Russell Banks - Affliction

At the school, Wade parked Margie’s car next to the principal’s, where he usually parked. Lugene said hello and nice day to him, and Wade, as always, said yeah and took up his post under the blinking yellow light in the middle of the road. The sky was peach-colored in the east, deep blue and starry in the west, with a light breeze in Wade’s face. It was going to be a fine day, clear and warm: yesterday’s snow had signaled the arrival of a front, and a high-pressure area seemed to be settling in for a spell.

The buses came and went, unloading their cargoes and heading back over the country roads for more. There was not much traffic otherwise: a few out-of-state cars with end-of-the-season deer hunters on the prowl, Hank Lank on his way to work, Bud Swette in his red-white-and-blue mail-delivery jeep, Chick Ward yawning past in his Trans Am, flipping a wave at Wade, Pearl Diehler, as she often did when she failed to get her kids fed and dressed in time, driving them in to school in her old rusted-out station wagon, smiling easily, naturally, normally, as she passed Wade. Wade liked Pearl, liked the way she seemed to be completely identified with motherhood: he never saw her without her two small children in tow. She was the good mother, to Wade and to most everyone else in town as well. Wade was feeling pretty kindly toward the whole town this morning: everything seemed to be operating on schedule and as usual, and he was able to fit his moves automatically in with everyone else’s for a change. It allowed him, like his father, both to act and to give the appearance of volition, without having to think about it.

Then it was time to go to work. He got into Margie’s car and swung out onto the road in the direction of LaRiviere’s shop. He had not driven more than a hundred yards beyond the school, when he looked into his rearview mirror and saw coming along behind him, just now passing under the yellow blinking light, Merritt’s tow truck. Wade was across from Alma Pittman’s house and quickly pulled into her driveway and watched as the truck passed by, driven by Jimmy Dame, with LaRiviere’s blue pickup dangling behind like a huge dead fish.

Then it was gone, and Wade sat in the car facing Alma’s barn door, his tooth aching as if with deliberate fury, his body seeming to weigh against the seat like an ingot and his mind filling rapidly with images retrieved from the times years ago when he had pulled into this very driveway and had sat out here in his old red Ford for a few moments, suffering like a dog hit by a car, before gathering his scattered mind and bruised body together and going inside to see Lillian and try once again to lie to her and, at the same time, with the same words, tell her the truth.

He had failed, of course. His need was an impossible need for either of them to satisfy. They could not even have named it. Every time he tried, during those two years that she lived with her aunt while finishing high school, to say what his young life was truly like, he had failed, and eventually he had stopped trying to make her understand what he himself could not understand. But his failure and his ongoing need drove him closer to her nonetheless, and when in their senior year of high school they began to talk of marriage, a number of powerful tangled strands in his life were neatly and inextricably braided together: his pain and shame, his secret exhilaration and the heat and drama of it, his pathetic fear of his father and incomprehensible anger at his mother, and his inability to imagine himself — a wretched youth, alone — without a family: he would become his own father; and Lillian would become his mother: they would get married in the month of June, a week after graduation. He would be the good father; she would be the good mother; they would have a beloved child.

Wade saw movement at the window, and a second later the front door opened and Alma poked her head outside, looking puzzled. Stepping from the car, Wade called, “Hello, Alma! It’s me. I’m just turning around.”

She nodded somberly, a tall woman in green twill trousers and plaid flannel shirt, mannish and abrupt, a woman who kept herself aloof from the town but seemed to love it nevertheless. She drew the glass storm door closed and started to shut the inner door, when Wade, instead of getting back in the car, abruptly strode across the driveway and up the narrow freshly shoveled pathway to the door. Alma swung the door open again, and Wade entered the house.

She offered him a cup of tea, and he accepted and followed her into the kitchen, a large room in the back with her office adjacent to it, heated by a wood stove and still familiar to him after all these years, still filled with the distinctive smells of a compulsively neat solitary woman’s cooking that he remembered from his youth and that he had admired and desired for his own kitchen, after he and Lillian were married. But their kitchen had smelled instead of larger, more gregarious meals — pot roast, baked beans, spaghetti and coffee and cigarettes and beer — and never the clean dry smell of baked bread and tea and raspberry jam.

Wade sat at the table and looked past Alma into her office, while she put water to boil. A large file was open, and on her desk, next to a crisp new computer, were several open boxes of three-by-five color-coded cards.

“You got yourself a computer, Alma.”

“Yes,” she said. “Been putting all my files on it. You take sugar and milk?”

“No. Black.”

She asked him if he would like her to toast him a muffin or a piece of bread, and he declined both: he was not sure why he had come in, after all, or how long he wanted to stay, so he preferred not to entertain any further questions concerning his desires. He knew that he wanted to be inside Alma’s house and in her trim efficient company, and he had accepted her offer of tea in order to accomplish it, but he knew nothing beyond that.

Alma put his cup and saucer in front of him and said to him, “Are you all right, Wade?”

“Yeah, sure. Why? I mean, I got a toothache, I got a few things bugging me, like everybody else. But I’m okay.”

“Well, you look … sad. Upset. I don’t mean to pry. I’m sorry about your mother, Wade. It was a nice funeral.”

“Yes, well, thanks. I guess that’s over now, though. Life goes on,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”

She agreed, sat down and stirred milk into her cup.

“Alma, I think there’s some dirty business going on in this town,” Wade said quickly. “I know there is.”

“There always has been,” she said.

“Well, this is maybe worse than what you and I are used

to.”

“Maybe. But I’ve gotten used to quite a lot of dirty business in this town over the years. And you, you see it all, or at least hear about it, don’t you? You’re the town police officer.”

“Oh, come on, Alma, this is different than a little public drunkenness or vandalism or maybe someone beating on his wife or a couple of the boys pounding on each other down at Toby’s. What I’m talking about,” he said, lowering his voice, “I’m talking about murder. Among other things.”

Alma looked across the table at Wade in silence, no expression on her face other than that of patience, as if she were waiting to hear about a strange dream he had last night. She slowly stirred her tea and looked at Wade’s agitated face. Finally, she said, “Who?”

“Evan Twombley, the union boss who got shot last week.”

“Did he murder somebody, or did somebody murder him?”

“He was murdered.”

“Oh? Who did it?”

Wade told her.

“I doubt that,” she said calmly, and she smiled, like a woman listening to a favorite nephew’s tall stories. Which was how, later, she explained it to me. Wade, she reported, always was pretty imaginative, and he was upset that week, because of his mother’s dying, among other things. So she had listened tolerantly, passively, to his jumbled account of how Jack Hewitt had been hired by Mel Gordon to make Twombley’s death look accidentally self-inflicted. Wade also insisted that Gordon LaRiviere was involved somehow, but the nature of the connection was not yet clear to him. It would all come out, he said, if Jack, who Wade believed was the weak link, told the truth. Also, Wade felt, if Jack told the truth, confessed his part in the murder of Evan Twombley and revealed what he knew of the roles played by the other two, then Jack might get off light, and somewhere down the line he could start his life over. “He could be free by the time he’s my age,” Wade said.