Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  “He’s a thief. Probably a killer.”

  “The guys who robbed your store was from New York anyhow,” she says. “Read the papers. You know, when it comes right down to it, Bob, you just like every other white man.”

  “Don’t give me that shit! Don’t! I know who the hell tried to rob me! I know who the hell tried to get me killed! And I know who I saw in your car. I saw him just a minute ago, too, at the bottom of your street, and I called to him, and he took off running. Naturally. He knows who the hell he is, and he knows who I am, too. It’s you who doesn’t know who’s who. Not me.”

  “You just now called out to him?”

  “Yeah, I followed him to the end of the block.”

  “What’d you say to him?”

  “Nuthin. I just hollered for him to come over to the car, and he saw me and recognized me and took off running. He ducked into a bar, and I ran in after him, but the guy in the bar covered for him, they all covered for him….”

  “You hollered for him to come over to your car? What for? If you so sure he’s the one robbed your store, whyn’t you call a cop? Tell me that. Whyn’t you just ask me his name and then call the cops to come pick him up so you can identify him down to the police station?”

  Bob looks stonily into Marguerite’s brown eyes for a few seconds. Then he sighs heavily, and as if he’s taken off a mask, his gaze softens. “Oh, God,” he says. “Oh, God damn everything. I fucked it up. I fucked it all up, didn’t I? Everything. Everything. All of it. Done.”

  Marguerite is still standing firmly by the open door, like a guard. If she’s seen his face shift or heard his words, she shows no signs of it. “You looking like a crazy white man, you come down here, and you drive up and holler for a black man to come over to your car like that, and he takes a look at you and runs off, and you wonder why? You worse’n crazy. You dumb.”

  “I fucked it all up.” He drops his weight onto the sofa, and leaning his head back, closes his eyes. “That’s it. Everything. Done.”

  “What’d you plan on saying to him? That woulda been a real interesting conversation.”

  “Nuthin.”

  “So what’d you call out to him for, then?”

  Slowly, Bob lifts his shirtfront, then drops it.

  Marguerite’s face, at the sight of the gun in his belt, doesn’t so much drop as slide warily to the side. “Oh-h-h,” she moans, a sound signifying both pain and insight, as if the name for the mysterious cause of the pain came to her only at the moment of feeling it.

  George enters the room from a back bedroom, and Marguerite rushes to him, leaving the front door open and unattended. “Daddy,” she says, “you get on back now. We almost finished, you gonna have your supper soon. Just you go on back and watch some more TV till we done.”

  The old man peers across the room at Bob, then up into his daughter’s face. “Somethin’ wrong out here?” he asks in a firm voice. “I heard you gettin’ upset,” he says to Marguerite.

  “Nothing, Daddy, nothing. Now go on back.”

  George looks coldly at Bob. “I know you got yourself a gun there, Mistah Bob. You got it under your shirt there. I seen it. Seen it when you come in. I sure don’t want nobody gettin’ shot now, and I know you is a good man, and you don’t want nobody gettin’ shot neither, no matter how mad you gets at ’em at the moment. Come tomorrow, Mistah Bob, things’ll cool down some and you won’t be so mad. You don’t want to shoot no one, Mistah Bob. Marguerite, now, she makes her mistakes, sure, but she’s a good woman. And she loves you, Mistah Bob, really loves you. Tol’ me all about it. You don’t hafta worry none about that. I can tell you, she been good to you right from the beginnin’. Ain’t no one else come round here. She been good to you right from the start, so you got no call to get mad.”

  “Bob,” Marguerite says coolly. “Go home, Bob. Just go home.”

  Bob looks from the woman’s face to her father’s, then back again. “Don’t be afraid,” Bob tells them. “I’ll go.”

  “We not afraid of you, Mistah Bob. We jus’ worried ’bout you, that’s all.”

  “No, I’ll go. I’ll go.”

  He stands, looks down in shame, and leaves.

  Marguerite closes the door behind him, quickly locks it and does not look out the window after him. Instead, she walks immediately to the kitchen and commences preparing supper. She and her father never speak of the event again, not to each other and not to anyone else. There’s nothing to say about it to each other that is not already fully understood, so they remain silent about it, almost as if it never happened.

