Affliction

19

IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT to imagine later how the rest of that night went for Wade: he left evidence behind him, a trail of sorts, and among the people he saw or spoke with that night and during the next two days (I myself turned out to be one of the latter), there was not much disagreement.

He made his way from the pond out of the woods by following the tire tracks of Jack’s truck in moonlight and, once up on the interstate, hitched a ride from the second car that passed him heading north. It was a new Bronco with a hearty pair of deer hunters from Lynn, Massachusetts, who had taken Friday off and had driven up after work, as they did every year, for the long last weekend of the season.They took him to Toby’s Inn, where they had reserved a room weeks earlier, which is how, with considerable effort, I was able to locate them down in Lynn months later and learn about the strange man they had noticed back in November standing on the shoulder of the highway, hitchhiking in the cold night in the middle of nowhere. He scrambled into the back of the car and shivered, and when he spoke his teeth chattered, and when they pulled into the lot at Toby’s to drop him off, he was still suffering from the cold, it seemed. He said little, blaming his presence out there on a car breakdown, and added that he had to meet his wife at Wickham’s Restaurant in Lawford by nine or he would be in big trouble.

The two deer hunters laughed knowingly, as married men will when another married man reveals his status in a way that makes a wife sound like a nagging mother and a grown man like a mischievous boy, and suggested that he join them for a drink at Toby’s, where he could phone his wife, if he wanted to, and have her pick him up there. They did not want his company so much as they wanted to ask him where the locals were finding deer this year: they came to the area every year to hunt and knew that the natives in these upcountry villages had a much better notion of where to hunt than they themselves ever could, but they did not know that such information never left town. Their view of country people was that they like to please strangers, which of course was flattering to themselves. I did not disabuse them of this notion: I was interested only in obtaining from them as complete a picture of Wade that night as was available to me, and the hunters’ high opinions of themselves, in spite of their eventual failure to sight a single deer over that long weekend, kept them from censoring their memories of their brief encounter with my brother.

He was not dressed for the weather, they thought; he wore no gloves or boots, but that was consistent with his story about his car’s having broken down and his having to hitch a ride into town to meet his wife, who apparently had her own car. He seemed more than cold, however, and huddled shivering in the back of the warm Bronco like a man who was terrified of something. Like a man who had seen a ghost, was the phrase both men used.

When they pulled into the parking lot at Toby’s Inn, a guy in a dump truck was plowing, and Wade ducked his head and turned deliberately away from the guy, as if he did not want to be seen by him. He hung back in the car when the others got out, and they thought at first that he had changed his mind about having a drink with them, so they asked him again to join them. He mumbled, “Maybe one,” and slowly got out of the truck, hunkering his head down behind his collar, as if still hiding from the man plowing out the lot, but then suddenly he said no, and without saying so much as thank you or goodbye, walked straight toward the plowman and climbed up inside the truck as if they had agreed to meet there.

What the deer hunters did not realize is that they had parked beside a burgundy 4x4 pickup truck, a fancy new vehicle with the rear bumper half torn off, and that when they went into the dark pine-paneled bar and restaurant, the young good-looking kid they saw at the bar, talking wildly to a couple of young women and two or three local men about some nut chasing him through the woods, was Jack Hewitt. Nor did it occur to them that the nut who had chased him was the gray-faced trembling man they had just let off outside. They took a booth, ordered “Toby-burgers” and beers, and studied with optimistic envy the stuffed and mounted heads of antlered deer and moose hanging on the walls. Tomorrow, by Saturday at the latest, they were sure they would have their own trophies strapped to the roof of the Bronco, racing back south to Lynn, Massachusetts, where they knew a taxidermist over in Saugus who could stuff a whole deer, if you got it to him quickly enough, could mount it in a lifelike re-creation of the way it looked at the very instant you shot it, hind feet kicking the air, white tail flagged, eyes wild with terror and pain, and you could put it in your basement recreation room if you wanted to.

Wade yanked shut the door of the dump truck and said, “You headed back to town now?”

