“Yeah.”
“You know much about it? Sounded a little… unlikely to me.”
“How’s that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Big-time union official out hunting with his guide, and somehow he shoots himself. You always wonder a little about these stories. Who was the guide? Local man, I suppose.”
“Yeah. Kid named Jack Hewitt. Used to be a ballplayer, got drafted by the Red Sox a few years back, then ruined his arm. You might’ve read about him in the papers. Nice kid. It was an accident, though. No doubt about it. Kid like Jack wouldn’t have any reason to kill a guy like Twombley anyhow.”
“Money,” the lawyer said, smiling. “There’s always money.”
“Yeah. Money. Yeah, there’s always that. But it’s hard to imagine,” Wade said.
“Yes, well, speaking of which,” the lawyer said, “my point in asking about your job is, can you manage the costs of a custody suit? Because you might be better off legally, as well as financially, just to go for the…”
“I know, I know,” Wade said, standing up and pulling on his coat. “I guess… I guess the custody suit business is just my way of showing how pissed off I am at my ex-wife. I’m not as dumb as I probably look. I’ll do whatever you recommend,” he said. “And it looks like you’re recommending me to forget the whole goddamned custody business.”
He made for the door, opened it and over his shoulder said to the lawyer, “I’ll send you the divorce decree on Monday. And the five hundred.”
The lawyer looked impassively at him and said nothing.
Wade walked through the outer office, then stopped in the doorway and peered back for a second and watched the lawyer’s chair scoot out the door opposite him, as if rushing him off to another meeting. The lawyer’s swift and purposeful mobility in his chair frightened Wade somehow. He tried to smile at the receptionist or secretary or whatever she was, but she was busily typing; she wore a headset and showed no sign of knowing Wade was even in the room. He closed the door carefully and moved on.
At the end of the hall, he almost bumped into two girls coming out of the women’s health center. They were giggling teenagers, kids, only a few years older than Jill, in scarlet lipstick and powder-blue eye shadow. They wore jeans, half-unbuttoned blouses and quilted down vests.
They probably just got fitted for diaphragms, Wade thought, and it was an embarrassing thought for him, although he did not know why and did not go any further with it than that. He restrained himself from judging the girls, though for a second he wanted to scold them, and he merely said, “‘Scuse me,” and stood back a second and watched them leave, switching their behinds, heads held high, hands patting their healthy hair in anticipation of the cold wind outside. As he got into his car, he thought, Those girls probably just had abortions! Jesus H. Christ. What a world.
12
WADE DROVE THE LENGTH of Main Street, halfway to the prison north of Concord, then turned around and drove all the way back. Specks of snow were coming down. It was two forty-five, and Wade felt himself drifting swiftly toward a familiar form of hysteria: a tangible panic. His particular desire, to conduct a successful custody suit against Lillian, now looked like a naive delusion, and his more general and long-lived desire, to be a good father, was starting to feel like a simpleminded obsession. There was a waxing and waning connection between the two desires, he knew, a hydraulic connection, so that when one was strong, the other weakened. When both weakened, however, as now, Wade dropped through the floor of depression into panic.
To fight off the panic, he decided that he wanted to see Jill. What the hell, it was a Saturday afternoon, he was coincidentally in Concord, and he needed to explain some things to the child. Why not call up and arrange to spend the rest of the afternoon with her? He also hoped that, after the fiasco at the Halloween party, she would be able to reassure him somewhat. Surely, his company was not so bad, so boring, that she could not enjoy herself with him. It was more or less a communication problem. They had missed each other’s signals the other night; that was all. He could apologize, and she could apologize, and everything would be swell.
Besides, it was his right, goddammit, especially after Lillian and her husband had driven up to Lawford Thursday night and taken her away from him. When you take a man’s child from him, you take much more than the child, so that the man tends to forget about regaining the child and instead focuses on regaining the other — self-respect, pride, sense of autonomy, that sort of thing. The child becomes emblematic. This was happening to Wade, of course; and he dimly perceived it. But he was powerless to stop it.
He called from a phone booth in the parking lot of the K mart in the shopping mall east of Main Street. The snow was coming down harder now and might amount to something, he observed, thinking warily of the drive home. The afternoon sky had darkened and lowered, and the day seemed to be easing into evening already. Shoppers, mostly women and children, occasionally a man, hurried back and forth between their cars and the store.
He let the phone ring an even dozen times before giving up. Hell, it’s barely three, he thought: too early to head back to Lawford and see Margie, but still early enough to wait around awhile and then take Jill out for supper at a Pizza Hut. She would like that. Meanwhile, he decided, he would go someplace for a beer, maybe try one of those fancy new bars in the renovated old warehouses behind the Eagle Hotel he had heard about, where there were supposed to be lots of single men and women hanging out, swingers or yuppies or whatever the hell they call them these days. He would not mind a look at that. Then he would try to call Jill again.
He parked on North Main Street in front of the hotel and, passing under phony gas lanterns, strolled through the bricked-over alley to The Stone Warehouse in back, walked in without hesitation or a preliminary look around the place — as if, though not exactly a regular, he came here frequently — and, using tunnel vision, zeroed in on the bar. He ordered a draft from a tall good-looking youth with slicked-back hair and then turned, glass in hand, and slowly perused the place.
The room was large, with mostly empty booths and rough tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Large potted ferns, ornate brass coatracks and spittoons cluttered the aisles, and on the walls old-fashioned farm tools had been hung, scythes and sickles, hay rakes, even horse collars, and elaborately framed pictures of New England couples dead a hundred years, dour and disapproving. Who would have thought junk like that could look good? But it did.
The place smelled of raw wood, beer and roasted peanuts, a downright pleasant smell, he thought. Not like Toby’s Inn. Wade looked down the bar, where a pair of young large-bellied men were watching the Celtics on TV and munching peanuts, and then he noticed that the floor by the bar was covered with peanut shells. A waitress approached the bar, and the shells crackled under her feet like insects.
Next to him on his right, three young women were seated and talking intently, smoking cigarettes with a kind of fury and every few seconds sipping in unison at their large beige drinks. Wade studied them, slyly, he thought, and tried to overhear their conversation, which he soon discovered concerned a man whom one or all three of them worked for. They were in their early thirties, he guessed. Two of the women wore jeans and plaid flannel shirts and cowboy boots; the third also wore jeans, but with tennis shoes and a washed-out yellow tee shirt with GANJA UNIVERSITY printed across the front. When Wade saw that she was not wearing a bra, he tried not to look at her anymore. She was a long-haired blond; the other two were brunettes and had short hair. Wade thought that maybe those two were sisters.