Affliction (17 page)

The light breeze had shifted and was blowing into their faces. Now there was a pair of crows calling to each other, and Wade could see one of them, glossy purple-black and nervous, perched near the top of a red pine to the left of LaRiviere's cabin.

Wade said, “I've never seen a man shot and killed before. Not even in the service. It must be something. I saw plenty who'd already been shot, you know, shot dead or wounded, all fucked up in all kinds of ways. When I was an MP, mostly. Same as when I come back here. Even here I've seen a couple guys after they'd already been shot, but I never actually
saw
it. You
know? It must be something, to see a man shoot himself.”

“Well … I didn't actually
see
him do it. Like I said.”

“Sure you did.”

“What?”

“Saw him do it.” Wade studied the crow as it leapt from branch to branch of the scraggly red pine. “Of course you did.” Wade put himself behind Jack's eyes and turned from the sight of the huge buck in the draw below to look along the ridge at Evan Twombley twenty feet away, just to make sure, like a good guide, that Twombley could see the buck, too, and was ready to shoot it; he saw Twombley take a tentative step toward the edge of the drop-off, saw him flip off the safety of his .30/30 with his thumb; he saw him slip on a small rock or stick hidden under the snow, toss one hand, the hand with the gun in it, damn it, out to break his fall, twisting the rifle as he went down, his fingers somehow tangled around the trigger guard or even brushing the trigger as he tried both to keep himself from falling and to protect the rifle, and before he hit the ground, the gun went off, and the force of the bullet exploding into his chest sent him flying into the air backward and down into the draw—a rich and powerful fat man blown clean off the earth.

“What the fuck are you telling me, Wade? I never seen the guy get shot. I told you that.”

Wade watched again as Twombley caught sight of the deer below, stumbled and turned his back in the direction of his fall; this time he fell with both hands shoving the fancy new rifle away from his chest, to keep it from being damaged or covered with snow, turning it somehow so that the tip of the barrel passed over his chest—when it fired straight into his chest, smashing his lungs and heart and backbone, splashing blood and bits of flesh over the snow and sending the body of the man tumbling this time, like a broken dummy, like trash, into the gully below.

“You must've seen him get shot,” Wade said in a low voice. “I know you did.”

“Let's get the fuck out of here,” Jack said. “You're not making sense, man. This whole thing has got me rattled anyhow.” He passed in front of Wade and climbed into the truck, slammed the door as if angry and started the engine.

Wade watched Twombley die a third time.

First, from behind Jack's eyes, he saw the huge buck
emerge from its hiding place in the birch copse at the left side of the draw and walk slowly along the draw directly into his and Evan Twombley's line of sight. Now Twombley could see the animal too, and suddenly excited, he patted the younger man on the shoulder, demanding, with gestures, his rifle back, for he had been unable to walk through the snow with it and had already dropped it once, and finally he had made his guide carry it for him. Wade brought the tip of the barrel up, shoved the stock against his right shoulder, aimed through the scope so that the bullet would hit the meat of the right shoulder from above, pass through the chest and exit from the left side of the animal's belly, killing it instantly and very cleanly with one shot. Twombley, mad with greed for the shot and the sudden knowledge that he was not going to get it, that his guide was taking it himself, grabbed the rifle with both hands and tried to tear it free, and the tip of the barrel swung around, and the gun went off. Twombley was tossed backward and over the precipice, his already dead body tumbling over the rocks and snow to the bottom, where it lay with its legs and arms splayed, as if it had been hurled from the sky, gushing blood into the snow. The echo of the gunshot died, and then the sounds of the huge buck leaping through the dense tangle of brush farther down drifted back, the clatter and crash of flight growing fainter and fainter, until the woods were silent again, except for the sigh of the wind through the trees and the mocking call of a crow somewhere above and behind, up by LaRiviere's cabin and the road.

Wade was startled by the blat of Jack's horn from the truck. He had already turned the vehicle around and was waving angrily for Wade to get in.

Slowly, Wade walked over to the truck and climbed up into the passenger's seat. He pointed at the three rifles in the rack attached to the window behind him. “Those're yours, right?”

“Yeah.”

“One of them must be Twombley's, though.”

Jack didn't answer.

