Affliction Page 5

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  OUTSIDE, WADE INHALED DEEPLY, filled his lungs with cold night air and walked rapidly down the path to the narrow lane where Jack Hewitt’s high-bodied burgundy pickup was still double-parked. It was a four-wheel-drive Ford with extra-long shackles that kicked the body high off the running gear. It had a roll bar and a rack of running lights, chrome exhaust extensions rising behind the cab, oak paneling on the floor of the bed and elaborate pin-striping all over the body—a work vehicle with too many accessories and too fine a paint job to be of much use for work. Jack sat inside with the motor running and Hettie beside him, and Frankie LaCoy and his girlfriend stood on the driver’s side, passing a joint back and forth through the window.

  “I thought I told you to move that sonofabitch!” Wade hollered. He stopped a few yards from the truck and placed his hands on his hips.

  It was a nice-looking truck, Wade had to admit. Nothing but hair and muscle, that truck. The kid was lucky—he made decent money working for LaRiviere, a hell of a lot more than he had ever made playing double A baseball, and all he had to do with it was spend it on his goddamned truck and new rifles and his girlfriend. The kid is under the impression that he is going to live forever, Wade said to himself. Wade believed that what had happened to him since he was Jack’s age was going to happen to Jack someday. It had to, as much because of who the kid was as because of who he was not. And Wade believed this because he had to—as much because of who Wade was as because of who he was not. “You can’t escape certain awful things in life,” Wade once opined. He was sitting in my kitchen, drinking beer late on a summer Sunday afternoon, after a Red Sox game at Fenway, before heading back up north to Lawford. He looked me in the eye, and I knew he was challenging me to contradict him, to say, as I surely wanted to say, “Yes, Wade, you can escape certain awful things in life. Look at me. I have done it.”

  But I said nothing. I looked at my watch, and then he looked at his, and he sighed and said, “Well, old buddy, I better hit the road if I want to get back to the land of milk and honey before dark.”

  LaCoy and his girlfriend stepped quickly away from Jack’s truck. Jack leaned out the open window and said to Wade, “Relax, Chief, we’re leaving now. You wanna toke?” he offered. He smiled broadly, a handsome young man, still a boy, practically, who was genuinely pleased by his own good looks and the physical and social pleasures they kept on bringing him.

  Wade said, “That shit’s still illegal, you know. You get too cocky, I’ll run you in for it. I’m fucking serious, Jack.”

  “Run me in? For what? The cockiness or the grass?” Jack grinned. LaCoy laughed. That Jack Hewitt, what a guy.

  “Cockiness, you wiseass little bastard. I’ll run you in for cockiness,” Wade said, and now he, too, was smiling, and he drew closer to the truck. “Listen, you got to be more careful about that shit. LaRiviere or Chub Merritt or one of those guys sees you smoking that wacky tabacky around me, they’ll expect me to bust you. I don’t, I’ll have to start looking for another job. Me personal, I don’t give a shit you smoke it, you know that. So long as you keep it among yourselves and don’t start peddling it. But you got to be a little cool, goddammit. This ain’t goddamn Greenwich Village or Harvard Square or someplace, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Jack said. “Here, for chrissakes, have a hit. Relax a little,” he said. “Don’t be such a hardass, man. I know you got problems, but everybody’s got problems. So relax, for chrissakes.” He extended the half-smoked joint to Wade.

  “Not here,” Wade said. His tooth had started to throb painfully again, after having lightened somewhat for almost a week, and he wrapped the right side of his jaw with his right hand, as if to warm it.

  “Well, c’mon, then. Get in, and we’ll take a little ride, my man.”

  Wade rocked back on his heels and looked up at the clear cold dark-blue sky. The moon had swung around to the south, and the stars, pinpoints of white light, seemed like secrets whispered to him from a vast distance.

  “Can’t,” Wade said. “I got Jill tonight.” I’m lying, he thought. She had only been loaned to him, and the loan had been called in early. Meanwhile, he was standing here, pretending to be a good responsible father whose child needed him to stay close by. Wade remembered Jill’s words: “I can wait up here fine. When Mommy comes, just tell her I’m up here.”

