Affliction (10 page)

Twombley crossed his arms over his chest. “You take care of your end, kid, I'll take care of mine.”

“Yep.”

“You understand what I'm saying? Like you say, I want a dead deer, not a live one.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Jack was not stupid. He knew what Twombley was asking him to do. Shoot the deer for him, if necessary. Discreetly. “Okay,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “No sweat. You'll get yourself a deer, and you'll get
him dead. One way or the other. And you'll have him by coffee time.”

“And you'll get your extra hundred bucks.”

“Wonderful,” Jack said. “Wonderful.”

The truck crested the hill, where the trees had thinned and diminished in size, scrawny balsams, mostly, and low reddish furze scattered around boulders. Beyond the boulders was a shallow high-country swamp, a muskeg, covered with ice. Barely visible through the falling snow, at the high end of a short rise, was a log cabin with a low overhanging shake roof set in under a stand of drooping snow-covered blue spruce and red pine.

Jack slowed the truck and drew it over to the side of the road. “That there's LaRiviere's cabin he told you about,” he said, pointing with his chin toward the small one-room structure. “We can start a fire in the wood stove now, if you want, so's it'll be nice and warm when we come in. Or we can head out for that monster buck of yours right now. Up to you.”

“You're a cocky sonofabitch,” Twombley said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You only got two and a half hours till ten, and you're willing to waste time building a fire.”

“Just trying to please,” Jack said.

“Let's get going, then. Forget the fire. I want to kill a ‘monster buck' first,” Twombley said with a derisive laugh. “Then I'll worry about getting warm.”

He swung open the door and stepped down to the ground and slammed the door behind him, while Jack stepped out on the driver's side and started taking out the guns and gear.

“C'mon, kid, let's haul ass,” Twombley said, and he walked off the road a short ways and stood, hands on hips, facing downhill along an old lumber trail that ran past the frozen muskeg several hundred yards to where it intercepted a rocky dry riverbed pitching through brush off to the right.

For a second Jack stopped gathering up the guns and his daypack and several pieces of loose equipment, and he glared at Evan Twombley's broad back as if the man were his mortal enemy. Then his gaze dropped, and he went quickly back to the task at hand.

 

At dawn, just before the pale smear of first light, the deer had already begun to move, and they moved generally away from the roads and fields along narrow twisting game trails into the deeper woods. In twos and threes and even fours—a buck and one or two does and their fawns, though just as often a buck traveling alone—the deer fled rapidly away from the sound and sight of dark prowling cars and trucks that ground up hills and down, that bumped and lurched as far into the woods as vehicles could go, where, with headlights slashing the predawn darkness, the cars and trucks stopped and let the hunters out, went back and on to another place and parked and let more hunters out, until soon the woods all over this part of the state were swarming with men carrying guns.

As the snow fell, the men talked and sometimes called to one another across brooks and among the oak trees and brush. They laughed and smoked cigarettes and pipes while they walked in pairs along old railroad beds or, alone, set up hidden stands in fallen brush along ridges that gave a long clear view of a meadow and a copse of birch beyond or, ten feet up in an oak tree, perched in a Y in the branches, rubbed hands against the cold, poured coffee and brandy from a thermos into a plastic cup. It was as if, behind every tree, along every ridge, beside every stream, there was a man looking down the blue barrel of his gun, a chilled impatient man waiting for a deer to move into his sight. He saw it walk delicately, warily, through the curtain of falling snow. He saw it step from behind a fallen tree. He saw it emerge from a pile of dead brush into full view, where it posed for one second in the crosshairs, a full-grown massive male deer holding itself absolutely still, ears like dark velvety leaves, white flag of a tail switching, large liquid eyes brushed by long lashes and soaking in as much visual detail as can register in the animal's brain, wet nose searching the breeze for scent that is not tree bark, pine needle, resin, leaf, water, snow, hoof, urine, fur or rut. Then, all across the hills and valleys, up and down the gullies and over the boulder-strewn ridges and cliffs, from up in trees, hillsides, overlooks, bridges, even from the backs of pickup trucks, out of brush piles, over stone walls, behind ancient elms—throughout the hundreds of square miles of New Hampshire hill-country woods—trigger fingers contract one eighth of an inch and squeeze. There is a roar of gunfire, a second, a third, then wave after wave of killing noise, over and over, sweeping
across the valleys and up the hills. Slugs, pellets, balls made of aluminum, lead, steel, rip into the body of the deer, crash through bone, penetrate and smash organs, rend muscle and sinew. Blood splashes into the air, across tree bark, stone, onto smooth white blankets of snow, where scarlet fades swiftly to pink. Black tongue lolls over blooded teeth, as if the mouth were a carnivore's; huge brown eyes roll back, glassed over, opaque and dry; blood trickles from carbon-black nostrils, shit spits steaming into the snow; urine, entrails, blood, mucus spill from the animal's body: as heavy-booted hunters rush across the frozen snow-covered ground to claim the kill.

