Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade ambled over to the booth and laid one hand across Margie’s broad shoulder and placed the other on Chick’s. He liked sometimes to try doing with his hands what Margie seemed compelled to do with hers: it looked good when she did it; it made her seem connected to other people in a way that Wade envied.

Margie turned to him, and the four men ceased talking and looked up at him expectantly with sober expressions, even Frankie, who usually grinned and winked when he saw Wade, as if the two shared a delightful secret, which in a sense they did. Wade knew that Frankie was the only person who sold marijuana in Lawford, and Frankie knew that as long as he acted as if Wade did not know, Wade would let him alone.

This morning, however, Frankie looked up at Wade as if he wanted the older man to explain something to him, to unravel an irritating mystery. Chick Ward too. Chick usually ignored Wade, except to grunt hello and, suddenly flush-faced, scowling, to stare at his feet, like a guilty child, which Wade understood to be the result of an encounter they had had years ago, when Chick was still in high school and liked peeping through windows at middle-aged women getting ready for bed. The other two men, both bearded, with long dark hair spilling over their collars, did not know who Wade was, but even so, they peered up at him eagerly, as if he had brought them important news.

“Getcha deer yet?” Wade asked the group. He squeezed Margie’s shoulder. There was something off, a beat or a note missing. People were not acting normal this morning, Wade thought, or else he was not seeing things right, as if he had a fever or were hung over or his toothache were distracting him. It was like watching a movie with the sound track out of sync. “Whaddaya say, boys?” he tried. “Some kinda snow.”

He let go of Chick’s shoulder, avoided his gaze and tapped a cigarette halfway loose of the pack and plucked it out with his lips. He squeezed Margie’s shoulder a second time. There were mornings like this — infrequent, six or seven times a year, but frequent enough to trouble him — when, after having lost all memory of the final hour of the previous night at Toby’s Inn, he strolled into Wickham’s for coffee, and it was instantly clear to him that whatever he had said or done during that last hour of total darkness the night before, whatever it was that he could not remember, was known this morning to everyone in the place.

Margie said, “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Wade said. His heart was pounding, as if he were frightened, but he was not frightened, not yet. He was only a little confused. There was a slight, almost imperceptible break in the pattern of greeting, that was all. No big deal. Yet he was sweating, and he was smiling oddly, he knew, making remarks that did not quite add up, driving the pattern of greeting further and further off with every passing second. He could not stop himself. He felt the way he believed Frankie LaCoy felt all the time, which put him on a kind of defensive alert.

To no one in particular Wade said, “Good thing my kid went back down to Concord with her mother.”

Frankie nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “How’s that?”

“The snow and all.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Margie took a step back and looked into Wade’s eyes, and he instantly turned away. Nick Wickham, wiping his hands on a towel, had come out of the kitchen and moved swiftly to refill several mugs of coffee for the men at the counter.

“Gimme a big one to go!” Wade called. Too loudly, he knew. “Cream, no sugar!” Wade suddenly wished that he had not stopped at the restaurant, that he had gone on plowing the road, alone, cold and content inside his dreams. Margie’s concerned gaze and the slightly perplexed expression on Frankie’s face and Chick’s expectant look were all too uncomfortably familiar to him. Other people were in one world; he was in a second. And the distance between their worlds caused other people concern and perplexity and made them curious about him — for here he was alone in his world; and there they were gathered together in theirs.

He lit his cigarette and saw that his hands were trembling. Look at the bastards, shaking like little frozen dogs begging at the door to be let inside. Wade felt fragile, about to shatter. When he was sixteen he had felt this particular kind of fragility for the first time, and he had gone on rediscovering it, suddenly, with no apparent cause, ever since. One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.

Margie said, “Jill went home with her mother? I thought she was up for the weekend.” Then she said, “Oh-h,” and her hand reached out and touched his forearm. She put her tray down on the floor, leaning it against the side of the booth, and reached toward Wade as if to embrace him.

He stepped back and stared at a spot on her shoulder, as if she were his girlfriend Lillian Pittman and he were sixteen again, stopping her with his movement and the sudden rigidity of his face. He had told her about his father’s beating him again, revealed it to her without planning or even wanting to, blurted out the information in the middle of a conversation about something else. “My father laid into me something wicked again last night,” he said, and Lillian, sweet innocent Lillian, made that same move toward him, just like Margie, hands reaching out, her long narrow lovely face swarming, it seemed to him, with pity and bewilderment, and with perversely detached curiosity as well, for she knew nothing of violence then, and it seemed both the most horrible and the most inexplicable thing she could imagine. Entranced as much as repelled by what he had told her of it, she nonetheless knew nothing of the light and heat he felt when his father beat him, nothing of the profound clarity of feeling that emerged from the center of his chest when it happened, nothing of the exquisite joining of all his various parts that he experienced when his father swung the boy’s lean body around and punched it and shoved it to the floor while his mother’s face howled in the distance. He could in no way tell her of these things; he could barely know of them himself. All he could know was that he had left out of his account something that was crucial and filled him with shame, which is why he simultaneously moved toward her for solace and pushed her away.

“Just forget I said it,” he murmured. “Just forget I said anything about it.”

Margie let her arms drop to her sides. “About what?”

“You know. Jill.”

She said, “C’mon, just a minute,” and moving swiftly, slipped her arm around Wade’s arm and turned him away from the booth toward the small pine-paneled back room where the video games and pinball machines were located, empty of players at this hour, shadowy and smelling of old cigarette smoke. Nick hollered, “Marge!” as she stepped through the door, and she shushed him with a wave.

Wade leaned against the Playboy machine, exhaled noisily and said, “Listen, Margie, I got to take care of business. Christ. I got to get…” He trailed off, and he spread his hands, as if in actuality he had nothing to do. Looming behind him was a brightly lit picture of Hugh Hefner in silk pajamas and bathrobe, pipe in smirking mouth, forelock dangling, and four naughtily unclad adolescent girls with provocative leers and outsized breasts like pink balloons slinging themselves around him. Wade shifted onto one elbow and seemed to study the picture. “Don’t you shut these things off at night? Wastes a lot of electricity.”