Ted Williams, without looking up, says, “No problem.”
Suddenly, Bob is running from the store in flight, bumping customers and knocking over displays, as if he’s stolen something. Outside, the sky is dark and low, and rain is pouring down. Bob splashes through puddles to his car, and when he gets in, discovers that he left the windows open. The seats are soaked. When he leans over and cranks up the window on the passenger’s side, he sees a small, white-haired woman inside the Chrysler convertible, her face angry and impatient as she draws the top down against the windshield bar and wrenches it closed.
Slowly, Bob closes the window next to him. He lays his head against the wet seat back and shuts his eyes. “Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Why, why, why? What’s the answer?” He watches his breath cloud over the windshield and window glass, while the rain pours down outside. When he can no longer see the world outside the car, he closes his eyes again and rests, like an animal momentarily hidden from its pursuers.
5
Elaine asks over her shoulder from the stove, “You get what you wanted?”
The girls, still posted in front of the television set, are watching a puppet who lives in a garbage can holler at a man in a bird suit. Bob takes up a position at the kitchen counter on the living room side and leans over it as if it were a fence. “I just saw Ted Williams,” he announces.
“Oh. Did you get what you wanted? You know, the nets for the shrimp. I managed to save the pan. Shrimp would be nice. A change.”
“Yeah. I mean, no, I … I guess I got so excited and all, seeing Ted Williams like that, alive. You know? Ted Williams! I mean, I knew he was alive, and I knew he had a place around here, in Islamorada, but I never expected to actually walk up on him like that. It’s really amazing to me. You probably can’t understand that.”
“No,” she says in a flat voice, and it’s clear to Bob that she doesn’t want to, either.
But he goes on. “Ted Williams is like a god to me, ever since I was a kid. My father took me once to Fenway Park down in Boston, and it was really to see Ted Williams play. He was old then, Ted Williams, I mean, not my father, and about to retire. Old for a ballplayer. Anyhow, we got there and got seats out behind the third baseline so we could see him better. He played left field. And then it turned out he didn’t play that day, I think they put Yastrzemski in, who was only a kid then, just come up from Pawtucket or someplace. Williams was sick or something. My father, he was more pissed off than I was, I think, and he bitched and moaned about it all the way home, and that was the only time we ever went to a ball game together. Whenever I asked to go again, he’d say, ‘Remember last time we drove all the way down to Boston and Williams didn’t even play.’ And then, the next year, I think it was, Williams retired, and from then on left field belonged to Yaz. I really should’ve gotten Yaz’s autograph last spring up in Winter Haven. Actually, I should’ve gotten Ted Williams’ autograph today….”
“Bob,” Elaine says, interrupting him. “We have to talk.” She turns and faces him, holding a wooden spoon in her hand as if about to wave it at him to make her point.
“Yeah?” He whips out his cigarettes and lights one, and his hands are trembling. “Everybody seems to want to have a fucking talk with me these days.” Then, without his knowing how or why, his voice has changed pitch and tone, and he’s shouting at her. “Ave wants to talk to me! You want to talk to me! Anybody else around here wants to talk to me?” he barks, turning to the children, who look up startled, confused.
“Bob, for heaven’s sake …”
“I can’t even come in here and get a little excited about seeing my goddamned childhood hero, a man who’s a fucking god to me, without bringing me down for it!”
“All I said was …”
“All you said was, ‘I want to have a talk with you,’ in that damned accusing way of yours, as if I was a fucking little kid, like you’re going to tell me what’s what and how it’s all my fault! I know already what you got to say to me.”
She folds her arms over her breasts. “What, then? You tell me.”
“I know. I know.”
“What?”
He spins and walks toward the door, stops, and without looking at her, says, “You want to tell me what I already know. You want to tell me what shit this all is. Shit. This … this whole damned life.”
“Is it? You feel that way about it?”
He remains silent for a second. “Yeah. It’s shit. All of it, shit, shit, shit. And now you want to tell me how it’s all my fault,” he says in a low, cold voice. “You like doing that, telling me how it’s all my fault.”
