Affliction Read online

  Jack liked Wade. Most everybody liked Wade. Not the way everybody liked Jack, of course, but Wade was twenty years older than Jack, and he had a reputation around town as a man who was dangerous when he was drunk, a reputation Jack knew the man deserved. He had seen Wade clock a few guys himself, and he had heard stories about him that went all the way back to when Wade was in high school, before he tried to go to Vietnam like his brothers but got sent to Korea instead, which people said really pissed him off. People liked to say, “If you rub his hair the wrong way, Wade Whitehouse can turn into a sonofabitch,” which is probably why he got made an MP after the army gave him their aptitude tests. Wade had an aptitude for being polecat mean.

  Even so, Jack liked Wade—or, more accurately, he was drawn to him. He watched him closely, knew at all times where in the room he was standing, who in the crowd he was talking to, almost as if Wade were someone’s wife Jack was attracted to. He liked the slight feeling of danger he got when he was around Wade, even though the idea of ending up in your forties living a life like Wade’s made him shudder and avert his gaze and go quickly back to talking about baseball. Jesus! A smart good-looking guy like that, living all alone out there by the lake in a rusted-out trailer, busting his butt digging wells for Gordon LaRiviere and working as a part-time cop for the town, drinking beer and brawling with the boys on Saturday nights and copping a quick Sunday fuck off some sad lonely lady like Margie Fogg—that was not the life Jack Hewitt planned to live. No way!

  He came to a halt at the edge of a steep incline that fell away to a branch of the old lumber trail and a half-overgrown field of scree, the remnants of a spring mud slide. Beyond the lumpy swatch of boulders the forest resumed. The wind that had blown steadily in his face all the way downhill from the truck shifted slightly and cast the sheet of snow briefly aside, and from where Jack stood, up there on the lip of the incline, he could see across the tops of the trees, mostly hardwoods now, oak and maple, down the side of the mountain and through the dip in Saddleback all the way to Lawford, identifiable among the distant trees by the spire of the Congregational church and the roof of the town hall. Jack stared at the town, at the place in the landscape where he knew the town lay, as if searching for his own house, then inhaled and exhaled deeply, and when the wind resumed blowing in his face and the curtain closed, he turned and faced Twombley, who had finally caught up with him.

  Scowling and out of breath, the man was about to speak, when Jack raised a finger and silenced him. He whispered, “Stay here, stand where I am,” and stepped away from the edge of the incline.

  Twombley nodded and moved into place and peered carefully down at the narrow trail and field of glacial till twenty feet below.

  “I’m going to move back up a ways, then come in from the west along the trail there,” he whispered in the man’s ear. “You just stand here and wait.” He pointed at the rifle still slung over Twombley’s beefy shoulder. “You’ll need that,” he said. “Be sure the safety’s off.”

  Twombley wrestled his rifle off his shoulder and into his hands. He checked the chamber, then flicked off the safety and cradled the gun under his right arm. He was breathing rapidly now, not from exertion but from excitement. In a tight dry whisper, he asked Jack, “What’d you see?”

  “Tracks. It’s your monster buck, all right. So you keep your eyes on that break in the trail down there,” he said, pointing down a ways to his left, where the trail disappeared around a bend in the cut slope. “And in a while, Mr. Twombley, you’ll see what you want to see.”

  “Where’ll you be?”

  “Where I can get him if you don’t,” Jack said. “There’s only one direction he can go when you shoot at him from up here. If you miss him, he’ll run downhill and back. Which is where I’ll be.”

  “Right, right.”

  Jack placed his hand on Twombley’s back and nudged him a step closer to the edge. “Be ready. You’ll only have time to get off a single shot. He’ll come facing you, so shoot him right where you’d shoot a man if you only had one shot,” he said, and pointed at Twombley’s heart and smiled.

  Twombley smiled back.

  “Good hunting, Mr. Twombley,” Jack said. He slung the daypack onto his back and started walking along the lip of the incline toward the line of small pines that grew uphill on the left. Then he turned and came back toward Twombley, who was already staring down at where he expected the deer to appear, and when Jack was about four feet from the older man, he stopped.

