Russell Banks - Affliction

Scowling and out of breath, the man was about to speak, when Jack raised a finger and silenced him. He whispered, “Stay here, stand where I am,” and stepped away from the edge of the incline.

Twombley nodded and moved into place and peered carefully down at the narrow trail and field of glacial till twenty feet below.

“I’m going to move back up a ways, then come in from the west along the trail there,” he whispered in the man’s ear. “You just stand here and wait.” He pointed at the rifle still slung over Twombley’s beefy shoulder. “You’ll need that,” he said. “Be sure the safety’s off.”

Twombley wrestled his rifle off his shoulder and into his hands. He checked the chamber, then flicked off the safety and cradled the gun under his right arm. He was breathing rapidly now, not from exertion but from excitement. In a tight dry whisper, he asked Jack, “What’d you see?”

“Tracks. It’s your monster buck, all right. So you keep your eyes on that break in the trail down there,” he said, pointing down a ways to his left, where the trail disappeared around a bend in the cut slope. “And in a while, Mr. Twombley, you’ll see what you want to see.”

“Where’ll you be?”

“Where I can get him if you don’t,” Jack said. “There’s only one direction he can go when you shoot at him from up here. If you miss him, he’ll run downhill and back. Which is where I’ll be.”

“Right, right.”

Jack placed his hand on Twombley’s back and nudged him a step closer to the edge. “Be ready. You’ll only have time to get off a single shot. He’ll come facing you, so shoot him right where you’d shoot a man if you only had one shot,” he said, and pointed at Twombley’s heart and smiled.

Twombley smiled back.

“Good hunting, Mr. Twombley,” Jack said. He slung the daypack onto his back and started walking along the lip of the incline toward the line of small pines that grew uphill on the left. Then he turned and came back toward Twombley, who was already staring down at where he expected the deer to appear, and when Jack was about four feet from the older man, he stopped.

Twombley looked up at him, puzzled. “You better get going, kid. You only got till ten o’clock to collect that extra hundred,” he said.

Jack said, “Let me check your gun.”

Twombley handed it to him. Jack looked it over. He lifted his head, and for a few seconds he stared at Twombley’s chest, and then he raised the gun and aimed it and fired.

MEANWHILE, AT THAT VERY MOMENT in the valley below, Wade drove slowly from the schoolhouse south along Route 29 into the center of town. Occasionally, a vehicle emerged from the falling snow and sloshed past Wade’s green sedan — Hank Lank delivering oil, Bud Swette in his jeep starting on his mail route, Pearl Diehler taking her children to school, late again.

Then Wade saw the plow approaching, LaRiviere’s bright-blue dump truck with the big double-V plow, driven by Jimmy Dame, who was normally one of Wade’s helpers on the drilling rig. The sonofabitch had got to the garage before him, and now Wade was stuck driving the grader again. They should’ve called school off, he thought. God damn it all to hell.

The vehicle loomed out of the snow like the huge silver-and-blue-helmeted face of a medieval knight, and Wade veered slightly to the right to give the truck plenty of room as it passed. LaRiviere had obtained the contract to plow the town roads nine years earlier, before he ran for selectman and right after the Board of Selectmen introduced at town meeting a rule requiring all bidders on the plowing to be local residents. Appealing to local pride and suspicion of outsiders, Chub Merritt, then the chairman of the Board, had got it passed, in spite of heavy opposition led by Alma Pittman, the town clerk, who had pointed out that Gordon LaRiviere, with his grader and truck, was now likely to be the only bidder, which was, of course, no surprise to Chub Merritt.

Though he worked for LaRiviere and would probably end up driving one of the plows himself and garnering lots of over-time to help pay for his new house and child, Wade had been against the proposal, telling no one but Lillian: he knew what LaRiviere and Chub Merritt were up to, and unlike most people in town, he did not admire them for it. Wade never understood why folks seemed to confuse envy with admiration when it came to wheeler-dealers like Gordon LaRiviere. A small town is a kind of ghetto, and hustlers look like heroes. But Wade kept his own counsel and never indicated aloud whether he was for or against Chub’s new plowing proposal, so everyone assumed he was for it. What the hell, Wade himself would benefit from it: winter work, in a town where unemployment from December till March was close to forty percent.

Chub called it Home Rule and for months before town meeting buttonholed everyone who came into his garage, asking as he pumped gas into their car, “How you stand on Home Rule, bub?” He never bothered to ask Wade. At the meeting, Alma angrily called for a secret ballot and got it. Wade voted Yea. Afterwards, he often wished that he had been more forthright, that he had come right out and said to Chub Merritt, “I’m against Home Rule. All it means is an inside track and inflated charges for Gordon LaRiviere, and we taxpayers end up paying for it.” Then he could have voted Nay. It was another of those small compromises that made Wade feel trapped, not so much by public opinion, or even by his cowardice, as by his desire to behave like a responsible husband and father. He believed that, and ate his anger.

The windshield wipers flopped back and forth, and the CB grumbled as state troopers out on the interstate between Littleton and Lebanon bounced calls back and forth. A speeder had been stopped on the northbound lane, and a truck was off the road at Chester. A car had been abandoned at the side of the road a half mile south of Littleton. Wade listened to these calls from habit, not curiosity or need. Though he had called the state police many times on his CB, in four years they had not once called him for help or even for information — not since the forest fire in Franconia. He was like a private security guard hired by the town, a human alarm system whose main functions were to call for the emergency vehicle at the fire station or the ambulance service in Littleton if someone died at home, to break up domestic arguments that got out of hand, to keep the bored and reckless teenagers sufficiently alert so that they did not do irreversible damage to themselves, to ease the children safely into the schoolyard in the mornings, and if anything really serious happened, to call in the real cops.

Sometimes Wade hated being the town cop. At least once a year, and usually in early March, just before the selectmen were due to reappoint him, he actually considered quitting the job. But then, when he was compelled to imagine his life in town without the job, he hated that even more. For Wade, so long as he stayed in Lawford, there were no acceptable alternatives to his present life, not here, and not anywhere in this valley. No alternatives, and so far as he could see, no prospects. Somehow, until now, being the town cop, which once in a while gave him something unpredictable to deal with, had made that almost acceptable.

He could go elsewhere, of course; most of the smart people in town already had. They usually fled south: to Concord, the state capital, like Lillian, who Wade had to admit was bright, or to Massachusetts, like me, whom Wade also regarded as bright and who had gone off first to the University of New Hampshire in Durham and then disappeared into the Boston suburbs, and even like our sister, Lena, younger than Wade and older than I, a woman who was thin when she was young, and pretty, and married a truckdriver for Wonder Bread from Somerville, Massachusetts, and left town with him. He had the northern delivery route the summer Lena was seventeen and met him at the Tunbridge Fair, where he was delivering hot dog rolls. She rode off in his truck with him, got quickly pregnant, and now they are born-again Christians and have five kids and live on the third floor of a triple-decker tenement in Revere. There were others from Lawford who were regarded by Wade as intelligent, mostly older people, and they had sold their land and houses in Lawford — sold them increasingly in recent years to Gordon LaRiviere — and owning for the first time in their lives a few thousand dollars more than they needed to live on, had gone to Florida, Arizona and California, bought a trailer or a condo, turned their skin to leather playing shuffleboard all day and waited to die.