Affliction

17

THE FUNERAL AND THE BURIAL were relatively uneventful, thanks no doubt to Pop’s earlier outburst and Wade’s reaction to it. Reverend Doughty performed the obsequies with amiable competence, as if officiating at a retirement. No one wept over the coffin — Wade had insisted that it be a closed-coffin service: “There’s no way you can improve on a body that’s been frozen to death,” he told the mortician, “unless you keep it in the freezer and have the funeral there. Which you cannot do.” The mortician agreed, but with reluctance. It would have been easy to have presented the body beautifully: it had died so peacefully. Oh, well, the winter was young. Soon there would be plenty of bodies that had frozen to death in their sleep, and the bereaved would not be quite as belligerent as this one.

Lillian and her husband Bob Horner and Jill arrived at the funeral a few moments after it had started, and Wade did not see them until he and three others — Gordon LaRiviere, our brother-in-law Clyde and I — carried the coffin from the church to the hearse. Lillian and Horner had seated themselves by the aisle in the last row of the church, with Jill between them, gazing in wonderment at the coffin, and as Wade passed their aisle, he nodded somberly. Jill did not take her eyes off the coffin. Horner returned the nod, but Lillian, whose eyes appeared to be red from weeping, pursed her lips, as if sending Wade a kiss. Wade seemed surprised and puzzled by Lillian’s gesture and stared after her and almost stumbled at the door of the vestry.

And at the burial, no one shed more than a few perfunctory tears. It was held at the Riverside Cemetery, high on the slope near the ridge, where Elbourne and Charlie, whose remains had been shipped back from Vietnam two decades earlier, were buried. At the head of each grave, a tiny VFW flag fluttered next to a small gray-blue granite stone with the boy’s name and birth and death date carved into it. Our mother’s open grave lay just beyond her firstborn son’s, shockingly dark and deep against the white blanket of snow, a quick entry to another world, where neither snow nor sunlight ever fell.

At one point, after Reverend Doughty had said his final benign and appropriately ecumenical prayer and the coffin was at last ready for the descent, Wade crossed from where he had been standing with me and Margie and Pop to the opposite side of the grave, where Lillian and Jill and Bob Horner stood alongside most of the twelve or fifteen townspeople who had attended. As he passed one of the several floral arrangements provided by the funeral home, he plucked a long-stemmed white carnation, which he handed to Jill. Leaning down beside her, he whispered into her ear, and she stepped forward and laid the flower across the coffin.

Then Wade returned to the bouquet and drew out four more flowers, which he presented in turn to Lena, me and Pop, keeping one for himself. He nodded to Lena, and she followed Jill’s example; as did I. Then Wade placed his own flower on the coffin.

We all looked at Pop, who stood blinking in the sunlight, his flower held in front of him as if he were about to smell it. It was strange moment. We were suddenly and unexpectedly aware of our mother’s presence in a way that until this moment we had either denied or had been denied. Her sad battered life seemed to come clear to us, and for a few seconds we were unable to look away from her suffering. We had looked away, averted our gaze, for so many reasons, but mostly because we all three believed at bottom that we could have and should have saved her from our father’s terrible violence, the permanent wrath that he seemed unable to breathe without. But somehow, the sight of that shrunken old man holding the flower before him in trembling hands, unsure of what to do with it, made us briefly forgive ourselves, perhaps, and allowed us to see him as she must have seen him, which is to say, allowed us to love him, and to know that she loved him and that there was no way we could have saved her from him, not Lena, surely, and not I, and not Wade. And not even the old man himself could have saved her from the violence that he had inflicted on her and on us. If he had taken himself out behind the barn one morning during his life with her and shot himself in the head, inflicted on himself in one awful blow all the violence he had battered us with during the years we lived with him, it still would not have released us, for our mother loved him, and so did we, and that awful blow would have been inflicted on us as well. His violence and wrath were our violence and wrath: there had been no way out of it.

