Affliction (23 page)

Margie was silent for a moment. She sighed and said, “Wade, you got to be able to prove those things. But really, I don't know what I think. It's not me who's the father, it's you.”

“Yeah, I am. And that's the whole problem in a nutshell,” he said. “I'm
supposed
to be the father, but I'm not able to. Not unless I make a huge fight over it. A goddamned war. Thing is, Margie, now it's a war I believe I can win.”

“You're obsessed with this, aren't you?”

He thought about the word for a few seconds—
obsessed, obsessed, obsessed
—and said, “Yes. Yes, I am. I am obsessed with it. It may be the only thing I've wanted in my life so far that I've been clear about wanting. Totally absolutely clear.”

She took a sip of beer and said, “Then… I guess you have to go ahead and do it.”

He was silent. Then he said, “There's another thing I've been thinking a lot about lately,” and he took the bottle from her hands, finished it off in one long swallow and set it on the floor beside the bed. He slipped one arm under her head and reached around her with the other and heard himself say words as if a stranger were speaking and he had no idea what words the stranger would say next. “I don't know how you feel about the idea, Margie, because we've never talked about it before. Maybe because we've been too scared of the idea to talk about it. But I've been thinking lately, I've been thinking that maybe we should get married sometime. You and me.”

“Oh, Wade,” she said, sounding vaguely disappointed.

‘I been just thinking about it, that's all,” he said rapidly. “It's not like a marriage proposal or anything, just a thought. An idea. Something for you and me to talk about and think about. You know?”

“All right,” she said. And she waited a moment and said, “I'll think about it.”

“Good.” He kissed her on the lips, then rolled away from her and blew out the candle. When he lay back down, he could hear her low slow breathing, and after a few seconds, he tried catching her rhythm with his, as he did when they made love, and got it, so that soon they were breathing in harmony, walk
ing along together, stride matching stride, brave and in love and crossing a grassy meadow together with blue sky overhead, drifting puffs of white clouds, soaring birds above and sunshine warming their heads and shoulders, and neither of them, ever again, alone.

THE SHRILL RING of the telephone tumbled Wade from light and heat—a blond dream of a beach town in summer— tossed him into darkness and cold, a bed and a room he could not at first recognize. The wrangling jangle of a telephone: he did not know where the damned thing was; it kept on ringing, still coming at him from all sides; some kind of maddened bird or rabid bat darting around his head in the darkness.

Then it stopped, and Wade heard Margie's voice, realized he was in her bed, her house, phone, darkness, cold. He was naked, and the covers had slipped down to his waist, and his chest and shoulders and arms were chilled. He shivered his way under the covers and listened to her sleep-thickened voice.

“What? Who is this? Oh, yeah, he's here. Wait a second,” she said, and she bumped Wade on the shoulder with the receiver. “It's Gordon LaRiviere. He's rip-shit about something.” She peered at the clock radio on the table beside the bed. “Christ. Four o'clock.”

Wade placed the receiver against his face, said, “Hello?” and remembered: the snow. Oh, Jesus, yes. It had been snow
ing all night, and here he was lying in bed, sound asleep. He had acted like any other citizen with a right to go to bed at night expecting the roads to be plowed in the morning when he woke up and made ready to drive himself and the family to church. Why had he forgotten? How had he been able to spend the night as if he did not work for LaRiviere?

It was the first time since LaRiviere got the contract to plow the town roads that this had happened to Wade; it alarmed him. What will you do next, when you have forgotten something this routine? It puzzled him; it made no sense. His life was essentially so simple and reactive that to do everything that was expected of him, Wade almost did not have to think: if it snowed, he went to LaRiviere's garage and took either the truck or the grader and plowed the roads until they were clear; if the roads were covered with ice, he hooked the sander to the truck or grader and sanded the roads; and, of course, if it was a school day, he showed up at the school at seven-thirty and directed traffic at the crossing. After that, Monday through Friday, he spent the day doing whatever LaRiviere told him to—drill a well in Catamount, estimate a job in Littleton, clean the gear and stack pipe in the shop. Simple. A wholly reactive life.

Now, for the first time in that life, it had snowed and Wade had not reacted. A strange kind of memory lapse: he had behaved as if last night had been merely an ordinary clear cold Saturday night in November instead of a snowy one; and he had ended up in bed with Margie Fogg—because his daughter was not with him this weekend and Margie had made it clear that she wanted him to make love to her; and then he had fallen asleep—because he was sleepy. Only to find that somehow in the last eight or ten hours he seemed to have stepped out of his life and into some other person's life, a stranger's. And this scared him even more than LaRiviere's predictable and justifiable wrath did. He realized that his hands were sweating. What the hell was going on with him? Maybe he really was fucked up, just like when he was in his twenties. Just like Jack. He had thought everything was going to be fine.

