Affliction (37 page)

YOU WILL SAY that I should have known terrible things were about to happen, and perhaps I should have. But even so, what could I have done to stop them? By Friday, Wade was being driven by forces that were as powerful as they were difficult to identify—for me and for Margie, who were best situated to observe them, and certainly for people like Alma Pittman or Gordon LaRiviere or Asa Brown. We had no choice, it seemed, but to react as we did to Wade's actions that day and the next. In doing so, we were able later to claim something like innocence, or at least blamelessness, but by the same token, we were unable to affect his actions. To have behaved differently would have required each of us to be prescient if not omniscient and perhaps hard-hearted as well.

I cannot blame Gordon LaRiviere for his reaction to Wade that morning, although, given what I know now, it may well have been what drove Wade to his bizarre and violent actions later that day and that evening. In fact, when Wade, after having left Alma Pittman's, slammed his way into LaRiviere's shop, ignoring Jack Hewitt and Jimmy Dame, and strode into LaRiviere's office, pushing right past Elaine
Bernier's attempts to stop him, LaRiviere did what I myself would have done under the same circumstances.

Wade came into the office already shouting. “You sneaky sonofabitch!” he bellowed. “I've got your number now, Gordon! All these years,” he said, panting, his eyes ablaze with a strange mixture of fury and sadness, “all these years I worked for you, since I was a kid, goddammit, and I thought you were a decent man. 1 thought you were a decent man, Gordon! I actually went around feeling grateful to you! Can you fucking believe that! Grateful!” He pounded both fists on LaRiviere's desk, bam, bam, bam, like an enraged child.

Jimmy and Jack had appeared at the door behind Wade, while Elaine Bernier, her face gray with fear, fluttered in the outer office beyond them. LaRiviere calmly stood up, raising himself to his not inconsiderable height and swelling his body like a tent, and said, “Wade, you're done.” He held out one hand, palm up. “Let me have the shop keys.”

Wade looked around and saw Jack and Jimmy, both as grim as executioners, and he laughed. “You two, you don't get it, do you? You think you're free, but you're like slaves, that's all. You're this man's slaves,” he said, and his voice changed again, became plaintive and soft. “Oh, Jack, don't you see what this man has done to you? Jesus Christ, Jack, you've turned into his slave. Don't you see that?”

Jack regarded Wade as if the man were made of wood.

“The key, Wade,” LaRiviere said.

“Yeah, sure. You can have the key, all right. It's the key that's kept me chained and locked to you all these years,” he said. “I give it back with pleasure!” He pulled his key ring from his pocket and worked one key free of it and dropped it into LaRiviere's extended hand. “Now I'm free.” He stared into LaRiviere's unblinking eyes and said, “See how easy it is, Jack? All you got to do is give back what the man gave you, and you're free of him.”

He turned, and Jack and Jimmy parted to let him pass. Elaine Bernier dodged to the side, and Wade walked through the outer office and was gone. Free.

 

From LaRiviere's, as far as we know, Wade drove straight home. It was midmorning by then, a sweetly bright day, warm enough to start the snow melting. Pop was out back, stacking
firewood and splitting kindling for the stove, something he did almost every day at this hour, early enough for him to wield an ax with relative safety. He worked slowly, methodically, a brittle cautious man who seemed much older than he was, and he did not look up when Wade drove into the yard and parked Margie's car by the porch.

Margie was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading a week-old newspaper, and when Wade strode into the room, she folded the paper and looked up, ready now to talk with him about last night, about whatever it was that had happened in the back seat of the car: she did not know, really, what was going on between him and his father, but it was an ancient war, and she knew it was painful for Wade, and she was prepared to understand and sympathize. And as for the business of his being late, perhaps that could be explained: his car was obviously not here, so it must have broken down last night on the way home from work, too far from town to phone, and he had to walk all the way home in the snow, and somehow she had missed him on the road when she drove in to Wickham's, had driven right past him, poor guy, so that he had to turn around and walk back into town and was unable to get there until nine. Something like that, she was sure, had happened, and then at the restaurant and later in the car, when Pop had started in with his wild drunk-talk, Wade was probably so angry and feeling so guilty, too, that he just lost control, and that was why he slapped the old man.

