Affliction (4 page)

Jill took another step away from Wade and the adults nearby, several of whom were staring at her now, aware, of course, that she was Wade's daughter visiting him for the weekend, an event that for the last year and a half had occurred on a more or less monthly basis. Lately, it seemed, folks had not seen the girl much, possibly not since the Labor Day picnic, when Wade and Jill had played together in the father-daughter softball game and Wade had to leave in the seventh inning to get her back to Concord by dark because she had school the next day—though no one quite believed that, since the Lawford and Barrington schools never started the school year till the Wednesday after Labor Day, and Concord
was unlikely to be on a different schedule. That ex-wife of his, Lillian, was a hard case. Everyone in town thought so. She had always been kind of a hard case—uptight and fussy, one of your more demanding women. Snooty was how some people described her, even though she was a Pittman and had been born and raised right here in Lawford and from the beginning and up to today was clearly no damn better than anyone else in town. Worse than some, if you wanted to know the truth.

Of course, Wade was a sonofabitch. That was truth too. Pure fact: the man got really mean when he wanted to. Still and all, he loved his daughter and she loved him, and there was no reason why the mother had to keep coming between them like she did. Whatever it was Wade did to Lillian back when they were married, it couldn't have been so bad, since she married him twice. So it was hard to say why the man deserved such shabby treatment, now that they were divorced again. He was a hard worker, a fair-minded cop who liked to drink with the boys down at Toby's Inn, and a slick left fielder for the local softball team who could probably still play Legion ball if he wanted to. That's what most people in town thought.

“I don't want to,” Jill said. She continued to stare at the other children, ignored by them but rapidly becoming of greater interest than they to the adults who were gathered near the entrance.

“Why? Why not?” Wade asked. “Go on, it's fun. You know lots of those kids, you know them from when you were in school here,” he said. “It hasn't been that long, for God's sake.” He threw out his arms, hands open, feigning exasperation, and laughed.

She backed up to him, as if into his arms, and in a low voice that only he could hear, she said, “It's not that.”

“What, then?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I just don't want to. It's stupid.”

“What's stupid? Sure it's stupid. But it's fun,” he said. “Jesus.” He looked around him as if for advice. There was Pearl Diehler and three or four others he knew well and a couple more he knew only slightly. There was probably no one in town that he did not know in some way or another—757 year-round residents and another 300 or so in the summer. Wade carried all their faces and almost all their names in his head, and he did it with a certain pride, making sure that whenever
he saw new folks in town, at Golden's store, say, or Merritt's, he got into a chat with them, asked their names, found out where they lived and where they used to live, learned what they did for their money. He would forget some of that, naturally, but seldom the name and rarely where they used to live and never where they lived now and what they did for their money. Wade was smart.

Suddenly Jill was squirming next to him, trying to get between him and the door and out. “Hey, what's going on? Where're you going, huh?” He reached out and grabbed her arm, and the child looked up at him, facing him with her bulbous plastic tiger mask, looking frightened even through the mask, her blue eyes wide and filling with tears.

Wade let go of her arm, and she pulled it to her, as if he had hurt it. “I want to go home,” she said quietly.

He leaned down to hear her better. “What?”

“I want to go home,” she said. “I don't like it here.”

“Oh, Jesus, come on, will you? Don't mess this up any more than it's already been messed up, for Christ's sake. Now get in there,” he said, “and join the other kids. Do that, and before you know it you'll be happy as a goddamned clam.” He turned her with the flat of his hand and pushed her slowly forward into the open area, toward the circle of children. Gordon LaRiviere had spotted her and was waving her on with his clipboard, drawing attention to her from all over the room.

Now, Wade thought, her friends will see her and will come over to her. Then she will have to join in, and she will have a good time and be glad that she is here again. Maybe she will even want to go to school tomorrow with the Lawford kids, instead of hanging around with him at work all day.

