Affliction (3 page)

LET US IMAGINE that around eight o'clock on this Halloween Eve, speeding west past Toby's and headed toward town on Route 29 from the interstate turnoff, there comes a pale-green eight-year-old Ford Fairlane with a blue police bubble on top. Let us imagine a dark square-faced man wearing a trooper's cap driving the vehicle. He is a conventionally handsome man, but nothing spectacular: if he were an actor, he would be cast as the decent but headstrong leader of the sheepherders in range-war westerns of the ‘50s. He has deep-set brown eyes with crinkled corners, the eyes of a man who works outdoors; his nose is short and hooked, narrow at the bridge, with large flared nostrils. He looks his age, forty-one, and though his mouth is small, his lips thin and tight and his chin boyishly delicate, his lower face, tinged gray by a five o'clock shadow, has the slight fleshiness of a healthy hardworking athletic man who drinks too much beer.

Seated next to him is a child, a little girl with hair like flax and a plastic tiger mask covering her face. The man is driving fast, clearly in a hurry, talking and gesturing intently to the child as he drives. The child appears to be about ten years old.

For anyone who lived in Lawford, the car would be instantly recognizable—it belonged to the town police officer, my brother, Wade Whitehouse. The child beside him was his daughter, Jill, and anyone would know that he was bringing her up from Concord, where she lived with her mother and stepfather, for the three-day weekend and the Halloween party.

And Wade was running late, as usual. He had not been able to start the hour-long drive south on the interstate to Concord until finishing work for LaRiviere (besides being Lawford's entire police force, Wade was also a well driller, Gordon LaRiviere's foreman). Then down in Concord, after stopping at the shopping mall north of the city for a Halloween costume that he had promised but forgotten to purchase and bring with him, he had been compelled—again, as usual—to negotiate certain complex custodial arrangements with his ex-wife, Lillian, after which he had to pick up a Big Mac, strawberry shake, fries and cherry pie to go for Jill's supper, all before even starting the drive back to Lawford.

Now he was late, late for everything he had planned and fantasized about for a month: late for trick-or-treating with his daughter at the homes of everyone in town he liked or wanted to impress with his fatherhood; late for showing up at the party at the town hall, where, like all the other parents for a change, he could see his kid win a prize in the costume contest, best this or that, scariest or funniest or some damned thing; late for the sleepy drive back to the trailer afterwards, Jill laying her head on his shoulder and falling peacefully asleep while he drove slowly, carefully home.

He tried to explain their lateness to her without blaming himself for it. “I'm sorry for the screw-up,” Wade said. “But I couldn't help it that it's too late to go trick-or-treating now. I couldn't help it I had to stop at Penney's for the costume,” he said, stirring the air with his right hand as he talked. “And you were hungry, remember.”

Jill spoke through her tiger's mask. “Whose fault is it, then, if it's not yours? You're the one in charge, Daddy.” She wore a flimsy-looking black-and-yellow tiger suit that Wade thought looked less like a costume than a pair of striped pajamas with paws and a scrawny black-tipped tail, which she held with one paw and slapped idly into the palm of the other. The bulbous grinning mask looked more hysterical than fierce but
was perhaps all the more frightening for it.

“Yeah,” he said, “but not really. I'm not really in charge.” Wade worked a cigarette free of his pack with one hand, stuck it between his lips and punched in the dashboard lighter. They were coming into town now, and he slowed down slightly as they began to pass darkened houses. “There's damned little I'm in charge of, believe it or not. It is my fault I had to stop for the costume, though, and we got slowed up some there.” He reached for the lighter and got his cigarette going. With the lighted cigarette bobbing up and down, he said, “I did screw that up, I admit it. Stopping for the costume. Forgetting it, I mean. I'm sorry for that, honey.”

She said nothing, turned and looked out the window and saw the Hoyt kids in a loose group on the shoulder of the road, making their disorganized way toward the center of town. “Look,” Jill said. “Those kids are still trick-or-treating. They're still out.”

“Those're the Hoyts,” he said.

“I don't care; they're out.”

