Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  “Alone,” she interrupts.

  “Yeah, alone. But that’s the way he is. He likes it that way. But he got out, that’s the point, and Eddie got out too. Eddie made a killing too. Ave Boone in his boat on the Keys, and Eddie wheeling and dealing in central Florida, while I sit up here in the snow and ice and darkness and fix people’s oil burners and wonder how the fuck I can afford a pair of ice skates for my kid for Christmas.”

  “But we have the kids, the house …” she says.

  He doesn’t hear her. “One time when we were kids, Ave came over to my house, and he had this advertisement he’d cut out of some fancy New York magazine he’d seen in the dentist’s office, and we were sitting around in my bedroom talking about what we were going to do after school or something, we were maybe seniors then. And he pulled this ad out of his wallet and unfolded it and handed it to me. It was a whiskey ad, and there was this handsome guy wearing his trousers rolled up to his knees and no shirt on, walking ashore on some tropical island. And he’s got this case of Haig & Haig on his shoulder and a dinghy on the shore behind him and a nice forty-foot catamaran sitting out in the bay. Eddie was out of school by then and was working at Thom McAn’s on Main Street selling shoes, but he was already figuring out what he was going to do in Florida a few years later, and I was already thinking about maybe joining the air force so I wouldn’t get drafted because I didn’t have anything like Eddie’s epilepsy to keep me out or Ave’s belief that he could con the draft board into a four-F, because neither of us particularly wanted to go to Vietnam and get fucking shot. Anyhow, Ave shows me this clipping like it’s a letter from Hugh Hefner asking him to spend a week with the Playmate of the Month or something, and he says to me, ‘There. That’s me,’ he says.” Bob is silent for a few seconds. Then he sighs. “You wanta know what I said? I’ll tell you. I said, ‘That’s me too.’ ”

  Elaine takes his hand in hers again. “Honey, honey …”

  Bob brushes his eyes with the back of his other hand. “I just don’t know what happened. Ol’ Ave, he’s probably right this minute walking ashore with a case of Canadian Club or Chivas Regal on his shoulder, and my brother Eddie is down there dancing cheek to cheek with his wife in a fancy nightclub while his accountant works late figuring out another tax dodge for him. And what am I doing? Sitting in Catamount in a fucking chair with the stuffing coming out so bad it has to be covered with slipcovers because I can’t afford to get it upholstered or buy another one.” He plucks at the arm of the chair as if clearing it of lint. “I sit up here feeling sorry for myself. Crying like a fucking baby. Just like my old man. Only he didn’t have brains enough to cry or get mad and break all his car windows. He sat in his chair with the stuffing coming out and listened to Frank Sinatra tell him he was destiny’s darling. Then he got old and then he died. And that’s all she wrote.”

  “Come on, honey. It’s Christmas …” she says.

  “It sure as shit is Christmas,” he snarls. Then, after a few seconds, in a low voice he says, “I don’t know, Elaine, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m having a nervous breakdown or something. I’ve never felt this way before. I don’t know, but I do know I can’t take it anymore. Maybe I’m freaking out. It’s this place, maybe, the cold and the dark … and no money. And it’s because I’ve had this look at myself, at my life, you know? I’ve looked at it, and all I can see is my father all over again. And his father. And on and on. All the way back to the fucking Dark Ages. Since the beginning of fucking time. I thought … I thought it was going to be different. You know? Not necessarily like the picture of Ave Boone coming ashore with a case of whiskey on his shoulder, I mean. But different. But now, tonight, I saw it all. I saw myself. Clear as crystal. I saw myself, and I realized that it’ll never be any different. Never. It’s like all these years I’ve just been waiting around to win the state lottery or something. Like that’s the only way my life, our life, can be different. The only way it can be the way I thought it would be is if I win the goddamned state lottery. You know what that means, Elaine?”

  “No. But it’s not true anyhow. We have a good life. We do.”

  Ignoring her, he says, “It means we’re dead. That’s what it means. Dead.”

  “No, honey. No, it doesn’t. You’re just depressed, that’s all.”

