Affliction (8 page)

Ah, what a terrible year that was—the year of the second divorce, the year of losing the house to Lillian, the months of living in the dingy apartment over Golden's and the day he bought the damned trailer from LaRiviere. Then, six months later, came Lillian's decision to move down to Concord with Jill in tow, and her marriage to Horner. It is a wonder he survived at all.

 

He rose from his tangled sheets and blankets like a porpoise surfacing, shocked by the fact of wakefulness itself, and then by cold air, by the sight of his cluttered room, by the smell of
stale beer and cigarette butts and his own night breath, by the sound of Kenny Rogers croaking from the clock radio on the blue plastic milk carrier next to the bed—so that the dream he had been dreaming disappeared almost instantly, like the memory of an earlier, less evolved and less vivid life spent drifting between wedges of shadow and beams of pale-green light.

He checked the time, ran his tongue across mossy teeth, reached for a cigarette and lit it and lay in bed for a few moments, hands under his head, smoking and running a fragmentary narrative of the end of last night in front of his eyes. Sitting in the dark by the window in his office at the town hall. Driving out to Toby's Inn in his car. Slumping silently in a booth with Jack Hewitt and his girlfriend, Hettie Rodgers, and three or four other men and women, and later, his toothache anesthetized by alcohol, yakking and laughing in a loud hearty voice with one or two kids he knew only vaguely. Then drinking at the bar alone, and at last, just before the sudden blackness at the end of the loop, standing in the parking lot, examining his pale-green car as if it were a stranger's, finding it unaccountably ugly. Then nothing.

But no memories—and no visible signs—of argument, he thought with relief. An advertisement for a Chevrolet dealer in Concord came on, and he snapped off the radio. He touched his face with the fingertips of his right hand, felt no pain and no swelling in his hands or above the eyes or around the mouth, and plucked his cigarette from his lips and tapped the ash into an empty Budweiser bottle next to the radio. Across from the bed was a plastic-and-aluminum picnic chair—with his clothes laid neatly over the back and arms, he noted. No torn or bloody shirt—he could tell that much from bed. He refolded his arms and slid his hands under his head and spread out his legs, and for a moment Wade thoroughly enjoyed his nakedness under the rumpled sheet and blanket. His tooth ached only a little, a hum, and he did not once think of his daughter or of his ex-wife.

It was not until after he had showered and shaved and was standing in his faded blue terry-cloth robe at the kitchen counter, stirring a cup of instant coffee, that the unique and vaguely familiar quality of the silence that surrounded the clink of his spoon against the coffee cup made him realize that it was snowing outside. He glanced at the window behind the
sink, where a week's dirty dishes and pans were stacked, and saw the haze of snow, for it was falling heavily now, like a gauze curtain, and he could make out no more than the rough outline of Saddleback Ridge and Parker Mountain.

He looked at his watch—six-forty. “Shit,” he said aloud, and he walked quickly to the frayed plaid couch, where he sighed, sat down and picked the telephone off a tipped pile of newspapers on the end table and dialed a number.

After a few seconds, he began to speak into the receiver. “Lugene? This's Wade. How you doing?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, said, “Hey, Lugene, look, I was wondering, with the snow and all, you got school today?”

He listened, lit a cigarette from a pack on the crowded coffee table and said, “How the hell do I know? You're the principal, damn it. You're the one who's supposed to know how much it's going to snow, not me. All I'm supposed to do is direct traffic from seven-thirty to eight-thirty, for Christ's sake.”

He listened again. “Yeah, okay, I'm sorry, Lugene. I'm running late,” he said, “and I only just now saw it was snowing, that's all. My whole day is fucked. I was just hoping you'd have called school off. You know? Because I got to plow all day, and if I don't get over to LaRiviere's early enough, I get stuck with the grader. Whyn't you check the weather bureau? Maybe you should cancel school.”

Wade paused a second. “Fuck. You check the weather bureau?”

