Affliction

18

BY MIDMORNING, the sky had clouded over, and then snow fell again — large flakes, like bits of paper, that got smaller as the front moved in and the temperature dropped. Wade continued with the inventory, counting and listing fittings, pipe, tools and equipment in careful order — boring tedious work, much of it performed while squatting in front of undercounter wooden bins half filled with loose copper trees, galvanized ninety-degree elbows or brass gate valves. It was warm inside the shop, however, and brightly lit and, of course, spotlessly clean, and Wade would much rather have been here than down in Catamount, drilling a well in half-frozen ground. Which, without LaRiviere’s sudden and still puzzling change of attitude toward him, is exactly what he would have been doing.

Once an hour or so, he went into the closet-sized lavatory, shut the door and smoked a cigarette, and it was evidently during one of those breaks that Mel Gordon, having finished his business with LaRiviere, had departed from the shop: when Wade quit for lunch and walked out to the parking lot to drive over to Wickham’s, the BMW was gone and its tracks had disappeared.

He got into his car and turned the key in the ignition, thinking at that moment mainly about his toothache — promising himself, yet again, that he had to get the damned thing fixed, drilled, pulled, whatever the hell it took, because this was ridiculous, a grown man walking around with a perpetual toothache in the age of modern dentistry, for God’s sake— when he realized that he was getting no response from the car. He turned the key again, heard a faint click, then nothing, except the tick of the new snow falling on the roof and hood.

He hated this car. Hated it. He was supposed to be a cop, on call twenty-four hours a day, but he had to rely on an unreliable eight-year-old Fairlane with a slippery clutch, a throw-out bearing that constantly chattered and now, he was sure, a bad starter motor.

LaRiviere’s new Dodge 4x4 sat next to Wade’s car, and he decided to take it: what the hell, why not? Let the man show him just how far he could go. Pull his chain, rattle his cage, shake the man up a little.

He got out of his car and reached for the door handle of LaRiviere’s pickup, when he saw the motto OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! and as if Wade were programmed, old habit kicked in, and he found himself walking into the office to ask LaRiviere for permission to use the truck.

He told LaRiviere about the starter motor, it had been giving him trouble on and off for the last month, but before he had a chance to make the switch and ask for the use of LaRiviere’s own vehicle, LaRiviere flipped Wade the keys. “Take my pickup. I can use the Town Car; it needs some use anyhow. Tell you what you ought to do, is have Chub Merritt tow your shitbox in this afternoon, and you drive the pickup until he gets yours fixed. You ever think of buying a new car, Wade?” he suddenly asked, squinting over his desk at him, drumming his fingers as if sending messages through the wood.

“On what you pay me?”

LaRiviere ignored the remark. He pressed his intercom and hollered into it, “Elaine! Call Chub Merritt and have him come tow Wade’s car in and check out the starter motor.”

“What?” her high hard voice came back, the tone colored more by disbelief than by not having heard him.

LaRiviere repeated his order and added that he wanted Chub to bill the company for the job. “Consider it a company expense, Wade. Better yet, I’ll bill the town. We’ll charge it against the police budget. You ever think about buying a new car, Wade? You’re the town police officer, you know, and the town police officer ought to have a decent vehicle, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would.”

“Maybe we could sneak that through the budget next town meeting, a new car for Wade Whitehouse. Get you a full-sized Olds or something, or a Bronco, not one of them little K-cars that fucking Lee Iacocca makes. That guy gets to me, you know?” he went on, swiveling his chair around and swinging his legs up onto the desktop. “First he goes broke, then he gets the taxpayers to bail him out, then he comes on like Captain Capitalism, like he’s running for fucking president. Him and that guy Donald Trump. Fucking guys feed at the public trough, and when they get rich from it, they turn into Republicans. I always liked it that you’re a Democrat, Wade. You and me,” he said, smiling broadly and, to Wade, looking a whole lot like Lee Iacocca himself. “It’s good talking politics now and then. So what do you say, you want a new car or not?”

“Sure I do. What do I have to do for it?”

“Nothing. Nothing you‘re not doing right now, Wade. I been thinking lately, you don’t get enough appreciation around here, and it’s time we changed things a little, that’s all.”

“I saw Mel Gordon here this morning,” Wade said.

“So?”

“He say anything more about that summons I gave him? Tried to give him, actually. Sonofabitch wouldn’t accept it.”

LaRiviere sighed and furrowed his brow with large concern. “Wade, that was not smart, going out there right after the man’s father-in-law shot himself. Let’s let that one go, okay? Call it a favor to me.”

“To you? Why?”

“Mel’s doing some business with me. It’s nice to do favors for people you do business with. Besides, he was all upset that day. He was in a hurry, and the way I understand it, you were holding everybody up at the school. No big deal, Wade.”

