Affliction (14 page)

Without turning around, they knew he was watching them from the doorway of the bedroom, and they went suddenly silent. All of them knew he was there and said nothing, Ma, Elbourne and Charlie, and even Wade. Although at that time Wade had never actually been hit by Pop, except of course for the usual spankings when he was little, he nonetheless had watched his older brothers being hit and heard Ma being hit late at night while the boys cowered in their beds and said not a word to one another until it was over, when they spoke rapidly of other things.

They went on watching the television show as if the man were not standing in the bedroom doorway behind them—it was
Gunsmoke
, with James Arness as Matt Dillon, a tall loose-limbed man whose big lantern-jawed face comforted Wade
somehow, although it was like no face he knew personally. Even so, Wade let himself dream over that large kindly strong face, wishing not that his father looked like U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon but that his father knew such a man, that's all, had a friend whose good-natured strength would quiet him down and at the same time cheer him up a little, make his father less turbulent and unpredictable, less dangerous.

“Shut that goddamn thing off!” Pop said. He had a crumpled pack of Old Golds in his hand and was wearing only underwear, baggy dark-green boxer shorts and a tee shirt. Behind him, the bedroom was in darkness, and the man's small pale wiry body looked almost fragile in the dim light from the lamp on the low table next to the couch. He dropped his cigarettes, and when he bent down to pick them up, Wade saw the bald spot at the back of Pop's head, which he usually covered by combing his straight reddish hair from the left side all the way across to the right, and Wade decided that he liked looking at Pop this way. He would never have said it, he knew no one he could say such a strange thing to, but he thought at that moment that his father grabbing at the floor for a pack of cigarettes, knobby-kneed, all pointy elbows and shoulders, flat-chested and red-faced, with his one sign of vanity exposed, was cute-looking, a man you could not help liking, even when he was sour-faced and shouting at you.

Elbourne jumped to his feet from the floor beside the couch and snapped off the television set. “Okay, okay, for Christ's sake,” he mumbled in a barely audible voice, and he headed for the stairs. Charlie silently followed.

“We'll keep it turned down,” Ma said. She sat facing the fading gray image on the screen, one hand buried in the bowl of popcorn on her lap. “Wade,” she said, “turn it back on. Just keep the sound low so your father can sleep.”

Wade unlocked his crossed legs and got up and reached for the knob, and Pop said, “I said shut the fucking thing off. Shut. It. Off.”

Wade thought for a second that Pop sounded like Marshal Dillon in Miss Kitty's bar daring a drunken gunfighter to reach for his gun. The boy held his hand still, six inches from the knob.

“Go ahead, it's all right,” Ma said. “Just keep it low so your father can sleep.” She drew several pieces of popcorn from the bowl and pushed them into her mouth and chewed slowly.

Pop took a step into the room and pulled a cigarette from the pack and placed it between his lips, and as he lit it, he said to Wade, “Go ahead, you little prick, don't do what your father tells you. Do what your mother tells you.” He inhaled deeply and blew the smoke at his feet, as if he were now thinking of something else.

Wade moved his hand a few inches closer to the knob. Where were his brothers? Why had they given up so easily?

Ma, chewing on the popcorn, said to Wade, “Honey, turn on the show, will you?” Wade obeyed, and his mother turned around on the couch and said to his father, “Go on back to sleep, Glenn, we'll be—” when he passed her by quickly and reached out for the boy with both hands and shoved him hard, away from the television set and back against the couch. Wade let himself fall into a sitting position beside his mother; his father snapped the television off again.

“You little prick!” Pop yelled, his eyes narrowing, and he raised his fist over Wade's head.

“
Don't
!” Ma cried, and the fist came down.

There was no time to hide from the blow, no time to protect himself with his arms or even to turn away. Pop's huge fist descended and collided with the boy's cheekbone. Wade felt a terrible slow warmth wash thickly across his face, and then he felt nothing at all. He was lying on his side, his face slammed against the couch, which smelled like cigarette smoke and sour milk, when there came a second blow, this one low on his back, and he heard his mother shout, “Glenn! Stop!” His body was behind him somewhere and felt hot and soft and bright, as if it had burst into flame. There was nothing before his eyes but blackness, and he realized that he was burrowing his face into the couch, showing his father his backside as he dug with his paws like a terrified animal into the earth. He felt his father's rigid hands reach under his belly like claws and yank him back, flinging him to his feet, and when he opened his eyes he saw the man standing before him with his right hand cocked in a fist, his face twisted in disgust and resignation, as if he were performing a necessary but extremely unpleasant task for a boss.