  “You’re right, I’m depressed. But for Christ’s sake, Elaine, there’s a reason! Don’t you think people get depressed for a reason sometimes? That’s what I’m trying to get you to understand, for Christ’s sake. Try. Please try to understand. Because you’re dead too. Not just me. You know you are too. Way down deep inside yourself, you know you’re dead. And the girls too. They’re as dead as we are, unless they get lucky. We’re all dead. Like my father and mother, and like your mother too. We only think we’re alive. We watch that fucking TV screen, and we think we’re like those people there, fucking Hart and Hart, and that makes us forget that we’re not like those people at all. We’re dead. They’re pretty pictures. We’re dead people.

  “I listen to Fred Turner down at the shop tell me how pretty soon he’ll take me off night call so I don’t have to go out nights and Sundays anymore to fix people’s goddamned broken furnaces, and I think I’m alive. I start to thinking I’m like Fred and someday I’ll be a big guy with my own company, even though I didn’t have a father with a company to hand it to me like Fred did, and pretty soon I’ll be driving around in a white Caddie with my company’s initials on the number plates, DOC, Dubois Oil Company. But Fred went to fucking college, and I can barely balance my own checkbook, and besides, if he takes me off night call I won’t get any more overtime and we won’t be able to handle the mortgage payment next month, so I say, No, Fred, for Christ’s sake, don’t take me off night call, I need the fucking overtime. That’s being dead, Elaine. Dead.

  “And I come home to this house and see how if I don’t paint it this spring the rot’s going to get it by next winter, only I can’t afford to paint the goddamned thing. And I can’t afford to put storm windows on it so we don’t have to burn so much oil, which I can’t afford either anyhow, and then I look out the window at that damned boat I still owe money on and which I wouldn’t have bought and built if my friend Ave Boone hadn’t taken off for the Keys with his boat, and I realize that I can’t afford to take off a week from work in the spring just so I can use the fucking thing anyhow.

  “And every time I drive that car I still owe money on I realize I’ll be lucky to get another month off the damned thing before the fucking transmission goes, which I can’t afford to have fixed if it does go. And that’s being dead, Elaine. Day and night, week after week, year in and year out, it’s the same, until finally my body catches up with the rest of me, and it dies too.”

  He removes his hand from hers and lights a cigarette. She remains kneeling at his side, and the television goes on yakking in the background. “I listen to my brother Eddie on the fucking phone telling me about his new house on the lake in Florida and his new boat and how he sends his kid to horseback lessons, you know? And at first I want to kill him. But then I think, Hey, Eddie’s my brother and he’s only a couple years older than me, and he’s not really any smarter than me or better educated, so I must be alive too, like Eddie, ’cause he sure as shit seems alive to me. So it’s you and me and our girls, just like Eddie and Sarah and Jessica. Only it’s Eddie and Sarah and Jessica in Oleander Park, and it’s his liquor store that’s doing so great he’s going to open up a second store and trade in his boat on a bigger one—that’s what he told me last time he called. And it’s me in Catamount, New Hampshire, and it’s Abenaki Oil Company, and me on night call because I can’t meet my bank payments without the overtime. No … if Eddie’s alive, I’m dead, Elaine.”

  “Honey, honey, honey,” she says. “It’s just because it’s Christmas and all. You’re worried. That’s all. And you’ve been working too hard, all these nights and Saturdays and Sundays being on call. It’s worse than being a doctor. You’ve just been working too hard. And we’re n
ot like Eddie and Sarah, you know that. We don’t want to be, either. We love each other, Bob. We don’t need all those material things they’ve got, to be happy. We’ve always said that.”

  He snorts and looks above the TV set at a spot on the wall, and though he is thinking of Doris Cleeve, he says to his wife, “Sure, we love each other. But if we had some of those material things Eddie’s got, if I had a fucking future, then maybe there’d be some kind of chance for romance. Hah! A chance for romance! Maybe we could go on a little vacation in the Caribbean, you know? Make love in the moonlight, drink rum punches from a coconut. Actually do the things we just get to think about. I wish you could understand what I’m trying to say to you.” He thinks of Doris Cleeve in her shabby apartment above Irwin’s, her thick legs and belly, her weary melancholy, her alcoholism, and he says, “It all started with those skates….” His shoulders sag, his eyes fill, and he shakes his head from side to side as if saying no.