Wade had a cigarette out and was tapping the end against his watch crystal. “That was before Twombley was shot.”

“Don’t light that in here. I’m allergic.”

“I won’t. Wasn’t that before he could have known about Twombley?”

“What the fuck difference does it make, Wade? Just lay off, will you? Try to be sensible, for Christ’s sake.” He shifted in his chair, brought his legs down and picked up a pencil, as if going back to work. “Look, take my truck, enjoy yourself, and stop worrying about Mel Gordon, will you?” He smiled. End of interview.

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 Nick’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.

Wade pulled back onto the road and slowly moved ahead and stopped just behind where Jack had been parked, illuminating his tire tracks and footprints with the headlights. He could see that Jack had gone beyond the spot twenty or thirty feet, had stopped his truck and backed up, and had got out and walked around on the side of the road by the snowbank. Very peculiar, Wade thought. What the hell was he looking for? Incriminating evidence? Shell casings? Was this the scene of the crime? The woods beyond the frozen marsh on both sides of the road were dark and impenetrable. Wade knew the land rose abruptly just beyond the woods and that he was in a draw between a pair of long ridges that ran off the mountain toward Saddleback: there was nothing to see from here, except woods, even during the day.

Puzzled, he put the truck in gear and drove on, moving faster now and not as cautiously as before, because he knew Jack had spotted him, although he probably had not identified the truck as LaRiviere’s. Still, Jack might be trying to elude him: there was no more reason for Wade or anyone else to be out here on a Thursday night than there was for Jack, unless you happened to be pursuing Jack.

Which Wade now knew he was indeed doing, pursuing Jack. He switched on the running lights and his high beams and turned on the CB scanner, in case Jack was using it— whom would he call? LaRiviere? Mel Gordon? — and pressed down on the accelerator, moving swiftly and skillfully through power slides on the curves, the plow blade rising and falling out in front of the truck, like the steel prow of a boat in a storm, when the road dipped and pitched and rose again, higher each time, as it neared the top of Parker Mountain.

It had stopped snowing altogether now — Jimmy was right: it was too cold to snow — and Wade could see clearly ahead of him. The tracks of Jack’s truck still extended out there in front of him, but he saw no lights in the distance: it was as if Jack had passed by an hour ago and not mere seconds; as if Wade were out here on the mountain road alone; as if he had made the whole thing up, had not seen Jack pass by his house and had not come upon his truck parked by the side of the road back there at the marshes, had not seen him hustle back into the truck and race away. There was nowhere to go up here. The road would gradually narrow, and just this side of the crest it would pass LaRiviere’s cabin. Then, on the other side of the mountain, where the land descended through dense spruce and pine woods toward a spatter of small shallow ponds and lakes, the road would turn into a lumber trail switchbacking down the mountain, connecting eventually to Route 29, ten or twelve miles south of Lawford, where the road crossed under the interstate through a cloverleaf.

A few hundred yards before LaRiviere’s cabin, Wade slowed and cut back his lights again, relying only on his low beams, and as he neared the turnoff by the muskeg in front of the cabin, the very place where Jack had parked the day he shot Twombley, where the ambulance and Asa Brown and the state troopers had parked, he saw Jack’s truck, backed off the road on the left, with all its lights out, ready to head out and blow by him. Fifty yards from the muskeg, Wade moved his truck over slightly to the left and filled the road, so Jack could not pass him when he pulled back onto the road — when suddenly Jack’s truck seemed to leap onto the road. But it turned the other way, toward the top of the mountain, full speed, with all its lights on.

Wade hit the gas pedal, and his tires spun, and the truck jumped to speed, and now the pair of trucks were separated by only a few yards, as they raced along the narrow winding road, up to the top of the mountain, flashing past the low stunted trees that grew up here, and then they were over the top, beyond the road. They were on the rocky switchbacking lumber trail, scrambling and leaping downhill, into gulleys and back out, lurching from side to side as the trail twisted and pitched through fallen trees and great heaps of brush. Both trucks were four-wheel-drive vehicles with oversized snow tires, their chassis kicked high with extra-long shackles, and they navigated the difficult terrain rapidly and with relative ease, though at this speed it was dangerous, and they had to dart out of the way as huge snow-covered boulders and tree stumps suddenly appeared out of the darkness before them. With the plows out in front slashing through the brush, the trucks lurched rapidly downhill, and soon they were in deep woods again, and the slope was not so steep. Where the trail switched to avoid a deep gully, Jack braked, and Wade clipped the rear bumper of Jack’s truck with his plow and sent the vehicle spinning to the edge of the gully. Somehow, Jack regained control of it, the wheels crunched into the frozen soil, tossing clods of dirt and snow into the air, and he was gone again, racing ahead, with Wade drawing up right behind, his plow just a few feet from the dangling bumper of Jack’s truck.

