Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Wade said sure and turned to leave. As he reached for the door, LaRiviere, in a quiet offhand way, said, “What about your folks’ place out there, Wade? What’re you planning to do with it?”

  “Nothing. Live there. Want to buy my trailer back?”

  “Maybe. What the hell, I put those trailers in to sell them, and I sold all of them once already and a few of them twice. But I was wondering, I wondered if you thought of selling your folks’ place.”

  “You interested?”

  “Could be.”

  “You and Mel Gordon?”

  “Could be.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be the guy who holds on to the place and sell it myself down the line? Why should you guys make all the money? Anyhow, I can’t sell it to you. I need the place, and my old man, he needs the place.”

  “Okay, okay. Just asking.”

  “I got it. Just asking.” Wade stuck the cigarette between his lips and pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket.

  “Out! Out!” LaRiviere hollered, waving both hands at him.

  Wade grinned, then closed the door and left the shop.

  He did not light his cigarette until he had driven LaRiviere’s and had noticed pickup into the parking lot at Wickham’s and had noticed, with his usual irritation, Nick’s neon sign, HOME MADE COOKING. He sat in the truck, peering over the raised plow at the sign on the low roof of the restaurant, the words bright pink through the falling snow. He inhaled deeply, the smoke hit the bottom of his lungs, and it suddenly came to him: the sonofabitch LaRiviere, he was in it, after all! They’re all in it! LaRiviere, Mel Gordon, Jack—all of them. Mel Gordon was in the real estate business with LaRiviere, using union funds, probably, to buy up all the loose real estate in the area, for God knows what, since it was barely worth paying taxes on, most of it, and Twombley found out about it, so they used Jack to get rid of him.

  Wade sat in the truck, smoking, and several times he ran it through, sorting out the connections, isolating the missing pieces, trying to separate what he knew from what he did not know. He did not know (a) the exact financial connection between Mel Gordon and LaRiviere, but he was sure it involved union funds and possibly organized-crime money; and he did not know (b) why anyone would want to buy up all the loose land and old farms in town and out along Saddleback and Parker Mountain, when no one else had wanted it for generations; and he did not know (c) why he cared so intensely about who killed Twombley, why it made him so angry that he could feel his heart start to pound and his body get rigid with rage, so angry that he wanted to hit someone with his fists.

  He found himself dreaming an image of himself, stepping forward with his fists cocked, leaning into the blow, driving his fists forward into the body and face of a person who had no face, no gender, even. Just a person, a person being hit by Wade Whitehouse.

  As of today, Margie was no longer working days at Wickham’; she was out at the house taking care of Pop, until Wade got home, when she was to drive into town and wait tables till Nick closed up the place at nine. They had agreed to try it temporarily, but after they got married, Wade said, he did not want her working at all. She had said, “What am I supposed to do, then, clean house and cook all day and night too? I did that once, Wade, and I don’t think it works for me. Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  Wade’s response had been to point out that someone had to stay with Pop; they could not leave him alone anymore; and at night and on weekends, when he was not working himself, Wade would not want to sit home alone waiting for her to get through at Wickham’s.

  They had not been quarreling, exactly, so much as thinking aloud over breakfast. Neither of them had imagined that it might so quickly turn out to be difficult to mesh their lives smoothly. To Wade, the idea of wedding Margie’s life to his had simply meant that he would work at his job and Margie would take care of the house and hearth, which happened to include an alcoholic old man and soon a ten-year-old girl. To Margie, the idea of moving in with Wade had meant that she did not have to worry quite so much about money and did not have to be lonely all the time. In spite of their strenuous and failed first marriages, they both held firmly in their minds that image of the family in which the man goes to his job all day and comes home at night, and the woman stays home and takes care of the house and any children or sick or infirm adults who happen to be there, and everybody is happy.

  What went wrong in her own family and in Wade’s, as in their first marriages and in most of the marriages that they knew about, causing so much suffering to both the parents and to all the children, was a failure of individual character— Wade’s father, her father, his mother, her mother, and so on— and, of course, bad luck. The way to make a marriage work, they both believed, was to improve your character and take advantage of your luck. The first they believed they had control over; the second you took your chances with. So that when one agreed, or refused, to marry a person one loved, one was making a statement about that person’s character and was expressing his or her attitude toward luck at that particular point in his or her life.

