Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Wade drove slowly now, peering into yards and calling out the damage as he saw it. “Look, they cut the Annises’ clotheslines, and I bet there’s a hell of a lot more they done out back where you can’t see it,” he said, rolling his hand again, a habitual gesture. “And there, see all those smashed flowerpots? Little bastards. Jesus H. Christ.”

  In front of the elementary school was a flashing yellow caution light. Wade had to steer carefully around the fleshy remains of three or four smashed pumpkins, hurled, surely, from a speeding Chevy sedan with dual exhausts.

  “See, honey, that’s all that’s going on out there now,” he said. “You don’t want to deal with that kind of stuff, do you? Trick-or-treating’s over, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know.”

  “Break stuff? Cause all that damage and trouble to people?”

  “Yeah. It’s stupid,” she said flatly.

  “I guess they’re stupid. It’s stupid.”

  “Did you use to do that, when you were a kid?”

  Wade inhaled deeply and flicked his cigarette out the open vent window. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sort of. Nothing really mean, you understand. But yeah, we did a few things like that, I guess. Me and my pals, me and my brothers. It was kind of funny then, or anyhow we thought it was. Stealing pumpkins and smashing them on the road, soaping windows. Stuff like that.”

  “ Was it funny?”

  “Was it funny. Yeah. To us it was. You know.”

  “But it’s not funny now.”

  “No, it’s not funny now,” he said. “Now I’m a cop, so now I have to listen to all the complaints people make. I’m a police officer,” he announced. “I’m not a kid anymore. You change, and things look different as a result. You understand that, don’t you?”

  His daughter nodded. “You did lots of bad things,” she declared.

  “What? I did what?”

  “I bet you did lots of bad things.”

  “Well, no, not really,” he said. He paused. “What? What’re you talking about?”

  She turned and looked through the eye holes of her mask, revealing her blue irises and nothing else. “I just think you used to be bad. That’s all.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “I didn’t use to be bad. No, sir. I did not. I did not use to be bad.” They were pulling into the parking lot behind the town hall, and Wade nodded to several people who had recognized and waved at him. “Where do you get this stuff anyhow? From your mother?”

  “No. She never talks about you anymore. I just know,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “You mean bad kind of bad? You mean like a bad man,I used to be? Like that?” He wanted to reach over and remove her mask, find out what she really meant, but he did not dare, somehow. He was frightened of her, suddenly aware of it. He had never been frightened of her before, or at least it had not seemed so to him. How could this be true now? Nothing had changed. She had only uttered a few ridiculous things, a child talking mean to her father because he would not let her do what she wanted to do, that was all. No big deal. Nothing to be scared of there. Kids do it all the time.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m cold.” She swung open the car door and got out and slammed it behind her, hard.

  The town hall is a large squarish two-story building on the north side of the small field called the Common, where, even in the dark, one can make out the Civil War cannon aimed south and the block of red granite that the townspeople, after the Spanish-American War, set up as a war memorial. Then and after each later war they inscribed on the block the names of the town’s fallen soldiers. In the four wars in this century so far, fifty-four young men from the valley—all but seven of them enlisted men—have been killed. No women. The names are for the most part familiar ones, familiar at least to me— Pittman, Emerson, Hoyt, Merritt, and so on—many the same names one sees today on Alma Pittman’s tax rolls.

  Wade’s name, my name, Whitehouse, is there—twice. Our two brothers, Elbourne and Charlie, were killed together in the same hooch by mortar fire near Hue during the Tet offensive. Charlie was on his way to Saigon and had stopped to visit. He wasn’t supposed to be there. Wade heard about it weeks after it happened, weeks after we heard about it at home. I was in grade school, the youngest of the five children; Wade was in Korea, an MP stopping fights between drunks in bars. He did not really believe that his two older brothers were dead, he told me, until sixteen months later, when he got home and saw their names on the war memorial by the town hall.

