Affliction

6

MEANWHILE, AT THAT VERY MOMENT in the valley below, Wade drove slowly from the schoolhouse south along Route 29 into the center of town. Occasionally, a vehicle emerged from the falling snow and sloshed past Wade’s green sedan — Hank Lank delivering oil, Bud Swette in his jeep starting on his mail route, Pearl Diehler taking her children to school, late again.

Then Wade saw the plow approaching, LaRiviere’s bright-blue dump truck with the big double-V plow, driven by Jimmy Dame, who was normally one of Wade’s helpers on the drilling rig. The sonofabitch had got to the garage before him, and now Wade was stuck driving the grader again. They should’ve called school off, he thought. God damn it all to hell.

The vehicle loomed out of the snow like the huge silver-and-blue-helmeted face of a medieval knight, and Wade veered slightly to the right to give the truck plenty of room as it passed. LaRiviere had obtained the contract to plow the town roads nine years earlier, before he ran for selectman and right after the Board of Selectmen introduced at town meeting a rule requiring all bidders on the plowing to be local residents. Appealing to local pride and suspicion of outsiders, Chub Merritt, then the chairman of the Board, had got it passed, in spite of heavy opposition led by Alma Pittman, the town clerk, who had pointed out that Gordon LaRiviere, with his grader and truck, was now likely to be the only bidder, which was, of course, no surprise to Chub Merritt.

Though he worked for LaRiviere and would probably end up driving one of the plows himself and garnering lots of over-time to help pay for his new house and child, Wade had been against the proposal, telling no one but Lillian: he knew what LaRiviere and Chub Merritt were up to, and unlike most people in town, he did not admire them for it. Wade never understood why folks seemed to confuse envy with admiration when it came to wheeler-dealers like Gordon LaRiviere. A small town is a kind of ghetto, and hustlers look like heroes. But Wade kept his own counsel and never indicated aloud whether he was for or against Chub’s new plowing proposal, so everyone assumed he was for it. What the hell, Wade himself would benefit from it: winter work, in a town where unemployment from December till March was close to forty percent.

Chub called it Home Rule and for months before town meeting buttonholed everyone who came into his garage, asking as he pumped gas into their car, “How you stand on Home Rule, bub?” He never bothered to ask Wade. At the meeting, Alma angrily called for a secret ballot and got it. Wade voted Yea. Afterwards, he often wished that he had been more forthright, that he had come right out and said to Chub Merritt, “I’m against Home Rule. All it means is an inside track and inflated charges for Gordon LaRiviere, and we taxpayers end up paying for it.” Then he could have voted Nay. It was another of those small compromises that made Wade feel trapped, not so much by public opinion, or even by his cowardice, as by his desire to behave like a responsible husband and father. He believed that, and ate his anger.

The windshield wipers flopped back and forth, and the CB grumbled as state troopers out on the interstate between Littleton and Lebanon bounced calls back and forth. A speeder had been stopped on the northbound lane, and a truck was off the road at Chester. A car had been abandoned at the side of the road a half mile south of Littleton. Wade listened to these calls from habit, not curiosity or need. Though he had called the state police many times on his CB, in four years they had not once called him for help or even for information — not since the forest fire in Franconia. He was like a private security guard hired by the town, a human alarm system whose main functions were to call for the emergency vehicle at the fire station or the ambulance service in Littleton if someone died at home, to break up domestic arguments that got out of hand, to keep the bored and reckless teenagers sufficiently alert so that they did not do irreversible damage to themselves, to ease the children safely into the schoolyard in the mornings, and if anything really serious happened, to call in the real cops.

Sometimes Wade hated being the town cop. At least once a year, and usually in early March, just before the selectmen were due to reappoint him, he actually considered quitting the job. But then, when he was compelled to imagine his life in town without the job, he hated that even more. For Wade, so long as he stayed in Lawford, there were no acceptable alternatives to his present life, not here, and not anywhere in this valley. No alternatives, and so far as he could see, no prospects. Somehow, until now, being the town cop, which once in a while gave him something unpredictable to deal with, had made that almost acceptable.

