Russell Banks - Affliction

Then, unexpectedly, the ground leveled off, and the trucks were running alongside a shallow beaver pond, with sumac and chokecherry flashing past. At the far end of the pond, the trail swerved left, away from the beaver dam and the brook beyond, too abruptly for Jack to make the turn, and his truck crashed through a stand of skinny birches straight onto the pond, its momentum carrying it swiftly over the surface of the thick ice, its headlights sending huge pale swirls out ahead of it. Wade pulled up at the shore, and he watched Jack’s truck slide across the ice like a leaf on a slow-moving river, until it came to a stop halfway across the pond, facing Wade’s truck, with its headlights gazing back over the snow-covered surface of the glass-smooth ice. Wade dropped his truck into first gear, edged it to the shore, then down onto the ice, and slowly he drove directly into the glare of Jack’s headlights, drawing carefully closer as if toward a fire, until finally the vehicles were face to face, plow blade to plow blade.

Jack opened his door and stuck his head out and shouted, “You crazy sonofabitch! You’ll sink us both! Get off the fucking ice! Get off!” he cried, waving Wade away frantically.

But Wade refused to budge. Jack backed his truck away a few feet, and Wade came forward. Behind Jack, on the far side of the pond, was an impenetrable pinewoods; he could not retreat there. And he could not push Wade out of the way; both trucks were the same size, and neither had traction on the ice.

Again Jack swung open his door, and this time he stepped down to the ice. He was clearly enraged, but he seemed almost in tears with frustration, and he swung himself in circles with fists balled, while the ice creaked and groaned under the weight of the two trucks.

Slowly Wade stepped down from LaRiviere’s truck and stood beside it for a few seconds, watching Jack twirl in rage and pain. It was cold, close to zero, and a sharp wind had come up, slicing through the pine trees and over the ice, lifting the light snow into low swirling curtains, and Jack passed in and out of Wade’s line of sight as waves of blowing snow passed between them. He seemed to be clothed in gold, glowing in the strange vibrating light, there and then not there, like a ghost or a warrior from a dream, when suddenly Wade realized that Jack was holding a rifle. He disappeared behind another cloud of the windblown snow, and when he appeared again, he was aiming the rifle at Wade, shouting words at him that Wade could not at first make out — then he heard him — he wanted Wade to close the door of his truck and move away from it, to walk out onto the ice into the darkness. He cried in an unnaturally high and very frightened voice, “I’ll shoot you, Wade! I swear it, I’ll fucking shoot you dead if you don’t move away from the truck!”

Wade closed the door to the truck and backed away from it a few steps. The ice was dry, and with the snow blown off it was too slippery to walk on except with extreme care, and he moved slowly, gingerly, so as not to fall. Jack shouted for him to keep moving, keep moving, goddammit, and he obeyed, step by step, until he was outside the circle of light that surrounded the two vehicles. Then Jack climbed back up into his truck. Quickly he opened the window on the passenger’s side and switched a flashlight beam into Wade’s eyes. “Don’t move!” Jack shouted. “I’ll shoot you dead if you move!” He backed his truck carefully away from the other, then moved around it and drove across the pond toward the lumber trail at the edge, clambered up onto the bank, and was quickly gone.

Wade stood in the darkness, listening to the wind rush through the pine trees behind him and to the low rumbling sound of the truck motor, and then he heard a third sound, like dry sticks broken over a knee, the snap of the ice under the truck starting to let go. Instinctively, Wade backed away, until he was only a few feet from the shore, where he stood and watched the ice out in the middle of the pond break into thick sheets and huge tipped planes all around the truck, when, as if a gigantic hand were reaching up from under the ice and yanking the chassis from underneath, the truck sank, front end first, then the entire vehicle, descending slowly, as if through ash, until it settled on the bottom, leaving the top of the cab, the roll bar and the running lights exposed, silent but with the headlights still glowing under the water, as if a chemical fire were burning there.

In a few seconds, the lights went out altogether, and Wade stood on the shore of the pond in total darkness. The wind blew steadily from behind him, the only sound in his ears. He knew he was maybe four miles from Route 29, if he followed the lumber trail out to the road, where Jack had gone. He could get up onto the interstate there, and maybe hitch a ride back to town, and if he was lucky he would get to Nick’s before nine. A half moon had appeared from behind the clouds and seemed likely to stay and able to provide enough light for him to follow Jack’s tire tracks in the snow. Wade did not want to think about anything more than that, getting back to town, and for the next few hours, although his tooth ached and his ears and hands felt as if they had turned to crystal in the cold, that is what he thought about.

IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT to imagine later how the rest of that night went for Wade: he left evidence behind him, a trail of sorts, and among the people he saw or spoke with that night and during the next two days (I myself turned out to be one of the latter), there was not much disagreement.

He made his way from the pond out of the woods by following the tire tracks of Jack’s truck in moonlight and, once up on the interstate, hitched a ride from the second car that passed him heading north. It was a new Bronco with a hearty pair of deer hunters from Lynn, Massachusetts, who had taken Friday off and had driven up after work, as they did every year, for the long last weekend of the season.They took him to Toby’s Inn, where they had reserved a room weeks earlier, which is how, with considerable effort, I was able to locate them down in Lynn months later and learn about the strange man they had noticed back in November standing on the shoulder of the highway, hitchhiking in the cold night in the middle of nowhere. He scrambled into the back of the car and shivered, and when he spoke his teeth chattered, and when they pulled into the lot at Toby’s to drop him off, he was still suffering from the cold, it seemed. He said little, blaming his presence out there on a car breakdown, and added that he had to meet his wife at Wickham’s Restaurant in Lawford by nine or he would be in big trouble.

The two deer hunters laughed knowingly, as married men will when another married man reveals his status in a way that makes a wife sound like a nagging mother and a grown man like a mischievous boy, and suggested that he join them for a drink at Toby’s, where he could phone his wife, if he wanted to, and have her pick him up there. They did not want his company so much as they wanted to ask him where the locals were finding deer this year: they came to the area every year to hunt and knew that the natives in these upcountry villages had a much better notion of where to hunt than they themselves ever could, but they did not know that such information never left town. Their view of country people was that they like to please strangers, which of course was flattering to themselves. I did not disabuse them of this notion: I was interested only in obtaining from them as complete a picture of Wade that night as was available to me, and the hunters’ high opinions of themselves, in spite of their eventual failure to sight a single deer over that long weekend, kept them from censoring their memories of their brief encounter with my brother.