Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

“George, tell Marguerite I need to speak with her about something, will you? Tell her it’s important. It’ll only take a minute.” He returns to the cash register and starts totaling the day’s sales.

  Seconds later, Marguerite appears at the door, opens it and sticks her head in. She’s wearing her nurse’s uniform, looking tired and a little perturbed. “I can’t talk now, honey. I gotta rush. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “No. It has to be now.”

  She doesn’t understand.

  “Come inside and close the door.”

  “Only a minute?”

  “Yeah. Only a minute.”

  She steps inside and lets the door close behind her, then walks carefully across the floor to the register. “Is somethin’ wrong?”

  “No, nothing’s wrong. But … but Elaine, she had her baby last night. Our baby. She had a boy.”

  Marguerite’s face breaks into a quick smile, a flash that catches itself and turns serious again. “That’s real nice, Bob. A boy. Is she okay and all, Elaine?”

  “Yeah, she’s fine, fine. But … well, listen, she had the baby when I … when I was with you last night. I got home, and … well, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  Bob looks down at the cash register keys and drums his fingertips nervously across them, as if trying to type out a message.

  “You couldn’a known she was gonna have the baby, honey. Those things happen on their own. The baby don’t know or care what his daddy’s doing at the time.” She tries a faint smile.

  “Yeah, well, I know that. But even so, I naturally did a whole lot of thinking last night … and this morning. I thought a lot about the way things have been going for me.”

  “Uh-huh.” She crosses her arms over her breasts and takes one step backwards.

  “Yeah, well, I decided we shouldn’t see each other anymore, Marguerite.” There. It’s said. He looks into her eyes hopefully, but they narrow and harden.

  She swallows with difficulty, then speaks in a dry, high voice. “You feeling guilty is all. With the new baby and all. And you not being there last night, being with me and all …”

  “Well, yeah, of course I’m feeling guilty!” he snaps. “I should, for Christ’s sake. Guilt’s important, you know. It tells you when you’ve done something wrong. And what I’ve been doing lately is wrong. Wrong.”

  “No, it ain’t. It just makes you feel all guilty inside, especially right now, with the new baby and all. That don’t mean it’s wrong, Bob. We got to talk this over. We can’t just walk off like this.”

  “No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “There’s nothing to talk over.”

  As if she hasn’t heard him, she brightens slightly and says, “Yeah, we got to do some talking, honey, that’s all. Maybe we take a break, and you just take care of your wife and babies for a while, and don’t worry about me none for a while. Don’t worry about nothing for a while. Then we can do some talking later on.”

  “Listen, we can’t.”

  She looks into his blue eyes steadily. “You just don’t know what kind of woman I am, do you?”

  “Well …”

  “And I guess I don’t know what kind of man you are, either.” She extends her right hand toward him, and her eyes fill, and quickly she blinks to cover it and withdraws her hand. “I hafta run,” she says. “I got to work tonight.” She turns abruptly and starts for the door.

  “Marguerite.”

  She stops but doesn’t turn around. “What you want?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  She leaves at once, yanking the door shut behind her. He stands at the register, staring after her, and when the car passes, he sees the man in the passenger’s seat, sees him clearly. It’s a young man, slumped down in the seat and facing away from Bob and toward Marguerite, who is looking straight ahead. The man has his arm out the open window and is wearing a light blue shirt with geometric designs crisscrossing the billowy sleeve. His hair, Bob sees, is plaited in tiny cornrows from front to back, from forehead to nape of neck, neat, tightly rolled tubes laid parallel to one another and raised against the dark brown skin of his scalp like thick black welts. It’s the kid! It’s Cornrow!

  My God, Bob thinks, she knows him, she’s known him all along, and now she’s brought him here! No wonder she was in such a hurry and didn’t want to come into the store! She must have known he was the same kid who tried to rob the store.

  No, she couldn’t, he decides. She couldn’t have known. It’s just an awful coincidence. She’s just giving the kid a ride home or something, they all know each other anyhow, and she’s just giving him a ride home.

