Affliction (33 page)

“Can't do it. I got a date.” Jack stood by the door, ready to leave, his black lunch box in one hand, a rolled-up newspaper in the other. Jimmy was already down at the far end of the garage, at the board where the keys to all of LaRiviere's vehicles and locks were hung, still singing, “O-ver-time, o-ver-time.”

“Jack!” LaRiviere barked. “Break your fucking date. We got a job to do.”

“You
got a job to do, Gordon, not me,” Jack said, and he walked out the door.

“Sonofabitch!”
LaRiviere said, as if amazed.

Wade thought, What a pair of actors these guys are. Who would have thought they could play their roles this well? If he had not known what he knew, he would have been completely fooled by this routine.

“You sure you can't take out the grader tonight, Wade?” LaRiviere asked.

“Tell you what,” Wade said. “Let me plow the roads out my way with your truck, not the grader. You know, from the turnoff up to my father's place from here, then on out Parker Mountain Road and the side roads in between, which you don't really need the grader for anyhow. That way, I can do it. I can pick up my old man at the house when I go by and let him ride along with me, and Margie can go into work a little late tonight.”

LaRiviere seemed to give the matter some thought, then said, “Just be careful and don't ding the plow, and if you do, touch it up in the morning.”

“Gotcha,” Wade said. “What're you going to do about Jack?” he asked. “Fire him? You would've fired me, Gordon, up till a few days ago. You know that, don't you?”

“Well … things change, Wade. Jack, though, I guess he's still fucked up from the Twombley thing. Christ, everybody's a little fucked up these days. Anyhow, I need Jack for a while longer—till the ground freezes too tight to drill.”

“It's already froze tighter'n a nun's cunt,” Jimmy chirped. He had come up on the conversation after Jack's departure and stood by the door, ready to plow, hat pulled down, gloves on, collar up. “We busted one bit this afternoon and give up on the second before we busted it too. You were lucky to get your mom buried,” he told Wade. “When did they dig the hole? Monday? They must've used a backhoe for it. I bet they used a backhoe.”

“Shit,” LaRiviere said, calculating the cost of the broken bit. “Jesus, winter's early this year.”

“Jack wants to quit anyhow,” Wade said. “He's ready to fly the coop. He's ready to go where it's warm.”

“He can't leave the fucking state till they hold a hearing on the Twombley thing.”

Wade smiled broadly. “A hearing? Why? Asa Brown think maybe Twombley didn't shoot himself?”

“Don't be an asshole, Wade. It's just a legality they got to go through, for Christ's sake. They got to decide whether to pull his license or not. Get off that one, will you? Everybody knows what you got cooked up in your brain about the Twombley thing. It's crazy, Wade, so forget it, will you? Jack's got enough on his mind from this thing, without you going around with all your goddamned suspicions. We aren't stupid, you know. Right?” LaRiviere asked Jimmy, who stood next to him now, facing Wade.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Jack's pretty pissed at you, Wade. He knows what you got in your mind, all cooked up, like Gordon says. He thinks you're acting nuts these days. He told me.”

“I'll bet he does,” Wade said.

LaRiviere asked Jimmy if he could handle all the roads except those at the Parker Mountain end of town, and Jimmy said sure, he wanted the o-ver-time, and it wasn't a real hard snow, four or five inches maximum. It was too cold to snow much, he said, and no wind. Good weather for deep-freezing the lakes, which meant ice fishing by Saturday. He grinned at the thought of holing up in a bobhouse for the weekend, away from his wife and children. He was a man whose desire to stay away from his large squabbling family was both justified and satisfied by his need to support them, a neat circle that left him guilt-free and alone and his wife and children fed and happy, for they did not want him around much anyhow, since it was clear that when he was home, he was only trying to figure out how to get away again.

Wade said fine, it was done, then, and hurried out to LaRiviere's truck: he wanted to get to the house by five o'clock, so Margie would not be more than a half hour late for work, which would probably irritate her, but what the hell, he had an excuse. He thought of calling her, but that would only delay his arrival another five minutes and make her that much more cross with him. She was a punctual woman, a neat and orderly woman, and he was none of those things. She said it was as if he had been born twenty minutes late and had spent his life so far running on that clock instead of the one everyone else ran on.

