He pulls off Route 17, and before he’s halfway down the lane to the trailer, he sees the van that’s parked in front of it, a large, metallic-green Chevy van with mag wheels and one-way mirror glass on the side and rear windows, and his first assumption is that it belongs to a friend of the Skeeters. But when he draws abreast of the van and sees the lettering on the driver’s door, Moray Key Charters, he knows the van belongs to Avery Boone.
This information should astonish Bob, since he hasn’t heard from Avery in almost a year, and then only by means of a Christmas card mailed to him in New Hampshire. Bob never answered the card, not, however, because he was still angry with Avery for what happened between him and Elaine (that, after all, was a long time ago, and both parties felt properly ashamed of themselves immediately afterwards, and who knows, maybe in some unconscious way Bob wanted it to happen, especially that first summer after Ave and Bob finished rebuilding the trawler, and Bob, as if to repay himself for all the work he did on Ave’s boat, treated the boat pretty much as if it were his own and went out on it almost every weekend, frequently alone). But the sight of Avery’s van parked on the grass outside his trailer doesn’t surprise Bob in the least. That is, the sudden appearance of Avery Boone doesn’t surprise the invisible man, Bob Dubois, though it would indeed astonish and unsettle the visible one, the invented man. The invisible version of Bob Dubois, the one who is feckless, reckless, irresponsible, and so forth, that man finds it perfectly natural that Avery should show up at this moment in his life, both natural and desirable, because, with Avery as with no one else, Bob can tell the truth and in that way can make the visible and the invisible man one.
Avery hasn’t come alone, he’s brought a girl with him, the two of them driving south from a month-long visit to New Hampshire, “to see the leaves turn color,” Avery explains, an annual phenomenon that in Avery’s three-year absence from New England has taken on mystical significance, like a total eclipse of the sun or the return of a long-gone comet, a significance reinforced by the reaction of the girl, who, as a native Floridian, has never seen the leaves go from green almost overnight to scarlet, gold, purple and orange and then for weeks hold their color crisply, cleanly, as if at the peak of health instead of the verge of death, and who, as a young woman in her early twenties with a somewhat mystical turn of mind anyhow, believes that in the 1840s in a previous incarnation she lived in Concord, New Hampshire, where she was the mistress of Franklin Pierce, U.S. senator, general in the Mexican War and fourteenth President of the United States. She first learned this from a Ouija board, but many events and signs have confirmed it since. Her belief regarding her previous existence has lent enormous significance to this trip with her “lover,” as she calls Avery, to his home town and state and has caused her to elicit from her lover any information regarding his present existence and actual past that he is willing to give, for she is convinced that an apparently coincidental connection with a man from New Hampshire, from a town not twenty-five miles from where Franklin Pierce was born and first practiced law, is no coincidence at all, but is in fact part of a cosmic plan intended to connect her past and future selves through the agency of this present self, if only she allows herself to read the signs properly. Avery Boone, she now realizes, is the most important sign, as well as the vehicle for her actual, physical return to New Hampshire, where there was, she reports to Bob, a “rush of signs,” including Bob Dubois himself, whose name came up often in this visit as she and Avery drove along in the van late at night, and Avery rambled on about his childhood and adolescence and young manhood, all shared with a person named Bob Dubois. When, after much prodding, Avery confessed to having had a falling out with Bob, the girl, whose name is Honduras (not her real name, of course, which is Joan Greenberg—the name Honduras, she says, was given to her when she was sixteen by her first lover, who happened to be a full-blooded Arawak Indian from the hills of Jamaica), convinced Avery that he should take this occasion to visit his old friend Bob Dubois in Catamount, to reestablish their bond, which would be good for their karma, she pointed out, and when they learned that Bob and his family had moved to Florida, well, she just knew, oh, yes, man, she knew.
