Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  He tries to hold it casually, almost drops it, quickly recovers and inhales deeply. He likes the sucking noise she makes when she smokes, likes the odor, likes the way his thoughts suddenly soften and liquefy. His skin feels crisp and tingly, but everything enclosed by his skin feels densely soft and warm. Like oatmeal, he thinks. He giggles and tells her what he was thinking.

  “More like grits,” she says. “With gravy.”

  “Pancakes with hot maple syrup,” he suggests.

  She says, “No, more like hushpuppies. I feel like a hushpuppy.”

  “Ah,” he exclaims, he has it now. “Corned beef and cabbage.”

  She laughs a long time, or what seems like a long time. “Chitlins!”

  “Yorkshire pudding, that’s it exactly!”

  “Nope. It’s rice an’ field peas!”

  “Baked beans … with molasses and salt pork.”

  “Beaten biscuits. You ain’t never had no beaten biscuits, I bet. Sometime I got to make you some. With red gravy on ’em.”

  “Boiled lobster!” Bob says he feels like a boiled lobster, red and hard on the outside, sweet and meaty on the inside. “Um-m-m,” he says, smacking his lips. “There’s nothing as good as that sweet, white, lobster meat sucked out of the hard, red claw and dipped in melted butter.”

  They are silent for a few seconds, and then their hands touch, and they lie down beside one another and place mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet against mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet, and then he moves into her, swiftly and easily.

  At nine thirty-five, Elaine’s water breaks. Too early, she thinks. Too soon. This is going to be a quick one, not like the others, and the contractions, now about five minutes apart, are heavy and deep, as if her uterus were a giant fist opening and closing. The pain is cold, not hot, and comes in waves, but it’s not as strong as when the others were born, she thinks, at least not as strong as she remembers. But they were big babies, and Emma was ten days late, and this baby is going to be early and probably small. Another girl, she decides. Oh, Jesus, not another girl, though it’ll be easier if it’s a girl. Easier and nicer. Except for Bob. Where the hell is he? The bastard. Oh, Bob, you bastard, where the hell are you? She grunts and turns to the phone and dials the number of her friend Ellen Skeeter, who, thank God, answers right away.

  They shower together, and for the first time Bob sees Marguerite’s naked body, long, dark brown and shining, like polished sandalwood. He soaps her slick back and buttocks, rubs her shoulders and neck with one hand, her ass and the back of her thighs with the other, and when, like a strung bow, she arches backwards and spreads her thighs, he slides his hand into her from behind, one finger, then two, then three, and she gasps, leans forward and lays her weight against the tile wall of the shower, lets the warm water splash over her soapy back, gush between her buttocks and down his stiff, pumping arm. Shoving her ass against him, she drives his fingers deeper and deeper into her body, until her cunt is sucking at his hand, reaching for it and grabbing, letting go, then reaching and grabbing again, farther in each time, snapping and letting go, over and over, deeper and deeper, and then she’s swirling his thick fingers around inside her, twitching them, whirling her ass in wet circles, and soon she starts to moan, low and steady, and flailing one hand back around in search of his prick, finding it, she pulls away from his fingers and jams his prick in, and he grabs onto her thrashing hips and rides, rides, rides, while the water splashes warmly over their faces, shoulders, chests and bellies.

  By ten-eighteen, when Elaine arrives at the emergency room of the Winter Haven Hospital and is met by her doctor, swiftly examined and rushed upstairs to a delivery room, she’s deeply into hard labor, and her cervix has dilated sufficiently that the doctor, a gaunt, red-eyed, rumpled Mississippian named Tucker Beacham, escorts her stretcher to obstetrics himself, in case he has to deliver the baby in the hallway. Ellen Skeeter, frightened and excited, joggles along behind the two, calling out to her friend, “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, honey, your chil’ren goin’ be fine. Soon’s I get you taken care of, honey, I’ll call home an’ tell Ronnie to stay right there at your place tonight. Ronnie’ll take good care of the chil’ren till Bob gets home, honey, an’ he’ll tell Bob everything, so don’t you fret, now.”

