Russell Banks - Affliction

“I thought I told you to move that sonofabitch!” Wade hollered. He stopped a few yards from the truck and placed his hands on his hips.

It was a nice-looking truck, Wade had to admit. Nothing but hair and muscle, that truck. The kid was lucky — he made decent money working for LaRiviere, a hell of a lot more than he had ever made playing double A baseball, and all he had to do with it was spend it on his goddamned truck and new rifles and his girlfriend. The kid is under the impression that he is going to live forever, Wade said to himself. Wade believed that what had happened to him since he was Jack’s age was going to happen to Jack someday. It had to, as much because of who the kid was as because of who he was not. And Wade believed this because he had to — as much because of who Wade was as because of who he was not. “You can’t escape certain awful things in life,” Wade once opined. He was sitting in my kitchen, drinking beer late on a summer Sunday afternoon, after a Red Sox game at Fenway, before heading back up north to Lawford. He looked me in the eye, and I knew he was challenging me to contradict him, to say, as I surely wanted to say, “Yes, Wade, you can escape certain awful things in life. Look at me. I have done it.”

But I said nothing. I looked at my watch, and then he looked at his, and he sighed and said, “Well, old buddy, I better hit the road if I want to get back to the land of milk and honey before dark.”

LaCoy and his girlfriend stepped quickly away from Jack’s truck. Jack leaned out the open window and said to Wade, “Relax, Chief, we’re leaving now. You wanna toke?” he offered. He smiled broadly, a handsome young man, still a boy, practically, who was genuinely pleased by his own good looks and the physical and social pleasures they kept on bringing him.

Wade said, “That shit’s still illegal, you know. You get too cocky, I’ll run you in for it. I’m fucking serious, Jack.”

“Run me in? For what? The cockiness or the grass?” Jack grinned. LaCoy laughed. That Jack Hewitt, what a guy.

“Cockiness, you wiseass little bastard. I’ll run you in for cockiness,” Wade said, and now he, too, was smiling, and he drew closer to the truck. “Listen, you got to be more careful about that shit. LaRiviere or Chub Merritt or one of those guys sees you smoking that wacky tabacky around me, they’ll expect me to bust you. I don’t, I’ll have to start looking for another job. Me personal, I don’t give a shit you smoke it, you know that. So long as you keep it among yourselves and don’t start peddling it. But you got to be a little cool, goddammit. This ain’t goddamn Greenwich Village or Harvard Square or someplace, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Jack said. “Here, for chrissakes, have a hit. Relax a little,” he said. “Don’t be such a hardass, man. I know you got problems, but everybody’s got problems. So relax, for chrissakes.” He extended the half-smoked joint to Wade.

“Not here,” Wade said. His tooth had started to throb painfully again, after having lightened somewhat for almost a week, and he wrapped the right side of his jaw with his right hand, as if to warm it.

“Well, c’mon, then. Get in, and we’ll take a little ride, my man.”

Wade rocked back on his heels and looked up at the clear cold dark-blue sky. The moon had swung around to the south, and the stars, pinpoints of white light, seemed like secrets whispered to him from a vast distance.

“Can’t,” Wade said. “I got Jill tonight.” I’m lying, he thought. She had only been loaned to him, and the loan had been called in early. Meanwhile, he was standing here, pretending to be a good responsible father whose child needed him to stay close by. Wade remembered Jill’s words: “I can wait up here fine. When Mommy comes, just tell her I’m up here.”

Abruptly, he ducked his head and walked toward the front of the truck, just as Jack switched on the bank of running lights and the headlights, and then Wade made himself pass slowly, deliberately, through the glare of the lights, pausing for a second there, a man with nothing to hide being screened for contraband. He rounded the front of the truck and opened the door on the passenger’s side and climbed up next to Hettie, and when he reached across her and took the joint from Jack’s fingers, he smelled her perfume and shampoo. Nice.

Jack dropped the truck into gear and pulled out onto the lane, and as the high powerful vehicle eased down the lane toward Route 29, Wade placed his left arm on the seatback behind Hettie, turned and, peering between the pair of rifles hanging on the rack, looked out the rear window. His glance passed over the red granite war memorial next to the town hall. It stood in the pale moonlight like an ancient dolmen, and he saw above it, in the lighted window of his own office, his daughter, Jill, still wearing the hideous plastic mask, looking back at him.

They drove north on Route 29 for a few miles, passed Toby’s Inn and went all the way out to the interstate, where they luffed along the southbound lane a ways, smoking a second joint and then a third. The land falls away to the west out there, then rises in a long dark forested ridge that hides the Minuit Valley and Lawford. Beyond that is a second, somewhat higher ridge, called Saddleback, that terminates in the spruce-covered knob called Parker Mountain. From the truck Wade could make out several of the half-dozen small lakes in the flats southwest of the valley, shining dully in the moonlight like hardened spatters of melted lead. He had calmed down considerably now — marijuana had a positively soothing effect on him, erasing toothache, anxieties and anger in one swipe, leaving him to drift a short distance outside and behind time without worrying about it, as if being anywhere on time, even at his own death, meant nothing to him.

At the Lebanon cloverleaf they turned around and slowly drove back along the shoulder of the northbound lane. Jack seemed to enjoy holding the speed of his truck way back, keeping it under forty, as if by restraining the truck’s immense power he was better able to exhibit it. Hettie was hunched forward over the dash so she could hear a new James Taylor tape, which Jack had turned down so that he could answer Wade’s question about his plans for deer hunting this year.

Jack said he had a job starting tomorrow at sunup, guiding some Boston business connection of LaRiviere’s, but then he planned to take Saturday and hunt for himself. All the client wanted was to kill something with horns — anything, Jack said, even a cow — but he would take him up to Parker Mountain, where they could use LaRiviere’s cabin as a base and where Jack figured he could find the old guy a deer and also track and mark a big buck off to go back and kill later for himself.

Wade knew the client, the way he knew everyone who spent much time in Lawford, even the summer people, which this man was. His name was Evan Twombley, some kind of Massachusetts union official or something, and he owned a fancy house out on Lake Agaway that he used maybe a month at the most in the summer and, since it was winterized, week-ends and holidays over the rest of the year. In recent years the place had been used more by Twombley’s daughter and her husband and kids than by Twombley himself, but Wade remembered the man nonetheless and believed he was rich and thought Jack was lucky to have the chance to work as a guide for him.

“Oh, I don’t know about lucky,” Jack said. “The guy’s a full-blown asshole. I’d just as soon be out there for myself tomorrow as work for some clown in a red suit who shoots at shadows with a gun he’s never used before. Pay’s good, though. Hundred dollars a day. I got to guarantee a kill, of course. Which I can do. There’s some monster bucks hiding out up there.”