Affliction by Russell Banks

different than usual? How did he act? What did he say? What do you think he was thinking?

3
    OUTSIDE, WADE INHALED DEEPLY, filled his lungs with cold night air and walked rapidly down the path to the narrow lane where Jack Hewitt’s high-bodied burgundy pickup was still double-parked. It was a four-wheel-drive Ford with extra-long shackles that kicked the body high off the running gear. It had a roll bar and a rack of running lights, chrome exhaust extensions rising behind the cab, oak paneling on the floor of the bed and elaborate pin-striping all over the body—a work vehicle with too many accessories and too fine a paint job to be of much use for work. Jack sat inside with the motor running and Hettie beside him, and Frankie LaCoy and his girlfriend stood on the driver’s side, passing a joint back and forth through the window.
    â€œI thought I told you to move that sonofabitch!” Wade hollered. He stopped a few yards from the truck and placed his hands on his hips.
    It was a nice-looking truck, Wade had to admit. Nothing but hair and muscle, that truck. The kid was lucky—he made decent money working for LaRiviere, a hell of a lot more than he had ever made playing double A baseball, and all he had todo with it was spend it on his goddamned truck and new rifles and his girlfriend. The kid is under the impression that he is going to live forever, Wade said to himself. Wade believed that what had happened to him since he was Jack’s age was going to happen to Jack someday. It had to, as much because of who the kid was as because of who he was not. And Wade believed this because he had to—as much because of who Wade was as because of who he was not. “You can’t escape certain awful things in life,” Wade once opined. He was sitting in my kitchen, drinking beer late on a summer Sunday afternoon, after a Red Sox game at Fenway, before heading back up north to Lawford. He looked me in the eye, and I knew he was challenging me to contradict him, to say, as I surely wanted to say, “Yes, Wade, you can escape certain awful things in life. Look at me. I have done it.”
    But I said nothing. I looked at my watch, and then he looked at his, and he sighed and said, “Well, old buddy, I better hit the road if I want to get back to the land of milk and honey before dark.”
    LaCoy and his girlfriend stepped quickly away from Jack’s truck. Jack leaned out the open window and said to Wade, “Relax, Chief, we’re leaving now. You wanna toke?” he offered. He smiled broadly, a handsome young man, still a boy, practically, who was genuinely pleased by his own good looks and the physical and social pleasures they kept on bringing him.
    Wade said, “That shit’s still illegal, you know. You get too cocky, I’ll run you in for it. I’m fucking serious, Jack.”
    â€œRun me in? For what? The cockiness or the grass?” Jack grinned. LaCoy laughed. That Jack Hewitt, what a guy.
    â€œCockiness, you wiseass little bastard. I’ll run you in for cockiness,” Wade said, and now he, too, was smiling, and he drew closer to the truck. “Listen, you got to be more careful about that shit. LaRiviere or Chub Merritt or one of those guys sees you smoking that wacky tabacky around me, they’ll expect me to bust you. I don’t, I’ll have to start looking for another job. Me personal, I don’t give a shit you smoke it, you know that. So long as you keep it among yourselves and don’t start peddling it. But you got to be a little cool, goddammit. This ain’t goddamn Greenwich Village or Harvard Square or someplace, you know.”
    â€œYeah, yeah, I know,” Jack said. “Here, for chrissakes,have a hit. Relax a little,” he said. “Don’t be such a hardass, man. I know you got problems, but everybody’s got problems. So relax, for chrissakes.” He extended the half-smoked joint to Wade.
    â€œNot