As it turned out, however, he never got around to buying a fishing rod. And he had not used the beach once in two years, partly because he was so busy in the summer months, frequently drilling wells for LaRiviere out of town and not getting home till after dark, but also because, except for maybe six short weeks in July and August, the lake was too cold to swim in comfortably. Then came his first winter at the trailer park, and with that it became obvious that the place at the end of the row of trailers out on the point was in fact the worst location in the park. It was the place most exposed to the cold winds that swept off Parker Mountain and, picking up speed as they crossed the lake, banged like hammers against the tin sides of the unprotected trailer before swooping on toward the White Mountains beyond. It took two winters before Wade decided that LaRiviere probably had known when he sold him the trailer that it was the least desirable of the fourteen trailers in the park and that if Wade had not eagerly, even gratefully, bought it for $22,000, LaRiviere would have been forced to sell it for much less.
Ah, what a terrible year that was — the year of the second divorce, the year of losing the house to Lillian, the months of living in the dingy apartment over Golden’s and the day he bought the damned trailer from LaRiviere. Then, six months later, came Lillian’s decision to move down to Concord with Jill in tow, and her marriage to Horner. It is a wonder he survived at all.
He rose from his tangled sheets and blankets like a porpoise surfacing, shocked by the fact of wakefulness itself, and then by cold air, by the sight of his cluttered room, by the smell of stale beer and cigarette butts and his own night breath, by the sound of Kenny Rogers croaking from the clock radio on the blue plastic milk carrier next to the bed — so that the dream he had been dreaming disappeared almost instantly, like the memory of an earlier, less evolved and less vivid life spent drifting between wedges of shadow and beams of pale-green light.
He checked the time, ran his tongue across mossy teeth, reached for a cigarette and lit it and lay in bed for a few moments, hands under his head, smoking and running a fragmentary narrative of the end of last night in front of his eyes. Sitting in the dark by the window in his office at the town hall. Driving out to Toby’s Inn in his car. Slumping silently in a booth with Jack Hewitt and his girlfriend, Hettie Rodgers, and three or four other men and women, and later, his toothache anesthetized by alcohol, yakking and laughing in a loud hearty voice with one or two kids he knew only vaguely. Then drinking at the bar alone, and at last, just before the sudden blackness at the end of the loop, standing in the parking lot, examining his pale-green car as if it were a stranger’s, finding it unaccountably ugly. Then nothing.
But no memories — and no visible signs — of argument, he thought with relief. An advertisement for a Chevrolet dealer in Concord came on, and he snapped off the radio. He touched his face with the fingertips of his right hand, felt no pain and no swelling in his hands or above the eyes or around the mouth, and plucked his cigarette from his lips and tapped the ash into an empty Budweiser bottle next to the radio. Across from the bed was a plastic-and-aluminum picnic chair — with his clothes laid neatly over the back and arms, he noted. No torn or bloody shirt — he could tell that much from bed. He refolded his arms and slid his hands under his head and spread out his legs, and for a moment Wade thoroughly enjoyed his nakedness under the rumpled sheet and blanket. His tooth ached only a little, a hum, and he did not once think of his daughter or of his ex-wife.
It was not until after he had showered and shaved and was standing in his faded blue terry-cloth robe at the kitchen counter, stirring a cup of instant coffee, that the unique and vaguely familiar quality of the silence that surrounded the clink of his spoon against the coffee cup made him realize that it was snowing outside. He glanced at the window behind the sink, where a week’s dirty dishes and pans were stacked, and saw the haze of snow, for it was falling heavily now, like a gauze curtain, and he could make out no more than the rough outline of Saddleback Ridge and Parker Mountain.
He looked at his watch — six-forty. “Shit,” he said aloud, and he walked quickly to the frayed plaid couch, where he sighed, sat down and picked the telephone off a tipped pile of newspapers on the end table and dialed a number.
After a few seconds, he began to speak into the receiver. “Lugene? This’s Wade. How you doing?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, said, “Hey, Lugene, look, I was wondering, with the snow and all, you got school today?”
He listened, lit a cigarette from a pack on the crowded coffee table and said, “How the hell do I know? You’re the principal, damn it. You’re the one who’s supposed to know how much it’s going to snow, not me. All I’m supposed to do is direct traffic from seven-thirty to eight-thirty, for Christ’s sake.”
He listened again. “Yeah, okay, I’m sorry, Lugene. I’m running late,” he said, “and I only just now saw it was snowing, that’s all. My whole day is fucked. I was just hoping you’d have called school off. You know? Because I got to plow all day, and if I don’t get over to LaRiviere’s early enough, I get stuck with the grader. Whyn’t you check the weather bureau? Maybe you should cancel school.”
Wade paused a second. “Fuck. You check the weather bureau?”
Lugene agreed to call the weather bureau, but no matter what the prediction, he said, there would certainly be school today. He might decide to send the children home at noon, but clearly not enough snow had fallen or would fall in the next hour to keep the buses from getting safely into town. Then he asked Wade if he talked to everyone that way.
“Okay,” Wade said, ignoring the question. “I’ll be over in a bit.”
He hung up the phone and barreled down the narrow hallway to his bedroom. He would not be drilling wells for LaRiviere today; he would be plowing snow for him. He dressed hurriedly in work clothes — long underwear, blue-and-black-plaid flannel shirt, green twill pants, heavy wool socks and insulated rubber boots with tan leather tops.
At the door, Wade grabbed his dark-blue trooper’s coat and cap off the hook, pulled the cap halfway over his ears and shrugged his way into the coat. He glanced at the thermostat on the wall and set it back ten degrees, to fifty-five, then stood briefly at the door and looked across the room with an empty expression on his face, as if running down a daily checklist.
Let us stop for a moment, while he stands by the door, and look at Wade up close. It is time for that. Examined from a certain angle, Wade’s face is a classic example of an ancient type of Northern European face. It is the broad high-cheekboned heavy-browed durable face that first appeared in this form twenty to thirty thousand years ago between ice ages in the marshes along the southern shores of the Baltic, among tribes of hunters and gatherers moving toward the western sea, driven from fertile estuarial homelands by a taller fairer fiercer people who possessed agrarian skills and tools, clever weapons and principles of social organization that allowed them to conquer and enslave others.
He would hate to hear me say this, but I am describing my own face as much as his. This is what we Whitehouse men and women (most of us, anyhow) look like. We wear a face shaped by thousands of years of peering into firelight, into cold mists rising off salt marshes, into deep waters where huge sturgeon cruise slowly past; a face tightened, crinkled and lined from having pursed thin lips thoughtfully for millennia over animal tracks and droppings, over individual wild grains counted into a wicker basket one by one, over small stone figures of women with large breasts and wide hips and bellies. And beyond these ancient habits of expression, there is something deeper and more ancient still, at least in Wade’s face. There is an intimacy and a tenderness, a melancholic vulnerability about his dark-brown eyes, especially in the way the heavy slightly protruding brow protects the delicacy of the eyes and allows them to stay wide open, alert to danger even in bright sunlight. The narrow mouth, tightened over large yellowed teeth, gives the impression of intelligence and sensitivity. It is not a noble face, not especially refined, either, but a passionate face, and thoughtful.