Wade's sloppiness and disorder Margie regarded as char
acteristic of males in general, so she rarely commented on that. Men were slobs. LaRiviere, who, from Margie's perspective, was merely a man who loved everything to be neat and clean, was regarded by most people as crazy on the subject, almost unmanly, which she felt only proved her point. If LaRiviere had been a woman, like Alma Pittman, who was just as fanatical about neatness as he was, then people would have thought him normal, as they did her.

Wade's perpetual tardiness, however, Margie did not understand: it was as if he were doing it to get even with the world for some ancient secret wrong. It certainly kept the world mad at him—his ex-wife, his daughter, Gordon LaRiviere, his brother Rolfe: anyone who allowed himself or herself to schedule a meeting with Wade started that meeting a little bit mad at him, as if he had opened it with a small insult.

Wade turned left on Route 29 by the Hoyt place on Parker Mountain Road and dropped the plow, angled it fifteen degrees to the right, then crossed the bridge and made his way slowly home. When he arrived at the house, it was five twenty-five. The porch light was on, and he saw that Margie's car, her gray Rabbit, was gone. Damn, he thought, she should not have left the old man here alone. He cut into the driveway, plowing it out with a single swipe, and parked the truck. He liked LaRiviere's truck; it still smelled brand-new, and when he drove it, he felt above the world and isolated from it: the cab was tight and dry, with no rattles or bumps in the road intruding on his thoughts. He especially liked driving it at night, with the twin banks of headlights and the running lights on, the plow out in front of the wide flat hood like a weapon, dipping and rising as he moved through these narrow back roads, lights flashing against the snowbanks and spilling out ahead of him to the next curve and the darkness beyond.

When he went inside the house, Wade stood in the kitchen by the door and called out, “Pop!” No answer. Sonofa-bitch is probably passed out, he thought, and he cringed at the idea of having to haul his drunken father into semiwakefulness, shove him into his coat, like putting a child into a snowsuit, and lug him outside and up into the truck with him. He never should have agreed to do this plowing for LaRiviere. It was not his problem, it was LaRiviere's, and Jack's.

But they had wanted to play cat and mouse with him, go through routines designed to make him think everything was
normal, that Jack was, as usual, both stubborn and impetuous and LaRiviere was easily pissed off and quickly forgiving. If Wade had said, “Sorry, Gordon, I'm not plowing tonight,” LaRiviere simply would have called down to Toby's Inn, Wade knew, and asked for Jack. He imagined the two of them talking about it, LaRiviere in his office, Jack on the wall phone in the dark hallway that led from the bar to the men's room in back.

LaRiviere: “He didn't buy it. He's onto us.”

Jack: “Shit! What are we going to do?”

LaRiviere: “I don't know. Maybe I can buy him off. I'll have to talk to Mel Gordon.”

Jack: “Shit! You can't buy Wade off.”

LaRiviere: “We bought you.”

Jack: “Wade Whitehouse is not Jack Hewitt.”

LaRiviere: “Yeah, well, I still got to get the roads plowed tonight. So get back here and take out the fucking grader.”

Jack: “Shit! The grader?”

LaRiviere: “That's right, the grader.”

Jack: “Shit!”

A second time, Wade hollered for his father. Still no answer. And then he saw the note on the kitchen table, next to one of the two place settings:
Wade, I had to leave for work. Thanks for being on time. Don't worry, I have Pop with me. Come pick him up at Nick's when you get home. Supper is in the oven for you both. Margie.

Despite the evidence of Margie's anger, Wade was relieved by her note. He stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket, and when he stepped out to the porch, he saw headlights flash past, a 4x4 pickup with its plow in the air, and although it was moving fast, Wade instantly recognized the vehicle: it was Jack's burgundy Ford, leaving high snowy fantails behind it as it passed the house without slowing and disappeared at the curve, heading uphill toward Parker Mountain.