  In the parking lot by the store, Bob kisses Marguerite softly on the lips, says he loves her more and more every day, and steps from her car. “Wait a second,” he says, closing her car door. “Wait till I make sure I can get my car into gear.” He slides into his car, starts the motor and drops the car into reverse. It makes a clunking noise, but it goes in. “Okay, it’s fine,” he says happily. “I don’t need you no mo’ for nuthin. Not for nuthin!” he says, laughing.

  She smiles out the open window of her car and purses her lips at him. “You will soon, honey. Jus’ wait.” Then she spins the wheel and drives off.

  Slowly, Bob draws out a cigarette and lights it, inhaling the smoke the way he inhaled the grass, tamping it down into the furthest recesses of his lungs. Grass is great, he announces to himself. Switching on the radio, he fiddles with the tuner until he finds a country and western station, and for a few seconds he listens to Kenny Rogers and Dottie West sing “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.”

  Abruptly, he cuts them off and flips the tuner down the band, until he picks up the rumbling, wet voice of Barry White. Then he backs the car, cuts the wheel, and slowly, smoothly, oozing sexy confidence like ol’ Barry himself, Bob Dubois drives onto the highway, turns left and heads on down the road to home.

  At eleven-twelve, Bob’s son is born, tiny, cheesy and blue, and because this is the first time Elaine has seen one of her children born—with Ruthie and Emma, she exhausted herself in labor, and the pain grew so great that finally she asked to be knocked out with gas—she believes the baby is born dead, and she starts to sob uncontrollably.

  Dr. Beacham grins behind his mask. “You got yourself a baby boy, Miz Dubois,” he says, handing the baby to the nurse. “Now,” he says, patting her still large belly, “let’s see if we can get the rest out as easy as he come out.”

  “It’s okay?” she asks in a plaintive voice. “It’s alive?”

  “Sure is. Soon’s we get him a little cleaned up, he’s all yours. Now, let’s bear down hard one more time,” he says softly.

  “It’s a boy, then,” Elaine says. “And he’s alive!” She wants to see him, to hold him to her breasts, to examine him all over, his mouth, nose, ears and eyes, his tiny fingers and toes, and his penis, oh, especially his penis! It’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to her—to have a male body, a body with a penis on it, emerge from her female body! It seems beyond belief, almost nonsensical. In a sensible world, females would give birth to females, and males would give birth to males. How can this funny miracle be?

  She does what she’s told and pushes her abdomen down and out, and when the placenta is driven from her, it feels like a wonderfully liberating bowel movement, and she almost laughs aloud. Then she reaches her arms toward the nurse, who places the baby boy on Elaine’s stomach with its tiny red face facing hers, and suddenly Elaine is weeping with love for this blind, wet infant, this sweet chaos lying limp as earth on her belly, this incredible, terrifying, godlike innocence.

  At eleven-thirty, Bob drives into his yard and parks the car, gets out and strolls slowly in the moonlight across the dew-wet plot between the driveway and the trailer. He hitches up his pants, unlocks the door and walks inside, and stops short in the doorway when he sees Ronnie Skeeter spread out on the couch, the Sony flickering on the coffee table before him. Ronnie’s huge body takes up nearly the whole couch. Though it’s a cool evening, and all he’s wearing is a Dairy Queen tee shirt and Scotch-plaid Bermuda shorts, Ronnie, as usual, is sweating ripely. He’s sprawled from the center of the couch on out to the ends, his meaty arms flung over the back of the couch, his huge beer gut, like a weighty sack of flour, billowing out in front of him and swooping smoothly down to his pinched
crotch, where enormous red legs merge like turnpike ramps.

  He looks up brightly as Bob enters. “Hidie, Bob!” he says. “Elaine ain’t here. She …”

  “What’s going on?” Bob interrupts, sensing disaster. “Where’re the kids?”

  “Oh, they’re jus’ fine. Sleepin’ like bugs in a rug.” Ronnie goes back to watching Johnny Carson, his message delivered. With the flat of one hand, he rubs the top of his blond crew cut, patting it affectionately, as if it were a pet.

  “Where’s Elaine? What’s going on?”

  Ronnie looks back slowly, reluctantly. It’s hard to watch the Johnny Carson show when you keep tuning out. You miss a lot of the jokes because you don’t know exactly who Johnny’s guest is or what Johnny or Ed said last. He tells Bob that his wife Ellen took Bob’s wife Elaine to the hospital.

