“You’re talking about a goddamned traffic ticket, aren’t you? From yesterday.”
“Yup.”
“From when I passed you at the school, where you had decided to hold up traffic for a goddamn half hour while you dreamed of becoming a traffic cop or something.” Gordon had stepped back now and was smiling broadly with amused disbelief. A surly pelt of black chest hairs filled in the V of chest exposed by his robe, and the pelt grew almost to his throat. He is the kind of man who has shaved twice a day since early adolescence and thinks all men do. “You going to advise me of my rights, Officer Whitehouse?”
“Don’t give me a hard time, Mr. Gordon. Just take the damn ticket and pay the fine by mail, or go to local court next month and fight it, I don’t care. I’m just—”
“Doing your fucking job. I know. I watch television too.”
“Yes. Doing my job. Here’s your ticket,” he said, and he tore it off the pad and handed the sheet to Gordon.
“You are something. You are really something.”
“Yeah. Well, so are you, Mr. Gordon. Something.” He smiled. “And your kids? They’re rude to strangers,” he added, tossing the boys a hard look, as if they were bugs.
“Hey!” Gordon said. “You might insult my wife, too, while you’re at it.” He took a step toward Wade. “Why the hell not? After all, you probably know all about her father’s accident. Must be something about that you can make a crack on, if you really give it some thought. Why not, Whitehouse? Why not touch all the bases while you’re here?” He smiled meanly.
“Yeah, well, I know about her father. I’m sorry about that.”
Gordon held the ticket out in front of him with one hand and folded it neatly in half and tucked it into Wade’s shirt pocket. He was no longer smiling. “You get the hell out of my house now, asshole. And know this — you are going to be a lucky asshole if I haven’t got you fired before the day is out.” He yanked open the door, turned Wade toward it and said, “I can put your country ass out of work with one phone call, Whitehouse, and I’m just pissed enough to do it now.” He placed a hand against Wade’s stiffened shoulder and moved the man through the doorway to the porch, then slammed the door shut behind him.
For a few seconds, Wade stood out there on the open porch, facing across the white ice-covered lake toward the black line of trees and hills beyond. He patted his shirt pocket, where the folded ticket seemed to give off heat, and then zipped his jacket against the steady breeze that blew across the lake. His mind was filled with the image of the blond woman on the balcony above him, her beautifully fatigued face, her tall slender form as she gazed down and with her eyes asked him to come up the stairs and save her.
11
WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT — which, while driving back to town from Lake Agaway, he did — Wade realized that there was no one in town he could go to for advice concerning the hiring of an attorney. He would never again use the last lawyer he had hired, the guy who got him stuck like this in the first place. That had been a shot in the dark, a lawyer from the Littleton yellow pages, and he had obviously missed. Now, however, Wade knew what he was doing, yes-by-God, and he needed an attorney who would reflect that knowledge.
There were a few people in Lawford who could recommend someone to him — Alma Pittman, Chub Merritt, Gordon LaRiviere — but Wade did not particularly want anyone in town to know what he was up to. Except for Rolfe, who was too long too far out of town and state and could not help him find a lawyer but might advise him generally; and there was Margie, of course, who was different from everyone else in town, because she alone happened to love him — or if she did not love him exactly, she could be brought to love him, he believed, by kindnesses returned, something he had up to now been reluctant to provide.
It was an out-of-balance affair, in which one party, Margie, was a finer human being than the other. But both parties knew it and accepted it, so that the worst thing that could happen, Wade believed, was that Margie someday would find a man who returned her kindnesses and she would leave Wade for such a man. But Wade expected that he would not feel much worse about things then than he did now. Which was possibly why he refused to move in closer to Margie, why he kept his gaze slightly averted at all times, even while making love to her. It did not keep her a stranger, exactly, but it kept her from becoming a wife.
Back in town now, Wade drove past LaRiviere’s, and as he passed he remembered drilling a well once for a man who was a Concord attorney, a guy named J. Battle Hand, whom neither Wade nor LaRiviere himself had ever actually met, but from what he could see, the man was successfuclass="underline" he had bought a large chunk of very expensive land down near Catamount and had built a Swiss-style chalet on the southern slope of a huge hill where there was a ski resort going up on the backside of the hill — condos, restaurants, shops, bars, saunas, a Ramada Inn, a half-dozen different ski slopes and tows: the works. And this guy, J. Battle Hand, owned the undeveloped half of the hill and evidently had no plans to do anything with it but plunk his own vacation home down in the middle of it, setting it in a stand of thick white birches with a lovely long view of the hills of central New Hampshire, only a mile and a quarter from where people drove whole days from Massachusetts and points south to get to.
By Wade’s and Lawford’s standards, and even by the standards of the much larger town of Catamount, the house was palatial. LaRiviere’s bid on the well had come in slightly high, but he had been hired anyhow, probably because of his reputation for being able to set up and drill on slopes that discouraged most flatland well drillers. LaRiviere could drive out to a hilly site when they got ready to set up the rig and in seconds could find the one piece of ground where the rig could be backed into place and the drill sent into the ground vertically. It was uncanny, at least to Wade, who inevitably had picked someplace else to drill. LaRiviere would survey the ground with a quick gaze, note Wade’s spot, pick another, then humiliate Wade by first having Jack Hewitt or Jimmy Dame park the rig where Wade had suggested. Every time, no matter how they jacked it, the rig ended up tilted at an angle that could not be corrected by the drill. Then LaRiviere would have Jack bring the truck down a few yards and to the left a ways, where a batch of chokecherry bushes had obscured the surface of the ground, and sure enough, the rig sat level as a cake in an oven, and the drill bit, lowered into place, aimed straight down to the center of the earth.
Though he had never met the man, Wade remembered J. Battle Hand clearly, mainly because of his name, which struck him as a lawyer-like name, the name of a man who fought like a tiger for his clients, who believed in justice and in absolute right and absolute wrong and would not defend a person unless he first believed in that person’s innocence and in the righteousness of his cause. It was clear, too, that he had become wealthy this way. J. Battle Hand was precisely the kind of attorney Wade needed for bringing a custody suit against his ex-wife. He needed a good rich man. Or, better, a rich good man.
He pulled in at Wickham’s, looked around for Margie and discovered what he had forgotten — she had worked yesterday, the first day of hunting season, and had today off. Nick told him that she had phoned in a message for Wade to call her if he came in. Half the booths and tables were filled with deer hunters, most of them local. These were not the fanatics and out-of-towners who had crowded the place yesterday morning. In one day the intensity of the hunt had been sufficiently diluted that here, along the sidelines, most of the observers and participants were able to affect little more than passive involvement with the killing still going on in the woods. It was not all that different from any other Saturday morning at Wickham’s. Two of the pickups parked in front had dead deer in the back, but they looked more like cargo than trophy. The town seemed to have settled into a seasonal rhythm, the deer-hunting season, which was as natural and unconscious an aspect of life as winter or spring: one simply went out and acted “natural,” and in that way one was able to behave appropriately too. Easy.