  4

  Bob lifts his shirtfront with one hand and pulls out the gun with the other, releases the loaded magazine and lays the gun and magazine down on the glass table in front of Eddie. Eddie looks at the gun, then up at his brother’s somber face, lowers his gaze to the gun again, then moves it back to the Wall Street Journal on his lap.

  “You wanna drink, Bob?” he asks without looking up. He’s wearing salmon-pink trousers and a cranberry-red short-sleeved shirt and white Italian loafers, sockless. On the tile floor next to his chair is a ceramic pitcher half-filled with gin and tonic. “Sarah!” he barks. “Bring a glass!”

  “No, forget it. No drink.” Bob lets himself down slowly into the redwood chair opposite Eddie, who continues to read his paper, or pretends to read it.

  Sarah appears at the sliding glass doors of the living room, spots Bob, smiles and crosses the patio to him. “Bob! It’s wonderful about the baby! A boy! Congratulations!”

  “Yeah,” Eddie says. “Great about the kid. Congratulations.” He looks pointedly at his watch.

  “Thanks.”

  “I was over at the hospital this afternoon,” Sarah reports, “to bring some presents and all, and I saw him, and he’s just adorable, Bob! Adorable. I’m glad it was a boy. After all the girls in this family.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “You want a drink, Bob? Let me bring a glass; Eddie’s got himself a pitcher of gin over there. His nightly dose. I’m sure he’ll share some with you.” She’s suddenly serious again, and she and Eddie exchange looks, quick, superficially wounding slashes, before she gushes on. “And Elaine, she just looks marvelous! Marvelous!”

  “Sarah,” Eddie growls, “Bob don’t want a drink.”

  Sarah glares at her husband, then, glancing over the low table in front of him, sees the handgun and magazine, and steps away. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, suddenly confused. She looks down at Bob. “Are you all right, Bob?”

  “Yes, fine,” he says. Then, “No. No, I’m not fine, Sarah,” he says, staring straight ahead at his brother, who continues to look at the paper in his lap as if he were intently reading it.

  “Sarah, leave us the fuck alone,” Eddie says.

  Turning quickly, she strides from the patio and disappears into the house. Behind Eddie, the pool glimmers in the twilight, and a thatch of palmettos beyond the pool, in a parody of a postcard, raises a silhouette against an orange- and lavender-streaked sky. Folding the paper in half, Eddie slaps it onto the table next to the gun and says, “Too fuckin’ dark to read anyhow.”

  Bob says nothing.

  Eddie grunts and leans down to the pitcher beside him and refills his glass. “Okay, let’s hear it. Let’s hear why you’re here on a Friday night at seven thirty-five instead of at the store. I know it ain’t because your wife had a baby last night, because you’re here, where I live, not at the hospital, where your wife and new kid are. And you’re not at home, where you and your other two kids live. So there must be some other, some very fucking good, some really extraordinary reason why you’re here and not at the store. Right?” He speaks through clenched teeth, his blue eyes cold and angry. “And I suppose that when you plopped that gun in front of me, like it was catshit or something, I suppose that has something to do with why you’re here and not at the store on a fucking Friday night, where you could be selling a thousand bucks’ worth of booze for me, which right now happens to be ver
y important to me and therefore in the long run should be very important to you too, asshole, since your livelihood depends very much on my livelihood.”

  “Don’t call me an asshole anymore, Eddie.”

  “‘Don’t call me an asshole, Eddie,’” he says, mocking him. He’s speaking more and more rapidly now, his face red with anger. “I really love it, Bob—no shit, I really love it. The way you go around with a long face all the time, like you got worries or some kinda hair across your ass, when all you got to do, for Christ’s sake, all you got to do is get up in the morning and get to work on time and come home and drink beer in front of the fucking TV screen till you get sleepy and then go fuck your wife for fifteen minutes and pop off to sleep. I really love it. You come in here like you got fucking troubles, and I’m supposed to sit here and hold your hand and listen sympathetically and say, ‘Aw, Bob, it must be tough out there at the store, having to think about keeping a gun around in case the niggers want to rob you again. Gee, it really must be a burden on you.’”

