Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  Bob’s hand is bleeding; he cut it when he smashed the window with his fist. Eddie’s body is lying on the cement floor of the garage, the wide, two-bay door is open, and Bob stands beside it, sucking in the fresh, moist air, while the rain splashes down on the driveway before him, on the dark green roof and hood of his old Chevy wagon, on the thick, freshly cropped lawn and, beyond the lawn, the road and the fenced-in meadow and, in the distance, the scattered, silver-gray shapes of Brahma cattle grazing beneath tall, spreading live oak trees. Bob squints and makes out strips of Spanish moss dangling from the branches of the trees, and he thinks, What a stupid place to die. So far from home, so far from ice and snow, dark blue spruce trees, maple and birch trees and granite hills, so far from small, redbrick milltowns huddled in narrow river valleys and old white colonial houses and triple-decker wooden tenement houses, and churches with tall spires—so far from what’s real. And for the first time since he left New Hampshire, Bob believes that he will never return there, that somehow, as much for him as for Eddie, it’s too late.

  With fastidious care, as if writing out a shopping list, Bob itemizes what he must do now. He must, of course, call the police, who will rule Eddie’s death a suicide and will have the body placed with a local mortician. Then Bob will call Sarah in Connecticut and tell her what has happened and place himself at her service for the next few days. Her parents’ address must be inside the house somewhere. He will give her the note that he found on the car seat next to Eddie’s body, still apparently unopened, as if Bob had not read it, since, after all, though it was unsealed, it did have Sarah’s name written on the envelope, and he should not have read it. The note, back inside the envelope, is in Bob’s shirt pocket, and no doubt the police will want to read Eddie’s last words, neatly typed, to his wife: I’m a failure. Three short words that must have taken Eddie an hour to compose, and when he had them down on the white sheet of paper, they must have made the rest easy, Bob thought when he first read them. That was when Bob started making his list of things to do, for he thought, I’m not a failure.

  After he has talked with Sarah and knows how long he’ll have to stay here in Winter Haven and how much of the funeral he has to arrange himself, he will call Elaine. He’ll apologize for everything and tell her she’s right about everything, and she won’t have to take the job at the Rusty Scupper, because he’s going to take an evening job himself, pumping gas, maybe, or tending bar, anything to bring in the money they will need to pay for Ruthie’s doctors and the rent and food and maybe some new clothes for spring, and who knows, they might be able to put a few bucks away and save enough for a down payment on a new trailer or possibly even one of those three-bedroom condominium apartments going up at the marina, though of course that probably will be a little too steep for them, as the price, he’s heard, is over a hundred thousand dollars for the large places, ninety-five for the smaller units. He’ll tell her what he plans to tell Ave: if Ave, who has plenty of cash, will loan him the money to buy the rest of the Belinda Blue, he will then be able to keep all the profits, instead of the one-fourth he keeps now, and will be able to pay Ave back in a couple of years, maybe even sooner. The way it is now, he’ll never be able to buy more of the boat than the one-quarter share of it he bought with the money they realized last October from the sale of the trailer in Oleander Park. Ave will be grateful for the idea. He probably never expected that Bob would not be able to make enough from his share of the boat to buy more than that share. Right from the start, the night Robbie was born, Ave said that what he wanted was for Bob to own and operate the Belinda Blue while he owned and operated a second boat. Bob will admit to Elaine that yes, he knows Ave owns and operates that second boat to smuggle marijuana and cocaine, but that’s no concern of his. He himself would certainly never do such a thing, nor would Ave want him to. It’s safer for Ave anyhow if Bob keeps straight and the Belinda Blue never carries anything but fat, half-drunk fishermen out into the bay for bonefish. If Ave wants to sneak drugs into Florida from the Bahamas or the Caymans or off freighters from Colombia, that’s his business. Those risks are his, not Bob’s.