“Is it?”
“No! No, goddamn it! It’s not all my fault!” He’s bellowing again, glaring at her from the door. “It’s shit, all right, but it’s not my fault!”
“Bob, the girls! Please! You’ll wake the baby.”
“Send ’em outside. We’ll get this settled now, once and for all, dammit!”
“Send them outside yourself,” she answers. “They’re your children too, remember.”
“Ruthie, Emma! Get outside for a while and play in the yard or something. Me and Mommy got to talk about something private.”
The girls whine and argue that the show’s not over yet, they don’t want to go outside, it’s raining. They turn back to the screen, and Ruthie slides her thumb into her mouth.
“Take your damned thumb out of your mouth!” Bob shouts. “And get the hell outside when I tell you to! It’s not raining now.”
Quickly, they obey, careful not to touch him as they pass him at the door.
Elaine turns down the burner on the stove and sits heavily at the kitchen table. She crosses her legs and lights a cigarette, waiting. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Whose fault is it?”
“How the fuck should I know? I’m not a genius. You think you know, though. You’re the fucking genius. You think it’s all my fault because we’re broke all the time and living like niggers in a shack in the middle of nowhere, eating goddamned macaroni and cheese out of a goddamned no-name box.” He looks scornfully over at the saucepan on the stove. “You could use a little more imagination, you know. You didn’t show much interest when I brought up getting some shrimp tonight. I could’ve gotten ten or fifteen pounds of shrimp easy, the way they’re running, and we could freeze what we didn’t eat right off, or we could sell some. The catwalks along the bridges are crowded these nights with people using a little imagination.”
“You forgot to get the nets,” she says, “because you saw an old retired baseball player.”
“Well, you didn’t want me to go out shrimping anyhow. All you do is bring me down about things I get excited about. You, you never get excited about anything anymore. All you do is mope around here with a long face.” He crosses to the television set and snaps it off. “I hate that fucking thing!”
“Bob, you can’t hear yourself, or you’d shut up. Can you listen to me for a minute?”
“Gimme a beer.”
Elaine gets up and opens the refrigerator and passes a can of Schlitz over the counter, as if she were a waitress and he a customer. Then she stands at the counter, both hands grasping the edge of it, and says to him, “Now, you listen to me for a few minutes. I know you’re working hard, as hard as anyone can. And I know you’re worried and scared. Like I am. And you’re right, it’s true, this life is shit,” she says, and the word “shit,” because he’s never heard her say it before, sounds to Bob so powerfully derogatory in her mouth that he shudders. To Bob, Elaine has made the term suddenly so strong that he instinctively wants to defend this life, his life, against it. But he’s too late. He has said it himself, and now, with her saying it, he sees the word and his life as one thing, as waste, excrement, offal, as a secret, dirty thing that should be hidden or buried, as a thing to be ashamed of.
His mind is flitting wildly about, a maddened bird in a cage, pursued by a word that repels him but that cannot be denied, and he hears only bits
of what Elaine is telling him, for, having no sense of the impact of her use of the word, believing she was merely quoting him, reassuring him, she thought, Elaine goes on to tell him what she knows he does not want to hear. She tells him that their daughter Ruthie is ill, “emotionally disturbed,” the counselor at school said, and that she’s going to have to start getting twice weekly treatment at the mental health clinic in Marathon, which will cost money, not a lot of money, but because they’re poor, more money than they have, which is no money at all, so she, Elaine, has decided to take a job in Islamorada. In fact, she accepted the job this morning, waiting on tables at the Rusty Scupper five nights a week. “I know,” she says rapidly, trying to stave off the explosion, “I know I should’ve talked it out with you first, but it had to be done, Bob, and I just saw the sign this morning when I took the girls to the beach…. No, that’s not true. I asked Horace next door if he knew of any jobs, when he took us up to the beach, and he told me about it, and I just went in and asked about the job and got it offered to me, so I took it. And I know I should’ve told you about Ruthie when the school called, but it was only yesterday, and it seemed so hard a thing to tell you, Bob, because of all you have to worry about, and the way you’ve been lately, kind of distant and lost in your own thoughts and depressed and all. I just wanted to wait till I had a way to pay for it before I told you about it, so it wouldn’t seem so bad.”
