Affliction (32 page)

It was harder with LaRiviere and Jack: in a way, he loved LaRiviere, had worked for him since he was a high school kid, except when he was in the army, and at times had thought of him as the kind of father he wished had been his, the kind of father he thought he actually deserved; and Jack he viewed as a little brother, almost, a man who was a lot like himself twenty years earlier—a smart good-looking kid with a brash sociability, stuck in a small town, maybe, but making the most of it. No, he did not want LaRiviere and Jack involved in this sorry business, and when he looked at the two men, the one blustering about cigarette butts and cleanliness, the other dropping his butt into the toilet as if dropping a coin into a fountain, he felt a form of grief, a turbulent mixture of abandonment, rage and guilt. Toward Asa Brown, however, all he felt was the all-too-familiar cold-edged resentment that insecure people feel toward those who humiliate them. No way that Asa Brown was involved in this Twombley business.

Wade said to LaRiviere, “Morning, Gordon,” and went to his locker and hung up his coat and hat.

LaRiviere smiled broadly, tossed Wade a wave and retreated to the office.

As Wade picked up his clipboard and inventory sheets and prepared to resume counting wrenches and fittings, Jack passed him and said, “I'm fucking out of here, man.”

“Catamount?”

“No, I mean this fucking job. This job sucks. Working outside in winter sucks. I'm fucking out of here.” He stalked to the truck and climbed back up into the cab, where Jimmy waited in the driver's seat. Jack cranked down the window and
hollered to Wade, “Open the garage door, will you?”

Instead, Wade strolled around to Jack's side of the truck and in a smooth low voice said, “Why don't you quit now, Jack, if you want out so bad?”

Jack sighed and leaned his head back against the seat. “Wade, just open the door. We're already late, and Gordon's got a hair across his ass.”

“No, I mean it—why don't you quit this job? You‘ve got enough money now, don't you? Head out to California, my man. Start over. Surf's up, Jack, but you, you're back here digging wells in the snow.”

“What do you mean, I've got enough money? I'm as broke as you are.”

Wade smiled broadly, then turned and ambled across the shop and hit the electric door opener, and the door lifted with a rattle and slid overhead. As the truck exited from the garage, Jack leaned out the open window and shouted to Wade, “You're looney tunes! You know that? Fucking looney tunes!”

“Like a fox!” Wade hollered after, as the truck lumbered across the parking lot toward the road. Wade started to turn back to the switch, when he saw the familiar black BMW enter the parking lot from the road, and as the truck passed on its way out, the BMW stopped. The truck stopped, and Jack lowered his window again, and Wade saw him exchange a few words with the driver of the BMW, then move on.

Wade stood at the garage door and watched Mel Gordon park his car next to the building and walk briskly around to the open door, where the man saw and recognized Wade.

Their eyes met, and then (significantly, Wade thought) Mel Gordon looked away at once and passed Wade by. Wade turned and followed him with his gaze as he headed straight for the office door. The door opened for a second, and Wade saw Elaine Bernier, seated behind her desk, greet Mel Gordon with a delighted smile.

“Mr. Gordon!” she exclaimed.

“The boss in?” he asked in a cheerful voice.

“Yes indeedy!”

Mel Gordon turned and drew the door closed behind him, catching Wade's glare as he pulled it to, returning it with a glare of his own, then slamming the door shut.

With a smile and a whistle, Wade punched the button, and the overhead door slid down and slammed against the
concrete floor. His chest was warm and filled with what felt peculiarly like joy, the way it felt when he discovered Lillian meeting her lover in Concord. The world was full of secrets, secrets and conspiracies and lies, plots and evil designs and elaborate deceptions, and knowing them—and now he knew them all—filled Wade's heart with inexpressible joy.