  After he has talked about this plan with Elaine, then Bob will call Ave himself, and he is sure Ave will like the plan and will want to draw up the papers immediately. Bob is amazed that he didn’t think of this before, back when he and Ave first talked about going into business together. Bob has decided that he and Ave will also have to talk about Elaine, and he knows that during that particular discussion, which will concern Elaine’s confession to Bob and will therefore oblige Bob to confess to Ave his somewhat complicated and delayed reactions to it, he will reveal that, as one aspect of those complications, he made love to Ave’s girlfriend Honduras. This will clear the air, Bob believes, at last, and then they will stand on an equal footing once again, just like they did years ago, for Ave will own one boat, Bob will own the other, they will split the profits of the fishing business, and both of them will have slept with the other man’s woman once, a thing done in the past and completely forgiven now. Bob knows he’ll never make love to Honduras again, especially after the way she treated him the one time he did make love to her. He’ll be friendly with her, all right, but cool.

  Then, finally, when he has finished talking with Ave, Bob will go through his brother’s papers and will try to put the poor man’s affairs in order as best he can. He’ll approach all the problems and tasks, meet everyone’s needs, in a perfectly rational way, be the man everyone can count on, Sarah, Jessica, the police, even Eddie’s creditors. He’ll leave the weeping to the others, let them be sad, frightened, angry, hurt or relieved; he will be calm, logical, competent. At times like this, he thinks, a man has to know how to take charge.

  Of course, nothing works out as Bob planned. He finds himself weeping in front of the police, for the sight of his brother’s body as they lift it onto a wheeled stretcher suddenly fills him with a strange, overwhelming pity that he has never felt before. In a flash, he realizes that Eddie is totally powerless now; a glowing red bed of coals has become a bag of waters. A spirit that shouted at Bob, that beat on him and prodded and directed him, scolded and shamed him for thirty-one years, has been miraculously transformed into a typed note that claims only absence for itself.

  It’s a terrible thing, Bob thinks. To go from being something to being nothing! A terrible thing for a man to endure—to be nothing after having been something. And for the first time, Bob pities his older brother, and his pity instantly releases him, so that when he weeps aloud for Eddie, in sorrow, of course, like any brother, but, more crucially, with pity as well, he weeps for himself, in joy. And as he weeps, he trembles, torn by the contending emotions that are called grief—pity and sudden potency, sorrow and joy, the horrified, abandoned child, bereft and frightened, and the exhilarated man, powerful and self-admiring.

  He has trouble speaking to the police officer in charge, and as a result instantly forgets the name of the funeral home the officer recommends to him and to which Bob agrees they should send the body, so that, a few minutes later, when he is speaking on the telephone to Sarah, his brother’s widow, he is unable to tell her where they have taken Eddie’s body.

  “You asshole,” she says, and she quickly apologizes but then begins to speak to him as if he were an adolescent boy. She tells him that she’ll fly down this afternoon and for him not to bother picking her up at Orlando, she can get out to the house on her own. “Just leave everything the way it is,” she instructs him. “And don’t let anybody inside the house. No lawyers, no bankers, no accountants, no nothing,” she says. “You stay there and watch TV or whatever you want, but don’t touch anything and don’t let anyone into the house. Jesus, what a fucking mess, excuse my French. Did he leave a letter or a note or anything around?”

  Bob says yes, there was a note.

  “What’s it say?”

  He pulls out the envelope and reads the note to her, slowly, as if reading it for the first time.

  Sarah laughs. “
I guess the hell he was a failure. Took him long enough to admit it, though.”

  “Sarah, for God’s sake! How can you say stuff like that? The man’s dead now. You’ve changed, Sarah.”

  She is silent for a second, then says, “No, I haven’t changed. You just never paid attention in the first place. Just like him. I’m sorry he’s dead, of course I’m sorry he’s dead, but our marriage went down the tubes years and years ago, whether you wanted to see it or not. So I can’t pretend to be the grieving widow. Frankly, I’m pissed. I’d feel a lot sorrier for him if it had been a car accident and he was drunk and hit a pole or something. But Eddie was a bastard. You know that as well as anyone. And he was a sad bastard, a pathetic little boy of a man, and I always knew that. And you did too. No, I feel sorrier for Jessie than anyone else, because now she has to live with the fact that her daddy killed himself because he felt sorry for himself. Because he thought he was a goddamned failure.”