 

From all the corners and back roads of the district, huge lumbering pumpkin-orange school buses passed north and south through the town, then slowed at the town center, as if by prearrangement, blinked red warning lights and waited for Wade Whitehouse, standing in the middle of the road, to wave them one by one into the schoolyard.

Wade did not enjoy this part of his job—for one hour a day five days a week he was the crossing guard at the school—but it was required. Wade's annual police pay, $1,500, one tenth of his total income, was a line item in the school budget that got authorized every March at town meeting. LaRiviere, who had been a selectman for over a decade, allowed Wade to come into work at eight-thirty, a half hour later than anyone else who worked for him, so that he could claim that he personally saved the school board the extra fifteen hundred dollars a year they would have to pay someone else to do the job if Wade had to be at work at eight o'clock. That way, the town was able to pay for its police officer from the moneys allotted to the school budget, and half those moneys came from the state and federal governments. Gordon LaRiviere was not selectman for nothing.

In the years when his daughter Jill was one of the children riding the bus to school, Wade had loved being the crossing guard. Especially after he and Lillian had got divorced and he moved out and he no longer saw Jill at the breakfast table. Every morning he waited out there in the middle of the road for her bus to round the downhill curve on Route 29, and when the bus finally reached him, he held the driver up for a long time and let all the buses coming the other way turn in first,
giving Jill time to get to the window, so that she could see him and wave as, at last, he permitted her bus to pass into the schoolyard. Then he waved back and smiled and watched until the bus stopped by the main entrance and let the kids tumble out, kids alone, kids in pairs, little knots of friends, when a second time he got to see his daughter, with lunch box and book bag, silvery-blond hair freshly braided, clean clothes and shoes, red scarf swinging in the crisp morning air.

She always looked for him then too, and they smiled and waved their hands like banners at one another, and she ran with her friends around to the playground in back, happier with her day, he was sure, than if he had not been there to greet her. Just as, for Wade, those few golden moments every morning were the zenith of his day and colored his attitude toward everything that followed, all the way to the end of the night, and even his sleep was more peaceful because he and his daughter for a few seconds had seen each other's faces and had smiled and waved at one another. Then something completely unexpected had happened: Lillian had sold the little yellow house in the birch grove and had moved down to Concord. And now the school buses only reminded Wade of his loss.

This morning, because of the snow, which had accumulated rapidly and was several inches deep and drifting already, the buses and the rest of the early morning traffic were moving with special care. Wade held them at the crossing longer than usual before letting them turn off the road into the schoolyard, giving the drivers extra time to see through the windblown snow and ease their precious cargoes, the children of the town, around each other and the occasional batches of kids who walked to school and crossed the road from the far side when Wade directed them to cross. Lined up behind the buses were cars and pickups with people hurrying to work and late-rising deer hunters. Their motors idled, windshield wipers clattered, and now and then, when a car passed him, the driver glowered at Wade, as if he had delayed them for no good reason.

He did not care. He was pissed this morning anyhow, and it almost improved his mood that people were mad at him. The faces of the children peering out the windows of the buses seemed to mock him, as if they were still wearing their Halloween masks—little demons, witches and ghosts. None of them
was his child; none of them was Jill, eager to wave at him.

