As for Bob, they do not believe that he is as his friend and business partner Avery Boone insists, that is, innocent of the charges they have placed against Boone himself, which charges result from Ave’s attempt the night before to deliver three-quarters of a pound of uncut cocaine to a man employed by the Federal Narcotics Commission. They do not believe that anyone, especially a man with a boat, can rub as closely to Ave’s business as Bob has and not also be profiting from it. There is no clean evidence that links Bob to Ave’s drug smuggling and sales, however, just as there is nothing and no one to tie the girl who calls herself Honduras to the trade, so both Bob and Honduras are let go. With Ave’s van, like both his boats, now impounded and his condominium instantly repossessed by the bank, Honduras packs her duffel and hitches down Route 1 to Key West, where by the following sunset she has moved into a beach house owned by a screenwriter who spends his winters on the Keys bonefishing and phoning his wife up in Michigan every few days to report on his loneliness. Unable to make bail, Ave mopes in jail in Marathon. Bob, reluctantly, goes home.
Bob lays the newspaper down on the kitchen table. There is a photograph above the article, and he studies it for a moment as if trying to memorize every element of the picture, as if preparing to draw a copy for himself. With his fingertip he traces the dark line between the white beach and the gray sea, from the upper right corner diagonally across to the lower left. Then he traces the outline of the black body lying face down on the beach, a woman, her arms folded under her chest, the soles of her bare feet facing the camera.
“Awful, isn’t it?” Elaine says, looking over his shoulder from the sink, where she stands, eggy plate in hand, cleaning the breakfast dishes while Robbie takes his morning nap. The girls have left for school. Bob has been home for a day and a night now, since being released by the police, but he has not slept. He’s reading this morning’s newspaper for the fifth or sixth time, smoking his third pack of cigarettes since walking in the door yesterday at ten, bleary-eyed, limp-limbed and, for the most part, silent.
He didn’t have to tell her about Ave. She’d already been informed by the police the previous evening, when, after arresting him in a bar in Key Largo, they’d raided Ave’s apartment, detained Honduras, impounded the Angel Blue and gone looking for Bob, Tyrone and the Belinda Blue. Confident that Bob was in no way involved in Ave’s smuggling and drug selling, Elaine nonetheless was terrified for him. She repeated to the police what Bob had told her, that he’d gone to New Providence in the Bahamas to take a large party of French Canadians out tarpon fishing and would return the next morning. When the police had finally seemed to believe her and had driven off, she got down on her knees right there in the living room and prayed straight out that Bob had not unknowingly allowed the Belinda Blue to carry drugs for Ave. Bob was capable of that, she knew. He’s not stupid, she thought, and he’s not naive about Ave’s business, not anymore, but even so, she knew that his capacity to behave as if he were both was great. His arrival home, then, relieved her, as if a terrible and likely disaster had been barely but wholly avoided.
His behavior afterwards confused her, however, and then it began to frighten her. He went out around noon and bought copies of all the newspapers he could find, the Miami Herald, the Marathon Keynoter, the Key West Citizen, examined each one carefully, and apparently not finding what he was searching for, tossed them all into the trash can under the sink. Elaine assumed he was looking for accounts of Ave’s arrest.
“It won’t be in the papers till tomorrow,” she told him. “Or tonight at the earliest. If then. They don’t write about those things anymore, they’re so common.”
“What things?” he snapped. He had turned on the radio and was spinning the dial rapidly past music, stopping for a few seconds whenever he found a news broadcast, then, when it turned out to be a weather or sports report, moving impatiently on.
“You know. Drugs. Except when it’s millions of dollars’ worth. Ave’s not one of those big-time drug dealers, I’m sure. Which means he’ll probably have to go to jail. It’s always the big guys who get off, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s awful, though,” she said, her voice going tender. “I know how you must feel. I feel it too.”
“About what?”
“Ave. Him going to jail.”
“Yeah. He’ll do okay, though. A couple of years, maybe.”
“But then he’ll have to start all over again,” she said. “With nothing.” She stood behind him, her hands lightly kneading his taut shoulders, while he went on fiddling with the radio. “Why don’t you try to sleep? You must be exhausted after all this. Otherwise, you won’t be able to stay awake tonight when I’m at work….”