  But she doesn’t know the kid is a killer, then, a thief. She can’t! Or she wouldn’t be giving him a ride home. She’s in danger, but she doesn’t know it. By now Bob has got the .38 out from under the cash register and is running wild-eyed toward the door, car keys in hand.

  The highway is clogged with cars at this hour, but by weaving between lanes and cutting into openings as they appear in the stop-and-go traffic, Bob is able to get in sight of Marguerite’s red Duster by the time it reaches Eagle Lake, a few miles south of Winter Haven. He falls in line three cars behind hers, turns left onto Route 655 north, bypassing downtown Winter Haven and heading toward Auburndale. He’s never been to her house and knows nothing of the town, so he’s careful not to lose her. At the same time, keeping two and sometimes three cars between them, he’s careful not to be seen by her.

  His mind is a stream of thoughts and emotions suddenly thawed and flowing, a gushing, ice-cold torrent that mixes fear for her safety, anger for her having betrayed him, disgust with himself, desire for Eddie’s approval, rage at the boy who wanted his friend to shoot him with a shotgun, and a strangely impersonal, generalized desire for a clarifying act of revenge. If you ask him what offense or crime he wants avenged, he won’t be able to say, but even so, the desire is there, powerful, implacable, righteous and cruel. He will shoot that boy with the fancy hairdo, and he’ll do it in front of Marguerite Dill, too. In front of her father. He’ll just walk up and pull the gun out of his belt and fire point-blank at the kid’s chest. Then he’ll turn around and walk away, maybe call the police and tell them he caught the guy who tried to rob the store last summer, maybe call Eddie and tell him, maybe call Elaine and tell her. Maybe do nothing, just drive on back to the store and open it up again till nine and then go home and see his daughters and go to the hospital and visit his wife and new son—it doesn’t matter what he does afterwards, as long as he has done it, done the one thing that right now needs doing more than any other thing needs doing, which is shooting his gun at the black kid in Marguerite’s car. The knowledge rides high in his chest, bracketed and bolted there like a steel block, an ingot of desire around which the rest of his body and mind and all the time he has left to live and all the time he has lived so far have been organized and ordered. It’s the absolute clarity of the desire that makes it irresistible to him, and now that he’s engaged it, committed himself to its satisfaction, he can’t turn back. He’s in the wind now, in a kind of free-fall, a rushing, exhilarating plummet toward the very ground of his life.

  The traffic has diminished somewhat, and they have entered the town of Auburndale, bumped across the railroad tracks that pass through the center of town, driven past the rows of citrus warehouses, on to the outskirts, where the narrow side streets are faced by small, shabby bungalows with low porches, where the streets are dusty and cluttered, yards are packed dirt, slash pine and locust trees are scrawny and tired-looking, and where all the people on the sidewalks and sitting on porch steps and driving home in their cars are black.

  Unexpectedly, Marguerite turns left off Polk City Road, and just as the car between her Duster and Bob’s station wagon reaches the intersection, the light turns red, and Bob has to stop. He cranes his neck and watches her reach the end of the block, cross and drive on. Then, about halfway down the second block, her car pulls off the street into a driveway by a small brick ho
use with metal awnings over the windows. He draws his shirt out of his pants and covers the gun handle, and when the light changes, turns left.

  By the time he reaches the driveway where Marguerite parked her car, the kid has left. Marguerite is on the cinder-block steps unlocking the door, while behind her, George hugs a grocery bag. Bob peers down the sidewalk past Marguerite’s house and spots the kid jogging along about a block away. Slowing his car in front of Marguerite’s, Bob turns to his right and catches a glimpse of her surprised gaze. Then he passes her and accelerates. She watches after him, one hand shielding her eyes from the dusty yellow glare of the low sun, then shaking her head as if disbelieving her eyes, goes inside.

