Affliction (31 page)

“Yeah, well, it seemed like something was … needed. You know. For Ma.”

“I was wondering, I wondered if maybe you felt the way I did, when we put the flowers on top of the coffin.”

“How' that?”

“Well, sort of like she was there, for just a minute longer, giving us some kind of message. About Pop. About taking care of Pop, maybe.” This was not working: Wade and I are incapa
ble of talking about the things that matter most to us. Still, it seemed important to try.

“Taking care of Pop, eh?
You
want to take care of him? Be my guest. I suppose what I‘m doing for him is what Ma would have wanted, but if it was up to me alone, I‘d take the bastard out behind the barn and shoot him. I kid you not.”

“Well, it was a nice gesture anyway, with the flowers.”

“Thanks,” he said, his back still to me.

We stood in silence for a moment longer, and then, finally, I turned toward the truck and suggested that we go back inside the house.

“Not yet, not till I burn out the little gas that' left in the tank. You go in if you want. I got to stay here until it stalls out, or the battery'll run dead. I guess I ought to shut off the headlights, though,” he said, clearly not wanting to. “There' a kerosene lantern I saw a minute ago over by the side of the door, where we came in. Whyn't you light that?” he said.

I did as he instructed, while he climbed into the cab and flicked off the headlights; and then we had a soft pale-yellow light filling the cavernous space. The truck motor chugged on, and I felt as if we were inside a ship at night, crossing a northern sea, looking out into darkness and cold with a steady wind in our faces.

I do not know where the thought came from, but suddenly I remembered the shooting of Evan Twombley, and I asked Wade if he had heard anything new about it in the last few days.

He said no and seemed oddly reluctant to talk about it, as if embarrassed by his earlier obsessive interest in the case. “I guess it was an accident, like everybody thinks.”

“Like everybody
wants
to think, you mean,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so. But don't get me all started up on that again. It doesn't go anywhere, and whenever I get to thinking on it, I get crazy, like a dog worrying at a flea it can't scratch. It feels better if I just let it alone,” he said.

“You want to know what I think happened?”

Wade said no, then yes, and walked around to the passenger' side of the truck and opened the door and groped in the dark through the glove compartment. I had taken up a position on the tailgate, and when he returned and sat down beside me, he was carrying a nearly full bottle of Canadian Club. “I‘ve been finding them all over the damned place,” he said, and he
unscrewed the cap, sniffed the contents and took a slug from the bottle. “In the basement, in the attic, under the bathroom sink. I didn't realize how bad he‘d got.” He started to pass the bottle to me, then withdrew it. “Sorry,” he said.

“Wade, I think your first response to the Twombley shooting was the correct one.”

“Which is?”

“That it was not an accident.”

“Then who shot him?”

“Well, your friend, I think. Jack Hewitt.”

“Motive, Rolfe. You got to have motive.”

“For Jack? Money.”

“Okay. Money. Jack always needs money, and he' had big ideas about life ever since he got all that attention for being a ballplayer. But come on, who the hell would pay Jack that kind of money? Bonus-baby money.”

“Easy. Who benefits if Twombley is suddenly dead?”

“Oh, the mob, I suppose. The Mafia or the Cosa Nostra or whatever the hell they call them these days. But those guys, they don't need to hire a hick from the sticks. They‘ve got their own talent, guys with lots of experience. Specialists.”

“Right. They would not deal with a guy like Jack. I know that. Who else benefits?”

“I don't know, Rolfe. You tell me.”

“Okay, I will. It is likely that there are people running the union who do not want Twombley to testify in Washington about connections between the union and organized crime. Twombley was the president, but his son-in-law is the vice-president and treasurer, and he will probably be the next president. I saw that in the papers. What' his name, Mel Gordon?”

“Gordon, yeah. The guy with the BMW I told you about. I told you about him, didn't I?”

“Yes. So listen, here is my theory. It is quite possible, it is even likely, that Twombley was unaware of connections between the union and the mob, money-laundering operations, say, where cash skimmed from Las Vegas or from drugs gets into the pension fund and then in turn gets invested in real estate deals, for example, or, what the hell, mutual funds. Sound and very legal investments. That could happen without his knowing. Until, prompted by a federal inquiry, he starts nosing around himself.”

