Affliction

2

LET US IMAGINE that around eight o’clock on this Halloween Eve, speeding west past Toby’s and headed toward town on Route 29 from the interstate turnoff, there comes a pale-green eight-year-old Ford Fairlane with a blue police bubble on top. Let us imagine a dark square-faced man wearing a trooper’s cap driving the vehicle. He is a conventionally handsome man, but nothing spectacular: if he were an actor, he would be cast as the decent but headstrong leader of the sheepherders in range-war westerns of the ‘50s. He has deep-set brown eyes with crinkled corners, the eyes of a man who works outdoors; his nose is short and hooked, narrow at the bridge, with large flared nostrils. He looks his age, forty-one, and though his mouth is small, his lips thin and tight and his chin boyishly delicate, his lower face, tinged gray by a five o’clock shadow, has the slight fleshiness of a healthy hardworking athletic man who drinks too much beer.

Seated next to him is a child, a little girl with hair like flax and a plastic tiger mask covering her face. The man is driving fast, clearly in a hurry, talking and gesturing intently to the child as he drives. The child appears to be about ten years old.

For anyone who lived in Lawford, the car would be instantly recognizable — it belonged to the town police officer, my brother, Wade Whitehouse. The child beside him was his daughter, Jill, and anyone would know that he was bringing her up from Concord, where she lived with her mother and stepfather, for the three-day weekend and the Halloween party.

And Wade was running late, as usual. He had not been able to start the hour-long drive south on the interstate to Concord until finishing work for LaRiviere (besides being Lawford’s entire police force, Wade was also a well driller, Gordon LaRiviere’s foreman). Then down in Concord, after stopping at the shopping mall north of the city for a Halloween costume that he had promised but forgotten to purchase and bring with him, he had been compelled — again, as usual — to negotiate certain complex custodial arrangements with his ex-wife, Lillian, after which he had to pick up a Big Mac, strawberry shake, fries and cherry pie to go for Jill’s supper, all before even starting the drive back to Lawford.

Now he was late, late for everything he had planned and fantasized about for a month: late for trick-or-treating with his daughter at the homes of everyone in town he liked or wanted to impress with his fatherhood; late for showing up at the party at the town hall, where, like all the other parents for a change, he could see his kid win a prize in the costume contest, best this or that, scariest or funniest or some damned thing; late for the sleepy drive back to the trailer afterwards, Jill laying her head on his shoulder and falling peacefully asleep while he drove slowly, carefully home.

He tried to explain their lateness to her without blaming himself for it. “I’m sorry for the screw-up,” Wade said. “But I couldn’t help it that it’s too late to go trick-or-treating now. I couldn’t help it I had to stop at Penney’s for the costume,” he said, stirring the air with his right hand as he talked. “And you were hungry, remember.”

Jill spoke through her tiger’s mask. “Whose fault is it, then, if it’s not yours? You’re the one in charge, Daddy.” She wore a flimsy-looking black-and-yellow tiger suit that Wade thought looked less like a costume than a pair of striped pajamas with paws and a scrawny black-tipped tail, which she held with one paw and slapped idly into the palm of the other. The bulbous grinning mask looked more hysterical than fierce but was perhaps all the more frightening for it.

“Yeah,” he said, “but not really. I’m not really in charge.” Wade worked a cigarette free of his pack with one hand, stuck it between his lips and punched in the dashboard lighter. They were coming into town now, and he slowed down slightly as they began to pass darkened houses. “There’s damned little I’m in charge of, believe it or not. It is my fault I had to stop for the costume, though, and we got slowed up some there.” He reached for the lighter and got his cigarette going. With the lighted cigarette bobbing up and down, he said, “I did screw that up, I admit it. Stopping for the costume. Forgetting it, I mean. I’m sorry for that, honey.”

She said nothing, turned and looked out the window and saw the Hoyt kids in a loose group on the shoulder of the road, making their disorganized way toward the center of town. “Look,” Jill said. “Those kids are still trick-or-treating. They’re still out.”

“Those’re the Hoyts,” he said.

“I don’t care; they’re out.”

“I care,” Wade said. “Those’re the Hoyts.” What he wanted to say was Shut up. He wanted credit, for God’s sake, not criticism. He wanted her cheerful, not whining. “Can’t you see … look out there,” he said. “Can’t you see that nobody’s got their porch lights on anymore? It’s late; it’s too late now. Those Hoyt kids, they’re just out to get in trouble. See,” he said, pointing past her mask to the right. “They put shaving cream all over that mailbox there. And they chopped down all of Herb Crane’s new bushes. Damn.” He slowed the car almost to a stop, and behind him the Hoyt kids scattered into the darkness. “Those damned kids tipped over Harrison’s toolshed. Jesus Christ.”