“I’ll stay awake,” he said, cutting her off.
And, indeed, he did stay awake. He lay down in the kids’ room and tried to nap while Elaine ironed in the living room, but in five minutes he was back in the kitchen, flipping the dial of the radio back and forth, then drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, pacing from room to room in the trailer and outside in the cluttered yard, walking to the sea, where, lost in a reverie, he’d stand a moment, then quickly step away, as if discovering he’d walked to the edge of a cliff.
He was shuffling back toward the trailer when he saw his daughters coming toward him along the sandy lane from the school bus stop. Emma waved and walked faster toward him, but Ruthie showed no sign of recognition and fell behind her younger sister.
Bob scooped Emma into his arms, lifted her up and leaned his weight against the front fender of the car. “Hi, baby. How’d it go? Good day at school? You like kindergarten?”
“Yeah,” she said, and shoving a fistful of crumpled paper in his face, she said, “Look! I got a star for drawing.” Then she wrinkled up her face and pulled away. “Yuck, Daddy! Whiskers!”
Bob put her down, spread out the sheet of paper and studied her drawing for a moment, lollipop people in front of a rectangle that, despite the absence of windows and doors, was clearly meant to represent their trailer. The broad crayon strokes against tan, pulpy paper had caught with precision the faded shade of flaking yellow. In the foreground, there were five stick figures of various sizes with large, disk-like heads, all but one of the five, the tiniest, wearing grim faces, mouths that were straight lines, eyebrows pointing down in scowls.
“Who’s the happy one here?” Bob asked. “The little guy.”
“Robbie. That’s Robbie.”
“How come he’s the only one who’s happy?” Ruthie had come up to them and stood silently behind Emma and peered anxiously back over her shoulder at the trailer, as if expecting someone to come out the door and scold her.
“Hi, Roots,” Bob said. “How’s it going?”
She turned and faced him, her dark head a heavy blossom on a thin stalk.
“You okay?” Bob said too quickly.
She nodded.
“Good day?”
Emma looked at the ground, as if embarrassed by her older sister, who nodded again, silent and withdrawn.
“Did you see Emma’s drawing?” Bob asked. “Isn’t it terrific? Look, here’s Robbie, smiling to beat the band.” He held the sheet of paper out before her and pointed with his finger at the figure that was Robbie. Ruthie raised her eyes and glanced at the drawing.
“Which one’s Ruthie?” Bob asked, turning to Emma. “It’s hard to tell.” Indeed, of the five figures, the three in the center were as alike as triplets, all with sour expressions and masses of dark curls on their heads. The tiny, bald, grinning figure on the left was the baby, of course, and the large, bald, frowning figure on the right, though the same size as the triplets, was clearly Bob. The three females in the center, as grim and harsh-looking as Furies, were drawn exactly alike.
“That’s Mama,” Emma said, pointing at the Fury standing next to Bob. “And that’s Ruthie. I’m next.”
Ruthie’s interest in the picture suddenly flared, and she edged closer and seemed about to smile.
“Well … Robbie’s a baby,” Emma said.
“He doesn’t know anything yet,” Ruthie added in a low voice.
To Bob, the three females seemed to be glancing toward the man, as if angry at him, whereas the man, like the baby, seemed to be looking straight out at the world. “Who’re you guys mad at?” Bob asked. “You all look so mad.”
“I don’t know,” Emma said slowly. “I think … I think everybody’s worried. That’s why Robbie’s smiling. He’s not worried yet. He’s only a baby.”
“Well, what’re we worried about?” Bob asked. “The way all you guys are looking at me, you must think I’m the one who made you worry or something.” He laughed, but it was thin.
“No. We’re just worried, that’s all. About things. School and stuff, and supper. Stuff like that …”
“You’re not mad at me, then?”
“No,” Ruthie pronounced.
“I’ll make another picture later,” Emma said, and grabbing the sheet of paper, she started for the trailer. “One that shows us happy. Like Robbie.” Ruthie turned and followed, her sweater, held by one sleeve, dragging the ground behind her.