“I care,” Wade said. “Those're the Hoyts.” What he wanted to say was
Shut up.
He wanted credit, for God's sake, not criticism. He wanted her cheerful, not whining. “Can't you see … look out there,” he said. “Can't you see that nobody's got their porch lights on anymore? It's late; it's too late now. Those Hoyt kids, they're just out to get in trouble. See,” he said, pointing past her mask to the right. “They put shaving cream all over that mailbox there. And they chopped down all of Herb Crane's new bushes. Damn.” He slowed the car almost to a stop, and behind him the Hoyt kids scattered into the darkness. “Those damned kids tipped over Harrison's toolshed. Jesus Christ.”

Wade drove slowly now, peering into yards and calling out the damage as he saw it. “Look, they cut the Annises' clotheslines, and I bet there's a hell of a lot more they done out back where you can't see it,” he said, rolling his hand again, a habitual gesture. “And there, see all those smashed flowerpots? Little bastards. Jesus H. Christ.”

In front of the elementary school was a flashing yellow caution light. Wade had to steer carefully around the fleshy remains of three or four smashed pumpkins, hurled, surely, from a speeding Chevy sedan with dual exhausts.

“See, honey, that's all that's going on out there now,” he
said. “You don't want to deal with that kind of stuff, do you? Trick-or-treating's over, I'm sorry to say.”

“Why do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

“Break stuff? Cause all that damage and trouble to people?”

“Yeah. It's stupid,” she said flatly.

“I guess they're stupid. It's stupid.”

“Did you use to do that, when you were a kid?”

Wade inhaled deeply and flicked his cigarette out the open vent window. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sort of. Nothing really mean, you understand. But yeah, we did a few things like that, I guess. Me and my pals, me and my brothers. It was kind of funny then, or anyhow we thought it was. Stealing pumpkins and smashing them on the road, soaping windows. Stuff like that.”

“ Was
it funny?”

“Was
it funny. Yeah. To us it was. You know.”

“But it's not funny now.”

“No, it's not funny now,” he said. “Now I'm a cop, so now I have to listen to all the complaints people make. I'm a police officer,” he announced. “I'm not a kid anymore. You change, and things look different as a result. You understand that, don't you?”

His daughter nodded. “You did lots of bad things,” she declared.

“What? I did what?”

“I bet you did lots of bad things.”

“Well, no, not really,” he said. He paused. “What? What're you talking about?”

She turned and looked through the eye holes of her mask, revealing her blue irises and nothing else. “I just think you used to be bad. That's all.”

“No,” he said flatly. “I didn't use to be bad. No, sir. I did not. I did not use to be bad.” They were pulling into the parking lot behind the town hall, and Wade nodded to several people who had recognized and waved at him. “Where do you get this stuff anyhow? From your mother?”

“No. She never talks about you anymore. I just know,” she said. “I can tell.”

“You mean
bad
kind of bad? You mean like a bad man,
I used to be? Like that?” He wanted to reach over and remove her mask, find out what she really meant, but he did not dare, somehow. He was frightened of her, suddenly aware of it. He had never been frightened of her before, or at least it had not seemed so to him. How could this be true now? Nothing had changed. She had only uttered a few ridiculous things, a child talking mean to her father because he would not let her do what she wanted to do, that was all. No big deal. Nothing to be scared of there. Kids do it all the time.

“Let's go inside,” she said. “I'm cold.” She swung open the car door and got out and slammed it behind her, hard.

 

The town hall is a large squarish two-story building on the north side of the small field called the Common, where, even in the dark, one can make out the Civil War cannon aimed south and the block of red granite that the townspeople, after the Spanish-American War, set up as a war memorial. Then and after each later war they inscribed on the block the names of the town's fallen soldiers. In the four wars in this century so far, fifty-four young men from the valley—all but seven of them enlisted men—have been killed. No women. The names are for the most part familiar ones, familiar at least to me— Pittman, Emerson, Hoyt, Merritt, and so on—many the same names one sees today on Alma Pittman's tax rolls.