Wade drove slowly now, peering into yards and calling out the damage as he saw it. “Look, they cut the Annises’ clotheslines, and I bet there’s a hell of a lot more they done out back where you can’t see it,” he said, rolling his hand again, a habitual gesture. “And there, see all those smashed flowerpots? Little bastards. Jesus H. Christ.”

In front of the elementary school was a flashing yellow caution light. Wade had to steer carefully around the fleshy remains of three or four smashed pumpkins, hurled, surely, from a speeding Chevy sedan with dual exhausts.

“See, honey, that’s all that’s going on out there now,” he said. “You don’t want to deal with that kind of stuff, do you? Trick-or-treating’s over, I’m sorry to say.”

“Why do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

“Break stuff? Cause all that damage and trouble to people?”

“Yeah. It’s stupid,” she said flatly.

“I guess they’re stupid. It’s stupid.”

“Did you use to do that, when you were a kid?”

Wade inhaled deeply and flicked his cigarette out the open vent window. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sort of. Nothing really mean, you understand. But yeah, we did a few things like that, I guess. Me and my pals, me and my brothers. It was kind of funny then, or anyhow we thought it was. Stealing pumpkins and smashing them on the road, soaping windows. Stuff like that.”

“ Was it funny?”

“Was it funny. Yeah. To us it was. You know.”

“But it’s not funny now.”

“No, it’s not funny now,” he said. “Now I’m a cop, so now I have to listen to all the complaints people make. I’m a police officer,” he announced. “I’m not a kid anymore. You change, and things look different as a result. You understand that, don’t you?”

His daughter nodded. “You did lots of bad things,” she declared.

“What? I did what?”

“I bet you did lots of bad things.”

“Well, no, not really,” he said. He paused. “What? What’re you talking about?”

She turned and looked through the eye holes of her mask, revealing her blue irises and nothing else. “I just think you used to be bad. That’s all.”

“No,” he said flatly. “I didn’t use to be bad. No, sir. I did not. I did not use to be bad.” They were pulling into the parking lot behind the town hall, and Wade nodded to several people who had recognized and waved at him. “Where do you get this stuff anyhow? From your mother?”

“No. She never talks about you anymore. I just know,” she said. “I can tell.”

“You mean bad kind of bad? You mean like a bad man,I used to be? Like that?” He wanted to reach over and remove her mask, find out what she really meant, but he did not dare, somehow. He was frightened of her, suddenly aware of it. He had never been frightened of her before, or at least it had not seemed so to him. How could this be true now? Nothing had changed. She had only uttered a few ridiculous things, a child talking mean to her father because he would not let her do what she wanted to do, that was all. No big deal. Nothing to be scared of there. Kids do it all the time.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m cold.” She swung open the car door and got out and slammed it behind her, hard.

The town hall is a large squarish two-story building on the north side of the small field called the Common, where, even in the dark, one can make out the Civil War cannon aimed south and the block of red granite that the townspeople, after the Spanish-American War, set up as a war memorial. Then and after each later war they inscribed on the block the names of the town’s fallen soldiers. In the four wars in this century so far, fifty-four young men from the valley — all but seven of them enlisted men — have been killed. No women. The names are for the most part familiar ones, familiar at least to me— Pittman, Emerson, Hoyt, Merritt, and so on — many the same names one sees today on Alma Pittman’s tax rolls.

Wade’s name, my name, Whitehouse, is there — twice. Our two brothers, Elbourne and Charlie, were killed together in the same hooch by mortar fire near Hue during the Tet offensive. Charlie was on his way to Saigon and had stopped to visit. He wasn’t supposed to be there. Wade heard about it weeks after it happened, weeks after we heard about it at home. I was in grade school, the youngest of the five children; Wade was in Korea, an MP stopping fights between drunks in bars. He did not really believe that his two older brothers were dead, he told me, until sixteen months later, when he got home and saw their names on the war memorial by the town hall.

Wade had grown up looking at the names of dead men carved into red granite, seen them every Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day. Even playing softball on the Common in the summer league, if you played left field, as Wade usually did, you got to read the names carved into the stone. For him, when your name got listed there, you were truly, undeniably, hopelessly dead. Those were men who had no faces, who were gone beyond memory, forever, to absolute elsewhere. Even Elbourne and Charlie.

