Russell Banks - Affliction

“Wade!” LaRiviere bellowed. “Boy, I hope to Christ you’re through getting your dick wet! You think maybe you could do a little work for me before the fucking sun comes up?”

“I… I didn’t realize…”

“No, I guess you didn’t. It’s only been snowing since suppertime. Where the fuck you been, Florida? For Christ’s sake, Wade, you know the goddamn drill. You know what to do on a goddamn night like this. You plow! You drive into town, and you take out the fucking plow, just like Jimmy did at eleven last night, and you plow, goddammit.” He paused for breath and started in again. “You plow till all the fucking roads in this town are cleared. And then I pay you for it. And then the town pays me. Very simple, Wade. I am the road agent, and I got a goddamn responsibility to the town, for which they pay me, and you got a responsibility to me, for which I pay you. That’s the drill. Got it?” He was panting. Wade pictured him red-faced and rounded in his rumpled pajamas at his kitchen table.

Wade said, “Jimmy’s already gone out?”

“Wade, it’s fucking after four A.M.! He’s been out since eleven last night.”

“I suppose he’s got the truck, and I get to go out in the grader again.”

“You think he oughta swap, maybe? Where the fuck you been the last five hours, tell me that! No, I’ll goddamn tell you where you been: while Jimmy’s been out there plowing snow, you been tucked in bed plowing Margie Fogg!”

“You’re crossing a line,” Wade said quietly.

“You already crossed, you’ve crossed just about every goddamn line you can in this town and still get by, so don’t start warning me, buddy. You got fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes to get your ass down here to the shop and put that fucking grader out on the road. I spent the whole last hour on the phone and the CB trying to find out where the hell you were. Ever since Jimmy called in that none of your roads were plowed yet and he ain’t seen you anywhere.”

“I’ll be there,” Wade said, and he sighed loudly.

“Fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes, or you’re fired, Wade. From everything. You’re supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day. You’re the town cop, and you plow the town roads. It’s like that. I had a short talk with Mel Gordon, by the way. But we’ll settle that later, you and me. Right now, Wade, you haul your ass on down here to the shop.”

“I said I’ll be there,” Wade said in a dead voice, and he reached across Margie and slid the receiver into its cradle.

“He’s really pissed,” she said. “Isn’t he?”

“Yep.” Wade slid out of the bed and yanked his clothes on.

“He probably ought to be, though. I mean, I never really thought of it,” she said. “The plowing. How come you didn’t just do it? What happened?”

“I forgot.”

“Forgot? You forgot it was snowing?”

“No, no, I knew it was snowing, all right. I just forgot that I was the one who had to plow it off the roads. Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes you just forget who you are. Especially when you’re sick of who you are,” he added, and he walked quickly from the bedroom, and Margie thought, Oh boy, trouble.

It was cold, but not uncomfortably so, and Wade was almost glad to be outdoors. Sometime earlier, probably around midnight, while he slept, the snow had stopped falling, and the sky had cleared. Now, as Wade drove toward town from Margie’s house, he could feel morning coming on, and he suddenly felt glad to be out of Margie’s bed and alone in his car with the heater fan clattering, the woods on either side of the road dark and impenetrable behind a white skirt of snow, the car head-lights splashing bright light ahead of him, like a wave washing up on a beach.

LaRiviere sat glowering out his kitchen window when Wade drove into the lot and parked his car next to the grader, but he did not come out to holler or to threaten him, and Wade simply went about his business and drove back out in the grader. He knew his route, and he knew that it would take him four to five hours in this snow, barely six inches of light powder. There was no school today: he would not have to worry about being out in front of the school in time to direct traffic and could just go on plowing until the job was done.

It was not long before Wade began actually to enjoy himself; it was almost fun, huddled up there in the grader alone in the cockpit with the four headlamps peering like monstrous eyes over the top of the huge front tires, casting nets of light across the smooth soft unbroken snow. The pain from his tooth was steady and familiar, like an old friend, and Wade felt calm and competent and not at all lonely.

Headed north on Main Street, he chugged past Alma Pittman’s house. Under a white mantle, the house was dark as a tomb, and Wade imagined the tall thin woman lying in her bed in the upstairs bedroom where she had slept alone her whole life, straight out and on her back, her hands crossed over her flat chest — not as if dead, exactly, but in a state of suspended animation, waiting for dawnlight, when she would rise, dress, make herself a pot of tea and go back to her work of keeping the town records. For as long as Wade could remember, back into his childhood, Alma Pittman had been the town clerk. She ran for the post, with only token opposition, every year, her election a simple annual renewal, as if no one else could be trusted to log the births and deaths, record the marriages and divorces, list the sales and resales of land and houses, register the voters and issue the permits and licenses for hunting and fishing and calculate and collect the taxes and fees, and in that way connect the town to the larger communities — the county, the state and even the nation — and make the people of Lawford into citizens, make them into more than a lost tribe, more than a sad jumble of families huddled in a remote northern valley against the cold and the dark.

Wade knew the inside of Alma Pittman’s house well: she was his ex-wife’s aunt, and after Lillian’s father had died and her mother had remarried and moved up to Littleton, Lillian, who still had two years of high school left, had moved in with her aunt. That was the summer Wade got his driver’s license, and every Sunday he drove Lillian out to the Riverside Cemetery, where she placed wildflowers in a plastic vase by her father’s gravestone and then stood silently for a few moments at the foot of his grave, wringing her hands and fighting off tears. She followed the routine precisely every Sunday afternoon, as if the whole enterprise — wildflowers, silence, hand wringing, heaving chest and wet eyes — were a spiritual exercise, a weekly purification rite that had nothing to do with her father.

To Wade that summer, Lillian was a nun touched by tragedy. She was tall and slender, still a girl, with long oak-colored hair that, brushed a hundred strokes every night and fifty more in the morning, hung straight as rain almost to her waist. Her father had been a housepainter who had not drawn a sober breath in years, people said. The previous autumn he had been painting the flagpole at the newly built elementary school, and in sight of half the children in town he had fallen from the top of the pole, had smashed his back and skull and had died right there on the playground.

I was in the first grade then, my first year at school, and had been among the fifty or sixty kids who had seen the man fall (or heard it, or were close enough to have seen it but did not — I am not sure even today whether I actually did see it) and told the story over and over at supper—”I’m out there at third base, so I got this wicked good view of the flagpole, which is right behind the batter’s cage, and all of a sudden, it’s like a plane crashing, eerroo-oom! Whap!”