Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade had a cigarette out and was tapping the end against his watch crystal. “That was before Twombley was shot.”

“Don’t light that in here. I’m allergic.”

“I won’t. Wasn’t that before he could have known about Twombley?”

“What the fuck difference does it make, Wade? Just lay off, will you? Try to be sensible, for Christ’s sake.” He shifted in his chair, brought his legs down and picked up a pencil, as if going back to work. “Look, take my truck, enjoy yourself, and stop worrying about Mel Gordon, will you?” He smiled. End of interview.

Wade said sure and turned to leave. As he reached for the door, LaRiviere, in a quiet offhand way, said, “What about your folks’ place out there, Wade? What’re you planning to do with it?”

“Nothing. Live there. Want to buy my trailer back?”

“Maybe. What the hell, I put those trailers in to sell them, and I sold all of them once already and a few of them twice. But I was wondering, I wondered if you thought of selling your folks’ place.”

“You interested?”

“Could be.”

“You and Mel Gordon?”

“Could be.”

“Why shouldn’t I be the guy who holds on to the place and sell it myself down the line? Why should you guys make all the money? Anyhow, I can’t sell it to you. I need the place, and my old man, he needs the place.”

“Okay, okay. Just asking.”

“I got it. Just asking.” Wade stuck the cigarette between his lips and pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket.

“Out! Out!” LaRiviere hollered, waving both hands at him.

Wade grinned, then closed the door and left the shop.

He did not light his cigarette until he had driven LaRiviere’s and had noticed pickup into the parking lot at Wickham’s and had noticed, with his usual irritation, Nick’s neon sign, HOME MADE COOKING. He sat in the truck, peering over the raised plow at the sign on the low roof of the restaurant, the words bright pink through the falling snow. He inhaled deeply, the smoke hit the bottom of his lungs, and it suddenly came to him: the sonofabitch LaRiviere, he was in it, after all! They’re all in it! LaRiviere, Mel Gordon, Jack — all of them. Mel Gordon was in the real estate business with LaRiviere, using union funds, probably, to buy up all the loose real estate in the area, for God knows what, since it was barely worth paying taxes on, most of it, and Twombley found out about it, so they used Jack to get rid of him.

Wade sat in the truck, smoking, and several times he ran it through, sorting out the connections, isolating the missing pieces, trying to separate what he knew from what he did not know. He did not know (a) the exact financial connection between Mel Gordon and LaRiviere, but he was sure it involved union funds and possibly organized-crime money; and he did not know (b) why anyone would want to buy up all the loose land and old farms in town and out along Saddleback and Parker Mountain, when no one else had wanted it for generations; and he did not know (c) why he cared so intensely about who killed Twombley, why it made him so angry that he could feel his heart start to pound and his body get rigid with rage, so angry that he wanted to hit someone with his fists.

He found himself dreaming an image of himself, stepping forward with his fists cocked, leaning into the blow, driving his fists forward into the body and face of a person who had no face, no gender, even. Just a person, a person being hit by Wade Whitehouse.

As of today, Margie was no longer working days at Wickham’; she was out at the house taking care of Pop, until Wade got home, when she was to drive into town and wait tables till Nick closed up the place at nine. They had agreed to try it temporarily, but after they got married, Wade said, he did not want her working at all. She had said, “What am I supposed to do, then, clean house and cook all day and night too? I did that once, Wade, and I don’t think it works for me. Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

Wade’s response had been to point out that someone had to stay with Pop; they could not leave him alone anymore; and at night and on weekends, when he was not working himself, Wade would not want to sit home alone waiting for her to get through at Wickham’s.

They had not been quarreling, exactly, so much as thinking aloud over breakfast. Neither of them had imagined that it might so quickly turn out to be difficult to mesh their lives smoothly. To Wade, the idea of wedding Margie’s life to his had simply meant that he would work at his job and Margie would take care of the house and hearth, which happened to include an alcoholic old man and soon a ten-year-old girl. To Margie, the idea of moving in with Wade had meant that she did not have to worry quite so much about money and did not have to be lonely all the time. In spite of their strenuous and failed first marriages, they both held firmly in their minds that image of the family in which the man goes to his job all day and comes home at night, and the woman stays home and takes care of the house and any children or sick or infirm adults who happen to be there, and everybody is happy.

What went wrong in her own family and in Wade’s, as in their first marriages and in most of the marriages that they knew about, causing so much suffering to both the parents and to all the children, was a failure of individual character— Wade’s father, her father, his mother, her mother, and so on— and, of course, bad luck. The way to make a marriage work, they both believed, was to improve your character and take advantage of your luck. The first they believed they had control over; the second you took your chances with. So that when one agreed, or refused, to marry a person one loved, one was making a statement about that person’s character and was expressing his or her attitude toward luck at that particular point in his or her life.

Margie thought highly of Wade, and she had felt lucky lately: just when her life had seemed to be freezing over her, trapping her beneath it in solitude and poverty, the man she enjoyed being with, a decent man with a steady job, had come into possession of a house and had expressed a strong desire to marry her. Wade had felt lucky lately too: there was the dumb luck of finding out about his ex-wife’s affair with her lawyer just as he was about to launch a custody suit against her; there was the luck of LaRiviere’s decision, whatever his reasons, to treat him fairly; there was the luck of the house dropping into his lap, as it were, although that was because of bad luck, his mother’s death; and there was the luck of having a woman he felt comfortable with, a decent woman with good sense, willing and able to marry him.

So why not get married? For fifty or a hundred thousand years, men and women had been marrying for these reasons; why not Wade Whitehouse and Margie Fogg? In fact, the force of these conditions, character and luck, was so strong that for them not to marry would take enormous effort, a kind of radical willfulness or downright perversity that neither of them seemed to possess. They would either have to deny the influence over their lives of character and luck, or they would have to admit that one or the other or both of them were bad people incapable of improving themselves or else merely people afflicted by misfortune.

Late in the afternoon, Jack Hewitt and Jimmy Dame drove into the parking lot, pulled the drilling rig up to the garage door and honked for Wade to open the door. It was snowing fairly heavily by now and gave all appearances of continuing into the night, and while Jack and Jimmy hosed down the rig and put tools away, Jimmy chanted, 4iO-ver-time, o-ver-time, won’t you give me o-ver-time?” and Jack looked grimly at his watch now and then and at the door, as if planning his escape.