  “Shit, Sarah, let’s not talk like this, not right now. Okay? He’s my brother. I’ve lost my brother. Let me … let me just be …”

  “I’ve lost a husband,” she cuts in. “And Jessie’s lost a father. I’ve got a right.”

  “Yeah, I know. I know. But let’s not argue about what kind of man he was, or how we ought to be feeling. Plenty of time for that later. It doesn’t matter right now what kind of man Eddie was. He’s a dead man is what matters. You know?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “I’ll … I’ll get the name of the funeral home they took him to. I’m sorry about that, it was just that I was kind of upset right at that moment and all and wasn’t paying the right kind of attention. I’ll take care of things here, till you get here, I mean.”

  “No,” she says. “Just stay in the house, and don’t do anything, you hear? Don’t let anyone in, either. Things are more complicated than you know. Eddie got everything screwed up, so it’s not gonna be easy to untangle things. The bastard.”

  “Sarah, he tried. Eddie tried. For Christ’s sake, I know a little bit.”

  “Bob,” she says sweetly, “you only know a little. I know a lot.”

  Bob tries to argue with her, not to prove her wrong, just to soften her feelings somewhat, but he can’t get over the wall of authority she’s put up between them: she knows the truth, has always known the truth, and he knows almost nothing.

  He does know, however, that his wife Elaine, unlike his brother’s wife Sarah, will not treat him and Eddie in such a hard, self-centered way, and he’s right, for when he calls her and tells her about Eddie’s death, she is indeed properly dismayed and feels deep pity for both Bob and Eddie, which pleases him and fills his heart with renewed affection for her. But not for long. When he tells her what he planned to tell her, that he will take an evening job himself, as soon as he gets back down from Oleander Park, which may be a few days, since he has to run things up here, she responds coldly and says only that she can make more money as a waitress in one night than he can pumping gas part time for a week. And when he unfolds to her his plan to borrow enough money from Ave to buy the remaining three-quarters of the Belinda Blue from Ave, she laughs outright. “For God’s sake, Bob, now you sound just like Eddie,” she says, as if she were talking to a child and the consequences of his acts could in no serious way affect her life, only his.

  When Bob Dubois is confused, he often responds by becoming angry, and now both his sister-in-law and his wife have confused him, so he slams down the phone and stalks out of Eddie’s kitchen, a large, shadowy room cluttered with dirty dishes, glasses, pots and pans, piles of dirty laundry, unread mail and newspapers, the room smelling of old garbage and burned cooking, and heads for Eddie’s liquor cabinet below the wet bar in the living room. The shades are drawn here, and the room is dim and sedately gray. Bob pours himself a double shot of Canadian Club and tosses it back in two gulps.

  Refilling the glass, he eases himself down into the large, L-shaped, wine-colored sofa, picks up the phone from the table next to it and dials his old friend Avery Boone.

  It’s Honduras who answers. Bob does not want to talk to any more women. He speaks to her as if she were a receptionist. “Ave, please.” She recognizes his voice and laughs, that same, high-pitched, mocking laugh she threw at him from the boat last night. “Let me speak to Ave, please,” he repeats.

  “I got some stuff of yours here, Bob. Pair of pants, tee shirt, shoes and socks. Even a pair of underpants. All nice and clean, freshly washed and dried and pressed. Got your wallet here too. You were right, honey, you are broke.”

  Bob says, “Just put my stuff on the boat.” The wallet he needs only because his driver’s license is inside it; the money in his pocket now is what’s left of a twenty-dollar bill he took from Elaine’s purse before leaving this morning. He’s suddenly afraid he won’t have enough money to get home on. Maybe he can borrow some money from Sarah when she gets in from Connecticut this afternoon. Oh, Christ, he thinks, I don’t have enough money to buy a damned newspaper when I want to. I have to live like a goddamned kid, begging and borrowing money I can’t pay back from the grownups, who all happen to be women now.

  “Where’s Ave?” he asks.

  “You know, honey. Still out on the boat with Tyrone.”

