“I figured you’d already heard,” Wade mumbled. “Off the CB,” he said, nodding toward the front office, where LaRiviere kept a small unit on the file cabinet next to Elaine Bernier’s desk. “I thought you knew all about it.”
“I hate that fucking squawk box!” LaRiviere said, glaring up at Wade from his chair. “I just use it to call out. What the fuck am I going to call Jack for, why would I call Jack this morning anyhow?” he snarled.
“They knew about it over to Wickham’s, even.”
“Forget that, for Christ’s sake. What’re you worrying me about that for? We got to get going, I got to get up there. Twombley. Jesus.” He was puffing himself up now, enlarging his abnormally large body, for action, movement, control. His hair bristled like an angry dog’s, and he rose from his chair and grabbed his blue down parka off the hook behind the door.
“C’mon, you drive; we’ll take my truck. Put that fucking cigarette out, will you?” he said to Wade. He pushed past him and headed out the door.
Wade followed, flipping the key to the grader onto Elaine’s desk. Outside, as they crossed the parking lot, he tossed his cigarette into a snowbank.
LaRiviere saw him and said, “Not there, for Christ’s sake.”
“Where, then?” Wade reached down and retrieved the still smoldering butt and held it out to LaRiviere as if offering it to him.
“Oh, Christ, Wade, how the hell do I know? Go inside, go use the fucking ashtray, but hurry the fuck up, I’m in a hurry. Jesus,” he said, and he started trotting toward the pickup.
Wade ducked back into the office, rubbed the cigarette out in the large ashtray on the counter, directly under the No Smoking sign, and smiled uneasily at Elaine, who did not smile back. Elaine Bernier disliked Wade because she knew Gordon LaRiviere did not like Wade but needed him and thus was not free, as she was, to show his dislike. She considered her scowls and snide remarks a vital part of her job.
In the truck, Wade drove, while LaRiviere, grim and silent beside him, continued to puff himself up, tightening the last few creases in his broad flat face, swelling his chest and arms. Wade reached for the CB receiver and flicked it to the police channel as they sped north past Wickham’s and passed out of town. They heard static and gibberish for a few seconds, then the gravelly voice of the dispatcher from Littleton telling car 12 to stay where it was, situation under control, ambulance already arrived.
“Fuck,” LaRiviere said. “Turn it off.”
Wade obeyed.
“All you heard was there was some kinda accident up there, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all you heard?”
“Well, no,” Wade said. “Twombley was shot. I heard that. Not Jack. He’s okay.”
“Fuck.”
“No, Jack’s okay. I assume.”
“Fuck. You don’t know how bad or anything?”
“You mean Twombley.”
“Yes, Wade, I mean Twombley.”
“No.” Wade switched on the wipers. “I don’t know how bad.” The snow was spitting at them, but the sky had lightened to a creamy gray color. It would not last much longer.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“He’s probably okay. He more than likely just shot himself in the foot or something. That’s what usually happens.”
“I should have sent you out with him instead of Jack.”
Wade was surprised. He glanced at LaRiviere, who was chewing his thumbnail. “Yeah, I wish you had,” Wade said. “I’d rather be deer hunting instead of riding around freezing my ass on that fucking grader.” He reached over and opened the ashtray in front of LaRiviere, who promptly deposited a sliver of thumbnail and went to work on the other one. Wade slid the ashtray closed.
“You ain’t the hunter Jack is. And he can’t drive the grader worth shit.”
“Like hell,” Wade said, although he knew LaRiviere was right on both counts. Jack hated the grader even more than Wade did and drove it with a careless anger that twice had got the thing turned onto its side in a ditch. And while Jack had not failed to kill a deer the opening day of every season since he was twelve, Wade had not taken a single shot at a deer in over a decade. For the last four years he had not bothered even to try. Not since Lillian and he split up the second time. Lots of things had gone out of him after that, among them the cheerful stubbornness that a man needed to keep on trudging into the woods with a gun year after year, despite the pattern of frustration and failure, in search of a flash of fur, a flag of a tail switching through the trees. Wade always made too much noise when he walked, as if warning the animals, a heavy-footed man with a body made more for carrying than for stalking, and he always figured the movement of animals wrongly, figuring them to move left instead of right, uphill instead of down, away instead of near: he would see the deer, look to where he thought it was going, and it would be gone. Then he would fire his gun at a stump four or five times, just to fire the damned thing, and scare every deer in hearing range deeper into hiding.
They passed the school, and Wade said, “You know that guy Mel Gordon, Twombley’s son-in-law?”
“Yeah.”
“Fucker almost ran me over this morning. Passed a stopped school bus.”
“Big deal.”
“I’d say so. I plan to nail the bastard.”
LaRiviere shifted in his seat and studied Wade’s profile for a second, then went back to working on his thumbnail. “Forget Mel Gordon,” he said, reaching forward to open the ashtray. He slipped the sliver of fingernail in and closed it again, patting it once afterwards as if with approval.
“Like hell. I was standing there in front of the school, holding up traffic to let the buses in, you know, like I do, with kids crossing the road there and all, and this sonofabitch in his BMW gets impatient and cuts around the line and tear-asses right at me and then blows by like I’m not even there. Could’ve been a little kid crossing right then, for all he knew. Sonofabitch oughta lose his fucking license for something like that.”
“So what are you gonna do, give him a lecture?”
“Shit, no. Summons him. Summons the bastard for a moving violation. I’d sure as hell call that a moving violation, wouldn’t you?”
LaRiviere didn’t answer. They had turned off Route 29 onto Parker Mountain Road, which was still unplowed, and were following in the tracks left by the half-dozen or so vehicles that had preceded them. Wade threw the truck into four-wheel drive, and the truck adhered to the rutted surface of the road as if magnetized by it. Drooping snow-covered pine trees whipped past. The remnants of ancient stone walls smoothed and softened by the snow drifted alongside the truck like loaves of new bread as it wound its way toward Saddleback Ridge, then out along the ridge and back and forth along the switchbacking road to the top of the mountain itself.
Both men were silent now, deep in their thoughts. Wade was replaying Mel Gordon’s offense against his dignity and the law, but who knew what LaRiviere was thinking? When he is not fussing the world into neat little piles and squares and rows, you cannot know what is going through his mind. He is a man who plots and schemes, a secretive man with a bluff exterior who plans his moves way ahead of time and rarely makes one that he has not already made a hundred times in his imagination. He thinks of life more or less as a strict and, for the winners, highly rewarding contest. In LaRiviere’s world, you win and win big, or you lose and lose everything. Survival, mere survival, does not exist for him, except as a dismal loss, which is one of the several reasons he despised Wade. As far as LaRiviere was concerned, Wade merely survived, which meant that his life had no purpose other than to facilitate LaRiviere’s. Either you are able to use people or they use you. Nothing in between. People who think they are in between and believe they are safe there are laughable. Like Wade.