  “No, Eddie, that’s not it. It’s just, I gotta keep the gun away from me. That’s all.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. You don’t hafta understand. It doesn’t matter. It’s like I’m afraid of heights, that’s all, so you stay away from heights when you’re scared of ’em. It’s not a burden to me, like you said. And I’m not complaining about my life or anything. The job’s fine. It’s just, I got to keep the gun away from me.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, Bob, let me tell you something, okay?” His voice is calmer now, and his face has returned to its normal shade of parchment brown. “I got problems, Bob. Real problems. Not like this candy-ass shit you’re talking about. I mean, what the fuck do I care about you gotta keep a gun away from yourself? What do I care you’re scared of heights? Save that shit for your wife when she gets outa the hospital. Save it for a shrink. I gotta run a business. I gotta do a certain volume every week, week after week, or one of these mornings you’re gonna find me sleeping in the trunk of my car and my car’ll be in Tampa Bay. I mean it. You, all you gotta think about is taking care of your mouth, your prick and your asshole. Me, I gotta come up with a certain amount of money every fucking week, Bob, or I won’t have any mouth, prick or asshole to worry about. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  Darkness has fallen on them like an attitude. The two men sit across the round, glass-topped table from each other and watch each other gradually get absorbed by the darkness, as if they are backing away in opposite directions, and their words to one another drift aimlessly into space, unheard, unattended, unconnected.

  “Is it because of the guys you’re working with in these housing projects?”

  “Your trouble is you think all I do is sit around counting my money and playing with my toys, like that boat. You think the difference between us is that you’re unlucky and smart and I’m lucky and stupid, so you mope around all the time feeling sorry for yourself and pissed off at me. Well, let me tell you, Bob, I’m not lucky. And I’m not stupid. And you’re not unlucky. And you’re not that fucking smart. Things are a hell of a lot different from what you think they are.”

  “I’m not really complaining about the gun, Eddie. I just figured I could leave it with you, since you owned it anyhow, and take my chances down at the store, you know?”

  “If I don’t come up with a very definite amount of cash every fucking week, the next week after that I hafta come up with twice as much again, and so on down the line, until the only way I can meet my fucking obligations is go out and rob a fucking bank. Do you think Sarah understands any of this? Do you? Fucking broad. She thinks money comes from heaven. She thinks credit cards are money, for Christ’s sake. You think I can go to a bank with this and take out a loan? Everything’s paper, Bob. Everything.”

  “See, if I don’t keep that gun away from me, I’m afraid I’ll end up shooting someone. Not someone robbing the store, but someone else, a stranger, maybe. I don’t trust myself anymore. I think I may be a little crazy or something. I don’t know how it’s happened, but I think sometimes I lose control of myself. Especially when it comes to women, you know? I get so pissed off at the world, so angry, that I’m liable to kill somebody by accident if I don’t keep that gun away from me. It’s not women, really, but they’ve got something to do with it. Somehow.”

  “I’ve worked hard for this. For over fifteen years I’ve been working hard. I got an ulcer. Did you know I got an ulcer? My ass is bleeding too. Did you know that? I’m thirty-three years old, and I got holes in my stomach and a bleeding asshole. And now my epilepsy is coming back. I had two fucking seizures this month. First in five years. You figure it out.”

  “I don’t want to kill anybody, see. I didn’t want to kill that nigger that robbed the store. I don’t know even how I did it. Or why. I knew, the second time I shot at him, that he wasn’t going to kill me anymore. I’d already at least winged him. I knew that. The worst he was going to do by then was get the hell out of there. But I killed him anyhow.”

  “I’m not pissed at you, Bob. I just got a lot to worry about lately. I hate my fucking wife. I wish she’d just get herself royally fucked, have a hundred orgasms, and run off with the tennis pro or somebody. I don’t even like my kid anymore. All she does is sit up there in her room getting stoned and listening to records of guys with safety pins stuck in their cheeks. I don’t know why the hell I’m even doing this, working this hard. I should be like you.”

  “It’s probably only a temporary hard time, Eddie. It’ll pass. It’s probably the recession. You know, from the energy crisis and the fucking Arabs and all, and fucking Carter. It’ll pass. You just gotta hold on to what you got for a while.”