He could go elsewhere, of course; most of the smart people in town already had. They usually fled south: to Concord, the state capital, like Lillian, who Wade had to admit was bright, or to Massachusetts, like me, whom Wade also regarded as bright and who had gone off first to the University of New Hampshire in Durham and then disappeared into the Boston suburbs, and even like our sister, Lena, younger than Wade and older than I, a woman who was thin when she was young, and pretty, and married a truckdriver for Wonder Bread from Somerville, Massachusetts, and left town with him. He had the northern delivery route the summer Lena was seventeen and met him at the Tunbridge Fair, where he was delivering hot dog rolls. She rode off in his truck with him, got quickly pregnant, and now they are born-again Christians and have five kids and live on the third floor of a triple-decker tenement in Revere. There were others from Lawford who were regarded by Wade as intelligent, mostly older people, and they had sold their land and houses in Lawford — sold them increasingly in recent years to Gordon LaRiviere — and owning for the first time in their lives a few thousand dollars more than they needed to live on, had gone to Florida, Arizona and California, bought a trailer or a condo, turned their skin to leather playing shuffleboard all day and waited to die.

But Wade was different; he had never imagined his life outside the town. Like almost everyone in northern New England, he talked now and then about getting the hell out of this godforsaken place, usually talked about it with Jack Hewitt, who, from the day he returned from playing ball in Connecticut, spoke of “lighting out for the fucking Sunbelt.” But their conversations always ended with Wade slapping Jack on the back and saying, “You’re a dreamer, kid. You’re going to die here in Lawford, and so’m I.”

Once Wade had gone so far as to answer a postcard from his friend Bob Grant, the plumber, who had sold his place and moved up to Alaska a few years before, with a letter asking Grant about the job possibilities for a skilled well driller up there. Wade had thought Grant’s moving to Alaska was crazy, but on the back of a postcard picture of a moose at dawn, Grant had written Wade that he had just bought a big new house and a new twenty-nine-foot-long RV, and he and the wife were taking a two-week vacation driving down to Oregon. Grant was Wade’s age, a tough smart fellow, a hard worker. He seemed to have benefited from moving north in ways that no one who had moved south or west had been able to do.

Wade had pulled out his yellow tablet and had written back: Well it looks like you’re doing real good now. I guess folks in Alaska need plumbers more than they need them around here. Most everybody here can fix their own toilets and thaw out their own pipes, so we don’t even notice you ‘re gone. (Just kidding.) Seriously, how do you think a guy like me could do up there? I’m sick of working for LaRiviere, who is nuts, as you know. And I’m sick of this town too. It’s only my kid who keeps me here nowadays.

But this was not true, and Wade knew it. No, at bottom Wade believed that he was staying on in Lawford year after year, grinding his way through the long winters, in his forties now and drifting into depression — he did not call it depression, but he remembered when he felt another way, not happy, exactly, but better — drinking too much and with increasing frequency enduring spasms of random violence, because at bottom he was shrewd and honest enough to know that he would be in his forties and lonely, poor, depressed, alcoholic and violent anywhere. Below that, however, was yet another truth that he was now and then aware of but surely could not speak of to Bob Grant, although he had said it to me and probably to Margie Fogg; he said it with a wince, a slight ironic twist on his face: he loved the town, and he could not imagine loving any other.

Alma Pittman was out shoveling her front path, a tall woman in a red plaid mackinaw and a man’s cap with the earflaps tied under her chin, pitching the snow with large easy swings of her long arms, and as he passed she looked up, acknowledged him with a nod and went grimly back to work. There were a few familiar cars parked outside Golden’s store, and farther down on the same side of the road was Wickham’s Restaurant, where the parking lot was filled, and for a second Wade thought of going in for something to eat. He was stuck with using the grader anyhow; no point now in rushing over to the garage to get it.

