Affliction

5

WINTER APPROACHES THIS HALF of New England from the northwest. It blows down from Ontario and Quebec, arriving with such ferocity and stunning relentlessness of purpose that you give yourself over to it completely and at once. There are no temporary adjustments, no mere holding actions or delays, no negotiated settlements.

For the tens of thousands of years that these narrow valleys and abrupt hillsides have been populated by human beings, life has been characterized by winter, not summer. Warm weather, high blue skies and sunshine, flowers and showers — these are the aberrations. What is normal is snow from early November well into May; normal is week after week of low zinc-gray overcast skies; is ice that cracks and booms as, closer every night to the bottom of the lake, a new layer of water cools, contracts and freezes beneath the layer of old ice above it.

There are, as it happens, two crucially different climate zones that are divided by an invisible line running across New Hampshire, drawn from Vermont in the southwest corner of the state near Keene, through Concord in the center of the state to the lakes north of Rochester in the east and on into Maine. When, south of that line, in November and December and again in March and April, it rains, north of that line the lakes are still frozen over and it snows. The land is tilted higher in the north, is rockier, less arable, with glacial corrugations like heavy-knuckled fingers reaching down toward the broad alluvial valleys and low rolling hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut and the coastal plain of eastern New Hampshire and Maine. South of that unmapped line, the climate is characterized by weather typical of most of the northeastern industrial United States; north of it, the weather is typical of eastern Canada.

This has been the case since the autumn of the year of the first appearance of human beings in the region — late-arriving bands of Pleistocene hunters drifting south and east all the way from Asia behind the herds of elk and woolly mammoths — and it remains true today, so that, not surprisingly, the lives of the people residing south of that line from the beginning seem to have reflected the generosity and temperance of the climate there, while those who have lived north of it have reflected in their daily lives the astringency, the sheer malignity and the dull extreme of the climate there. It is the difference, let us say, between China and Mongolia, or between England and Scotland, Michigan and Manitoba: people adapt, or they quickly die. Or they move.

Thus, when in autumn in the town of Lawford the first ice and snow of winter arrive — usually in early November, sometimes even earlier — the natives, whether Pleistocene or modern, do not look up in surprise and dismay and hurry to prepare their houses for the coming season. No, they barely notice winter’s arrival. They barely noticed its absence in the first place. The ice in the deeper lakes did not break up until late April, and there were gray patches of old snow in the deep woods and on the north slopes well into May. The nights were not reliably free of frost until June, and then it returned by late August, when leaves of maple trees and sumacs near water turned red and birches turned gold. Every day long black V’s of Canada geese flew over, and soon the leaves of the oaks and hemlocks, elm, hawthorn and birch, were turned out in brilliant colors — deep red, flame yellow, pink, purple and scarlet. By the first week of October, whole long gray days passed without the temperature’s rising above freezing, while the leaves, their colors dulled by the cold, tumbled from the trees and swirled in the autumn winds, and stalks and reeds clattered in the icy clasp of the marshes and ponds, and animals drew into their caves for a six months’ sleep.

When the snows do come, it is as natural and as inescapable and in some sense as welcome as gravity. Starting long after midnight, a clear starry sky with a sickle of moon in the southeast fills slowly with low dark gray clouds, until the sky is covered from horizon to horizon and all the light seems to have been wiped from the valley, every dot of it, every pale reflection, every memory. The first scattered flakes drift almost accidentally down, as if spilled while carted by a high wind to somewhere east of here, to the Maritimes or New Brunswick: a single hard dry flake, then several more, then a hundred, a thousand, too many to be seen as separate from one another anymore: until at last the snow is falling over the valley and the hills and lakes like a lacy soft eiderdown billowing out and settling over the entire region, covering the trees, the rocks and ridges, the old stone walls, the fields and meadows behind the houses in town and out along Route 29, the roofs of the houses, barns and trailers, the tops of cars and trucks, the roads, lanes, driveways and parking lots: covering and transforming everything in the last few moments of the night, so that when at dawn the day and the month truly begin, winter too will have arrived, returned, seeming never to have left.

The burgundy 4x4 pickup driven by Jack Hewitt left Route 29 at Parker Mountain Road and lunged down to the narrow wooden bridge, where it crossed the Minuit River and headed uphill, through the woods and past occasional trailers, half-finished ranch houses and now and then, set in among the trees, a tar-paper-covered shack with a rusty tin stovepipe sticking out of the roof, a gray string of wood smoke disappearing quickly into the falling snow. The truck headed toward Saddleback, moving fast along the rough unpaved road, blowing high fantails of snow behind and kicking up loose stones and dirt with its huge knobby tires.