  Wade had grown up looking at the names of dead men carved into red granite, seen them every Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day. Even playing softball on the Common in the summer league, if you played left field, as Wade usually did, you got to read the names carved into the stone. For him, when your name got listed there, you were truly, undeniably, hopelessly dead. Those were men who had no faces, who were gone beyond memory, forever, to absolute elsewhere. Even Elbourne and Charlie.

  Outside the entrance to the town hall, a small group of people had gathered, mostly men smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices that went silent as Wade and his daughter walked from his car across the lot and up the path. The men faced him in a friendly way, and one said, “Howdy, Wade. Got you some company tonight, eh?”

  Wade nodded and, opening the door for his daughter, passed into the large, brightly lit hall. It takes up the entire first floor of the building, with a staircase in the far left corner, a small stage at the rear and rest rooms on the other side. The unpainted walls and ceiling are made of narrow tongue-in-groove spruce boards, and the place smells of the forest and of the fire in the big Ranger wood stove that heats it. The wooden chairs that usually fill the room had been folded and stacked to the right by the door. Half a hundred adults were gathered around the room in bunches close to the walls, and the children, all in costumes and makeup, were in the middle, as if penned.

  Picture, if you will, clowns, tramps and robots of various types and sizes, at least two pirates, an angel and a devil, half a dozen vampires and as many witches. There were astronauts and a scarecrow and the hunchback of Notre Dame, and among the younger children, the toddlers, there were several species of animals represented, rabbits, lions, a horse, a lamb. Most of the costumes were homemade and depended for their effect on the viewer’s willed suspension of disbelief—willed only for the viewer, however, not for the wearer of the costume, whose disbelief got suspended regardless of will, for all the children, clearly, were eager to be out of their child’s body, if only temporarily, and into a more powerful one. They smiled, sometimes laughed outright, looked through their masks and makeup straight into the eyes of adults as they never would otherwise and seemed strangely independent and sure of themselves and a little dangerous.

  Standing among them, like a nervous ringmaster surrounded by small but unpredictable and possibly hostile animals, was Gordon LaRiviere, clipboard in hand, in a loud voice urging the throng of children to start moving clockwise in a circle around the room. A large beefy red-faced man in his mid-fifties with a silver flat-top haircut and tiny bright-blue eyes, LaRiviere, as chairman of the Board of Selectmen this year, was the costume contest judge, a responsibility he seemed determined to exercise with great seriousness and attention to detail, for he repeatedly called out the various categories, alerting the audience and engaging its sympathies, as the children began to march in a slow swirl around the room. “We’re looking for the Funniest Costume!” LaRiviere shouted. “And the Scariest! And the Most Imaginative! And the Best Costume of All!”

  Standing near the door, Wade put his hand on Jill’s shoulder and nudged his daughter forward. “Got here just in time for the judging,” he said. “Go ahead in. Just jump into line. Maybe you’ll win a prize.”

  The girl took a single step forward and stopped. Wade nudged her a second time. “Go on, Jill. Some of those kids you know.” He looked down at the tiger’s tail drooping to
the floor and the child’s blue sneakers peeking out from under the cuffs of the pathetic costume. Then he looked at the back of her head, her flax-colored hair creased by the string from the mask, and he suddenly wanted to weep.

  He decided it was because he loved her so, and then the impulse passed. His stomach fell, and his chest heaved, and he took a deep breath and said to her, “Go ahead. You’ll have fun if you just go on and join the other kids out there. See how happy they seem,” he said, and he looked out at the children moving in a thick slow circle around the room with Gordon LaRiviere at the hub, and they did indeed seem happy to him, a parade of monsters and freaks delighted to find themselves admired for once.