“Knew what?” Bob asks, because what the hell could she know from that piece of information, except the facts, and why does she keep calling him “man,” and where does she get off talking all the time in front of Ave and him when they haven’t seen each other for over three years and obviously have a lot to talk about, and why does Ave just kind of smile and lean back with his hands folded behind his head and watch the girl rattle on, as if he thought she was the most interesting person he’s ever met, although Bob does have to admit that she is sexy, with that huge pile of orange curly hair bushing out from a tiny face, and high cheekbones and tight wide mouth, flared nostrils and pale green eyes and shapely breasts, braless and pointing good-naturedly from behind a tie-dyed tee shirt, and tanned, muscular legs, tight and smooth, practically leaping out at him from dark green gym shorts, which she wears without underpants, so that when she sits cross-legged on the sofa, as she is now, Bob can see light brown pubic hairs and a neat little vertical roll of vaginal fat, which of course excites him sexually and makes him pay much closer attention to what she is saying than he might otherwise pay.
The kids, Emma and Ruthie, seem to be fond of Honduras, and though Emma was only a baby when Avery left New Hampshire on the Belinda Blue, and Ruthie only pretends to remember him, they both treat him as if he were a favorite uncle, which is as he prefers it and the model he adheres to anyhow, expressing eager interest in Ruthie’s schoolyard adventures and Emma’s toys, while Honduras rattles on in the living room with Bob, telling him, as people in their late teens and early twenties are wont to do, what kind of person she really is, something Bob feels incapable of doing, so that her doing it, telling him that she’s the kind of person who can’t stand dishonesty in a lover, the kind of person who loves to travel, the kind of person who thinks a lover should not have to tell everything he or she knows about him- or herself, the kind of person who believes in privacy, the kind of person who needs to have a sense of belonging somewhere, the kind of person who thinks everyone should be encouraged to discover the life he or she was meant to live, all subjects of interest to Bob—love, truth, destiny—nevertheless, her talking this way finally irritates him, and he says so. “You’re too young to know anything about yourself,” he says. “If you got any brains at all, you’d know the only thing you can know about yourself is nothing, which is what it’s taken me till now to find out,” a pronouncement that Honduras says is “Far out, Bob, that’s really very far out, you are really a very together person,” she says. “No shit, a really very together person.” And so when she asks if it’s okay to smoke a joint, he says sure, why not, and when she lights up and passes him the joint, he takes a long hit, and when Avery strolls loosely into the room, passes him the joint, which Avery smokes the rest of the way down, causing Honduras to roll another joint for her and Bob, and when that’s gone, Bob lays his head back on the couch next to Honduras’s head, looks over at her green eyes, her long, blond lashes and dark eyebrows, and he smiles and says, “I really like you, Honduras,” to which she responds by sitting up perkily and poking him on the point of his doggy nose with a fingertip, because she knows that this is not the time to encourage Bob Dubois, not with his two little girls in the back bedroom watching TV and his old friend and her lover Avery Boone rummaging through the kitchen in search of something to eat and Bob’s wife and new baby in the hospital waiting for Bob to get there before the end of visiting hours…. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to go to the hospital, isn’t that what you said when you came in? Or is that what those people told us, the fat guy and his funny wife, what’s their name?”
Bob says Skeeter, and they all laugh, but then he remembers his promise to Elaine and his new son, so he gratefully accepts Honduras’s offer to baby-sit while he and Avery go to the hospital, an offer made, Honduras says, only because she know
s she’ll see the new baby and meet Bob’s wife tomorrow when they come home from the hospital.
“All the pieces in this puzzle,” she says, “are falling together.” She looks up appealingly at the two men, who stand side by side at the door, and she spins on her butt, leans back on the arm of the couch, spreads her legs provocatively toward them and throws her head back, exposing her long white throat to them. “When you see Elaine,” she says, “you tell her that I’m taking care of the girls and the house for her till she gets back. Tell her I love her and her new baby, and I love her daughters too, and I love her husband too. Tell her … oh, you’ll know what to tell her,” she says, suddenly laughing. “Incredible,” she says. “Really in credible.”