  Twombley looked up at him, puzzled. “You better get going, kid. You only got till ten o’clock to collect that extra hundred,” he said.

  Jack said, “Let me check your gun.”

  Twombley handed it to him. Jack looked it over. He lifted his head, and for a few seconds he stared at Twombley’s chest, and then he raised the gun and aimed it and fired.

  6

  MEANWHILE, AT THAT VERY MOMENT in the valley below, Wade drove slowly from the schoolhouse south along Route 29 into the center of town. Occasionally, a vehicle emerged from the falling snow and sloshed past Wade’s green sedan—Hank Lank delivering oil, Bud Swette in his jeep starting on his mail route, Pearl Diehler taking her children to school, late again.

  Then Wade saw the plow approaching, LaRiviere’s bright-blue dump truck with the big double-V plow, driven by Jimmy Dame, who was normally one of Wade’s helpers on the drilling rig. The sonofabitch had got to the garage before him, and now Wade was stuck driving the grader again. They should’ve called school off, he thought. God damn it all to hell.

  The vehicle loomed out of the snow like the huge silver-and-blue-helmeted face of a medieval knight, and Wade veered slightly to the right to give the truck plenty of room as it passed. LaRiviere had obtained the contract to plow the town roads nine years earlier, before he ran for selectman and right after the Board of Selectmen introduced at town meeting a rule requiring all bidders on the plowing to be local residents. Appealing to local pride and suspicion of outsiders, Chub Merritt, then the chairman of the Board, had got it passed, in spite of heavy opposition led by Alma Pittman, the town clerk, who had pointed out that Gordon LaRiviere, with his grader and truck, was now likely to be the only bidder, which was, of course, no surprise to Chub Merritt.

  Though he worked for LaRiviere and would probably end up driving one of the plows himself and garnering lots of over-time to help pay for his new house and child, Wade had been against the proposal, telling no one but Lillian: he knew what LaRiviere and Chub Merritt were up to, and unlike most people in town, he did not admire them for it. Wade never understood why folks seemed to confuse envy with admiration when it came to wheeler-dealers like Gordon LaRiviere. A small town is a kind of ghetto, and hustlers look like heroes. But Wade kept his own counsel and never indicated aloud whether he was for or against Chub’s new plowing proposal, so everyone assumed he was for it. What the hell, Wade himself would benefit from it: winter work, in a town where unemployment from December till March was close to forty percent.

  Chub called it Home Rule and for months before town meeting buttonholed everyone who came into his garage, asking as he pumped gas into their car, “How you stand on Home Rule, bub?” He never bothered to ask Wade. At the meeting, Alma angrily called for a secret ballot and got it. Wade voted Yea. Afterwards, he often wished that he had been more forthright, that he had come right out and said to Chub Merritt, “I’m against Home Rule. All it means is an inside track and inflated charges for Gordon LaRiviere, and we taxpayers end up paying for it.” Then he could have voted Nay. It was another of those small compromises that made Wade feel trapped, not so much by public opinion, or even by his cowardice, as by his desire to behave like a responsible husband and father. He believed that, and ate his anger.

  The windshield wipers flopped back and forth, and the CB grumbled as state troopers out on the interstate between Littleton and Lebanon bounced calls back and forth. A speeder had been stopped on the northbound lane, and a truck was off the road at Chester. A car had
been abandoned at the side of the road a half mile south of Littleton. Wade listened to these calls from habit, not curiosity or need. Though he had called the state police many times on his CB, in four years they had not once called him for help or even for information—not since the forest fire in Franconia. He was like a private security guard hired by the town, a human alarm system whose main functions were to call for the emergency vehicle at the fire station or the ambulance service in Littleton if someone died at home, to break up domestic arguments that got out of hand, to keep the bored and reckless teenagers sufficiently alert so that they did not do irreversible damage to themselves, to ease the children safely into the schoolyard in the mornings, and if anything really serious happened, to call in the real cops.