“Sonofabitch! There’s not any goddamn thing wrong with Ruthie that some steady discipline wouldn’t cure!” Bob smacks the flat of his hand against the counter, and his face tightens and reddens. “You never tell her to cut out that damned thumb-sucking. You just sit around whispering with her about how rotten everything is, and then I come home, and I have to be the bad guy. You tell that fancy counselor down to the school that? It’s no fucking wonder she’s acting retarded!”
“Emotionally disturbed.”
“Emotionally disturbed, then!” He bats the words back. “I can tell you about ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m goddamned disturbed that you go around my back the way you do. The way you always have, too. And you know what the hell I’m talking about, so don’t give me that look. And now with this job business. Jesus H. Christ! And Horace! Horace, that fat pig, that slimy, woman-sniffing pig. I know what that guy’s interested in, don’t worry. And you do too.”
“You sound crazy. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t know what’s important to you anymore, like I used to,” Elaine says sadly. “And I don’t know what you mean, going around behind your back. I’ve never gone around behind your back. I was just waiting until I could tell you, and we don’t talk much any …”
“Like hell!” he shouts into her face. “You know what I’m talking about. You know. You got a memory. You know.”
“No, I don’t.” She backs away from him toward the stove.
He raises and slowly extends his fist toward her. He howls. He howls like a trapped beast, and with both hands he clears the counter of bowls, dishes, kitchen implements, clock.
Elaine’s face has gone all to white, her eyes are wide with fear, and she can’t speak. From the rear of the trailer, the cries of her son start up and rise, and suddenly Elaine finds words and says, “Bob, the baby! The baby!”
But it doesn’t matter what she says, for he can no longer hear her or the baby. He lurches around the tiny, cluttered room like a blindfolded deaf man, sweeping tables and shelves clear, knocking over chairs, sending the television set crashing to the floor, the clock-radio and pole lamp beside the sofa, the floor lamp next to the easy chair, kicking at magazines, jars, ashtrays as they fall.
“Stop! Stop this!” Elaine shrieks at him. “You son of a bitch! You’re wrecking my house!”
For a split second, Bob looks over at his wife, and then, as if what he’s seen has compounded his rage, he turns on the chairs and tables, and grunting, tips onto its stiff, flat back the tattered green sofa. Elaine grabs his sleeve with both hands, and when he swings away from her grasp, her face stiffens, for suddenly she is afraid of him, of his size and force, as if he were of an utterly different species than she and her children, a huge, coarse-bodied beast with a thick hide, like a buffalo or rhinoceros, and berserk, rampaging, maddened, as if by the stings of a thousand bees.
Eyes widened, mouth open and dry, hands in tight little fists against her belly, Elaine slips by him and darts down the hall to the back of the trailer, where her baby is, while Bob continues smashing through the trailer, moving like a storm from the living room into the kitchen, then back along the narrow hallway to the bathroom, where he rips the tin medicine cabinet from the wall and kicks over the rubbish can, yanks the contents of the linen closet to the floor, and then moves on to the bedroom at the end, and when he lurches through the door, he stops, panting, enormous in the small door frame, a giant looking down on tiny beds, dolls, stuffed animals and picture puzzles, building blocks, books and pictures, articles of clothing. He hears sniffling and looks up and sees his wife in the corner of the alcove beyond, behind the crib, with the baby in her arms. And he sees that she expects him to keep on coming, and then he sees what she sees, and he stops.
Bob hears Emma at the screened door off the living room asking in a high, scared voice if she can come inside, and the sounds of Ruthie, poor Ruthie, crying quietly behind her younger sister.