Bob leaves first, feeling a little dizzy, and Avery follows, though once outside, Avery takes the lead, and they are soon inside his van, heading north toward Winter Haven on Route 17. This is an experience, riding in a customized van, new to Bob, and to his surprise, he finds that he enjoys it. It’s a rather deliberately sensual experience, what with the carpeting, the padded swivel seats, the flicking lights of the dash and the CB scanner, the lush throb of an Earth, Wind & Fire tape on the stereo. “This is something,” Bob says. “Really something”.
He gives the directions, telling Avery where to turn right and left, and then, because the easy parts are coming more easily than he’d expected, Bob decides to try the hard part and tell Avery the truth about his life, so he says to him, “Ave, a lot’s happened to me lately. I’m in trouble, but you got to hear me out. There’s nobody else I can talk to.”
Avery nods silently; it’s an old ritual, he knows: you don’t say anything, not when the speech and its subject have been formally announced like this. You just nod and shut up and listen.
“Okay, first off,” Bob says, “a few months ago, I went and shot a nigger, a guy trying to rob the store, Eddie’s store. That’s one piece of information.”
Ave purses his lips and lets out a long, low-toned whistle.
“Then you oughta know that for the last six months or so, I been sleeping with a woman, a girlfriend, I guess you’d call her, not a ‘lover,’ really. And she’s a black woman. A nurse,” he adds.
“A black woman. No shit.”
“Yeah. But that’s not really the important thing about her. Anyhow, I blew the relationship today, I was kind of breaking it off with her, you know, because of the new baby and all, and I was feeling guilty and complicated about the whole thing, but I just wanted to pull back a little, to ease up while I thought things out …”
Avery interrupts to ask if Bob is in love with this woman, “this black woman,” and Bob says yes, he is in love with her, but he doesn’t know how much he’s willing to give up for that. But the real problems aren’t there, he goes on. The real problems grow out of this robbery somehow, when he shot one of the guys and let the other guy escape and then unexpectedly spotted him this afternoon, or thought he spotted him, the guy who escaped, with Marguerite …
“The black woman? Your girlfriend?”
Right, Bob says, repeating her name so he won’t have to keep going through this “black woman” business, which is starting to irritate him, though he’s not sure why. He plows on with his story, telling Avery about his having chased Cornrow to the bar and the confrontation there and the one in Marguerite’s living room, his sudden realization that he was likely to kill somebody for no good reason and his decision to deliver the gun to Eddie, since it was his gun anyhow, and then his decision, when Eddie insisted on his keeping the gun at the store, to quit his job.
He doesn’t know what’s happening, he tells Avery. He’s a changed man somehow. Maybe it doesn’t show, but inside, he’s a changed man, Bob insists, and it all started last winter, just before Christmas, when out of the blue he got himself turned around one night and ended up taking a hard, honest look at himself and his life, and what he saw made him so angry that he ended up punching the shit out of his car, which was lucky, he realizes now, because it could just as easily have been a perfect stranger he was punching, or Elaine, say.
“You took a hard look at yourself and your life and didn’t like what you saw? So you decided to come down here and work for Eddie? Ol’ Fast Eddie,” Avery says, smiling and shaking his head slowly from side to side.
“Well, you know Eddie,” Bob says, and he explains how he was led to expect that his brother would be making him a partner in his business here, liquor stores and real estate development. “And some other stuff he’s got his fingers in. Shopping centers. I don’t know.”
“Eddie’s a dealer, all right. A real horse trader. This place is made for him. Or he’s made for it.”
No, Bob says. Not true. And he tells about Eddie’s fears of being killed, his involvement, Bob is sure, with the Mafia, “or somebody a whole hell of a lot like the Mafia, somebody he owes a lot of money to. And if he can’t pay it back on time, he says he’ll end up in the back of his car in Tampa Bay.”
