Russell Banks - Affliction

“Mr. Whitehouse,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Good to meet you.” It was the same voice Wade had heard on the phone, a deep baritone, smooth and cultivated.

Wade shifted his cigarette from his right hand to his left and started to extend the right, then plopped it back onto his knee. He swallowed and said, “Howdy.”

“I heard you had some serious snow up your way yesterday.”

Wade nodded, and the man went on. “There’s practically two different climates between here and there. What is it, forty, forty-five, fifty miles, and when you get snow, we get rain. At least till mid-December. Then we both get snowed on. I think I prefer the snow, though, to this dreary rain,” he said.

“Yeah,” Wade said. “Yeah, I prefer the snow.” He lapsed into silence again.

“Do you ski?”

“No. I never did. I never did try that.”

“Well,” the lawyer said, suddenly looking serious. “Let’s talk about this suit you’re proposing, shall we?” With his right hand he wrestled a yellow legal pad from a slot on the side of his chair onto his lap, drew a pen from his shirt pocket and prepared to write.

But Wade was not ready to talk about Lillian and Jill yet; in fact, he had almost forgotten why he had driven down here in the first place. He wanted to know what was wrong with Hand, what injury or disease had made off with his body. He wanted to know what the man could and could not do, how he could work as a lawyer, for God’s sake, or how he managed to drive a car, get dressed, cut his food. How he was with a woman.

He had never seen a man like this up close, and now he was about to hire him to do a very complex and mysterious job for him. Wade was about to place himself in a dependent relation to a man who said he preferred snow to rain but surely could not go out in the snow, a man who, even with his fancy rubber-tired battery-powered chair, could not get around in the stuff, but who nonetheless had built a huge vacation house on the side of a mountain where it snowed six months a year. He was a cripple who lived on a goddamned ski slope!

He suddenly thought of Evan Twombley, an overweight city fellow with his new gun up on Parker Mountain in the snow, hunting for a deer to kill and then getting killed himself. He thought of Jack Hewitt, lean and in all the necessary ways expert, moving swiftly, silently, through the drifts and brush and over the rock-strewn trails of the mountain, with the fat red-faced man struggling along behind. This man, J. Battle Hand, in the world of normal men and women, was like Twombley in the snowy woods, and Wade was like Jack somehow.

Maybe here, though, among these books, it was J. Battle Hand who was the lean mean expert, and Wade who was like Twombley, red-faced and puffing to keep up and, unless he was damned careful, likely to shoot himself. Or get shot. For less than a second, like a slide inexplicably shown out of order, Wade saw Jack Hewitt shoot Evan Twombley, a wash of falling snow, the abrupt tilt of the hill, the fat man going over, blood against the white ground.

Then he was in Attorney Hand’s office again, wondering how the man was able to plead cases in court. Actually, Wade thought, if I was sitting on a jury and this guy wheeled up in front of me and started defending his client, I would be inclined to believe whatever he said. It was hard to think that a man with so little use of his body, a man whose body was such an undeniable truth, could lie to you about anything. This man, J. Battle Hand, could say anything he wanted and be believed.

Wade brightened a little: Lillian would hire some slick gray-haired guy like that lawyer she hired for the divorce, tall and good-looking, smooth as a goddamn presidential candidate, and Attorney Hand would roll back and forth in front of the judge and make mincemeat of the guy. Not like last time, when Wade had entered the courtroom with Bob Chagnon from Littleton, all rumpled and nervously sweating and talking too fast in his north-country French-accented English, until even Wade felt embarrassed for him. Lillian had looked down and smiled. Wade had seen her and had suddenly wanted to tell his lawyer to shut the fuck up, for Christ’s sake. Stop talking, now, before everyone in the room ends up believing what Wade himself already knew, that in this twice-destroyed marriage Lillian had been the smart and competent one, and Wade had been dumb and out of control, an uneducated irresponsible irrational man prone to violence and alcoholism. Look at his lawyer, for Christ’s sake, look at the man he hires to represent him — a half-assed half-drunk Canuck who can barely talk English and ends up telling the judge that when Wade hit Lillian those times it was because she deserved it! “Your Honor, the woman egged him on,” Chagnon had said.

No wonder he lost everything. Wade was lucky the judge did not send him to jail, and the judge told him so.

Wade sat back in the green leather chair, crossed his legs and lit another cigarette and began explaining to his new attorney why he wanted to gain custody of his child. Lillian was turning Jill against him, he said, and, more and more, the woman was making it difficult for Wade to see Jill or for Jill to visit him. First she had moved to Concord, and now she was talking about moving even farther south, or out west, maybe, as soon as her new husband got himself transferred, and if that was tough for Wade, well, too bad. This was not exactly true, but Wade figured it soon would be. She could move to Florida if she wanted to, and there was nothing he could do about it.

The lawyer said nothing and seemed to be waiting for Wade to continue.

But on the other hand, maybe he did not really need custody, Wade offered. Maybe all he needed were guarantees of regular visits with Jill during the school year and then summers and holidays. Maybe that would be enough. All he really wanted was to be a good father. He wanted to have a daughter, and he had one, by God, but the girl’s mother was doing everything she could to deny that fact. Wade figured that if he asked for custody and offered Lillian regular visits and summers and holidays with Jill, the judge might be willing to do the opposite, to let Lillian keep custody and give him the regular visits and summers and holidays. What did Mr. Hand think of that strategy? he wondered.

“Not all that bad,” Hand said. “If you have a sympathetic judge. It’s risky, though. You don’t want to ask for the moon and then lose everything because of the asking. Sometimes you’re better off asking for exactly what you want, instead of what you think you deserve. If you know what I mean. You’re still unmarried, I take it. It would help if you were married and there were someone at home while you’re at work.”

“Well, yeah. Now I am. Unmarried, I mean. But that’s going to change,” Wade said. “Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Oh, by this spring anyhow. Probably before. There’s this woman, she and I been talking about getting married for a long time. Nice woman,” he added.

“Good,” Hand said, and he wrote on his pad for a few seconds, using only his fingertips, the weight of his hand holding the pad flat against his leg.

Then he asked Wade about Lillian’s character. Did she and her husband provide a good life for Jill? Did they have any alcohol or drug problems that he knew of? Any sexual problems or habits that might be upsetting to the child? “That sort of thing would help,” he said to Wade. “Especially if we’re going for custody. In fact, without hard evidence of sexual misconduct or drug or alcohol abuse, we probably should not even ask for custody in this state. And even then, it would be an uphill fight. You understand,” he said.

Wade understood. In fact, he was starting to feel foolish in this quest of his. What was it that kept him from making his anger and frustration understood? What kept him from finding the words and then the legal means to articulate the pain he felt at the loss of his child? That was all he really wanted. He wanted to be a good father; and he wanted everyone to know it.