  Margie thought highly of Wade, and she had felt lucky lately: just when her life had seemed to be freezing over her, trapping her beneath it in solitude and poverty, the man she enjoyed being with, a decent man with a steady job, had come into possession of a house and had expressed a strong desire to marry her. Wade had felt lucky lately too: there was the dumb luck of finding out about his ex-wife’s affair with her lawyer just as he was about to launch a custody suit against her; there was the luck of LaRiviere’s decision, whatever his reasons, to treat him fairly; there was the luck of the house dropping into his lap, as it were, although that was because of bad luck, his mother’s death; and there was the luck of having a woman he felt comfortable with, a decent woman with good sense, willing and able to marry him.

  So why not get married? For fifty or a hundred thousand years, men and women had been marrying for these reasons; why not Wade Whitehouse and Margie Fogg? In fact, the force of these conditions, character and luck, was so strong that for them not to marry would take enormous effort, a kind of radical willfulness or downright perversity that neither of them seemed to possess. They would either have to deny the influence over their lives of character and luck, or they would have to admit that one or the other or both of them were bad people incapable of improving themselves or else merely people afflicted by misfortune.

  Late in the afternoon, Jack Hewitt and Jimmy Dame drove into the parking lot, pulled the drilling rig up to the garage door and honked for Wade to open the door. It was snowing fairly heavily by now and gave all appearances of continuing into the night, and while Jack and Jimmy hosed down the rig and put tools away, Jimmy chanted, 4iO-ver-time, o-ver-time, won’t you give me o-ver-time?” and Jack looked grimly at his watch now and then and at the door, as if planning his escape.

  At four-thirty, Wade was ready to leave for home, so Margie could get to work at five, as she had promised Nick Wickham, and when LaRiviere came yawning out of his office to set up the plowing detail, Wade explained how and why he would not be available for overtime tonight. Probably not for quite a while, maybe not all winter, he added, what with his new responsibilities at home.

  “You ought to sell that place and move into town, Wade,” LaRiviere said, winking.

  “Not mine to sell.”

  “Talk your dad into it, then.”

  “That man can’t be talked into anything, Gordon, except another bottle of CC. You know that.”

  “You can do it, Wade,” LaRiviere said, draping an arm good-naturedly over Wade’s shoulders. “Jack, what say you take the grader out tonight? Jimmy’s used to the dump truck and the V-plow.”

  “Can’t do it. I got a date.” Jack stood by the door, ready to leave, his black lunch box in one hand, a rolled-up newspaper in the other. Jimmy was already down at the far end of the garage, at the board where the keys to all of LaRiviere’s vehicles and locks were hung, still singing, “O-ver-time, o-ver-time.”

 
“Jack!” LaRiviere barked. “Break your fucking date. We got a job to do.”

  “You got a job to do, Gordon, not me,” Jack said, and he walked out the door.

  “Sonofabitch!” LaRiviere said, as if amazed.

  Wade thought, What a pair of actors these guys are. Who would have thought they could play their roles this well? If he had not known what he knew, he would have been completely fooled by this routine.

  “You sure you can’t take out the grader tonight, Wade?” LaRiviere asked.

  “Tell you what,” Wade said. “Let me plow the roads out my way with your truck, not the grader. You know, from the turnoff up to my father’s place from here, then on out Parker Mountain Road and the side roads in between, which you don’t really need the grader for anyhow. That way, I can do it. I can pick up my old man at the house when I go by and let him ride along with me, and Margie can go into work a little late tonight.”

  LaRiviere seemed to give the matter some thought, then said, “Just be careful and don’t ding the plow, and if you do, touch it up in the morning.”

  “Gotcha,” Wade said. “What’re you going to do about Jack?” he asked. “Fire him? You would’ve fired me, Gordon, up till a few days ago. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Well … things change, Wade. Jack, though, I guess he’s still fucked up from the Twombley thing. Christ, everybody’s a little fucked up these days. Anyhow, I need Jack for a while longer—till the ground freezes too tight to drill.”