As if she were sitting up in her coffin with her arms reaching toward her husband, our mother drew our father slowly forward. He tottered a bit, blinked away tears, and held out the carnation, a pathetic and vain plea for forgiveness impossible to give, and placed it over the others. Then he withdrew, and the young mortician flipped the lever, and the coffin slowly descended into the grave, and our mother was gone.

One by one, the townspeople returned to their cars and pickup trucks parked below on the lane and drove off, until only we family members, including Lillian and Jill and Bob Horner and, of course, Margie Fogg, who had one large arm around Pop’s shoulders, remained at the gravesite.

Wade looked down at Jill, smiled and then hugged her closely. She let herself be held for a few seconds and stepped away.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Wade said to her. “Can you stay for a while?” He looked at Lillian for an answer.

She hesitated, as if she herself would like to stay on and were trying to think of a way to say it that would not mislead him. But then she shook her head no.

Wade inhaled deeply and held his breath, making a hard bubble in his chest, and looked off toward the ridge. “You ever come to your father’s grave anymore?” he asked Lillian.

She turned and followed his gaze up the slope. “No, not anymore. It’s too … it’s too far.”

She was remembering what Wade wanted her to remember, those summer Sunday afternoons when they were teenagers newly in love and the future was endless and full of hope for them — together and alone. They were going to turn into a marvelous man and powerful woman and brilliant couple: they were going to become successful at everything, but especially at love. And here they were, and now Wade wanted her to know, in the same way he knew, what in the intervening years had been lost and, if possible, to grieve with him for a moment. This might be the last time they could share something as tender and powerful as grief over their broken dreams.

But Lillian did not know that, because she did not know yet about Wade’s new lawyer, so she offered Wade only a quick pat on the shoulder and said, “Wade, I‘m sorry about your mother. I always liked her and felt sorry for her.” She glanced sharply over at our father; he had been turned by Margie; she was moving him with care down the slope toward Wade’s car.

“Come on, honey,” Lillian said to Jill. “We‘ve got to get back by four for your ice-skating lesson.”

“I’m taking ice-skating, Daddy!” Jill said, suddenly brightening.

“Great. Figure skating, I suppose.” He wondered where in hell she could take figure-skating lessons up here. Nowhere, probably.

“And ice ballet.”

“Great.”

She smiled warmly at him, and waved, and moved off with her mother and her stepfather, who, Wade realized, had a new Tyrolean hat, just like the other.

For a few moments, Wade stood alone by our mother’s grave. I watched his dark slump-shouldered figure from the black Buick down below, with Pop sitting in silence beside me. Wade seemed terribly lonely to me then. He must still love that woman, I thought. How painful it must be for him, to have his mother buried and to stand and watch the woman he loves and his only child walk away from him. I was glad that I did not have to endure such pain.

Not surprisingly, Lena and her family headed back down to Massachusetts right after the burial. I rode out to the house with Wade and Margie and Pop, however, because my car was parked out there, but also to talk over a few financial matters with Wade. It was clear that Wade now intended to take responsibility for the house and for Pop, but it was a little vague to me as to who would bear the costs for this. Far better, I felt, to discuss and clarify these changes now than to let debts, real or imagined, and resentments, just or unjust, accumulate.

We left Margie with Pop in the kitchen and walked outside to the porch. It was midafternoon but already growing dark and, with the sunlight gone, getting cold fast. A pair of snow shovels leaned against the wall of the porch, and Wade grabbed one and handed me the other.

“Let’s dig out Pop’s truck before the skin of the snow freezes up,” he said.

I said okay and followed him around to the side of the house, where we commenced to break apart the drift that had nearly buried the vehicle. The snow had thickened during the day and was heavy, packed tightly by its own weight, and we were able to cut it into neat blocks that flew solidly through the air when we heaved them. It was pleasant warming work, and the talk came easily to us, perhaps because the tensions of the funeral were now behind us and we were able to mourn privately and alone.