  “Yeah.” They are silent for a moment, and then Eddie says, “If you leave that gun here, Bob, I’m just gonna hafta haul it back in to the store tomorrow morning and put it right back where it was.”

  “I got to keep that gun away from me.”

  “The gun stays at the store.”

  Bob looks down at the table and tries to make out the shape of the gun, but it’s too dark now. “No, I got to stay away from the gun. At least for a while. I’m too shaky these days.”

  “The gun stays at the store.”

  Bob says nothing, shifts his position in the chair, then says, “Well, I guess I quit.”

  Eddie remains silent for a few seconds. Finally, he sighs and says, “Okay. Fine. Quit. Just fucking quit.”

  “I mean it, Eddie. I quit.”

  “Yeah, I hear you. You can pick up your pay tomorrow after noon at my office downtown. My secretary’ll have it ready for you by three. Don’t even come in to work tomorrow. I’ll get a temporary for a few days. By Wednesday I’ll have a replacement full time out there. That’s the least of my worries right now, replacing you.”

  Bob stands up and faces his brother’s lumpy shape in the chair below him. “Okay, then. No hard feelings?”

  “No. No hard feelings. I think you’re an asshole, of course. Worse, actually. Since you got a new baby and no job and probably no savings. But no, Bob, no hard feelings.”

  “I’ll get another job. I can do lotsa stuff.”

  “Yeah. Jobs’re falling outa trees around here.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry.”

  Eddie doesn’t respond, and Bob takes a step away. “I mean it, Eddie,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not,” Eddie says, his voice coming from the darkness. “You’re not sorry. You’re glad.”

  “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Yeah.”

  Bob leaves, walking through the living room to the carpeted front hall, out the huge oaken door and down the long flagstone walkway to the street. As he walks, he listens for the sound of the gun, but it doesn’t come. It’s not until he reaches his car and has got in and slammed the door that he realizes he has been listening for the gun, and then he re
alizes why, for he knows that if his brother can’t find his way out of this maze he’s built, he will put the barrel of the gun into his mouth and pull the trigger and blow off the top of his head.

  Bob turns the ignition key, starts the motor, and drives away.

  5

  The girls are fine, he tells Elaine, fine, and as soon as he gets off the phone, he’s going home to tuck them into bed. Then he’ll drive out to the hospital to see her and the baby again. Where is he right now? At a pay phone. On the way home from work, he lies. He didn’t call her from work, he explains, because … well, because he didn’t realize how late it was until he got halfway home. So he pulled off the road at the first pay phone he saw and called her to tell her he’d be a little later getting over to the hospital than he’d said this morning. It’s been a real busy day, he explains. Yes, he, too, is grateful to Ellen and Ronnie Skeeter. They couldn’t have done this without them. Yes, he promises that he’ll do something nice for them. Maybe bring home some kind of fancy expensive liqueur from the store, she suggests. Galliano, maybe, or Kahlúa. Okay, sure, why not? He can buy it with his discount, she points out, and that way it won’t cost any more than a regular bottle of whiskey would. Right, right, he says, cringing as he talks, drawing his body into itself, shrinking it away from the rapidly expanding world of lies he’s created. He feels himself being squeezed small and pressed against an invisible wall, until he has begun to imagine his body moving through that wall and becoming invisible itself, leaving behind nothing but lies, leaving behind the life of another man, the one who calls home to check on his kids, while this other Bob, off on his crazy mission to Auburndale with the gun and then to Eddie’s in Oleander Park, forgets all about his kids, forgets that he is the father of three children, two of whom are at home in the care of kindly neighbors; he’s left in the visible world the life of a man who has a job in his brother’s liquor store, when the man who’s just become invisible has no job at all, has in fact quit his job without a second’s hesitation or fear and has no regrets or second thoughts; he’s left out there in the real world an invented, unreal man who’s dutiful, prudent, custodial, faithful and even-tempered, while here in the invisible world, where Bob now lives, he’s feckless, reckless, irresponsible, faithless and irrational—so that the invented man, the one everyone but Bob believes exists, is the father of the real man, who is the man no one but Bob knows exists, the man who is a boy.