Affliction by Russell Banks Page A

here,” Wade said. His tooth had started to throb painfully again, after having lightened somewhat for almost a week, and he wrapped the right side of his jaw with his right hand, as if to warm it.
    â€œWell, c’mon, then. Get in, and we’ll take a little ride, my man.”
    Wade rocked back on his heels and looked up at the clear cold dark-blue sky. The moon had swung around to the south, and the stars, pinpoints of white light, seemed like secrets whispered to him from a vast distance.
    â€œCan’t,” Wade said. “I got Jill tonight.” I’m lying, he thought. She had only been loaned to him, and the loan had been called in early. Meanwhile, he was standing here, pretending to be a good responsible father whose child needed him to stay close by. Wade remembered Jill’s words: “I can wait up here fine. When Mommy comes, just tell her I’m up here.”
    Abruptly, he ducked his head and walked toward the front of the truck, just as Jack switched on the bank of running lights and the headlights, and then Wade made himself pass slowly, deliberately, through the glare of the lights, pausing for a second there, a man with nothing to hide being screened for contraband. He rounded the front of the truck and opened the door on the passenger’s side and climbed up next to Hettie, and when he reached across her and took the joint from Jack’s fingers, he smelled her perfume and shampoo. Nice.
    Jack dropped the truck into gear and pulled out onto the lane, and as the high powerful vehicle eased down the lane toward Route 29, Wade placed his left arm on the seatback behind Hettie, turned and, peering between the pair of rifles hanging on the rack, looked out the rear window. His glance passed over the red granite war memorial next to the town hall. It stood in the pale moonlight like an ancient dolmen, and he saw above it, in the lighted window of his own office, his daughter, Jill, still wearing the hideous plastic mask, looking back at him.
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    They drove north on Route 29 for a few miles, passed Toby’s Inn and went all the way out to the interstate, where they luffed along the southbound lane a ways, smoking a second joint and then a third. The land falls away to the west out there, then rises in a long dark forested ridge that hides the Minuit Valley and Lawford. Beyond that is a second, somewhat higher ridge, called Saddleback, that terminates in the spruce-covered knob called Parker Mountain. From the truck Wade could make out several of the half-dozen small lakes in the flats southwest of the valley, shining dully in the moonlight like hardened spatters of melted lead. He had calmed down considerably now—marijuana had a positively soothing effect on him, erasing toothache, anxieties and anger in one swipe, leaving him to drift a short distance outside and behind time without worrying about it, as if being anywhere on time, even at his own death, meant nothing to him.
    At the Lebanon cloverleaf they turned around and slowly drove back along the shoulder of the northbound lane. Jack seemed to enjoy holding the speed of his truck way back, keeping it under forty, as if by restraining the truck’s immense power he was better able to exhibit it. Hettie was hunched forward over the dash so she could hear a new James Taylor tape, which Jack had turned down so that he could answer Wade’s question about his plans for deer hunting this year.
    Jack said he had a job starting tomorrow at sunup, guiding some Boston business connection of LaRiviere’s, but then he planned to take Saturday and hunt for himself. All the client wanted was to kill something with horns—anything, Jack said, even a cow—but he would take him up to Parker Mountain, where they could use LaRiviere’s cabin as a base and where Jack figured he could find the old guy a deer and also track and mark a big buck off to go back and kill later for himself.
    Wade knew the client, the