Wade seemed grateful for my interest in his plans. He would pay for all the funeral expenses with a small insurance policy that our mother had taken out years ago. He had checked the deed and other papers he had found in her dresser drawers and learned that there was no mortgage or lien on the house. He was not sure about the taxes but would stop by and ask Alma Pittman tomorrow, he assured me. Wade explained that he planned to live in the house and pay for any renovations or repairs himself, along with the taxes and insurance, and when Pop died, which he said could be tomorrow or twenty years from now, he would probably want to buy out my and Lena’ two thirds, after having the place properly appraised, of course. I said that I was agreeable to the arrangement, and I was sure Lena would feel the same. Pop had hissocial security check, a bit more than five hundred dollars a month, which Wade said should more than cover his expenses for food and booze. It all sounded reasonable and even kind.

“What about Margie?” I asked.

“What about her?”

We had ceased work for a minute, and we were leaning on our shovel handles, face to face. “Well, do you plan to get married?”

“Yes,” he said, although they had not yet set a date for it. Meanwhile, she would be living with him. “She’ll probably quit her job and stay out here at the place with Pop,” he added. “We leave him alone here, he’ll set the damned place on fire. And of course Jill will be here a lot, so it’ll be good to have Margie around then. Things are going to change there, by the way,” he said, and he briefly updated me on his legal maneuvers. “I got an appointment Saturday in Concord with my lawyer, and after that all hell’s going to break loose for a while. And dammit, it’s worth it,” he said. But then he sighed, as if it were not worth it, and we went back to work.

In a short while, we had the truck free of the snow and had driven it out to the cleared part of the driveway while we cleaned up the area. Then Wade suggested that we shovel out the driveway all the way to the barn, so he could put Pop’s truck inside and leave it till spring. “Or whenever. I don’t want the bastard driving drunk, and he’s always drunk now, so it’s best to put the damned thing out of the snow, in the barn. Empty the gas tank and hide the keys.”

The barn was still more or less intact at the front, although open to the weather in back, where the roof had collapsed and where years ago Pop and Wade and Charlie had torn off most of the boards in Pop’s short-lived attempt to close up the building. When we had cleared the driveway from the front of the house around to the back, all the way to the large open door of the barn, Wade got in Pop’s truck and drove it inside. It was dark by now, and the truck headlights illuminated the skeletal interior of the structure. It looked like the backstage area of a long-unused opera house.

I walked behind the truck, and when I entered the barn, with the light bouncing and sliding off the lofts and beams overhead, I was suddenly out of the winter wind and early darkness and found myself surprisingly comfortable there; I wanted to stay, to make my home in the wreckage and rot of the old building; I liked the barn, decrepit and falling down, better than the house.

Wade kept the motor running for a few moments, as if he, too, were reluctant to break the spell cast by the lights and the strange interior space of the barn. He got out and stood beside me and, with me, looked up at the roof, at the old empty haylofts and through the exposed beams and timbers at the back at the dark sky beyond. There was a familial comfort to the place, and one could almost smell the cattle and other livestock that had once been housed here. But there was also a mystery to the place, as if an unpunished crime had been committed in this space.

Pop’ shaky old red truck, a Ford stake-body rusted out at the fenders and the bottom of the cab, idled quietly, while Wade and I walked in careful silence through the splash of light, touching the splintery unpainted wood of the walls, as if looking for clues. Wade lit a cigarette and stopped walking and, with his back to me, stared out the open end of the barn at the brush-cluttered field behind it. The lights from the truck sent a wash of pale light over the snow to the far woods. Beyond the woods the land rose sharply on the left toward Parker Mountain and fell away on the right toward Saddleback Ridge. The old farm lay halfway between them and in years past, when the land was cleared of trees, must have offered lovely views out here. There were over a hundred acres of high sloping brushy fields and woodlands that had belonged once to Uncle Elbourne and then to Pop and now, in a way, to Wade. The dark hillside and woods stirred me profoundly in a way I could not name, and Wade must have felt as I did, for we continued to stare out from the wreck of the barn in silence.

“Wade,” I said. “That was a nice gesture, with the flowers, at the cemetery.”

“Yeah, well, it seemed like something was … needed. You know. For Ma.”

