Affliction (19 page)

She gripped the rail as if for balance and said, “Do you think you could come back later on, when he'll be up?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose so. Sure. I mean, I don't want to intrude, you know, at a time like this and all. I just had a little business to settle with Mr. Gordon. I'm the local police officer, and there was something I wanted to speak with him about.”

“Something concerning my father?” She took several steps along the deck toward the stairs.

“Oh, no, nothing about that. Jeez, no. It's a … it's a traffic thing,” he said. “No big deal.”

“Can't it wait, then?”

Wade thought, Yes, yes, it can wait, of course it can wait. It could wait until another morning, when she would be freshly wakened once again and this terrible thing concerning her father would have passed by; he could drive over here and talk with this fair woman at her breakfast table, while her husband and her children drove farther and farther north into the mountains, leaving her behind so that Wade could comfort her, take care of her, provide strength for her to draw upon in her time of affliction and grief, this intelligent beautiful sad needy woman who was unlike all the other women Wade had known and loved, he was sure.

He backed toward the door, gazing up at her, concentrating so narrowly on her pale form that he did not see the man emerge from a room at the far end of the balcony—Mel Gordon, dark-eyed, unshaven, short black hair pressed to his narrow skull. He was wearing a wool plaid robe, forest green and blue, the Gordon tartan. He crossed his arms over his chest and studied Wade for a second, and as Wade reached behind him for the doorknob, Gordon said, “Whitehouse. Next time, phone ahead.”

“How's that?”

“I said, 'Next time, phone ahead.' ”

The older of the two boys cut a look at his father and said, “Daddy, be quiet, will you?”

Wade smiled and looked down at his feet and shook his head slightly. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured. Then he said, “Mr. Gordon, when I come all the way out to serve somebody a summons, I don't call ahead for an appointment.”

Gordon's face knotted, and he moved quickly past his wife to the stairs. He said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He hurried down the stairs, as if to close a window against a storm, and when he reached the landing at the bottom, a few feet from where Wade stood by the door, he said,
"C'mon, Whitehouse, let's see it, this summons.” He held out his hand and glared at Wade. “Let's see it.”

“I got to write it out.” Wade reached into his back pocket and drew out his fat pad of tickets and plucked a Bic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket.

“What the hell are you talking about, Whitehouse?”

“I'm issuing you a ticket, Mr. Gordon. Moving violation.” He pursed his lips and started to write.

“Moving violation! I just got out of bed, for Christ's sake, and you're telling me you're giving me a goddamn speeding ticket?” He barked a laugh. “Are you nuts? Is that it, White-house? You're nuts? I think you're nuts.”

Wade went on writing. “Yesterday morning, you passed a stopped school bus, which was flashing its lights, and then you passed a traffic officer holding traffic for pedestrians at a crosswalk,” Wade said without looking up. “Looked to me like you was speeding too. That's a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. But I'll let that one go by this time.”

Above them, the pale woman in the dark-green velour robe turned and retreated to one of the bedrooms. Wade glanced up and saw her disappear. The two men would duel down here below, and when only one of them remained, he would mount the stairs to her tower, where he would enter her darkened room. She would not know which of the two men in her life was crossing the room toward her.

Mel Gordon reached out and grabbed Wade's writing hand, startling him. “Hold on!” Gordon said.

Wade wrenched his hand free. “Don't ever put your hands on me, Mr. Gordon,” he said.

“You're talking about a goddamned traffic ticket, aren't you? From yesterday.”

“Yup.”

“From when I passed you at the school, where you had decided to hold up traffic for a goddamn half hour while you dreamed of becoming a traffic cop or something.” Gordon had stepped back now and was smiling broadly with amused disbelief. A surly pelt of black chest hairs filled in the V of chest exposed by his robe, and the pelt grew almost to his throat. He is the kind of man who has shaved twice a day since early adolescence and thinks all men do. “You going to advise me of my rights, Officer Whitehouse?”

“Don't give me a hard time, Mr. Gordon. Just take the
damn ticket and pay the fine by mail, or go to local court next month and fight it, I don't care. I'm just—”

“Doing your fucking job. I know. I watch television too.”

“Yes. Doing my job. Here's your ticket,” he said, and he tore it off the pad and handed the sheet to Gordon.

“You are something. You are really something.”

“Yeah. Well, so are you, Mr. Gordon. Something.” He smiled. “And your kids? They're rude to strangers,” he added, tossing the boys a hard look, as if they were bugs.