  Sometimes Wade hated being the town cop. At least once a year, and usually in early March, just before the selectmen were due to reappoint him, he actually considered quitting the job. But then, when he was compelled to imagine his life in town without the job, he hated that even more. For Wade, so long as he stayed in Lawford, there were no acceptable alternatives to his present life, not here, and not anywhere in this valley. No alternatives, and so far as he could see, no prospects. Somehow, until now, being the town cop, which once in a while gave him something unpredictable to deal with, had made that almost acceptable.

  He could go elsewhere, of course; most of the smart people in town already had. They usually fled south: to Concord, the state capital, like Lillian, who Wade had to admit was bright, or to Massachusetts, like me, whom Wade also regarded as bright and who had gone off first to the University of New Hampshire in Durham and then disappeared into the Boston suburbs, and even like our sister, Lena, younger than Wade and older than I, a woman who was thin when she was young, and pretty, and married a truckdriver for Wonder Bread from Somerville, Massachusetts, and left town with him. He had the northern delivery route the summer Lena was seventeen and met him at the Tunbridge Fair, where he was delivering hot dog rolls. She rode off in his truck with him, got quickly pregnant, and now they are born-again Christians and have five kids and live on the third floor of a triple-decker tenement in Revere. There were others from Lawford who were regarded by Wade as intelligent, mostly older people, and they had sold their land and houses in Lawford—sold them increasingly in recent years to Gordon LaRiviere—and owning for the first time in their lives a few thousand dollars more than they needed to live on, had gone to Florida, Arizona and California, bought a trailer or a condo, turned their skin to leather playing shuffleboard all day and waited to die.

  But Wade was different; he had never imagined his life outside the town. Like almost everyone in northern New England, he talked now and then about getting the hell out of this godforsaken place, usually talked about it with Jack Hewitt, who, from the day he returned from playing ball in Connecticut, spoke of “lighting out for the fucking Sunbelt.” But their conversations always ended with Wade slapping Jack on the back and saying, “You’re a dreamer, kid. You’re going to die here in Lawford, and so’m I.”

  Once Wade had gone so far as to answer a postcard from his friend Bob Grant, the plumber, who had sold his place and moved up to Alaska a few years before, with a letter asking Grant about the job possibilities for a skilled well driller up there. Wade had thought Grant’s moving to Alaska was crazy, but on the back of a postcard picture of a moose at dawn, Grant had written Wade that he had just bought a big new house and a new twenty-nine-foot-long RV, and he and the wife were taking a two-week vacation driving down to Oregon. Grant was Wade’s age, a tough smart fellow, a hard worker. He seemed to have benefited from moving north in ways that no one who had moved south or west had been able to do.

  Wade had pulled out his yellow tablet and had written back: Well it looks like you’re doing real good now. I guess folks in Alaska need plumbers more than they need them around here. Most everybody here can fix their own toilets and thaw out their own pipes, so we don’t even notice you ‘re gone. (Just kidding.) Seriously, how do you think a guy like me could do up there? I’m sick of working for LaRiviere, who is nuts, as you know. And I’m sick of this town too. It’s only my kid who keeps me here nowadays.

  But this was not true, and Wade knew it. No, at bottom Wade believed that he was staying on in Lawford year after year, grinding his way through the long winters, in his forties now and drifting into depression—he did not call it depression, but he remembered when he felt another way, not happy, exactly, but better—drinking too much and with increasing frequency enduring spasms of random violence, because at bottom he was shrewd and honest enough to know that he would be in his forties and lonely, poor, depressed, alcoholic and violent anywhere. Below that, however, was yet another truth that he was now and then aware of but surely could not speak of to Bob Grant, although he had said it to me and probably to Margie Fogg; he said it with a wince, a slight ironic twist on his face: he loved the town, and he could not imagine loving any other.

  Alma Pittman was out shoveling her front path, a tall woman in a red plaid mackinaw and a man’s cap with the earflaps tied under her chin, pitching the snow with large easy swings of her long arms, and as he passed she looked up, acknowledged him with a nod and went grimly back to work. There were a few familiar cars parked outside Golden’s store, and farther down on the same side of the road was Wickham’s Restaurant, where the parking lot was filled, and for a second Wade thought of going in for something to eat. He was stuck with using the grader anyhow; no point now in rushing over to the garage to get it.