Outside the entrance to the town hall, a small group of people had gathered, mostly men smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices that went silent as Wade and his daughter walked from his car across the lot and up the path. The men faced him in a friendly way, and one said, “Howdy, Wade. Got you some company tonight, eh?”

Wade nodded and, opening the door for his daughter, passed into the large, brightly lit hall. It takes up the entire first floor of the building, with a staircase in the far left corner, a small stage at the rear and rest rooms on the other side. The unpainted walls and ceiling are made of narrow tongue-in-groove spruce boards, and the place smells of the forest and of the fire in the big Ranger wood stove that heats it. The wooden chairs that usually fill the room had been folded and stacked to the right by the door. Half a hundred adults were gathered around the room in bunches close to the walls, and the children, all in costumes and makeup, were in the middle, as if penned.

Picture, if you will, clowns, tramps and robots of various types and sizes, at least two pirates, an angel and a devil, half a dozen vampires and as many witches. There were astronauts and a scarecrow and the hunchback of Notre Dame, and among the younger children, the toddlers, there were several species of animals represented, rabbits, lions, a horse, a lamb. Most of the costumes were homemade and depended for their effect on the viewer’s willed suspension of disbelief — willed only for the viewer, however, not for the wearer of the costume, whose disbelief got suspended regardless of will, for all the children, clearly, were eager to be out of their child’s body, if only temporarily, and into a more powerful one. They smiled, sometimes laughed outright, looked through their masks and makeup straight into the eyes of adults as they never would otherwise and seemed strangely independent and sure of themselves and a little dangerous.

Standing among them, like a nervous ringmaster surrounded by small but unpredictable and possibly hostile animals, was Gordon LaRiviere, clipboard in hand, in a loud voice urging the throng of children to start moving clockwise in a circle around the room. A large beefy red-faced man in his mid-fifties with a silver flat-top haircut and tiny bright-blue eyes, LaRiviere, as chairman of the Board of Selectmen this year, was the costume contest judge, a responsibility he seemed determined to exercise with great seriousness and attention to detail, for he repeatedly called out the various categories, alerting the audience and engaging its sympathies, as the children began to march in a slow swirl around the room. “We’re looking for the Funniest Costume!” LaRiviere shouted. “And the Scariest! And the Most Imaginative! And the Best Costume of All!”

Standing near the door, Wade put his hand on Jill’s shoulder and nudged his daughter forward. “Got here just in time for the judging,” he said. “Go ahead in. Just jump into line. Maybe you’ll win a prize.”

The girl took a single step forward and stopped. Wade nudged her a second time. “Go on, Jill. Some of those kids you know.” He looked down at the tiger’s tail drooping to the floor and the child’s blue sneakers peeking out from under the cuffs of the pathetic costume. Then he looked at the back of her head, her flax-colored hair creased by the string from the mask, and he suddenly wanted to weep.

He decided it was because he loved her so, and then the impulse passed. His stomach fell, and his chest heaved, and he took a deep breath and said to her, “Go ahead. You’ll have fun if you just go on and join the other kids out there. See how happy they seem,” he said, and he looked out at the children moving in a thick slow circle around the room with Gordon LaRiviere at the hub, and they did indeed seem happy to him, a parade of monsters and freaks delighted to find themselves admired for once.

Jill took another step away from Wade and the adults nearby, several of whom were staring at her now, aware, of course, that she was Wade’s daughter visiting him for the weekend, an event that for the last year and a half had occurred on a more or less monthly basis. Lately, it seemed, folks had not seen the girl much, possibly not since the Labor Day picnic, when Wade and Jill had played together in the father-daughter softball game and Wade had to leave in the seventh inning to get her back to Concord by dark because she had school the next day — though no one quite believed that, since the Lawford and Barrington schools never started the school year till the Wednesday after Labor Day, and Concord was unlikely to be on a different schedule. That ex-wife of his, Lillian, was a hard case. Everyone in town thought so. She had always been kind of a hard case — uptight and fussy, one of your more demanding women. Snooty was how some people described her, even though she was a Pittman and had been born and raised right here in Lawford and from the beginning and up to today was clearly no damn better than anyone else in town. Worse than some, if you wanted to know the truth.

Of course, Wade was a sonofabitch. That was truth too. Pure fact: the man got really mean when he wanted to. Still and all, he loved his daughter and she loved him, and there was no reason why the mother had to keep coming between them like she did. Whatever it was Wade did to Lillian back when they were married, it couldn’t have been so bad, since she married him twice. So it was hard to say why the man deserved such shabby treatment, now that they were divorced again. He was a hard worker, a fair-minded cop who liked to drink with the boys down at Toby’s Inn, and a slick left fielder for the local softball team who could probably still play Legion ball if he wanted to. That’s what most people in town thought.