But when she looked up from her newspaper and saw Wade, all these thoughts flew away, for she knew instantly that he was someone to be afraid of. His movements were abrupt and erratic, and his face was red and stiffly contorted, as if he were wearing a mask made from a badly photographed portrait of himself, and he was trembling: his hands shook; she could see the tremors from across the room as he pulled off his coat and draped it over a chair by the wall.

“I've got to talk to my brother,” he announced. “Did you get my note? Yes, you did, I see it there. Listen, there's lots going on right now, and I've got to talk to Rolfe about some things,” he said. “Everything okay? You got to go to work today, don't you?”

Margie nodded yes and watched him carefully, as Wade headed into the living room and grabbed up the telephone
from the table next to the television set. “I'll only be a few minutes!” he called.

And that, of course, was when he telephoned me, at a time when I am not usually at home, but I happened on this occasion to have called in sick: it was a Friday, and I was suffering from some kind of mental exhaustion of my own, perhaps a delayed reaction to the funeral and my trip to Lawford, perhaps because of an obscure and complex and no doubt unconscious involvement with what Wade was going through—although at that time I was only marginally aware of what Wade was experiencing. At any rate, I had wakened that morning feeling unnaturally gloomy and peculiarly weak, unable to stand without my legs turning to water, so I had called the school and asked that a substitute take my classes for the day. Then, midmorning, the phone rang, and it was Wade.

It was an unusually long conversation. Wade was garrulous and intense at first, rapidly filling me in on the events of the previous evening. He left out, of course, certain details that would have put him in an unfavorable light, such as the slapping incident in the car, details that I obtained months later from various sources—Margie, Nick Wickham, Jimmy Dame, the deer hunters from Lynn, Massachusetts. Then he told me the story, his version, of the bathtub incident, which I found somewhat disconcerting, since it was so far from my own version of that story and because it happened to be about me. And finally he got to the apparent point of his call, to tell me what he had learned at Alma Pittman's this morning—he did not mention his being fired by Gordon LaRiviere—and to ask my advice on how to use this new information. “I know what it
means,
” he said. “I'm just running out of ways to use it.”

“For what?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘for what?' To help Jack, of course, and to nail those sonsofbitches, the two Gordons, as old Alma calls them. Jesus Christ, Rolfe, whose side are you on in this?”

“Yours, naturally,” I assured him. But his intensity and the ferocity of his feelings alarmed me. And his chaos and apparent lack of focus, in spite of his obsession with this case, were causing me to react carefully. He switched from topic to topic, tone to tone: one minute he would be railing against Mel Gordon, the next he would be complaining about his toothache, which had persisted for weeks now; he spoke with anxious
sympathy about Jack Hewitt, seeming almost to identify with the man, and then rambled on at tedious length about his car's being in the garage and having to borrow Margie's car and being unable to leave Pop alone in the house for very long; he turned bitter for a few moments as he spoke about Lillian and his custody suit, as he referred to it, and then practically wept when he recounted how Lillian was keeping him from being a good father to his own daughter.

It was an anxiety-producing conversation, to say the least, and I felt one of my old migraines coming on, as if a penlight inside my skull were being shined directly at my eyes from behind. I wanted to get away from him, so I took over the conversation and spoke with perhaps more authority than I normally would have. I do believe, however, that this was precisely what Wade wanted me to do and why he had called me in the first place. While he was talking, once it became evident to me that he had become hopelessly confused, I made notes on the yellow pad I keep by the phone, numbering his individual problems and putting them into relation to one another: this is, after all, one of the ways I solve my own problems, by naming them and by placing them in order, so that solving the least of my problems leads finally to the solution of the largest. Why not try to solve Wade's problems the same way? Thus, when I decided to take over the conversation, I was able to speak with clarity and force. He listened and, for all I know, may have been taking notes himself, because as it turned out, he followed my advice to the letter. Which is why I feel today less than innocent, less than blameless for what eventually happened. Of course, I had no way of knowing how Wade would botch things, no way of predicting how simple circumstances would thwart him and no way of anticipating the forms he would eventually discover to express his increasingly violent feelings.

 

Wade got off the phone with me and, as I had suggested, immediately called Merritt's garage to arrange to pick up his car. It was Chick Ward who answered, and when Wade said he was calling about his car, Chick laughed, a sneering knowing laugh, and said, “Wade, old buddy, there's good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

“Just give me the facts, Chick. I'm in a hurry.”