  Jill took another step away from Wade and the adults nearby, several of whom were staring at her now, aware, of course, that she was Wade’s daughter visiting him for the weekend, an event that for the last year and a half had occurred on a more or less monthly basis. Lately, it seemed, folks had not seen the girl much, possibly not since the Labor Day picnic, when Wade and Jill had played together in the father-daughter softball game and Wade had to leave in the seventh inning to get her back to Concord by dark because she had school the next day—though no one quite believed that, since the Lawford and Barrington schools never started the school year till the Wednesday after Labor Day, and Concord was unlikely to be on a different schedule. That ex-wife of his, Lillian, was a hard case. Everyone in town thought so. She had always been kind of a hard case—uptight and fussy, one of your more demanding women. Snooty was how some people described her, even though she was a Pittman and had been born and raised right here in Lawford and from the beginning and up to today was clearly no damn better than anyone else in town. Worse than some, if you wanted to know the truth.

  Of course, Wade was a sonofabitch. That was truth too. Pure fact: the man got really mean when he wanted to. Still and all, he loved his daughter and she loved him, and there was no reason why the mother had to keep coming between them like she did. Whatever it was Wade did to Lillian back when they were married, it couldn’t have been so bad, since she married him twice. So it was hard to say why the man deserved such shabby treatment, now that they were divorced again. He was a hard worker, a fair-minded cop who liked to drink with the boys down at Toby’s Inn, and a slick left fielder for the local softball team who could probably still play Legion ball if he wanted to. That’s what most people in town thought.

  “I don’t want to,” Jill said. She continued to stare at the other children, ignored by them but rapidly becoming of greater interest than they to the adults who were gathered near the entrance.

  “Why? Why not?” Wade asked. “Go on, it’s fun. You know lots of those kids, you know them from when you were in school here,” he said. “It hasn’t been that long, for God’s sake.” He threw out his arms, hands open, feigning exasperation, and laughed.

  She backed up to him, as if into his arms, and in a low voice that only he could hear, she said, “It’s not that.”

  “What, then?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just don’t want to. It’s stupid.”

  “What’s stupid? Sure it’s stupid. But it’s fun,” he said. “Jesus.” He looked around him as if for advice. There was Pearl Diehler and three or four others he knew well and a couple more he knew only slightly. There was probably no one in town that he did not know in some way or another—757 year-round residents and another 300 or so in the summer. Wade carried all their faces and almost all their names in his head, and he did it with a certain pride, making sure that whenever he saw new folks in town, at Golden’s store, say, or Merritt’s, he got into a chat with them, asked their names, found out where they lived and where they used to live, learned what they did for their money. He would forget some of that, naturally, but seldom the name and rarely where they used to live and never where they lived now and what they did for their money. Wade was smart.

  Suddenly Jill was squirming next to him, trying to get between him and the door and out. “Hey, what’s going on? Where’re you going, huh?” He reached out and grabbed her arm, and the child looked up at him, facing him with her bulbous plastic tiger mask, looking frightened even through the mask, her blue eyes wide and filling with tears.

  Wade let go of her arm, and she pulled it to her, as if he had hurt it. “I want to go home,” she said quietly.

  He leaned down to hear her better. “What?”

  “I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t like it here.”

  “Oh, Jesus, come on, will you? Don’t mess this up any more than it’s already been messed up, for Christ’s sake. Now get in there,” he said, “and join the other kids. Do that, and before you know it you’ll be happy as a goddamned clam.” He turned her with the flat of his hand and pushed her slowly forward into the open area, toward the circle of children. Gordon LaRiviere had spotted her and was waving her on with his clipboard, drawing attention to her from all over the room.

  Now, Wade thought, her friends will see her and will come over to her. Then she will have to join in, and she will have a good time and be glad that she is here again. Maybe she will even want to go to school tomorrow with the Lawford kids, instead of hanging around with him at work all day.

  He had not figured that one out yet—how he was going to amuse her during the day while he ran the rig down in Catamount. Two weeks before, during one of his regular twice-a-week phone conversations with Jill, Wade had learned that, because of a local teachers’ convention, the Concord children had the Friday after Halloween off. Immediately, he had insisted that she come up to Lawford for the Halloween party and spend all three days of the weekend with him. But when Lillian had discovered that the Lawford children would be in school all day Friday, she quickly telephoned Wade and demanded to know just what he thought Jill would be doing by herself while he was at work. “You amaze me,” she said. “You keep on amazing me, year after year, the same old ways.”