“I don’t want to,” Jill said. She continued to stare at the other children, ignored by them but rapidly becoming of greater interest than they to the adults who were gathered near the entrance.

“Why? Why not?” Wade asked. “Go on, it’s fun. You know lots of those kids, you know them from when you were in school here,” he said. “It hasn’t been that long, for God’s sake.” He threw out his arms, hands open, feigning exasperation, and laughed.

She backed up to him, as if into his arms, and in a low voice that only he could hear, she said, “It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I just don’t want to. It’s stupid.”

“What’s stupid? Sure it’s stupid. But it’s fun,” he said. “Jesus.” He looked around him as if for advice. There was Pearl Diehler and three or four others he knew well and a couple more he knew only slightly. There was probably no one in town that he did not know in some way or another—757 year-round residents and another 300 or so in the summer. Wade carried all their faces and almost all their names in his head, and he did it with a certain pride, making sure that whenever he saw new folks in town, at Golden’s store, say, or Merritt’s, he got into a chat with them, asked their names, found out where they lived and where they used to live, learned what they did for their money. He would forget some of that, naturally, but seldom the name and rarely where they used to live and never where they lived now and what they did for their money. Wade was smart.

Suddenly Jill was squirming next to him, trying to get between him and the door and out. “Hey, what’s going on? Where’re you going, huh?” He reached out and grabbed her arm, and the child looked up at him, facing him with her bulbous plastic tiger mask, looking frightened even through the mask, her blue eyes wide and filling with tears.

Wade let go of her arm, and she pulled it to her, as if he had hurt it. “I want to go home,” she said quietly.

He leaned down to hear her better. “What?”

“I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t like it here.”

“Oh, Jesus, come on, will you? Don’t mess this up any more than it’s already been messed up, for Christ’s sake. Now get in there,” he said, “and join the other kids. Do that, and before you know it you’ll be happy as a goddamned clam.” He turned her with the flat of his hand and pushed her slowly forward into the open area, toward the circle of children. Gordon LaRiviere had spotted her and was waving her on with his clipboard, drawing attention to her from all over the room.

Now, Wade thought, her friends will see her and will come over to her. Then she will have to join in, and she will have a good time and be glad that she is here again. Maybe she will even want to go to school tomorrow with the Lawford kids, instead of hanging around with him at work all day.

He had not figured that one out yet — how he was going to amuse her during the day while he ran the rig down in Catamount. Two weeks before, during one of his regular twice-a-week phone conversations with Jill, Wade had learned that, because of a local teachers’ convention, the Concord children had the Friday after Halloween off. Immediately, he had insisted that she come up to Lawford for the Halloween party and spend all three days of the weekend with him. But when Lillian had discovered that the Lawford children would be in school all day Friday, she quickly telephoned Wade and demanded to know just what he thought Jill would be doing by herself while he was at work. “You amaze me,” she said. “You keep on amazing me, year after year, the same old ways.”

Her demand had angered him, and he had responded by saying that he had it all figured out, damn it, so leave him alone, he was not required by law to account to her for how he spent every single hour of his weekends with his daughter. Consequently, it was only now, with his anger abated, that he was able to admit to himself that indeed he did not know what he was going to do with his daughter tomorrow. When she made herself happy with her Lawford friends tonight, she would want to go to school with them in the morning, he assured himself. Especially when she saw what the alternative was — sitting in the cab of the truck all day while he finished drilling a well in Catamount.

Relieved, he turned away, smiled down at Pearl Diehler and stepped out the door for a quick cigarette and a chat with the boys. From somewhere way back inside his jawbone, his toothache was giving him distant early warnings, and it had occurred to him that a cigarette might help postpone the onslaught of pain that he knew was coming.

There were five or six of them out there, a couple of women too, smoking and probably drinking: Jimmy Dame and Hector Eastman, brothers-in-law whose wives and children were inside. Also Frankie LaCoy, a skinny kid from Littleton whom Wade suspected of selling grass to the local high school kids but who otherwise seemed to cause little harm, so Wade was content to let it ride. Standing next to him was LaCoy’s girlfriend, Didi Forque, still in high school, but she had moved out of her parents’ house last summer, taken a job waitressing at Toby’s Inn, and now shared an apartment in town with the other girl here, Hettie Rodgers. Wade liked looking at Hettie, even though she was only about eighteen and was very much the girlfriend of Jack Hewitt, who worked for LaRiviere with Wade and was a damned good kid. Hettie had her own car and after graduation last June had gone to work as a hairstylist at Ken’s Kutters in Littleton, but she had continued to live here in Lawford because of Jack.

