I had heard from Wade a half-dozen times that fall, and I had seen him twice; both times he had driven down suddenly on a Saturday night. He had stood around in my kitchen drinking beer, rambling on about Lillian and Jill and LaRiviere — his problems — then had fallen like a tree onto my couch, only to return to Lawford the next morning after breakfast. I was sure, as we talked about Twombley, that I knew Wade’s whole story by now, the way you do when you have heard a drunk man’s story, even your drunken brother’s — perhaps especially your drunken brother’s — and did not require any new chapters.
“Wade,” I said, “it’s very late. Not for you, maybe, but we have different habits, you and I. You’re at Toby’s, and I’m in bed reading.”
“No, no, no. Not tonight. I’m at home tonight, Rolfe. I’m not reading, maybe, but in fact I’m in bed too. Anyhow, I’m calling because I need you to listen. You’re supposed to be such a smart guy, Rolfe. I’ve got a theory about this guy Twombley, and I need you to check me out on it.” He was excited, more than usual, and that alarmed me, although I was not sure why, so I did not cut him off. I half listened to what he called his theory, which struck me as slightly crackbrained, the alcohol talking. It was a theory unsupported by evidence and full of unlikely motives and connections. It also did not take into account — since Wade had not seen the Boston news, and the New Hampshire stations had not mentioned the shooting at all (it being only one of so many hunting accidents that day) — the fact that Evan Twombley had been scheduled to testify before a congressional subcommittee that was investigating links between organized crime in New England and the construction industry. I remembered that much from the news and had my own theory.
I mentioned the investigation to him anyhow, and he said, “No shit,” and went on as if I had offered nothing more than Twombley’s middle name. For Wade, there was no connection, because he seemed to want badly to believe that his “best friend” had shot Evan Twombley — accidentally, of course— and was hiding the fact, which, he insisted, was what worried him. “What’ll happen is, it’ll come out that the bastard didn’t shoot himself, Jack shot him. And then lied about it. And the kid’ll get hung for it, Rolfe. They hang you up here for murder, you know.”
“He won’t hang if it was accidental,” I said. “But you do think Jack Hewitt shot him, eh? Why?”
“Why do I think it, or why did he shoot him?”
“Both.”
“Well, it was an accident,” he said. “Naturally. But who knows how it happened? It happens all the time, though. You play with guns, somebody’s going to get shot. Eventually. But as to why I myself think Jack did it. That’s not so easy to say. It’s like it’s the only way I can see it happening. The only way I can imagine it. I think about Twombley getting shot, and all I see is Jack shooting him.”
“So where’s this theory of yours?”
He admitted that it was not so much a theory as a hunch. I could tell that I was disappointing him. Again.
I apologized for sounding so skeptical and explained that it seemed likely to me that if Twombley’s death was not in fact self-inflicted, then he surely was killed by someone other than the local boy Jack Hewitt, who probably never even saw it happen anyhow. “They were out deer hunting, right? In the woods. Jack probably heard the gun go off, then came back and found Twombley’s body and concluded the obvious, that the man had shot himself. And if he did not shoot himself, then whoever did it took care to use Twombley’s own gun. Just in case.”
Yes, yes, Wade agreed, grumpily, and then he started to drift a bit, and soon he was recounting another small humiliation at the hands of his ex-wife. This story, too, I had heard before, or a close version of it, but now, to my surprise, I was listening as if it were fresh and new to me. It was his account of Halloween and his quarrel with his daughter Jill, and I was fascinated by it. There was some odd connection in my mind between the two stories, between his version of Twombley’s death and his version of Lillian’s driving up to Lawford and removing Jill from his care. I did not then know how powerful the connection was, of course, but it was there, to be sure, just below the surface of the narrative, and I felt its presence strongly and responded to it, as if it had the power of logic.
I closed my history of mankind and sat up straight in bed and listened closely to Wade, while he slowly told of his adventures of the night before, presented them with a sad mournful slightly puzzled voice, his sentences ending pathetically with phrases like “You know?” and “I guess.”
And then, finally, he closed the conversation — it was more monologue than conversation — by telling me how tired he was, just exhausted, beat. “I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days, Rolfe,” he said. “And some night I’m going to bite back. I swear it.”
I said, “Haven’t you already done a bit of that?”
“No. No, I haven’t. Not really. I’ve growled a little, but I haven’t bit.”
We said good night then and hung up. I tried to resume reading but could not, and when I tried to sleep, I could not do that, either. I lay awake for hours, it seemed, with visions of whirling suddenly in the snow, aiming down the barrel of a gun, firing.
But let us return to the morning Twombley died, to Lawford, twelve or fifteen hours earlier. After Wade and Jack rode down from Parker Mountain together in Jack’s truck, Jack dropped Wade off at LaRiviere’s and, as LaRiviere had suggested, went home, while for the rest of the day Wade drove the blue grader. By the time he parked it back at LaRiviere’s garage, it was late afternoon and dark, and the temperature was falling toward zero again.
He scraped his windshield and then, while he waited for his car to warm up, decided that it would be best for everyone, especially for Wade himself, if he drove straight home, if he cleaned up his trailer, for God’s sake, and cooked a simple supper and went to bed sober and alone. He was right: his mood and his afflicted view of the events of the day promised nothing but trouble for anyone who happened to join him at bar, table or bed.
Then, as if to verify the wisdom of his decision, his tooth flared up again. Over the afternoon, it had gradually turned into a throbbing knot of pain below his right ear. As usual, the pain got worse and spread quickly across his face, until its center was as large and as definable a shape as a man’s hand, with the heel and thumb of the hand running along his jawbone to his chin, the little finger tucked up behind his ear, the palm smack against his cheek and the other three fingers pressing against the bony ridge that encircled his right eye. The pain was yellow, it seemed to him, neither hot nor cold, and lay in a thin zone between his outer flesh and the bone, radiating woe in both directions.
He groaned aloud all the way home.
The place looked even worse to him now than it had when he left that morning — a midden heap, as if a motorcycle gang had been camped here all fall.
He shucked his coat and set to work, bagging all the trash and garbage, old newspapers, TV Guides, beer cans and bottles, food containers, empty cigarette packs, crusts of bread, tin cans, apple cores and milk cartons. He moved all the caked and crusted dishes, pots and pans in the general direction of the kitchen sink and all the dirty clothes to the hamper in the bathroom, where he paused for a second, shuddered at the sight, ran the faucets briefly and dumped a layer of Comet into the tub, toilet and lavatory, to be scrubbed later, after he finished cleaning the kitchen.
In his shirtsleeves, he lugged two large green plastic bags outside and shoved them into the barrel at the end of the driveway. Un-fucking-believable, that a grown man could let things get this bad! The cold air made the toothache shriek, so he raced back inside, where it lapsed swiftly back to a steady low-key whine, which distressed him, but at least the pain was steady and he could make mental adjustments to it that did not have to be undone and remade every fifteen or twenty seconds.