He had not figured that one out yet—how he was going to amuse her during the day while he ran the rig down in Catamount. Two weeks before, during one of his regular twice-a-week phone conversations with Jill, Wade had learned that, because of a local teachers' convention, the Concord children had the Friday after Halloween off. Immediately, he had insisted that she come up to Lawford for the Halloween party and spend all three days of the weekend with him. But when Lillian had discovered that the Lawford children would be in school all day Friday, she quickly telephoned Wade and demanded to know just what he thought Jill would be doing by herself while he was at work. “You amaze me,” she said. “You
keep on amazing me, year after year, the same old ways.”

Her demand had angered him, and he had responded by saying that he had it all figured out, damn it, so leave him alone, he was not required by law to account to her for how he spent every single hour of his weekends with his daughter. Consequently, it was only now, with his anger abated, that he was able to admit to himself that indeed he did not know what he was going to do with his daughter tomorrow. When she made herself happy with her Lawford friends tonight, she would want to go to school with them in the morning, he assured himself. Especially when she saw what the alternative was—sitting in the cab of the truck all day while he finished drilling a well in Catamount.

Relieved, he turned away, smiled down at Pearl Diehler and stepped out the door for a quick cigarette and a chat with the boys. From somewhere way back inside his jawbone, his toothache was giving him distant early warnings, and it had occurred to him that a cigarette might help postpone the onslaught of pain that he knew was coming.

There were five or six of them out there, a couple of women too, smoking and probably drinking: Jimmy Dame and Hector Eastman, brothers-in-law whose wives and children were inside. Also Frankie LaCoy, a skinny kid from Littleton whom Wade suspected of selling grass to the local high school kids but who otherwise seemed to cause little harm, so Wade was content to let it ride. Standing next to him was LaCoy's girlfriend, Didi Forque, still in high school, but she had moved out of her parents' house last summer, taken a job waitressing at Toby's Inn, and now shared an apartment in town with the other girl here, Hettie Rodgers. Wade liked looking at Hettie, even though she was only about eighteen and was very much the girlfriend of Jack Hewitt, who worked for LaRiviere with Wade and was a damned good kid. Hettie had her own car and after graduation last June had gone to work as a hairstylist at Ken's Kutters in Littleton, but she had continued to live here in Lawford because of Jack.

Jack Hewitt himself was coming slowly up the walk from his pickup, which he had double-parked directly in front of the building. He was a tall man in his early twenties, rangy, sharp-featured, some would say clean-cut, and intelligent and good-humored looking, with a reddish complexion and rust-colored hair. He walked with a slight hitch, almost a skip-step, which
probably had started out as an adolescent affectation and had become a habit and made him look as if he had just played a practical joke on someone and was dancing sneakily away before the firecracker went off. In one hand he held what appeared to be a pint of whiskey in a brown paper bag. In the other he carried a rifle.

“What you boys up to?” Wade said, cupping his hands to light a cigarette.

“Same old shit,” one of the men said. Hector Eastman.

“You see some of that shit them kids got into tonight?” Frankie LaCoy asked Wade. “Little sonsofbitches been causing some wicked damage this year, I'll tell ya. Jesus,” he said. “Little sonsofbitches.”

Wade ignored him. He did not really like LaCoy, but he enjoyed tolerating him. He believed that LaCoy's talky servility was practically endless, and although Wade knew that eventually it could make the man dangerous, he enjoyed feeling as superior to another human being, especially another man, as he felt toward Frankie LaCoy, so he usually appeared to listen to him and then refused to acknowledge that Frankie had said anything. It was a pleasing form of dominance.

“You're going to have to move that truck, Jack,” Wade said to Hewitt.

“I know it.” He showed the older man his sideways smile and held out the whiskey. “Take a bite?”

“Don't mind if I do,” Wade said. He reached for the bottle, put it to his lips and took a good-sized swallow. I need a drink, he thought. He had not believed he would tonight, but Jesus H. Christ, did he need a drink. That kid had made him all jumpy tonight. He did not know what the hell had gotten into Jill, but whatever it was, he had let it get into him too. It was only more of the same old stuff her mother had been putting out for years, he thought, and no matter where it came from, Jill or Lillian herself, it always had the same effect on Wade: it made him want to hang his head in shame and run. He said to Jack, “That the gun you were bragging on today?”

