Russell Banks - Affliction

At last the man stopped slapping him. He tossed the boy aside, onto the couch, like a bag of rags, and said, “You’re just a little prick, remember that."

Wade looked up and saw that Pop was still smoking his cigarette. Ma had her hands on the man’s shoulders and was steering him away from the couch, back toward the bedroom door, saying to him, “Just go on back to bed now, go on, go back to bed,” she said. “You’ve done enough damage for one night. It’s over. It’s over.”

“When I say do something, goddammit, I mean it,” Pop said over his shoulder. His voice was high and thin, almost a whine. “I really mean it. When I say do something, I mean it.”

“I know you do,” she said. “I know.”

Then the man was gone into the darkness of the bedroom, and the door was closed on him, and Ma was able to attend to her son’s bleeding mouth and nose, his swelling cheeks. She reached toward him, to soothe and cool the heated flesh of his face, but he shoved her hands away, wildly, as if they were serpents, and backed wide-eyed from her to the stairs behind him, where he turned and saw his older brothers waiting for him, huddled in gloom on the stairs like gargoyles.

He moved slowly past the two, and a few minutes later, when he had undressed and climbed into his bed, they came along behind him. For a long time, our mother sat on the couch, listening to herself break apart inside, while everyone else in the house, even Wade, let pain be absorbed by sleep— cool gray, hard and dry as pumice stone, sleep.

HOME MADE COOKING. Wade passed the sign and drew the grader carefully to the side of the road at the far end of Wickham’s parking lot, where he shut off the engine, clambered down to the ground as if descending from a tree house and started to walk back toward the restaurant. The sign, custom made for Nick Wickham in pink neon by a bearded ponytailed glassblower over in White River Junction, bugged Wade.

Wade knew something was wrong with it, had said so to Nick the first time he saw it, but he had not been able to say what it was. It was only a few weeks before, early one morning stopping in for a cup of coffee before work, that he had first noticed the sign. Today, with the snowstorm, that morning seemed not weeks but an entire season ago, early autumn, with leaves flashing brass-flecked light in his eyes. He had driven his car into the lot and had seen Nick up on a stepladder attaching the new sign to the low roof of the restaurant.

“That don’t look right, ” Wade had said. “It looks like it’s spelled wrong or something.”

Nick had glared down and said, “Fuck. Wade Whitehouse, it’s people like you that keep this fucking town from prospering. You got a perpetual hair across your ass, pardon the expression. No matter what an individual does to improve things around here, you got to find fault with it.”

“I’m not finding fault with it,” Wade had said. “It’s a goddamned good idea, putting up a neon sign and all. Good for you, good for the town. Looks real modern too, like those new restaurants they got down to Concord,” he said. “Probably wasn’t cheap, neither, was it?” he asked. “I mean, them hippie craftsmen, they can cost you an arm and a leg. You think you’re getting a dish or something, you think you’re getting something you can use, something of true value, you think. Only it turns out it’s a goddamn work of art.”

Nick got down to the ground and folded his ladder and stepped back a ways to admire his new sign. He smacked his lips, as if he had just eaten it. “This town,” he said, “sucks.”

Wade said, “Aw, c’mon, I was only just saying that there’s something wrong with ’Home Made Cooking,’ that’s all. The sign’s fine. The sign itself. It’s just what it says that’s wrong.”

“How? Why? Tell me what the fuck’s wrong with it. Jesus Christ. That thing cost me a hundred and fifty bucks.”

“It don’t matter,” Wade said to Nick, and he clapped him on the shoulder. “It looks real … serious,” he said. “It looks like you’re in the goddamn restaurant business to stay. We’re proud of you, Nick, we the citizens of Lawford, New Hampshire, we goddamn salute you, sir!” he said, and he reached to open the door. “Now I think I’ll go in and have me some of that home made cooking you’re advertising, if you don’t mind.”

Since that morning, every time Wade pulled into Wickham’s parking lot — every time, in fact, that he passed the restaurant, whether he stopped in or not — he examined the neon sign and tried once again to figure out what was wrong with it. The sign made him nervous, embarrassed him slightly, as if it were a mirror in which he had caught a glimpse of himself with a silly grin on his face.

Nobody else seemed to find the sign peculiar or “wrong”; in fact, no one even spoke of it unless to compliment it. One evening Wade had leaned over the counter and asked Margie what she thought of Nick’s new sign, asked her offhandedly, as if he himself held no opinion on the subject, and she had said, “Oh, well, the sign’s terrific, I guess. But who needs it? Everybody who comes in here has been coming in here for years. They don’t need a neon sign to tell them where it is or what’s sold here. It’s nice, though,” she had said. “Better than what was there before.”

“What was there before? I never saw anything there before.”

She punched his arm and laughed. “That’s the point.” She patted his hand. “ Nothing was there before,” she said, and she reached across the counter and with both hands squeezed his cheeks. Hands: Margie Fogg had hands that went everywhere, all over you, faster than you could think about and before you could decide whether you wanted her to touch you or not. From back in the kitchen, Nick hollered for her to pick up her orders, for Christ’s sake, before they froze, and she let go of Wade’s cheeks and, rolling her eyes, slouched toward the kitchen in a parody of obedience.

Now Wade stood among the cars and pickup trucks in the snow-covered lot for a few seconds before going into the restaurant, and once again he studied the pink neon sign, pinker than usual in the falling snow, almost obscenely pink. Underwear pink, he thought, although he had never known a woman who wore pink underwear. Margie wore white cotton underpants and cream-colored bras. Lillian’s underwear was beige or sometimes bronze-colored or dark gray. Taupe, she once told him. Who knew what color she wore now? Surely not Wade. Ho, ho, not he. But the sign was bubble-gum pink. Wade figured that hookers, probably, were the only women who wore bright-pink underpants — prostitutes, B-girls — and then he remembered one who had, a girl in Seoul, he even remembered her full name, Kim Chul Hee, and he quickly looked down from the Home Made Cooking sign and entered the restaurant.

Inside, clouds of cigarette smoke and intense chatter swirled from the booths along the wall, where men wearing luminous orange hunting vests and caps and plaid wool shirts were seated in groups of three and four. Coats, parkas and quilted jackets were strewn on chair backs and hooks around the room. A dozen or more men, their boots dripping puddles onto the floor, perched on stools with their elbows on the counter, smoking and talking intently, as if just before Wade entered something exciting had occurred here. Normally, the place was quiet as a tavern at this hour, no matter how many people were there.

Wade looked around the crowded room, his eyebrows raised for a greeting, but no one seemed to notice him. Even Margie, standing at the booth at the far end with her empty tray propped against her outslung hip, did not notice him. She was listening to the conversation between the four young men seated before her: Chick Ward, whose purple Trans Am Wade had observed parked outside among the pickups and Wagoneers and Broncos like a fancy switchblade among sledgehammers; and two other guys, whom Wade did not recognize but who he assumed were from Littleton, where Chick often went to drive his car at night; and there was the kid Frankie LaCoy, who, like Chick, spent a lot of time up in Littleton, but for a different reason, because Littleton was where Frankie bought the grass he sold here in Lawford. All four were dressed for hunting and from the looks of their boots had been tramping through the woods since daybreak. There had not been any dead deer tied to the fenders of Chick’s Trans Am out front — Wade had registered that on the way in — but why should there be? Chick was no hunter, except for women. You’d expect to see a couple of naked women trussed up and lashed to the fenders of the Trans Am, not white-tailed deer, right? That Chick Ward, he was obsessed.