Turning, Bob shuffles slowly back through the wreckage to the front door and lets Emma come inside and then Ruthie, who, as she passes, removes her thumb from her mouth. Neither girl looks at her father.
“Mama?” Emma cries, and Bob hears Elaine call from the back room, “Here! I’m back here with Robbie!” and the two girls run toward her.
He steps outside. The trees are still dripping from the afternoon rain, and shallow puddles glisten white as milk in the yard and roadway ruts. The clouds have passed over the Keys toward the mainland, and the eastern sky, deepening into dark blue as night comes on, pulls from the horizon a large, dark orange half-moon, as if delivering it from old smoke and volcanic ash.
As soon as Bob has driven away, his red-dotted taillights disappearing around the far bend in the road, a man emerges from the trailer across the road. He’s a middle-aged man with a beer belly tightly encased in a sleeveless undershirt, barefoot with skinny legs sticking out below khaki trousers cut off at the knees. He stands in the middle of the road, snaps his fingers for his dog, which emerges obediently from under the trailer, and looks cautiously in the direction taken by Bob’s car and then over toward Bob’s darkened, now silent trailer.
Allie Hubbell, too, has come outside and stands in her yard, peering into the darkness of the road where Bob has gone. “Horace? That you?” she calls to the man.
“Yeah.”
“Some kinda ruckus.”
“I’d say so.”
“She all right, do y’ know?”
“Sonofabitch can do what he wants to his own stuff, but he better not ruin anything of mine, I’ll tell ya,” he says.
“You think we better check on Elaine?”
“Elaine?”
“Yeah. Maybe just to check, you know?”
“Naw,” he says, rubbing his grizzled chin. “You don’t wanta go buttin’ into other people’s fights. Sonofabitch better not’ve banged up any of my stuff, though, I’ll tell ya. I had some kids there once that punched a buncha holes in the walls one night when they was drunk.”
“Maybe we better just go on over and check on Elaine, make sure she’s okay.” Allie takes a step off the grass onto the road.
“Naw. She can always call the cops on the bastard if she’s scared of him. Besides, he ain’t the type to shoot or cut anybody. He might knock her around a little, but he ain’t the violent type.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, yeah,” Horace says, and he turns and starts heading back to his own trailer. “Men can tell these things about each other,” he says. “He’s harmless. Just screwed up is all. See you later,” he says,
and goes inside.
Allie stands by the road for several moments, arms crossed below her breasts, hands cupping her elbows. Then she turns and slowly walks back to her trailer, where she sits down on the stoop and smokes a cigarette and watches Bob’s trailer until the lights come on inside it. Then she stands, opens the door and goes in.
6
By the time Bob crosses from Upper Matecumbe to Moray Key, it’s dark, and the shrimpers are already out, dozens of them leaning over the rail of the catwalk along the bridge, men, women and children with lanterns hung from the catwalk and long-handled dip nets stuck down into the channel. Bob drives by barely noticing them and does not remember that a few hours earlier he was planning to join the shrimpers tonight. Without intending it, without particularly desiring it, almost without being aware of it, he has momentarily severed the connection between his past and his future. During this moment and the several that will immediately follow, Bob is floating free of time, a man without memories and without plans, like an infant, conscious only of the immediate present. If you stop him and ask where he is going on this tropical winter’s eve, he’ll blink and look down the hood of his car at the piles of sand, cinder block and steel, and recognizing the marina and the apartment building beside it and the Clam Shack, he’ll say, “To Moray Key.” If, when he parks the car in the lot behind the apartment building, you ask him where on the key he’s going, he’ll blink again, and noting that his car is next to Avery Boone’s van, he’ll say, “To Ave’s.” And if, as he climbs the narrow iron stairs to the second floor and pauses on the terrace before Ave’s door and raises his hand to knock, you ask him what business he has with his old friend and new partner Avery Boone on this lovely, breezy, moonlit evening, he’ll blink a third time, hold his hand in the air and say, “Why, no business at all.”
Continental Drift Page 30