“Wade!” LaRiviere bellowed. “Boy, I hope to Christ you're through getting your dick wet! You think maybe you could do a little work for me before the fucking sun comes up?”

“I… I didn't realize…”

“No, I guess you didn't. It's only been snowing since suppertime. Where the fuck you been, Florida? For Christ's sake, Wade, you know the goddamn drill. You know what to do on a goddamn night like this. You
plow!
You drive into town, and you take out the fucking plow, just like Jimmy did at eleven last night, and you plow, goddammit.” He paused for breath and started in again. “You plow till all the fucking roads in this town are cleared. And then I pay you for it. And then the town pays me. Very simple, Wade. I am the road agent, and I got a goddamn responsibility to the town, for which they pay me, and you got a responsibility to me, for which I pay you. That's the drill. Got it?” He was panting. Wade pictured him red-faced and rounded in his rumpled pajamas at his kitchen table.

Wade said, “Jimmy's already gone out?”

“Wade, it's fucking after four
A.M.
! He's been out since eleven last night.”

“I suppose he's got the truck, and I get to go out in the grader again.”

“You think he oughta swap, maybe? Where the fuck you been the last five hours, tell me that! No, I'll goddamn tell
you
where you been: while Jimmy's been out there plowing snow, you been tucked in bed plowing Margie Fogg!”

“You're crossing a line,” Wade said quietly.

“You already crossed, you've crossed just about every goddamn line you can in this town and still get by, so don't start warning me, buddy. You got fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes to get your ass down here to the shop and put that fucking grader out on the road. I spent the whole last hour on the phone and the CB trying to find out where the hell you were. Ever since Jimmy called in that none of your roads were plowed yet and he ain't seen you anywhere.”

“I'll be there,” Wade said, and he sighed loudly.

“Fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes, or you're fired, Wade. From
everything.
You're supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day. You're the town cop, and you plow the town roads. It's like that. I had a short talk with Mel Gordon, by the way. But we'll settle that later, you and me. Right now, Wade, you haul your ass on down here to the shop.”

“I said I'll be there,” Wade said in a dead voice, and he reached across Margie and slid the receiver into its cradle.

“He's really pissed,” she said. “Isn't he?”

“Yep.” Wade slid out of the bed and yanked his clothes on.

“He probably ought to be, though. I mean, I never really thought of it,” she said. “The plowing. How come you didn't just do it? What happened?”

“I forgot.”

“Forgot? You forgot it was snowing?”

“No, no, I knew it was snowing, all right. I just forgot that I was the one who had to plow it off the roads. Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes you just forget who you are. Especially when you're sick of who you are,” he added, and he walked quickly from the bedroom, and Margie thought, Oh boy, trouble.

 

It was cold, but not uncomfortably so, and Wade was almost glad to be outdoors. Sometime earlier, probably around midnight, while he slept, the snow had stopped falling, and the sky had cleared. Now, as Wade drove toward town from Margie's house, he could feel morning coming on, and he suddenly felt glad to be out of Margie's bed and alone in his car with the heater fan clattering, the woods on either side of the road dark and impenetrable behind a white skirt of snow, the car head-lights splashing bright light ahead of him, like a wave washing up on a beach.

LaRiviere sat glowering out his kitchen window when Wade drove into the lot and parked his car next to the grader, but he did not come out to holler or to threaten him, and Wade simply went about his business and drove back out in the grader. He knew his route, and he knew that it would take him four to five hours in this snow, barely six inches of light powder. There was no school today: he would not have to worry about being out in front of the school in time to direct traffic and could just go on plowing until the job was done.

It was not long before Wade began actually to enjoy himself; it was almost fun, huddled up there in the grader alone in the cockpit with the four headlamps peering like monstrous eyes over the top of the huge front tires, casting nets of light across the smooth soft unbroken snow. The pain from his tooth was steady and familiar, like an old friend, and Wade felt calm and competent and not at all lonely.

Headed north on Main Street, he chugged past Alma Pittman's house. Under a white mantle, the house was dark as a tomb, and Wade imagined the tall thin woman lying in her bed in the upstairs bedroom where she had slept alone her whole
life, straight out and on her back, her hands crossed over her flat chest—not as if dead, exactly, but in a state of suspended animation, waiting for dawnlight, when she would rise, dress, make herself a pot of tea and go back to her work of keeping the town records. For as long as Wade could remember, back into his childhood, Alma Pittman had been the town clerk. She ran for the post, with only token opposition, every year, her election a simple annual renewal, as if no one else could be trusted to log the births and deaths, record the marriages and divorces, list the sales and resales of land and houses, register the voters and issue the permits and licenses for hunting and fishing and calculate and collect the taxes and fees, and in that way connect the town to the larger communities—the county, the state and even the nation—and make the people of Lawford into citizens, make them into more than a lost tribe, more than a sad jumble of families huddled in a remote northern valley against the cold and the dark.