"Glenn, stop!” Ma cried. “He didn't do anything.” She was behind Pop, standing now but still holding the bowl of popcorn before her, as if she were his assistant and the bowl contained certain of his awful tools.

Pop held Wade with one hand by the front of his shirt, like Matt Dillon drawing a puny terrified punk up to his broad chest, and he took his left fist, swung it out to the side, opened it and brought it swiftly back, slapping the boy's face hard, as if with a board, then brought it back the other way, slapping him again and again, harder each time, although each time the boy felt it less, felt only the lava-like flow of heat that each blowleft behind, until he thought he would explode from the heat, would blow up like a bomb, from the face outward.

At last the man stopped slapping him. He tossed the boy aside, onto the couch, like a bag of rags, and said, “You're just a little prick, remember that."

Wade looked up and saw that Pop was still smoking his cigarette. Ma had her hands on the man's shoulders and was steering him away from the couch, back toward the bedroom door, saying to him, “Just go on back to bed now, go on, go back to bed,” she said. “You've done enough damage for one night. It's over. It's over.”

“When I say do something, goddammit, I mean it,” Pop said over his shoulder. His voice was high and thin, almost a whine. “I really mean it. When I say do something, I mean it.”

“I know you do,” she said. “I know.”

Then the man was gone into the darkness of the bedroom, and the door was closed on him, and Ma was able to attend to her son's bleeding mouth and nose, his swelling cheeks. She reached toward him, to soothe and cool the heated flesh of his face, but he shoved her hands away, wildly, as if they were serpents, and backed wide-eyed from her to the stairs behind him, where he turned and saw his older brothers waiting for him, huddled in gloom on the stairs like gargoyles.

He moved slowly past the two, and a few minutes later, when he had undressed and climbed into his bed, they came along behind him. For a long time, our mother sat on the couch, listening to herself break apart inside, while everyone else in the house, even Wade, let pain be absorbed by sleep— cool gray, hard and dry as pumice stone, sleep.

HOME MADE COOKING. Wade passed the sign and drew the grader carefully to the side of the road at the far end of Wickham's parking lot, where he shut off the engine, clambered down to the ground as if descending from a tree house and started to walk back toward the restaurant. The sign, custom made for Nick Wickham in pink neon by a bearded ponytailed glassblower over in White River Junction, bugged Wade.

Wade knew something was wrong with it, had said so to Nick the first time he saw it, but he had not been able to say what it was. It was only a few weeks before, early one morning stopping in for a cup of coffee before work, that he had first noticed the sign. Today, with the snowstorm, that morning seemed not weeks but an entire season ago, early autumn, with leaves flashing brass-flecked light in his eyes. He had driven his car into the lot and had seen Nick up on a stepladder attaching the new sign to the low roof of the restaurant.

“That don't look right, ” Wade had said. “It looks like it's spelled wrong or something.”

Nick had glared down and said, “Fuck. Wade Whitehouse, it's people like you that keep this fucking town from prospering.
You got a perpetual hair across your ass, pardon the expression. No matter what an individual does to improve things around here, you got to find fault with it.”

“I'm not finding fault with it,” Wade had said. “It's a goddamned good idea, putting up a neon sign and all. Good for you, good for the town. Looks real modern too, like those new restaurants they got down to Concord,” he said. “Probably wasn't cheap, neither, was it?” he asked. “I mean, them hippie craftsmen, they can cost you an arm and a leg. You think you're getting a dish or something, you think you're getting something you can use, something of true value, you think. Only it turns out it's a goddamn work of art.”

Nick got down to the ground and folded his ladder and stepped back a ways to admire his new sign. He smacked his lips, as if he had just eaten it. “This town,” he said, “sucks.”

Wade said, “Aw, c'mon, I was only just saying that there's something wrong with 'Home Made Cooking,' that's all. The sign's fine. The sign itself. It's just what it says that's wrong.”

“How? Why? Tell me what the fuck's wrong with it. Jesus Christ. That thing cost me a hundred and fifty bucks.”

“It don't matter,” Wade said to Nick, and he clapped him on the shoulder. “It looks real … serious,” he said. “It looks like you're in the goddamn restaurant business to stay. We're proud of you, Nick, we the citizens of Lawford, New Hampshire, we goddamn salute you, sir!” he said, and he reached to open the door. “Now I think I'll go in and have me some of that home made cooking you're advertising, if you don't mind.”

