Russell Banks - Affliction

“I should be getting on home. It’s a long drive, and I have school tomorrow.”

“You coming in to say goodbye to Pop?” He lifted the chimney on the lantern and blew out the flame, dousing us in darkness.

“You think he will notice one way or the other?”

“Nope.”

“Then I’ll skip it.” I told him that I liked Margie, she was very attractive and seemed kind, and I suggested that he bring her with him the next time he came down to visit. He said he would and shook my hand, and I walked to my car alone. From the road, while my car warmed up, I watched Wade walk onto the porch and go inside the house, and I did not know it then, but when the door closed, it was the last time I would see my brother.

During the long drive home, I played back to myself that odd eerily lit scene in the barn, troubled by it somehow and feeling vaguely guilty, as if in an important way I had misrepresented myself. It was as if I had cast myself in a role that I was unsuited for, a role that was better suited for Wade to play, and in doing so, I had thrown Wade off his lines and intentions, had changed his motives and thus, to the detriment of the play itself, had affected his actions. It was a usurpation of sorts, for me to speculate with such bland confidence about the cause of Twombley’s death, and though I did not realize it at the time, by reawakening and giving a hard focus to Wade’s involvement with that event, I was sending Wade off in a direction of inquiry that he should never have pursued.

I know that now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. But back in November, the day we buried our mother and the night we dug our father’s truck out of the snow and stored it in the old collapsing barn, I myself must have needed Wade’s obsession with Twombley’s death, and I myself must have wanted Jack Hewitt and Mel Gordon, two men I had not even met, punished for killing him. I had no way of knowing what Wade would do with my highly speculative theory — let us face it, a hypothesis based on intuition and the flimsiest of evidence, fortified with little more than my pretended knowledge of how large unions function — but I did know that Wade would accept my version of events, that it would become the truth for him and that he would apply to that truth a range and intensity of emotion that was denied me.

That night Wade slept fitfully, floating in and out of dark dreams and barely conscious fantasies, and he woke gloomy, dour and in a hurry to get to work. He directed traffic at the school with impatience and a glower for everyone he saw, even the children. It was a sunny day, cloudless and relatively warm, but Wade held his head down and his shoulders hunched, as if pummeled by a northeaster. By the time he arrived at LaRiviere’s, he had fixed his mind onto a single question: What was LaRiviere’s connection to the killing of Evan Twombley?

Where prior to our conversation in the barn Wade had viewed LaRiviere’s uncharacteristic benevolence and sudden generosity with some puzzlement and gratitude, he now clearly saw his boss as behaving suspiciously. LaRiviere’s putting Wade on salary and offering him an inside job, and his somewhat unctuous presence at the house before the funeral and his surprising offer to be the fourth pallbearer, when, after more than twenty years of being Wade’s employer, he barely knew our mother’s first name — all that had struck Wade at the time merely as odd but, in a sense, typical: he was used to thinking of LaRiviere as odd. My conversation with him in the barn, however, had created for Wade a new order, as it were, a microcosmic system in which all the parts now had to fit, especially the odd ones, the puzzling and inconsistent parts, and to Wade, LaRiviere’s recent behavior was exactly that. A mere symmetry, a small observed order, placed like a black box in a corner of one’s turbulent or afflicted life, can make one’s accustomed high tolerance of chaos no longer possible.

Wade walked into the shop and saw Jack and Jimmy Dame ready to head out, the drilling rig loaded with steel pipe, gleaming and clean as if it were brand-new, straight out of a trade-journal advertisement. Jimmy was walking around the front of the truck taking swipes at real and imagined specks of dirt with a rag, while Jack sat up inside the cab, smoking a cigarette and reading the sports page of the Manchester Union-Leader.

“Put out that fucking cigarette!” It was LaRiviere from the office door, and his face was red and swollen, like an angry frog’s.

Jack grimaced, took one last deep drag and reached for the ashtray on the dashboard, moving slowly.

“Not there, asshole. Flush it!”

Jack swung down from the truck, saw Wade standing just inside the door and, expressionless, walked across the shop to the lavatory. Wade thought, This is a smart little piece of theater, everything normal, the usual craziness from LaRiviere, the usual surly response from Jack, who is probably half hung over, or at least trying tc look that way to me, the two of them going through their routines so that I will think that everything is normal. He could imagine them agreeing privately before he arrived: LaRiviere would catch Jack smoking in the shop just as Wade came through the door, and Jack would react with his everyday sour compliance.

Wade knew that somehow LaRiviere was a part of the killing of Evan Twombley. He had to be: LaRiviere was the one who had provided Twombley with Jack as a guide in the first place, and he had advised Twombley to go hunting on his land up on Parker Mountain, to use his cabin up there if he wanted, and when Wade had told LaRiviere about the shooting, he had acted odd about it, making Wade drive him up to the mountain lickety-split and seeming almost relieved when he heard the state police version of the event. For a second Wade entertained the notion that the police captain, Asa Brown, was somehow involved, but then dismissed it: he only thought it because he did not like Asa Brown personally and wanted him somehow involved.

It was harder with LaRiviere and Jack: in a way, he loved LaRiviere, had worked for him since he was a high school kid, except when he was in the army, and at times had thought of him as the kind of father he wished had been his, the kind of father he thought he actually deserved; and Jack he viewed as a little brother, almost, a man who was a lot like himself twenty years earlier — a smart good-looking kid with a brash sociability, stuck in a small town, maybe, but making the most of it. No, he did not want LaRiviere and Jack involved in this sorry business, and when he looked at the two men, the one blustering about cigarette butts and cleanliness, the other dropping his butt into the toilet as if dropping a coin into a fountain, he felt a form of grief, a turbulent mixture of abandonment, rage and guilt. Toward Asa Brown, however, all he felt was the all-too-familiar cold-edged resentment that insecure people feel toward those who humiliate them. No way that Asa Brown was involved in this Twombley business.

Wade said to LaRiviere, “Morning, Gordon,” and went to his locker and hung up his coat and hat.

LaRiviere smiled broadly, tossed Wade a wave and retreated to the office.

As Wade picked up his clipboard and inventory sheets and prepared to resume counting wrenches and fittings, Jack passed him and said, “I’m fucking out of here, man.”

“Catamount?”

“No, I mean this fucking job. This job sucks. Working outside in winter sucks. I’m fucking out of here.” He stalked to the truck and climbed back up into the cab, where Jimmy waited in the driver’s seat. Jack cranked down the window and hollered to Wade, “Open the garage door, will you?”

Instead, Wade strolled around to Jack’s side of the truck and in a smooth low voice said, “Why don’t you quit now, Jack, if you want out so bad?”