“Hey!” Gordon said. “You might insult my wife, too, while you're at it.” He took a step toward Wade. “Why the hell not? After all, you probably know all about her father's accident. Must be something about that you can make a crack on, if you really give it some thought. Why not, Whitehouse? Why not touch all the bases while you're here?” He smiled meanly.

“Yeah, well, I know about her father. I'm sorry about that.”

Gordon held the ticket out in front of him with one hand and folded it neatly in half and tucked it into Wade's shirt pocket. He was no longer smiling. “You get the hell out of my house now, asshole. And know this—you are going to be a
lucky
asshole if I haven't got you fired before the day is out.” He yanked open the door, turned Wade toward it and said, “I can put your country ass out of work with one phone call, Whitehouse, and I'm just pissed enough to do it now.” He placed a hand against Wade's stiffened shoulder and moved the man through the doorway to the porch, then slammed the door shut behind him.

For a few seconds, Wade stood out there on the open porch, facing across the white ice-covered lake toward the black line of trees and hills beyond. He patted his shirt pocket, where the folded ticket seemed to give off heat, and then zipped his jacket against the steady breeze that blew across the lake. His mind was filled with the image of the blond woman on the balcony above him, her beautifully fatigued face, her tall slender form as she gazed down and with her eyes asked him to come up the stairs and save her.

WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT—which, while driving back to town from Lake Agaway, he did—Wade realized that there was no one in town he could go to for advice concerning the hiring of an attorney. He would never again use the last lawyer he had hired, the guy who got him stuck like this in the first place. That had been a shot in the dark, a lawyer from the Littleton yellow pages, and he had obviously missed. Now, however, Wade knew what he was doing, yes-by-God, and he needed an attorney who would reflect that knowledge.

There were a few people in Lawford who could recommend someone to him—Alma Pittman, Chub Merritt, Gordon LaRiviere—but Wade did not particularly want anyone in town to know what he was up to. Except for Rolfe, who was too long too far out of town and state and could not help him find a lawyer but might advise him generally; and there was Margie, of course, who was different from everyone else in town, because she alone happened to love him—or if she did not love him exactly, she could be brought to love him, he believed, by kindnesses returned, something he had up to now been reluctant to provide.

It was an out-of-balance affair, in which one party, Margie, was a finer human being than the other. But both parties knew it and accepted it, so that the worst thing that could happen, Wade believed, was that Margie someday would find a man who returned her kindnesses and she would leave Wade for such a man. But Wade expected that he would not feel much worse about things then than he did now. Which was possibly why he refused to move in closer to Margie, why he kept his gaze slightly averted at all times, even while making love to her. It did not keep her a stranger, exactly, but it kept her from becoming a wife.

Back in town now, Wade drove past LaRiviere's, and as he passed he remembered drilling a well once for a man who was a Concord attorney, a guy named J. Battle Hand, whom neither Wade nor LaRiviere himself had ever actually met, but from what he could see, the man was successful: he had bought a large chunk of very expensive land down near Catamount and had built a Swiss-style chalet on the southern slope of a huge hill where there was a ski resort going up on the backside of the hill—condos, restaurants, shops, bars, saunas, a Ramada Inn, a half-dozen different ski slopes and tows: the works. And this guy, J. Battle Hand, owned the undeveloped half of the hill and evidently had no plans to do anything with it but plunk his own vacation home down in the middle of it, setting it in a stand of thick white birches with a lovely long view of the hills of central New Hampshire, only a mile and a quarter from where people drove whole days from Massachusetts and points south to get to.

By Wade's and Lawford's standards, and even by the standards of the much larger town of Catamount, the house was palatial. LaRiviere's bid on the well had come in slightly high, but he had been hired anyhow, probably because of his reputation for being able to set up and drill on slopes that discouraged most flatland well drillers. LaRiviere could drive out to a hilly site when they got ready to set up the rig and in seconds could find the one piece of ground where the rig could be backed into place and the drill sent into the ground vertically. It was uncanny, at least to Wade, who inevitably had picked someplace else to drill. LaRiviere would survey the ground with a quick gaze, note Wade's spot, pick another, then humiliate Wade by first having Jack Hewitt or Jimmy Dame park the rig where Wade had suggested. Every time, no matter how they
jacked it, the rig ended up tilted at an angle that could not be corrected by the drill. Then LaRiviere would have Jack bring the truck down a few yards and to the left a ways, where a batch of chokecherry bushes had obscured the surface of the ground, and sure enough, the rig sat level as a cake in an oven, and the drill bit, lowered into place, aimed straight down to the center of the earth.