  He slowed and peered out his window, but the windows of the restaurant were clouded over, and he could not see anyone inside. He imagined the smell of cigarette smoke and fresh coffee and bacon and toasted bread, and he lit a cigarette and braked the car slightly, and then he realized that Margie would immediately ask him about Jill. Where was she this morning? Had she gone to school for the day? What were his plans for this snowy weekend with his daughter? Maybe the three of them could take Margie’s snowmobile out. Maybe they could head up to Littleton for a movie.

  He checked his watch, saw he was running real late and, almost relieved, drew back off the shoulder onto the road and drove past the restaurant and made straight for LaRiviere’s, a quarter mile beyond and on the left. The heavily falling snow had eased somewhat, and the sky was satiny and pale gray, as Wade pulled into LaRiviere’s wide neatly plowed asphalt driveway, rolled quickly by the mobile home in front and parked his car off to the side of the building behind it. The parking lot, the size of a small airport, surrounds both the blue ranch-style mobile home and the matching blue barn in back, which is where Gordon LaRiviere runs his several businesses.

  The trucks were all out, Wade observed, except for LaRiviere’s 4 x 4 pickup and, of course, the grader, that damned grader. It was parked beside the barn like a blue dinosaur, arched and lean and, like all LaRiviere’s vehicles, spotlessly clean. The company motto, LaRiviere’s notion of wit, was painted in white on the side of the pickup and the grader as well—OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE!—just as it appeared on everything owned by Gordon LaRiviere, on business cards, stationery, bank checks, tools large enough to carry it, drilling rigs, rain gear and every one of his numerous meticulously maintained matching blue vehicles. It was as if LaRiviere were a small republic. Even the plots of land he bought were planted as soon as the deed was signed with a small blue sign with white lettering: PROPERTY OF LARIVIERE ENTERPRISES. OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! NO SNOW-MOBILES, HUNTING, OR FISHING. NO TRESPASSING. THIS MEANS YOU!

  Wade eased himself slowly out of his car as if he had all morning to waste and walked across the lot to the small door next to the large truck-bay doors of the barn and went into the office. Elaine Bernier was at her desk on the other side of the green-speckled Formica counter. The office was as neat and orderly as a showroom for office furniture. There was none of the sloppy evidence of work being done—no stacks of papers, loose files, overflowing ashtrays, drawers left half open, paper food containers�
�none of it. There were not even any calendars or photographs, although a large red NO SMOKING sign glared from each of the four walls. Elaine was busy typing when Wade strolled through the door, but her desk, too, was clean and, to all intents and purposes, empty. Beyond her desk was the entrance to the inner office and next to it a large plate-glass window behind which sat Gordon LaRiviere, hard at work on the phone, hunkered down close to the receiver, as if proximity to the instrument increased his effectiveness on it.

  Elaine looked up, zippered her mouth in a tight smile that was more a grimace and went quickly back to typing. She was a middle-aged woman with a bush of red-dyed hair, a long bony face, plucked eyebrows, green eye makeup and a thin mouth, who overdressed for the job in flouncy full-sleeved blouses and long pleated skirts and high heels that rarely emerged from under her desk. It was Wade’s opinion that Elaine Bernier was in love with Gordon LaRiviere, and that Gordon sometimes had his way with her.

  Wade unzipped his jacket and took off his cap and slapped it against his thigh, spraying drops of melted snow over Elaine’s desk, and she glared at him. He waved at his reflection in the glass behind her, and LaRiviere hollered from the other side, “Wade! C’mere a second!”

  Wade nodded, and stepping toward the door, said with his lips, One, two, three, and in unison with LaRiviere said aloud, I want you to take the grader!” Wade stopped just short of the entrance to the inner office—he could see the silvery crew-cut top of LaRiviere’s head while the man stared straight down at the telephone, his face a few inches from the surface of his immaculate desk, as if examining it for dust—and counted to three once more and said, again in unison with LaRiviere, ”Follow Jimmy up Twenty-nine to Toby’s and back!” Then he heard LaRiviere return to his telephone conversation, a rapid-fire whisper, his usual telephone voice, like the hissing of a tape rewinding on its spool.