Russell Banks - Affliction

Jack sighed and leaned his head back against the seat. “Wade, just open the door. We’re already late, and Gordon’s got a hair across his ass.”

“No, I mean it — why don’t you quit this job? You‘ve got enough money now, don’t you? Head out to California, my man. Start over. Surf’s up, Jack, but you, you’re back here digging wells in the snow.”

“What do you mean, I’ve got enough money? I’m as broke as you are.”

Wade smiled broadly, then turned and ambled across the shop and hit the electric door opener, and the door lifted with a rattle and slid overhead. As the truck exited from the garage, Jack leaned out the open window and shouted to Wade, “You’re looney tunes! You know that? Fucking looney tunes!”

“Like a fox!” Wade hollered after, as the truck lumbered across the parking lot toward the road. Wade started to turn back to the switch, when he saw the familiar black BMW enter the parking lot from the road, and as the truck passed on its way out, the BMW stopped. The truck stopped, and Jack lowered his window again, and Wade saw him exchange a few words with the driver of the BMW, then move on.

Wade stood at the garage door and watched Mel Gordon park his car next to the building and walk briskly around to the open door, where the man saw and recognized Wade.

Their eyes met, and then (significantly, Wade thought) Mel Gordon looked away at once and passed Wade by. Wade turned and followed him with his gaze as he headed straight for the office door. The door opened for a second, and Wade saw Elaine Bernier, seated behind her desk, greet Mel Gordon with a delighted smile.

“Mr. Gordon!” she exclaimed.

“The boss in?” he asked in a cheerful voice.

“Yes indeedy!”

Mel Gordon turned and drew the door closed behind him, catching Wade’s glare as he pulled it to, returning it with a glare of his own, then slamming the door shut.

With a smile and a whistle, Wade punched the button, and the overhead door slid down and slammed against the concrete floor. His chest was warm and filled with what felt peculiarly like joy, the way it felt when he discovered Lillian meeting her lover in Concord. The world was full of secrets, secrets and conspiracies and lies, plots and evil designs and elaborate deceptions, and knowing them — and now he knew them all — filled Wade’s heart with inexpressible joy.

BY MIDMORNING, the sky had clouded over, and then snow fell again — large flakes, like bits of paper, that got smaller as the front moved in and the temperature dropped. Wade continued with the inventory, counting and listing fittings, pipe, tools and equipment in careful order — boring tedious work, much of it performed while squatting in front of undercounter wooden bins half filled with loose copper trees, galvanized ninety-degree elbows or brass gate valves. It was warm inside the shop, however, and brightly lit and, of course, spotlessly clean, and Wade would much rather have been here than down in Catamount, drilling a well in half-frozen ground. Which, without LaRiviere’s sudden and still puzzling change of attitude toward him, is exactly what he would have been doing.

Once an hour or so, he went into the closet-sized lavatory, shut the door and smoked a cigarette, and it was evidently during one of those breaks that Mel Gordon, having finished his business with LaRiviere, had departed from the shop: when Wade quit for lunch and walked out to the parking lot to drive over to Wickham’s, the BMW was gone and its tracks had disappeared.

He got into his car and turned the key in the ignition, thinking at that moment mainly about his toothache — promising himself, yet again, that he had to get the damned thing fixed, drilled, pulled, whatever the hell it took, because this was ridiculous, a grown man walking around with a perpetual toothache in the age of modern dentistry, for God’s sake— when he realized that he was getting no response from the car. He turned the key again, heard a faint click, then nothing, except the tick of the new snow falling on the roof and hood.

He hated this car. Hated it. He was supposed to be a cop, on call twenty-four hours a day, but he had to rely on an unreliable eight-year-old Fairlane with a slippery clutch, a throw-out bearing that constantly chattered and now, he was sure, a bad starter motor.

LaRiviere’s new Dodge 4x4 sat next to Wade’s car, and he decided to take it: what the hell, why not? Let the man show him just how far he could go. Pull his chain, rattle his cage, shake the man up a little.

He got out of his car and reached for the door handle of LaRiviere’s pickup, when he saw the motto OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! and as if Wade were programmed, old habit kicked in, and he found himself walking into the office to ask LaRiviere for permission to use the truck.

He told LaRiviere about the starter motor, it had been giving him trouble on and off for the last month, but before he had a chance to make the switch and ask for the use of LaRiviere’s own vehicle, LaRiviere flipped Wade the keys. “Take my pickup. I can use the Town Car; it needs some use anyhow. Tell you what you ought to do, is have Chub Merritt tow your shitbox in this afternoon, and you drive the pickup until he gets yours fixed. You ever think of buying a new car, Wade?” he suddenly asked, squinting over his desk at him, drumming his fingers as if sending messages through the wood.

“On what you pay me?”

LaRiviere ignored the remark. He pressed his intercom and hollered into it, “Elaine! Call Chub Merritt and have him come tow Wade’s car in and check out the starter motor.”

“What?” her high hard voice came back, the tone colored more by disbelief than by not having heard him.

LaRiviere repeated his order and added that he wanted Chub to bill the company for the job. “Consider it a company expense, Wade. Better yet, I’ll bill the town. We’ll charge it against the police budget. You ever think about buying a new car, Wade? You’re the town police officer, you know, and the town police officer ought to have a decent vehicle, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would.”

“Maybe we could sneak that through the budget next town meeting, a new car for Wade Whitehouse. Get you a full-sized Olds or something, or a Bronco, not one of them little K-cars that fucking Lee Iacocca makes. That guy gets to me, you know?” he went on, swiveling his chair around and swinging his legs up onto the desktop. “First he goes broke, then he gets the taxpayers to bail him out, then he comes on like Captain Capitalism, like he’s running for fucking president. Him and that guy Donald Trump. Fucking guys feed at the public trough, and when they get rich from it, they turn into Republicans. I always liked it that you’re a Democrat, Wade. You and me,” he said, smiling broadly and, to Wade, looking a whole lot like Lee Iacocca himself. “It’s good talking politics now and then. So what do you say, you want a new car or not?”

“Sure I do. What do I have to do for it?”

“Nothing. Nothing you‘re not doing right now, Wade. I been thinking lately, you don’t get enough appreciation around here, and it’s time we changed things a little, that’s all.”

“I saw Mel Gordon here this morning,” Wade said.

“So?”

“He say anything more about that summons I gave him? Tried to give him, actually. Sonofabitch wouldn’t accept it.”

LaRiviere sighed and furrowed his brow with large concern. “Wade, that was not smart, going out there right after the man’s father-in-law shot himself. Let’s let that one go, okay? Call it a favor to me.”

“To you? Why?”

“Mel’s doing some business with me. It’s nice to do favors for people you do business with. Besides, he was all upset that day. He was in a hurry, and the way I understand it, you were holding everybody up at the school. No big deal, Wade.”