Though he had never met the man, Wade remembered J. Battle Hand clearly, mainly because of his name, which struck him as a lawyer-like name, the name of a man who fought like a tiger for his clients, who believed in justice and in absolute right and absolute wrong and would not defend a person unless he first believed in that person's innocence and in the righteousness of his cause. It was clear, too, that he had become wealthy this way. J. Battle Hand was precisely the kind of attorney Wade needed for bringing a custody suit against his ex-wife. He needed a good rich man. Or, better, a rich good man.

He pulled in at Wickham's, looked around for Margie and discovered what he had forgotten—she had worked yesterday, the first day of hunting season, and had today off. Nick told him that she had phoned in a message for Wade to call her if he came in. Half the booths and tables were filled with deer hunters, most of them local. These were not the fanatics and out-of-towners who had crowded the place yesterday morning. In one day the intensity of the hunt had been sufficiently diluted that here, along the sidelines, most of the observers and participants were able to affect little more than passive involvement with the killing still going on in the woods. It was not all that different from any other Saturday morning at Wickham's. Two of the pickups parked in front had dead deer in the back, but they looked more like cargo than trophy. The town seemed to have settled into a seasonal rhythm, the deer-hunting season, which was as natural and unconscious an aspect of life as winter or spring: one simply went out and acted “natural,” and in that way one was able to behave appropriately too. Easy.

Wade got Nick to change a dollar bill, and he headed through the nearly empty restaurant to the game room in back. Nick himself was serving at the counter this morning; he had a high school girl waiting tables, a plump girl with a uniform two sizes too small for her and a face made up to look like a Las Vegas showgirl's. Back in the game room, where the pay
phone was located, a pair of teenaged boys were playing donkey ball and smoking cigarettes. Wade dropped a coin in, got Concord information and the number of J. Battle Hand, attorney at law, and dialed it.

It occurred to Wade that J. Battle Hand might not be in his office on a Saturday morning, he might be over in Catamount skiing, or lounging in front of a fire in his huge living room, so he was pleased and a little surprised to have a secretary ask him who was calling and then to say, “Just one moment, please, Mr. Whitehouse,” and then to find himself instantly and easily speaking with the man he wanted to represent him in what Wade regarded as the most complicated, ambitious, possibly reckless but nonetheless righteous thing he had ever undertaken: the attempt to gain regular and easy access to his own child. This might not be all that hard, after all, he thought, and he noticed that his hands had stopped shaking and his toothache had gone back to a dry rattle in his mouth. It had not bothered him much this morning anyhow, but it had been there nonetheless, like unpleasant background noise, a next-door neighbor playing his radio a little too loud.

Hand's voice was low, calm, authoritative, just as Wade had hoped he would sound. He said, “I see,” many times, while Wade quickly explained what he wished Hand to do for him. When the lawyer suggested that, before they do anything, Wade come in to his office and talk, Wade explained that he worked up in Lawford and had trouble getting off on weekdays; he would like to come in today, sometime this afternoon, if possible. Hand said fine, how was two o'clock, and that was that.

No, sir, this was not going to be as hard or as confusing as he had expected. They had not talked about how much it would cost, of course, but Wade could tell from the sound of the man's voice that Attorney Hand was a reasonable man. Whatever it cost Wade, it would be worth it to have Jill back in his life, and he could pay it out over years, if necessary. He could take out a bank loan, maybe, a second mortgage on the trailer, if he had to—and no doubt he would have to, for he had no savings whatsoever.

Then Wade called Margie. As soon as he heard her voice, he wanted a cigarette. He patted his shirt pocket and found that he was out. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“Wait a minute, I got to get a pack of cigarettes. Can you hold on?”

“Hurry up. I'm baking.”

“Be right back,” he said. He was suddenly frantic for a cigarette; the need was as physical and immediate as the need to urinate. He placed the receiver on top of the phone box and hurried out to the cash register and bought a pack of Camel Lights from Nick. By the time he got back to Margie, he was already smoking, his lungs and face feeling soothed and familiar again.