  Abruptly, he ducked his head and walked toward the front of the truck, just as Jack switched on the bank of running lights and the headlights, and then Wade made himself pass slowly, deliberately, through the glare of the lights, pausing for a second there, a man with nothing to hide being screened for contraband. He rounded the front of the truck and opened the door on the passenger’s side and climbed up next to Hettie, and when he reached across her and took the joint from Jack’s fingers, he smelled her perfume and shampoo. Nice.

  Jack dropped the truck into gear and pulled out onto the lane, and as the high powerful vehicle eased down the lane toward Route 29, Wade placed his left arm on the seatback behind Hettie, turned and, peering between the pair of rifles hanging on the rack, looked out the rear window. His glance passed over the red granite war memorial next to the town hall. It stood in the pale moonlight like an ancient dolmen, and he saw above it, in the lighted window of his own office, his daughter, Jill, still wearing the hideous plastic mask, looking back at him.

  They drove north on Route 29 for a few miles, passed Toby’s Inn and went all the way out to the interstate, where they luffed along the southbound lane a ways, smoking a second joint and then a third. The land falls away to the west out there, then rises in a long dark forested ridge that hides the Minuit Valley and Lawford. Beyond that is a second, somewhat higher ridge, called Saddleback, that terminates in the spruce-covered knob called Parker Mountain. From the truck Wade could make out several of the half-dozen small lakes in the flats southwest of the valley, shining dully in the moonlight like hardened spatters of melted lead. He had calmed down considerably now—marijuana had a positively soothing effect on him, erasing toothache, anxieties and anger in one swipe, leaving him to drift a short distance outside and behind time without worrying about it, as if being anywhere on time, even at his own death, meant nothing to him.

  At the Lebanon cloverleaf they turned around and slowly drove back along the shoulder of the northbound lane. Jack seemed to enjoy holding the speed of his truck way back, keeping it under forty, as if by restraining the truck’s immense power he was better able to exhibit it. Hettie was hunched forward over the dash so she could hear a new James Taylor tape, which Jack had turned down so that he could answer Wade’s question about his plans for deer hunting this year.

  Jack said he had a job starting tomorrow at sunup, guiding some Boston business connection of LaRiviere’s, but then he planned to take Saturday and hunt for himself. All the client wanted was to kill something with horns—anything, Jack said, even a cow—but he would take him up to Parker Mountain, where they could use LaRiviere’s cabin as a base and where Jack figured he could find the old guy a deer and also track and mark a big buck off to go back and kill later for himself.

  Wade knew the client, the way he knew everyone who spent much time in Lawford, even the summer people, which this man was. His name was Evan Twombley, some kind of Massachusetts union official or something, and he owned a fancy house out on Lake Agaway that he used maybe a month at the most in the summer and, since it was winterized, week-ends and holidays over the rest of the year. In recent years the place had been used more by Twombley’s daughter and her husband and kids than by Twombley himself, but Wade remembered the man nonetheless and believed he was rich and thought Jack was lucky to have the chance to work as a guide for him.

  “Oh, I don’t know about lucky,” Jack said. “The guy’s a full-blown asshole. I’d just as soon be out there for myself tomorrow as work for some clown in a red suit who shoots at shadows with a gun he’s never used before. Pay’s good, though. Hundred dollars a day. I got to guarantee a kill, of co
urse. Which I can do. There’s some monster bucks hiding out up there.”

  “How’d you get the job?” Wade asked.

  “LaRiviere,” Jack said. He inhaled, held his breath and passed the joint back and kept talking. “You know Gordon, he’s always got some kind of angle working,” he said. “Right now looks like he’s keeping Twombley happy, and I suppose I’m his boy.”

  Hettie said, “Do you mind?” and reached forward, flipped the tape over and turned the volume up enough to make the men shout to one another to be heard. They had reached the Route 29 turnoff, and Jack tooled the truck down the ramp onto the narrow road to Lawford.