  “Hospital! Why?”

  “Well, if I was to guess, Bob, I’d say it was so she could have her baby.”

  “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Jesus H. Christ! When, Ronnie? When did she go?”

  “Couple hours ago. Hey, listen, I hope you don’t mind I drank a couple of your Colt 45’s. I didn’t want to leave the kiddies here alone and get some from home.”

  “No, no, fine, fine.” Bob opens the door to leave, then abruptly turns back. “She went to the hospital?”

  Ronnie answers without looking away from the TV screen. “Yeah. Couple hours ago.”

  “Alone?” Bob feels his blood wash down his body. His face is stiff and white, a hardened plaster mask, and his hands are shaking. Alone? Oh, not alone. Please, not alone. Oh, my sweet Jesus, what an awful thing to happen. That poor woman. Alone.

  “Naw. Ellen drove her. She tried to get you, Elaine did. But you was out, I guess.”

  “Yeah, right. With a friend. From work. Had a couple of beers. You know.”

  “Right. Well, she’s in the hospital….”

  Bob turns to leave again. “What hospital? Winter Haven?”

  “Yeah, that’d be the closest one. Same as the one you went when the niggers cut you.” Ronnie leans forward, grunting with the effort, and adjusts the sound. His broad forehead is slick with sweat. “You … you oughta get yourself one of them remotes. I got me one, and they’re real nice.”

  “Oh, Jesus, what if she already had the baby! I better phone the hospital. Right?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  That won’t change anything, Bob thinks. What’s done is done. If she’s had the baby, his calling won’t help her; and if she hasn’t had the baby yet, she’s probably stuck away in a room without a phone. “No, I’ll go right over now. If she calls, Ronnie, or if your wife calls, say I’m on my way, okay?”

  “Sure enough. Hey, I might tap me a couple more Colts, if it’s all right with you.”

  “Sure, sure, help yourself. Take all you want. And thanks for watching the kids. I’ll call you from the hospital, soon’s I know what’s happening.”

  “Suit yourself,” he says, working himself free of the couch, his eyes already moving toward the refrigerator. “I’ll just sleep here on the couch till you get back. I don’t have to work till tomorrow noon. Friday’s night’s busy, after the movies let out and all, so I stay late an’ don’t go in till noon.”

  Bob doesn’t hear him. He’s already out the door and running for his car. As he runs, he punches his fist against his thigh, curses himself through clenched teeth. If he could beat himself up, he would. If he could slap himself around, punch himself in the stomach, throw himself to the ground and stomp on his back, kick himself in the kidneys, break his ribs, he would. But he can’t. Elaine needs him, so he can’t punish himself yet. But he will, goddammit, he will.

  Bob pushes open the door from the hallway and enters the nearly dark room, walks carefully past the other beds, two of them with women sleeping in them, one empty, to the bed at the end, and as Dr. Beacham promised, Elaine is there, all in white, like an angel, or at least a saint, covered with a sheet and wearing a cotton nightie, her face washed and smooth, her damp hair pulled back by a pair of Ruthie’s white plastic barrettes. She’s lying slightly propped on pillows, peacefully asleep.

  Stopping beside the bed, Bob stares down at his wife, looks down the length of her body to where the baby was and on to her feet. Her left: hand dangles from the bed, as if pointing to the floor, and her thin wrist, circled with a plastic cord and name tag, is like a child’s, and to Bob, at this moment, tells everything. Her slender white wrist carries to him the long, sadly relentless tale of her strength, her patience and her trust. It tells him what he’s been shutting out for months, perhaps for years. Purely and simply, it tells him about the woman’s goodness.

  His jumbled thoughts and feelings suddenly clarify and separate, and he realizes in a rush that this is what he loves in her. And this is what he’s been denying himself, keeping it from himself so that he could go on thinking he didn’t love her, so that he could go on trying to love a different woman, a woman he thinks is probably not good, or at least she’s a woman whose goodness he’s incapable of seeing, as he sees Elaine’s goodness now, simply by looking down at her wrist.