“I was wondering, I wondered if maybe you felt the way I did, when we put the flowers on top of the coffin.”

“How’ that?”

“Well, sort of like she was there, for just a minute longer, giving us some kind of message. About Pop. About taking care of Pop, maybe.” This was not working: Wade and I are incapable of talking about the things that matter most to us. Still, it seemed important to try.

“Taking care of Pop, eh? You want to take care of him? Be my guest. I suppose what I‘m doing for him is what Ma would have wanted, but if it was up to me alone, I‘d take the bastard out behind the barn and shoot him. I kid you not.”

“Well, it was a nice gesture anyway, with the flowers.”

“Thanks,” he said, his back still to me.

We stood in silence for a moment longer, and then, finally, I turned toward the truck and suggested that we go back inside the house.

“Not yet, not till I burn out the little gas that’ left in the tank. You go in if you want. I got to stay here until it stalls out, or the battery’ll run dead. I guess I ought to shut off the headlights, though,” he said, clearly not wanting to. “There’ a kerosene lantern I saw a minute ago over by the side of the door, where we came in. Whyn’t you light that?” he said.

I did as he instructed, while he climbed into the cab and flicked off the headlights; and then we had a soft pale-yellow light filling the cavernous space. The truck motor chugged on, and I felt as if we were inside a ship at night, crossing a northern sea, looking out into darkness and cold with a steady wind in our faces.

I do not know where the thought came from, but suddenly I remembered the shooting of Evan Twombley, and I asked Wade if he had heard anything new about it in the last few days.

He said no and seemed oddly reluctant to talk about it, as if embarrassed by his earlier obsessive interest in the case. “I guess it was an accident, like everybody thinks.”

“Like everybody wants to think, you mean,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so. But don’t get me all started up on that again. It doesn’t go anywhere, and whenever I get to thinking on it, I get crazy, like a dog worrying at a flea it can’t scratch. It feels better if I just let it alone,” he said.

“You want to know what I think happened?”

Wade said no, then yes, and walked around to the passenger’ side of the truck and opened the door and groped in the dark through the glove compartment. I had taken up a position on the tailgate, and when he returned and sat down beside me, he was carrying a nearly full bottle of Canadian Club. “I‘ve been finding them all over the damned place,” he said, and heunscrewed the cap, sniffed the contents and took a slug from the bottle. “In the basement, in the attic, under the bathroom sink. I didn’t realize how bad he‘d got.” He started to pass the bottle to me, then withdrew it. “Sorry,” he said.

“Wade, I think your first response to the Twombley shooting was the correct one.”

“Which is?”

“That it was not an accident.”

“Then who shot him?”

“Well, your friend, I think. Jack Hewitt.”

“Motive, Rolfe. You got to have motive.”

“For Jack? Money.”

“Okay. Money. Jack always needs money, and he’ had big ideas about life ever since he got all that attention for being a ballplayer. But come on, who the hell would pay Jack that kind of money? Bonus-baby money.”

“Easy. Who benefits if Twombley is suddenly dead?”

“Oh, the mob, I suppose. The Mafia or the Cosa Nostra or whatever the hell they call them these days. But those guys, they don’t need to hire a hick from the sticks. They‘ve got their own talent, guys with lots of experience. Specialists.”

“Right. They would not deal with a guy like Jack. I know that. Who else benefits?”

“I don’t know, Rolfe. You tell me.”

“Okay, I will. It is likely that there are people running the union who do not want Twombley to testify in Washington about connections between the union and organized crime. Twombley was the president, but his son-in-law is the vice-president and treasurer, and he will probably be the next president. I saw that in the papers. What’ his name, Mel Gordon?”

“Gordon, yeah. The guy with the BMW I told you about. I told you about him, didn’t I?”

“Yes. So listen, here is my theory. It is quite possible, it is even likely, that Twombley was unaware of connections between the union and the mob, money-laundering operations, say, where cash skimmed from Las Vegas or from drugs gets into the pension fund and then in turn gets invested in real estate deals, for example, or, what the hell, mutual funds. Sound and very legal investments. That could happen without his knowing. Until, prompted by a federal inquiry, he starts nosing around himself.”

