Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade did not hear her and said not another word. He grabbed his coat and hat and made for the door without so much as a thank you. From the living room window, she watched him hurry out to Margie’s car, get in and drive off. It was the last time she saw Wade, she told me, and she knew that something terrible was about to happen, and she felt intricately involved in it, just as, by the time it happened, we all would feel.

YOU WILL SAY that I should have known terrible things were about to happen, and perhaps I should have. But even so, what could I have done to stop them? By Friday, Wade was being driven by forces that were as powerful as they were difficult to identify — for me and for Margie, who were best situated to observe them, and certainly for people like Alma Pittman or Gordon LaRiviere or Asa Brown. We had no choice, it seemed, but to react as we did to Wade’s actions that day and the next. In doing so, we were able later to claim something like innocence, or at least blamelessness, but by the same token, we were unable to affect his actions. To have behaved differently would have required each of us to be prescient if not omniscient and perhaps hard-hearted as well.

I cannot blame Gordon LaRiviere for his reaction to Wade that morning, although, given what I know now, it may well have been what drove Wade to his bizarre and violent actions later that day and that evening. In fact, when Wade, after having left Alma Pittman’s, slammed his way into LaRiviere’s shop, ignoring Jack Hewitt and Jimmy Dame, and strode into LaRiviere’s office, pushing right past Elaine Bernier’s attempts to stop him, LaRiviere did what I myself would have done under the same circumstances.

Wade came into the office already shouting. “You sneaky sonofabitch!” he bellowed. “I’ve got your number now, Gordon! All these years,” he said, panting, his eyes ablaze with a strange mixture of fury and sadness, “all these years I worked for you, since I was a kid, goddammit, and I thought you were a decent man. 1 thought you were a decent man, Gordon! I actually went around feeling grateful to you! Can you fucking believe that! Grateful!” He pounded both fists on LaRiviere’s desk, bam, bam, bam, like an enraged child.

Jimmy and Jack had appeared at the door behind Wade, while Elaine Bernier, her face gray with fear, fluttered in the outer office beyond them. LaRiviere calmly stood up, raising himself to his not inconsiderable height and swelling his body like a tent, and said, “Wade, you’re done.” He held out one hand, palm up. “Let me have the shop keys.”

Wade looked around and saw Jack and Jimmy, both as grim as executioners, and he laughed. “You two, you don’t get it, do you? You think you’re free, but you’re like slaves, that’s all. You’re this man’s slaves,” he said, and his voice changed again, became plaintive and soft. “Oh, Jack, don’t you see what this man has done to you? Jesus Christ, Jack, you’ve turned into his slave. Don’t you see that?”

Jack regarded Wade as if the man were made of wood.

“The key, Wade,” LaRiviere said.

“Yeah, sure. You can have the key, all right. It’s the key that’s kept me chained and locked to you all these years,” he said. “I give it back with pleasure!” He pulled his key ring from his pocket and worked one key free of it and dropped it into LaRiviere’s extended hand. “Now I’m free.” He stared into LaRiviere’s unblinking eyes and said, “See how easy it is, Jack? All you got to do is give back what the man gave you, and you’re free of him.”

He turned, and Jack and Jimmy parted to let him pass. Elaine Bernier dodged to the side, and Wade walked through the outer office and was gone. Free.

From LaRiviere’s, as far as we know, Wade drove straight home. It was midmorning by then, a sweetly bright day, warm enough to start the snow melting. Pop was out back, stacking firewood and splitting kindling for the stove, something he did almost every day at this hour, early enough for him to wield an ax with relative safety. He worked slowly, methodically, a brittle cautious man who seemed much older than he was, and he did not look up when Wade drove into the yard and parked Margie’s car by the porch.

Margie was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading a week-old newspaper, and when Wade strode into the room, she folded the paper and looked up, ready now to talk with him about last night, about whatever it was that had happened in the back seat of the car: she did not know, really, what was going on between him and his father, but it was an ancient war, and she knew it was painful for Wade, and she was prepared to understand and sympathize. And as for the business of his being late, perhaps that could be explained: his car was obviously not here, so it must have broken down last night on the way home from work, too far from town to phone, and he had to walk all the way home in the snow, and somehow she had missed him on the road when she drove in to Wickham’s, had driven right past him, poor guy, so that he had to turn around and walk back into town and was unable to get there until nine. Something like that, she was sure, had happened, and then at the restaurant and later in the car, when Pop had started in with his wild drunk-talk, Wade was probably so angry and feeling so guilty, too, that he just lost control, and that was why he slapped the old man.

But when she looked up from her newspaper and saw Wade, all these thoughts flew away, for she knew instantly that he was someone to be afraid of. His movements were abrupt and erratic, and his face was red and stiffly contorted, as if he were wearing a mask made from a badly photographed portrait of himself, and he was trembling: his hands shook; she could see the tremors from across the room as he pulled off his coat and draped it over a chair by the wall.

“I’ve got to talk to my brother,” he announced. “Did you get my note? Yes, you did, I see it there. Listen, there’s lots going on right now, and I’ve got to talk to Rolfe about some things,” he said. “Everything okay? You got to go to work today, don’t you?”

Margie nodded yes and watched him carefully, as Wade headed into the living room and grabbed up the telephone from the table next to the television set. “I’ll only be a few minutes!” he called.

And that, of course, was when he telephoned me, at a time when I am not usually at home, but I happened on this occasion to have called in sick: it was a Friday, and I was suffering from some kind of mental exhaustion of my own, perhaps a delayed reaction to the funeral and my trip to Lawford, perhaps because of an obscure and complex and no doubt unconscious involvement with what Wade was going through — although at that time I was only marginally aware of what Wade was experiencing. At any rate, I had wakened that morning feeling unnaturally gloomy and peculiarly weak, unable to stand without my legs turning to water, so I had called the school and asked that a substitute take my classes for the day. Then, midmorning, the phone rang, and it was Wade.

It was an unusually long conversation. Wade was garrulous and intense at first, rapidly filling me in on the events of the previous evening. He left out, of course, certain details that would have put him in an unfavorable light, such as the slapping incident in the car, details that I obtained months later from various sources — Margie, Nick Wickham, Jimmy Dame, the deer hunters from Lynn, Massachusetts. Then he told me the story, his version, of the bathtub incident, which I found somewhat disconcerting, since it was so far from my own version of that story and because it happened to be about me. And finally he got to the apparent point of his call, to tell me what he had learned at Alma Pittman’s this morning — he did not mention his being fired by Gordon LaRiviere — and to ask my advice on how to use this new information. “I know what it means, ” he said. “I’m just running out of ways to use it.”