  “You should get close to Twombley!” Wade yelled.

  “How come?”

  “The fucker’s loaded,” he said. “That’s why. If you want to get ahead, my boy, you got to learn to make a guy like that need you. Get irreplaceable.”

  Jack laughed, flashing white teeth, and Hettie laughed too, and Wade watched her place her left hand on Jack’s thigh.

  “Follow your example, eh?” Jack said.

  “You bet. Look at LaRiviere,” he said. “The sonofabitch couldn’t get along without me.”

  Jack laughed again. “Yeah, he’d go broke tomorrow if you quit him, right? And you, you’d be sitting in the catbird seat, right?”

  “Right!” Wade said, and he grinned like a lizard, when he noticed in the side mirror next to him the glare from the high beams of a car coming up behind them fast.

  Jack said, “Bastard’s got his lights on high.”

  The driver hit his horn once sharply, and as the car passed them on the left, Wade looked over and recognized it—the silver Audi owned by Lillian’s husband.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “What?” Hettie said.

  “My ex-wife. Lillian and her new husband,” he said. “That was them in the Audi that just passed us.”

  Jack said, “Audi’s a good car.”

  “Lillian?” Hettie said. “What’s she doing up here? Lillian, jeez, I haven’t seen her since—what?—years. Since I used to baby-sit Jill for you guys, remember?” she said, and she smiled warmly into Wade’s face.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s she up for?” Jack asked.

  “Aw, shit, she’s here to get Jill. Pain in the ass,” Wade said. “Me and Jill had a little argument. Listen, Jack, I got to get back, I got to get back to town. Move this thing, will you? See if you can get back to the town hall before they get there, okay?”

  “Piece of fucking cake, man.” He hit the accelerator, and the truck leapt ahead, the exhausts suddenly roaring, like a steady high-pitched wind sweeping through pine trees.

  Wade was jumpy again; the effect of the marijuana was instantly and wholly gone. He was inside his own time now, and running late, as usual. Staring over the flat hood of the truck at the curving narrow road ahead of it, he asked himself over and over, as if he had the answer lodged someplace in the back of his brain, why the hell the night had to work out like this. It could have been an ordinary and decent evening, just a divorced father spending time with his ten-year-old daughter. Not much to ask for. No big deal. Nothing complicated. Now the whole thing was a humiliating mess, and it was getting worse by the minute.

  The silver Audi kept ahead of the truck all the way into town. At the blinking yellow caution light in front of the school, with the truck less than a hundred yards behind it, the car, without slowing down, lurched around the heap of smashed pumpkins. Jack plowed straight through, splashing chunks and halves of pumpkin like orange slush into the air and off to the sides of the road, but he could not catch the car on a straight stretch of road where he could pass, so that he was still trailing the Audi when it slowed suddenly at the Common and pulled in and double-parked in front of the town hall.

  Jack braked the truck by dropping into lower gears, turned left off Route 29 and drew slowly, almost delicately, toward the Audi, just as the driver and the woman in the passenger’s seat got out. The woman, Lillian, wore a tailored lavender ankle-length down coat with a hood; her narrow angular face seemed aimed out of the hood like a weapon at the door of the town hall, where a large number of people, adults and children, were coming out.

  The driver, Lillian’s husband, is named Bob Horner. He is a tall thin man with an extremely high forehead and strips of sandy hair that he combs carefully over the top of his head from a part just above his left ear. He wore that night a tan tweed shooting jacket, belted, with suede patches on the elbows and across the right shoulder and breast, and before he closed the car door, he reached inside and grabbed from the back a felt Tyrolean hat and put it on.

  By this time Jack had drawn his truck up next to the Audi, hood to hood and towering over it, and Wade swung open the door and stepped down to the ground. “Lillian!” he called, and she wheeled around to face him, while her husband, caught standing next to Wade, stepped quickly back and away.

  As if merely curious, Lillian asked, “Where’s Jill?” She smiled lightly.