“Okay, the good news, old buddy, is we haven't got to your car yet. It only came in yesterday afternoon, you know. That's the good news, you understand.” His voice was loud, as if he were talking for the benefit of an audience of listeners other than Wade.

“What the hell are you up to?”

“You want the bad news?” Wade could picture Chick grinning at the other end, standing in the garage and flashing a knowing wink at Chub Merritt and anyone else who happened to be there resuscitating LaRiviere's drowned pickup truck.

“Just tell me when you'll have it fixed. It's the starter motor, I'm pretty sure, it's been giving me trouble—”

“The bad news,” Chick said, interrupting him, “is, the reason we ain't got to your car yet is we got a problem here with a truck somebody drove through the ice last night. Figured you'd know something about that, Wade.”

Wade was silent for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “I know about that.”

“Yep. Figured. Chub also says to tell you that Gordon LaRiviere won't let you bill your job back to him. You'll have to pay for it yourself. Probably come to a couple hundred bucks, if it's a starter motor, like you say.”

Wade said nothing. Money … he had none. No job, no money, no car, nothing.

“That okay with you, Wade?”

“Yeah. That's fine with me.”

“Oh, I got some more of the bad news, Wade. You want to hear it?”

“Not particularly, you sonofabitch.”

“Hey, I'm just the messenger, you know. I just work here.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, Chub, he says you're fired, Wade.”

“Fired! He can't! He can't fire me! LaRiviere already did that this morning.”

“Oh, yeah, Wade, he can. He's one of the selectmen, and he said to tell you to turn your badge in and clean out your office down to the town hall and leave your office key with his wife there. She'll be in the Board of Selectmen's office all day. He says he'll pull the CB and the police light off your car while he's got it down here. I guess they're town property, Wade.”

“Let me talk to Chub,” Wade said. “There's some things he ought to know. Put Chub on.”

Chick muffled the phone for a few seconds, then came back on and said, “Chub says, he says to tell you he's too busy drying out your ex-boss's pickup truck to talk to you. Sorry.”

“Look, you sonofabitch, put Chub on! I know a few things he ought to know, goddammit. Before he fires me, he should know what I know about a few people in this town. You put him on, you hear?”

Again, Chick muffled the phone. A moment passed, and then Wade heard the receiver click, and a dial tone buzzed in his ear.

Slowly, Wade laid the receiver back in its cradle. So Chub was in it too! Chub Merritt was working with them. He was probably taking a cut from Gordon LaRiviere and Mel Gordon, and as one of the selectmen, he had as much access to the tax records as LaRiviere did, so his job was to keep quiet about Northcountry Development Corporation and, among other things, help keep Wade out of the way.

The throb in his jaw seemed to continue the buzz of the dial tone, distracting him abruptly from his mania—for by now it was that, a mania—and made him remember my second piece of advice, to call a dentist, for heaven's sake, and get that tooth pulled. Take care of the little things first, the things that are distracting and handicapping you in your attempts to take care of the big things. Get your own car back, get your tooth pulled, let Pop take care of himself while you get your facts in order, and take your facts over the heads of the locals, whom you cannot trust, straight to the state police. Let the state police go to work on this. And then maybe try to get Jack Hewitt to turn himself in. But do it calmly, peacefully, rationally. Do not chase him around the countryside or go up against him in a bar or in LaRiviere's shop, where there will be other people around. Talk to his girlfriend or his father, talk to somebody he trusts, and explain what is at stake for him here. Jack no longer trusts you, Wade, so you might have to let someone else convince him that he must confess his crime and incriminate the others. Save that young man, and break the others. And while you are doing that, instruct J. Battle Hand to pursue your case against Lillian. Now that you have given him information that not only tarnishes Lillian's good-mother image but also implicates her own attorney, your Mr. Hand should be
able to cut a deal that will force Lillian to give you back your rights as a father. In a few short weeks, before Christmas, maybe even before Thanksgiving, Wade, everything that now seems out of control and chaotic will be under control and orderly, and you and the fine woman who will soon be your wife and your lovely daughter Jill and your father will sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in the old family homestead together, and you will offer up a prayer to thank the Lord for all that He has given to you this year. And maybe I myself will join you at that table.