Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade entered the woodshed and once again could not see, blinded this time by darkness instead of light. He set the bottle on the bench and felt along the length of it, touching a hammer, tin cans filled with nails and screws, a rasp, a small monkey wrench, a gas can and parts of a chainsaw, a file, a splitting wedge, and finally, as the darkness softened to a gray haze, he reached the pair of channel-lock pliers that he knew were there — he had seen them the other night, Sunday, when he had come out here with a flashlight looking for tools to repair the furnace: Pop’s tools, scattered and rusting, a drunk’s tools, Wade had thought then.

He uncapped the bottle of whiskey and opened his mouth — it hurt just to open it — and took a bite of whiskey the size of a tea bag and sloshed it around inside his mouth and swallowed: but he felt and tasted nothing, no grainy burn in his mouth or chest; nothing except the cold steel ripsaw of pain emanating from his jaw. He opened his mouth wider and touched the beak of the long-handled pliers to his front teeth, pulled his lip away with his fingers, forcing a cadaverous grin onto his mouth, and moved the pliers toward the dark star of pain back there. The jaws of the pliers angled away from the handles, like the head of a long-necked bird, and he managed for a second to lock them onto one of his molars, then released it and clamped them on the adjacent tooth. He withdrew the pliers and set them back down on the bench. The pain roared in his ears, like a train in a tunnel, and he felt tears on his cheeks.

He took another bite of whiskey, grabbed up the pliers and the bottle and walked quickly from the shed into the white wall of light outside, weeping and stumbling as he crossed the driveway and made his way to the porch without seeing, going on memory now — until he was back inside the house and could see his way through the gloom of the kitchen into the living room, where Pop sat in front of the television: the grunting huge men slammed their pink bodies against each other and the crowd shrieked with pleasure; Wade hurried past Pop, up the stairs and into the bathroom.

He set the bottle down on the toilet tank and looked into the mirror and saw a disheveled gray-faced stranger with tears streaming down his cheeks look back at him. He opened the stranger’s mouth and with his left hand yanked back the lips on the right side, then took the pliers and reached in. He turned the face slightly to the side, so that he could see into it, pried the mouth open still further, and locked the pliers onto the largest molar in the back, squeezed and pulled. He heard the tooth grind against the cold steel of the pliers, as if the tooth were grabbing onto the bone, and he dug further into the gum with the mouth of the pliers and squeezed tightly again and pulled harder, steadily. It shifted in its bed, and he moved his left hand into place behind his right, and with both hands, one keeping the pressure on the tooth, the other lifting and guiding the pliers straight up against the jaw, he pulled, and the tooth came out, wet, bloody, rotted, clattering in the sink. He put the pliers down and reached for the whiskey.

When he passed Pop, he set the whiskey bottle down with pointed emphasis on the table beside him. Pop looked at the bottle for a second and up at Wade, and their eyes met and suddenly flared with hatred.

Neither man said a word. Abruptly, as if dismissing him, Pop looked back at the television. Wade grabbed his coat and hat from the hook in the kitchen, put them on and went outside, moving quickly through the sheets of bright light to the woodshed, where he picked up the gas can and headed on to the barn. His face felt aflame to him, burning from the inside out, as if the hole in his jaw were the chimney of a volcano about to erupt. Removing the tooth had opened a shaft, a dark tunnel, and sparks, cinders, hot gases flew up and scorched his mouth: he opened his mouth and spat a clot of hot blood into the snow and imagined it hissing behind him.

Inside the barn, it was dark and sepulchral. Wade emptied the gas from the can into Pop’s truck and tossed the can aside. He stepped up on the running board and got into the driver’s seat, took the key from his coat pocket, where it had remained since Wednesday, and after a few tries, got the motor running. The old truck shuddered and shook, and Wade backed it slowly out the huge barn door and along the narrow snowbanked lane that he and I had shoveled clear only two nights before, until he had it out on the road, where he aimed it toward town, worked the stickshift into first gear, and drove off.

ASA BROWN WORKED OUT of the Clinton County state police headquarters, a low concrete-and-yellow-brick building on the interstate a few miles north of Lawford. By the time Wade parked Pop’s shaky old stake-body truck between a pair of cruisers in the lot, it was midafternoon and nearly dark. The sky was like gray suede, and a light breeze brushed snow off the banks onto the pavement, where it swirled and curled into low white berms.

Wade got out and for a few seconds stood by the open door of the truck and studied the large dark green Fords next to it and remembered that once long ago he had considered becoming a state trooper. It was after he had returned from his hitch in the army, after Korea, and it had seemed logical to him, since he had been an MP in the army, to take the exam and study at the trooper academy down in Concord and become a statie, by God, ride around all day in one of those cruisers wearing reflector shades and a trooper hat and busting heads down in Laconia when all the bikers came in for the motorcycle races every summer, driving the governor home from the statehouse for lunch, chasing coked-out Massachusetts drivers on the interstate speeding south after a long weekend on the ski slopes. It would have been better than what he had done instead.

He had not even tried to become a state trooper. He had come home to Lawford from Korea obsessed with what he called “unfinished business,” by which he meant his love for Lillian, from whom he was then legally divorced. A year later, he was married to her a second time, his unfinished business finished, as it were, but by then he was working for LaRiviere again and building the little yellow house out on Lebanon Road for him and Lillian to live in, and he could not figure out how to become a state trooper and still hold down a full-time job and build a house nights and weekends. So he did not take the exam, which he knew he could easily pass. He remained a well driller and became the town cop instead and built the house for himself and Lillian and the family they wanted to raise.

When they got married the first time, right after graduating high school, they were both technically still virgins. A cynic might say they got married in order to sleep with each other and got divorced when they had gotten used to sleeping with each other and never should have remarried, and that would be part of the truth. But things are never as simple as cynics believe, especially with regard to bright adolescents in love. Wade Whitehouse and Lillian Pittman, through their openness and intimacy with one another, had separated themselves, by the age of sixteen, from the kids and adults around them and had protected each other while they made themselves more sensitive and passionate than those kids, until they came to depend on one another for an essential recognition of their more tender qualities and their intelligence.

Without Lillian, without her recognition and protection, Wade would have been forced to regard himself as no different from the boys and men who surrounded him, boys his age like Jimmy Dame and Hector Eastman and grown men like Pop and Gordon LaRiviere — deliberately roughened and coarse, cultivating their violence for one another to admire and shrink from, growing up with a defensive willed stupidity and then encouraging their sons to follow. Without Lillian’s recognition and protection, Wade, who was very good at being male in this world, a hearty bluff athletic sort of guy with a mean streak, would have been unable to resist the influence of the males who surrounded him. The loneliness would have been too much to bear.