Russell Banks - Affliction

But Wade was different; he had never imagined his life outside the town. Like almost everyone in northern New England, he talked now and then about getting the hell out of this godforsaken place, usually talked about it with Jack Hewitt, who, from the day he returned from playing ball in Connecticut, spoke of “lighting out for the fucking Sunbelt.” But their conversations always ended with Wade slapping Jack on the back and saying, “You’re a dreamer, kid. You’re going to die here in Lawford, and so’m I.”

Once Wade had gone so far as to answer a postcard from his friend Bob Grant, the plumber, who had sold his place and moved up to Alaska a few years before, with a letter asking Grant about the job possibilities for a skilled well driller up there. Wade had thought Grant’s moving to Alaska was crazy, but on the back of a postcard picture of a moose at dawn, Grant had written Wade that he had just bought a big new house and a new twenty-nine-foot-long RV, and he and the wife were taking a two-week vacation driving down to Oregon. Grant was Wade’s age, a tough smart fellow, a hard worker. He seemed to have benefited from moving north in ways that no one who had moved south or west had been able to do.

Wade had pulled out his yellow tablet and had written back: Well it looks like you’re doing real good now. I guess folks in Alaska need plumbers more than they need them around here. Most everybody here can fix their own toilets and thaw out their own pipes, so we don’t even notice you ‘re gone. (Just kidding.) Seriously, how do you think a guy like me could do up there? I’m sick of working for LaRiviere, who is nuts, as you know. And I’m sick of this town too. It’s only my kid who keeps me here nowadays.

But this was not true, and Wade knew it. No, at bottom Wade believed that he was staying on in Lawford year after year, grinding his way through the long winters, in his forties now and drifting into depression — he did not call it depression, but he remembered when he felt another way, not happy, exactly, but better — drinking too much and with increasing frequency enduring spasms of random violence, because at bottom he was shrewd and honest enough to know that he would be in his forties and lonely, poor, depressed, alcoholic and violent anywhere. Below that, however, was yet another truth that he was now and then aware of but surely could not speak of to Bob Grant, although he had said it to me and probably to Margie Fogg; he said it with a wince, a slight ironic twist on his face: he loved the town, and he could not imagine loving any other.

Alma Pittman was out shoveling her front path, a tall woman in a red plaid mackinaw and a man’s cap with the earflaps tied under her chin, pitching the snow with large easy swings of her long arms, and as he passed she looked up, acknowledged him with a nod and went grimly back to work. There were a few familiar cars parked outside Golden’s store, and farther down on the same side of the road was Wickham’s Restaurant, where the parking lot was filled, and for a second Wade thought of going in for something to eat. He was stuck with using the grader anyhow; no point now in rushing over to the garage to get it.

He slowed and peered out his window, but the windows of the restaurant were clouded over, and he could not see anyone inside. He imagined the smell of cigarette smoke and fresh coffee and bacon and toasted bread, and he lit a cigarette and braked the car slightly, and then he realized that Margie would immediately ask him about Jill. Where was she this morning? Had she gone to school for the day? What were his plans for this snowy weekend with his daughter? Maybe the three of them could take Margie’s snowmobile out. Maybe they could head up to Littleton for a movie.

He checked his watch, saw he was running real late and, almost relieved, drew back off the shoulder onto the road and drove past the restaurant and made straight for LaRiviere’s, a quarter mile beyond and on the left. The heavily falling snow had eased somewhat, and the sky was satiny and pale gray, as Wade pulled into LaRiviere’s wide neatly plowed asphalt driveway, rolled quickly by the mobile home in front and parked his car off to the side of the building behind it. The parking lot, the size of a small airport, surrounds both the blue ranch-style mobile home and the matching blue barn in back, which is where Gordon LaRiviere runs his several businesses.

The trucks were all out, Wade observed, except for LaRiviere’s 4 x 4 pickup and, of course, the grader, that damned grader. It was parked beside the barn like a blue dinosaur, arched and lean and, like all LaRiviere’s vehicles, spotlessly clean. The company motto, LaRiviere’s notion of wit, was painted in white on the side of the pickup and the grader as well — OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! — just as it appeared on everything owned by Gordon LaRiviere, on business cards, stationery, bank checks, tools large enough to carry it, drilling rigs, rain gear and every one of his numerous meticulously maintained matching blue vehicles. It was as if LaRiviere were a small republic. Even the plots of land he bought were planted as soon as the deed was signed with a small blue sign with white lettering: PROPERTY OF LARIVIERE ENTERPRISES. OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! NO SNOW-MOBILES, HUNTING, OR FISHING. NO TRESPASSING. THIS MEANS YOU!

Wade eased himself slowly out of his car as if he had all morning to waste and walked across the lot to the small door next to the large truck-bay doors of the barn and went into the office. Elaine Bernier was at her desk on the other side of the green-speckled Formica counter. The office was as neat and orderly as a showroom for office furniture. There was none of the sloppy evidence of work being done — no stacks of papers, loose files, overflowing ashtrays, drawers left half open, paper food containers — none of it. There were not even any calendars or photographs, although a large red NO SMOKING sign glared from each of the four walls. Elaine was busy typing when Wade strolled through the door, but her desk, too, was clean and, to all intents and purposes, empty. Beyond her desk was the entrance to the inner office and next to it a large plate-glass window behind which sat Gordon LaRiviere, hard at work on the phone, hunkered down close to the receiver, as if proximity to the instrument increased his effectiveness on it.

Elaine looked up, zippered her mouth in a tight smile that was more a grimace and went quickly back to typing. She was a middle-aged woman with a bush of red-dyed hair, a long bony face, plucked eyebrows, green eye makeup and a thin mouth, who overdressed for the job in flouncy full-sleeved blouses and long pleated skirts and high heels that rarely emerged from under her desk. It was Wade’s opinion that Elaine Bernier was in love with Gordon LaRiviere, and that Gordon sometimes had his way with her.

Wade unzipped his jacket and took off his cap and slapped it against his thigh, spraying drops of melted snow over Elaine’s desk, and she glared at him. He waved at his reflection in the glass behind her, and LaRiviere hollered from the other side, “Wade! C’mere a second!”

Wade nodded, and stepping toward the door, said with his lips, One, two, three, and in unison with LaRiviere said aloud, I want you to take the grader!” Wade stopped just short of the entrance to the inner office — he could see the silvery crew-cut top of LaRiviere’s head while the man stared straight down at the telephone, his face a few inches from the surface of his immaculate desk, as if examining it for dust — and counted to three once more and said, again in unison with LaRiviere, ”Follow Jimmy up Twenty-nine to Toby’s and back!” Then he heard LaRiviere return to his telephone conversation, a rapid-fire whisper, his usual telephone voice, like the hissing of a tape rewinding on its spool.