“Yep. I’m headed to the shop. Want a lift to the shop?” Jimmy asked. He shoved half a cubic yard of packed snow hard against the head-high bank at the end of the parking lot, banged the truck into reverse, lifted the plow and backed away from the snowbank and stopped.

“No. Wickham’s.”

“Margie over there?”

“Yeah. And my old man,” Wade added.

“Thought he was going out with you in Gordon’s pickup.”

“She brought him in with her.”

“You cold? Heater’s on full blast.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Heard about you chasing Jack over-the backside of Parker Mountain.”

Wade was silent. He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. Then, like a child, he put his fingers into his mouth and sucked them.

Jimmy moved the truck out onto the road and dropped the plow again and headed south into town, scudding the un-plowed snow on the right lane off the road. “You got folks pretty scared, Wade. And pissed. More pissed than scared, actually. Jack, I mean he’s wicked bullshit.”

“I expect so.”

“What the hell did Jack do, to get you on his case so hard? He’s a decent kid. A little bit cocky, maybe, but—”

“He happen to tell you what he was doing up there tonight?”

“He might’ve. It wasn’t so bad; maybe just looking to jack himself a deer was all. Not something to chase him all over the damn county for. Considering.”

“Jacking deer, eh? He said that?”

“Might’ve. Maybe he was just checking tracks, for later. You know, when he gets his license back. He knows them woods pretty good up there; maybe he was just checking out some deer trails in the fresh snow, see if his big ol’ buck was still up there.”

“Maybe he was up to something a little more interesting than that.”

“Well, it don’t matter a rat’s ass to me. You’re the cop, you can do the worrying about who does what and where and when. All that. Course, it’s none of my beeswax, Wade, but if I was you, I’d cool it on Jack for a spell. Gordon’s going to—”

“Just drive, for Christ’s sake.”

“Okeydokey.”

They rode in silence for a ways, past the school, past Merritt’s Shell Station, and as they entered the village center, a few hundred yards from Wickham’s, Wade said, “Jack tell you about Gordon’s truck going through the ice?”

Jimmy whistled a single long descending note. “Well, no, Wade, he did not. He did say you was out on the ice, said he had to pull a fucking gun on you to back you off him.” He paused, then said, “Gordon’s truck went through, eh?”

Wade did not answer.

“Guess it’s still too early for ice fishing.”

“Yeah.”

“You know Gordon’s going to want your ass in a sling for this one. If I was you, Wade, I’d move to Florida. Tonight.”

“But you’re not.”

“Nope, I’m not. Thank Christ.”

“You think Gordon knows yet?”

“Wade, you’re the only one to tell it, and so far, it looks like nobody but me knows. Unless they heard it from you. Except for the business about chasing Jack around the fucking mountain, and by now probably everybody in Toby’s knows that part of the story. If I was you, Wade, I wouldn’t tell Gordon about this in person. Course, I’m not you. Like you said. But I‘d let him find out on his own, let him blow his stack for a while, and then come around later, when he’s cooled off some.”

They pulled into Wickham’s parking lot, where there were only a few cars, including Margie’s gray Rabbit. What Wade should do, Jimmy said, was stay out of sight for a few days. Don’t even answer the phone. He himself would go down and get the truck out of the pond in the morning. “Can I get in there with Merritt’s tow truck? If I can do that, I can put the winch on her and yank the fucker out from the shore.”

Wade said he thought Merritt’s truck could get into the pond from Route 29 on the old lumber trail. He would not have to come down from the top.

Jimmy said fine, he would break the news to LaRiviere himself, after he got the pickup safely into Merritt’s garage, and Chub Merritt would probably have it running by Monday. “Slicker’n shit. That Chub, he’s clever as a sheep when it comes to cars. Dumb as a stick otherwise.”

Wade had stopped trembling by now. “I guess I owe you one, Jimmy.”

Jimmy grinned. “I guess you do. But don’t worry, I’ll be putting my time in. Overtime.”

“Yeah,” Wade said. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t

it?”

“Nope. But it’s enough to think about, ol’ buddy. Keeps a fellow out of trouble.”