Avery is impressed. And his quick advice to Bob is to stay clear of his brother altogether. He tells him that he quit his job just in time, because if Eddie goes, so long as Bob is working for him Bob will go too, especially if he’s running around with a gun on him. “You don’t have a chance to explain much to these guys, Bob. They are definitely not your Catamount Savings and Loan types. What they are is very serious businessmen who enforce verbal promises by having big, ugly guys from Providence and New Jersey fly down just to break your arms and legs very slowly. I shit you not. I’ve been down here three years now, and I’ve seen a lot and heard a lot more, especially being down on the Keys, and there’s two things you end up getting killed for down here, real estate and drugs, and that’s because those are the two things you can make a killing at here. You can be a millionaire overnight, but you can get dead overnight too.”
Bob points to the turnoff for the hospital, and Avery wheels the large, glistening vehicle smoothly off the ramp, turns left at the stop sign, then pulls into the hospital parking lot and stops.
“What about you?” Bob asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how are you making it down here? You’re obviously doing okay,” he adds, gesturing to the car that surrounds them.
Avery slings one arm over the back of his chair and faces his friend. “Hey, Bob. I haven’t changed, not inside, not out. You may have changed, but I haven’t.”
Bob studies him for a few seconds. True, he hasn’t changed, Bob decides. Physically he’s the same, a little heavier, maybe, but only through the face and neck, and that’s natural enough when a man hits his thirties, especially if he’s a drinker. No, he’s the same man he was three years ago—as tall as Bob, but because of his smaller head and face, narrow shoulders and hips, seeming even taller; his hair is still reddish blond, though perhaps a shade or two lighter from the year-round sunshine and a few inches longer in back and over the ears, but that’s the style now, especially here in Florida, and in fact Bob has been thinking of letting his hair grow out some too; Ave’s blue eyes are still narrow, nearsighted, squinty, with a fan of crinkles in each corner, and his teeth still buck out slightly in front, making his face look perpetually adolescent, almost mischievous; his freckled pale skin looks as freshly sunburnt now in October as it did summers when he was a kid, peeling and pink across his nose and forehead no matter how much time he spent in the sun and no matter what precautions he took, hats, lotions, sun shields. No, it’s the same Avery Boone he’s always known, at least outside it’s the same man, and that’s usually an indication that inside he’s the same as well, that he’s just as good-natured and easygoing as he always was, just as lazy, just as easily amused and easily bored as when he was a kid, just as loyal and affectionate, but just as detached and impenetrable too, just as honest as he was, yet just as dishonest, just as careless with his life, as if it meant nothing to him, and just as careful not to risk it for anything less than a sure thing.
“I don’t guess you have changed,�
�� Bob says somberly. “You get by okay with just the boat, taking out groups and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a good life?”
“A good life.”
“The old Belinda Blue, eh? She worked out fine down here? That old Maine trawler?”
“Yeah. She’s a beautiful boat. Solid. Slow, but solid.”
“You still running that old Chrysler diesel?”
“Yep.”
“Living aboard, like you planned?”
“Not so much now as before. I got an apartment with Honduras. It’s easier that way, with two of us. It gets a little crowded aboard, and whenever I hadda take her out, I hadda move Honduras out first, or else she’d hafta come along as mate, and that’s not really her idea of a good time, going fishing with a bunch of fat, half-drunk, middle-aged salesmen from Cleveland.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“You like that boat, don’t you, Bob.”
“Belinda Blue? Jesus, yeah. Man, I still lie back some nights and rerun whole days I spent on that boat, out beyond the Isles of Shoals, down around Newburyport and Plum Island, that time I took her all the way through the canal to the south side of the Cape and cruised back around Hyannis and Truro and Provincetown home across the bay to Portsmouth … I guess that’s about as happy as I’ve ever been, days and nights I spent on that boat. It’s hard to say why, but that boat gave me a feeling that I owned myself. You know? I’d get a few miles out, and all of a sudden, my whole world was that boat. And I had it under control. I could take care of it, and it could take care of me. It’s hard to explain. You probably understand.”
Continental Drift Page 21