BY MIDMORNING, the sky had clouded over, and then snow fell again—large flakes, like bits of paper, that got smaller as the front moved in and the temperature dropped. Wade continued with the inventory, counting and listing fittings, pipe, tools and equipment in careful order—boring tedious work, much of it performed while squatting in front of undercounter wooden bins half filled with loose copper trees, galvanized ninety-degree elbows or brass gate valves. It was warm inside the shop, however, and brightly lit and, of course, spotlessly clean, and Wade would much rather have been here than down in Catamount, drilling a well in half-frozen ground. Which, without LaRiviere's sudden and still puzzling change of attitude toward him, is exactly what he would have been doing.

Once an hour or so, he went into the closet-sized lavatory, shut the door and smoked a cigarette, and it was evidently during one of those breaks that Mel Gordon, having finished his business with LaRiviere, had departed from the shop: when Wade quit for lunch and walked out to the parking lot to drive
over to Wickham's, the BMW was gone and its tracks had disappeared.

He got into his car and turned the key in the ignition, thinking at that moment mainly about his toothache—promising himself, yet again, that he had to get the damned thing fixed, drilled, pulled, whatever the hell it took, because this was ridiculous, a grown man walking around with a perpetual toothache in the age of modern dentistry, for God's sake— when he realized that he was getting no response from the car. He turned the key again, heard a faint click, then nothing, except the tick of the new snow falling on the roof and hood.

He hated this car. Hated it. He was supposed to be a cop, on call twenty-four hours a day, but he had to rely on an unreliable eight-year-old Fairlane with a slippery clutch, a throw-out bearing that constantly chattered and now, he was sure, a bad starter motor.

LaRiviere's new Dodge 4x4 sat next to Wade's car, and he decided to take it: what the hell, why not? Let the man show him just how far he could go. Pull his chain, rattle his cage, shake the man up a little.

He got out of his car and reached for the door handle of LaRiviere's pickup, when he saw the motto
OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE
! and as if Wade were programmed, old habit kicked in, and he found himself walking into the office to ask LaRiviere for permission to use the truck.

He told LaRiviere about the starter motor, it had been giving him trouble on and off for the last month, but before he had a chance to make the switch and ask for the use of LaRiviere's own vehicle, LaRiviere flipped Wade the keys. “Take my pickup. I can use the Town Car; it needs some use anyhow. Tell you what you ought to do, is have Chub Merritt tow your shitbox in this afternoon, and you drive the pickup until he gets yours fixed. You ever think of buying a new car, Wade?” he suddenly asked, squinting over his desk at him, drumming his fingers as if sending messages through the wood.

“On what you pay me?”

LaRiviere ignored the remark. He pressed his intercom and hollered into it, “Elaine! Call Chub Merritt and have him come tow Wade's car in and check out the starter motor.”

“What?” her high hard voice came back, the tone colored more by disbelief than by not having heard him.

LaRiviere repeated his order and added that he wanted
Chub to bill the company for the job. “Consider it a company expense, Wade. Better yet, I'll bill the town. We'll charge it against the police budget. You ever think about buying a new car, Wade? You're the town police officer, you know, and the town police officer ought to have a decent vehicle, wouldn't you say?”

“I would.”

“Maybe we could sneak that through the budget next town meeting, a new car for Wade Whitehouse. Get you a full-sized Olds or something, or a Bronco, not one of them little K-cars that fucking Lee Iacocca makes. That guy gets to me, you know?” he went on, swiveling his chair around and swinging his legs up onto the desktop. “First he goes broke, then he gets the taxpayers to bail him out, then he comes on like Captain Capitalism, like he's running for fucking president. Him and that guy Donald Trump. Fucking guys feed at the public trough, and when they get rich from it, they turn into Republicans. I always liked it that you're a Democrat, Wade. You and me,” he said, smiling broadly and, to Wade, looking a whole lot like Lee Iacocca himself. “It's good talking politics now and then. So what do you say, you want a new car or not?”

“Sure I do. What do I have to do for it?”

“Nothing. Nothing you‘re not doing right now, Wade. I been thinking lately, you don't get enough appreciation around here, and it's time we changed things a little, that's all.”