He slowed and peered out his window, but the windows of the restaurant were clouded over, and he could not see anyone inside. He imagined the smell of cigarette smoke and fresh coffee and bacon and toasted bread, and he lit a cigarette and braked the car slightly, and then he realized that Margie would immediately ask him about Jill. Where was she this morning? Had she gone to school for the day? What were his plans for this snowy weekend with his daughter? Maybe the three of them could take Margie’s snowmobile out. Maybe they could head up to Littleton for a movie.

He checked his watch, saw he was running real late and, almost relieved, drew back off the shoulder onto the road and drove past the restaurant and made straight for LaRiviere’s, a quarter mile beyond and on the left. The heavily falling snow had eased somewhat, and the sky was satiny and pale gray, as Wade pulled into LaRiviere’s wide neatly plowed asphalt driveway, rolled quickly by the mobile home in front and parked his car off to the side of the building behind it. The parking lot, the size of a small airport, surrounds both the blue ranch-style mobile home and the matching blue barn in back, which is where Gordon LaRiviere runs his several businesses.

The trucks were all out, Wade observed, except for LaRiviere’s 4 x 4 pickup and, of course, the grader, that damned grader. It was parked beside the barn like a blue dinosaur, arched and lean and, like all LaRiviere’s vehicles, spotlessly clean. The company motto, LaRiviere’s notion of wit, was painted in white on the side of the pickup and the grader as well — OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! — just as it appeared on everything owned by Gordon LaRiviere, on business cards, stationery, bank checks, tools large enough to carry it, drilling rigs, rain gear and every one of his numerous meticulously maintained matching blue vehicles. It was as if LaRiviere were a small republic. Even the plots of land he bought were planted as soon as the deed was signed with a small blue sign with white lettering: PROPERTY OF LARIVIERE ENTERPRISES. OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE! NO SNOW-MOBILES, HUNTING, OR FISHING. NO TRESPASSING. THIS MEANS YOU!

Wade eased himself slowly out of his car as if he had all morning to waste and walked across the lot to the small door next to the large truck-bay doors of the barn and went into the office. Elaine Bernier was at her desk on the other side of the green-speckled Formica counter. The office was as neat and orderly as a showroom for office furniture. There was none of the sloppy evidence of work being done — no stacks of papers, loose files, overflowing ashtrays, drawers left half open, paper food containers — none of it. There were not even any calendars or photographs, although a large red NO SMOKING sign glared from each of the four walls. Elaine was busy typing when Wade strolled through the door, but her desk, too, was clean and, to all intents and purposes, empty. Beyond her desk was the entrance to the inner office and next to it a large plate-glass window behind which sat Gordon LaRiviere, hard at work on the phone, hunkered down close to the receiver, as if proximity to the instrument increased his effectiveness on it.

Elaine looked up, zippered her mouth in a tight smile that was more a grimace and went quickly back to typing. She was a middle-aged woman with a bush of red-dyed hair, a long bony face, plucked eyebrows, green eye makeup and a thin mouth, who overdressed for the job in flouncy full-sleeved blouses and long pleated skirts and high heels that rarely emerged from under her desk. It was Wade’s opinion that Elaine Bernier was in love with Gordon LaRiviere, and that Gordon sometimes had his way with her.

Wade unzipped his jacket and took off his cap and slapped it against his thigh, spraying drops of melted snow over Elaine’s desk, and she glared at him. He waved at his reflection in the glass behind her, and LaRiviere hollered from the other side, “Wade! C’mere a second!”

Wade nodded, and stepping toward the door, said with his lips, One, two, three, and in unison with LaRiviere said aloud, I want you to take the grader!” Wade stopped just short of the entrance to the inner office — he could see the silvery crew-cut top of LaRiviere’s head while the man stared straight down at the telephone, his face a few inches from the surface of his immaculate desk, as if examining it for dust — and counted to three once more and said, again in unison with LaRiviere, ”Follow Jimmy up Twenty-nine to Toby’s and back!” Then he heard LaRiviere return to his telephone conversation, a rapid-fire whisper, his usual telephone voice, like the hissing of a tape rewinding on its spool.