Then, unexpectedly, the ground leveled off, and the trucks were running alongside a shallow beaver pond, with sumac and chokecherry flashing past. At the far end of the pond, the trail swerved left, away from the beaver dam and the brook beyond, too abruptly for Jack to make the turn, and his truck crashed through a stand of skinny birches straight onto the pond, its momentum carrying it swiftly over the surface of the thick ice, its headlights sending huge pale swirls out ahead of it. Wade pulled up at the shore, and he watched Jack’s truck slide across the ice like a leaf on a slow-moving river, until it came to a stop halfway across the pond, facing Wade’s truck, with its headlights gazing back over the snow-covered surface of the glass-smooth ice. Wade dropped his truck into first gear, edged it to the shore, then down onto the ice, and slowly he drove directly into the glare of Jack’s headlights, drawing carefully closer as if toward a fire, until finally the vehicles were face to face, plow blade to plow blade.

Jack opened his door and stuck his head out and shouted, “You crazy sonofabitch! You’ll sink us both! Get off the fucking ice! Get off!” he cried, waving Wade away frantically.

But Wade refused to budge. Jack backed his truck away a few feet, and Wade came forward. Behind Jack, on the far side of the pond, was an impenetrable pinewoods; he could not retreat there. And he could not push Wade out of the way; both trucks were the same size, and neither had traction on the ice.

Again Jack swung open his door, and this time he stepped down to the ice. He was clearly enraged, but he seemed almost in tears with frustration, and he swung himself in circles with fists balled, while the ice creaked and groaned under the weight of the two trucks.

Slowly Wade stepped down from LaRiviere’s truck and stood beside it for a few seconds, watching Jack twirl in rage and pain. It was cold, close to zero, and a sharp wind had come up, slicing through the pine trees and over the ice, lifting the light snow into low swirling curtains, and Jack passed in and out of Wade’s line of sight as waves of blowing snow passed between them. He seemed to be clothed in gold, glowing in the strange vibrating light, there and then not there, like a ghost or a warrior from a dream, when suddenly Wade realized that Jack was holding a rifle. He disappeared behind another cloud of the windblown snow, and when he appeared again, he was aiming the rifle at Wade, shouting words at him that Wade could not at first make out — then he heard him — he wanted Wade to close the door of his truck and move away from it, to walk out onto the ice into the darkness. He cried in an unnaturally high and very frightened voice, “I’ll shoot you, Wade! I swear it, I’ll fucking shoot you dead if you don’t move away from the truck!”

Wade closed the door to the truck and backed away from it a few steps. The ice was dry, and with the snow blown off it was too slippery to walk on except with extreme care, and he moved slowly, gingerly, so as not to fall. Jack shouted for him to keep moving, keep moving, goddammit, and he obeyed, step by step, until he was outside the circle of light that surrounded the two vehicles. Then Jack climbed back up into his truck. Quickly he opened the window on the passenger’s side and switched a flashlight beam into Wade’s eyes. “Don’t move!” Jack shouted. “I’ll shoot you dead if you move!” He backed his truck carefully away from the other, then moved around it and drove across the pond toward the lumber trail at the edge, clambered up onto the bank, and was quickly gone.

Wade stood in the darkness, listening to the wind rush through the pine trees behind him and to the low rumbling sound of the truck motor, and then he heard a third sound, like dry sticks broken over a knee, the snap of the ice under the truck starting to let go. Instinctively, Wade backed away, until he was only a few feet from the shore, where he stood and watched the ice out in the middle of the pond break into thick sheets and huge tipped planes all around the truck, when, as if a gigantic hand were reaching up from under the ice and yanking the chassis from underneath, the truck sank, front end first, then the entire vehicle, descending slowly, as if through ash, until it settled on the bottom, leaving the top of the cab, the roll bar and the running lights exposed, silent but with the headlights still glowing under the water, as if a chemical fire were burning there.

In a few seconds, the lights went out altogether, and Wade stood on the shore of the pond in total darkness. The wind blew steadily from behind him, the only sound in his ears. He knew he was maybe four miles from Route 29, if he followed the lumber trail out to the road, where Jack had gone. He could get up onto the interstate there, and maybe hitch a ride back to town, and if he was lucky he would get to Nick’s before nine. A half moon had appeared from behind the clouds and seemed likely to stay and able to provide enough light for him to follow Jack’s tire tracks in the snow. Wade did not want to think about anything more than that, getting back to town, and for the next few hours, although his tooth ached and his ears and hands felt as if they had turned to crystal in the cold, that is what he thought about.