Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Then it was time to go to work. He got into Margie’s car and swung out onto the road in the direction of LaRiviere’s shop. He had not driven more than a hundred yards beyond the school, when he looked into his rearview mirror and saw coming along behind him, just now passing under the yellow blinking light, Merritt’s tow truck. Wade was across from Alma Pittman’s house and quickly pulled into her driveway and watched as the truck passed by, driven by Jimmy Dame, with LaRiviere’s blue pickup dangling behind like a huge dead fish.

  Then it was gone, and Wade sat in the car facing Alma’s barn door, his tooth aching as if with deliberate fury, his body seeming to weigh against the seat like an ingot and his mind filling rapidly with images retrieved from the times years ago when he had pulled into this very driveway and had sat out here in his old red Ford for a few moments, suffering like a dog hit by a car, before gathering his scattered mind and bruised body together and going inside to see Lillian and try once again to lie to her and, at the same time, with the same words, tell her the truth.

  He had failed, of course. His need was an impossible need for either of them to satisfy. They could not even have named it. Every time he tried, during those two years that she lived with her aunt while finishing high school, to say what his young life was truly like, he had failed, and eventually he had stopped trying to make her understand what he himself could not understand. But his failure and his ongoing need drove him closer to her nonetheless, and when in their senior year of high school they began to talk of marriage, a number of powerful tangled strands in his life were neatly and inextricably braided together: his pain and shame, his secret exhilaration and the heat and drama of it, his pathetic fear of his father and incomprehensible anger at his mother, and his inability to imagine himself—a wretched youth, alone—without a family: he would become his own father; and Lillian would become his mother: they would get married in the month of June, a week after graduation. He would be the good father; she would be the good mother; they would have a beloved child.

  Wade saw movement at the window, and a second later the front door opened and Alma poked her head outside, looking puzzled. Stepping from the car, Wade called, “Hello, Alma! It’s me. I’m just turning around.”

  She nodded somberly, a tall woman in green twill trousers and plaid flannel shirt, mannish and abrupt, a woman who kept herself aloof from the town but seemed to love it nevertheless. She drew the glass storm door closed and started to shut the inner door, when Wade, instead of getting back in the car, abruptly strode across the driveway and up the narrow freshly shoveled pathway to the door. Alma swung the door open again, and Wade entered the house.

  She offered him a cup of tea, and he accepted and followed her into the kitchen, a large room in the back with her office adjacent to it, heated by a wood stove and still familiar to him after all these years, still filled with the distinctive smells of a compulsively neat solitary woman’s cooking that he remembered from his youth and that he had admired and desired for his own kitchen, after he and Lillian were married. But their kitchen had smelled instead of larger, more gregarious meals—pot roast, baked beans, spaghetti and coffee and cigarettes and beer—and never the clean dry smell of baked bread and tea and raspberry jam.

  Wade sat at the table and looked past Alma into her office, while she put water to boil. A large file was open, and on her desk, next to a crisp new computer, were several open boxes of three-by-five color-coded cards.

  “You got yourself a computer, Alma.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Been putting all my files on it. You take sugar and milk?”

  “No. Black.”

  She asked him if he would like her to toast him a muffin or a piece of bread, and he declined both: he was not sure why he had come in, after all, or how long he wanted to stay, so he preferred not to entertain any further questions concerning his desires. He knew that he wanted to be inside Alma’s house and in her trim efficient company, and he had accepted her offer of tea in order to accomplish it, but he knew nothing beyond that.

  Alma put his cup and saucer in front of him and said to him, “Are you all right, Wade?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why? I mean, I got a toothache, I got a few things bugging me, like everybody else. But I’m okay.”

  “Well, you look … sad. Upset. I don’t mean to pry. I’m sorry about your mother, Wade. It was a nice funeral.”

  “Yes, well, thanks. I guess that’s over now, though. Life goes on,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”

  She agreed, sat down and stirred milk into her cup.

  “Alma, I think there’s some dirty business going on in this town,” Wade said quickly. “I know there is.”

  “There always has been,” she said.

  “Well, this is maybe worse than what you and I are used

  to.”