“That’s all right,” Bob said. “This one’s fine. I like this one fine.”
Then he, too, entered the trailer. He told Elaine he was going up to Islamorada for the evening papers, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and went out again.
“Take the girls with you!” Elaine called through the screened door.
“They don’t want to go,” he said, and kept moving.
Elaine turned to her daughters, both already in front of the TV, watching a soap opera. “Don’t you want to go to the store with Daddy?”
“No,” Ruthie said without turning.
“Emma?”
“Nope.”
Robbie was crying loudly now from the bedroom. “Ruthie, go change your brother’s diapers and bring him out here.”
Ruthie didn’t respond.
“Ruth! You heard me!”
In silence, the girl got up, her eyes fixed on the TV screen, and edged backwards from the room.
“For God’s sake, move! The baby’s crying and wet!” She slammed the iron back and forth over the wrinkled blouse, muttering to herself as she worked, “This family … this damned family. The way we ignore everyone around here …”
Ruthie returned carrying Robbie and deposited him like a teddy bear in the plastic playpen in the center of the room. Unable to sit yet, he immediately collapsed into a reddening heap. By the time Ruthie had returned to her seat on the floor in front of the TV, the baby was howling.
Elaine stood at the ironing board and watched him. Ruthie sucked her thumb and stared at the doctor and nurse making love on leather upholstered furniture in the doctor’s paneled, book-lined office. Emma leaned forward and turned up the volume.
At the Whale Harbor Tackle Shop, Bob went down the row of newspaper-dispensing racks and bought the two Miami papers and the Marathon paper, and standing outside the store, leafed quickly through all three. There was nothing about the Haitians in any of them.
Maybe it never happened, he let himself think. Maybe it was a nightmare, some kind of hallucination, a craziness worse than anything I’ve ever experienced before. Is that possible? he wondered. Nothing else seemed real to him now. And for a moment at least, the split made it easy for him to believe that the part of his life which now seemed most vivid and clear to him—the trip over to New Providence, the long wait in the bay and then the arrival of the Haitians in the dinghy with Tyrone, the trip back across the straits, the sudden storm off Sunny Isles, the arrival of the coast guard cutter, and finally that awful moment when the Haitians leaped into the sea—all that might well have been experienced by Bob on a different plane of reality than the plane where everything else was taking place: Elaine and the children, home, groceries, laundry, television, a can of Schlitz from the refrigerator, work, the Belinda Blue, Ave, Ave’s arrest, Tyrone’s arrest, Honduras’s disappearance, the seizure of the boats. These things made sense. They weren’t all happy things, but they could be lived with somehow. Even the particular terrible consequences of Ave’s arrest, that is, Bob’s sudden unemployment, seemed likely, bland, vague and conditional to him, of a piece somehow with Elaine’s familiar complaints about money, his irritation and embarrassment at his wife’s having to work nights as a waitress, his anxiety over Ruthie’s deepening strangeness, his ongoing disappointment and bewildered surprise at his own inadequacy.
Could it be? Could the strong part of his life be dream and the weak part real? If so, then he was just crazy, that’s all. Crazy. A quiet kind of madman who lived his dreams and dreamed his life. Most people were a little like that anyhow, especially people whose lives, like Bob’s, were ordinary and, despite the ordinariness, gave them constant trouble. Maybe, just possibly, the awful pressures that Bob’s ordinary life had placed on him, the difficulty, for him, of living an ordinary life well, had finally made him crazy. Most men, he was sure, lived such a life easily: they worked and saved, they took care of their wives and children, who were grateful and respectful for it, and their days and nights passed cheerfully by, until finally they were gray-haired and a little fat and semiretired and spent the winters in Florida with the wife, fishing, watching baseball on TV, waiting for the kids and grandkids to come down for the holidays. But a few men, like Bob, despite their being just as intelligent, dutiful and orderly as the others, turned their ordinary lives into early disasters and never knew why. That can make a man crazy, Bob thought.
For a second, he thought of going inside the store, just in case Ted Williams was there again. He peered across the parking lot, looking for Ted’s white Chrysler, then remembered his mistake regarding the Chrysler and said to himself, See, I am crazy! What I imagine, what I remember and what I actually experience get all mixed together, and I can’t tell the difference. He was now sure that he had dreamed the death of the Haitians.