  Her demand had angered him, and he had responded by saying that he had it all figured out, damn it, so leave him alone, he was not required by law to account to her for how he spent every single hour of his weekends with his daughter. Consequently, it was only now, with his anger abated, that he was able to admit to himself that indeed he did not know what he was going to do with his daughter tomorrow. When she made herself happy with her Lawford friends tonight, she would want to go to school with them in the morning, he assured himself. Especially when she saw what the alternative was—sitting in the cab of the truck all day while he finished drilling a well in Catamount.

  Relieved, he turned away, smiled down at Pearl Diehler and stepped out the door for a quick cigarette and a chat with the boys. From somewhere way back inside his jawbone, his toothache was giving him distant early warnings, and it had occurred to him that a cigarette might help postpone the onslaught of pain that he knew was coming.

  There were five or six of them out there, a couple of women too, smoking and probably drinking: Jimmy Dame and Hector Eastman, brothers-in-law whose wives and children were inside. Also Frankie LaCoy, a skinny kid from Littleton whom Wade suspected of selling grass to the local high school kids but who otherwise seemed to cause little harm, so Wade was content to let it ride. Standing next to him was LaCoy’s girlfriend, Didi Forque, still in high school, but she had moved out of her parents’ house last summer, taken a job waitressing at Toby’s Inn, and now shared an apartment in town with the other girl here, Hettie Rodgers. Wade liked looking at Hettie, even though she was only about eighteen and was very much the girlfriend of Jack Hewitt, who worked for LaRiviere with Wade and was a damned good kid. Hettie had her own car and after graduation last June had gone to work as a hairstylist at Ken’s Kutters in Littleton, but she had continued to live here in Lawford because of Jack.

  Jack Hewitt himself was coming slowly up the walk from his pickup, which he had double-parked directly in front of the building. He was a tall man in his early twenties, rangy, sharp-featured, some would say clean-cut, and intelligent a
nd good-humored looking, with a reddish complexion and rust-colored hair. He walked with a slight hitch, almost a skip-step, which probably had started out as an adolescent affectation and had become a habit and made him look as if he had just played a practical joke on someone and was dancing sneakily away before the firecracker went off. In one hand he held what appeared to be a pint of whiskey in a brown paper bag. In the other he carried a rifle.

  “What you boys up to?” Wade said, cupping his hands to light a cigarette.

  “Same old shit,” one of the men said. Hector Eastman.

  “You see some of that shit them kids got into tonight?” Frankie LaCoy asked Wade. “Little sonsofbitches been causing some wicked damage this year, I’ll tell ya. Jesus,” he said. “Little sonsofbitches.”

  Wade ignored him. He did not really like LaCoy, but he enjoyed tolerating him. He believed that LaCoy’s talky servility was practically endless, and although Wade knew that eventually it could make the man dangerous, he enjoyed feeling as superior to another human being, especially another man, as he felt toward Frankie LaCoy, so he usually appeared to listen to him and then refused to acknowledge that Frankie had said anything. It was a pleasing form of dominance.

  “You’re going to have to move that truck, Jack,” Wade said to Hewitt.

  “I know it.” He showed the older man his sideways smile and held out the whiskey. “Take a bite?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Wade said. He reached for the bottle, put it to his lips and took a good-sized swallow. I need a drink, he thought. He had not believed he would tonight, but Jesus H. Christ, did he need a drink. That kid had made him all jumpy tonight. He did not know what the hell had gotten into Jill, but whatever it was, he had let it get into him too. It was only more of the same old stuff her mother had been putting out for years, he thought, and no matter where it came from, Jill or Lillian herself, it always had the same effect on Wade: it made him want to hang his head in shame and run. He said to Jack, “That the gun you were bragging on today?”