  Above and to the right of the television set, a small plaster crucified Jesus gazes sadly down. Bob studies the object, and as he does every time his gaze happens to fall on it, he wonders how he can improve the way it looks. By itself and because of its smallness, the crucifix looks isolated and pathetic. The way it looks now, has looked from the day years ago when Elaine first hung it on the wall, the thing bothers Bob. He’d change it somehow, but if he surrounded it with pictures or wall hangings, framed mottoes or bric-a-brac, he wouldn’t really be able to respect it. It would be a decoration, like everything else. On the other hand, if he swapped it for a larger crucifix, one of those massive and detailed crosses with a Jesus so large you can see the awful expression on His face, it would be scary. He’d think he was in a church or a priest’s house or a monastery. Better to leave the thing the way it is.

  “Bob,” Elaine says quietly. “Bob, let’s move.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it. Let’s move, Bob. Let’s start over. Let’s move and start over.” She’s smiling up into his large, sad face. “Let’s just sell the house, sell the car and the boat, and even sell the furniture, and start over someplace else. Lots of people do it.”

  Bob screws his face into a question mark. “Move?” He’s never really put the possibility to himself, never truly thought about it. Moving was what other people did, people who were just starting out in life, like Eddie back when he left for Oleander Park, or people without family responsibilities, like Ave Boone, or people who had no choice. “Now? Sell everything?” Would it be giving up, admitting defeat to everyone? “Not the boat,” he says. “I’ve only got three more payments on the boat.”

  “Okay, fine, honey. Not the boat. And not the car, if you want. Things we need. But everything else. Then we can take the money and go to California, or go down to Arizona, if you want. Anywhere. I don’t care. Anywhere, so long as it’s somewhere else, where there’s a future for us. We’re not dead,” she says. “We’re not. It’s this place that’s dead.”

  “I don’t know about California. I don’t know anybody out west, you realize. I mean, you can’t just wander into a town and start your life over,” he says. “What about Florida? Oleander Park. With Eddie. You know.”

  Elaine lapses into silence and scowls slightly. She says, “Well …” then stops.

  Elaine does not like Eddie, even though he’s her husband’s only brother, and she pities Eddie’s wife Sarah, because of the way Eddie treats her, and she thinks their daughter Jessica is stupid and a little on the homely side. Bob always insists that Eddie means well, and Sarah gets her kicks from suffering, she’s a whiner, and though whiners drive him crazy, that’s all she is, so he can ignore her, and Elaine should too, and Jessica, poor kid, she’s just going through an awkward stage. Consequently, Elaine rarely voices her feelings about them, and until now she has felt immense relief whenever, after Eddie has made his annual pitch, Bob has turned him down. The pitch runs like this: “Listen, Bob, you move the fucking wife and kids down, I’ll put your French ass to work tomorrow morning managing the fucking store in Oleander Park while I set up that new cocksucker I been planning over in Lakeland, and also I got a few cute little real estate deals on the back burner I can keep myself busy with and maybe cut you a piece of, and then in a few years, if you’re still interested, we can work out a parnership deal, maybe open a goddamned chain of stores, like Martignetti’s down in Massachusetts, and get cocksucking big, you know? Big. The fucking Dubois brothers. Like those Dunfey brothers from Hampton who run all those hotels now. The Dubois Boys. Right? Just like the old days, only now it’s palm trees and all that tanned pussy in bikinis. Sand in your shoes, Bob. Think about it. That’s all I’m asking, just think about it. Because if you ever get sick of shoveling all that fucking snow, all you got to do is call me up, brother, and you got a job in Oleander Park, a job that a hell of a lot of guys’d give their left nut for. So think about it, okay?”