  “Tell him when he gets in that I have to talk with him, so he should call me right away.”

  “Now, don’t you go carrying any tales back to him. You were just as bad as me, you know.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry, I won’t say anything. But last night was it, girl. Never again. You understand?”

  She laughs and says, “Of course,” as if she does not believe him, though it’s not clear to Bob if that’s because she thinks she’s irresistible or he is. He decides it’s because she thinks she’s irresistible, which means he’ll have to be on his guard from now on. Bob understands men; it’s women who confuse him and make him angry, which he is, once again, and so once again he slams down the receiver and knocks back the Canadian Club.

  The room is gray and damp and smells to Bob of the death of men and of their debts. Everywhere he looks he sees something that reminds him of male helplessness and ineptitude—the framed pictures of Jessica on horseback, on water skis, in her Holy Communion dress, pictures of a girl gone north to Connecticut with her mother because her father, the fool who snapped the pictures, was too loud, too selfishly obsessed with becoming rich, too insensitive to anyone’s pain but his own. And the room itself, with its department store decorations, huge, ornately framed pictures of New England villages and covered bridges in autumn hung above the long, low sofas and marble-topped tables, the pale green wall-to-wall carpeting, the neo-colonial wet bar with thirty different kinds of liqueurs underneath, everything in the room expensive, ready-made, impersonal—Bob sees it clearly now, all for show.

  All for nothing, Bob thinks. His brother’s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because they were empty. But he never believed that it would all come to this, to nothing. Actually, he had envied his brother’s show, had thought that the appearance of confidence, knowledge, wealth and power would somehow over the years demand or create the reality, and Eddie would in fact be confident, knowledgeable, powerful and wealthy. Bob thought that was how you became those things. You created an outer man you could admire, and then after a time, over years, the inner man gave in to the pressure of the outer and fell into line, and from then on, the two marched in step together, like brothers. And when one died, the other died with him.

  But here is Bob, living on alone, and if he feels more like a child than a man, it’s the women who make him feel that way, he thinks, his wife, his sister-in-law, his friend’s girlfriend. What he believes he needs to induce these women to make him feel like the grown man he’s become is money, and he has none, or sex, and after last night with Honduras, he hasn’t much of that, either. Since the birth of Robbie last fall, a shadow has fallen between Bob an
d Elaine, so that they rarely make love now, and when they do, it’s perfunctory and routine, a polite form of exchange. Elaine grew fat during the pregnancy and stayed thick in the hips and belly afterwards and started to speak of her body as if it were not hers but belonged instead to a pathetic, neglected, insecure friend. Anything that pointed to its existence distressed her, and sex most emphatically pointed to the existence of her body. And for Bob, the birth of his son has resulted, oddly, in his feeling outnumbered and alienated from his entire family—the three children and mother became one unit, and he became a solitary, outriding, secondary unit, like a comet passing accidentally through their solar system and moving on into deep space alone. That is not the kind of man who strolls through his house feeling sexy.

  Bob remembers that the last time he felt truly sexy, which is to say, the last time he felt like an adult male instead of a boy inside an outsized body, was with Marguerite, before he went out there with the gun, of course. If only he could see her now, tall and mocha-colored, with her soft, Southern voice licking him all over, if only he could lie with her in a darkened room and tell her about Eddie and how strange the idea of going on alone without him makes him feel, then he would be able to understand it all, Eddie’s death and life and the suicide that’s made one the expression of the other. He would be able in the telling to learn how he is different from Eddie, as one man is different from another and not as a child is different from an adult.

  But it’s too late now for him to talk to Marguerite. He ruined that possibility the last time he saw her, that afternoon in October when he nearly went crazy with a gun in his hand. She hates him now, Bob is sure. She probably hates all white men now, he thinks, and then he winces, for he is once again thinking of them both in terms of color, which he cannot seem to avoid doing, even though every time he does it, he loses sight of her face and voice and almost forgets her name. It’s not that he believes there is anything morally wrong with this; it’s that he’s genuinely frustrated, feels deprived, experiences a loss when it happens.