Russell Banks - Affliction

That is the face and body I see when I see Wade flick the switch by the door and turn off the overhead light in the living room and stand for a second more in the gloomy gray light of the trailer and study the room before him, a sad dirty cluttered room filled with the evidence of a sloppy man nearing middle age and living alone — empty beer bottles on the floor and coffee table, work clothes strewn around the room, ashtrays overflowing, newspapers tossed aimlessly about, empty food cartons and dirty dishes and coffee cups abandoned on the end tables and the TV in the corner.

For the first time in what even he knew must have been months, he looked at the room as if there were a stranger living here, a man he had never met, and he felt his stomach tighten with aversion. He would not want to meet such a man. No, sir. And then, suddenly, he saw how the room would have looked to Jill as she came through the door, tired and sleepy but very happy from all the fun trick-or-treating and afterwards going to the Halloween party with her dad. He would have carried her in from the car, worked the door open with his free hand and switched on the overhead light, and Jill would have turned on his shoulder and looked around, and this awful room, this stranger’s room, is what she would have seen.

He looked down and off to his right, a boxer dodging a blow, wrenched open the door and stepped quickly outside. There was about an inch of snow on the ground, and it was still coming down in a light dry powder but falling more heavily now than before, accumulating rapidly. Like a man trying to spot a particular friend in a crowd of strangers, he squinted across the lake at Saddleback and Parker Mountain, hazy dark lumps profiled indistinctly against the white sky, more like zones than solid objects, and he heard it, suddenly but without surprise, as if he had been listening for it, the first gunfire of the hunting season — a rapid series of four distinct shots crackling across the lake and echoing back again.

With his gloved hands, he brushed the snow off the wind-shield and exposed a rough skin of silvery ice underneath, got inside and inserted the key into the ignition, pumped the gas pedal hard twice and turned the key. The starter moaned but did not catch. He tried again, exactly as before, and still got nothing. This was part of the drill. The third time would do it, and indeed it did, turning the cold engine over once, several times slowly, then rapidly, until at last it caught and came coughing to life.

Sitting inside the car was like hunkering down inside a tent in the Arctic or an igloo — that is how Wade imagined it. Light managed to penetrate the ice on the windshield and windows, but it was an eerie white metallic light that did not so much illuminate the interior of the car as fill it with itself, like Wade’s breath, which drifted from his mouth and nostrils in wispy clouds. When the engine was running smoothly and would not stall, he reached forward and switched on the defroster fan. At first it chattered and whined, but in a few seconds it was humming from somewhere behind the dash, shoving air up against the windshield glass.

Wade waited, and before long the air coming from the defroster had melted a dime-sized circle on each side. Slowly the circles expanded, becoming quarters, then saucers, until Wade could look through the glass and see the snow coming down, could see the trailer, could even see the lake beyond.

The melting of his icy sanctuary made him feel oddly disappointed, a little saddened and, for a few seconds, apprehensive. Out in the middle of the lake, which was now a flattened white teardrop, he could see the black circle of open water. It would probably freeze solid and disappear into whiteness by tonight, even there, where the water was over fifty feet deep. Then there would be two utterly distinct worlds, the world above and the world below, with the ice in between like an impenetrable barrier protecting one from the other. He felt that split, that barrier between two worlds, abandon him now, as the ice on his windshield melted into a pair of rapidly enlarging circles, like eyes that could look out but also — as if that were the price he had paid for the privilege of looking out — eyes that allowed him to be seen.

Automatically, Wade flicked on the CB, and with the red dot of light dancing along the scanner, he backed the car down the driveway, spun the wheel and eased out of the trailer park, laying down the winter’s first set of tire tracks in the fresh snow. Turning left at Route 29, he passed the row of snow-crowned mailboxes lined up side by side on a two-by-four like miniature prairie schooners and headed toward town.

A quarter of a mile north of the trailer park, the Minuit River suddenly veers in close to the left side of the road, and from here all the way into town the road and the riverbed wind and loop in tandem through the narrow valley. Wade liked the way the river looked in the new snow and milky early morning light. That is a tourist’s idea of New Hampshire, he thought, with pine trees drooping over the water and snarls of icicle-laden birches clumped at the edges of eddies and pools, with large snow-covered boulders in the middle of the stream and dark-green water churning, swirling and splashing past and over them, raising a thick white crust of ice at the crest marks. At moments like this, Wade felt something like pride of place, a rare and deeply pleasurable feeling that started with delight in the sight of the country, passed through a desire to share that delight with someone else and abruptly ended in a fantasy in which he stands before the scene and spreads his arms wide as if to embrace it whole, then steps aside and reveals it to … to whom?

He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, put it in his mouth and reached to punch in the dashboard lighter, when, startled, he saw on the seat next to him a green Tyrolean hat. It was the hat he had picked off the ground the night before, after the owner of the hat and Lillian and Jill had driven away. Wade looked at the thing with dismay, as if it were a severed body part, a piece of irrefutable evidence linking him to a crime he had no knowledge of.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said aloud, and he cranked down the window next to him. He let the freezing air blow in and grabbed the hat and shoved it out. All the way into town he left the window open, as if pummeling himself with the cold wind to keep himself from falling asleep at the wheel and swerving and skidding off the narrow dangerously curving road into the icy river.

WINTER APPROACHES THIS HALF of New England from the northwest. It blows down from Ontario and Quebec, arriving with such ferocity and stunning relentlessness of purpose that you give yourself over to it completely and at once. There are no temporary adjustments, no mere holding actions or delays, no negotiated settlements.

For the tens of thousands of years that these narrow valleys and abrupt hillsides have been populated by human beings, life has been characterized by winter, not summer. Warm weather, high blue skies and sunshine, flowers and showers — these are the aberrations. What is normal is snow from early November well into May; normal is week after week of low zinc-gray overcast skies; is ice that cracks and booms as, closer every night to the bottom of the lake, a new layer of water cools, contracts and freezes beneath the layer of old ice above it.

There are, as it happens, two crucially different climate zones that are divided by an invisible line running across New Hampshire, drawn from Vermont in the southwest corner of the state near Keene, through Concord in the center of the state to the lakes north of Rochester in the east and on into Maine. When, south of that line, in November and December and again in March and April, it rains, north of that line the lakes are still frozen over and it snows. The land is tilted higher in the north, is rockier, less arable, with glacial corrugations like heavy-knuckled fingers reaching down toward the broad alluvial valleys and low rolling hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut and the coastal plain of eastern New Hampshire and Maine. South of that unmapped line, the climate is characterized by weather typical of most of the northeastern industrial United States; north of it, the weather is typical of eastern Canada.