  Bob, as recently as a month ago at Thanksgiving, when Eddie last called, has always smiled and said thanks, but he spent ten years learning how to fix oil burners, a trade there wasn’t much call for in Florida, and besides, he was happy. He had a good job, a nice house, a loving wife and two healthy kids, a future too, one that was connected to his past and made sense to him. Throwing all that away and starting over in Florida didn’t make sense to him.

  “Well what?” Bob asks his wife. “Eddie’s doing all right in Florida, you know that. He has from the first down there. And he wants me to come down. You know that.”

  “Yes, sure I know. It’s just … we’ve talked about all this before. The Florida business and Eddie’s offers, and you were the one … it was always you, you were the one who said Eddie would be hard to work for, and the idea of running a liquor store always seemed boring to you, I thought.”

  She stands and walks to the TV and snaps it off, and the room suddenly seems vacant, as if they have wandered into it in search of someone not at home. “Let’s go to bed, Bob.”

  “I’ll get the skates for Ruthie tomorrow,” he says. “First thing in the morning.”

  “I know, honey. I know.” She extends her hand, and he leans forward in the chair, takes her hand in his and rises. Together, they switch off the lights and slowly walk up the stairs to bed.

  4

  Before Bob and Elaine Dubois sleep on this snowy night in December, they have one more conversation that is of significance to them both.

  They are lying on their backs side by side in darkness, he in his underwear, she in her flannel nightgown. She has wrapped her curlers in a nylon net. When, in a familiar form of invitation, he lays one leg over hers at the thigh, she quickly slides her hip against his.

  Bob speaks first. “You know something? Ever since we were kids, I was the big silent one and Eddie was the little guy who did all the talking. But actually, I was a lot smarter than Eddie. In school, I mean. I was even smarter than Ave Boone, but he just never tried, he didn’t give a shit then, just like now. But I got things faster than Eddie did. He was always just this side of flunking, and I did okay in school. And he knew I was smarter than he was, so he was kind of jealous of me and got a real kick whenever he could make me look stupid, which was easy for him when we were kids, because he was almost two years older than me, even though he was only a grade ahead of me in school. But I was jealous of him, too, because he could talk so good, and all I could do was stand there like a big dummy.

  “The only time we were even, when we were really equals, was when we both skated for Bishop Grenier those three years before he graduated. He was a forward, and I was a defenseman, and we were the best combination in the state for three years running. The Dubois brothers. Remember? The Granite Skates, they called us in the Boston papers. That was the year I was a junior and we won the New England Championship down in the old Boston Arena. If it was today instead of 1966, we’d both have gone to college on scholarship. UNH, probably. But hockey wasn’t such a big college sport in those days. Anyhow, we were a team then, me and Eddie. And we w
ere real close then. You know? Real close.”

  “You want to move to Florida, don’t you?”

  He sighs heavily and says nothing for several seconds. “I didn’t before.”

  “But you do now.”

  “Naw, I just don’t want to buy Ruthie’s skates,” he says. “If we move to Florida, I won’t hafta buy her any skates for Christmas.”

  “Be serious. You do want to move to Florida, don’t you?”

  “Well … yes, I do.”

  “Right away? Right after Christmas?”

  “No. No, there’s something I want to do first.” He slides his leg down her thighs to her knees, then back again.

  “There is? What?”

  “You know what I want to do first. And I’m not moving to Florida till I do it.”

  “Now?”

  “Is it okay? You wanta check the calendar?”

  “It’s okay.”

  Bob turns, places one hand between her legs and kisses his wife on the mouth, gently, gently, then more intensely, and when she starts to move beneath his hand, he kisses her fiercely, until he can feel himself huge and stiff, and then he finds himself fucking her with marvelous, thrilling force, while she turns and writhes under him, pushes her pelvis back at him more and more rapidly, in their old, familiar, utterly natural rhythm, the rhythm it took them years to discover, a rhythm they’ll never lose, they know, because it belongs to them alone, Bob and Elaine, his body and hers, in the one clear linkage either body can make to the other. They push smoothly on, one against the other, until first she sighs, and then seconds later he feels himself spread warmly out from the center of his body, and they stop.