Wade's name, my name, Whitehouse, is there—twice. Our two brothers, Elbourne and Charlie, were killed together in the same hooch by mortar fire near Hue during the Tet offensive. Charlie was on his way to Saigon and had stopped to visit. He wasn't supposed to be there. Wade heard about it weeks after it happened, weeks after we heard about it at home. I was in grade school, the youngest of the five children; Wade was in Korea, an MP stopping fights between drunks in bars. He did not really believe that his two older brothers were dead, he told me, until sixteen months later, when he got home and saw their names on the war memorial by the town hall.

Wade had grown up looking at the names of dead men carved into red granite, seen them every Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day. Even playing softball on the Common in the summer league, if you played left field, as Wade usually did, you got to read the names carved into the stone. For him, when your name got listed there, you were truly,
undeniably, hopelessly dead. Those were men who had no faces, who were gone beyond memory, forever, to absolute elsewhere. Even Elbourne and Charlie.

Outside the entrance to the town hall, a small group of people had gathered, mostly men smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices that went silent as Wade and his daughter walked from his car across the lot and up the path. The men faced him in a friendly way, and one said, “Howdy, Wade. Got you some company tonight, eh?”

Wade nodded and, opening the door for his daughter, passed into the large, brightly lit hall. It takes up the entire first floor of the building, with a staircase in the far left corner, a small stage at the rear and rest rooms on the other side. The unpainted walls and ceiling are made of narrow tongue-in-groove spruce boards, and the place smells of the forest and of the fire in the big Ranger wood stove that heats it. The wooden chairs that usually fill the room had been folded and stacked to the right by the door. Half a hundred adults were gathered around the room in bunches close to the walls, and the children, all in costumes and makeup, were in the middle, as if penned.

Picture, if you will, clowns, tramps and robots of various types and sizes, at least two pirates, an angel and a devil, half a dozen vampires and as many witches. There were astronauts and a scarecrow and the hunchback of Notre Dame, and among the younger children, the toddlers, there were several species of animals represented, rabbits, lions, a horse, a lamb. Most of the costumes were homemade and depended for their effect on the viewer's willed suspension of disbelief—willed only for the viewer, however, not for the wearer of the costume, whose disbelief got suspended regardless of will, for all the children, clearly, were eager to be out of their child's body, if only temporarily, and into a more powerful one. They smiled, sometimes laughed outright, looked through their masks and makeup straight into the eyes of adults as they never would otherwise and seemed strangely independent and sure of themselves and a little dangerous.

Standing among them, like a nervous ringmaster surrounded by small but unpredictable and possibly hostile animals, was Gordon LaRiviere, clipboard in hand, in a loud voice urging the throng of children to start moving clockwise in a circle around the room. A large beefy red-faced man in his
mid-fifties with a silver flat-top haircut and tiny bright-blue eyes, LaRiviere, as chairman of the Board of Selectmen this year, was the costume contest judge, a responsibility he seemed determined to exercise with great seriousness and attention to detail, for he repeatedly called out the various categories, alerting the audience and engaging its sympathies, as the children began to march in a slow swirl around the room. “We're looking for the Funniest Costume!” LaRiviere shouted. “And the Scariest! And the Most Imaginative! And the Best Costume of All!”

Standing near the door, Wade put his hand on Jill's shoulder and nudged his daughter forward. “Got here just in time for the judging,” he said. “Go ahead in. Just jump into line. Maybe you'll win a prize.”

The girl took a single step forward and stopped. Wade nudged her a second time. “Go on, Jill. Some of those kids you know.” He looked down at the tiger's tail drooping to the floor and the child's blue sneakers peeking out from under the cuffs of the pathetic costume. Then he looked at the back of her head, her flax-colored hair creased by the string from the mask, and he suddenly wanted to weep.

He decided it was because he loved her so, and then the impulse passed. His stomach fell, and his chest heaved, and he took a deep breath and said to her, “Go ahead. You'll have fun if you just go on and join the other kids out there. See how happy they seem,” he said, and he looked out at the children moving in a thick slow circle around the room with Gordon LaRiviere at the hub, and they did indeed seem happy to him, a parade of monsters and freaks delighted to find themselves admired for once.