Russell Banks - Affliction

He stood in the center of the small cluttered kitchen with a dish towel in one hand and a soup pan in the other, and when he saw Wade standing in the doorway to the kitchen, he waved the pan at him and shouted, “Aha! The return of the prodigal son!”

“About fucking time too,” Nick mumbled, swiping at the counter with a sponge.

“Look! I’ve got me a new job, second cook and bottle-washer, by God!” Suddenly Pop’s face went from glee to a sneer, and his voice switched timbre and pitch, hardening into a saw blade and dropping down a register: “So don’t worry yourself about me, you sonofabitch, I can take care of myself.”

“Jesus Christ, Pop,” Wade said. “Come on, let’s go home. I’m sorry, Nick, I got waylaid. My car—”

“I guess the fuck you got waylaid,” Pop said. “You follow your prick around like it was your goddamn nose. Don’t you? You’re a fucking hound dog, Wade. You always were.”

“Can it, Whitehouse,” Nick said, and he looked at Wade and said, “Get him the hell out of here, will you? It was funny at first, but I’m tired.”

“And let’s go home, you say, eh? What home are you talking about, my prodigal son? Your home? Or my home? Let’s have us a little talk about that one, eh? You been making some pret-ty sly moves lately, and don’t think I ain’t been watching you, because I goddamn well have been watching you. Your mother’s dead, Wade, so she can’t make any excuses for you anymore! You’ve got to deal with me now, mister! On your fucking own. Your mother can’t protect you anymore. No more sugar tit, asshole!”

“Oh, Pop, for Christ’s sake!” Wade moved toward the man with both hands outstretched, as if reaching for a small delicate thing in the air, and Pop leapt backward knocking over a stack of pans.

He laughed and stuck out his red tongue at Wade and said, “You think you can take me now, don’t you? Come on, try me! Come on.”

Nick moved quickly between them and said to Wade, “Let me help you get him out of here, so nobody gets hurt.”

Margie now stood at the door, her coat on, and she moved away from the door and held it open, as Wade and Nick each grabbed one of Pop’s flailing arms and scooted him across the floor and past her. Pop was shouting, denouncing Wade and Nick both, moving inside his body like a cat thrashing inside a bag, as the two men dragged the bag outside to the parking lot and shoved it into the back seat of Margie’s car.

“You better sit back there with him,” Nick said in a low voice, “and let Margie drive. He’ll cool out. Won’t he?”

“Yes,” Wade said. He reached into the back seat and grabbed both his father’s wrists, and holding them tightly, he climbed into the car and situated himself next to the man. “He’ll cool out when he gets hold of his fucking bottle. His sugar tit.”

Margie walked to the car from the restaurant, carrying Pop’s coat and hat, and as she passed Nick, he stopped her and touched her cheek and saw that she was weeping. “Jesus, Marge,” Nick whispered. “Get out of this. Fast.”

She nodded and pulled away, got into the driver’s seat and started the car. Inside, in the darkness of the back, Wade had clamped his hands on his father’s bony wrists, and the two men stared silently into each other’s eyes while Margie backed the car from the lot and headed north out of town. When she reached the Hoyt place and turned onto Parker Mountain Road, Wade leaned in close until he could feel his father’s hot breath on his face, and he whispered, “I wish you would die.”

The old man spat directly into Wade’s face, and Wade let go of one wrist for an instant and slapped him hard on the side of his forehead, then grabbed the wrist again. Margie shrieked, “Stop it! Stop it! Just stop it!”

And they did. They glared into each other’s face all the way home, but Pop did not struggle against Wade, who nonetheless kept the man’s wrists locked firmly in his grip until Margie had parked the car in the yard and had rushed inside the house. Then, finally, Wade let go of Pop — first one wrist, then the other, like releasing snakes — and got out of the car, walked up onto the porch and went inside, firmly shutting the door behind him. A few seconds later, Pop came in too.

Wade clumped up the stairs, saw that Margie had shut the bedroom door. He went into the bathroom. He peed, zipped up and then stood before the sink and washed his hands slowly and deliberately, lathering them gently with soap and warm water as if they were small dirty animals he felt tenderly toward. When he had finished and was wiping his hands dry on a towel, he looked into the mirror and startled himself with the image of his own face. He told me, the following morning, that he looked like a stranger to himself, as if someone had sneaked in behind him and got caught accidentally by the mirror. “No shit, Rolfe, I just glanced up and there he was, only it was me, of course. But it was like I had never seen myself before that moment, so it was a stranger’s face. Hard to explain. You fly on automatic pilot, like I was doing all night, and you disappear, you go off to God knows where, while your body stays home. And then you accidentally happen to see your body, or your face, or whatever, and you don’t know who the hell it belongs to. Strange. It was the business with the old man, I know, and how incredibly pissed at him I was, and also chasing Jack Hewitt like that, and then the goddamned truck going through the ice, not to mention Margie’s being so upset — one thing piled on top of another, until there I was, standing in front of a mirror and not knowing who the hell I was looking at.

“So I went back downstairs and saw that Pop had gone into his room and closed the door, and then in a sense I was alone in the house, which was fine with me. I had had enough of other people for one night. Sometimes other people are hell, pure hell. Sometimes I think you’ve got the right idea, Rolfe, living alone as far from this damned town as you can and never coming back here except when you have to.

“I got me a beer and stoked the fire in the stove and turned off all the lights and sat there in the kitchen for a while, trying to calm myself down a little, trying to forget about Jack and Twombley and all that, trying to forget about LaRiviere’s truck. I tried not to think about Margie, even, and Pop, I tried not to think about him. But in that house, where we were all raised, knowing that Pop was in the next room, it’s impossible not to think about Pop and about Ma’s dying. That’s the trouble with being in that house now. You can understand that.”

I allowed that I could, indeed, understand, but he did not hear me, really; he just rattled on. He had called me late in the morning, a Friday, which was unusual, and had caught me at home, and he was in a manic mood, it seemed, calling me, I surmised, because he needed to talk about all this and no one else would listen. I listened, and, yes, I did understand, for I myself have felt as he did then, although not in nearly fifteen years. But I could remember all too easily how it felt to be filled with strangely powerful information — dark fears and anger and dangerous obsessions — with no one to reveal them to. I remembered how it felt to look at yourself in a mirror and see a stranger looking back.

“Anyhow,” he went on, “I was sitting there in the dark, watching the fire glow through the cracks in the stove, you know how it does, and I suddenly remembered that summer when we didn’t have a water heater and had to take our baths in the kitchen, in that big galvanized tub, with water heated on the stove. You were maybe five or six. I think I was sixteen, because I was in high school then and on the baseball team; that was the first year I made all-state, and I got special privileges, so I could drive by the school and say I was working out and use the showers there. I think Elbourne and Charlie did the same as me, took their baths someplace else. But you and Lena and Ma and Pop, you all had to bathe in the kitchen so we wouldn’t have to lug big tubs of hot water up the stairs to the bathroom. The water heater was broke, or some damn thing, but we didn’t have enough money to get a new one till that fall, and I guess because it was summer and the house was warm, nobody really minded too much. Do you remember that?”