“I got to quit these things,” he said to her, but he could not imagine being able to endure for more than a minute the agitated unfamiliarity that smoking eliminated. It was a singular and specific kind of psychic pain, which had been caused by the cigarettes in the first place, and they were the singular specific remedy for it. If there were available to him a similar remedy for the general pain, a wide-body potion that eliminated the overall agitation and unfamiliarity that he believed he suffered every waking moment of his life, and if that potion were programmed to kill him in an even shorter and more exact time than the cigarettes were, Wade surely would have taken that remedy too. The final result may be death, but addiction is about eliminating pain with what causes the pain in the first place, and death was coming along anyway, so what the hell. But there was no such general remedy that he knew of, and though he did not always think so, he was probably lucky there was none. It was perhaps sufficient that at present it was only the cigarettes that were killing him.

While he spoke to Margie, he kept thinking of Mel Gordon's wife, the dead Evan Twombley's living daughter, standing between him and Mel Gordon like an angelic shield, protecting him from Gordon's dark fury, and when Margie said that she could not spend the afternoon with him in Concord, she had to finish baking pies for Nick Wickham, Wade was almost glad. For the moment, his image of Margie Fogg could not compete with his image of Mel Gordon's wife.

“It's probably just as well,” he said. “I got to see my lawyer at two anyhow.”

“So. You're really going to do that. The custody thing.”

“Yep.”

“Oh, God. I think you'll be sorry. I think you'll wish you had never opened this whole thing up again, Wade.”

“Maybe. But I'd be a hell of a lot sorrier if I just let it go. Kids grow up fast,” he said. “And then it's over. You get old, and the kids are grown into strangers. Look at my old man and me.”

“Your father,” she said. “Your father was not like you. That's why you and he are strangers.”

“That's the whole point. My father … well, I don't want to get into that.”

“And Lillian, she's not like your mother, either. Lillian's going to fight this like a she-bear. Believe me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But that's the whole point too. If Lillian
was
like my mother, I wouldn't be doing any of this in the first place, you know.” He lit a second cigarette off the first and inhaled deeply. “Besides, me and my old man, we aren't really strangers.”

“No.”

“In fact,” he said, “I was kind of thinking of going up there tomorrow. I haven't been by to see them in months. You feel like coming?”

“Sure,” she said in a flat voice. She was giving up on Wade: his inconsistency was patterned and self-serving, and there was no way in for her. She might as well just let him be who he is and enjoy him for that as much as possible. More and more often these days, she found herself regarding Wade from a distance. She knew what it meant: sooner or later she would not want to sleep with him anymore. Right now, however, she was lonely, she was, and she felt imprisoned by her body, she did, and she wanted out, badly, and sleeping with Wade, even if only on occasion, provided her with brief reprieves, like conjugal visits, and she was not about to give that up. She was not.

“Wade,” she said, and she said his name in a low voice that was instantly meaningful to him, like the start of a catechism, and they began their old ritual sequence:

“Yes.”

“Can you come by my place tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What will you do with me, Wade?”

He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and cast a glance at the teenagers playing donkey ball in the corner of the room. In a low voice, he said, “I'll do everything you want me to do.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. And a few things you don't want me to do.”

“Ah-h-h,” she said. “You're not at home now, are you?”

“No.”

“So we can't do it over the phone,” she said.

“No. We can't. I'd look… I'd look pretty silly if we did. I'm in Nick's back room.”

“You wouldn't look silly. Not to me you wouldn't. I love to see you do that,” she said. “You know what I'm doing now, don't you?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. I surely do. But I'm not going to listen anymore,” he said. “Besides, I thought you were baking.”

“Ummm. I am.”

“I'm gonna hang up on you. Before I make a fool of myself in public. I'll come by later,” he said. “I'll come by and make a fool of myself in private. If that's okay by you.”

She assured him that, yes, it was fine by her, and they said goodbye and hung up. Wade sighed heavily, and the two boys looked over at him and stared for a second.

“Hello, Wade,” the taller one said. “Getcha deer yet?”

“Nope,” he said. “I give up hunting five years ago, boys. Give it up for women. You oughta try it. Great for your sex life,” he said, and he hitched up his pants and headed out the door, his mind refilling with the golden light cast by his image of Mel Gordon's wife.

 

The office of J. Battle Hand was on the first floor of a white Federal town house on South Main Street in Concord. It had snowed only a few inches in Concord the day before, and then it had rained, which had washed away the accumulated snow, but it was cold under a low dark-gray midafternoon sky, as if it were going to snow again, and the sidewalks were smeared here and there with half-frozen puddles.