Russell Banks - Affliction

With the phone book in his lap, Wade flipped through the yellow pages and checked the Littleton listings for dentists: there were four, and he called one after the other in alphabetical order, asking, and then begging and finally shouting, for an appointment that afternoon. All four refused to see him. Two of them — I later learned, having called them myself — remembered hanging up in the middle of his rant, convinced that he was either crazy or dangerous or both.

Wade slammed down the phone, tossed the telephone book across the room, and when he stood up and turned around, he saw Margie standing by the door, watching him, mouth open, ashen-faced.

“What?” he said.

“What on earth is happening to you, Wade? Why are you acting this way?”

“What do you mean? It’s my tooth! My fucking tooth! I can’t even think anymore because of it!”

“Wade, I heard you talking. You got fired this morning, didn’t you?”

“Look, that’s just temporary, believe me. There’s so much shit going to hit the fan in the next few days, my getting fired by LaRiviere and Chub Merritt won’t matter a bit. Those sonsofbitches are going to be out of business and doing time before I’m through.” He paced around the room while he talked, and clamped his hand against his throbbing jaw, as if making sure that it was still attached to him. Behind Margie, Pop came into the kitchen from outside with a half-dozen chunks of wood in his arms and dumped them noisily into the woodbox. “There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t told you or told anyone yet, but by God, I’m going to blow this town wide open now,” Wade said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get another job. I can find work doing lots of things around here. People are going to need me, anyhow. After this is over, and people see what’s been going on behind their backs, they’ll make me into a goddamned hero. You wait: when this blows, people will need me. Like the way Jill needs me, right? You’ll see, I’ll deliver. And I’ll be the best goddamned father for her who ever lived. You need me. Even Pop, for Christ’s sake, he needs me. So don’t worry, I’ll have a job, a good job, when this is over, and I’ll take care of this house, fix it up, make it nice for all of us. And this town needs me too. They don’t know it yet, but they do. The same as Jill and you and Pop. I’ll be the town cop again, don’t worry. Maybe now they think they can send me howling into a corner, like a kicked dog or some damned thing, some small irritating thing in the way, but by God, it’ll be different soon.”

Slowly, as if being shoved back by the force of his words, Margie retreated from the room toward the kitchen, where she lifted her coat from the hook by the door and picked up her pocketbook, and while Wade paced and ranted on behind her, gesturing and explaining quite as if she were still standing at the living room door, she stepped outside.

She hurried down the steps and got into her car, started the motor and backed out to the road, thinking, The man’s crazy. One’s a drunk, and the other’s crazy. What on earth am I doing here? She could leave, she thought: her furniture was still in her old place in town, and she had not yet written to her ex-husband’s parents in Florida to tell them that she had moved out. But all her clothes, her linens and personal belongings, photographs, papers, were in Wade’s house, which was how she thought of the house now. Somehow the place smelled like Wade and looked like him: once a fine piece of country workmanship, symmetrical, handsomely proportioned, attractively located, the house was now broken down, disheveled, barely functional.

Wade was turning into his father, she suddenly realized. Wade, sober, sounded and acted the way his father did drunk. And his father was being eased out of existence altogether. She could see what was happening. She did not intend to turn into Wade’s mother. She would stay in the house one more night, she decided, and tomorrow, when Wade went down to Concord to see that lawyer of his, she would move out.

The pain was worse than it had ever been: it had turned scarlet, had painted half of the inside of his face, was smeared from the point of his chin to his temple and was eating its way in toward the center. Wade’s vision was affected now, and he saw things in discontinuous flutters and flashes — Pop was in the kitchen shucking his jacket; the television set was turned on, the horizontal control out of whack, the picture flipping again and again; Pop was seated on the couch in front of the television; was in the kitchen; was adjusting the horizontal control. Noises were unnaturally loud, followed by strange bits of silence: the sound of Pop opening the kitchen cabinet, unscrewing the top of his bottle, pouring whiskey into a glass and drinking it down — Wade heard it all clearly and at high volume, as if Pop had a microphone attached to him; and then the television came on, loud at first, suddenly silent, loud again; and the sound of Pop dropping an armload of wood into the woodbox, like a rock slide, punctuated by a hollow silence.

Pop was watching wrestling, his hands clapped onto his knees as if to hold them still, while Wade chased the pain in his face around the room, from window to window to door, as if his face were a dog in a pen looking for a way out. Pop said something about a dish antenna, he wished he had one of those dish antennas, they should buy one of those dish antennas, how much did a dish antenna cost, did Wade know how much people paid for those dish antennas you see all over town these days? Shut up! Wade shouted. Just shut the fuck up! The television audience was screaming, as a huge nearly naked man wearing a mask picked up another man and tossed him to the mat and leapt onto him, and the crowd shrieked with joy. Then the picture flipped again, and Pop got out of his seat and adjusted the knob and said he wished he had one of those dish antennas and sat back down, while the man with the mask flew through the air with his feet out and slammed the other man in the back, sending him staggering across the ring against the ropes, and the audience went crazy, booing, screaming, clapping hands, some even standing on their seats and shaking their fists. Then silence, as Wade stood by the window and looked out across the snow-covered backyard to the half-collapsed barn. A crow — in sharp black profile, like a silhouette, perched on a rafter — turned its head slowly, as if it knew it was being watched, until its beak was aimed at Wade like an accusing finger: You! Wade turned away, and the sound of the television bored into his head, the screams of the audience, the grunts and thuds of the wrestlers, the hearty voice of the announcer, strands of loud noise winding around one another and making a single shaft that drilled into his brain: Pop was out in the kitchen again; the television went silent; Wade heard the bottle being opened, the whiskey splashing into the glass, the sound of his father’s mouth, lips, tongue, throat, as he swallowed. Leave that fucking bottle out! Wade shouted, and he strode into the kitchen, passed Pop coming the other way, grabbed the bottle from the counter and hurried outdoors.

The bright light of the sun against the snow blinded him, and he stood for a few seconds on the porch and struggled to see: he heard the wind sigh in the pines across the road, heard the crow call from the barn out back, heard gunfire from a distant clearing in the woods. Soon the blaze of light started to crack and crumble, and at last it fell apart in chunks of white that floated across Wade’s field of vision. He stepped from the porch to the ground and walked around the porch to the woodshed attached to the end of the house, a three-sided lean-to open to the driveway, where Pop split, stacked and stored his firewood, and tools were kept on a rough workbench.