It rumbled past the Whitehouse place, the house where Wade and I grew up and where our parents still lived, crossed Saddleback and continued on to Parker Mountain. Seated next to Jack was a man named Evan Twombley. He was a large burly man dressed in brand-new scarlet wool pants, jacket and cap. He smoked a cigarette that he kept jammed into the right side of his mouth while he talked out of the left. It was a very busy man’s way of talking and smoking at the same time, and it had the desired effect: even when he spoke idly, he was listened to.

Although one could not be sure Jack was listening. His head was canted slightly to the side, a characteristic pose, and his lips were pursed, as if he were silently whistling and was listening to the tune in his head instead of to Twombley, who, after all, was only expressing slight anxiety about the weather and its effect on the deer hunting, and this after Jack had already assured him that it would have no effect whatsoever, except to make it easier for the hunters.

Twombley seemed unable to accept Jack’s reassurances. “I mean, it’s not enough snow, and won’t be for a while. Not for tracking the bastards,” Twombley said. “There’s no advantage there, kid. And it’ll be hard, you know, to see very well in the damned stuff.”

Three rifles, two with scopes, hung in the rack against the rear window of the cab, and all three swung and clunked against the rack in tandem as the truck dipped into a gully and out. The incline got steeper, and Jack double-clutched and shifted down, and the truck leapt ahead.

Jack said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Twombley, I know where those suckers are. Rain or shine, snow or no snow, I know where they hide. I know deer, Mr. Twombley, and this particular piece of land. We’ll kill us a buck today. Guaranteed. Before ten.” He laughed lightly.

“Guaranteed, eh?”

“Yep,” he said. “Guaranteed. And it’s because of the snow. We’ll be still-hunting, see, instead of stand-hunting. This here is your best snow for tracking, actually, real powdery and dry, couple inches deep. You don’t want no foot-deep wet stuff. Right about now the does are holing up for the day in brush piles, and the bucks’re right behind them. And here we come right behind the bucks. I guarantee,” he said, “this gun gets fired before ten o’clock.”

Jack crooked his thumb at the rifle hung from the bottom hook of the rack behind him. “Whether it kills a deer or not is more or less up to you, of course. I can’t guarantee that much. But I’ll put you inside thirty, thirty-five yards of a buck the first four hours of the season. That’s what you’re paying me for, ain’t it?”

“Damn straight,” Twombley said. He yanked the cigarette from his mouth and rubbed it out in the ashtray. The windshield wipers clacked back and forth, and large beads of melted snow skittered like water bugs across the wide flat hood of the truck.

At first glance and often for a long time after you got to know him, Evan Twombley gave the impression of being a physically and personally powerful man, and most people tried to give him whatever he seemed to want from them. Often, later on, they realized that they had been foolishly intimidated, but by then it was too late and they would have other reasons for continuing to give him what he wanted. He was one of those American Irishmen who find themselves in their mid-fifties with a body that, in its bloat and thickened coarsened face, looks large, bulky, formidable, when in fact it is a small body, even delicate, with fine hands, narrow shoulders and hips, small precise ears, eyes, mouth. Forty years of heavy consumption of whiskey and beefsteak can turn a dancer’s body and a musician’s face into those of a venal politician. That other, much younger man, the dancer, the musician, was nonetheless still there and was wide awake somewhere inside and making trouble for Twombley now by questioning the venal politician’s right to bully people with his loud voice, by mocking his swagger and brag, his claims of physical fearlessness, and finally making the loud burly red-faced man often come off as hesitant, conflicted, vulnerable, even guilty. In the end, although one neared Twombley feeling intimidated by him and wary of and possibly hostile toward him, up close one quickly discovered a fellow feeling for him and a genuine sympathy, sometimes a protectiveness.

Twombley himself, of course, knew nothing of this transition; he only perceived its effects, the most useful being that it gave him power over people: at first, people were afraid of him; then they warmed to him. In human relations, this is a sequence that invites dominance and creates loyalty. And in Twombley’s particular line of work — which, after a long careful climb from the local organizing level, had come to be that of the president of the New England Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, AFL–CIO — dominance and loyalty were extremely useful, not to say essential, for without them he would have been forced back long ago to working with the wrenches in the trenches.

The truck entered a flat S curve in the road, and the rear wheels broke loose, and the vehicle fishtailed from one side of the road to the other; Jack hit the accelerator and nonchalantly flipped the front wheels in the direction of the slide and anchored the truck to the road again.

“You done much shooting with that rifle of yours yet?” Jack reached behind him with his right hand and patted the stock of Twombley’s gun.

“Some,” Twombley said, and lit another cigarette and looked out the window at the spruce trees and thatches of cedar flashing past.