Wade climbed up into the driver's seat of LaRiviere's blue Dodge and started the motor, listened to the throaty rumble of the mufflers for a few seconds and flicked on the headlights, splashing a field of white over the yard. Then, with the plow up, he drove slowly out to the road, where, instead of turning left and downhill toward town, he turned right and started following Jack's tracks in the fresh snow. There were no side roads off this road out here, except for the lumber trails that crisscrossed through the woods, and no houses beyond the
Whitehouse place, except for a few closed-up summer cabins and, back in the woods, a couple of hunting camps, like LaRiviere's, on the near side of the mountain. It made no sense for Jack to be out here tonight.

Driving fast now, but not too fast, because he did not want to overtake Jack suddenly if he stopped or slowed, Wade peered through the lightly falling snow for the lights of Jack's truck. He shut down his own running lights and used the low beams, hoping that Jack was not looking back in his mirror: he wondered if Jack had noticed him standing there on the porch when he passed the house. If not, then Jack had no reason to think anyone was following him.

Suddenly, as Wade came over a low rise where the road dropped and ran between a pair of low frozen marshes, he saw Jack's truck a hundred yards ahead of him, and he hit the brakes, went into a short slide, and came to a halt. Jack was outside the truck and had been standing a few feet into the bushes beyond the snowbank, but he had seen Wade and was scrambling back into his truck now. He slammed the door shut and drove quickly on.

Wade pulled back onto the road and slowly moved ahead and stopped just behind where Jack had been parked, illuminating his tire tracks and footprints with the headlights. He could see that Jack had gone beyond the spot twenty or thirty feet, had stopped his truck and backed up, and had got out and walked around on the side of the road by the snowbank. Very peculiar, Wade thought. What the hell was he looking for? Incriminating evidence? Shell casings? Was this the scene of the crime? The woods beyond the frozen marsh on both sides of the road were dark and impenetrable. Wade knew the land rose abruptly just beyond the woods and that he was in a draw between a pair of long ridges that ran off the mountain toward Saddleback: there was nothing to see from here, except woods, even during the day.

Puzzled, he put the truck in gear and drove on, moving faster now and not as cautiously as before, because he knew Jack had spotted him, although he probably had not identified the truck as LaRiviere's. Still, Jack might be trying to elude him: there was no more reason for Wade or anyone else to be out here on a Thursday night than there was for Jack, unless you happened to be pursuing Jack.

Which Wade now knew he was indeed doing, pursuing
Jack. He switched on the running lights and his high beams and turned on the CB scanner, in case Jack was using it— whom would he call? LaRiviere? Mel Gordon?—and pressed down on the accelerator, moving swiftly and skillfully through power slides on the curves, the plow blade rising and falling out in front of the truck, like the steel prow of a boat in a storm, when the road dipped and pitched and rose again, higher each time, as it neared the top of Parker Mountain.

It had stopped snowing altogether now—Jimmy was right: it was too cold to snow—and Wade could see clearly ahead of him. The tracks of Jack's truck still extended out there in front of him, but he saw no lights in the distance: it was as if Jack had passed by an hour ago and not mere seconds; as if Wade were out here on the mountain road alone; as if he had made the whole thing up, had not seen Jack pass by his house and had not come upon his truck parked by the side of the road back there at the marshes, had not seen him hustle back into the truck and race away. There was nowhere to go up here. The road would gradually narrow, and just this side of the crest it would pass LaRiviere's cabin. Then, on the other side of the mountain, where the land descended through dense spruce and pine woods toward a spatter of small shallow ponds and lakes, the road would turn into a lumber trail switchbacking down the mountain, connecting eventually to Route 29, ten or twelve miles south of Lawford, where the road crossed under the interstate through a cloverleaf.

A few hundred yards before LaRiviere's cabin, Wade slowed and cut back his lights again, relying only on his low beams, and as he neared the turnoff by the muskeg in front of the cabin, the very place where Jack had parked the day he shot Twombley, where the ambulance and Asa Brown and the state troopers had parked, he saw Jack's truck, backed off the road on the left, with all its lights out, ready to head out and blow by him. Fifty yards from the muskeg, Wade moved his truck over slightly to the left and filled the road, so Jack could not pass him when he pulled back onto the road—when suddenly Jack's truck seemed to leap onto the road. But it turned the other way, toward the top of the mountain, full speed, with all its lights on.