Russell Banks - Affliction

Alma reached across the table and patted Wade’s jumpy hand. “Wade,” she said, “sometimes things are simpler than you think. Let me ask you a question.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“About Jack Hewitt? No, I don’t. But there is something to what you’re nosing into. Just tell me this: Have you checked out the tax bill on your father’s place lately?”

Wade said, “Well, actually, yes. I mean, no, but 1 was wondering about my father’s taxes, if he’d paid them this year.”

“Nope,” she said. “He hasn’t. Not for two years, as a matter of fact. One more year, he gets a warning to pay all the taxes due plus penalties, or the place gets seized by the town and auctioned. Of course, it almost never comes to that. The taxes are low, and even with the deflated price of real estate around here, people can always sell their property for more than what they owe, so either they do that or they go to the bank and borrow. Anyhow, it’s a good thing to be checking on, I suppose, now that your mother’s gone. And I figured you’d be doing that soon.”

“Yeah, I thought so too. I was thinking of paying his bill when the insurance comes in.”

“Anybody offer to buy that place lately, do you know?” she asked idly.

Wade said, “As a matter of fact, yes. LaRiviere.”

Alma put her cup down and stood. “Come here a minute, Wade,” she said.

He followed her into the office, a small winterized sun porch furnished sparely and efficiently with several tall filing cabinets, a desk and a high-tech black workstand for her computer. She sat down in front of the computer and drew a swivel chair in next to her and motioned for Wade to sit down. Flipping a pair of diskettes into the machine, she punched a bunch of keys expertly, and suddenly in front of Wade the screen was filled with rows of tiny figures and names, which could have been the computer’s own packing and parts list, for all he knew. They meant nothing to him.

Alma turned in her chair and looked at him with sly satisfaction. “That ought to tell you something,” she said.

Wade squinted and tried to read the words and numbers before him. He saw a few names he recognized — Hector Eastman, Sam and Barbara Forque, old Bob Ward, called Robert W. Ward, Jr., here — but nothing else on the screen made sense to him, and the names by themselves, of course, made no sense. “What is it, some kind of back-tax roll?”

“You might say that. No, this is a list of all the real estate transactions in town for this past year. Most of it is unused land,” she explained. “Most of it bought for a little bit more than the back taxes owed.” She pointed out the various columns on the sheet and their meanings — original owner, taxes owed, size of the property and buildings thereon if any, purchaser, purchase price, date of sale, and so on.

“Ah!” Wade exclaimed, as if now he understood what he was looking at.

“That’s this year’s sales so far.” She punched a pair of keys, and the screen rolled. “Here’s the record for three years ago.” There were five lines across the screen, the rest blank. “Some difference, eh?” Then she switched back to the current year. “Check out this here column,” she instructed, pointing at the list of purchasers.

Wade leaned forward and saw that all but four of the purchases had been made by something called the Northcountry Development Corporation. The remaining four, he noticed, were house lots close to town where in the past summer trailers had been set down. In those cases the seller was Gordon LaRiviere. Nothing unusual there.

“What’s Northcountry Development Corporation?” Wade said. He lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray.

Alma got up from her chair and went into the kitchen and returned with a clean ashtray and handed it to him. “Keep it in your lap,” she said. “I wondered that myself, Wade. So I went down to Concord one day and checked it out, since it’s a matter of public record. It’s registered in New Hampshire, all right, with a Lawford post office box for an address. And the president is Melvin Gordon, and the vice-president and treasurer is Gordon LaRiviere. Those two boys are buying up the mountain, Wade. Cheap, too. LaRiviere is a selectman and keeps track of the tax records, and that way he knows just what to offer for a piece of otherwise useless land. And since nobody else is offering these days, he gets it at his price. His partner probably puts up the money. LaRiviere surely doesn’t have enough on his own to buy this much. Look,” she said, pointing at the column that showed the size of the plots. “Two hundred and forty acres. A hundred and seventy-one. Eighty acres. And total up the purchase prices, if you want. I did. Three hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars, for this year alone. I believe that’s out of Gordon LaRiviere’s league.”

“What about Evan Twombley?” Wade asked. “Was his name on the incorporation papers anywhere?”

“Nope. Just the two Gordons. Wade, please forget that business with Twombley and Jack Hewitt. It’s just a story you’ve concocted in your head. There’s something more important going on that you’re ignoring. Come here,” she said. “I want to show you what I mean.” She got up and crossed to the back of the office, where a surveyor’s map of the township was tacked to the wall.

Wade followed, and Alma, using her finger as a pointer, traced the curving line of Parker Mountain Road out from Route 29. “All those lots bought by Northcountry Development Corporation, they connect to one another. Starting here, where the Lake Agaway Homeowners Association owns about a thousand acres, which is where your friend the late Mr. Twombley once had a place and where your other friend Melvin Gordon and Mr. Twombley’s daughter now have a place. These two boys, Melvin Gordon and Gordon LaRiviere, on the QT, have bought up everything on both sides of the road, piece by piece, all the way across Saddleback and up the mountain and down the other side. They’ve bought up that whole end of town. Except for this place here,” she said, and she placed her finger on a dot close to the road. “Which, according to the tax records, totals one hundred and twenty-five acres, with a three-bedroom house and a barn. Right?”

“Right,” Wade said, exhaling slowly. “Except that the barn’s about caved in now.”

“No matter. It’s still a building you’re taxed for.”

“What’s the current bill — how much is due the town for the place?” Wade asked.

“Little less than twelve hundred dollars, including penalties. Not much, compared to most of those properties the two Gordons bought. I shouldn’t have showed you this, but you can probably get a pretty penny for that place in a year or two, if you pay the taxes now and hold on to it.”

“Yes,” Wade said. He was panting visibly, Alma later reported, surprisingly upset by what she had shown him, and she suddenly wished that she had kept quiet about the Northcountry Development Corporation, because he banged his fist against the map and said, “See! That proves LaRiviere’s involved in this! Jack, he’s just a kid! He’s just a pawn they used to get rid of the old man!” Twombley, Wade explained, must have found out that his son-in-law was siphoning union funds into land in northern New Hampshire, probably laundering organized-crime money somehow, and tried to put a stop to it because the union was being investigated.

“No,” Alma said, “it’s much simpler than that.” What the map and the figures proved, she asserted, was that Gordon LaRiviere was going to become a very rich man by using his position as selectman to exploit his neighbors. “These boys are probably in the ski resort business,” she told Wade. “And a year or two from now, you won’t recognize this town.”