“That there's your old twenty-gauge,” Wade went on, laying his hand on the shotgun, “and that there's the new Browning you was showing off last night at the town hall.” Then he placed his hand on the barrel of the third gun and held it tightly, as if he had captured it. “This must be Twombley's
gun. Brand-new, almost. Very fancy tooling,” he murmured. “Thirty-thirty, and only been fired one time,” he said. “It's a beautiful piece of work, Twombley's gun. But what the hell, Jack, I guess you deserve it. Right's right.”

Jack said, “Yeah, right's right,” and started to drive slowly downhill, following in the tracks left by the police cruisers and LaRiviere's truck and before them the ambulance carrying Twombley's body to Littleton.

“Twombley sure as hell won't be shooting it again, will he?” Wade said.

“No,” Jack said. “He sure as hell won't.”

LATE THAT SAME NIGHT, Wade telephoned me to ask if the Boston TV stations had reported Evan Twombley's death. Yes, I told him, they had, but I had barely noticed: the death by gunshot of someone about to testify about union connections to organized crime, even though disguised as a New Hampshire hunting accident, was a common enough news item and was sufficiently distant from my daily life not to attract my attention.

“There was something,” I said, “but I missed it. Why, did it happen up your way?”

“Yeah, and I know the guy. And the kid with him, Jack Hewitt. Who you probably know too, incidentally. He works for LaRiviere with me. That kid, he's my best friend, Rolfe,” Wade said.

It was close to midnight, and Wade sounded slightly drunk, calling me, I imagined, from the phone booth at Toby's Inn, although I could not hear the jukebox thumping as usual in the background. I was in bed reading a new history of mankind, and this was not a conversation I found enthralling.

I had heard from Wade a half-dozen times that fall, and
I had seen him twice; both times he had driven down suddenly on a Saturday night. He had stood around in my kitchen drinking beer, rambling on about Lillian and Jill and LaRiviere—his problems—then had fallen like a tree onto my couch, only to return to Lawford the next morning after breakfast. I was sure, as we talked about Twombley, that I knew Wade's whole story by now, the way you do when you have heard a drunk man's story, even your drunken brother's—perhaps especially your drunken brother's—and did not require any new chapters.

“Wade,” I said, “it's very late. Not for you, maybe, but we have different habits, you and I. You're at Toby's, and I'm in bed reading.”

“No, no, no. Not tonight. I'm at home tonight, Rolfe. I'm not reading, maybe, but in fact I'm in bed too. Anyhow, I'm calling because I need you to listen. You're supposed to be such a smart guy, Rolfe. I've got a theory about this guy Twombley, and I need you to check me out on it.” He was excited, more than usual, and that alarmed me, although I was not sure why, so I did not cut him off. I half listened to what he called his theory, which struck me as slightly crackbrained, the alcohol talking. It was a theory unsupported by evidence and full of unlikely motives and connections. It also did not take into account—since Wade had not seen the Boston news, and the New Hampshire stations had not mentioned the shooting at all (it being only one of so many hunting accidents that day)—the fact that Evan Twombley had been scheduled to testify before a congressional subcommittee that was investigating links between organized crime in New England and the construction industry. I remembered that much from the news and had my own theory.

I mentioned the investigation to him anyhow, and he said, “No shit,” and went on as if I had offered nothing more than Twombley's middle name. For Wade, there was no connection, because he seemed to want badly to believe that his “best friend” had shot Evan Twombley—accidentally, of course— and was hiding the fact, which, he insisted, was what worried him. “What'll happen is, it'll come out that the bastard didn't shoot himself, Jack shot him. And then lied about it. And the kid'll get hung for it, Rolfe. They hang you up here for murder, you know.”

“He won't hang if it was accidental,” I said. “But you do think Jack Hewitt shot him, eh? Why?”

“Why do I think it, or why did he shoot him?”

“Both.”

“Well, it was an accident,” he said. “Naturally. But who knows how it happened? It happens all the time, though. You play with guns, somebody's going to get shot. Eventually. But as to why I myself think Jack did it. That's not so easy to say. It's like it's the only way I can see it happening. The only way I can imagine it. I think about Twombley getting shot, and all I see is Jack shooting him.”

“So where's this theory of yours?”

He admitted that it was not so much a theory as a hunch. I could tell that I was disappointing him. Again.

