Jimmy Dame, like Jack Hewitt, was one of Wade’s helpers on the well-drilling crew. Wade was the foreman and had been for a decade. But when they were not drilling wells, they all three tumbled to the same level and were paid accordingly. When the ground froze solid and well drilling was no longer feasible, LaRiviere put them to work first on snowplowing, and when that was done, on maintaining equipment, vehicles, tools and materiel, and when everything LaRiviere owned had been brought up to his fastidious snuff, which is to say, in as-new condition, and the garage and toolboxes and storage bins had been swept and squared as smartly as a marine barracks, LaRiviere promptly laid off Jimmy. A few weeks later, he laid off Jack, and last of all, Wade. This usually occurred late in February, which meant that Wade was out of work no more than six weeks.
It was hard to know what factors determined LaRiviere’s policy of laying off first Jimmy, then Jack, then Wade. Both Jimmy and Wade had worked for LaRiviere since getting out of the service, and Jack had come on only three years ago, so it was not seniority. And it was not age, either, as Jimmy was two years older than Wade, twenty-two years older than Jack. And it was not on the basis of who had the widest range of skills, because Jack could type and Wade could not, and when given the opportunity to do it, Jack liked office work, whereas Wade felt worse than peculiar, he felt downright terrified, when, as inevitably happened on a cold dark snowy day in February, LaRiviere asked him to come into the office, get out the calculator and an architect’s scale and take measurements off a blueprint stretched across the drafting table and help prepare a bid on some spring work for the state. Wade pulled off his jacket and cap and sat on the stool and went to work, listing sizes and lengths of pipe and fitting required, converting those figures into man-hours, calling Capitol Supply in Concord for prices, clicking away on the calculator and every time, without fail, coming up with totals that were so much over or under what simple horse sense told him the job should cost that he felt compelled to start the process all over again. The second time through, his totals once again were so far off, and in the opposite direction of the first set, that Wade could trust nothing — not the drawings and not the architect and engineer who made them, not the calculator, not the supplier and, most of all, not himself. He knew the work, the figures for the materials were all fixed in black and white, and he could read blueprints with ease; but somehow, every time he added up his figures he fumbled, skipping a whole column of figures one time, doubling sums the next. Was he brain-damaged, missing a few crucial cells someplace? Was there something wrong with his eyes, some mysterious affliction? Or was he just made so nervous by LaRiviere sitting a few feet away from him that he could not concentrate on the rows of numbers in front of him? Usually, after a dozen failed attempts to come up with an estimate that approximated his commonsense knowledge of the cost of a job, Wade would start to growl audibly from his stool at the drafting table, a low rumbling canine growl, and LaRiviere would look up from his desk, blink his tiny pale-blue eyes three or four times and tell Wade to go on home for the rest of the winter.
When, at last, Wade had finished plowing the parking lot of Toby’s Inn, he drew the grader alongside the dump truck, cut the engine back and flopped open the canvas door. He was a few feet higher than Jimmy in the truck and swung around in his narrow seat and kicked down at the closed window of the truck several times.
Jimmy rolled the window down and hollered, “What the fuck you want, Wade? What you want?”
Wade felt a wave of petulance roll over him, a warm self-satisfied pout, and he kicked his booted feet, right, then left, into the space of the open window below him.
Jimmy dodged Wade’s feet and yelled, “What the fuck? Knock that shit off, will you?” He started rolling the window up, but Wade stuck one boot into the window far enough to stop it a few inches from the top. Jimmy peered up at Wade, puzzled, angry, a little scared. “Hey, c’mon, will you?”
Wade said nothing. His face was expressionless, but he was suddenly happy, feeling playful almost, unexpectedly released from the anger and grief that had weighed on him all morning. Even his toothache had eased back. Wade somehow knew that this nearly miraculous and strangely innocent feeling of release would last only as long as he could strike dumbly out, refusing to explain his blows, refusing to rationalize them, refusing even to connect them to anger, to particular offense given or taken: so he pulled his foot free of the nearly closed window and swung both of them hard against the glass.
Jimmy said, “Jesus Christ, Wade! You bust this glass, Gordon’ll kick my ass too!” He rapidly rolled the window down again and slid away from the opening and Wade’s swinging feet. From his position halfway across the passenger’s seat, Jimmy reached over to the steering wheel and stretched to place his feet against the clutch and gas pedal, and he managed to shove the truck into low gear and got it to lurch unsteadily away from the grader. But as the truck moved away, Wade simply stepped up onto the roof of the cab, and now he stood atop the vehicle, legs spread, fists at his hips, banging his feet against the roof in a wild awkward dance.
Below him, Jimmy slid into proper place behind the wheel, and shifting it into second gear, got the truck quickly up to about twenty-five miles an hour and headed straight for the snowbank at the far end of the lot. Then he hit the brakes hard and had the pleasure of watching Wade, like some gigantic dark-blue bird of prey, sail past, over the hood of the truck, over the top of the plow and straight into the high pile of hard-packed snow.
As soon as Wade had landed, Jimmy cut the wheel hard to the left, dropped the truck back into first and pulled quickly out of the parking lot onto Route 29 toward town and commenced plowing the right lane in that direction, as nonchalantly and purposefully as he had plowed the other lane coming out.
After half a minute, Wade managed to extricate himself from the snowbank and stood covered with snow and hunched over in the middle of the lot, freezing, with chunks of snow inside his clothes, down his neck and back, up his sleeves and pants legs and inside his boots, gloves and hat.
Jimmy and the truck were out of sight now; the great unwieldy blue grader chortled at the other side of the lot. Wade reached down and picked up a hard-packed chunk of snow the size of his fist, and just as he was about to throw it — at the windshield of the grader, he supposed, although he hadn’t actually decided on a target yet — he heard the sirens.
A few seconds later, two state police cruisers and a long white ambulance came speeding along Route 29 from the interstate, and as they passed Toby’s Inn, Wade whirled with them, and he hurled the snowball, splattering it against the passenger-side window of the cruiser in front. The pair of cruisers and the ambulance kept going, however, as if Wade were not there.
7
FOR YEARS IT WAS A FAMILIAR winter morning sight: people glanced out their living room windows or paused a second with an armload of firewood halfway from the woodshed to the back porch and watched the big ugly machine chug slowly toward them. It tickled and mildly reassured folks to see Wade Whitehouse out plowing the town roads with LaRiviere’s blue grader.