Margie was angry. She looked up at Wade when he came in, stared at him for a second as if he were a stranger who reminded her of someone she once knew, and went directly back to filling the napkin holders. Nick hollered from the kitchen, “We’re closed!” then, peering out the open door, saw that it was Wade who had entered and said, “Your father’s back here, Wade”

And indeed he was. The fire was in his face, and the small shriveled man was now taut and reckless with energy. Wade knew instantly what had happened: Pop had stopped drinking several hours earlier: no doubt, when Margie took him from the house and brought him into work with her, she had insisted that he leave his bottle of whiskey behind. Then he had not been able to locate anything more to drink at Nick’s, and because of the cold and the snow earlier, had been forced to stay there in the kitchen with Nick, and slowly, like charcoal igniting at the edges and spreading into the center, he had started to burn, and now he glowed red, as if he were indeed, as Lena believed, possessed by a demon.

He stood in the center of the small cluttered kitchen with a dish towel in one hand and a soup pan in the other, and when he saw Wade standing in the doorway to the kitchen, he waved the pan at him and shouted, “Aha! The return of the prodigal son!”

“About fucking time too,” Nick mumbled, swiping at the counter with a sponge.

“Look! I’ve got me a new job, second cook and bottle-washer, by God!” Suddenly Pop’s face went from glee to a sneer, and his voice switched timbre and pitch, hardening into a saw blade and dropping down a register: “So don’t worry yourself about me, you sonofabitch, I can take care of myself.”

“Jesus Christ, Pop,” Wade said. “Come on, let’s go home. I’m sorry, Nick, I got waylaid. My car—”

“I guess the fuck you got waylaid,” Pop said. “You follow your prick around like it was your goddamn nose. Don’t you? You’re a fucking hound dog, Wade. You always were.”

“Can it, Whitehouse,” Nick said, and he looked at Wade and said, “Get him the hell out of here, will you? It was funny at first, but I’m tired.”

“And let’s go home, you say, eh? What home are you talking about, my prodigal son? Your home? Or my home? Let’s have us a little talk about that one, eh? You been making some pret-ty sly moves lately, and don’t think I ain’t been watching you, because I goddamn well have been watching you. Your mother’s dead, Wade, so she can’t make any excuses for you anymore! You’ve got to deal with me now, mister! On your fucking own. Your mother can’t protect you anymore. No more sugar tit, asshole!”

“Oh, Pop, for Christ’s sake!” Wade moved toward the man with both hands outstretched, as if reaching for a small delicate thing in the air, and Pop leapt backward knocking over a stack of pans.

He laughed and stuck out his red tongue at Wade and said, “You think you can take me now, don’t you? Come on, try me! Come on.”

Nick moved quickly between them and said to Wade, “Let me help you get him out of here, so nobody gets hurt.”

Margie now stood at the door, her coat on, and she moved away from the door and held it open, as Wade and Nick each grabbed one of Pop’s flailing arms and scooted him across the floor and past her. Pop was shouting, denouncing Wade and Nick both, moving inside his body like a cat thrashing inside a bag, as the two men dragged the bag outside to the parking lot and shoved it into the back seat of Margie’s car.

“You better sit back there with him,” Nick said in a low voice, “and let Margie drive. He’ll cool out. Won’t he?”

“Yes,” Wade said. He reached into the back seat and grabbed both his father’s wrists, and holding them tightly, he climbed into the car and situated himself next to the man. “He’ll cool out when he gets hold of his fucking bottle. His sugar tit.”

Margie walked to the car from the restaurant, carrying Pop’s coat and hat, and as she passed Nick, he stopped her and touched her cheek and saw that she was weeping. “Jesus, Marge,” Nick whispered. “Get out of this. Fast.”

She nodded and pulled away, got into the driver’s seat and started the car. Inside, in the darkness of the back, Wade had clamped his hands on his father’s bony wrists, and the two men stared silently into each other’s eyes while Margie backed the car from the lot and headed north out of town. When she reached the Hoyt place and turned onto Parker Mountain Road, Wade leaned in close until he could feel his father’s hot breath on his face, and he whispered, “I wish you would die.”