“I saw Mel Gordon here this morning,” Wade said.

“So?”

“He say anything more about that summons I gave him? Tried to give him, actually. Sonofabitch wouldn't accept it.”

LaRiviere sighed and furrowed his brow with large concern. “Wade, that was not smart, going out there right after the man's father-in-law shot himself. Let's let that one go, okay? Call it a favor to me.”

“To you? Why?”

“Mel's doing some business with me. It's nice to do favors for people you do business with. Besides, he was all upset that day. He was in a hurry, and the way I understand it, you were holding everybody up at the school. No big deal, Wade.”

Wade had a cigarette out and was tapping the end against his watch crystal. “That was before Twombley was shot.”

“Don't light that in here. I'm allergic.”

“I won't. Wasn't that before he could have known about Twombley?”

“What the fuck difference does it make, Wade? Just lay off, will you? Try to be sensible, for Christ's sake.” He shifted in his chair, brought his legs down and picked up a pencil, as if going back to work. “Look, take my truck, enjoy yourself, and stop worrying about Mel Gordon, will you?” He smiled. End of interview.

Wade said sure and turned to leave. As he reached for the door, LaRiviere, in a quiet offhand way, said, “What about your folks' place out there, Wade? What're you planning to do with it?”

“Nothing. Live there. Want to buy my trailer back?”

“Maybe. What the hell, I put those trailers in to sell them, and I sold all of them once already and a few of them twice. But I was wondering, I wondered if you thought of selling your folks' place.”

“You interested?”

“Could be.”

“You and Mel Gordon?”

“Could be.”

“Why shouldn't I be the guy who holds on to the place and sell it myself down the line? Why should you guys make all the money? Anyhow, I can't sell it to you. I need the place, and my old man, he needs the place.”

“Okay, okay. Just asking.”

“I got it. Just asking.” Wade stuck the cigarette between his lips and pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket.

“Out! Out!” LaRiviere hollered, waving both hands at him.

Wade grinned, then closed the door and left the shop.

He did not light his cigarette until he had driven LaRiviere's and had noticed pickup into the parking lot at Wickham's and had noticed, with his usual irritation, Nick's neon sign,
HOME MADE COOKING.
He sat in the truck, peering over the raised plow at the sign on the low roof of the restaurant, the words bright pink through the falling snow. He inhaled deeply, the smoke hit the bottom of his lungs, and it suddenly came to him: the sonofabitch LaRiviere, he
was
in it, after all! They're
all
in it! LaRiviere, Mel Gordon, Jack—all of them. Mel Gordon was in the real estate business with LaRiviere, using union funds,
probably, to buy up all the loose real estate in the area, for God knows what, since it was barely worth paying taxes on, most of it, and Twombley found out about it, so they used Jack to get rid of him.

Wade sat in the truck, smoking, and several times he ran it through, sorting out the connections, isolating the missing pieces, trying to separate what he knew from what he did not know. He did not know
(a)
the exact financial connection between Mel Gordon and LaRiviere, but he was sure it involved union funds and possibly organized-crime money; and he did not know
(b)
why anyone would want to buy up all the loose land and old farms in town and out along Saddleback and Parker Mountain, when no one else had wanted it for generations; and he did not know
(c)
why he cared so intensely about who killed Twombley, why it made him so angry that he could feel his heart start to pound and his body get rigid with rage, so angry that he wanted to hit someone with his fists.

He found himself dreaming an image of himself, stepping forward with his fists cocked, leaning into the blow, driving his fists forward into the body and face of a person who had no face, no gender, even. Just a person, a person being hit by Wade Whitehouse.

 

As of today, Margie was no longer working days at Wickham'; she was out at the house taking care of Pop, until Wade got home, when she was to drive into town and wait tables till Nick closed up the place at nine. They had agreed to try it temporarily, but after they got married, Wade said, he did not want her working at all. She had said, “What am I supposed to do, then, clean house and cook all day and night too? I did that once, Wade, and I don't think it works for me. Maybe, but I don't think so.”