  Lillian, as usual, was playing a role in a scene, Wade decided. And its purpose was to manipulate him into playing opposite her. Though he was not fooled by the tactic, it was effective nonetheless. It was an old story: she was too fast for him. At least when it came to setting up their respective roles—controlling what he said to her and how he said it. He always realized a few seconds too late that their encounters were contests, games with high stakes, and that winning them had nothing to do with rightness or wrongness or even with will power—God knows, he had plenty of will power, everyone said so, even Lillian herself. No, it had to do with who could set the rules of the game first, which, as he always found out a little too late, came straight from the nature of the roles they played. If she was yellow, he had to be red; if her die was six, his was forced to be one.

  He leaned forward and placed his hands flat on the trunk of the Audi, as if he were being frisked, and spread all ten fingers out and studied them for a second. “Me and Jill, we just had a little spat, Lillian,” he said. “That’s all. She felt kind of strange, I guess, and shy. From not knowing some of the kids or something. You know, from not knowing them like she used to, feeling like an outsider, I think. So she decided the best thing was to call you to come up here to bring her home. I didn’t know she called you. I don’t know what she said, but I … I tried to call you, to get you to forget it, you know? But you’d already left.”

  “Well, where is she now?” she asked. “In there, in the truck with your friends?” She leaned forward as if to see inside the truck. Jack and Hettie had the windows closed and were wrapped around one another, necking.

  “You know she’s not there. No, she’s inside the town hall, at the party.”

  Lillian turned around and faced the crowd of people coming toward her and spreading over the lot, headed toward their cars. “Really? Looks like the party’s over,” she said. Then she glanced up at the lighted window above and to the left of the door—Wade’s office. “Oh, look!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that Jill up there with the mask on? What’s she doing up there? Isn’t that your office?” Lillian waved her hand, and suddenly Jill’s face disappeared from the window. A second later the light went out.

  Wade said, “She told me she wanted to wait for you there.”

  “Oh. While you went off for a few beers with your friends in the truck?”

  “No. She wanted to stay up there alone,” he said. “Once she got it into her head that she was going back to Concord, I guess she felt a little uneasy around me or something. I mean, I wasn’t exactly tickled by the idea,” he said. “I looked forward to this weekend a lot, Lillian.”

  “Yes, I imagine you must have.” She looked past him into the cab of the truck. “Is that Hettie Rodgers there, with whatzizname?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s grown up some, hasn’t she?”

  “Oh, Jesus, lay off, will you?” he said. “It looks like you’ve won this fucking round already, so lay off a little, for Christ’s
sake.” Wade was vaguely aware of Bob Horner off to his left by the car door, and as Jill came out of the town hall, Horner walked quickly around the front of the car and started toward her.

  “Horner!” Wade said. “Leave her be. This’s got nothing to do with you, so you just act like the chauffeur. Got it?”

  “Wade,” Horner said, and he stopped and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets as if suddenly searching for a match. “Nobody wants any trouble,” he said in his high reedy voice.

  Lillian had already turned and was walking almost regally to greet her daughter, who had removed her mask—at last, Wade thought. That goddamned mask.

  In a voice loud enough to stop several people crossing near them, Wade said, “I don’t want her to go, Lillian.”

  “Don’t cause a scene.” She had her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and was escorting her to the rear door opposite Wade. Lillian peered across the top of the car and said to him, “The child is obviously upset enough. No one’s trying to win any ‘rounds.’ We’re both, I assume, only interested in Jill’s happiness,” she announced. “Don’t make it any worse, will you?”

  “Goddammit,” he said. “I’m not making it worse. You are. You and this clown here. Me and Jill, we could’ve worked this thing out okay on our own, for God’s sake. It’s a normal thing, a spat like this. I mean, it’s normal for a kid to feel a little strange coming back here like this. It’s even normal for me to get a little touchy about it. Believe it or not. You two, you come butting in here like this, how the hell do you think it makes me feel? Treating her like some kind of tragic victim or something, how do you think it makes me look to her?”