Russell Banks - Affliction

When, at last, Wade had finished plowing the parking lot of Toby’s Inn, he drew the grader alongside the dump truck, cut the engine back and flopped open the canvas door. He was a few feet higher than Jimmy in the truck and swung around in his narrow seat and kicked down at the closed window of the truck several times.

Jimmy rolled the window down and hollered, “What the fuck you want, Wade? What you want?”

Wade felt a wave of petulance roll over him, a warm self-satisfied pout, and he kicked his booted feet, right, then left, into the space of the open window below him.

Jimmy dodged Wade’s feet and yelled, “What the fuck? Knock that shit off, will you?” He started rolling the window up, but Wade stuck one boot into the window far enough to stop it a few inches from the top. Jimmy peered up at Wade, puzzled, angry, a little scared. “Hey, c’mon, will you?”

Wade said nothing. His face was expressionless, but he was suddenly happy, feeling playful almost, unexpectedly released from the anger and grief that had weighed on him all morning. Even his toothache had eased back. Wade somehow knew that this nearly miraculous and strangely innocent feeling of release would last only as long as he could strike dumbly out, refusing to explain his blows, refusing to rationalize them, refusing even to connect them to anger, to particular offense given or taken: so he pulled his foot free of the nearly closed window and swung both of them hard against the glass.

Jimmy said, “Jesus Christ, Wade! You bust this glass, Gordon’ll kick my ass too!” He rapidly rolled the window down again and slid away from the opening and Wade’s swinging feet. From his position halfway across the passenger’s seat, Jimmy reached over to the steering wheel and stretched to place his feet against the clutch and gas pedal, and he managed to shove the truck into low gear and got it to lurch unsteadily away from the grader. But as the truck moved away, Wade simply stepped up onto the roof of the cab, and now he stood atop the vehicle, legs spread, fists at his hips, banging his feet against the roof in a wild awkward dance.

Below him, Jimmy slid into proper place behind the wheel, and shifting it into second gear, got the truck quickly up to about twenty-five miles an hour and headed straight for the snowbank at the far end of the lot. Then he hit the brakes hard and had the pleasure of watching Wade, like some gigantic dark-blue bird of prey, sail past, over the hood of the truck, over the top of the plow and straight into the high pile of hard-packed snow.

As soon as Wade had landed, Jimmy cut the wheel hard to the left, dropped the truck back into first and pulled quickly out of the parking lot onto Route 29 toward town and commenced plowing the right lane in that direction, as nonchalantly and purposefully as he had plowed the other lane coming out.

After half a minute, Wade managed to extricate himself from the snowbank and stood covered with snow and hunched over in the middle of the lot, freezing, with chunks of snow inside his clothes, down his neck and back, up his sleeves and pants legs and inside his boots, gloves and hat.

Jimmy and the truck were out of sight now; the great unwieldy blue grader chortled at the other side of the lot. Wade reached down and picked up a hard-packed chunk of snow the size of his fist, and just as he was about to throw it — at the windshield of the grader, he supposed, although he hadn’t actually decided on a target yet — he heard the sirens.

A few seconds later, two state police cruisers and a long white ambulance came speeding along Route 29 from the interstate, and as they passed Toby’s Inn, Wade whirled with them, and he hurled the snowball, splattering it against the passenger-side window of the cruiser in front. The pair of cruisers and the ambulance kept going, however, as if Wade were not there.

FOR YEARS IT WAS A FAMILIAR winter morning sight: people glanced out their living room windows or paused a second with an armload of firewood halfway from the woodshed to the back porch and watched the big ugly machine chug slowly toward them. It tickled and mildly reassured folks to see Wade Whitehouse out plowing the town roads with LaRiviere’s blue grader.

You usually heard it before you saw it — a low grinding sound slapped rapidly by a hammer — and then you saw through the falling snow the dull waxy glow of the headlights like a hungry insect’s eyes, and gradually the beast itself emerged from behind shuddering white waves, a tangle of thighbones and plates of steel with six huge black corrugated tires munching implacably along the road.

Stuck up inside the canvas cab like a telephone repairman perched on a pole, Wade hunkered over the steel steering wheel and shoved the gears and the blade-control levers back and forth, fitting the rigid unwieldy machine to the dips and bends and bone-rattling frost heaves in the old badly maintained roads that ran along the river and crisscrossed the valley and the surrounding hills.

The chilled meat of his body had quickly thickened with numbness; his feet against the metal pedals were soon as cold as ingots; his gloved hands were stiff as monkey wrenches. He knew nothing of what had happened up on Parker Mountain this morning, nothing of anything beyond the immediate range of his body’s diminishing senses, and he stared out the plexiglass square at the white road before him, and he dreamed.

As far back as he could remember, certainly as far back as I can remember, Wade was called a dreamer, but only by those who knew him well and had known him for a long time — our mother and father, our sister and us three brothers, and his ex-wife Lillian too, and lately Margie Fogg, good old Margie Fogg. We all thought of Wade as a dreamer. Most people saw him as tense, quick, unpredictable and hot-tempered, and indeed he was all those things too. But since childhood, he seemed, when he was alone or imagined that he was alone, sometimes almost to let go of consciousness and float on waves of thought and feeling of his own making. They were not fantasies, exactly, for they had no narrative and little structure, and not memories or wishes, but warm streams of dumb contentment that flowed steadily through his mind and remained nonetheless safely outside of time, as if they had no source and no end.

A country boy and the third child in a taciturn family that left children early to their own devices, as if there were nothing coming in adult life worth preparing them for, Wade from infancy had found himself, often and for long periods of time, essentially alone. Whether in our mother’s company in the warm food-smelling kitchen or at night in his crib with his older brothers in the unheated upstairs bedroom where all three boys slept, he was generally ignored, treated like a piece of inherited furniture that had no particular use or value but might turn out someday to be worth something. Before long, he began to be discovered suddenly underfoot, noticed one morning or early afternoon when his older brothers were in school by our mother on her way out of the kitchen — a small boy seated silently in a corner facing the wall open-eyed as if studying the pattern in the wallpaper, until she scooped him up and held him tightly and, smiling down into his small dark somber face, said, “Wade, honey, you are my dreamer.”

He squirmed and hardened his body until it became difficult to hold, and when she put him down again, he ran out of the room ahead of her, letting the screened door slam behind him, and went in search of his brothers, standing by the side of the dirt road and waiting for the school bus to ease up to the house and let the two older boys out.

Behind him, our mother brushed aside the curtain and peered out the kitchen window at him and saw that once again the boy had the dreaming look on his face — impassive, enduring, unworried and unfocused. Our mother’s name was Sally, and she was pregnant then with Lena, her fourth child, and I was not born yet. Sally was barely thirty years old, and her husband, Glenn, our father, was a turbulent man who drank heavily, and though Glenn loved Sally, he beat her from time to time and had beaten the boys — not Wade, of course, he was still too young, but the older boys, Elbourne and Charlie, who could be provoking at times, even she had to admit it, especially when Glenn came home late on a Friday night and had been drinking and was truculent, though of course there was no excuse for beating her or the boys, none whatsoever, so Glenn was always sorry afterwards.