Lugene agreed to call the weather bureau, but no matter what the prediction, he said, there would certainly be school today. He might decide to send the children home at noon, but clearly not enough snow had fallen or would fall in the next hour to keep the buses from getting safely into town. Then he asked Wade if he talked to everyone that way.

“Okay,” Wade said, ignoring the question. “I'll be over in a bit.”

He hung up the phone and barreled down the narrow hallway to his bedroom. He would not be drilling wells for LaRiviere today; he would be plowing snow for him. He dressed hurriedly in work clothes—long underwear, blue-and-black-plaid flannel shirt, green twill pants, heavy wool socks and insulated rubber boots with tan leather tops.

At the door, Wade grabbed his dark-blue trooper's coat
and cap off the hook, pulled the cap halfway over his ears and shrugged his way into the coat. He glanced at the thermostat on the wall and set it back ten degrees, to fifty-five, then stood briefly at the door and looked across the room with an empty expression on his face, as if running down a daily checklist.

 

Let us stop for a moment, while he stands by the door, and look at Wade up close. It is time for that. Examined from a certain angle, Wade's face is a classic example of an ancient type of Northern European face. It is the broad high-cheekboned heavy-browed durable face that first appeared in this form twenty to thirty thousand years ago between ice ages in the marshes along the southern shores of the Baltic, among tribes of hunters and gatherers moving toward the western sea, driven from fertile estuarial homelands by a taller fairer fiercer people who possessed agrarian skills and tools, clever weapons and principles of social organization that allowed them to conquer and enslave others.

He would hate to hear me say this, but I am describing my own face as much as his. This is what we Whitehouse men and women (most of us, anyhow) look like. We wear a face shaped by thousands of years of peering into firelight, into cold mists rising off salt marshes, into deep waters where huge sturgeon cruise slowly past; a face tightened, crinkled and lined from having pursed thin lips thoughtfully for millennia over animal tracks and droppings, over individual wild grains counted into a wicker basket one by one, over small stone figures of women with large breasts and wide hips and bellies. And beyond these ancient habits of expression, there is something deeper and more ancient still, at least in Wade's face. There is an intimacy and a tenderness, a melancholic vulnerability about his dark-brown eyes, especially in the way the heavy slightly protruding brow protects the delicacy of the eyes and allows them to stay wide open, alert to danger even in bright sunlight. The narrow mouth, tightened over large yellowed teeth, gives the impression of intelligence and sensitivity. It is not a noble face, not especially refined, either, but a passionate face, and thoughtful.

Wade's body, like my own, is of a similarly ancient type, evolved over tens of thousands of years of holding the reins of another man's horse in the cold rain while the horseman does
business inside by the fire, of climbing rickety ladders with a load of bricks in a hod, of yanking back the head of a boar with one stout arm and reaching around with the other and slashing its throat with a single stroke, of drawing sticks on a cart from someone else's woods to someone else's fire. It is a compact hardy body, flat-muscled and round-shouldered, with a long wide back and short limbs, a body not so tall as to draw undue attention to itself, not so short as to be unfit for heavy lifting or long grueling marches carrying weapons and tents. It is, I suppose, the kind of body that made it possible for European princes and popes to wage war against one another for a millennium.

That is the face and body I see when I see Wade flick the switch by the door and turn off the overhead light in the living room and stand for a second more in the gloomy gray light of the trailer and study the room before him, a sad dirty cluttered room filled with the evidence of a sloppy man nearing middle age and living alone—empty beer bottles on the floor and coffee table, work clothes strewn around the room, ashtrays overflowing, newspapers tossed aimlessly about, empty food cartons and dirty dishes and coffee cups abandoned on the end tables and the TV in the corner.

For the first time in what even he knew must have been months, he looked at the room as if there were a stranger living here, a man he had never met, and he felt his stomach tighten with aversion. He would not want to meet such a man. No, sir. And then, suddenly, he saw how the room would have looked to Jill as she came through the door, tired and sleepy but very happy from all the fun trick-or-treating and afterwards going to the Halloween party with her dad. He would have carried her in from the car, worked the door open with his free hand and switched on the overhead light, and Jill would have turned on his shoulder and looked around, and this awful room, this stranger's room, is what she would have seen.