Wade knew the inside of Alma Pittman's house well: she was his ex-wife's aunt, and after Lillian's father had died and her mother had remarried and moved up to Littleton, Lillian, who still had two years of high school left, had moved in with her aunt. That was the summer Wade got his driver's license, and every Sunday he drove Lillian out to the Riverside Cemetery, where she placed wildflowers in a plastic vase by her father's gravestone and then stood silently for a few moments at the foot of his grave, wringing her hands and fighting off tears. She followed the routine precisely every Sunday afternoon, as if the whole enterprise—wildflowers, silence, hand wringing, heaving chest and wet eyes—were a spiritual exercise, a weekly purification rite that had nothing to do with her father.

To Wade that summer, Lillian was a nun touched by tragedy. She was tall and slender, still a girl, with long oak-colored hair that, brushed a hundred strokes every night and fifty more in the morning, hung straight as rain almost to her waist. Her father had been a housepainter who had not drawn a sober breath in years, people said. The previous autumn he had been painting the flagpole at the newly built elementary school, and in sight of half the children in town he had fallen from the top of the pole, had smashed his back and skull and had died right there on the playground.

I was in the first grade then, my first year at school, and
had been among the fifty or sixty kids who had seen the man fall (or heard it, or were close enough to have seen it but did not—I am not sure even today whether I actually did see it) and told the story over and over at supper—”I'm out there at third base, so I got this wicked good view of the flagpole, which is right behind the batter's cage, and all of a sudden, it's like a plane crashing,
eerroo-oom!
Whap!”

Finally, after a week of it, Wade had snapped at me, “Hey, c'mon, Rolfe, we all know the story. Whyn't you think of something new to say? Besides, it's kind of disgusting when we're eating.”

Pop had held his fork in midair between his plate and mouth and said, “Leave him be, Wade. Don't be such a candyass, anyhow. Rolfe probably won't ever see nothing that stupid again.”

“I hope not,” Ma had said.

Wade had shut up, but sensing the source of my brother's discomfort, I did not tell the story again.

The following spring, Lillian's mother married Tom Smith, a divorced drinking buddy of Lillian's father, another housepainter, who lived up in Littleton and owned a triple-decker apartment house there. The woman took her two younger daughters to Littleton with her, leaving Lillian behind, to complete high school and live with her spinster aunt, Alma Pittman, the hardworking dour pinch-faced older sister of her dead father, a woman who was regarded as necessary to the town but a little overeducated, because she had studied accounting for two years at Plymouth State before
coming
back to Lawford during the war to take care of her ailing parents.

Lillian did not particularly like her cheerless aunt, but the woman left her alone, gave her a room upstairs and allowed Wade to come over whenever he wanted and even let them spend hours alone in Lillian's room with the door closed, where they passionately kissed and hugged and groped through each other's clothing to their virginal bodies. And after a while, exhausted, they would cease to struggle with the angels of their adolescent consciences; they fell away panting and talked in whispers of their fears and longings; and sometimes they came downstairs and sat side by side on the couch, with Alma in her ladder-back rocker, and the three of them watched television together. And though Wade and Lillian did
not actually make love in those steamy sessions upstairs (perhaps
because
they never actually made love), it was during those summer months, when Wade was sixteen years old and Lillian fifteen, that they decided to marry as soon as they graduated from high school. It was the same summer that Wade first spoke to anyone of our father's violence.

In the years that our father had been beating him, Wade had not spoken of it to anyone, not to his friends at school or on the football and baseball teams, who often joked, the way boys in cars or in locker rooms will, about how their old man used to beat the shit out of them but he damn well better not try it now or he will damn well get his ass kicked. And he could not imagine talking about it with our mother, though at times it seemed clear that she wanted him to. Whenever she brought the subject up, he felt his heart race, as if she had asked him something about his sex life or told him something about hers, and he always said, “I don't want to talk about it.”

Our sister, Lena, suffered only her father's verbal assaults, so Wade knew she could not possibly understand. It was bad for her, but different. And though he sometimes wanted to warn me, now seven and not yet beaten by the man, Wade felt somehow that if no one spoke of it, if no one acknowledged it, then it might never happen again. It might turn out to be ancient history.