Wade took another drink from the bottle and set it down next to him on the tailgate. He looked at me and said, “Toothache,” then lit a cigarette and stared out the open door at the backside of the house, where now and then we could see Margie pass by the kitchen window, walking from the sink to the stove.

Wade said, “So you think Mel Gordon would want to get rid of him, but he wouldn't want it to look like a hit, a professional killing. Because that would only confirm the Mafia connection and make people dig deeper.”

“Right. But a hunting accident, now
that
would be perfect.”

“Yep,” he said. “I guess it would. It's true, y know. Show a kid like Jack enough money, and he just might do something like that. And it' obviously the easiest way in the world to shoot somebody and get away with it. Shit, in this state, even if you admit that you shot somebody in the woods, so long as you say it was accidental, you might get fined fifty bucks and your hunting license gets pulled for the season. Jack, fucking Jack. He probably claimed the guy shot himself, instead of saying he shot him himself accidentally, because it was the first day of the season and Jack hadn't got his own deer yet and didn't want his license pulled.”

“That, and his reputation as a guide.”

Wade laughed lightly. “I don't know, Rolfe. It's all a little too neat for me.” Then he turned serious again. “Nothing in life is ever that neat.”

“Some things are,” I said.

“Only in books.”

This was a criticism of me, I knew, the bookish one, as Wade would have it, the one who did not know about real life, which he regarded as his area of expertise. He may not have been to college, as he was fond of pointing out, but he had been in the army and had been a cop, and he had seen some things that would surprise you about human nature. Whereas I, by his lights, had lived a privileged and protected and therefore, when it came to human nature, an ignorant life.

“It is what happened,” I said. “And not because it's so neat, but in spite of it. And I know you agree with me.”

He stood up and walked to the door and stared down the driveway past the house to the road. “You're trying to make
me crazy with this, Rolfe. It gets me so fucking mad, when I think about Jack shooting this guy Twombley, and Mel Gordon paying him for it, to kill his own father-in-law, for God's sake, the father of his own wife—it gets me so mad I can't stand it. I feel like hitting something, pounding the shit out of it. You sit there, calmly laying it out like that—I don't know how the hell you do it. Doesn't it piss you off?”

“No,” I said. “Not particularly.”

“Well, it makes me crazy. And I can't do a damned thing about it. The kid gets to kill the guy, and Mel Gordon gets to buy the death of his own father-in-law, and that's the end of it. Nobody gets
punished
for it. It's not right.”

“You don't care about that, do you?” I said. “Punishment?”

“Sure I do! Right's right, goddammit. Don't you care about that, about what's right?”

“No, not when it has got nothing to do with me. All I care about is what really happened. What the truth is. I am a student of history, remember.”

“Yeah, I remember.” We were silent for a few moments. Wade sat back down beside me on the tailgate and took another drink of whiskey. The truck sputtered, and then the motor coughed and stopped.

“Out of gas,” Wade said in a low voice. He got up and turned off the ignition and returned. “Let's go in,” he said. He sounded dispirited.

“I should be getting on home. It's a long drive, and I have school tomorrow.”

“You coming in to say goodbye to Pop?” He lifted the chimney on the lantern and blew out the flame, dousing us in darkness.

“You think he will notice one way or the other?”

“Nope.”

“Then I'll skip it.” I told him that I liked Margie, she was very attractive and seemed kind, and I suggested that he bring her with him the next time he came down to visit. He said he would and shook my hand, and I walked to my car alone. From the road, while my car warmed up, I watched Wade walk onto the porch and go inside the house, and I did not know it then, but when the door closed, it was the last time I would see my brother.

 

During the long drive home, I played back to myself that odd eerily lit scene in the barn, troubled by it somehow and feeling vaguely guilty, as if in an important way I had misrepresented myself. It was as if I had cast myself in a role that I was unsuited for, a role that was better suited for Wade to play, and in doing so, I had thrown Wade off his lines and intentions, had changed his motives and thus, to the detriment of the play itself, had affected his actions. It was a usurpation of sorts, for me to speculate with such bland confidence about the cause of Twombley's death, and though I did not realize it at the time, by reawakening and giving a hard focus to Wade's involvement with that event, I was sending Wade off in a direction of inquiry that he should never have pursued.