  Shame washes over him, and he feels suddenly cold. He knows, for this brief moment, what he’s done, and the knowledge makes him feel naked. To keep his options open, a man has kept himself from loving his own wife. This is a terrible sin. It’s the kind of sin, worse than a crime, that Satan loves more than a crime, because it breeds on itself and generates more sin. Because of the nature of his sin, it’s been impossible for Bob to see goodness in Marguerite or Doris or anyone else he might like to love. Yet until now, to keep his options open, he’s been willing, he’s even been eager, to trade off the years it took him to lose sight of Elaine, all the years of living with her day in and out, eating, working, sleeping with her, night after night, season after season, until she finally became invisible and he no longer knew what she looked like, until her voice became as familiar and lost to his ears as his own is, until, when he wished to see her, truly see who this woman was, he could only look into the exact center of her eyes and see the exact center of his own eyes looking back and know that he still had not seen her—until finally, now, years and years later, after what he’s done to her tonight, and perhaps only because of what he’s done to her tonight, Bob is able, when Satan isn’t looking, to glance at the woman’s thin wrist and at last see the woman’s goodness, which is the very thing, the only thing, a man can truly, endlessly, passionately love.

  Her eyes flutter open, and she smiles. “Hi, honey.”

  Bob can’t speak. He pats her shoulder, then leans over and gently kisses her on the lips.

  She brushes his cheeks with her fingertips and whispers, “The baby’s a boy, Bob. It’s a boy.”

  He nods. He knows, he knows.

  “Have you seen him? He’s real pretty.”

  He shakes his head no, turns away from her face and lays his head on her breast.

  Tenderly, she runs her fingers through his hair.

  “I … I’m sorry,” he says in a muffled voice. “I … I’m sorry I wasn’t able to … to help.”

  She smiles and says that she knows he’s sorry, but he shouldn’t feel guilty, the baby came early and quick. “It was real easy,” she says. “Not like the girls. I almost had him in the car on the way over. Poor Ellen, she thought she’d have to deliver him herself.” She laughs, and he laughs a little too.

  He stands and clears his face with his fists, like a child, and they smile at one another. “A boy, huh?”

  “Yep,” she says proudly.

  “Bob junior?”

  “Bob junior.”

  “Wow. A son.”

  “Going to grow up and be just like his daddy,” she says sweetly.

  A shade passes over Bob’s face. “No.”

  “Oh, come on, honey. Be happy.”

  “I am, I am. I just … no, I’m happy, really. A son!”

  She tells him he can see his son in the morning, the nurse will bring him i
n early so she can feed him, and if Bob wears a face mask, he can see him and maybe hold him too. Then she asks about the girls.

  Ellen Skeeter’s going back to Oleander Park to be with them now, he tells her, and she said she’d stay all night and get Ruthie off to school in the morning, if he wants, which he does, because he plans to sleep out in the waiting room tonight. “Thank God for Ellen and Ronnie,” he says.

  She smiles and tells him to go on home and get some sleep and come back early tomorrow. “You’re going to be busy the next few days,” she tells him. “I’m on vacation, me and little Bob, but you and the girls, you got to take care of business as usual, you know.”

  He understands. She’s right. She’s always right. He does have a lot to do in the next few days. He kisses her lightly, pats her wrist gently and backs from the room.

  3

  Late the next afternoon, George Dill spots his daughter’s car as it lurches out of traffic into the parking lot of the liquor store and pulls up by the Dempster-Dumpster in back, and he shuffles forward to the front door, waves good night to Bob and starts out.

  “Hey, George!” Bob calls from the register. “Isn’t Marguerite coming in?”

  “No, sah, Mistah Bob, she tol’ me this mornin’ she gon’ be in a hurry tonight, so I better be ready.” The old man nods emphatically, as if agreeing with himself, and his Miami Dolphins cap slides forward on his bald head.

  “Really?” Bob says. He didn’t see her this morning. He was at the hospital, viewing his son and namesake, and got to the store later than usual; by then Marguerite had already dropped her father off and gone on to the clinic. He wasn’t able to tell her, as he’d planned, that he would not be able to see her anymore.

  Bob steps around the counter and peers back through the side window at her car. He can’t quite see who’s inside, though it is clear to him that there is someone other than Marguerite inside the car. A man, evidently. In the front passenger’s seat. A black man.