He made everyone wait, held long lines of buses, cars and trucks back, letting one child at a time cross the road as he or she arrived, instead of making a group of them gather there first. And he did not permit a single bus to enter the schoolyard until the bus ahead of it had unloaded all its passengers and had pulled out at the far end and was back on the road again, heading north to Littleton.

Now even the bus drivers, who normally acknowledged Wade not at all, as if the discipline it took to keep them from being rattled by the noise and play of their passengers kept them from perceiving Wade as anything but a traffic signal, were staring sullenly at him as they passed, a few shaking their heads with disgust. He did not care. I don't give a rat's ass you're pissed, he thought. One driver, a flat-faced woman with red hair, slid her window open and hollered, “For Christ's sake, Whitehouse, we ain't got all day!” and the kids in the seats behind her laughed to hear it.

He heard the school bell ring and saw the kids come racing around from the schoolyard behind the low light-green cinder-block building to line up in messy formation, girls separated from boys, at the main entrance. The principal, Lugene Brooks, his buttoned sports jacket barely able to contain his round belly, his collar turned up, his thin gray hair fluttering in the wind, had come outside and was mouthing commands at the children, marching them inside like a drill sergeant. He glanced toward Wade, saw that there was still one more bus to turn off the road and unload, and he shouted, “Wade! Hurry up! They'll be late!”

Wade kept his arms straight out, one aimed north and one south, with both hands up. Motionless, expressionless, he held his post in the middle of the road. The yellow caution light directly over his head blinked and bobbed on its wire, and the remnants of last night's smashed pumpkins, half covered by snow and slush, lay scattered at his feet. He looked like a demented scarecrow.

He felt like a statue, however: a man made of stone, unable to bring his arms down or force his legs to walk, unable to release the one remaining school bus and the dozens of vehicles lined up behind it and the dozen more facing it. Someone way in the back hit his horn, and at once most of the others joined in, and even the bus driver was blowing his horn. But
still Wade held his arms out and did not let anyone pass.

He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus. Simple. It was his only thought. Oh, how he wanted to see his daughter's face. He longed to look over as the vehicle passed and see Jill's pale face peer out the window at him, the palms of her hands pressed against the glass, ready to wave to him.
Daddy!Daddy, here I am!

He knew, of course, that she would not be there, knew that he would see instead some other man's child staring at him. And so he refused to allow the bus to move at all. To release that one remaining bus and all the cars and trucks lined up behind and in front of it, horns blaring, windows rolled down and drivers hollering and gesturing angrily at him, to let them pass, would instantly transform his desire to see his daughter into simple loss of his daughter. Somehow he understood that the pain of enduring a frustrated desire was easier to bear than the pain of facing one more time this ultimate loss. He wanted his daughter to be on that last bus; it was his only thought.

Then suddenly, from near the end of the long line behind the bus, a glossy black BMW sedan nosed into the second lane and started coming forward, passing the other cars and trucks and gaining speed as it approached Wade. There was a man driving and beside him a woman in a fur coat and in back a pair of small children, boys, staring over their parents' shoulders at Wade, who behaved as if he did not see them at all or as if he fully expected the BMW to come to an abrupt stop when it drew abreast of the bus.

But it did not. The BMW accelerated, changing gears as it flew past Wade and on down the road and disappeared around the bend beyond the Common. Wade still did not move. As if the flight of the black BMW had been a countermanding signal to the signal Wade's position and posture gave, the last yellow schoolbus drew quickly off the road and entered the schoolyard, and at once the rest of the cars began to move again, north and south, passing Wade on both sides.

Slowly his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood there starkly alone in the exact center of the road. It was only after all the vehicles had passed him by and the road was once again empty and the bus had unloaded the thirty or forty children it carried and had pulled out of the schoolyard and headed back toward Littleton that Wade himself departed from the
road. He walked slowly in the blowing snow toward his own car, which was parked just beyond the main entrance to the school.