The old man spat directly into Wade’s face, and Wade let go of one wrist for an instant and slapped him hard on the side of his forehead, then grabbed the wrist again. Margie shrieked, “Stop it! Stop it! Just stop it!”

And they did. They glared into each other’s face all the way home, but Pop did not struggle against Wade, who nonetheless kept the man’s wrists locked firmly in his grip until Margie had parked the car in the yard and had rushed inside the house. Then, finally, Wade let go of Pop — first one wrist, then the other, like releasing snakes — and got out of the car, walked up onto the porch and went inside, firmly shutting the door behind him. A few seconds later, Pop came in too.

Wade clumped up the stairs, saw that Margie had shut the bedroom door. He went into the bathroom. He peed, zipped up and then stood before the sink and washed his hands slowly and deliberately, lathering them gently with soap and warm water as if they were small dirty animals he felt tenderly toward. When he had finished and was wiping his hands dry on a towel, he looked into the mirror and startled himself with the image of his own face. He told me, the following morning, that he looked like a stranger to himself, as if someone had sneaked in behind him and got caught accidentally by the mirror. “No shit, Rolfe, I just glanced up and there he was, only it was me, of course. But it was like I had never seen myself before that moment, so it was a stranger’s face. Hard to explain. You fly on automatic pilot, like I was doing all night, and you disappear, you go off to God knows where, while your body stays home. And then you accidentally happen to see your body, or your face, or whatever, and you don’t know who the hell it belongs to. Strange. It was the business with the old man, I know, and how incredibly pissed at him I was, and also chasing Jack Hewitt like that, and then the goddamned truck going through the ice, not to mention Margie’s being so upset — one thing piled on top of another, until there I was, standing in front of a mirror and not knowing who the hell I was looking at.

“So I went back downstairs and saw that Pop had gone into his room and closed the door, and then in a sense I was alone in the house, which was fine with me. I had had enough of other people for one night. Sometimes other people are hell, pure hell. Sometimes I think you’ve got the right idea, Rolfe, living alone as far from this damned town as you can and never coming back here except when you have to.

“I got me a beer and stoked the fire in the stove and turned off all the lights and sat there in the kitchen for a while, trying to calm myself down a little, trying to forget about Jack and Twombley and all that, trying to forget about LaRiviere’s truck. I tried not to think about Margie, even, and Pop, I tried not to think about him. But in that house, where we were all raised, knowing that Pop was in the next room, it’s impossible not to think about Pop and about Ma’s dying. That’s the trouble with being in that house now. You can understand that.”

I allowed that I could, indeed, understand, but he did not hear me, really; he just rattled on. He had called me late in the morning, a Friday, which was unusual, and had caught me at home, and he was in a manic mood, it seemed, calling me, I surmised, because he needed to talk about all this and no one else would listen. I listened, and, yes, I did understand, for I myself have felt as he did then, although not in nearly fifteen years. But I could remember all too easily how it felt to be filled with strangely powerful information — dark fears and anger and dangerous obsessions — with no one to reveal them to. I remembered how it felt to look at yourself in a mirror and see a stranger looking back.

“Anyhow,” he went on, “I was sitting there in the dark, watching the fire glow through the cracks in the stove, you know how it does, and I suddenly remembered that summer when we didn’t have a water heater and had to take our baths in the kitchen, in that big galvanized tub, with water heated on the stove. You were maybe five or six. I think I was sixteen, because I was in high school then and on the baseball team; that was the first year I made all-state, and I got special privileges, so I could drive by the school and say I was working out and use the showers there. I think Elbourne and Charlie did the same as me, took their baths someplace else. But you and Lena and Ma and Pop, you all had to bathe in the kitchen so we wouldn’t have to lug big tubs of hot water up the stairs to the bathroom. The water heater was broke, or some damn thing, but we didn’t have enough money to get a new one till that fall, and I guess because it was summer and the house was warm, nobody really minded too much. Do you remember that?”

