths in the kitchen. I remember now that we were bathing in the kitchen the summer I turned six, the summer Elbourne had enlisted and was home after basic training before leaving for Vietnam, so he must have been twenty. Charlie was out of the house by then, holing up in Littleton, and you were working for LaRiviere. But it was Elbourne who told the story, by way of a friendly warning, I suspect.”

  Wade interrupted and insisted that I had it all wrong: a person should know, after all, whether something as interesting and dramatic as being beaten by his old man and having to go to the hospital for it actually happened to him. And it did not happen to him, he said: I was the child in the story, not he.

  “No, you were the child, although I was a child when I heard the story, and I heard it from Elbourne, who was hanging out upstairs in the big bedroom where you guys slept. It was evening, I think, not afternoon, and Lena and I had already bathed down in the kitchen, and I was in my pajamas, and I started to walk downstairs, probably to get a cookie or something, you know, when Elbourne caught me at the head of the stairs, reached out and grabbed me from behind and lifted me right up—he was huge, you know, way bigger than you or Charlie or Pop, even—and he carried me into his room, very good-naturedly, and teased me about sneaking down the stairs to catch Ma taking a bath, which of course embarrassed me terribly. Then he went on to tell me what had happened to you years before, when you were my age. The story was essentially the same one you just told, except for the business about the hospital and the lie told to the doctors—that bit about your falling from the loft in the barn. I never heard that one before.”

  Wade said that he had never heard this one before and laughed.

  “Well, I remember it vividly, because the story terrified me. Up until then I had only seen Pop get mad, or heard him late at night from my bed, going against you or Ma, when he was drunk, and I had figured that Lena and I were somehow safe from him, although I was scared of him, of course. I guess I thought that somehow the drinking and anger were a part of your and Ma’s relationship with him and that it had nothing to do with me or Lena. Not particularly intelligent of me, I know, but I was only a child then. So when Elbourne told me what Pop had done to you when you, too, were a child, I was suddenly terrified. And from then on, I was careful. I was a careful child, and I was a careful adolescent, and I guess now I am a careful adult. It may have been a high price to pay, never having been carefree, but at least I managed to avoid being afflicted by that man’s violence.”

  Wade laughed again. “That’s what you think,” he said.

  Then he changed the subject. He went back to the reason he had called me in the first place, which, as it turned out, had nothing to do with Pop or Wade’s misadventures with LaRiviere’s truck but concerned instead, once again, Evan Twombley, Mel Gordon, Gordon LaRiviere and Jack Hewitt—Wade’s hobbyhorse.

  The
next morning, shortly after seven, Wade drove away from the house in Margie’s car, gone at the usual time on a weekday to direct traffic at the school, as if everything were normal, in spite of numerous signs to the contrary: Margie either had feigned sleep or had stayed asleep when he had come to bed and had kept her back to him all night long, and in the morning, when he awoke, she appeared not to, and while he washed and shaved and dressed, she stayed in bed, head buried in the pillow. He had acted his part, not turning on the bedroom light while he dressed, tiptoeing out and closing the door quietly, leaving a note for her on the kitchen table when he left: I’ve gone to the school, borrowed your car, will check back later. Pop, too, had stayed in his room until after Wade had left. Pop’s habit was to rise at six, regardless of how late he had gone to bed the night before and how drunk: for Pop, there was now sufficient alcohol in his veins and cells that most of his acts had been reduced to the level of compulsion or involuntary reflex actions, giving, at best, only the appearance of volition.

  At the school, Wade parked Margie’s car next to the principal’s, where he usually parked. Lugene said hello and nice day to him, and Wade, as always, said yeah and took up his post under the blinking yellow light in the middle of the road. The sky was peach-colored in the east, deep blue and starry in the west, with a light breeze in Wade’s face. It was going to be a fine day, clear and warm: yesterday’s snow had signaled the arrival of a front, and a high-pressure area seemed to be settling in for a spell.

  The buses came and went, unloading their cargoes and heading back over the country roads for more. There was not much traffic otherwise: a few out-of-state cars with end-of-the-season deer hunters on the prowl, Hank Lank on his way to work, Bud Swette in his red-white-and-blue mail-delivery jeep, Chick Ward yawning past in his Trans Am, flipping a wave at Wade, Pearl Diehler, as she often did when she failed to get her kids fed and dressed in time, driving them in to school in her old rusted-out station wagon, smiling easily, naturally, normally, as she passed Wade. Wade liked Pearl, liked the way she seemed to be completely identified with motherhood: he never saw her without her two small children in tow. She was the good mother, to Wade and to most everyone else in town as well. Wade was feeling pretty kindly toward the whole town this morning: everything seemed to be operating on schedule and as usual, and he was able to fit his moves automatically in with everyone else’s for a change. It allowed him, like his father, both to act and to give the appearance of volition, without having to think about it.