Russell Banks - Affliction

At four-thirty, Wade was ready to leave for home, so Margie could get to work at five, as she had promised Nick Wickham, and when LaRiviere came yawning out of his office to set up the plowing detail, Wade explained how and why he would not be available for overtime tonight. Probably not for quite a while, maybe not all winter, he added, what with his new responsibilities at home.

“You ought to sell that place and move into town, Wade,” LaRiviere said, winking.

“Not mine to sell.”

“Talk your dad into it, then.”

“That man can’t be talked into anything, Gordon, except another bottle of CC. You know that.”

“You can do it, Wade,” LaRiviere said, draping an arm good-naturedly over Wade’s shoulders. “Jack, what say you take the grader out tonight? Jimmy’s used to the dump truck and the V-plow.”

“Can’t do it. I got a date.” Jack stood by the door, ready to leave, his black lunch box in one hand, a rolled-up newspaper in the other. Jimmy was already down at the far end of the garage, at the board where the keys to all of LaRiviere’s vehicles and locks were hung, still singing, “O-ver-time, o-ver-time.”

“Jack!” LaRiviere barked. “Break your fucking date. We got a job to do.”

“You got a job to do, Gordon, not me,” Jack said, and he walked out the door.

“Sonofabitch!” LaRiviere said, as if amazed.

Wade thought, What a pair of actors these guys are. Who would have thought they could play their roles this well? If he had not known what he knew, he would have been completely fooled by this routine.

“You sure you can’t take out the grader tonight, Wade?” LaRiviere asked.

“Tell you what,” Wade said. “Let me plow the roads out my way with your truck, not the grader. You know, from the turnoff up to my father’s place from here, then on out Parker Mountain Road and the side roads in between, which you don’t really need the grader for anyhow. That way, I can do it. I can pick up my old man at the house when I go by and let him ride along with me, and Margie can go into work a little late tonight.”

LaRiviere seemed to give the matter some thought, then said, “Just be careful and don’t ding the plow, and if you do, touch it up in the morning.”

“Gotcha,” Wade said. “What’re you going to do about Jack?” he asked. “Fire him? You would’ve fired me, Gordon, up till a few days ago. You know that, don’t you?”

“Well … things change, Wade. Jack, though, I guess he’s still fucked up from the Twombley thing. Christ, everybody’s a little fucked up these days. Anyhow, I need Jack for a while longer — till the ground freezes too tight to drill.”

“It’s already froze tighter’n a nun’s cunt,” Jimmy chirped. He had come up on the conversation after Jack’s departure and stood by the door, ready to plow, hat pulled down, gloves on, collar up. “We busted one bit this afternoon and give up on the second before we busted it too. You were lucky to get your mom buried,” he told Wade. “When did they dig the hole? Monday? They must’ve used a backhoe for it. I bet they used a backhoe.”

“Shit,” LaRiviere said, calculating the cost of the broken bit. “Jesus, winter’s early this year.”

“Jack wants to quit anyhow,” Wade said. “He’s ready to fly the coop. He’s ready to go where it’s warm.”

“He can’t leave the fucking state till they hold a hearing on the Twombley thing.”

Wade smiled broadly. “A hearing? Why? Asa Brown think maybe Twombley didn’t shoot himself?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Wade. It’s just a legality they got to go through, for Christ’s sake. They got to decide whether to pull his license or not. Get off that one, will you? Everybody knows what you got cooked up in your brain about the Twombley thing. It’s crazy, Wade, so forget it, will you? Jack’s got enough on his mind from this thing, without you going around with all your goddamned suspicions. We aren’t stupid, you know. Right?” LaRiviere asked Jimmy, who stood next to him now, facing Wade.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Jack’s pretty pissed at you, Wade. He knows what you got in your mind, all cooked up, like Gordon says. He thinks you’re acting nuts these days. He told me.”

“I’ll bet he does,” Wade said.

LaRiviere asked Jimmy if he could handle all the roads except those at the Parker Mountain end of town, and Jimmy said sure, he wanted the o-ver-time, and it wasn’t a real hard snow, four or five inches maximum. It was too cold to snow much, he said, and no wind. Good weather for deep-freezing the lakes, which meant ice fishing by Saturday. He grinned at the thought of holing up in a bobhouse for the weekend, away from his wife and children. He was a man whose desire to stay away from his large squabbling family was both justified and satisfied by his need to support them, a neat circle that left him guilt-free and alone and his wife and children fed and happy, for they did not want him around much anyhow, since it was clear that when he was home, he was only trying to figure out how to get away again.

Wade said fine, it was done, then, and hurried out to LaRiviere’s truck: he wanted to get to the house by five o’clock, so Margie would not be more than a half hour late for work, which would probably irritate her, but what the hell, he had an excuse. He thought of calling her, but that would only delay his arrival another five minutes and make her that much more cross with him. She was a punctual woman, a neat and orderly woman, and he was none of those things. She said it was as if he had been born twenty minutes late and had spent his life so far running on that clock instead of the one everyone else ran on.

Wade’s sloppiness and disorder Margie regarded as characteristic of males in general, so she rarely commented on that. Men were slobs. LaRiviere, who, from Margie’s perspective, was merely a man who loved everything to be neat and clean, was regarded by most people as crazy on the subject, almost unmanly, which she felt only proved her point. If LaRiviere had been a woman, like Alma Pittman, who was just as fanatical about neatness as he was, then people would have thought him normal, as they did her.

Wade’s perpetual tardiness, however, Margie did not understand: it was as if he were doing it to get even with the world for some ancient secret wrong. It certainly kept the world mad at him — his ex-wife, his daughter, Gordon LaRiviere, his brother Rolfe: anyone who allowed himself or herself to schedule a meeting with Wade started that meeting a little bit mad at him, as if he had opened it with a small insult.

Wade turned left on Route 29 by the Hoyt place on Parker Mountain Road and dropped the plow, angled it fifteen degrees to the right, then crossed the bridge and made his way slowly home. When he arrived at the house, it was five twenty-five. The porch light was on, and he saw that Margie’s car, her gray Rabbit, was gone. Damn, he thought, she should not have left the old man here alone. He cut into the driveway, plowing it out with a single swipe, and parked the truck. He liked LaRiviere’s truck; it still smelled brand-new, and when he drove it, he felt above the world and isolated from it: the cab was tight and dry, with no rattles or bumps in the road intruding on his thoughts. He especially liked driving it at night, with the twin banks of headlights and the running lights on, the plow out in front of the wide flat hood like a weapon, dipping and rising as he moved through these narrow back roads, lights flashing against the snowbanks and spilling out ahead of him to the next curve and the darkness beyond.

When he went inside the house, Wade stood in the kitchen by the door and called out, “Pop!” No answer. Sonofa-bitch is probably passed out, he thought, and he cringed at the idea of having to haul his drunken father into semiwakefulness, shove him into his coat, like putting a child into a snowsuit, and lug him outside and up into the truck with him. He never should have agreed to do this plowing for LaRiviere. It was not his problem, it was LaRiviere’s, and Jack’s.