  At the corner, Bob catches up to the kid, who, when the car draws abreast of him, turns, and for the first time, Bob sees the boy’s face up close, and yes, it is the same one, it’s Cornrow, only he’s older than Bob thought, in his twenties, maybe his late twenties, or at least he looks older now, out here on the streets, than he did cowering in the stockroom three months ago. Bob knows it’s the same person. There’s no way he could be mistaken. He recognizes the hair, of course, but also the skin color, the high cheekbones and almost Oriental eyes, the wide, loose mouth and receding chin, and the way he wears his shirt unbuttoned to expose his brown, hairless chest, and his bony frame and the jumpy lope of his stride. He knows this person. He’s had his image burned into his memory, and there’s no way on earth he would not recognize him instantly.

  Bob leans over to the passenger’s side and calls out the open window. “Hey! You! Come here!” He reaches under his shirt and grabs the handle of the gun.

  Cornrow stoops a little and peers inside, sees Bob’s twisted face and breaks into a run. He streaks down the sidewalk, passes a market and a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet and darts to the right into a bar.

  Dropping the car into first gear, Bob guns the motor and jumps it into the traffic, yanks the wheel and pulls over in front of the same bar. A few people passing by on the sidewalk, startled, stop and watch the white man leap from his car and rush through the door to the bar.

  Inside, it’s suddenly dark, and Bob sees only a long counter on the right with human shapes leaning against it and a line of narrow booths along the other side. A small crowd of people is gathered at the rear, and somewhere back there the blat of a television set cuts across the thick noise of a half-dozen male conversations.

  Bob stands at the end of the bar, still by the door, next to a pair of middle-aged men silently studying their bottles of beer, and looks down the length of the bar, searching the unknown faces for the known one. But they’re all strangers, old men and young men, a few fat women, all of them ignoring him, going on with their quiet conversations as if they hadn’t noticed the sudden appearance of a breathless white man.

  The bartender, a gaunt, extremely tall man with an Afro and wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt, tan Bermuda shorts and red jogging shoes, strolls slowly toward Bob. The customers follow the bartender with their eyes and watch Bob by watching the other man, who leans across the counter and says, as if he knows Bob from somewhere else, “How’re you doin’ today, mister?”

  Bob tries to see around the bartender and over the heads of the customers near the bar to the crowd standing at the back. “I’m looking for a kid, he just ran in here.” His eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and he can make out the faces in the rear now. None of them is the face he’s looking for; all of them, the dozen expressionless black and brown male faces looking back at him, are interchangeable.

  The bartender puts a toothpick into his mouth. “Ain’t no kid jus’ run in here. No so’s I’d notice. You sure?”

  “Yeah, I saw him. I followed him. He came in a few seconds ahead of me. He’s here,” Bob declares.

  The man looks silently down at Bob. Then he says, “You a cop, mister? I gotta see some ID.”

  “A cop?”

  “Yeah.” He switches the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “ ’cause if you ain’t, you probably oughta look somewheres else. If you is, you welcome to look around all you like,” he says, sweeping a long arm over the bar. “But I gotta see me some ID.”

  Bob slips his hand under his shirt and rests it against the gun. Now everyone in the bar seems to be staring at him. A wall of large, dark faces peers down the bar at his blue eyes, his peach-colored skin, his brown hair, his long, pointed nose. “Is there a back door?” he asks the bartender. He suddenly hates his own voice, high and thin, effeminate, he thinks, and his clipped, flat, Yankee accent.

  “Yes, there is a back door.” The bartender studies him for a second, then smiles wittily. “Maybe you the fire inspector?”

  “No, no. I’m just looking for this kid, see, he ran …”

  “Ain’t no such kid run in here, no such kid as I seen, anyhow,” he interrupts. Then abruptly he turns away from Bob and walks back down the length of the bar, and everyone else goes back to drinks and conversations.

  Startled, suddenly alone again, Bob takes a step backwards, and as if watching himself from a spot located in a high corner of the room, he sees himself pull the gun from under his shirt. Holding the gun in the air next to his head, he aims it at the ceiling. At once, the bar drops into silence, except for the television in the rear, where Dan Rather intones the news. A few men say, “Hey!” and “What the fuck?” and then they see Bob and go silent, waiting. The pair of middle-aged men in front and a few others step back. Everyone watches him, and he watches himself, as if he has just turned into a writhing serpent.