  “Maybe. But I’ve gotten used to quite a lot of dirty business in this town over the years. And you, you see it all, or at least hear about it, don’t you? You’re the town police officer.”

  “Oh, come on, Alma, this is different than a little public drunkenness or vandalism or maybe someone beating on his wife or a couple of the boys pounding on each other down at Toby’s. What I’m talking about,” he said, lowering his voice, “I’m talking about murder. Among other things.”

  Alma looked across the table at Wade in silence, no expression on her face other than that of patience, as if she were waiting to hear about a strange dream he had last night. She slowly stirred her tea and looked at Wade’s agitated face. Finally, she said, “Who?”

  “Evan Twombley, the union boss who got shot last week.”

  “Did he murder somebody, or did somebody murder him?”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Oh? Who did it?”

  Wade told her.

  “I doubt that,” she said calmly, and she smiled, like a woman listening to a favorite nephew’s tall stories. Which was how, later, she explained it to me. Wade, she reported, always was pretty imaginative, and he was upset that week, because of his mother’s dying, among other things. So she had listened tolerantly, passively, to his jumbled account of how Jack Hewitt had been hired by Mel Gordon to make Twombley’s death look accidentally self-inflicted. Wade also insisted that Gordon LaRiviere was involved somehow, but the nature of the connection was not yet clear to him. It would all come out, he said, if Jack, who Wade believed was the weak link, told the truth. Also, Wade felt, if Jack told the truth, confessed his part in the murder of Evan Twombley and revealed what he knew of the roles played by the other two, then Jack might get off light, and somewhere down the line he could start his life over. “He could be free by the time he’s my age,” Wade said.

  Alma reached across the table and patted Wade’s jumpy hand. “Wade,” she said, “sometimes things are simpler than you think. Let me ask you a question.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “About Jack Hewitt? No, I don’t. But there is something to what you’re nosing into. Just tell me this: Have you checked out the tax bill on your father’s place lately?”

  Wade said, “Well, actually, yes. I mean, no, but 1 was wondering about my father’s taxes, if he’d paid them this year.”

  “Nope,” she said. “He hasn’t. Not for two years, as a matter of fact. One more year, he gets a warning to pay all the taxes due plus penalties, or the place gets seized by the town and auctioned. Of course, it almost never comes to that. The taxes are low, and even with the deflated price of real estate around here, people can always sell their property for more than what they owe, so either they do that or they go to the bank and borrow. Anyhow, it’s a good thing to be checking on, I suppose, now that your mother’s gone. And I figured you’d be doing that soon.”

  “Yeah, I thought so too. I was thinking of paying his bill when the insurance comes in.”

  “Anybody offer to buy that place lately, do you know?” she asked idly.

  Wade said, “As a matter of fact, yes. LaRiviere.”

  Al
ma put her cup down and stood. “Come here a minute, Wade,” she said.

  He followed her into the office, a small winterized sun porch furnished sparely and efficiently with several tall filing cabinets, a desk and a high-tech black workstand for her computer. She sat down in front of the computer and drew a swivel chair in next to her and motioned for Wade to sit down. Flipping a pair of diskettes into the machine, she punched a bunch of keys expertly, and suddenly in front of Wade the screen was filled with rows of tiny figures and names, which could have been the computer’s own packing and parts list, for all he knew. They meant nothing to him.

  Alma turned in her chair and looked at him with sly satisfaction. “That ought to tell you something,” she said.

  Wade squinted and tried to read the words and numbers before him. He saw a few names he recognized—Hector Eastman, Sam and Barbara Forque, old Bob Ward, called Robert W. Ward, Jr., here—but nothing else on the screen made sense to him, and the names by themselves, of course, made no sense. “What is it, some kind of back-tax roll?”

  “You might say that. No, this is a list of all the real estate transactions in town for this past year. Most of it is unused land,” she explained. “Most of it bought for a little bit more than the back taxes owed.” She pointed out the various columns on the sheet and their meanings—original owner, taxes owed, size of the property and buildings thereon if any, purchaser, purchase price, date of sale, and so on.

  “Ah!” Wade exclaimed, as if now he understood what he was looking at.