Jack smiled. He knew that Twombley had not fired the rifle at all. It was a lovely thing, not a scratch or blemish on it, a Winchester M-94 pump-action, a.30/30 with a custom-carved stock. It must have set Twombley back two thousand bucks. Ah, sweet Jesus, these rich old guys and their toys! Jack seemed almost to sigh, but he ended by pursing his lips again as if to whistle. Men like Twombley, over-the-hill fat cats, cannot ever truly appreciate the beauty of things that they can afford to buy. And the men who can appreciate a gun like Twombley’s, guys like Jack Hewitt, say, who can remember the feel of a particular gun in their hands for years afterwards, as if it were a marvelous woman they slept with once, will never be able to own it.

Next to Twombley’s gun, Jack’s new Browning looked utilitarian, ordinary, merely adequate. Yet to buy it he had been obliged to borrow money from the bank, had lied and said that the money was for his mother’s medical bills, which was true, in a sense, because he was still paying for her stay in the hospital last summer and the old man was still out of work, and if Jack did not take care of his parents, who would? He had bought the gun, and now he had yet another monthly payment to make. In addition to the $48 a month for the gun, he sent out $420 a month for his truck, $52 a month for insurance on the truck, $35 a month for the engagement ring he bought last May for Hettie, $50 a month to Concord Hospital for his mother, and $200 a month to his father directly, for household expenses and food, which was, after all, the least he could do, since, as his father had explained one drunken night — shortly after Jack went and ruined his arm and quit playing professional ball for the Red Sox farm team in New Britain, Connecticut, and came home to Lawford and parked his ass back in his room the same week the old man got laid off at the mill — there was just no way the old man was going to be able to support him. In fact, if Jack wanted to live with his parents, then he would have to support them. So that now, only a few years out of high school, where, because of baseball and his intelligent good looks, he had been one of the most promising Lawford kids ever to graduate from Barrington Regional, Jack was already mired in debt, a man who worked overtime to make enough money to pay interest on borrowed money, and he knew it, and that made a gun like Twombley’s fancy Winchester all the more attractive to him. He practically deserved Twombley’s gun. As a reward, for Christ’s sake!

Twombley shifted in his seat and rubbed his red nose with a knuckle. “You get me close to a big buck by ten o’clock, kid, there’s another hundred bucks in it.”

Jack nodded and offered a faint smile. A few seconds later he said, “You might not kill it.”

“You think so.”

“And I expect you’ll have to kill it, for me to get my extra hundred bucks, right?”

“Right.”

“Can’t guarantee that, you know.”

“What?”

“That you won’t gut-shoot the deer, say, or cripple him up for somebody else to find and tag a mile downriver from where you shot him. Or maybe you’ll miss him altogether. Or just spook him before you even get a shot off. It happens. Happens all the time. Happens especially with a new gun. You want a dead deer, not a live one.”

Twombley crossed his arms over his chest. “You take care of your end, kid, I’ll take care of mine.”

“Yep.”

“You understand what I’m saying? Like you say, I want a dead deer, not a live one.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Jack was not stupid. He knew what Twombley was asking him to do. Shoot the deer for him, if necessary. Discreetly. “Okay,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “No sweat. You’ll get yourself a deer, and you’ll get him dead. One way or the other. And you’ll have him by coffee time.”

“And you’ll get your extra hundred bucks.”

“Wonderful,” Jack said. “Wonderful.”

The truck crested the hill, where the trees had thinned and diminished in size, scrawny balsams, mostly, and low reddish furze scattered around boulders. Beyond the boulders was a shallow high-country swamp, a muskeg, covered with ice. Barely visible through the falling snow, at the high end of a short rise, was a log cabin with a low overhanging shake roof set in under a stand of drooping snow-covered blue spruce and red pine.

Jack slowed the truck and drew it over to the side of the road. “That there’s LaRiviere’s cabin he told you about,” he said, pointing with his chin toward the small one-room structure. “We can start a fire in the wood stove now, if you want, so’s it’ll be nice and warm when we come in. Or we can head out for that monster buck of yours right now. Up to you.”

“You’re a cocky sonofabitch,” Twombley said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You only got two and a half hours till ten, and you’re willing to waste time building a fire.”

“Just trying to please,” Jack said.

“Let’s get going, then. Forget the fire. I want to kill a ‘monster buck’ first,” Twombley said with a derisive laugh. “Then I’ll worry about getting warm.”

He swung open the door and stepped down to the ground and slammed the door behind him, while Jack stepped out on the driver’s side and started taking out the guns and gear.

“C’mon, kid, let’s haul ass,” Twombley said, and he walked off the road a short ways and stood, hands on hips, facing downhill along an old lumber trail that ran past the frozen muskeg several hundred yards to where it intercepted a rocky dry riverbed pitching through brush off to the right.