I had no memory of it, which is not surprising: the machines we lived with — water heaters, furnaces, pumps, cars, trucks and refrigerators — were always old and decrepit, held together with tape and baling wire, and were always breaking down, and we frequently got along without one or more of them for months before we had enough money to fix or replace them. As a child of six, I would have been neither inconvenienced nor thrilled by having to bathe in a galvanized tub in the kitchen once a week. A forgettable experience.

“Well, I remember one afternoon, it must have been a Saturday, because Pop was home and that was when you took your baths anyhow, and you and Lena had already taken your baths. You got sent upstairs, as usual, while Ma took hers. I don’t know where I was, probably working for LaRiviere by then. Yeah, that was the summer I went to work for Gordon the first time. Anyhow, it was just you two and Ma and Pop who were at home. And you got it into your head to sneak down the stairs and out the door, the door off the living room, without anyone seeing you, except Lena, of course, who probably knew what you were up to. And you tippy-toed around the outside of the house to the porch and peeked through the window there into the kitchen, where Ma was taking her bath. It wasn’t exactly innocent, of course, but what the hell, you were only a little kid. ”

I tried to interrupt him, but he just rolled on with his story, so I let him finish.

“Well, Pop, he must have seen you from the living room or something, because he went out the back door himself and tippy-toed right up behind you, while you were staring at Ma, getting a real eyeful, probably, and he reached down and grabbed you right off the ground. Scared the bejesus out of you.

“And the old man, he lugged you screaming back into the house, by the living room door, of course, and he whaled on you, he truly lost it. You were only a little kid, and he knocked you around like you were me or Elbourne or Charlie, although by then he had laid off those two. He just lost it. I came home later, but I didn’t know anything was wrong, except that you had been a bad little boy and were upstairs in your bedroom being punished for it.

“But the next day I noticed that you weren’t around for breakfast, and then later in the day it came out, what you’d done, and what Pop had done. Ma was as usual real confused and upset, and Lena was scared shitless and wasn’t talking, but by afternoon Ma was worried because you were actually spitting blood and breathing funny. It was obvious the fucker had broken your ribs or something. I told Ma we had to take you into Littleton to the hospital, and she said okay, but we first had to concoct a story about your falling from the hayloft in the barn. We told the doctor you’d been playing in the barn, where you weren’t supposed to be, and you’d rolled off the loft to the floor and had banged yourself against some old boards or something out there when you fell. I don’t think the doctor bought it, but he bandaged you up, and you were okay by the end of the summer.”

“Wade, I hate to disappoint you,” I said quietly, “but it never happened. Not to me.”

“Of course it happened! Why would I lie about it?”

“You would not lie, necessarily. But you have got the story confused somewhat. What you described certainly did happen, but before I was born, and it happened to you, not to me. At least, that is how I heard the story, which I heard when I was about five or six, from you, or maybe it was from Charlie or Elbourne and he was telling it about you. Yes, it was Elbourne — it was he who told me. And you are right about the broken water heater and the baths in the kitchen. I remember now that we were bathing in the kitchen the summer I turned six, the summer Elbourne had enlisted and was home after basic training before leaving for Vietnam, so he must have been twenty. Charlie was out of the house by then, holing up in Littleton, and you were working for LaRiviere. But it was Elbourne who told the story, by way of a friendly warning, I suspect.”

Wade interrupted and insisted that I had it all wrong: a person should know, after all, whether something as interesting and dramatic as being beaten by his old man and having to go to the hospital for it actually happened to him. And it did not happen to him, he said: I was the child in the story, not he.

“No, you were the child, although I was a child when I heard the story, and I heard it from Elbourne, who was hanging out upstairs in the big bedroom where you guys slept. It was evening, I think, not afternoon, and Lena and I had already bathed down in the kitchen, and I was in my pajamas, and I started to walk downstairs, probably to get a cookie or something, you know, when Elbourne caught me at the head of the stairs, reached out and grabbed me from behind and lifted me right up — he was huge, you know, way bigger than you or Charlie or Pop, even — and he carried me into his room, very good-naturedly, and teased me about sneaking down the stairs to catch Ma taking a bath, which of course embarrassed me terribly. Then he went on to tell me what had happened to you years before, when you were my age. The story was essentially the same one you just told, except for the business about the hospital and the lie told to the doctors — that bit about your falling from the loft in the barn. I never heard that one before.”