He looked down and off to his right, a boxer dodging a blow, wrenched open the door and stepped quickly outside. There was about an inch of snow on the ground, and it was still coming down in a light dry powder but falling more heavily now than before, accumulating rapidly. Like a man trying to spot a particular friend in a crowd of strangers, he squinted across the lake at Saddleback and Parker Mountain, hazy dark lumps profiled indistinctly against the white sky, more like
zones than solid objects, and he heard it, suddenly but without surprise, as if he had been listening for it, the first gunfire of the hunting season—a rapid series of four distinct shots crackling across the lake and echoing back again.

With his gloved hands, he brushed the snow off the wind-shield and exposed a rough skin of silvery ice underneath, got inside and inserted the key into the ignition, pumped the gas pedal hard twice and turned the key. The starter moaned but did not catch. He tried again, exactly as before, and still got nothing. This was part of the drill. The third time would do it, and indeed it did, turning the cold engine over once, several times slowly, then rapidly, until at last it caught and came coughing to life.

Sitting inside the car was like hunkering down inside a tent in the Arctic or an igloo—that is how Wade imagined it. Light managed to penetrate the ice on the windshield and windows, but it was an eerie white metallic light that did not so much illuminate the interior of the car as fill it with itself, like Wade's breath, which drifted from his mouth and nostrils in wispy clouds. When the engine was running smoothly and would not stall, he reached forward and switched on the defroster fan. At first it chattered and whined, but in a few seconds it was humming from somewhere behind the dash, shoving air up against the windshield glass.

Wade waited, and before long the air coming from the defroster had melted a dime-sized circle on each side. Slowly the circles expanded, becoming quarters, then saucers, until Wade could look through the glass and see the snow coming down, could see the trailer, could even see the lake beyond.

The melting of his icy sanctuary made him feel oddly disappointed, a little saddened and, for a few seconds, apprehensive. Out in the middle of the lake, which was now a flattened white teardrop, he could see the black circle of open water. It would probably freeze solid and disappear into whiteness by tonight, even there, where the water was over fifty feet deep. Then there would be two utterly distinct worlds, the world above and the world below, with the ice in between like an impenetrable barrier protecting one from the other. He felt that split, that barrier between two worlds, abandon him now, as the ice on his windshield melted into a pair of rapidly enlarging circles, like eyes that could look out but also—as if that
were the price he had paid for the privilege of looking out—eyes that allowed him to be seen.

Automatically, Wade flicked on the CB, and with the red dot of light dancing along the scanner, he backed the car down the driveway, spun the wheel and eased out of the trailer park, laying down the winter's first set of tire tracks in the fresh snow. Turning left at Route 29, he passed the row of snow-crowned mailboxes lined up side by side on a two-by-four like miniature prairie schooners and headed toward town.

A quarter of a mile north of the trailer park, the Minuit River suddenly veers in close to the left side of the road, and from here all the way into town the road and the riverbed wind and loop in tandem through the narrow valley. Wade liked the way the river looked in the new snow and milky early morning light. That is a tourist's idea of New Hampshire, he thought, with pine trees drooping over the water and snarls of icicle-laden birches clumped at the edges of eddies and pools, with large snow-covered boulders in the middle of the stream and dark-green water churning, swirling and splashing past and over them, raising a thick white crust of ice at the crest marks. At moments like this, Wade felt something like pride of place, a rare and deeply pleasurable feeling that started with delight in the sight of the country, passed through a desire to share that delight with someone else and abruptly ended in a fantasy in which he stands before the scene and spreads his arms wide as if to embrace it whole, then steps aside and reveals it to … to whom?

He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, put it in his mouth and reached to punch in the dashboard lighter, when, startled, he saw on the seat next to him a green Tyrolean hat. It was the hat he had picked off the ground the night before, after the owner of the hat and Lillian and Jill had driven away. Wade looked at the thing with dismay, as if it were a severed body part, a piece of irrefutable evidence linking him to a crime he had no knowledge of.