For a second Jack stopped gathering up the guns and his daypack and several pieces of loose equipment, and he glared at Evan Twombley’s broad back as if the man were his mortal enemy. Then his gaze dropped, and he went quickly back to the task at hand.

At dawn, just before the pale smear of first light, the deer had already begun to move, and they moved generally away from the roads and fields along narrow twisting game trails into the deeper woods. In twos and threes and even fours — a buck and one or two does and their fawns, though just as often a buck traveling alone — the deer fled rapidly away from the sound and sight of dark prowling cars and trucks that ground up hills and down, that bumped and lurched as far into the woods as vehicles could go, where, with headlights slashing the predawn darkness, the cars and trucks stopped and let the hunters out, went back and on to another place and parked and let more hunters out, until soon the woods all over this part of the state were swarming with men carrying guns.

As the snow fell, the men talked and sometimes called to one another across brooks and among the oak trees and brush. They laughed and smoked cigarettes and pipes while they walked in pairs along old railroad beds or, alone, set up hidden stands in fallen brush along ridges that gave a long clear view of a meadow and a copse of birch beyond or, ten feet up in an oak tree, perched in a Y in the branches, rubbed hands against the cold, poured coffee and brandy from a thermos into a plastic cup. It was as if, behind every tree, along every ridge, beside every stream, there was a man looking down the blue barrel of his gun, a chilled impatient man waiting for a deer to move into his sight. He saw it walk delicately, warily, through the curtain of falling snow. He saw it step from behind a fallen tree. He saw it emerge from a pile of dead brush into full view, where it posed for one second in the crosshairs, a full-grown massive male deer holding itself absolutely still, ears like dark velvety leaves, white flag of a tail switching, large liquid eyes brushed by long lashes and soaking in as much visual detail as can register in the animal’s brain, wet nose searching the breeze for scent that is not tree bark, pine needle, resin, leaf, water, snow, hoof, urine, fur or rut. Then, all across the hills and valleys, up and down the gullies and over the boulder-strewn ridges and cliffs, from up in trees, hillsides, overlooks, bridges, even from the backs of pickup trucks, out of brush piles, over stone walls, behind ancient elms — throughout the hundreds of square miles of New Hampshire hill-country woods — trigger fingers contract one eighth of an inch and squeeze. There is a roar of gunfire, a second, a third, then wave after wave of killing noise, over and over, sweeping across the valleys and up the hills. Slugs, pellets, balls made of aluminum, lead, steel, rip into the body of the deer, crash through bone, penetrate and smash organs, rend muscle and sinew. Blood splashes into the air, across tree bark, stone, onto smooth white blankets of snow, where scarlet fades swiftly to pink. Black tongue lolls over blooded teeth, as if the mouth were a carnivore’s; huge brown eyes roll back, glassed over, opaque and dry; blood trickles from carbon-black nostrils, shit spits steaming into the snow; urine, entrails, blood, mucus spill from the animal’s body: as heavy-booted hunters rush across the frozen snow-covered ground to claim the kill.

From all the corners and back roads of the district, huge lumbering pumpkin-orange school buses passed north and south through the town, then slowed at the town center, as if by prearrangement, blinked red warning lights and waited for Wade Whitehouse, standing in the middle of the road, to wave them one by one into the schoolyard.

Wade did not enjoy this part of his job — for one hour a day five days a week he was the crossing guard at the school — but it was required. Wade’s annual police pay, $1,500, one tenth of his total income, was a line item in the school budget that got authorized every March at town meeting. LaRiviere, who had been a selectman for over a decade, allowed Wade to come into work at eight-thirty, a half hour later than anyone else who worked for him, so that he could claim that he personally saved the school board the extra fifteen hundred dollars a year they would have to pay someone else to do the job if Wade had to be at work at eight o’clock. That way, the town was able to pay for its police officer from the moneys allotted to the school budget, and half those moneys came from the state and federal governments. Gordon LaRiviere was not selectman for nothing.

In the years when his daughter Jill was one of the children riding the bus to school, Wade had loved being the crossing guard. Especially after he and Lillian had got divorced and he moved out and he no longer saw Jill at the breakfast table. Every morning he waited out there in the middle of the road for her bus to round the downhill curve on Route 29, and when the bus finally reached him, he held the driver up for a long time and let all the buses coming the other way turn in first, giving Jill time to get to the window, so that she could see him and wave as, at last, he permitted her bus to pass into the schoolyard. Then he waved back and smiled and watched until the bus stopped by the main entrance and let the kids tumble out, kids alone, kids in pairs, little knots of friends, when a second time he got to see his daughter, with lunch box and book bag, silvery-blond hair freshly braided, clean clothes and shoes, red scarf swinging in the crisp morning air.