Wade's response had been to point out that someone had to stay with Pop; they could not leave him alone anymore; and at night and on weekends, when he was not working himself, Wade would not want to sit home alone waiting for her to get through at Wickham's.

They had not been quarreling, exactly, so much as thinking aloud over breakfast. Neither of them had imagined that it might so quickly turn out to be difficult to mesh their lives smoothly. To Wade, the idea of wedding Margie's life to his had
simply meant that he would work at his job and Margie would take care of the house and hearth, which happened to include an alcoholic old man and soon a ten-year-old girl. To Margie, the idea of moving in with Wade had meant that she did not have to worry quite so much about money and did not have to be lonely all the time. In spite of their strenuous and failed first marriages, they both held firmly in their minds that image of the family in which the man goes to his job all day and comes home at night, and the woman stays home and takes care of the house and any children or sick or infirm adults who happen to be there, and everybody is happy.

What went wrong in her own family and in Wade's, as in their first marriages and in most of the marriages that they knew about, causing so much suffering to both the parents and to all the children, was a failure of individual character— Wade's father, her father, his mother, her mother, and so on— and, of course, bad luck. The way to make a marriage work, they both believed, was to improve your character and take advantage of your luck. The first they believed they had control over; the second you took your chances with. So that when one agreed, or refused, to marry a person one loved, one was making a statement about that person's character and was expressing his or her attitude toward luck at that particular point in his or her life.

Margie thought highly of Wade, and she had felt lucky lately: just when her life had seemed to be freezing over her, trapping her beneath it in solitude and poverty, the man she enjoyed being with, a decent man with a steady job, had come into possession of a house and had expressed a strong desire to marry her. Wade had felt lucky lately too: there was the dumb luck of finding out about his ex-wife's affair with her lawyer just as he was about to launch a custody suit against her; there was the luck of LaRiviere's decision, whatever his reasons, to treat him fairly; there was the luck of the house dropping into his lap, as it were, although that was because of bad luck, his mother's death; and there was the luck of having a woman he felt comfortable with, a decent woman with good sense, willing and able to marry him.

So why not get married? For fifty or a hundred thousand years, men and women had been marrying for these reasons; why not Wade Whitehouse and Margie Fogg? In fact, the force of these conditions, character and luck, was so strong that for
them not to marry would take enormous effort, a kind of radical willfulness or downright perversity that neither of them seemed to possess. They would either have to deny the influence over their lives of character and luck, or they would have to admit that one or the other or both of them were bad people incapable of improving themselves or else merely people afflicted by misfortune.

Late in the afternoon, Jack Hewitt and Jimmy Dame drove into the parking lot, pulled the drilling rig up to the garage door and honked for Wade to open the door. It was snowing fairly heavily by now and gave all appearances of continuing into the night, and while Jack and Jimmy hosed down the rig and put tools away, Jimmy chanted,
⁴ⁱ
O-ver-time, o-ver-time, won't you give me o-ver-time?” and Jack looked grimly at his watch now and then and at the door, as if planning his escape.

At four-thirty, Wade was ready to leave for home, so Margie could get to work at five, as she had promised Nick Wickham, and when LaRiviere came yawning out of his office to set up the plowing detail, Wade explained how and why he would not be available for overtime tonight. Probably not for quite a while, maybe not all winter, he added, what with his new responsibilities at home.

“You ought to sell that place and move into town, Wade,” LaRiviere said, winking.

“Not mine to sell.”

“Talk your dad into it, then.”

“That man can't be talked into anything, Gordon, except another bottle of CC. You know that.”

“You can do it, Wade,” LaRiviere said, draping an arm good-naturedly over Wade's shoulders. “Jack, what say you take the grader out tonight? Jimmy's used to the dump truck and the V-plow.”