Wade took another drink from the bottle and set it down next to him on the tailgate. He looked at me and said, “Toothache,” then lit a cigarette and stared out the open door at the backside of the house, where now and then we could see Margie pass by the kitchen window, walking from the sink to the stove.

Wade said, “So you think Mel Gordon would want to get rid of him, but he wouldn’t want it to look like a hit, a professional killing. Because that would only confirm the Mafia connection and make people dig deeper.”

“Right. But a hunting accident, now that would be perfect.”

“Yep,” he said. “I guess it would. It’s true, y know. Show a kid like Jack enough money, and he just might do something like that. And it’ obviously the easiest way in the world to shoot somebody and get away with it. Shit, in this state, even if you admit that you shot somebody in the woods, so long as you say it was accidental, you might get fined fifty bucks and your hunting license gets pulled for the season. Jack, fucking Jack. He probably claimed the guy shot himself, instead of saying he shot him himself accidentally, because it was the first day of the season and Jack hadn’t got his own deer yet and didn’t want his license pulled.”

“That, and his reputation as a guide.”

Wade laughed lightly. “I don’t know, Rolfe. It’s all a little too neat for me.” Then he turned serious again. “Nothing in life is ever that neat.”

“Some things are,” I said.

“Only in books.”

This was a criticism of me, I knew, the bookish one, as Wade would have it, the one who did not know about real life, which he regarded as his area of expertise. He may not have been to college, as he was fond of pointing out, but he had been in the army and had been a cop, and he had seen some things that would surprise you about human nature. Whereas I, by his lights, had lived a privileged and protected and therefore, when it came to human nature, an ignorant life.

“It is what happened,” I said. “And not because it’s so neat, but in spite of it. And I know you agree with me.”

He stood up and walked to the door and stared down the driveway past the house to the road. “You’re trying to make me crazy with this, Rolfe. It gets me so fucking mad, when I think about Jack shooting this guy Twombley, and Mel Gordon paying him for it, to kill his own father-in-law, for God’s sake, the father of his own wife — it gets me so mad I can’t stand it. I feel like hitting something, pounding the shit out of it. You sit there, calmly laying it out like that — I don’t know how the hell you do it. Doesn’t it piss you off?”

“No,” I said. “Not particularly.”

“Well, it makes me crazy. And I can’t do a damned thing about it. The kid gets to kill the guy, and Mel Gordon gets to buy the death of his own father-in-law, and that’s the end of it. Nobody gets punished for it. It’s not right.”

“You don’t care about that, do you?” I said. “Punishment?”

“Sure I do! Right’s right, goddammit. Don’t you care about that, about what’s right?”

“No, not when it has got nothing to do with me. All I care about is what really happened. What the truth is. I am a student of history, remember.”

“Yeah, I remember.” We were silent for a few moments. Wade sat back down beside me on the tailgate and took another drink of whiskey. The truck sputtered, and then the motor coughed and stopped.

“Out of gas,” Wade said in a low voice. He got up and turned off the ignition and returned. “Let’s go in,” he said. He sounded dispirited.

“I should be getting on home. It’s a long drive, and I have school tomorrow.”

“You coming in to say goodbye to Pop?” He lifted the chimney on the lantern and blew out the flame, dousing us in darkness.

“You think he will notice one way or the other?”

“Nope.”

“Then I’ll skip it.” I told him that I liked Margie, she was very attractive and seemed kind, and I suggested that he bring her with him the next time he came down to visit. He said he would and shook my hand, and I walked to my car alone. From the road, while my car warmed up, I watched Wade walk onto the porch and go inside the house, and I did not know it then, but when the door closed, it was the last time I would see my brother.