“No brag. Just fact.” Jack tossed the rifle to Wade, who caught it expertly, snapped it into his shoulder and sighted down the barrel for a few seconds. Then he examined the gun more carefully, turning it in his hands as if it were the corpse of a small unfamiliar animal. It was a Browning BAR .30/06 with a scope.

“What'd it set you back?” Wade asked. “Four fifty, five hundred bucks?” Jack just smiled, so Wade turned and handed the gun on to Hector, a towering grim man in overalls and solid-red wool shirt and plaid cap with the earflaps down.

Hector weighed the gun in his thick hands and aimed it at his huge distant feet. “Nice.”

Jack had taken up a position next to Hettie Rodgers, the girl in jeans and blue down vest who had been Jack's girlfriend since the spring of her sophomore year in high school, the spring Jack got cut by the Red Sox organization and came back to Lawford and went to work drilling wells for LaRiviere with Wade. Jack slung his arm around Hettie's shoulders and watched proudly as the men passed his rifle back and forth and examined it.

Wade studied Hettie, who seemed distracted, lost in thought, her long dark hair half covering her heart-shaped face. He might have been thinking that Lillian used to look like that, when she was a kid and she was fresh-faced and happy just from being present and accounted for when Wade was around. Lillian would stand next to him thinking God knows what, off on her own, while Wade and his friends drank and laughed the night away, and there never seemed to be anything wrong with it, so long as he pulled away from his friends when she wanted to go. Then they would drive home and after they got married make love in that first apartment they rented and later they would do it in the bedroom of the house he built out on Lebanon Road. Just like Jack and Hettie—who will head out of here in a little while in Jack's burgundy truck for his parents' place on Horse Pen Road, or else, if that kid LaCoy keeps hanging around here at the town hall with Hettie's roommate, they will pop over to Hettie's apartment above Golden's store and make love there.

There was nothing wrong back then, nothing, or so it seemed then. And for Wade, looking back from a point twenty years later and then studying this young couple in front of him, it still seemed that nothing had been wrong. Those were wonderful times, he thought, truly wonderful times. After that, things all of a sudden started going wrong. They were only kids, he and Lillian, and they did not know how to repair anything, so when something in the marriage broke, they just went out and got divorced, and then came the army and his getting sent to Korea instead of Vietnam like he wanted, and
all the rest followed—their getting married again, Jill, more troubles, getting divorced a second time: the long tangled painful sequence that had brought him, at last, aged forty-one, to where he was now. He was a man alone, hands jammed in pockets against the cold, while his only child, against her mother's wishes, grumpily spent one weekend every month or two with him. The rest of the time his thoughts were mostly locked on his work, day in and out, drilling wells for Gordon LaRiviere—which he found boring, difficult and, because of the low pay and LaRiviere's peculiar personality, demeaning—and being the part-time police officer for the town as well, which seemed to him almost accidental, an automatic consequence of his solitary condition and of his having been made an MP in the service.

Wade still believed in romance, however. That is, he had somehow managed to sustain into his forties a romantic view of love. Thus he looked back upon those few brief years when he was in his late teens and early twenties, when he and Lillian were happy just from being in the same room with each other, as the model against which the rest of his life had to be measured. And held against that warmly golden glow, his present life looked grim and cold and terribly diminished to him, and increasingly he found himself regarding men like Jack Hewitt—handsome young men in love with handsome young women who loved them back—with something like envy and, to avoid rage, sorrow. He had made the connections himself many times late at night lying in his bed alone—between rage and sorrow, and between sorrow, envy and romance—and he had tried to dispel his painful feelings by changing his view of love. But he could not. There was the love he had known with Lillian when he was very young, and that was perfect love, and there was the rest, which was a diminishment.