She always looked for him then too, and they smiled and waved their hands like banners at one another, and she ran with her friends around to the playground in back, happier with her day, he was sure, than if he had not been there to greet her. Just as, for Wade, those few golden moments every morning were the zenith of his day and colored his attitude toward everything that followed, all the way to the end of the night, and even his sleep was more peaceful because he and his daughter for a few seconds had seen each other’s faces and had smiled and waved at one another. Then something completely unexpected had happened: Lillian had sold the little yellow house in the birch grove and had moved down to Concord. And now the school buses only reminded Wade of his loss.

This morning, because of the snow, which had accumulated rapidly and was several inches deep and drifting already, the buses and the rest of the early morning traffic were moving with special care. Wade held them at the crossing longer than usual before letting them turn off the road into the schoolyard, giving the drivers extra time to see through the windblown snow and ease their precious cargoes, the children of the town, around each other and the occasional batches of kids who walked to school and crossed the road from the far side when Wade directed them to cross. Lined up behind the buses were cars and pickups with people hurrying to work and late-rising deer hunters. Their motors idled, windshield wipers clattered, and now and then, when a car passed him, the driver glowered at Wade, as if he had delayed them for no good reason.

He did not care. He was pissed this morning anyhow, and it almost improved his mood that people were mad at him. The faces of the children peering out the windows of the buses seemed to mock him, as if they were still wearing their Halloween masks — little demons, witches and ghosts. None of them was his child; none of them was Jill, eager to wave at him.

He made everyone wait, held long lines of buses, cars and trucks back, letting one child at a time cross the road as he or she arrived, instead of making a group of them gather there first. And he did not permit a single bus to enter the schoolyard until the bus ahead of it had unloaded all its passengers and had pulled out at the far end and was back on the road again, heading north to Littleton.

Now even the bus drivers, who normally acknowledged Wade not at all, as if the discipline it took to keep them from being rattled by the noise and play of their passengers kept them from perceiving Wade as anything but a traffic signal, were staring sullenly at him as they passed, a few shaking their heads with disgust. He did not care. I don’t give a rat’s ass you’re pissed, he thought. One driver, a flat-faced woman with red hair, slid her window open and hollered, “For Christ’s sake, Whitehouse, we ain’t got all day!” and the kids in the seats behind her laughed to hear it.

He heard the school bell ring and saw the kids come racing around from the schoolyard behind the low light-green cinder-block building to line up in messy formation, girls separated from boys, at the main entrance. The principal, Lugene Brooks, his buttoned sports jacket barely able to contain his round belly, his collar turned up, his thin gray hair fluttering in the wind, had come outside and was mouthing commands at the children, marching them inside like a drill sergeant. He glanced toward Wade, saw that there was still one more bus to turn off the road and unload, and he shouted, “Wade! Hurry up! They’ll be late!”

Wade kept his arms straight out, one aimed north and one south, with both hands up. Motionless, expressionless, he held his post in the middle of the road. The yellow caution light directly over his head blinked and bobbed on its wire, and the remnants of last night’s smashed pumpkins, half covered by snow and slush, lay scattered at his feet. He looked like a demented scarecrow.

He felt like a statue, however: a man made of stone, unable to bring his arms down or force his legs to walk, unable to release the one remaining school bus and the dozens of vehicles lined up behind it and the dozen more facing it. Someone way in the back hit his horn, and at once most of the others joined in, and even the bus driver was blowing his horn. But still Wade held his arms out and did not let anyone pass.

He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus. Simple. It was his only thought. Oh, how he wanted to see his daughter’s face. He longed to look over as the vehicle passed and see Jill’s pale face peer out the window at him, the palms of her hands pressed against the glass, ready to wave to him. Daddy!Daddy, here I am!

He knew, of course, that she would not be there, knew that he would see instead some other man’s child staring at him. And so he refused to allow the bus to move at all. To release that one remaining bus and all the cars and trucks lined up behind and in front of it, horns blaring, windows rolled down and drivers hollering and gesturing angrily at him, to let them pass, would instantly transform his desire to see his daughter into simple loss of his daughter. Somehow he understood that the pain of enduring a frustrated desire was easier to bear than the pain of facing one more time this ultimate loss. He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus; it was his only thought.

Then suddenly, from near the end of the long line behind the bus, a glossy black BMW sedan nosed into the second lane and started coming forward, passing the other cars and trucks and gaining speed as it approached Wade. There was a man driving and beside him a woman in a fur coat and in back a pair of small children, boys, staring over their parents’ shoulders at Wade, who behaved as if he did not see them at all or as if he fully expected the BMW to come to an abrupt stop when it drew abreast of the bus.