During the long drive home, I played back to myself that odd eerily lit scene in the barn, troubled by it somehow and feeling vaguely guilty, as if in an important way I had misrepresented myself. It was as if I had cast myself in a role that I was unsuited for, a role that was better suited for Wade to play, and in doing so, I had thrown Wade off his lines and intentions, had changed his motives and thus, to the detriment of the play itself, had affected his actions. It was a usurpation of sorts, for me to speculate with such bland confidence about the cause of Twombley’s death, and though I did not realize it at the time, by reawakening and giving a hard focus to Wade’s involvement with that event, I was sending Wade off in a direction of inquiry that he should never have pursued.

I know that now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. But back in November, the day we buried our mother and the night we dug our father’s truck out of the snow and stored it in the old collapsing barn, I myself must have needed Wade’s obsession with Twombley’s death, and I myself must have wanted Jack Hewitt and Mel Gordon, two men I had not even met, punished for killing him. I had no way of knowing what Wade would do with my highly speculative theory — let us face it, a hypothesis based on intuition and the flimsiest of evidence, fortified with little more than my pretended knowledge of how large unions function — but I did know that Wade would accept my version of events, that it would become the truth for him and that he would apply to that truth a range and intensity of emotion that was denied me.

That night Wade slept fitfully, floating in and out of dark dreams and barely conscious fantasies, and he woke gloomy, dour and in a hurry to get to work. He directed traffic at the school with impatience and a glower for everyone he saw, even the children. It was a sunny day, cloudless and relatively warm, but Wade held his head down and his shoulders hunched, as if pummeled by a northeaster. By the time he arrived at LaRiviere’s, he had fixed his mind onto a single question: What was LaRiviere’s connection to the killing of Evan Twombley?

Where prior to our conversation in the barn Wade had viewed LaRiviere’s uncharacteristic benevolence and sudden generosity with some puzzlement and gratitude, he now clearly saw his boss as behaving suspiciously. LaRiviere’s putting Wade on salary and offering him an inside job, and his somewhat unctuous presence at the house before the funeral and his surprising offer to be the fourth pallbearer, when, after more than twenty years of being Wade’s employer, he barely knew our mother’s first name — all that had struck Wade at the time merely as odd but, in a sense, typical: he was used to thinking of LaRiviere as odd. My conversation with him in the barn, however, had created for Wade a new order, as it were, a microcosmic system in which all the parts now had to fit, especially the odd ones, the puzzling and inconsistent parts, and to Wade, LaRiviere’s recent behavior was exactly that. A mere symmetry, a small observed order, placed like a black box in a corner of one’s turbulent or afflicted life, can make one’s accustomed high tolerance of chaos no longer possible.

Wade walked into the shop and saw Jack and Jimmy Dame ready to head out, the drilling rig loaded with steel pipe, gleaming and clean as if it were brand-new, straight out of a trade-journal advertisement. Jimmy was walking around the front of the truck taking swipes at real and imagined specks of dirt with a rag, while Jack sat up inside the cab, smoking a cigarette and reading the sports page of the Manchester Union-Leader.

“Put out that fucking cigarette!” It was LaRiviere from the office door, and his face was red and swollen, like an angry frog’s.

Jack grimaced, took one last deep drag and reached for the ashtray on the dashboard, moving slowly.

“Not there, asshole. Flush it!”

Jack swung down from the truck, saw Wade standing just inside the door and, expressionless, walked across the shop to the lavatory. Wade thought, This is a smart little piece of theater, everything normal, the usual craziness from LaRiviere, the usual surly response from Jack, who is probably half hung over, or at least trying tc look that way to me, the two of them going through their routines so that I will think that everything is normal. He could imagine them agreeing privately before he arrived: LaRiviere would catch Jack smoking in the shop just as Wade came through the door, and Jack would react with his everyday sour compliance.

Wade knew that somehow LaRiviere was a part of the killing of Evan Twombley. He had to be: LaRiviere was the one who had provided Twombley with Jack as a guide in the first place, and he had advised Twombley to go hunting on his land up on Parker Mountain, to use his cabin up there if he wanted, and when Wade had told LaRiviere about the shooting, he had acted odd about it, making Wade drive him up to the mountain lickety-split and seeming almost relieved when he heard the state police version of the event. For a second Wade entertained the notion that the police captain, Asa Brown, was somehow involved, but then dismissed it: he only thought it because he did not like Asa Brown personally and wanted him somehow involved.