Jack Hewitt himself was coming slowly up the walk from his pickup, which he had double-parked directly in front of the building. He was a tall man in his early twenties, rangy, sharp-featured, some would say clean-cut, and intelligent and good-humored looking, with a reddish complexion and rust-colored hair. He walked with a slight hitch, almost a skip-step, which probably had started out as an adolescent affectation and had become a habit and made him look as if he had just played a practical joke on someone and was dancing sneakily away before the firecracker went off. In one hand he held what appeared to be a pint of whiskey in a brown paper bag. In the other he carried a rifle.

“What you boys up to?” Wade said, cupping his hands to light a cigarette.

“Same old shit,” one of the men said. Hector Eastman.

“You see some of that shit them kids got into tonight?” Frankie LaCoy asked Wade. “Little sonsofbitches been causing some wicked damage this year, I’ll tell ya. Jesus,” he said. “Little sonsofbitches.”

Wade ignored him. He did not really like LaCoy, but he enjoyed tolerating him. He believed that LaCoy’s talky servility was practically endless, and although Wade knew that eventually it could make the man dangerous, he enjoyed feeling as superior to another human being, especially another man, as he felt toward Frankie LaCoy, so he usually appeared to listen to him and then refused to acknowledge that Frankie had said anything. It was a pleasing form of dominance.

“You’re going to have to move that truck, Jack,” Wade said to Hewitt.

“I know it.” He showed the older man his sideways smile and held out the whiskey. “Take a bite?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Wade said. He reached for the bottle, put it to his lips and took a good-sized swallow. I need a drink, he thought. He had not believed he would tonight, but Jesus H. Christ, did he need a drink. That kid had made him all jumpy tonight. He did not know what the hell had gotten into Jill, but whatever it was, he had let it get into him too. It was only more of the same old stuff her mother had been putting out for years, he thought, and no matter where it came from, Jill or Lillian herself, it always had the same effect on Wade: it made him want to hang his head in shame and run. He said to Jack, “That the gun you were bragging on today?”

“No brag. Just fact.” Jack tossed the rifle to Wade, who caught it expertly, snapped it into his shoulder and sighted down the barrel for a few seconds. Then he examined the gun more carefully, turning it in his hands as if it were the corpse of a small unfamiliar animal. It was a Browning BAR.30/06 with a scope.

“What’d it set you back?” Wade asked. “Four fifty, five hundred bucks?” Jack just smiled, so Wade turned and handed the gun on to Hector, a towering grim man in overalls and solid-red wool shirt and plaid cap with the earflaps down.

Hector weighed the gun in his thick hands and aimed it at his huge distant feet. “Nice.”

Jack had taken up a position next to Hettie Rodgers, the girl in jeans and blue down vest who had been Jack’s girlfriend since the spring of her sophomore year in high school, the spring Jack got cut by the Red Sox organization and came back to Lawford and went to work drilling wells for LaRiviere with Wade. Jack slung his arm around Hettie’s shoulders and watched proudly as the men passed his rifle back and forth and examined it.

Wade studied Hettie, who seemed distracted, lost in thought, her long dark hair half covering her heart-shaped face. He might have been thinking that Lillian used to look like that, when she was a kid and she was fresh-faced and happy just from being present and accounted for when Wade was around. Lillian would stand next to him thinking God knows what, off on her own, while Wade and his friends drank and laughed the night away, and there never seemed to be anything wrong with it, so long as he pulled away from his friends when she wanted to go. Then they would drive home and after they got married make love in that first apartment they rented and later they would do it in the bedroom of the house he built out on Lebanon Road. Just like Jack and Hettie — who will head out of here in a little while in Jack’s burgundy truck for his parents’ place on Horse Pen Road, or else, if that kid LaCoy keeps hanging around here at the town hall with Hettie’s roommate, they will pop over to Hettie’s apartment above Golden’s store and make love there.

