Russell Banks - Affliction

“Well, it was a nice gesture anyway, with the flowers.”

“Thanks,” he said, his back still to me.

We stood in silence for a moment longer, and then, finally, I turned toward the truck and suggested that we go back inside the house.

“Not yet, not till I burn out the little gas that’ left in the tank. You go in if you want. I got to stay here until it stalls out, or the battery’ll run dead. I guess I ought to shut off the headlights, though,” he said, clearly not wanting to. “There’ a kerosene lantern I saw a minute ago over by the side of the door, where we came in. Whyn’t you light that?” he said.

I did as he instructed, while he climbed into the cab and flicked off the headlights; and then we had a soft pale-yellow light filling the cavernous space. The truck motor chugged on, and I felt as if we were inside a ship at night, crossing a northern sea, looking out into darkness and cold with a steady wind in our faces.

I do not know where the thought came from, but suddenly I remembered the shooting of Evan Twombley, and I asked Wade if he had heard anything new about it in the last few days.

He said no and seemed oddly reluctant to talk about it, as if embarrassed by his earlier obsessive interest in the case. “I guess it was an accident, like everybody thinks.”

“Like everybody wants to think, you mean,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so. But don’t get me all started up on that again. It doesn’t go anywhere, and whenever I get to thinking on it, I get crazy, like a dog worrying at a flea it can’t scratch. It feels better if I just let it alone,” he said.

“You want to know what I think happened?”

Wade said no, then yes, and walked around to the passenger’ side of the truck and opened the door and groped in the dark through the glove compartment. I had taken up a position on the tailgate, and when he returned and sat down beside me, he was carrying a nearly full bottle of Canadian Club. “I‘ve been finding them all over the damned place,” he said, and heunscrewed the cap, sniffed the contents and took a slug from the bottle. “In the basement, in the attic, under the bathroom sink. I didn’t realize how bad he‘d got.” He started to pass the bottle to me, then withdrew it. “Sorry,” he said.

“Wade, I think your first response to the Twombley shooting was the correct one.”

“Which is?”

“That it was not an accident.”

“Then who shot him?”

“Well, your friend, I think. Jack Hewitt.”

“Motive, Rolfe. You got to have motive.”

“For Jack? Money.”

“Okay. Money. Jack always needs money, and he’ had big ideas about life ever since he got all that attention for being a ballplayer. But come on, who the hell would pay Jack that kind of money? Bonus-baby money.”

“Easy. Who benefits if Twombley is suddenly dead?”

“Oh, the mob, I suppose. The Mafia or the Cosa Nostra or whatever the hell they call them these days. But those guys, they don’t need to hire a hick from the sticks. They‘ve got their own talent, guys with lots of experience. Specialists.”

“Right. They would not deal with a guy like Jack. I know that. Who else benefits?”

“I don’t know, Rolfe. You tell me.”

“Okay, I will. It is likely that there are people running the union who do not want Twombley to testify in Washington about connections between the union and organized crime. Twombley was the president, but his son-in-law is the vice-president and treasurer, and he will probably be the next president. I saw that in the papers. What’ his name, Mel Gordon?”

“Gordon, yeah. The guy with the BMW I told you about. I told you about him, didn’t I?”

“Yes. So listen, here is my theory. It is quite possible, it is even likely, that Twombley was unaware of connections between the union and the mob, money-laundering operations, say, where cash skimmed from Las Vegas or from drugs gets into the pension fund and then in turn gets invested in real estate deals, for example, or, what the hell, mutual funds. Sound and very legal investments. That could happen without his knowing. Until, prompted by a federal inquiry, he starts nosing around himself.”

Wade took another drink from the bottle and set it down next to him on the tailgate. He looked at me and said, “Toothache,” then lit a cigarette and stared out the open door at the backside of the house, where now and then we could see Margie pass by the kitchen window, walking from the sink to the stove.

Wade said, “So you think Mel Gordon would want to get rid of him, but he wouldn’t want it to look like a hit, a professional killing. Because that would only confirm the Mafia connection and make people dig deeper.”

“Right. But a hunting accident, now that would be perfect.”

“Yep,” he said. “I guess it would. It’s true, y know. Show a kid like Jack enough money, and he just might do something like that. And it’ obviously the easiest way in the world to shoot somebody and get away with it. Shit, in this state, even if you admit that you shot somebody in the woods, so long as you say it was accidental, you might get fined fifty bucks and your hunting license gets pulled for the season. Jack, fucking Jack. He probably claimed the guy shot himself, instead of saying he shot him himself accidentally, because it was the first day of the season and Jack hadn’t got his own deer yet and didn’t want his license pulled.”

“That, and his reputation as a guide.”

Wade laughed lightly. “I don’t know, Rolfe. It’s all a little too neat for me.” Then he turned serious again. “Nothing in life is ever that neat.”

“Some things are,” I said.

“Only in books.”

This was a criticism of me, I knew, the bookish one, as Wade would have it, the one who did not know about real life, which he regarded as his area of expertise. He may not have been to college, as he was fond of pointing out, but he had been in the army and had been a cop, and he had seen some things that would surprise you about human nature. Whereas I, by his lights, had lived a privileged and protected and therefore, when it came to human nature, an ignorant life.

“It is what happened,” I said. “And not because it’s so neat, but in spite of it. And I know you agree with me.”

He stood up and walked to the door and stared down the driveway past the house to the road. “You’re trying to make me crazy with this, Rolfe. It gets me so fucking mad, when I think about Jack shooting this guy Twombley, and Mel Gordon paying him for it, to kill his own father-in-law, for God’s sake, the father of his own wife — it gets me so mad I can’t stand it. I feel like hitting something, pounding the shit out of it. You sit there, calmly laying it out like that — I don’t know how the hell you do it. Doesn’t it piss you off?”

“No,” I said. “Not particularly.”

“Well, it makes me crazy. And I can’t do a damned thing about it. The kid gets to kill the guy, and Mel Gordon gets to buy the death of his own father-in-law, and that’s the end of it. Nobody gets punished for it. It’s not right.”

“You don’t care about that, do you?” I said. “Punishment?”

“Sure I do! Right’s right, goddammit. Don’t you care about that, about what’s right?”

“No, not when it has got nothing to do with me. All I care about is what really happened. What the truth is. I am a student of history, remember.”

“Yeah, I remember.” We were silent for a few moments. Wade sat back down beside me on the tailgate and took another drink of whiskey. The truck sputtered, and then the motor coughed and stopped.

“Out of gas,” Wade said in a low voice. He got up and turned off the ignition and returned. “Let’s go in,” he said. He sounded dispirited.