Wade took two more steps forward and leaned into the brightly lit office. LaRiviere looked up and wrinkled his broad pink brow in puzzlement, and as he started to open his mouth, Wade snapped his middle finger at him and said, “Fuck you, Gordon.” LaRiviere’s expression did not change; it was as if Wade and he were in different time zones. Wade pushed his cap onto his head, turned and left the office.

Five minutes later, he was up inside the flapping canvas cab of the grader, driving it across the parking lot and down the driveway to the road, the long narrow plow blade bouncing along under the high belly of the machine like a gigantic straight razor.

Jack Hewitt stood at the lip of the incline and peered across the tops of the trees through the dip in Saddleback all the way to Lawford Center. The wind had shifted slightly, or perhaps the falling snow had eased somewhat, for he could see the spire of the Congregational church and the roof of the town hall in the valley below. He might have been trying to figure out where among the distant trees his father’s house was located, when Twombley come puffing up behind him.

Red-faced and out of breath from the effort of trying to keep up with the younger man, Twombley was about to speak, no doubt with irritation, but Jack lifted one finger to his mouth and silenced him. Then, stepping off the edge of the low ledge, he leaned into Twombley’s ear and said, “Stay here, stand where I am.”

Twombley took two steps forward, peered over the edge at the lumber trail twenty feet below and the field of strewn boulders beyond it.

Jack came up alongside him and whispered that he was going to circle back around the ledge on the west. He would cut down to the trail through a stand of pines there and drive the deer back along the trail to where the animal would come into clear view just below Twombley and fifty yards to his left. He told him to make sure he was ready to shoot, because he would only have one shot.

Twombley unslung his rifle, checked the chamber and flicked off the safety. “What’d you see?” he asked.

Jack told him about the tracks and the moist dark-brown pellets of deer shit.

“Fresh?” Twombley said.

“Yup. And wicked big, too. This here’s your buck, Mr. Twombley. The one you been thinking about all fall, right?”

Twombley nodded and edged closer to the drop-off. “Get going,” he said to Jack. “You only got a little while if you want that extra hundred.”

Jack looked at the man for a second, and his mouth curled into a slight sneer. Then he turned abruptly away, as if to hide the sneer, and started walking toward the stand of pines that ran in a ragged line uphill from the ledge. On the farther side of the pines the ground sloped more softly, and the trail nearly flattened out for a ways, and there were several head-high heaps of dead branches and brush that had been stacked along-side the trail some years back by the lumbermen. Jack knew that the big buck was hiding in one of those brush piles, that he was lying down, listening to gunfire in the distance and the snap of a twig fifty feet away, sniffing for the sour smoky odor of humans, large brown eyes wide open and searching for any movement in his field of vision that did not fall into the familiar rhythm of a world without humans. Jack was adjusting, narrowing, his own field of vision, bringing his gaze to a sharp focus on the tangled heaps of brush so that he could determine which of the three hid the big deer, when he heard Twombley cry out, and he started to turn. At the same instant, he heard the gun go off, and he knew that the stupid sonofabitch had slipped and had shot himself.

He thought about it that way and that way only, and he walked slowly, angrily, back to the edge of the incline where Evan Twombley had stood, and he looked down at the man’s body splayed in the snow below him. He shouted at the body, “You’re an asshole! A fucking asshole!”

Twombley lay face down, with his arms and legs spread as if he were free-falling through space. His new rifle lay beside him, a few feet to his right, half buried in the snow.

