Russell Banks - Affliction

But let us return to the morning Twombley died, to Lawford, twelve or fifteen hours earlier. After Wade and Jack rode down from Parker Mountain together in Jack’s truck, Jack dropped Wade off at LaRiviere’s and, as LaRiviere had suggested, went home, while for the rest of the day Wade drove the blue grader. By the time he parked it back at LaRiviere’s garage, it was late afternoon and dark, and the temperature was falling toward zero again.

He scraped his windshield and then, while he waited for his car to warm up, decided that it would be best for everyone, especially for Wade himself, if he drove straight home, if he cleaned up his trailer, for God’s sake, and cooked a simple supper and went to bed sober and alone. He was right: his mood and his afflicted view of the events of the day promised nothing but trouble for anyone who happened to join him at bar, table or bed.

Then, as if to verify the wisdom of his decision, his tooth flared up again. Over the afternoon, it had gradually turned into a throbbing knot of pain below his right ear. As usual, the pain got worse and spread quickly across his face, until its center was as large and as definable a shape as a man’s hand, with the heel and thumb of the hand running along his jawbone to his chin, the little finger tucked up behind his ear, the palm smack against his cheek and the other three fingers pressing against the bony ridge that encircled his right eye. The pain was yellow, it seemed to him, neither hot nor cold, and lay in a thin zone between his outer flesh and the bone, radiating woe in both directions.

He groaned aloud all the way home.

The place looked even worse to him now than it had when he left that morning — a midden heap, as if a motorcycle gang had been camped here all fall.

He shucked his coat and set to work, bagging all the trash and garbage, old newspapers, TV Guides , beer cans and bottles, food containers, empty cigarette packs, crusts of bread, tin cans, apple cores and milk cartons. He moved all the caked and crusted dishes, pots and pans in the general direction of the kitchen sink and all the dirty clothes to the hamper in the bathroom, where he paused for a second, shuddered at the sight, ran the faucets briefly and dumped a layer of Comet into the tub, toilet and lavatory, to be scrubbed later, after he finished cleaning the kitchen.

In his shirtsleeves, he lugged two large green plastic bags outside and shoved them into the barrel at the end of the driveway. Un-fucking-believable, that a grown man could let things get this bad! The cold air made the toothache shriek, so he raced back inside, where it lapsed swiftly back to a steady low-key whine, which distressed him, but at least the pain was steady and he could make mental adjustments to it that did not have to be undone and remade every fifteen or twenty seconds.

It was not long before he had the kitchen clean — dishes washed and dried and put away, counters wiped down, moldy and decomposing food removed from the refrigerator and tossed out, floor mopped. And then he was off to the bathroom, scrub-a-dub-dub, and to the bedroom, where he hauled from the closet the portable Hoover he had picked up the previous spring at a flea market down in Catamount, his first vacuum cleaner, and even though it seemed to suck dirt weakly, as if through a single bent straw, he was proud of owning it and enjoyed using it — a good thing, too, as it took him nearly an hour to vacuum the entire trailer.

At last, his home was clean. It smelled like water and soap, looked symmetrical and square, felt smooth, cool and dry to fingertips brushed along the kitchen counters. His tooth went on aching, but the privacy it gave, the way the pain walled him in, somehow comforted him, and although several times he thought of aspirin — Why not, for Christ’s sake, Wade, do yourself a favor and take a couple aspirins, maybe even pack a second pair between your cheek and gum — he quickly dismissed the thought, as if ending his toothache, or even easing it somewhat, would expose him to a flurry of faces, voices and questions that he preferred not to meet right now. Or ever, for that matter. Although he did not like to think of the toothache’s lasting forever.

In the refrigerator there were three bottles of Rolling Rock and no other beverage. He had thrown out the curdled milk, and the orange juice had soured. He thought: if he drank all three beers, he would still be going to bed sober tonight. Good: he would drink all three: if there had been six or eight, he would have been forced to drink tap water. He cracked open one of the beers, took a long pull from it and poked through the permafrost of the freezer compartment, disinterring a package of baby lima beans and a chicken breast shrouded in several layers of Saran Wrap. Then he started a pan of rice, dropped the Baggie of baby limas into a saucepan of boiling water and melted a chunk of butter in a skillet. He held the chicken breast under warm running water to get it unwrapped and tossed it into the skillet. The food smelled good: domestic, orderly and constant — a warm bright spot in the middle of the cold dark forest.

By the time he sat down at the table to eat, it was after ten. He chewed slowly, carefully, with his left and front teeth only, and managed to avoid antagonizing the rotted tooth, which growled quietly in the right corner of his mouth’s cage.

The table, a card table, actually, with four folding chairs placed around it, was situated in the middle of the kitchen. While he ate his solitary meal, he looked down the length of the trailer and admired the place. Before sitting down, he had turned off all the overhead lights in the trailer — overhead lights always made Wade feel he was still at work in LaRiviere’s shop — and now to all appearances he was at home and there could have been two or even three moderate adults just out of sight in the living room having a quiet reasonable conversation about money, and in the near bedroom, his own, there could have been another such adult, reading in bed, maybe, the way his brother Rolfe liked to end his day, while in the farther bedroom a child did her homework. The bathroom door was ajar and the light was on, as if a woman who had just finished brushing her hair were touching up her lipstick before going out.

There was nothing wrong with this place that a little tender loving care could not fix, he thought, and he nibbled his lima beans with his incisors, like a rodent.

He got up and went for another beer, lit a cigarette and walked back to his bedroom and turned on the radio. He moved the tuner up and down a few times until he found the easy-listening station in Littleton: Carly Simon was singing about a man who really knew how to make love good, so good that nobody did it better.

Jesus, that woman knows things, Wade thought, and he strolled back to the table and sat down again. Then he saw that he was smoking without having finished his meal yet and hurriedly rubbed the butt out in the ashtray. He resumed eating and thought, Whoa. This man’s got to start thinking seriously about quitting cigarettes. Maybe this spring, after things settle down. The chicken was a little tough and dry, but it tasted fine to him, and as long as he cut it into tiny pieces and kept it on the left side of his mouth, he did not have any trouble chewing it.

Wade welcomed evenings like this; they were rare, and he almost credited it to the toothache. As if locked inside deep meditation, he was profoundly alone. His conscious mind, walled around by physical pain and the trailer and the snow and darkness beyond, was cleared of everything but the filmy shreds of a few simple fantasies, and though it was a long ways from happiness, it seemed as close to happiness as he had been able to get in weeks. Maybe longer. But he did not want to think about that right now; so he didn’t.