  Bob backs to the door and stops. “Kid!” he yells into the stunned crowd. “I know you’re here! You’re safe now, but not for long! I’m going to get you, kid!” he bellows. “I’m going to get you!” Then he backs through the door to the sidewalk, jams the gun into his belt and runs for his car, leaving everyone in the bar shaken but with something strange to tell about and wonder at for days.

  In minutes, Bob pulls up in front of Marguerite’s house. He steps quickly from his car, flings the door shut, strides up the steps and raps loudly on the door. When old George opens the door, Bob walks past him and in. George slowly closes the door behind him, and Marguerite, barefoot, her white uniform unbuttoned at the throat, emerges from the kitchen.

  “I thought that was you,” she says flatly. “What you doin’ way over here?”

  “Howdy, Mistah Bob,” George says from behind him. “Sit down, sit down, make yourself to home.”

  Bob waves the old man away with the back of his hand, and George steps from the room quickly and purposefully, a man with better things to do than hover around a white man he has no particular fondness for.

  “I followed you from the store,” Bob announces. He says it as if it were an accusation.

  “Yes?”

  “I saw who was in your car when you left the store.”

  “Did you now? Fancy that.” She pads back to the kitchen and yanks open the refrigerator door. From the grocery bag set on a small, oilcloth-covered table, she pulls out lettuce, tomatoes, frozen lemonade, bologna, and places them one by one in the refrigerator.

  “I recognized the kid in your car.”

  Marguerite turns and squints her eyes at him. Then she shakes her head slowly from side to side and goes back to putting away her groceries. “That kid,” she says, “is as old as you.”

  “Yeah, sure. And I suppose you don’t know how I happen to be able to recognize him.”

  “No. And frankly, mister, I don’t know as I care much about all that. I don’t particularly like the way you talking to me. What you got on your mind, anyhow? You didn’t come all the way over here just to tell me you think you know who I give a ride home to. Whyn’t you just let me know what you got on your little mind and stop all this dancing round the subject. All of a sudden you sounding a little too cute to me.”

  “That kid in the car. You know ’im?”

  “What’s it to you? Who you think you is, my husband?” She takes a step toward him.
“What the hell you think you doing? One minute you whining about how you gotta not see me no more ’cause of your wife had a baby, and then you come running in here and start to asking me all about someone I give a ride home to, like you own me or something? Listen, mister, you can just take it somewheres else.” She turns away and folds the emptied bag, folds it carefully, meticulously, along the edges, and slides it between the refrigerator and the stove. “I don’t know,” she says in a low voice, as if to herself. “I just don’t know anymore.” She hides her face from him and stares out the kitchen window, at the back of another small brick house.

  “I’m gonna tell you who that kid is,” Bob says. “And I know he’s a kid. He’s no more than twenty or twenty-one—I seen him up close. That kid is the same one who tried to rob the store and got away while I was calling the cops. That kid is the one I shoulda shot, not the other guy. That kid wanted me dead, the other guy didn’t. The kid kept telling the other guy, the guy with the shotgun at my head, to go on and blow me away! Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? That sonofabitch was laughing at the idea of me dead! He kept trying to get the other guy to pull the trigger. The only reason I’m alive now is because the guy with the gun had enough brains or decency or whatever not to pull the trigger. But when I didn’t pull the trigger, when I left that kid lying there in his own shit on the floor, crying like a baby, begging me not to kill him, he turned around and ran away. You know the story. So I end up looking like I don’t have any brains, or else too much decency, which amounts to the same thing nowadays. No. I want that kid.”

  She is squinting into his face as if trying to understand a man speaking a language she’s never learned.

  “I want that kid,” he says quietly, a child selecting a teddy bear from a shelf crowded with teddy bears.

  “You crazy, Bob.”

  “I want that kid. He wanted me dead. Now I want him dead. If not dead, then scared shitless and in jail.”

  “Yeah, well, that guy in my car ain’t the kid you want. You crazy, is what I think. Now get outa here,” she says, and she brushes past him into the living room, crosses to the front door and opens it. “That guy in my car is husband to my cousin.”