Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade kept his arms straight out, one aimed north and one south, with both hands up. Motionless, expressionless, he held his post in the middle of the road. The yellow caution light directly over his head blinked and bobbed on its wire, and the remnants of last night’s smashed pumpkins, half covered by snow and slush, lay scattered at his feet. He looked like a demented scarecrow.

He felt like a statue, however: a man made of stone, unable to bring his arms down or force his legs to walk, unable to release the one remaining school bus and the dozens of vehicles lined up behind it and the dozen more facing it. Someone way in the back hit his horn, and at once most of the others joined in, and even the bus driver was blowing his horn. But still Wade held his arms out and did not let anyone pass.

He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus. Simple. It was his only thought. Oh, how he wanted to see his daughter’s face. He longed to look over as the vehicle passed and see Jill’s pale face peer out the window at him, the palms of her hands pressed against the glass, ready to wave to him. Daddy!Daddy, here I am!

He knew, of course, that she would not be there, knew that he would see instead some other man’s child staring at him. And so he refused to allow the bus to move at all. To release that one remaining bus and all the cars and trucks lined up behind and in front of it, horns blaring, windows rolled down and drivers hollering and gesturing angrily at him, to let them pass, would instantly transform his desire to see his daughter into simple loss of his daughter. Somehow he understood that the pain of enduring a frustrated desire was easier to bear than the pain of facing one more time this ultimate loss. He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus; it was his only thought.

Then suddenly, from near the end of the long line behind the bus, a glossy black BMW sedan nosed into the second lane and started coming forward, passing the other cars and trucks and gaining speed as it approached Wade. There was a man driving and beside him a woman in a fur coat and in back a pair of small children, boys, staring over their parents’ shoulders at Wade, who behaved as if he did not see them at all or as if he fully expected the BMW to come to an abrupt stop when it drew abreast of the bus.

But it did not. The BMW accelerated, changing gears as it flew past Wade and on down the road and disappeared around the bend beyond the Common. Wade still did not move. As if the flight of the black BMW had been a countermanding signal to the signal Wade’s position and posture gave, the last yellow schoolbus drew quickly off the road and entered the schoolyard, and at once the rest of the cars began to move again, north and south, passing Wade on both sides.

Slowly his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood there starkly alone in the exact center of the road. It was only after all the vehicles had passed him by and the road was once again empty and the bus had unloaded the thirty or forty children it carried and had pulled out of the schoolyard and headed back toward Littleton that Wade himself departed from the road. He walked slowly in the blowing snow toward his own car, which was parked just beyond the main entrance to the school.

Standing at the door to the schoolhouse was Lugene Brooks, his arms folded over his chest more as protection against the cold and snow than as a gesture of disapproval, his round face, as usual, puzzled and anxious. Wade walked heavily past the man without acknowledging him and yanked open the car door.

“Are you okay, Wade?” Brooks called to him. “What was the matter out there? Why were you holding everyone up?”

Wade got in and slammed the car door and started the motor. Then he backed up a few feet and rolled the window down and shouted, “That sonofabitch in the BMW, he could’ve killed somebody.”

“Yes. Yes, he could have.” The principal paused. “Did you get his number?” he asked.

“I know who it is.”

“Good!” the principal exclaimed. Then he said, “I still don’t understand—”

“I’m going to nail that bastard,” Wade muttered.

“Who … who was it?”

“It was Mel Gordon. From Boston. Evan Twombley’s fucking son-in-law — he was the one driving. I know where they’re headed, too. Up the lake, Agaway. Up here for the weekend, probably. The old man’s out deer hunting with Jack Hewitt, so they probably got a big weekend party planned,” he said. “Oh, I’m gonna nail the bastard, though. Spoil his fucking weekend for him.”

“Good. Good for you, Wade. Well …, ” Brooks said, stepping halfway inside the school. “I’m the guy who’s got to make things run around here, so I better hop to it.” He smiled apologetically.

Wade stared at him, remaining silent, so the principal said, “I was just wondering … you know, about why the big holdup out there, why you were keeping everybody stopped like that. You know?” He smiled feebly.

“You probably think I got an answer for that question,” Wade growled. “You ask more dumb questions than anybody in town.”

“Well, yes. No, I mean. It just… seemed odd, you know. I figured, holding the bus like that and all the cars, you’d had a reason for it. You know.”

“Yeah,” Wade said. “It’s logical for me to have a logical reason for things. Everybody else I know does. You, for instance. You got a logical reason for everything you do?” he suddenly asked the principal. “Do you?”

“Well, no … not really. Not everything, I mean.”

“There you go,” Wade said, and he quickly closed the car window and started moving away.

He left the schoolyard and turned right onto the road, flipped on the CB and started listening to the squawks coming in from all over — truckers out on 1-95, hunters up in the hills plotting their coordinates, a wife in Easton telling her husband he forgot his lunch bag. The snow was coming down with fury, in white fists, and as he drove slowly through the stuff, Wade thought, I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it.

In the lot outside Wickham’s Restaurant, a half-dozen pickup trucks and as many cars were parked side by side. The corpses of large male deer were lashed to front fenders, slung onto roof racks, stretched out in the corrugated beds, carcasses gutted and stiffening in the cold, tongues flopping from bloody mouths, fur riffling in the light breeze, snowflakes catching in eyelashes. It gave the impression not of the aftermath of a successful hunt but of a brief morning respite in an ongoing war, as if the bodies of the deer were not chunks of meat but trophies, were proof of individual acts of bravery, dramatic evidence of the tribe’s rage, courage and righteousness and a cruel warning to those of the enemy who still lived. Counting coup. One half expected to see the antlered heads of the slain deer severed roughly from the bodies and stuck onto poles tied to the rear bumpers of the vehicles. One expected crow feathers tipped in blood.

Out on the highway, cars with out-of-state plates hurried south with the trophies on the roof and lashed to the front fender freezing solid in the wind, the drivers and passengers passing a bottle back and forth while they whooped and detailed in compulsive repetition the story of the kill. And in Lawford, in backyards, deer hung from makeshift gallows, in dark barns on meat hooks, in garages from winch chains or rope tied to I beams; and behind fogged-over kitchen windows, hunters shucked their coats and boots and sat down to tables and ate hearty breakfasts, eggs and bacon, pancakes smeared with butter and covered with maple syrup, huge steaming mugs of coffee: men and women, their blood running, excited in ancient ways, proud and relieved and suddenly ravenous for food.