Margie shook her head sadly and followed him. As he approached the cash register at the end of the counter, Nick looked out from the kitchen and said, “Your coffee’s by the register, Wade. What do you hear about Jack Hewitt and that guy he found? Who the fuck is the individual?” He called out, “Hey, Marge, for God’s sake, honey, you got two orders sitting there getting cold!” Nick held a trio of white plates like playing cards in one hand and with the other rapidly shoveled pancakes off the griddle. “You hear anything more about that guy that shot himself? You talked to Jack?”
All along the counter, men looked up at Wade and waited for him to answer. Wade glanced beyond them and saw that most of the men in the booths were waiting too. “No. No, I mean, not since last night,” he mumbled. “He took a guy named Twombley up to Parker Mountain early.”
Nick handed the three plates of pancakes to Margie and came down the counter to Wade and rang up his coffee. “You heard, didn’t you?” he said quietly.
“What?”
“About the fucking guy shooting himself.” Nick pointed an index finger at one temple and pulled the trigger and said, “Bang. Least that’s what it sounds like. Not on purpose, I mean. I assume accidental.”
“Where … how’d you hear that?”
“CB. Little while ago. One of the boys on the way in, Chick, I think, picked up Jack on the CB calling for the state troopers. Jack told the staties he was up to Parker Mountain with a guy who shot himself, and wanted help. Couple of the boys started over from here to give him a hand, but the troopers were already all over the fucking place up there and sent them on back. I figured you’d know the whole story,” he said. “I figured you’d know what really happened, I mean. The fucking guy kill himself? This Twombley, who the fuck is he, anyhow?”
“No. I … I didn’t know. I was … Jesus, where was I? I was out plowing — I been out in the grader all morning,” Wade said. “And up the school before that,” he quickly added. He felt vaguely guilty, as if he were somehow lying and were struggling to find an alibi, when all he was trying to do was answer the man’s simple innocent question. He took a deep breath and tried again. “Twombley … Evan Twombley is summer people, from Massachusetts. He’s got a place over on Lake Agaway. Friend of LaRiviere’s or something, which is how Jack come to take him out hunting. For Gordon. It was his idea. Gordon’s, I mean.” Wade started for the door. “I shouldn’t say any more about it. I was out plowing the whole time,” he said, and he swung the door open and stepped into the blowing snow, where he paused for a second, as if to clear his head, turned and saw the pink neon sign on the low roof of the restaurant.
HOME MADE COOKING. It should be Home Cooking, Wade suddenly realized. Or Home Made Pies, or some damned thing. Stupid. He is stupid. She is stupid. We are all stupid.
9
WADE WANTED ONLY to get rid of the grader, shuck it, cast it away and never drive it again — huge lumbering ridiculous machine. It humiliated him. It was only a thing, but he despised it. It was inept, and slow. It belonged to LaRiviere, and driving it made Wade feel that he belonged to LaRiviere too, as if he were painted the same wimpy shade of blue and had that dumb motto on his back, OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE!
He had an excuse to get off the machine now. Let LaRiviere find somebody else to finish the plowing; Wade had official business to attend to. Thanks to Twombley. The state troopers might turn away Chick and Frankie and their crummy friends from Littleton, but they would have to let him through. Let Wade through, he’s okay. No matter if it was an accidental shooting, it still took place in his jurisdiction, and he was obliged to turn in a report to the Fish and Game Commission, so they would have to let him talk to Twombley, assuming Twombley could talk, and he would have to take statements from Jack and anyone else who happened to witness the shooting. Sonofabitch was probably half drunk or too hung over to handle his gun properly.
But as he climbed back up into the cab of the grader, Wade sighed. No, he would end up spending the whole damned day driving that damned grader. Gordon LaRiviere the well driller was also Gordon LaRiviere the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, who hired and fired the town cop. LaRiviere would tell Wade to make his goddamned investigation on his own time and turn in his report later. For now, until five o’clock this afternoon anyhow, Wade Whitehouse the snow-plow driver belonged to Gordon LaRiviere the town road agent. Only then would he belong to the Board of Selectmen. And at no time would he belong to himself.
It was a quarter to eleven when Wade drew the grader off the road onto LaRiviere’s parking lot. In the far corner near the shop, his own car sat huddled under a blanket of snow, and next to it was parked LaRiviere’s pickup, a 4 X 4 Dodge with a roll bar and running lights like Jack’s and a plow that LaRiviere made Wade repaint light blue after every major snow-storm, covering over the nicks in the paint made by stones and gravel scraped up while plowing.
LaRiviere was crazy. No other word for it, as far as Wade was concerned. He insisted on having everything he owned look simultaneously ready to use and never used. When LaRiviere drove out to inspect a well-drilling job, he paced around the site with his hands on his hips and his upper lip curled as if he had just spotted a pile of cat shit on the toe of his boot. Then he would stop the work and make Wade and Jack or whoever was drilling police the area, restack the pipe, lay the wrenches and tools down side by side in order of size. Only when the trucks, rigs, stock, tools and site had been arranged as if for sale in a showroom would he allow the men to go back to work.
Wade pulled the grader in next to the shop and shut off the motor and climbed stiffly down to the ground. The snow was falling lightly now, tiny hard particles that stung his face. He was cold, and it felt permanent. There was, he said to himself, no rational reason for a man to go on living in a climate like this when he did not have to. And Wade knew he did not have to. True, wherever he lived he would live just as badly, and true, in a perverse way he loved the town, but at least in some places he would be warm. He thought about it often, and usually he understood why he had not left Lawford and then left the state of New Hampshire and even left New England altogether. Sometimes, though, the only reason he had for not moving, even down to Concord, where Lillian had taken Jill, was that he no longer possessed the energy it would require. Perhaps he had never possessed it, even when he was young and freshly married, a high school kid, practically, or when he came back from Korea four years later and had a few bucks and was freshly married a second time. Lillian would have traipsed off with him, he knew, to Florida or Arizona, or maybe to one of those southeastern states like North Carolina. When he was in Korea he met men, Seabees, who told him that he could easily find a high-paying job using the same skills he had used drilling for water in northern New Hampshire drilling for oil instead in Texas or Oklahoma; if he had suggested that to Lillian — and had not kept the idea to himself, as if there were nowhere else on earth a man like him could find a job — she would have said, “How long do I have to pack?” And then everything would have been different. He thought the unaccustomed thing crossly: Oh, Lord, he was a fool! The others were stupid, maybe; but Wade was worse: he was a fool.
LaRiviere’s not knowing about Twombley surprised him. When Wade told him what had occurred up on Parker Mountain, the little he knew, LaRiviere’s normally red face went white, and the big man seemed to shrink inside his clothes.