There was nothing wrong back then, nothing, or so it seemed then. And for Wade, looking back from a point twenty years later and then studying this young couple in front of him, it still seemed that nothing had been wrong. Those were wonderful times, he thought, truly wonderful times. After that, things all of a sudden started going wrong. They were only kids, he and Lillian, and they did not know how to repair anything, so when something in the marriage broke, they just went out and got divorced, and then came the army and his getting sent to Korea instead of Vietnam like he wanted, and all the rest followed — their getting married again, Jill, more troubles, getting divorced a second time: the long tangled painful sequence that had brought him, at last, aged forty-one, to where he was now. He was a man alone, hands jammed in pockets against the cold, while his only child, against her mother’s wishes, grumpily spent one weekend every month or two with him. The rest of the time his thoughts were mostly locked on his work, day in and out, drilling wells for Gordon LaRiviere — which he found boring, difficult and, because of the low pay and LaRiviere’s peculiar personality, demeaning — and being the part-time police officer for the town as well, which seemed to him almost accidental, an automatic consequence of his solitary condition and of his having been made an MP in the service.

Wade still believed in romance, however. That is, he had somehow managed to sustain into his forties a romantic view of love. Thus he looked back upon those few brief years when he was in his late teens and early twenties, when he and Lillian were happy just from being in the same room with each other, as the model against which the rest of his life had to be measured. And held against that warmly golden glow, his present life looked grim and cold and terribly diminished to him, and increasingly he found himself regarding men like Jack Hewitt — handsome young men in love with handsome young women who loved them back — with something like envy and, to avoid rage, sorrow. He had made the connections himself many times late at night lying in his bed alone — between rage and sorrow, and between sorrow, envy and romance — and he had tried to dispel his painful feelings by changing his view of love. But he could not. There was the love he had known with Lillian when he was very young, and that was perfect love, and there was the rest, which was a diminishment.

But by God none of that sadness kept him from being a good cop. Abruptly, he passed Jack’s rifle back to him. “Don’t leave your truck there,” he said.

Then he turned and went back inside, where he saw right off that LaRiviere had already chosen the winners of the costume contests and was parading them up onto the stage at the far end of the hall. People were clapping their hands, some more enthusiastically than others, for some were the parents of the joyful winners and others the parents of hard losers. Pearl Diehler’s daughter, the fairy godmother with the wand, was among the winners, but her son, writhing in agony next to Pearl and directly in front of Wade, was a hard loser. Pearl clapped with energy for a few seconds, then turned her attention to the vampire at her side.

Wade looked for Jill up on the stage with the winners. There was a boy dressed like a hobo up there, and next to him a clown of undetermined gender, and scowling and clawing the air behind the clown came a larger more theatrical version of Pearl Diehler’s vampire, and bringing up the rear, no doubt the winner of Best Costume, was a tall kid covered with feathers and wearing a huge yellow cardboard beak, a reasonably successful attempt to look like a popular television-show character.

Jill was not there, Wade observed, and he began to search for her in the crowd of children who had not won a prize. Most of them had remained in the loose circle LaRiviere had herded them into while he made his selections, but a few had wandered toward the additional amusements, the apple-bobbing tank, the long white table where refreshments were being set out, the ring games. But Wade could not find Jill anywhere among them.

Maybe she went to the bathroom, he decided, and he made his way through the crowd in the direction of the rest rooms to the right of the stage, when suddenly there she was, standing alone in the corner next to the pay phone, looking forlorn, tiny, abandoned. She had kept her mask on but had unbuttoned the top half of her costume, exposing the green-and-white ski sweater underneath, and she looked oddly disheveled.

At once Wade realized that he should not have left her alone without first making sure that she had found a friend among the kids, and he said to her in a hearty way, “Hey, sweet stuff! How’s it going? What’re you doing way over here by yourself?” He put his arm around her and drew her to his side and peered out and scanned the room as if looking for an enemy to protect her from.

“Some party, huh? Sorry I lost sight of you for a few minutes,” he said. “I just had to step out for a smoke. You find anybody you know here? There must be some kids here you used to know from school. They got school here tomorrow,” he added. “You want to go in with any of them? See your old teachers?” he said. “Want me to take you by? Be more fun than hanging out with me all day.”

“No,” she said in a low voice.

“No what?”

“No, I didn’t see anybody I know here. And no, I don’t want to go to school here tomorrow,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“C’mon, Jill, will you? You are home. There’s lots of kids you still know. You were playing with a whole bunch of kids Labor Day, don’t you remember?”

“They’ve changed,” she said. “They’re different.”

“Kids don’t change that fast. Any more than you do.”

“Well, I’ve changed a lot,” she declared.

Wade looked down at her. She was staring at her feet.

“Hey, what’s the matter, honey?” he asked quietly. “Tell

me.”

She said, “I don’t want to be here, Daddy. Don’t worry, I love you, Daddy, I do. But I want to go home.”