But it did not. The BMW accelerated, changing gears as it flew past Wade and on down the road and disappeared around the bend beyond the Common. Wade still did not move. As if the flight of the black BMW had been a countermanding signal to the signal Wade’s position and posture gave, the last yellow schoolbus drew quickly off the road and entered the schoolyard, and at once the rest of the cars began to move again, north and south, passing Wade on both sides.

Slowly his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood there starkly alone in the exact center of the road. It was only after all the vehicles had passed him by and the road was once again empty and the bus had unloaded the thirty or forty children it carried and had pulled out of the schoolyard and headed back toward Littleton that Wade himself departed from the road. He walked slowly in the blowing snow toward his own car, which was parked just beyond the main entrance to the school.

Standing at the door to the schoolhouse was Lugene Brooks, his arms folded over his chest more as protection against the cold and snow than as a gesture of disapproval, his round face, as usual, puzzled and anxious. Wade walked heavily past the man without acknowledging him and yanked open the car door.

“Are you okay, Wade?” Brooks called to him. “What was the matter out there? Why were you holding everyone up?”

Wade got in and slammed the car door and started the motor. Then he backed up a few feet and rolled the window down and shouted, “That sonofabitch in the BMW, he could’ve killed somebody.”

“Yes. Yes, he could have.” The principal paused. “Did you get his number?” he asked.

“I know who it is.”

“Good!” the principal exclaimed. Then he said, “I still don’t understand—”

“I’m going to nail that bastard,” Wade muttered.

“Who … who was it?”

“It was Mel Gordon. From Boston. Evan Twombley’s fucking son-in-law — he was the one driving. I know where they’re headed, too. Up the lake, Agaway. Up here for the weekend, probably. The old man’s out deer hunting with Jack Hewitt, so they probably got a big weekend party planned,” he said. “Oh, I’m gonna nail the bastard, though. Spoil his fucking weekend for him.”

“Good. Good for you, Wade. Well …, ” Brooks said, stepping halfway inside the school. “I’m the guy who’s got to make things run around here, so I better hop to it.” He smiled apologetically.

Wade stared at him, remaining silent, so the principal said, “I was just wondering … you know, about why the big holdup out there, why you were keeping everybody stopped like that. You know?” He smiled feebly.

“You probably think I got an answer for that question,” Wade growled. “You ask more dumb questions than anybody in town.”

“Well, yes. No, I mean. It just… seemed odd, you know. I figured, holding the bus like that and all the cars, you’d had a reason for it. You know.”

“Yeah,” Wade said. “It’s logical for me to have a logical reason for things. Everybody else I know does. You, for instance. You got a logical reason for everything you do?” he suddenly asked the principal. “Do you?”

“Well, no … not really. Not everything, I mean.”

“There you go,” Wade said, and he quickly closed the car window and started moving away.

He left the schoolyard and turned right onto the road, flipped on the CB and started listening to the squawks coming in from all over — truckers out on 1-95, hunters up in the hills plotting their coordinates, a wife in Easton telling her husband he forgot his lunch bag. The snow was coming down with fury, in white fists, and as he drove slowly through the stuff, Wade thought, I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it.

In the lot outside Wickham’s Restaurant, a half-dozen pickup trucks and as many cars were parked side by side. The corpses of large male deer were lashed to front fenders, slung onto roof racks, stretched out in the corrugated beds, carcasses gutted and stiffening in the cold, tongues flopping from bloody mouths, fur riffling in the light breeze, snowflakes catching in eyelashes. It gave the impression not of the aftermath of a successful hunt but of a brief morning respite in an ongoing war, as if the bodies of the deer were not chunks of meat but trophies, were proof of individual acts of bravery, dramatic evidence of the tribe’s rage, courage and righteousness and a cruel warning to those of the enemy who still lived. Counting coup. One half expected to see the antlered heads of the slain deer severed roughly from the bodies and stuck onto poles tied to the rear bumpers of the vehicles. One expected crow feathers tipped in blood.

Out on the highway, cars with out-of-state plates hurried south with the trophies on the roof and lashed to the front fender freezing solid in the wind, the drivers and passengers passing a bottle back and forth while they whooped and detailed in compulsive repetition the story of the kill. And in Lawford, in backyards, deer hung from makeshift gallows, in dark barns on meat hooks, in garages from winch chains or rope tied to I beams; and behind fogged-over kitchen windows, hunters shucked their coats and boots and sat down to tables and ate hearty breakfasts, eggs and bacon, pancakes smeared with butter and covered with maple syrup, huge steaming mugs of coffee: men and women, their blood running, excited in ancient ways, proud and relieved and suddenly ravenous for food.