Jack pulled out a cigarette and lit it and stuffed the crumpled pack back into his pocket. He dearly hoped the man was dead, stone cold dead, because if he was still alive, Jack would have to lug the stupid sonofabitch all the way back up to the truck and probably haul him all the way to Littleton. “Stupid, arrogant sonofabitch,” he said in a low voice, and he started down, slowly, carefully, to find out if indeed, and as he hoped, Evan Twombley had killed himself.

Not until he reached Toby’s Inn did Wade — hunched over the large steel steering wheel in the painfully cold windblown cab of LaRiviere’s blue grader — finally catch up to Jimmy Dame in the dump truck. This was as far as the town plows went; they and the state DPW plows met and turned around at Toby’s and went back to their respective territories. Jimmy had zipped a few complimentary passes over Toby’s lot and was sitting in the truck in the far corner of the lot, enjoying coffee and Danish from Toby’s kitchen and watching Wade as — compulsively and with great difficulty, because of the size and awkwardness of the grader — he finished scutting Jimmy’s residue off to the side of the rutted parking lot.

Jimmy liked watching Wade try to use the grader as if it were a pickup with a flat plow on the front, driving the enormous and grotesquely shaped vehicle forward ten feet, then backward ten feet, short half turn to the right, short half turn to the left, wrenching that huge steering wheel like the captain of a ship trying to avoid an oncoming iceberg. It was crazy, Jimmy thought, and Wade was crazy. He did it every winter: got to LaRiviere’s shop late the first day of a snowstorm because of directing traffic at the school, then got stuck with the grader, which naturally pissed him off, since it was like being in an icehouse up there, except that then he’d drive the damned thing like he was glad to have it, really pleased to have the chance to show folks what this here grader could do when it came to plowing snow. After knowing him all his life, Jimmy still did not know if he liked Wade or not.

Jimmy Dame, like Jack Hewitt, was one of Wade’s helpers on the well-drilling crew. Wade was the foreman and had been for a decade. But when they were not drilling wells, they all three tumbled to the same level and were paid accordingly. When the ground froze solid and well drilling was no longer feasible, LaRiviere put them to work first on snowplowing, and when that was done, on maintaining equipment, vehicles, tools and materiel, and when everything LaRiviere owned had been brought up to his fastidious snuff, which is to say, in as-new condition, and the garage and toolboxes and storage bins had been swept and squared as smartly as a marine barracks, LaRiviere promptly laid off Jimmy. A few weeks later, he laid off Jack, and last of all, Wade. This usually occurred late in February, which meant that Wade was out of work no more than six weeks.

It was hard to know what factors determined LaRiviere’s policy of laying off first Jimmy, then Jack, then Wade. Both Jimmy and Wade had worked for LaRiviere since getting out of the service, and Jack had come on only three years ago, so it was not seniority. And it was not age, either, as Jimmy was two years older than Wade, twenty-two years older than Jack. And it was not on the basis of who had the widest range of skills, because Jack could type and Wade could not, and when given the opportunity to do it, Jack liked office work, whereas Wade felt worse than peculiar, he felt downright terrified, when, as inevitably happened on a cold dark snowy day in February, LaRiviere asked him to come into the office, get out the calculator and an architect’s scale and take measurements off a blueprint stretched across the drafting table and help prepare a bid on some spring work for the state. Wade pulled off his jacket and cap and sat on the stool and went to work, listing sizes and lengths of pipe and fitting required, converting those figures into man-hours, calling Capitol Supply in Concord for prices, clicking away on the calculator and every time, without fail, coming up with totals that were so much over or under what simple horse sense told him the job should cost that he felt compelled to start the process all over again. The second time through, his totals once again were so far off, and in the opposite direction of the first set, that Wade could trust nothing — not the drawings and not the architect and engineer who made them, not the calculator, not the supplier and, most of all, not himself. He knew the work, the figures for the materials were all fixed in black and white, and he could read blueprints with ease; but somehow, every time he added up his figures he fumbled, skipping a whole column of figures one time, doubling sums the next. Was he brain-damaged, missing a few crucial cells someplace? Was there something wrong with his eyes, some mysterious affliction? Or was he just made so nervous by LaRiviere sitting a few feet away from him that he could not concentrate on the rows of numbers in front of him? Usually, after a dozen failed attempts to come up with an estimate that approximated his commonsense knowledge of the cost of a job, Wade would start to growl audibly from his stool at the drafting table, a low rumbling canine growl, and LaRiviere would look up from his desk, blink his tiny pale-blue eyes three or four times and tell Wade to go on home for the rest of the winter.

