Russell Banks - Affliction

Jack led the way from the truck onto the flat beside the road, circled the frozen patch of high-country marsh, then angled left on the sloping lumber trail, over rocks and low brush. Immediately, Jack started playing his gaze back and forth across the rough snow-covered ground in front of him, searching for tracks and sign. Whenever Twombley, wrapped like a huge infant in red bunting, trundled close and attempted to come up alongside him, Jack seemed to walk a little faster and put the man behind him again.

He moved smoothly, a natural athlete, long-legged, broad-shouldered, lean and loose — a ballplayer. “I’m a ballplayer,” he always said, “no matter what else I ever do.” He never said “baseball player” or even “pitcher,” and in fact he had been slightly disappointed when the Red Sox turned out to be the only team that wanted to sign him, despite the fact that since early childhood the Sox had been his favorite team, because that meant the American League and the designated-hitter rule: as a pitcher, if he ever made the majors, he would not be allowed to hit. And back in those days he fully expected to make the majors. Everybody in town and even across the state and into Massachusetts expected the kid Jack Hewitt from a hill-country village in New Hampshire to make the majors. “No way that kid won’t be pitching in Fenway a couple years from now,” people said when Jack with his big-league fastball was drafted in his senior year of high school. “No fucking way. The best ballplayer to come out of New Hampshire since Carlton Fisk.” People thought he even looked a little like Fisk, square-jawed and nobly constructed in all the ways an unformed boy of eighteen can be said to be constructed — the kind of boy a town is proud to send out into the world.

The world in this case turned out to be New Britain, Connecticut, but after a season and a half playing double A ball, Jack was back in Lawford, unable to lift his right hand above his right shoulder, where he wore two long white scars that Hettie Rodgers loved to touch with her tongue. Beneath the scars he wore a ruined rotator cuff, ruined, he liked to say, by trying to do what man was not meant to do, throw a slider, and by surgical attempts to repair the damage.

He did not complain, though. At least he had a shot at the big time, right? Most guys never even got that far. He knew lots of pitchers in the minors who had ruined their arms the first year or two, so he did not feel especially unlucky. His story was not all that unusual. Not for someone who had got as close to the big time as he did. That was the unusual story, he felt, getting as close as he did in the first place. More worldly than his neighbors, he took the statistical view and gained comfort from it.

Or so it seemed. Every once in a while, his disappointment and frustration would break through with the force of grief and rage, and he’d find himself beer drunk and weeping in Hettie Rodgers’s arms, crying into her soft white neck ridiculous things, like, “Why did my fucking arm have to be the one to go? Why couldn’t I be like those other guys who’re pitching in Fenway, for Christ’s sake? I was as good as those fucking guys! I was!”

Then the next day, after digging wells with Wade all day for Gordon LaRiviere, he would land back at his stand at Toby’s Inn, watching the game on the TV above the bar with the regulars and explaining the finer points of the game, dropping bits of gossip and rumor about Oil Can Boyd, Roger Clemens and Bruce Hurst, guys he’d known and pitched against in the minors, diagramming on a napkin the difference between hit and run and run and hit, anticipating managerial moves with an accuracy and alacrity that pleased everyone who heard him, made them proud to know him. “That Jack Hewitt, he’s fucking amazing. Only difference between him and that guy Clemens up there on the TV is luck. That’s all, shit luck.”

Slipping and sliding downhill behind Jack came Evan Twombley, carrying his rifle, lugging it first with his right hand, then with his left, sticking one hand and then the other out for balance as he tried to follow Jack’s footsteps in the snow and tripped on a rock or a slick piece of trash wood. Finally, he slung the rifle over his shoulder, like an infantryman, and used both arms for balance. Overweight, out of shape, he was soon puffing and red-faced from the effort of keeping up with the younger man; he began to curse. “Sonofabitch, where the fuck’s he think he’s going, a goddamn party?”

When Jack had eased twenty yards ahead of Twombley and had actually disappeared from view around a stand of low spruce trees, Twombley hollered at him, “Hey, Hewitt! Slow the fuck down!”

Jack stopped and turned and waited for the man. A look of disgust crept across his face, but when Twombley came lurching awkwardly around the spruce trees, Jack smiled easily and in a soft voice said, “Deer’s got ears too, you know.” The falling snow spread like a veil between them, billowing from the wind, and Twombley might have looked like a fat red ghost approaching. As if suddenly frightened by him, Jack turned and moved on, a little slower now than earlier, but keeping the distance between them constant.

They were switchbacking down the north slope of Parker Mountain, walking in the direction of Lake Minuit through woods that were lumbered out five or six years before, past stumps and piles of old brush among young pine and spruce trees. The sky seemed huge and low, smoky gray and spewing white ash over the valley. Now and then the sound of gunfire from below drifted all the way up the long tangled side of the mountain, as if skirmishes were being fought down there, isolated mopping-up actions and occasional sniper fire. Out in the open now, they could see in the distance the oval shape of the frozen lake, a white disk with a crystallized roughening at the farther edge that was LaRiviere’s trailer park, as Jack thought of it, where Wade Whitehouse lived.

Jack liked Wade. Most everybody liked Wade. Not the way everybody liked Jack, of course, but Wade was twenty years older than Jack, and he had a reputation around town as a man who was dangerous when he was drunk, a reputation Jack knew the man deserved. He had seen Wade clock a few guys himself, and he had heard stories about him that went all the way back to when Wade was in high school, before he tried to go to Vietnam like his brothers but got sent to Korea instead, which people said really pissed him off. People liked to say, “If you rub his hair the wrong way, Wade Whitehouse can turn into a sonofabitch,” which is probably why he got made an MP after the army gave him their aptitude tests. Wade had an aptitude for being polecat mean.

Even so, Jack liked Wade — or, more accurately, he was drawn to him. He watched him closely, knew at all times where in the room he was standing, who in the crowd he was talking to, almost as if Wade were someone’s wife Jack was attracted to. He liked the slight feeling of danger he got when he was around Wade, even though the idea of ending up in your forties living a life like Wade’s made him shudder and avert his gaze and go quickly back to talking about baseball. Jesus! A smart good-looking guy like that, living all alone out there by the lake in a rusted-out trailer, busting his butt digging wells for Gordon LaRiviere and working as a part-time cop for the town, drinking beer and brawling with the boys on Saturday nights and copping a quick Sunday fuck off some sad lonely lady like Margie Fogg — that was not the life Jack Hewitt planned to live. No way!

He came to a halt at the edge of a steep incline that fell away to a branch of the old lumber trail and a half-overgrown field of scree, the remnants of a spring mud slide. Beyond the lumpy swatch of boulders the forest resumed. The wind that had blown steadily in his face all the way downhill from the truck shifted slightly and cast the sheet of snow briefly aside, and from where Jack stood, up there on the lip of the incline, he could see across the tops of the trees, mostly hardwoods now, oak and maple, down the side of the mountain and through the dip in Saddleback all the way to Lawford, identifiable among the distant trees by the spire of the Congregational church and the roof of the town hall. Jack stared at the town, at the place in the landscape where he knew the town lay, as if searching for his own house, then inhaled and exhaled deeply, and when the wind resumed blowing in his face and the curtain closed, he turned and faced Twombley, who had finally caught up with him.