I apologized for sounding so skeptical and explained that it seemed likely to me that if Twombley's death was not in fact self-inflicted, then he surely was killed by someone other than the local boy Jack Hewitt, who probably never even saw it happen anyhow. “They were out deer hunting, right? In the woods. Jack probably heard the gun go off, then came back and found Twombley's body and concluded the obvious, that the man had shot himself. And if he did not shoot himself, then whoever did it took care to use Twombley's own gun. Just in case.”

Yes, yes, Wade agreed, grumpily, and then he started to drift a bit, and soon he was recounting another small humiliation at the hands of his ex-wife. This story, too, I had heard before, or a close version of it, but now, to my surprise, I was listening as if it were fresh and new to me. It was his account of Halloween and his quarrel with his daughter Jill, and I was fascinated by it. There was some odd connection in my mind between the two stories, between his version of Twombley's death and his version of Lillian's driving up to Lawford and removing Jill from his care. I did not then know how powerful the connection was, of course, but it was there, to be sure, just below the surface of the narrative, and I felt its presence strongly and responded to it, as if it had the power of logic.

I closed my history of mankind and sat up straight in bed and listened closely to Wade, while he slowly told of his adventures of the night before, presented them with a sad mournful slightly puzzled voice, his sentences ending pathetically with phrases like “You know?” and “I guess.”

And then, finally, he closed the conversation—it was more monologue than conversation—by telling me how tired he
was, just exhausted, beat. “I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days, Rolfe,” he said. “And some night I'm going to bite back. I swear it.”

I said, “Haven't you already done a bit of that?”

“No. No, I haven't. Not really. I've growled a little, but I haven't bit.”

We said good night then and hung up. I tried to resume reading but could not, and when I tried to sleep, I could not do that, either. I lay awake for hours, it seemed, with visions of whirling suddenly in the snow, aiming down the barrel of a gun, firing.

 

But let us return to the morning Twombley died, to Lawford, twelve or fifteen hours earlier. After Wade and Jack rode down from Parker Mountain together in Jack's truck, Jack dropped Wade off at LaRiviere's and, as LaRiviere had suggested, went home, while for the rest of the day Wade drove the blue grader. By the time he parked it back at LaRiviere's garage, it was late afternoon and dark, and the temperature was falling toward zero again.

He scraped his windshield and then, while he waited for his car to warm up, decided that it would be best for everyone, especially for Wade himself, if he drove straight home, if he cleaned up his trailer, for God's sake, and cooked a simple supper and went to bed sober and alone. He was right: his mood and his afflicted view of the events of the day promised nothing but trouble for anyone who happened to join him at bar, table or bed.

Then, as if to verify the wisdom of his decision, his tooth flared up again. Over the afternoon, it had gradually turned into a throbbing knot of pain below his right ear. As usual, the pain got worse and spread quickly across his face, until its center was as large and as definable a shape as a man's hand, with the heel and thumb of the hand running along his jawbone to his chin, the little finger tucked up behind his ear, the palm smack against his cheek and the other three fingers pressing against the bony ridge that encircled his right eye. The pain was yellow, it seemed to him, neither hot nor cold, and lay in a thin zone between his outer flesh and the bone, radiating woe in both directions.

He groaned aloud all the way home.

The place looked even worse to him now than it had when he left that morning—a midden heap, as if a motorcycle gang had been camped here all fall.

He shucked his coat and set to work, bagging all the trash and garbage, old newspapers,
TV Guides
, beer cans and bottles, food containers, empty cigarette packs, crusts of bread, tin cans, apple cores and milk cartons. He moved all the caked and crusted dishes, pots and pans in the general direction of the kitchen sink and all the dirty clothes to the hamper in the bathroom, where he paused for a second, shuddered at the sight, ran the faucets briefly and dumped a layer of Comet into the tub, toilet and lavatory, to be scrubbed later, after he finished cleaning the kitchen.

In his shirtsleeves, he lugged two large green plastic bags outside and shoved them into the barrel at the end of the driveway. Un-fucking-believable, that a grown man could let things get this bad! The cold air made the toothache shriek, so he raced back inside, where it lapsed swiftly back to a steady low-key whine, which distressed him, but at least the pain was steady and he could make mental adjustments to it that did not have to be undone and remade every fifteen or twenty seconds.