Wade said that he had never heard this one before and laughed.

“Well, I remember it vividly, because the story terrified me. Up until then I had only seen Pop get mad, or heard him late at night from my bed, going against you or Ma, when he was drunk, and I had figured that Lena and I were somehow safe from him, although I was scared of him, of course. I guess I thought that somehow the drinking and anger were a part of your and Ma’s relationship with him and that it had nothing to do with me or Lena. Not particularly intelligent of me, I know, but I was only a child then. So when Elbourne told me what Pop had done to you when you, too, were a child, I was suddenly terrified. And from then on, I was careful. I was a careful child, and I was a careful adolescent, and I guess now I am a careful adult. It may have been a high price to pay, never having been carefree, but at least I managed to avoid being afflicted by that man’s violence.”

Wade laughed again. “That’s what you think,” he said.

Then he changed the subject. He went back to the reason he had called me in the first place, which, as it turned out, had nothing to do with Pop or Wade’s misadventures with LaRiviere’s truck but concerned instead, once again, Evan Twombley, Mel Gordon, Gordon LaRiviere and Jack Hewitt — Wade’s hobbyhorse.

The next morning, shortly after seven, Wade drove away from the house in Margie’s car, gone at the usual time on a weekday to direct traffic at the school, as if everything were normal, in spite of numerous signs to the contrary: Margie either had feigned sleep or had stayed asleep when he had come to bed and had kept her back to him all night long, and in the morning, when he awoke, she appeared not to, and while he washed and shaved and dressed, she stayed in bed, head buried in the pillow. He had acted his part, not turning on the bedroom light while he dressed, tiptoeing out and closing the door quietly, leaving a note for her on the kitchen table when he left: I’ve gone to the school, borrowed your car, will check back later. Pop, too, had stayed in his room until after Wade had left. Pop’s habit was to rise at six, regardless of how late he had gone to bed the night before and how drunk: for Pop, there was now sufficient alcohol in his veins and cells that most of his acts had been reduced to the level of compulsion or involuntary reflex actions, giving, at best, only the appearance of volition.

At the school, Wade parked Margie’s car next to the principal’s, where he usually parked. Lugene said hello and nice day to him, and Wade, as always, said yeah and took up his post under the blinking yellow light in the middle of the road. The sky was peach-colored in the east, deep blue and starry in the west, with a light breeze in Wade’s face. It was going to be a fine day, clear and warm: yesterday’s snow had signaled the arrival of a front, and a high-pressure area seemed to be settling in for a spell.

The buses came and went, unloading their cargoes and heading back over the country roads for more. There was not much traffic otherwise: a few out-of-state cars with end-of-the-season deer hunters on the prowl, Hank Lank on his way to work, Bud Swette in his red-white-and-blue mail-delivery jeep, Chick Ward yawning past in his Trans Am, flipping a wave at Wade, Pearl Diehler, as she often did when she failed to get her kids fed and dressed in time, driving them in to school in her old rusted-out station wagon, smiling easily, naturally, normally, as she passed Wade. Wade liked Pearl, liked the way she seemed to be completely identified with motherhood: he never saw her without her two small children in tow. She was the good mother, to Wade and to most everyone else in town as well. Wade was feeling pretty kindly toward the whole town this morning: everything seemed to be operating on schedule and as usual, and he was able to fit his moves automatically in with everyone else’s for a change. It allowed him, like his father, both to act and to give the appearance of volition, without having to think about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You got yourself a computer, Alma.”

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

“No. Black.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There always has been,” she said.

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

to.”

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

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

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

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

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

“He was murdered.”

“Oh? Who did it?”

Wade told her.

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

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

“You don’t believe me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wade did not hear her and said not another word. He grabbed his coat and hat and made for the door without so much as a thank you. From the living room window, she watched him hurry out to Margie’s car, get in and drive off. It was the last time she saw Wade, she told me, and she knew that something terrible was about to happen, and she felt intricately involved in it, just as, by the time it happened, we all would feel.