When, at last, Wade had finished plowing the parking lot of Toby’s Inn, he drew the grader alongside the dump truck, cut the engine back and flopped open the canvas door. He was a few feet higher than Jimmy in the truck and swung around in his narrow seat and kicked down at the closed window of the truck several times.

Jimmy rolled the window down and hollered, “What the fuck you want, Wade? What you want?”

Wade felt a wave of petulance roll over him, a warm self-satisfied pout, and he kicked his booted feet, right, then left, into the space of the open window below him.

Jimmy dodged Wade’s feet and yelled, “What the fuck? Knock that shit off, will you?” He started rolling the window up, but Wade stuck one boot into the window far enough to stop it a few inches from the top. Jimmy peered up at Wade, puzzled, angry, a little scared. “Hey, c’mon, will you?”

Wade said nothing. His face was expressionless, but he was suddenly happy, feeling playful almost, unexpectedly released from the anger and grief that had weighed on him all morning. Even his toothache had eased back. Wade somehow knew that this nearly miraculous and strangely innocent feeling of release would last only as long as he could strike dumbly out, refusing to explain his blows, refusing to rationalize them, refusing even to connect them to anger, to particular offense given or taken: so he pulled his foot free of the nearly closed window and swung both of them hard against the glass.

Jimmy said, “Jesus Christ, Wade! You bust this glass, Gordon’ll kick my ass too!” He rapidly rolled the window down again and slid away from the opening and Wade’s swinging feet. From his position halfway across the passenger’s seat, Jimmy reached over to the steering wheel and stretched to place his feet against the clutch and gas pedal, and he managed to shove the truck into low gear and got it to lurch unsteadily away from the grader. But as the truck moved away, Wade simply stepped up onto the roof of the cab, and now he stood atop the vehicle, legs spread, fists at his hips, banging his feet against the roof in a wild awkward dance.

Below him, Jimmy slid into proper place behind the wheel, and shifting it into second gear, got the truck quickly up to about twenty-five miles an hour and headed straight for the snowbank at the far end of the lot. Then he hit the brakes hard and had the pleasure of watching Wade, like some gigantic dark-blue bird of prey, sail past, over the hood of the truck, over the top of the plow and straight into the high pile of hard-packed snow.

As soon as Wade had landed, Jimmy cut the wheel hard to the left, dropped the truck back into first and pulled quickly out of the parking lot onto Route 29 toward town and commenced plowing the right lane in that direction, as nonchalantly and purposefully as he had plowed the other lane coming out.

After half a minute, Wade managed to extricate himself from the snowbank and stood covered with snow and hunched over in the middle of the lot, freezing, with chunks of snow inside his clothes, down his neck and back, up his sleeves and pants legs and inside his boots, gloves and hat.

Jimmy and the truck were out of sight now; the great unwieldy blue grader chortled at the other side of the lot. Wade reached down and picked up a hard-packed chunk of snow the size of his fist, and just as he was about to throw it — at the windshield of the grader, he supposed, although he hadn’t actually decided on a target yet — he heard the sirens.

A few seconds later, two state police cruisers and a long white ambulance came speeding along Route 29 from the interstate, and as they passed Toby’s Inn, Wade whirled with them, and he hurled the snowball, splattering it against the passenger-side window of the cruiser in front. The pair of cruisers and the ambulance kept going, however, as if Wade were not there.