Wade sighed heavily. “Jesus. You want to go home.” He looked at the ceiling, then at his feet, then at his daughter’s feet. “Listen, Jill, tell you what. Tomorrow morning, you still want to go home, I’ll drive you down,” he said. “Okay? But not tonight, not now. It’s too … it’s too late, for one thing. Tomorrow, we’ll see. What the hell,” he said, perhaps warming to the idea. “I’ll tell LaRiviere I’m sick or something. He owes me one. Maybe we can find something to do in Concord tomorrow afternoon, maybe we can go to the movies or something. And if you really and truly still want to stay down there, then I’ll drop you off and come back up here alone,” he said somberly. “And we’ll just wait till the next time or something. Though by then it’ll be Thanksgiving …” He trailed off. “Well, anyhow, we’ll work that one out when the time comes,” he said, chopping the air above her head with his right hand. “Right now, okay. If tomorrow you want to stay down there in Concord, it’s okay.”

She was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, “I called Mommy.”

“What?” Wade stared down at her in disbelief. “You called her? You called Mommy?” He glanced over at the pay phone as if checking the evidence. “Just now you called her?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. Why?”

“I… because I want to go home. She said she’d come and get me.”

“Come and get you! Shit! It’s a damn hour and a half drive up and another hour and a half back,” he said. “Why’d you make her do that? Why didn’t you talk to me about it first, for

God’s sake?”

“See, I knew you’d be mad,” she said. “That’s why I called her to do it, because I knew you’d be mad, and I was right. You are mad.”

“Yeah. Yeah, right, I am mad,” he declared. “It’s … it’s spoiled,” he said. “It’s just being spoiled, this kind of stuff. Your ma doesn’t want to come all the way up here just to get you when you’re supposed to be spending the damn weekend with me. What’d you tell her, for Christ’s sake?” He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. “Jesus.”

“I just told her I wanted to come home. Daddy, don’t be mad at me.” She slowly drew off her mask and turned to him.

He said, “Well, I guess I am. It’s hard not to be mad at you, for Christ’s sake. I planned this, I planned all this, you know. I mean, I know it isn’t much,” he said. “It’s sort of pathetic, even. But I planned it.” He paused. “You shouldn’t have called your mother,” he announced, and he grabbed her hand and said, “C’mon, we’re gonna call her before she leaves.”

“No way, José,” she said, and she stepped back.

Wade sealed her hand in his huge one and pulled her toward the stairs and up to the long narrow unlit hallway on the second floor. They walked rapidly past the frosted-glass doors that led to the Office of the Selectmen, Office of the Town Clerk and Tax Collector, to the end, where the sign on the door said simply POLICE. Wade pulled out his keys and opened the door and snapped on the light. It was a small efficient cubicle with pegboard walls and a large window, a file cabinet and a gray metal desk and chair, with a straight-backed chair beside it. There was a locked glass-enclosed rifle rack with two shotguns and a rifle on one wall and on the other a geological survey map of the forty-nine square miles of Clinton County that made up the township of Lawford, New Hampshire.

Wade closed the door solidly behind him, flicked on the overhead neon light and sat down in his chair facing the desk; Jill plunked herself into the chair beside the desk, crossed her legs and rested her chin on one fist, as if lost in deep thought. Quickly he dialed the number, put the receiver tight to his face and waited while it rang. I will just tell her, he thought, that she should forget it, stay home, Jill’s only acting up a little because she has not kept up with any of her friends here and she is kind of shy and this is her way of dealing with shyness, that’s all. Simple. Nothing to worry about, nothing that was Wade’s fault, nothing to be mad at, and certainly no reason to drive all the way up here to Lawford, for Christ’s sake. She should stay home in Concord in her fancy new house with her fancy new husband and watch TV or something and forget about him, forget about him and Jill, forget about everything that had happened.

The phone buzzed like an insect, over and over, and no one answered, until finally he concluded that Lillian and her husband had already left for Lawford, and at once he felt flooded by anger, overwhelmed by it.

“She’s gone already!” He slammed the receiver into the cradle and stared at it. “Fucking gone already. Couldn’t wait.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all you got to say, ‘Yes.’ “

“Yes.”

“She won’t be here for at least an hour,” he said. “Think you can stand it that long?”

“Yes.”

“Well. Where do you expect to wait for her? Obviously downstairs with the other kids isn’t good enough for you.” Wade was locked into an old familiar sequence: his thoughts and feelings were accelerating at a pace that threw him into a kind of overdrive, a steady high-speed flow that he could not control and that he knew often led to disastrous consequences. But he did not care. Not caring was only additional evidence that he was in this particular sequence again. But there was not a damned thing he could do about it, and not a damned thing he wanted to do about it, either, which was yet a third way that he knew he was in this particular gear again.

