Russell Banks - Affliction

It was a quarter to eleven when Wade drew the grader off the road onto LaRiviere’s parking lot. In the far corner near the shop, his own car sat huddled under a blanket of snow, and next to it was parked LaRiviere’s pickup, a 4 X 4 Dodge with a roll bar and running lights like Jack’s and a plow that LaRiviere made Wade repaint light blue after every major snow-storm, covering over the nicks in the paint made by stones and gravel scraped up while plowing.

LaRiviere was crazy. No other word for it, as far as Wade was concerned. He insisted on having everything he owned look simultaneously ready to use and never used. When LaRiviere drove out to inspect a well-drilling job, he paced around the site with his hands on his hips and his upper lip curled as if he had just spotted a pile of cat shit on the toe of his boot. Then he would stop the work and make Wade and Jack or whoever was drilling police the area, restack the pipe, lay the wrenches and tools down side by side in order of size. Only when the trucks, rigs, stock, tools and site had been arranged as if for sale in a showroom would he allow the men to go back to work.

Wade pulled the grader in next to the shop and shut off the motor and climbed stiffly down to the ground. The snow was falling lightly now, tiny hard particles that stung his face. He was cold, and it felt permanent. There was, he said to himself, no rational reason for a man to go on living in a climate like this when he did not have to. And Wade knew he did not have to. True, wherever he lived he would live just as badly, and true, in a perverse way he loved the town, but at least in some places he would be warm. He thought about it often, and usually he understood why he had not left Lawford and then left the state of New Hampshire and even left New England altogether. Sometimes, though, the only reason he had for not moving, even down to Concord, where Lillian had taken Jill, was that he no longer possessed the energy it would require. Perhaps he had never possessed it, even when he was young and freshly married, a high school kid, practically, or when he came back from Korea four years later and had a few bucks and was freshly married a second time. Lillian would have traipsed off with him, he knew, to Florida or Arizona, or maybe to one of those southeastern states like North Carolina. When he was in Korea he met men, Seabees, who told him that he could easily find a high-paying job using the same skills he had used drilling for water in northern New Hampshire drilling for oil instead in Texas or Oklahoma; if he had suggested that to Lillian — and had not kept the idea to himself, as if there were nowhere else on earth a man like him could find a job — she would have said, “How long do I have to pack?” And then everything would have been different. He thought the unaccustomed thing crossly: Oh, Lord, he was a fool! The others were stupid, maybe; but Wade was worse: he was a fool.

LaRiviere’s not knowing about Twombley surprised him. When Wade told him what had occurred up on Parker Mountain, the little he knew, LaRiviere’s normally red face went white, and the big man seemed to shrink inside his clothes.

“I figured you’d already heard,” Wade mumbled. “Off the CB,” he said, nodding toward the front office, where LaRiviere kept a small unit on the file cabinet next to Elaine Bernier’s desk. “I thought you knew all about it.”

“I hate that fucking squawk box!” LaRiviere said, glaring up at Wade from his chair. “I just use it to call out. What the fuck am I going to call Jack for, why would I call Jack this morning anyhow?” he snarled.

“They knew about it over to Wickham’s, even.”

“Forget that, for Christ’s sake. What’re you worrying me about that for? We got to get going, I got to get up there. Twombley. Jesus.” He was puffing himself up now, enlarging his abnormally large body, for action, movement, control. His hair bristled like an angry dog’s, and he rose from his chair and grabbed his blue down parka off the hook behind the door.

“C’mon, you drive; we’ll take my truck. Put that fucking cigarette out, will you?” he said to Wade. He pushed past him and headed out the door.

Wade followed, flipping the key to the grader onto Elaine’s desk. Outside, as they crossed the parking lot, he tossed his cigarette into a snowbank.

LaRiviere saw him and said, “Not there, for Christ’s sake.”

“Where, then?” Wade reached down and retrieved the still smoldering butt and held it out to LaRiviere as if offering it to him.

“Oh, Christ, Wade, how the hell do I know? Go inside, go use the fucking ashtray, but hurry the fuck up, I’m in a hurry. Jesus,” he said, and he started trotting toward the pickup.

Wade ducked back into the office, rubbed the cigarette out in the large ashtray on the counter, directly under the No Smoking sign, and smiled uneasily at Elaine, who did not smile back. Elaine Bernier disliked Wade because she knew Gordon LaRiviere did not like Wade but needed him and thus was not free, as she was, to show his dislike. She considered her scowls and snide remarks a vital part of her job.

In the truck, Wade drove, while LaRiviere, grim and silent beside him, continued to puff himself up, tightening the last few creases in his broad flat face, swelling his chest and arms. Wade reached for the CB receiver and flicked it to the police channel as they sped north past Wickham’s and passed out of town. They heard static and gibberish for a few seconds, then the gravelly voice of the dispatcher from Littleton telling car 12 to stay where it was, situation under control, ambulance already arrived.

“Fuck,” LaRiviere said. “Turn it off.”

Wade obeyed.

“All you heard was there was some kinda accident up there, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s all you heard?”

“Well, no,” Wade said. “Twombley was shot. I heard that. Not Jack. He’s okay.”

“Fuck.”

“No, Jack’s okay. I assume.”

“Fuck. You don’t know how bad or anything?”

“You mean Twombley.”

“Yes, Wade, I mean Twombley.”

“No.” Wade switched on the wipers. “I don’t know how bad.” The snow was spitting at them, but the sky had lightened to a creamy gray color. It would not last much longer.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“He’s probably okay. He more than likely just shot himself in the foot or something. That’s what usually happens.”

“I should have sent you out with him instead of Jack.”

Wade was surprised. He glanced at LaRiviere, who was chewing his thumbnail. “Yeah, I wish you had,” Wade said. “I’d rather be deer hunting instead of riding around freezing my ass on that fucking grader.” He reached over and opened the ashtray in front of LaRiviere, who promptly deposited a sliver of thumbnail and went to work on the other one. Wade slid the ashtray closed.

“You ain’t the hunter Jack is. And he can’t drive the grader worth shit.”

“Like hell,” Wade said, although he knew LaRiviere was right on both counts. Jack hated the grader even more than Wade did and drove it with a careless anger that twice had got the thing turned onto its side in a ditch. And while Jack had not failed to kill a deer the opening day of every season since he was twelve, Wade had not taken a single shot at a deer in over a decade. For the last four years he had not bothered even to try. Not since Lillian and he split up the second time. Lots of things had gone out of him after that, among them the cheerful stubbornness that a man needed to keep on trudging into the woods with a gun year after year, despite the pattern of frustration and failure, in search of a flash of fur, a flag of a tail switching through the trees. Wade always made too much noise when he walked, as if warning the animals, a heavy-footed man with a body made more for carrying than for stalking, and he always figured the movement of animals wrongly, figuring them to move left instead of right, uphill instead of down, away instead of near: he would see the deer, look to where he thought it was going, and it would be gone. Then he would fire his gun at a stump four or five times, just to fire the damned thing, and scare every deer in hearing range deeper into hiding.