Since that morning, every time Wade pulled into Wickham's parking lot—every time, in fact, that he passed the restaurant, whether he stopped in or not—he examined the neon sign and tried once again to figure out what was wrong with it. The sign made him nervous, embarrassed him slightly, as if it were a mirror in which he had caught a glimpse of himself with a silly grin on his face.

Nobody else seemed to find the sign peculiar or “wrong”; in fact, no one even spoke of it unless to compliment it. One evening Wade had leaned over the counter and asked Margie what she thought of Nick's new sign, asked her offhandedly, as if he himself held no opinion on the subject, and she had said, “Oh, well, the sign's terrific, I guess. But who needs it? Everybody who comes in here has been coming in here for years. They don't need a neon sign to tell them where it is or what's
sold here. It's nice, though,” she had said. “Better than what was there before.”

“What was there before? I never saw anything there before.”

She punched his arm and laughed. “That's the point.” She patted his hand. “
Nothing
was there before,” she said, and she reached across the counter and with both hands squeezed his cheeks. Hands: Margie Fogg had hands that went everywhere, all over you, faster than you could think about and before you could decide whether you wanted her to touch you or not. From back in the kitchen, Nick hollered for her to pick up her orders, for Christ's sake, before they froze, and she let go of Wade's cheeks and, rolling her eyes, slouched toward the kitchen in a parody of obedience.

Now Wade stood among the cars and pickup trucks in the snow-covered lot for a few seconds before going into the restaurant, and once again he studied the pink neon sign, pinker than usual in the falling snow, almost obscenely pink. Underwear pink, he thought, although he had never known a woman who wore pink underwear. Margie wore white cotton underpants and cream-colored bras. Lillian's underwear was beige or sometimes bronze-colored or dark gray. Taupe, she once told him. Who knew what color she wore now? Surely not Wade. Ho, ho, not he. But the sign was bubble-gum pink. Wade figured that hookers, probably, were the only women who wore bright-pink underpants—prostitutes, B-girls—and then he remembered one who had, a girl in Seoul, he even remembered her full name, Kim Chul Hee, and he quickly looked down from the Home Made Cooking sign and entered the restaurant.

Inside, clouds of cigarette smoke and intense chatter swirled from the booths along the wall, where men wearing luminous orange hunting vests and caps and plaid wool shirts were seated in groups of three and four. Coats, parkas and quilted jackets were strewn on chair backs and hooks around the room. A dozen or more men, their boots dripping puddles onto the floor, perched on stools with their elbows on the counter, smoking and talking intently, as if just before Wade entered something exciting had occurred here. Normally, the place was quiet as a tavern at this hour, no matter how many people were there.

Wade looked around the crowded room, his eyebrows
raised for a greeting, but no one seemed to notice him. Even Margie, standing at the booth at the far end with her empty tray propped against her outslung hip, did not notice him. She was listening to the conversation between the four young men seated before her: Chick Ward, whose purple Trans Am Wade had observed parked outside among the pickups and Wagoneers and Broncos like a fancy switchblade among sledgehammers; and two other guys, whom Wade did not recognize but who he assumed were from Littleton, where Chick often went to drive his car at night; and there was the kid Frankie LaCoy, who, like Chick, spent a lot of time up in Littleton, but for a different reason, because Littleton was where Frankie bought the grass he sold here in Lawford. All four were dressed for hunting and from the looks of their boots had been tramping through the woods since daybreak. There had not been any dead deer tied to the fenders of Chick's Trans Am out front—Wade had registered that on the way in—but why should there be? Chick was no hunter, except for women. You'd expect to see a couple of naked women trussed up and lashed to the fenders of the Trans Am, not white-tailed deer, right? That Chick Ward, he was obsessed.

Wade ambled over to the booth and laid one hand across Margie's broad shoulder and placed the other on Chick's. He liked sometimes to try doing with his hands what Margie seemed compelled to do with hers: it looked good when she did it; it made her seem connected to other people in a way that Wade envied.

Margie turned to him, and the four men ceased talking and looked up at him expectantly with sober expressions, even Frankie, who usually grinned and winked when he saw Wade, as if the two shared a delightful secret, which in a sense they did. Wade knew that Frankie was the only person who sold marijuana in Lawford, and Frankie knew that as long as he acted as if Wade did not know, Wade would let him alone.

This morning, however, Frankie looked up at Wade as if he wanted the older man to explain something to him, to unravel an irritating mystery. Chick Ward too. Chick usually ignored Wade, except to grunt hello and, suddenly flush-faced, scowling, to stare at his feet, like a guilty child, which Wade understood to be the result of an encounter they had had years ago, when Chick was still in high school and liked peeping through windows at middle-aged women getting ready for
bed. The other two men, both bearded, with long dark hair spilling over their collars, did not know who Wade was, but even so, they peered up at him eagerly, as if he had brought them important news.