“You can sit right here, dammit, sit right here in the office and wait for her all by yourself,” he told his daughter. “That’s fine with me. Dandy, just dandy. I’m going downstairs,” he said, and he stood up.

Jill looked toward the window. “That’s fine with me too,” she said in a low voice. “I can wait up here fine. When Mommy comes, just tell her I’m up here.” She uncrossed her legs and stood up too, and putting her mask back on, she grabbed the chair with both hands and dragged it over to the window. “I’ll wait here. That way I’ll see her when she comes and can come downstairs myself.” She lined the chair up against the window and sat down again, and with the mask still covering her face, she peered out the window into the darkness.

“Jesus, Jill, you really are tragic,” Wade said. “No kidding, tragic. Sitting there in your tower like some kind of fairy princess or something, waiting to be saved from a fate worse than death.”

Jill turned toward him and said calmly, “I’m a tiger, Daddy, not a fairy princess. Remember? You bought the costume.” Then she went back to looking out the window.

“Yep, that’s my doing, all right,” he said, and he wrenched the door open and stormed out. He slammed it behind him, rattling the glass, and stalked down the hallway to the stairs.

Passing through the crowd in the hall, ignoring the noise and the faces, the few waves and nods tossed toward him, Wade made his way across the room to the door. He arrived there just as Margie Fogg entered. She wore a dark-green down jacket over her white waitress’s uniform and was probably hoping to see Wade here. Not wanting it to seem so, however, to him or anyone else, she had come with her boss, Nick Wickham, despite his usual designs on her. The same age as Wade, Margie had been one of his girlfriends back in high school, before Lillian — though it was not until years later, when both he and Margie were married to other people, that they had actually ended up in bed with each other. They were old friends by now, however, and possibly too familiar with each other ever to fall in love, but in the absence of particular strangers, there were many cold and lonely nights when they depended on each other’s kindness.

She touched Wade’s shoulder as he brushed by her, and when he turned, Margie surely saw at once, as we all did with Wade, that he had gone to someplace deep inside himself, a place where he was kept from doing more than merely recognizing her. His deep-set dark-brown eyes had a membrane laid over them, and his thin lips were drawn tightly over his teeth, as if fighting to hold back huge and derisive laughter. Over the years, Margie Fogg, like many of us, had seen that expression enough times to know how to respond intelligently, which was simply to get out of the way and stay out of the way until he came looking for her again.

She pulled her hand back as if she had touched a hot stove and went directly into the hall, with Wickham coming along behind her, toothpick slanting jauntily from under his dark drooping mustache.

She should have known, she later told me. Wade was out of it that night, the way he can get, but with his daughter Jill in town with him, and with him stone sober, it was strange, and she should have known that something important had gone sour for him, one more thing, maybe the one that finally, truly, because of what it added up to, mattered in a way that none of the others had, not the divorce itself and all that ugly business with the lawyers, not losing his house the way he did, and you know how he loved that little house he built, and not Lillian’s moving down to Concord. “I just should have known, that night at the town hall. Not that it would’ve made any difference,” she said.

She reached across the table and took my fork from my hand and cut a bite off my slice of raisin pie and popped it into her mouth. “Sorry. I love Nick’s raisin pie. Let me get you another fork.” She laughed. “I can’t help myself.” She is a tall large-boned woman with a broad Irish face, downturned green eyes and pale skin. Due to her size, perhaps, and the suddenness of her movements, she looks awkward, but she is in fact uncannily graceful and a pleasure to watch move. Her frizzy hair is the color of cordovan, and she had it tied back in a loose thatch with a piece of black ribbon, showing to advantage her long and handsome white neck.

“No, that’s okay, we can share,” I said, but she got up from the table anyhow and brought a clean fork from the counter. We were at Wickham’s, and Margie had served me coffee and pie. It was a slow Thursday night, and I was at the moment the only customer. Wickham was out back in the kitchen, watching the Bruins game on a portable TV, ignoring my presence, by now used to my showing up alone at odd hours once or twice a week to ask questions of him or Margie or the odd customer, questions about Wade, about Jack and all the others, asking what happened, what was said, what was thought and imagined, asking what was true. Was it true that on Halloween Eve down at the town hall party Wade was acting strange? Or was he the same old Wade, all knotted up, to be sure, but no different than usual? How did he act? What did he say? What do you think he was thinking?