Jack led the way from the truck onto the flat beside the road, circled the frozen patch of high-country marsh, then angled left on the sloping lumber trail, over rocks and low brush. Immediately, Jack started playing his gaze back and forth across the rough snow-covered ground in front of him, searching for tracks and sign. Whenever Twombley, wrapped like a huge infant in red bunting, trundled close and attempted to come up alongside him, Jack seemed to walk a little faster and put the man behind him again.

He moved smoothly, a natural athlete, long-legged, broad-shouldered, lean and loose — a ballplayer. “I’m a ballplayer,” he always said, “no matter what else I ever do.” He never said “baseball player” or even “pitcher,” and in fact he had been slightly disappointed when the Red Sox turned out to be the only team that wanted to sign him, despite the fact that since early childhood the Sox had been his favorite team, because that meant the American League and the designated-hitter rule: as a pitcher, if he ever made the majors, he would not be allowed to hit. And back in those days he fully expected to make the majors. Everybody in town and even across the state and into Massachusetts expected the kid Jack Hewitt from a hill-country village in New Hampshire to make the majors. “No way that kid won’t be pitching in Fenway a couple years from now,” people said when Jack with his big-league fastball was drafted in his senior year of high school. “No fucking way. The best ballplayer to come out of New Hampshire since Carlton Fisk.” People thought he even looked a little like Fisk, square-jawed and nobly constructed in all the ways an unformed boy of eighteen can be said to be constructed — the kind of boy a town is proud to send out into the world.

The world in this case turned out to be New Britain, Connecticut, but after a season and a half playing double A ball, Jack was back in Lawford, unable to lift his right hand above his right shoulder, where he wore two long white scars that Hettie Rodgers loved to touch with her tongue. Beneath the scars he wore a ruined rotator cuff, ruined, he liked to say, by trying to do what man was not meant to do, throw a slider, and by surgical attempts to repair the damage.

He did not complain, though. At least he had a shot at the big time, right? Most guys never even got that far. He knew lots of pitchers in the minors who had ruined their arms the first year or two, so he did not feel especially unlucky. His story was not all that unusual. Not for someone who had got as close to the big time as he did. That was the unusual story, he felt, getting as close as he did in the first place. More worldly than his neighbors, he took the statistical view and gained comfort from it.

Or so it seemed. Every once in a while, his disappointment and frustration would break through with the force of grief and rage, and he’d find himself beer drunk and weeping in Hettie Rodgers’s arms, crying into her soft white neck ridiculous things, like, “Why did my fucking arm have to be the one to go? Why couldn’t I be like those other guys who’re pitching in Fenway, for Christ’s sake? I was as good as those fucking guys! I was!”

Then the next day, after digging wells with Wade all day for Gordon LaRiviere, he would land back at his stand at Toby’s Inn, watching the game on the TV above the bar with the regulars and explaining the finer points of the game, dropping bits of gossip and rumor about Oil Can Boyd, Roger Clemens and Bruce Hurst, guys he’d known and pitched against in the minors, diagramming on a napkin the difference between hit and run and run and hit, anticipating managerial moves with an accuracy and alacrity that pleased everyone who heard him, made them proud to know him. “That Jack Hewitt, he’s fucking amazing. Only difference between him and that guy Clemens up there on the TV is luck. That’s all, shit luck.”

Slipping and sliding downhill behind Jack came Evan Twombley, carrying his rifle, lugging it first with his right hand, then with his left, sticking one hand and then the other out for balance as he tried to follow Jack’s footsteps in the snow and tripped on a rock or a slick piece of trash wood. Finally, he slung the rifle over his shoulder, like an infantryman, and used both arms for balance. Overweight, out of shape, he was soon puffing and red-faced from the effort of keeping up with the younger man; he began to curse. “Sonofabitch, where the fuck’s he think he’s going, a goddamn party?”

When Jack had eased twenty yards ahead of Twombley and had actually disappeared from view around a stand of low spruce trees, Twombley hollered at him, “Hey, Hewitt! Slow the fuck down!”

Jack stopped and turned and waited for the man. A look of disgust crept across his face, but when Twombley came lurching awkwardly around the spruce trees, Jack smiled easily and in a soft voice said, “Deer’s got ears too, you know.” The falling snow spread like a veil between them, billowing from the wind, and Twombley might have looked like a fat red ghost approaching. As if suddenly frightened by him, Jack turned and moved on, a little slower now than earlier, but keeping the distance between them constant.