“Getcha deer yet?” Wade asked the group. He squeezed Margie's shoulder. There was something off, a beat or a note missing. People were not acting normal this morning, Wade thought, or else he was not seeing things right, as if he had a fever or were hung over or his toothache were distracting him. It was like watching a movie with the sound track out of sync. “Whaddaya say, boys?” he tried. “Some kinda snow.”

He let go of Chick's shoulder, avoided his gaze and tapped a cigarette halfway loose of the pack and plucked it out with his lips. He squeezed Margie's shoulder a second time. There were mornings like this—infrequent, six or seven times a year, but frequent enough to trouble him—when, after having lost all memory of the final hour of the previous night at Toby's Inn, he strolled into Wickham's for coffee, and it was instantly clear to him that whatever he had said or done during that last hour of total darkness the night before, whatever it was that he could not remember, was known this morning to everyone in the place.

Margie said, “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Wade said. His heart was pounding, as if he were frightened, but he was not frightened, not yet. He was only a little confused. There was a slight, almost imperceptible break in the pattern of greeting, that was all. No big deal. Yet he was sweating, and he was smiling oddly, he knew, making remarks that did not quite add up, driving the pattern of greeting further and further off with every passing second. He could not stop himself. He felt the way he believed Frankie LaCoy felt all the time, which put him on a kind of defensive alert.

To no one in particular Wade said, “Good thing my kid went back down to Concord with her mother.”

Frankie nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “How's that?”

“The snow and all.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Margie took a step back and looked into Wade's eyes, and he instantly turned away. Nick Wickham, wiping his hands on a towel, had come out of the kitchen and moved swiftly to refill
several mugs of coffee for the men at the counter.

“Gimme a big one to go!” Wade called. Too loudly, he knew. “Cream, no sugar!” Wade suddenly wished that he had not stopped at the restaurant, that he had gone on plowing the road, alone, cold and content inside his dreams. Margie's concerned gaze and the slightly perplexed expression on Frankie's face and Chick's expectant look were all too uncomfortably familiar to him. Other people were in one world; he was in a second. And the distance between their worlds caused other people concern and perplexity and made them curious about him—for here he was alone in his world; and there they were gathered together in theirs.

He lit his cigarette and saw that his hands were trembling. Look at the bastards, shaking like little frozen dogs begging at the door to be let inside. Wade felt fragile, about to shatter. When he was sixteen he had felt this particular kind of fragility for the first time, and he had gone on rediscovering it, suddenly, with no apparent cause, ever since. One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else's sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.

Margie said, “Jill went home with her mother? I thought she was up for the weekend.” Then she said, “Oh-h,” and her hand reached out and touched his forearm. She put her tray down on the floor, leaning it against the side of the booth, and reached toward Wade as if to embrace him.

He stepped back and stared at a spot on her shoulder, as if she were his girlfriend Lillian Pittman and he were sixteen again, stopping her with his movement and the sudden rigidity of his face. He had told her about his father's beating him again, revealed it to her without planning or even wanting to, blurted out the information in the middle of a conversation about something else. “My father laid into me something wicked again last night,” he said, and Lillian, sweet innocent Lillian, made that same move toward him, just like Margie, hands reaching out, her long narrow lovely face swarming, it seemed to him, with pity and bewilderment, and with perversely detached curiosity as well, for she knew nothing of
violence then, and it seemed both the most horrible and the most inexplicable thing she could imagine. Entranced as much as repelled by what he had told her of it, she nonetheless knew nothing of the light and heat he felt when his father beat him, nothing of the profound clarity of feeling that emerged from the center of his chest when it happened, nothing of the exquisite joining of all his various parts that he experienced when his father swung the boy's lean body around and punched it and shoved it to the floor while his mother's face howled in the distance. He could in no way tell her of these things; he could barely know of them himself. All he could know was that he had left out of his account something that was crucial and filled him with shame, which is why he simultaneously moved toward her for solace and pushed her away.

“Just forget I said it,” he murmured. “Just forget I said anything about it.”

Margie let her arms drop to her sides. “About what?”

“You know. Jill.”

She said, “C'mon, just a minute,” and moving swiftly, slipped her arm around Wade's arm and turned him away from the booth toward the small pine-paneled back room where the video games and pinball machines were located, empty of players at this hour, shadowy and smelling of old cigarette smoke. Nick hollered, “Marge!” as she stepped through the door, and she shushed him with a wave.