Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade was startled by the blat of Jack’s horn from the truck. He had already turned the vehicle around and was waving angrily for Wade to get in.

Slowly, Wade walked over to the truck and climbed up into the passenger’s seat. He pointed at the three rifles in the rack attached to the window behind him. “Those’re yours, right?”

“Yeah.”

“One of them must be Twombley’s, though.”

Jack didn’t answer.

“That there’s your old twenty-gauge,” Wade went on, laying his hand on the shotgun, “and that there’s the new Browning you was showing off last night at the town hall.” Then he placed his hand on the barrel of the third gun and held it tightly, as if he had captured it. “This must be Twombley’s gun. Brand-new, almost. Very fancy tooling,” he murmured. “Thirty-thirty, and only been fired one time,” he said. “It’s a beautiful piece of work, Twombley’s gun. But what the hell, Jack, I guess you deserve it. Right’s right.”

Jack said, “Yeah, right’s right,” and started to drive slowly downhill, following in the tracks left by the police cruisers and LaRiviere’s truck and before them the ambulance carrying Twombley’s body to Littleton.

“Twombley sure as hell won’t be shooting it again, will he?” Wade said.

“No,” Jack said. “He sure as hell won’t.”

LATE THAT SAME NIGHT, Wade telephoned me to ask if the Boston TV stations had reported Evan Twombley’s death. Yes, I told him, they had, but I had barely noticed: the death by gunshot of someone about to testify about union connections to organized crime, even though disguised as a New Hampshire hunting accident, was a common enough news item and was sufficiently distant from my daily life not to attract my attention.

“There was something,” I said, “but I missed it. Why, did it happen up your way?”

“Yeah, and I know the guy. And the kid with him, Jack Hewitt. Who you probably know too, incidentally. He works for LaRiviere with me. That kid, he’s my best friend, Rolfe,” Wade said.

It was close to midnight, and Wade sounded slightly drunk, calling me, I imagined, from the phone booth at Toby’s Inn, although I could not hear the jukebox thumping as usual in the background. I was in bed reading a new history of mankind, and this was not a conversation I found enthralling.

I had heard from Wade a half-dozen times that fall, and I had seen him twice; both times he had driven down suddenly on a Saturday night. He had stood around in my kitchen drinking beer, rambling on about Lillian and Jill and LaRiviere — his problems — then had fallen like a tree onto my couch, only to return to Lawford the next morning after breakfast. I was sure, as we talked about Twombley, that I knew Wade’s whole story by now, the way you do when you have heard a drunk man’s story, even your drunken brother’s — perhaps especially your drunken brother’s — and did not require any new chapters.

“Wade,” I said, “it’s very late. Not for you, maybe, but we have different habits, you and I. You’re at Toby’s, and I’m in bed reading.”

“No, no, no. Not tonight. I’m at home tonight, Rolfe. I’m not reading, maybe, but in fact I’m in bed too. Anyhow, I’m calling because I need you to listen. You’re supposed to be such a smart guy, Rolfe. I’ve got a theory about this guy Twombley, and I need you to check me out on it.” He was excited, more than usual, and that alarmed me, although I was not sure why, so I did not cut him off. I half listened to what he called his theory, which struck me as slightly crackbrained, the alcohol talking. It was a theory unsupported by evidence and full of unlikely motives and connections. It also did not take into account — since Wade had not seen the Boston news, and the New Hampshire stations had not mentioned the shooting at all (it being only one of so many hunting accidents that day) — the fact that Evan Twombley had been scheduled to testify before a congressional subcommittee that was investigating links between organized crime in New England and the construction industry. I remembered that much from the news and had my own theory.

I mentioned the investigation to him anyhow, and he said, “No shit,” and went on as if I had offered nothing more than Twombley’s middle name. For Wade, there was no connection, because he seemed to want badly to believe that his “best friend” had shot Evan Twombley — accidentally, of course— and was hiding the fact, which, he insisted, was what worried him. “What’ll happen is, it’ll come out that the bastard didn’t shoot himself, Jack shot him. And then lied about it. And the kid’ll get hung for it, Rolfe. They hang you up here for murder, you know.”

“He won’t hang if it was accidental,” I said. “But you do think Jack Hewitt shot him, eh? Why?”

“Why do I think it, or why did he shoot him?”

“Both.”

“Well, it was an accident,” he said. “Naturally. But who knows how it happened? It happens all the time, though. You play with guns, somebody’s going to get shot. Eventually. But as to why I myself think Jack did it. That’s not so easy to say. It’s like it’s the only way I can see it happening. The only way I can imagine it. I think about Twombley getting shot, and all I see is Jack shooting him.”

“So where’s this theory of yours?”

He admitted that it was not so much a theory as a hunch. I could tell that I was disappointing him. Again.

I apologized for sounding so skeptical and explained that it seemed likely to me that if Twombley’s death was not in fact self-inflicted, then he surely was killed by someone other than the local boy Jack Hewitt, who probably never even saw it happen anyhow. “They were out deer hunting, right? In the woods. Jack probably heard the gun go off, then came back and found Twombley’s body and concluded the obvious, that the man had shot himself. And if he did not shoot himself, then whoever did it took care to use Twombley’s own gun. Just in case.”

Yes, yes, Wade agreed, grumpily, and then he started to drift a bit, and soon he was recounting another small humiliation at the hands of his ex-wife. This story, too, I had heard before, or a close version of it, but now, to my surprise, I was listening as if it were fresh and new to me. It was his account of Halloween and his quarrel with his daughter Jill, and I was fascinated by it. There was some odd connection in my mind between the two stories, between his version of Twombley’s death and his version of Lillian’s driving up to Lawford and removing Jill from his care. I did not then know how powerful the connection was, of course, but it was there, to be sure, just below the surface of the narrative, and I felt its presence strongly and responded to it, as if it had the power of logic.

I closed my history of mankind and sat up straight in bed and listened closely to Wade, while he slowly told of his adventures of the night before, presented them with a sad mournful slightly puzzled voice, his sentences ending pathetically with phrases like “You know?” and “I guess.”

And then, finally, he closed the conversation — it was more monologue than conversation — by telling me how tired he was, just exhausted, beat. “I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days, Rolfe,” he said. “And some night I’m going to bite back. I swear it.”

I said, “Haven’t you already done a bit of that?”

“No. No, I haven’t. Not really. I’ve growled a little, but I haven’t bit.”

We said good night then and hung up. I tried to resume reading but could not, and when I tried to sleep, I could not do that, either. I lay awake for hours, it seemed, with visions of whirling suddenly in the snow, aiming down the barrel of a gun, firing.