  “That’s this year’s sales so far.” She punched a pair of keys, and the screen rolled. “Here’s the record for three years ago.” There were five lines across the screen, the rest blank. “Some difference, eh?” Then she switched back to the current year. “Check out this here column,” she instructed, pointing at the list of purchasers.

  Wade leaned forward and saw that all but four of the purchases had been made by something called the Northcountry Development Corporation. The remaining four, he noticed, were house lots close to town where in the past summer trailers had been set down. In those cases the seller was Gordon LaRiviere. Nothing unusual there.

  “What’s Northcountry Development Corporation?” Wade said. He lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray.

  Alma got up from her chair and went into the kitchen and returned with a clean ashtray and handed it to him. “Keep it in your lap,” she said. “I wondered that myself, Wade. So I went down to Concord one day and checked it out, since it’s a matter of public record. It’s registered in New Hampshire, all right, with a Lawford post office box for an address. And the president is Melvin Gordon, and the vice-president and treasurer is Gordon LaRiviere. Those two boys are buying up the mountain, Wade. Cheap, too. LaRiviere is a selectman and keeps track of the tax records, and that way he knows just what to offer for a piece of otherwise useless land. And since nobody else is offering these days, he gets it at his price. His partner probably puts up the money. LaRiviere surely doesn’t have enough on his own to buy this much. Look,” she said, pointing at the column that showed the size of the plots. “Two hundred and forty acres. A hundred and seventy-one. Eighty acres. And total up the purchase prices, if you want. I did. Three hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars, for this year alone. I believe that’s out of Gordon LaRiviere’s league.”

  “What about Evan Twombley?” Wade asked. “Was his name on the incorporation papers anywhere?”

  “Nope. Just the two Gordons. Wade, please forget that business with Twombley and Jack Hewitt. It’s just a story you’ve concocted in your head. There’s something more important going on that you’re ignoring. Come here,” she said. “I want to show you what I mean.” She got up and crossed to the back of the office, where a surveyor’s map of the township was tacked to the wall.

  Wade followed, and Alma, using her finger as a pointer, traced the curving line of Parker Mountain Road out from Route 29. “All those lots bought by Northcountry Development Corporation, they connect to one another. Starting here, where the Lake Agaway Homeowners Association owns about a thousand acres, which is where your friend the late Mr. Twombley once had a place and where your other friend Melvin Gordon and Mr. Twombley’s daughter now have a place. These two boys, Melvin Gordon and Gordon LaRiviere, on the QT, have bought up everything on both sides of the road, piece by piece, all the way across Saddleback and up the mountain and down the other side. They’ve bought up that whole end of town. Except for this place here,” she said, and she placed her finger on a dot close to the road. “Which, according to the tax records, totals one hundred and twenty-five acres, with a three-bedroom house and a barn. Right?”

  “Right,” Wade said, exhaling slowly. “Except that the barn’s about caved in now.”

  “No matter. It’s still a building you’re taxed for.”

  “What’s the current bill—how much is due the town for the place?” Wade asked.

  “Little less than twelve hundred dollars, including penalties. Not much, compared to most of those properties the two Gordons bought. I shouldn’t have showed you this, but you can probably get a pretty penny for that place in a year or two, if you pay the taxes now and hold on to it.”

  “Yes,” Wade said. He was panting visibly, Alma later reported, surprisingly upset by what she had shown him, and she suddenly wished that she had kept quiet about the Northcountry Development Corporation, because he banged his fist against the map and said, “See! That proves LaRiviere’s involved in this! Jack, he’s just a kid! He’s just a pawn they used to get rid of the old man!” Twombley, Wade explained, must have found out that his son-in-law was siphoning union funds into land in northern New Hampshire, probably laundering organized-crime money somehow, and tried to put a stop to it because the union was being investigated.

  “No,” Alma said, “it’s much simpler than that.” What the map and the figures proved, she asserted, was that Gordon LaRiviere was going to become a very rich man by using his position as selectman to exploit his neighbors. “These boys are probably in the ski resort business,” she told Wade. “And a year or two from now, you won’t recognize this town.”

  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.

  20

  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.