They were switchbacking down the north slope of Parker Mountain, walking in the direction of Lake Minuit through woods that were lumbered out five or six years before, past stumps and piles of old brush among young pine and spruce trees. The sky seemed huge and low, smoky gray and spewing white ash over the valley. Now and then the sound of gunfire from below drifted all the way up the long tangled side of the mountain, as if skirmishes were being fought down there, isolated mopping-up actions and occasional sniper fire. Out in the open now, they could see in the distance the oval shape of the frozen lake, a white disk with a crystallized roughening at the farther edge that was LaRiviere’s trailer park, as Jack thought of it, where Wade Whitehouse lived.

Jack liked Wade. Most everybody liked Wade. Not the way everybody liked Jack, of course, but Wade was twenty years older than Jack, and he had a reputation around town as a man who was dangerous when he was drunk, a reputation Jack knew the man deserved. He had seen Wade clock a few guys himself, and he had heard stories about him that went all the way back to when Wade was in high school, before he tried to go to Vietnam like his brothers but got sent to Korea instead, which people said really pissed him off. People liked to say, “If you rub his hair the wrong way, Wade Whitehouse can turn into a sonofabitch,” which is probably why he got made an MP after the army gave him their aptitude tests. Wade had an aptitude for being polecat mean.

Even so, Jack liked Wade — or, more accurately, he was drawn to him. He watched him closely, knew at all times where in the room he was standing, who in the crowd he was talking to, almost as if Wade were someone’s wife Jack was attracted to. He liked the slight feeling of danger he got when he was around Wade, even though the idea of ending up in your forties living a life like Wade’s made him shudder and avert his gaze and go quickly back to talking about baseball. Jesus! A smart good-looking guy like that, living all alone out there by the lake in a rusted-out trailer, busting his butt digging wells for Gordon LaRiviere and working as a part-time cop for the town, drinking beer and brawling with the boys on Saturday nights and copping a quick Sunday fuck off some sad lonely lady like Margie Fogg — that was not the life Jack Hewitt planned to live. No way!

He came to a halt at the edge of a steep incline that fell away to a branch of the old lumber trail and a half-overgrown field of scree, the remnants of a spring mud slide. Beyond the lumpy swatch of boulders the forest resumed. The wind that had blown steadily in his face all the way downhill from the truck shifted slightly and cast the sheet of snow briefly aside, and from where Jack stood, up there on the lip of the incline, he could see across the tops of the trees, mostly hardwoods now, oak and maple, down the side of the mountain and through the dip in Saddleback all the way to Lawford, identifiable among the distant trees by the spire of the Congregational church and the roof of the town hall. Jack stared at the town, at the place in the landscape where he knew the town lay, as if searching for his own house, then inhaled and exhaled deeply, and when the wind resumed blowing in his face and the curtain closed, he turned and faced Twombley, who had finally caught up with him.

Scowling and out of breath, the man was about to speak, when Jack raised a finger and silenced him. He whispered, “Stay here, stand where I am,” and stepped away from the edge of the incline.

Twombley nodded and moved into place and peered carefully down at the narrow trail and field of glacial till twenty feet below.

“I’m going to move back up a ways, then come in from the west along the trail there,” he whispered in the man’s ear. “You just stand here and wait.” He pointed at the rifle still slung over Twombley’s beefy shoulder. “You’ll need that,” he said. “Be sure the safety’s off.”

Twombley wrestled his rifle off his shoulder and into his hands. He checked the chamber, then flicked off the safety and cradled the gun under his right arm. He was breathing rapidly now, not from exertion but from excitement. In a tight dry whisper, he asked Jack, “What’d you see?”

“Tracks. It’s your monster buck, all right. So you keep your eyes on that break in the trail down there,” he said, pointing down a ways to his left, where the trail disappeared around a bend in the cut slope. “And in a while, Mr. Twombley, you’ll see what you want to see.”

“Where’ll you be?”

“Where I can get him if you don’t,” Jack said. “There’s only one direction he can go when you shoot at him from up here. If you miss him, he’ll run downhill and back. Which is where I’ll be.”

“Right, right.”

Jack placed his hand on Twombley’s back and nudged him a step closer to the edge. “Be ready. You’ll only have time to get off a single shot. He’ll come facing you, so shoot him right where you’d shoot a man if you only had one shot,” he said, and pointed at Twombley’s heart and smiled.

Twombley smiled back.

“Good hunting, Mr. Twombley,” Jack said. He slung the daypack onto his back and started walking along the lip of the incline toward the line of small pines that grew uphill on the left. Then he turned and came back toward Twombley, who was already staring down at where he expected the deer to appear, and when Jack was about four feet from the older man, he stopped.

Twombley looked up at him, puzzled. “You better get going, kid. You only got till ten o’clock to collect that extra hundred,” he said.

Jack said, “Let me check your gun.”

Twombley handed it to him. Jack looked it over. He lifted his head, and for a few seconds he stared at Twombley’s chest, and then he raised the gun and aimed it and fired.