Affliction Read Free Page B

BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE!
    LaRiviere’s story, too, will get told in due time, but at this particular moment, still early on Halloween Eve, let us picture six teenagers, four boys and two girls, out in the field behind LaRiviere’s blue barn—his combination office, workshop, garage and warehouse—working in darkness in LaRiviere’s garden, a meticulously laid out and maintained plot of earth half covered with black plastic and mulch for the winter, the other half, with rattling dry cornstalks and dead tomato plants and sprawling pumpkin vines, not yet turned over. The teenagers guzzle king-sized beers and laugh through harsh whispers as they strip the few remaining vines of the few remaining pumpkins. I know this because I myself did it, not to Gordon LaRiviere’s pumpkin patch but to someone else’s. And I did it because my older brother Wade did it, and he, too, had merely followed the example of an older brother, two of them.
    Soon the teenagers are up and running, awkwardly, clutching beer cans and pumpkins, around the far side of LaRiviere’s house—impossible to call it a trailer or mobile home, forit is set on a permanent foundation and has shutters, porch, breezeway, chimney attached—racing toward the road out front, then down the road a ways to where a boy waits in a ten-year-old Chevy with dual exhausts gurgling.
    The thieves pile into the car with their pumpkins, hard goofy laughter now drifting back toward LaRiviere’s on the cold night air, and the kid driving pops the clutch and spins off the gravel shoulder onto the road, his tires burning rubber as they hit the pavement, the car fishtailing down the road toward the town hall, hurtling past it, the kids cackling out the windows and giving the finger to a large group of adults with children in costumes gathering outside the town hall.
    Most of the adults have stopped moving and talking and stare bitterly at the old Chevrolet sedan as it blasts past. In seconds, the car has rounded the slow turn on the far side of town and is out of sight. The people clustering outside the town hall hesitate a second, as if waiting to hear a crash, then resume what they were doing.
    Â 
    A short ways north of the town hall and the Common and the three churches facing it—First Congregational, First Baptist and Methodist—and out along Route 29 beyond Alma Pittman’s house, from whose darkened door Pearl Diehler and her children had long since departed, there were a few straggling houses with porch lights still on for the last of the trick-or-treaters, kids whose parents had sat around the kitchen table drinking and arguing too long to drive them into town in time to join the others. This late they joined only a battalion of older greedier kids who would not stop until no one any longer answered the door, when they would commence their more serious work of the evening, what they had come out to accomplish in the first place: the gleeful destruction of private property. They intended to cut clotheslines, break windows, slash tires, open outdoor spigots so the wells would run dry and the pumps burn out.
    A short ways beyond the settlement one comes to Merritt’s Shell Station—a cinder-block bunker, closed, dark, with car parts scattered around the building like rubble after a terrorist’s attack. On this night, a dim light from a rear window indicated that someone was still in the office—not Merritt, of course, who, as always, had gone home promptly at six andtonight was down at the town hall, attending the annual Halloween party in his official capacity as one of the selectmen. More likely it was Merritt’s mechanic, Chick Ward, leafing slowly, like a monk studying scripture, through a pornographic magazine from Sweden that normally he keeps hidden under the carpeting of the trunk of his car, a purple Trans Am that Merritt lets him work on in the garage after hours. Tonight he furrowed his narrow