It was not long before he had the kitchen clean—dishes washed and dried and put away, counters wiped down, moldy and decomposing food removed from the refrigerator and tossed out, floor mopped. And then he was off to the bathroom, scrub-a-dub-dub, and to the bedroom, where he hauled from the closet the portable Hoover he had picked up the previous spring at a flea market down in Catamount, his first vacuum cleaner, and even though it seemed to suck dirt weakly, as if through a single bent straw, he was proud of owning it and enjoyed using it—a good thing, too, as it took him nearly an hour to vacuum the entire trailer.

At last, his home was clean. It smelled like water and soap, looked symmetrical and square, felt smooth, cool and dry to fingertips brushed along the kitchen counters. His tooth went on aching, but the privacy it gave, the way the pain walled him in, somehow comforted him, and although several times he thought of aspirin—Why not, for Christ's sake, Wade, do yourself a favor and take a couple aspirins, maybe even pack a second pair between your cheek and gum—he quickly dismissed the thought, as if ending his toothache, or even easing
it somewhat, would expose him to a flurry of faces, voices and questions that he preferred not to meet right now. Or ever, for that matter. Although he did not like to think of the toothache's lasting forever.

In the refrigerator there were three bottles of Rolling Rock and no other beverage. He had thrown out the curdled milk, and the orange juice had soured. He thought: if he drank all three beers, he would still be going to bed sober tonight. Good: he would drink all three: if there had been six or eight, he would have been forced to drink tap water. He cracked open one of the beers, took a long pull from it and poked through the permafrost of the freezer compartment, disinterring a package of baby lima beans and a chicken breast shrouded in several layers of Saran Wrap. Then he started a pan of rice, dropped the Baggie of baby limas into a saucepan of boiling water and melted a chunk of butter in a skillet. He held the chicken breast under warm running water to get it unwrapped and tossed it into the skillet. The food smelled good: domestic, orderly and constant—a warm bright spot in the middle of the cold dark forest.

By the time he sat down at the table to eat, it was after ten. He chewed slowly, carefully, with his left and front teeth only, and managed to avoid antagonizing the rotted tooth, which growled quietly in the right corner of his mouth's cage.

The table, a card table, actually, with four folding chairs placed around it, was situated in the middle of the kitchen. While he ate his solitary meal, he looked down the length of the trailer and admired the place. Before sitting down, he had turned off all the overhead lights in the trailer—overhead lights always made Wade feel he was still at work in LaRiviere's shop—and now to all appearances he was at home and there could have been two or even three moderate adults just out of sight in the living room having a quiet reasonable conversation about money, and in the near bedroom, his own, there could have been another such adult, reading in bed, maybe, the way his brother Rolfe liked to end his day, while in the farther bedroom a child did her homework. The bathroom door was ajar and the light was on, as if a woman who had just finished brushing her hair were touching up her lipstick before going out.

There was nothing wrong with this place that a little tender loving care could not fix, he thought, and he nibbled his
lima beans with his incisors, like a rodent.

He got up and went for another beer, lit a cigarette and walked back to his bedroom and turned on the radio. He moved the tuner up and down a few times until he found the easy-listening station in Littleton: Carly Simon was singing about a man who really knew how to make love good, so good that nobody did it better.

Jesus, that woman knows things, Wade thought, and he strolled back to the table and sat down again. Then he saw that he was smoking without having finished his meal yet and hurriedly rubbed the butt out in the ashtray. He resumed eating and thought, Whoa. This man's got to start thinking seriously about quitting cigarettes. Maybe this spring, after things settle down. The chicken was a little tough and dry, but it tasted fine to him, and as long as he cut it into tiny pieces and kept it on the left side of his mouth, he did not have any trouble chewing it.

Wade welcomed evenings like this; they were rare, and he almost credited it to the toothache. As if locked inside deep meditation, he was profoundly alone. His conscious mind, walled around by physical pain and the trailer and the snow and darkness beyond, was cleared of everything but the filmy shreds of a few simple fantasies, and though it was a long ways from happiness, it seemed as close to happiness as he had been able to get in weeks. Maybe longer. But he did not want to think about that right now; so he didn't.

When he had finished eating, he cleaned his dishes, dried them and put them away, and while standing by the sink, looked past his reflection in the window at the darkness outside and smoked a cigarette all the way down and drank off the third bottle of beer. He turned the thermostat back to sixty and went into his bedroom, shutting off the lights one by one behind him. He undressed and draped his clothes neatly over the back of the chair, got into bed and switched off the radio and the bedside light.