It was harder with LaRiviere and Jack: in a way, he loved LaRiviere, had worked for him since he was a high school kid, except when he was in the army, and at times had thought of him as the kind of father he wished had been his, the kind of father he thought he actually deserved; and Jack he viewed as a little brother, almost, a man who was a lot like himself twenty years earlier — a smart good-looking kid with a brash sociability, stuck in a small town, maybe, but making the most of it. No, he did not want LaRiviere and Jack involved in this sorry business, and when he looked at the two men, the one blustering about cigarette butts and cleanliness, the other dropping his butt into the toilet as if dropping a coin into a fountain, he felt a form of grief, a turbulent mixture of abandonment, rage and guilt. Toward Asa Brown, however, all he felt was the all-too-familiar cold-edged resentment that insecure people feel toward those who humiliate them. No way that Asa Brown was involved in this Twombley business.

Wade said to LaRiviere, “Morning, Gordon,” and went to his locker and hung up his coat and hat.

LaRiviere smiled broadly, tossed Wade a wave and retreated to the office.

As Wade picked up his clipboard and inventory sheets and prepared to resume counting wrenches and fittings, Jack passed him and said, “I’m fucking out of here, man.”

“Catamount?”

“No, I mean this fucking job. This job sucks. Working outside in winter sucks. I’m fucking out of here.” He stalked to the truck and climbed back up into the cab, where Jimmy waited in the driver’s seat. Jack cranked down the window and hollered to Wade, “Open the garage door, will you?”

Instead, Wade strolled around to Jack’s side of the truck and in a smooth low voice said, “Why don’t you quit now, Jack, if you want out so bad?”

Jack sighed and leaned his head back against the seat. “Wade, just open the door. We’re already late, and Gordon’s got a hair across his ass.”

“No, I mean it — why don’t you quit this job? You‘ve got enough money now, don’t you? Head out to California, my man. Start over. Surf’s up, Jack, but you, you’re back here digging wells in the snow.”

“What do you mean, I’ve got enough money? I’m as broke as you are.”

Wade smiled broadly, then turned and ambled across the shop and hit the electric door opener, and the door lifted with a rattle and slid overhead. As the truck exited from the garage, Jack leaned out the open window and shouted to Wade, “You’re looney tunes! You know that? Fucking looney tunes!”

“Like a fox!” Wade hollered after, as the truck lumbered across the parking lot toward the road. Wade started to turn back to the switch, when he saw the familiar black BMW enter the parking lot from the road, and as the truck passed on its way out, the BMW stopped. The truck stopped, and Jack lowered his window again, and Wade saw him exchange a few words with the driver of the BMW, then move on.

Wade stood at the garage door and watched Mel Gordon park his car next to the building and walk briskly around to the open door, where the man saw and recognized Wade.

Their eyes met, and then (significantly, Wade thought) Mel Gordon looked away at once and passed Wade by. Wade turned and followed him with his gaze as he headed straight for the office door. The door opened for a second, and Wade saw Elaine Bernier, seated behind her desk, greet Mel Gordon with a delighted smile.

“Mr. Gordon!” she exclaimed.

“The boss in?” he asked in a cheerful voice.

“Yes indeedy!”

Mel Gordon turned and drew the door closed behind him, catching Wade’s glare as he pulled it to, returning it with a glare of his own, then slamming the door shut.

With a smile and a whistle, Wade punched the button, and the overhead door slid down and slammed against the concrete floor. His chest was warm and filled with what felt peculiarly like joy, the way it felt when he discovered Lillian meeting her lover in Concord. The world was full of secrets, secrets and conspiracies and lies, plots and evil designs and elaborate deceptions, and knowing them — and now he knew them all — filled Wade’s heart with inexpressible joy.