Russell Banks: Affliction

Soon the teenagers are up and running, awkwardly, clutching beer cans and pumpkins, around the far side of LaRiviere’s house — impossible to call it a trailer or mobile home, for it is set on a permanent foundation and has shutters, porch, breezeway, chimney attached — racing toward the road out front, then down the road a ways to where a boy waits in a ten-year-old Chevy with dual exhausts gurgling.

The thieves pile into the car with their pumpkins, hard goofy laughter now drifting back toward LaRiviere’s on the cold night air, and the kid driving pops the clutch and spins off the gravel shoulder onto the road, his tires burning rubber as they hit the pavement, the car fishtailing down the road toward the town hall, hurtling past it, the kids cackling out the windows and giving the finger to a large group of adults with children in costumes gathering outside the town hall.

Most of the adults have stopped moving and talking and stare bitterly at the old Chevrolet sedan as it blasts past. In seconds, the car has rounded the slow turn on the far side of town and is out of sight. The people clustering outside the town hall hesitate a second, as if waiting to hear a crash, then resume what they were doing.

A short ways north of the town hall and the Common and the three churches facing it — First Congregational, First Baptist and Methodist — and out along Route 29 beyond Alma Pittman’s house, from whose darkened door Pearl Diehler and her children had long since departed, there were a few straggling houses with porch lights still on for the last of the trick-or-treaters, kids whose parents had sat around the kitchen table drinking and arguing too long to drive them into town in time to join the others. This late they joined only a battalion of older greedier kids who would not stop until no one any longer answered the door, when they would commence their more serious work of the evening, what they had come out to accomplish in the first place: the gleeful destruction of private property. They intended to cut clotheslines, break windows, slash tires, open outdoor spigots so the wells would run dry and the pumps burn out.

A short ways beyond the settlement one comes to Merritt’s Shell Station — a cinder-block bunker, closed, dark, with car parts scattered around the building like rubble after a terrorist’s attack. On this night, a dim light from a rear window indicated that someone was still in the office — not Merritt, of course, who, as always, had gone home promptly at six and tonight was down at the town hall, attending the annual Halloween party in his official capacity as one of the selectmen. More likely it was Merritt’s mechanic, Chick Ward, leafing slowly, like a monk studying scripture, through a pornographic magazine from Sweden that normally he keeps hidden under the carpeting of the trunk of his car, a purple Trans Am that Merritt lets him work on in the garage after hours. Tonight he furrowed his narrow brow in concentration, smoked his cigarette, took a pull on his beer and turned the page on one type of pink contortion and began to examine another. He put his beer can on the floor and rubbed his hand across his crotch, back and forth, as if stroking the head of a sleeping dog.

Beyond Merritt’s Shell Station, the residents of the few remaining houses in town had finally shut their porch lights off, a signal to the trick-or-treaters that the night was nearly over. On the road there was only a scraggly group of small children in homemade costumes, brothers and sisters and cousins from the Hoyt place, a shack settlement on the river set in among the wreckage of an abandoned mill there. They traveled along the side of the road, gobbling their loot as they walked, now and then grabbing an apple or a piece of candy from one another’s sack — a hit and a kick and a cry; then a laugh — as they continued down the road toward town and the party.

A mile past the Hoyt kids on the right, where Route 29 bends sharply east, one passes Wickham’s Restaurant, still open but in the process of being closed for the night by Nick Wickham and his waitress, Margie Fogg. Back in the kitchen, Wickham, a lean dark man with a long wet mustache, poured three fingers of Old Mr. Boston vodka into a juice glass and knocked it back in two swallows, then stared intently at Margie Fogg’s wide rounded backside as she filled the napkin holders at the counter.

From Wickham’s all the way north practically as far as Littleton there are deep woods on both sides of the road, with the Minuit River still rushing through the darkness west of the road. The sky was a narrow black velvet band overhead, and there were no buildings visible from the road in those woods or overlooking the river, except for Toby’s Inn, three miles from town on the river side of Route 29. Toby’s is a battered two-story farmhouse converted into an inn when the Littleton-Concord Stage Line opened back in the 1880s, and it operated now as a roadhouse, with rooms for rent. Tonight the parking lot outside Toby’s had fewer than the usual ten or twelve local cars and pickups pulled up against the building and a surprisingly large number of out-of-state cars — surprising, until you remembered that tomorrow, the first day of November, was also the first day of deer-hunting season.

LET US IMAGINE that around eight o’clock on this Halloween Eve, speeding west past Toby’s and headed toward town on Route 29 from the interstate turnoff, there comes a pale-green eight-year-old Ford Fairlane with a blue police bubble on top. Let us imagine a dark square-faced man wearing a trooper’s cap driving the vehicle. He is a conventionally handsome man, but nothing spectacular: if he were an actor, he would be cast as the decent but headstrong leader of the sheepherders in range-war westerns of the ‘50s. He has deep-set brown eyes with crinkled corners, the eyes of a man who works outdoors; his nose is short and hooked, narrow at the bridge, with large flared nostrils. He looks his age, forty-one, and though his mouth is small, his lips thin and tight and his chin boyishly delicate, his lower face, tinged gray by a five o’clock shadow, has the slight fleshiness of a healthy hardworking athletic man who drinks too much beer.

Seated next to him is a child, a little girl with hair like flax and a plastic tiger mask covering her face. The man is driving fast, clearly in a hurry, talking and gesturing intently to the child as he drives. The child appears to be about ten years old.

For anyone who lived in Lawford, the car would be instantly recognizable — it belonged to the town police officer, my brother, Wade Whitehouse. The child beside him was his daughter, Jill, and anyone would know that he was bringing her up from Concord, where she lived with her mother and stepfather, for the three-day weekend and the Halloween party.

And Wade was running late, as usual. He had not been able to start the hour-long drive south on the interstate to Concord until finishing work for LaRiviere (besides being Lawford’s entire police force, Wade was also a well driller, Gordon LaRiviere’s foreman). Then down in Concord, after stopping at the shopping mall north of the city for a Halloween costume that he had promised but forgotten to purchase and bring with him, he had been compelled — again, as usual — to negotiate certain complex custodial arrangements with his ex-wife, Lillian, after which he had to pick up a Big Mac, strawberry shake, fries and cherry pie to go for Jill’s supper, all before even starting the drive back to Lawford.

Now he was late, late for everything he had planned and fantasized about for a month: late for trick-or-treating with his daughter at the homes of everyone in town he liked or wanted to impress with his fatherhood; late for showing up at the party at the town hall, where, like all the other parents for a change, he could see his kid win a prize in the costume contest, best this or that, scariest or funniest or some damned thing; late for the sleepy drive back to the trailer afterwards, Jill laying her head on his shoulder and falling peacefully asleep while he drove slowly, carefully home.