I know that now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. But back in November, the day we buried our mother and the night we dug our father's truck out of the snow and stored it in the old collapsing barn, I myself must have needed Wade's obsession with Twombley's death, and I myself must have wanted Jack Hewitt and Mel Gordon, two men I had not even met, punished for killing him. I had no way of knowing what Wade would do with my highly speculative theory—let us face it, a hypothesis based on intuition and the flimsiest of evidence, fortified with little more than my pretended knowledge of how large unions function—but I did know that Wade would accept my version of events, that it would become the truth for him and that he would apply to that truth a range and intensity of emotion that was denied me.

 

That night Wade slept fitfully, floating in and out of dark dreams and barely conscious fantasies, and he woke gloomy, dour and in a hurry to get to work. He directed traffic at the school with impatience and a glower for everyone he saw, even the children. It was a sunny day, cloudless and relatively warm, but Wade held his head down and his shoulders hunched, as if pummeled by a northeaster. By the time he arrived at LaRiviere's, he had fixed his mind onto a single question: What was LaRiviere's connection to the killing of Evan Twombley?

Where prior to our conversation in the barn Wade had
viewed LaRiviere's uncharacteristic benevolence and sudden generosity with some puzzlement and gratitude, he now clearly saw his boss as behaving suspiciously. LaRiviere's putting Wade on salary and offering him an inside job, and his somewhat unctuous presence at the house before the funeral and his surprising offer to be the fourth pallbearer, when, after more than twenty years of being Wade's employer, he barely knew our mother's first name—all that had struck Wade at the time merely as odd but, in a sense, typical: he was used to thinking of LaRiviere as odd. My conversation with him in the barn, however, had created for Wade a new order, as it were, a microcosmic system in which all the parts now had to fit, especially the odd ones, the puzzling and inconsistent parts, and to Wade, LaRiviere's recent behavior was exactly that. A mere symmetry, a small observed order, placed like a black box in a corner of one's turbulent or afflicted life, can make one's accustomed high tolerance of chaos no longer possible.

Wade walked into the shop and saw Jack and Jimmy Dame ready to head out, the drilling rig loaded with steel pipe, gleaming and clean as if it were brand-new, straight out of a trade-journal advertisement. Jimmy was walking around the front of the truck taking swipes at real and imagined specks of dirt with a rag, while Jack sat up inside the cab, smoking a cigarette and reading the sports page of the
Manchester Union-Leader.

“Put out that fucking cigarette!” It was LaRiviere from the office door, and his face was red and swollen, like an angry frog's.

Jack grimaced, took one last deep drag and reached for the ashtray on the dashboard, moving slowly.

“Not there, asshole. Flush it!”

Jack swung down from the truck, saw Wade standing just inside the door and, expressionless, walked across the shop to the lavatory. Wade thought, This is a smart little piece of theater, everything normal, the usual craziness from LaRiviere, the usual surly response from Jack, who is probably half hung over, or at least trying tc look that way to me, the two of them going through their routines so that I will think that everything is normal. He could imagine them agreeing privately before he arrived: LaRiviere would catch Jack smoking in the shop just as Wade came through the door, and Jack would react with his everyday sour compliance.

Wade knew that somehow LaRiviere was a part of the killing of Evan Twombley. He had to be: LaRiviere was the one who had provided Twombley with Jack as a guide in the first place, and he had advised Twombley to go hunting on his land up on Parker Mountain, to use his cabin up there if he wanted, and when Wade had told LaRiviere about the shooting, he had acted odd about it, making Wade drive him up to the mountain lickety-split and seeming almost relieved when he heard the state police version of the event. For a second Wade entertained the notion that the police captain, Asa Brown, was somehow involved, but then dismissed it: he only thought it because he did not like Asa Brown personally and wanted him somehow involved.