  “It’s already froze tighter’n a nun’s cunt,” Jimmy chirped. He had come up on the conversation after Jack’s departure and stood by the door, ready to plow, hat pulled down, gloves on, collar up. “We busted one bit this afternoon and give up on the second before we busted it too. You were lucky to get your mom buried,” he told Wade. “When did they dig the hole? Monday? They must’ve used a backhoe for it. I bet they used a backhoe.”

  “Shit,” LaRiviere said, calculating the cost of the broken bit. “Jesus, winter’s early this year.”

  “Jack wants to quit anyhow,” Wade said. “He’s ready to fly the coop. He’s ready to go where it’s warm.”

  “He can’t leave the fucking state till they hold a hearing on the Twombley thing.”

  Wade smiled broadly. “A hearing? Why? Asa Brown think maybe Twombley didn’t shoot himself?”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Wade. It’s just a legality they got to go through, for Christ’s sake. They got to decide whether to pull his license or not. Get off that one, will you? Everybody knows what you got cooked up in your brain about the Twombley thing. It’s crazy, Wade, so forget it, will you? Jack’s got enough on his mind from this thing, without you going around with all your goddamned suspicions. We aren’t stupid, you know. Right?” LaRiviere asked Jimmy, who stood next to him now, facing Wade.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Jack’s pretty pissed at you, Wade. He knows what you got in your mind, all cooked up, like Gordon says. He thinks you’re acting nuts these days. He told me.”

  “I’ll bet he does,” Wade said.

  LaRiviere asked Jimmy if he could handle all the roads except those at the Parker Mountain end of town, and Jimmy said sure, he wanted the o-ver-time, and it wasn’t a real hard snow, four or five inches maximum. It was too cold to snow much, he said, and no wind. Good weather for deep-freezing the lakes, which meant ice fishing by Saturday. He grinned at the thought of holing up in a bobhouse for the weekend, away from his wife and children. He was a man whose desire to stay away from his large squabbling family was both justified and satisfied by his need to support them, a neat circle that left him guilt-free and alone and his wife and children fed and happy, for they did not want him around much anyhow, since it was clear that when he was home, he was only trying to figure out how to get away again.

  Wade said fine, it was done, then, and hurried out to LaRiviere’s truck: he wanted to get to the house by five o’clock, so Margie would not be more than a half hour late for work, which would probably irritate her, but what the hell, he had an excuse. He thought of calling her, but that would only delay his arrival another five minutes and make her that much more cross with him. She was a punctual woman, a neat and orderly woman, and he was none of those things. She said it was as if he had been born twenty minutes late and had spent his life so far running on that clock instead of the one everyone else ran on.

  Wade’s sloppiness and disorder Margie regarded as characteristic of males in general, so she rarely commented on that. Men were slobs. LaRiviere, who, from Margie’s perspective, was merely a man who loved everything to be neat and clean, was regarded by most people as crazy on the subject, almost unmanly, which she felt only proved her point. If LaRiviere had been a woman, like Alma Pittman, who was just as fanatical about neatness as he was, then people would have thought him normal, as they did her.

  Wade’s perpetual tardiness, however, Margie did not understand: it was as if he were doing it to get even with the world for some ancient secret wrong. It certainly kept the world mad at him—his ex-wife, his daughter, Gordon LaRiviere, his brother Rolfe: anyone who allowed himself or herself to schedule a meeting with Wade started that meeting a little bit mad at him, as if he had opened it with a small insult.

  Wade turned left on Route 29 by the Hoyt place on Parker Mountain Road and dropped the plow, angled it fifteen degrees to the right, then crossed the bridge and made his way slowly home. When he arrived at the house, it was five twenty-five. The porch light was on, and he saw that Margie’s car, her gray Rabbit, was gone. Damn, he thought, she should not have left the old man here alone. He cut into the driveway, plowing it out with a single swipe, and parked the truck. He liked LaRiviere’s truck; it still smelled brand-new, and when he drove it, he felt above the world and isolated from it: the cab was tight and dry, with no rattles or bumps in the road intruding on his thoughts. He especially liked driving it at night, with the twin banks of headlights and the running lights on, the plow out in front of the wide flat hood like a weapon, dipping and rising as he moved through these narrow back roads, lights flashing against the snowbanks and spilling out ahead of him to the next curve and the darkness beyond.