The relief and pleasure he took from the conviction lasted only a few seconds, however. As he started toward his car, he put the folded newspapers under his left arm and shoved both hands deep into his pants pockets and with his left hand instantly felt the money, a packet of bills a half-inch thick. There it was, blood money, uncounted, forgotten, invisible for whole hours at a time, then suddenly reappearing, linking everything back together again, closing and welding fast the split in his life, so that his dreams and his daily life were one thing again. It’s horrible, horrible! he thought, and he almost cried out, and he withdrew his hand as if he had touched a cold, dry serpent there.
He wandered in and out of the trailer all the rest of the afternoon, unable to leave the place, unable to sit down and make his home there, a ghostly figure who repeatedly appeared in the yard and then stood at the threshold outside the screened door for a few moments, until finally the woman and children inside felt his presence and looked up at him, and he turned away and went back to the road again. Up the lane to the highway he walked, then back, past the trailers to the water, where gulls and terns poked between chunks of coral and blond, almost translucent crabs scrambled in the shallows for shelter. A car driven by Horace came and went, and all the while Bob kept his back to the man. Around five-thirty, Allie Hubbell came home from the crafts shops in Key Largo, walking in from the bus stop on the highway, and. Bob kept his back to her too. She stood a moment on her stoop, watching him, and not until she had lit a cigarette and gone inside did he turn slowly back toward his own trailer. He stopped next to his car, got in, sat behind the wheel awhile, got out,
walked to the water again, resumed peering at the horizon. The sky was low, zinc gray and smooth, like sheet metal. A steady southeast wind blew, keeping the water choppy and dark as old, cold coffee.
Finally, Elaine came out on the steps and called his name. He turned and faced her.
“You want supper?” she shouted into the wind.
He shook his head no and turned away from her, and she went quickly inside, closing both doors against the wind.
A little later, when it was nearly dark, Elaine came out again, this time wearing a pink cardigan sweater buttoned to the throat to cover her bare shoulders and the low neckline of the short black dress she wore for work. Wobbling on high heels in the sand, she came up to Bob and asked him for the car keys.
“I’m sick of taking the bus,” she said. “I hate being seen like this five nights a week, and you don’t like anybody from up there giving me a ride home, remember?”
“What’d you do last night?” he said. As if he’d asked an idle question, he pursed his lips and watched a crab at his feet scuttle to the water.
She studied his profile for a second, then said, “Sunday and Monday I’m off, Bob. Remember? I spent the evening at home, talking to the police.”
“This Tuesday?”
“Yes, this is Tuesday. What did you do last night?”
He didn’t answer.
“I said, ‘What did you do last night?’ “
“You know what I did. Where I was,” he said in a thick, sullen voice.
“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t. All I know is you left here early Sunday in the car and you drove back into the yard this morning, and that’s all I know. That’s it. Oh, yes, I know the police met you this morning at Moray Key as you came off the boat. Because they said they would, and if you hadn’t been there, they would have been back here. And I know they thought for a while you were involved with Ave’s drug business, because they said they did. Maybe they still think it. But really, in the end, that’s everything I know about you lately. You, though, you know everything about me. What I do every minute of my life. No surprises. Nothing to sneak up and hit you on the head when you’re not looking. If you told me right now this minute that for the last two days you were smuggling heroin or cocaine or whatever, guns, anything, I’d just say, ‘Oh, so that’s the kind of man he is.’ You could tell me you had a girlfriend in Miami or someplace and spent the last two days in bed with her, and I’d say the same thing. Because I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what kind of man you are, Bob. That’s the truth. You understand that? Somehow it wouldn’t seem so awful to me, so hard to take, if you didn’t know what kind of woman I am. But you do. You know me. And it’s not fair. And it’s hard. Hard. This is not like it used to be with us. And I don’t know where it went from being fair to being unfair. Because I never knew that’s what it was between us, fair. I only knew it after it was gone, after it had been unfair a long time. A long time now. And you know it. Don’t you?”
Continental Drift Page 41