  When he went inside the house, Wade stood in the kitchen by the door and called out, “Pop!” No answer. Sonofa-bitch is probably passed out, he thought, and he cringed at the idea of having to haul his drunken father into semiwakefulness, shove him into his coat, like putting a child into a snowsuit, and lug him outside and up into the truck with him. He never should have agreed to do this plowing for LaRiviere. It was not his problem, it was LaRiviere’s, and Jack’s.

  But they had wanted to play cat and mouse with him, go through routines designed to make him think everything was normal, that Jack was, as usual, both stubborn and impetuous and LaRiviere was easily pissed off and quickly forgiving. If Wade had said, “Sorry, Gordon, I’m not plowing tonight,” LaRiviere simply would have called down to Toby’s Inn, Wade knew, and asked for Jack. He imagined the two of them talking about it, LaRiviere in his office, Jack on the wall phone in the dark hallway that led from the bar to the men’s room in back.

  LaRiviere: “He didn’t buy it. He’s onto us.”

  Jack: “Shit! What are we going to do?”

  LaRiviere: “I don’t know. Maybe I can buy him off. I’ll have to talk to Mel Gordon.”

  Jack: “Shit! You can’t buy Wade off.”

  LaRiviere: “We bought you.”

  Jack: “Wade Whitehouse is not Jack Hewitt.”

  LaRiviere: “Yeah, well, I still got to get the roads plowed tonight. So get back here and take out the fucking grader.”

  Jack: “Shit! The grader?”

  LaRiviere: “That’s right, the grader.”

  Jack: “Shit!”

  A second time, Wade hollered for his father. Still no answer. And then he saw the note on the kitchen table, next to one of the two place settings: Wade, I had to leave for work. Thanks for being on time. Don’t worry, I have Pop with me. Come pick him up at Nic
k’s when you get home. Supper is in the oven for you both. Margie.

  Despite the evidence of Margie’s anger, Wade was relieved by her note. He stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket, and when he stepped out to the porch, he saw headlights flash past, a 4x4 pickup with its plow in the air, and although it was moving fast, Wade instantly recognized the vehicle: it was Jack’s burgundy Ford, leaving high snowy fantails behind it as it passed the house without slowing and disappeared at the curve, heading uphill toward Parker Mountain.

  Wade climbed up into the driver’s seat of LaRiviere’s blue Dodge and started the motor, listened to the throaty rumble of the mufflers for a few seconds and flicked on the headlights, splashing a field of white over the yard. Then, with the plow up, he drove slowly out to the road, where, instead of turning left and downhill toward town, he turned right and started following Jack’s tracks in the fresh snow. There were no side roads off this road out here, except for the lumber trails that crisscrossed through the woods, and no houses beyond the Whitehouse place, except for a few closed-up summer cabins and, back in the woods, a couple of hunting camps, like LaRiviere’s, on the near side of the mountain. It made no sense for Jack to be out here tonight.

  Driving fast now, but not too fast, because he did not want to overtake Jack suddenly if he stopped or slowed, Wade peered through the lightly falling snow for the lights of Jack’s truck. He shut down his own running lights and used the low beams, hoping that Jack was not looking back in his mirror: he wondered if Jack had noticed him standing there on the porch when he passed the house. If not, then Jack had no reason to think anyone was following him.

  Suddenly, as Wade came over a low rise where the road dropped and ran between a pair of low frozen marshes, he saw Jack’s truck a hundred yards ahead of him, and he hit the brakes, went into a short slide, and came to a halt. Jack was outside the truck and had been standing a few feet into the bushes beyond the snowbank, but he had seen Wade and was scrambling back into his truck now. He slammed the door shut and drove quickly on.