Russell Banks - Continental Drift

“Yeah, well, I decided we shouldn’t see each other anymore, Marguerite.” There. It’s said. He looks into her eyes hopefully, but they narrow and harden.

She swallows with difficulty, then speaks in a dry, high voice. “You feeling guilty is all. With the new baby and all. And you not being there last night, being with me and all …”

“Well, yeah, of course I’m feeling guilty!” he snaps. “I should, for Christ’s sake. Guilt’s important, you know. It tells you when you’ve done something wrong. And what I’ve been doing lately is wrong. Wrong.”

“No, it ain’t. It just makes you feel all guilty inside, especially right now, with the new baby and all. That don’t mean it’s wrong, Bob. We got to talk this over. We can’t just walk off like this.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “There’s nothing to talk over.”

As if she hasn’t heard him, she brightens slightly and says, “Yeah, we got to do some talking, honey, that’s all. Maybe we take a break, and you just take care of your wife and babies for a while, and don’t worry about me none for a while. Don’t worry about nothing for a while. Then we can do some talking later on.”

“Listen, we can’t.”

She looks into his blue eyes steadily. “You just don’t know what kind of woman I am, do you?”

“Well …”

“And I guess I don’t know what kind of man you are, either.” She extends her right hand toward him, and her eyes fill, and quickly she blinks to cover it and withdraws her hand. “I hafta run,” she says. “I got to work tonight.” She turns abruptly and starts for the door.

“Marguerite.”

She stops but doesn’t turn around. “What you want?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

She leaves at once, yanking the door shut behind her. He stands at the register, staring after her, and when the car passes, he sees the man in the passenger’s seat, sees him clearly. It’s a young man, slumped down in the seat and facing away from Bob and toward Marguerite, who is looking straight ahead. The man has his arm out the open window and is wearing a light blue shirt with geometric designs crisscrossing the billowy sleeve. His hair, Bob sees, is plaited in tiny cornrows from front to back, from forehead to nape of neck, neat, tightly rolled tubes laid parallel to one another and raised against the dark brown skin of his scalp like thick black welts. It’s the kid! It’s Cornrow!

My God, Bob thinks, she knows him, she’s known him all along, and now she’s brought him here ! No wonder she was in such a hurry and didn’t want to come into the store! She must have known he was the same kid who tried to rob the store.

No, she couldn’t, he decides. She couldn’t have known. It’s just an awful coincidence. She’s just giving the kid a ride home or something, they all know each other anyhow, and she’s just giving him a ride home.

But she doesn’t know the kid is a killer, then, a thief. She can’t ! Or she wouldn’t be giving him a ride home. She’s in danger, but she doesn’t know it. By now Bob has got the.38 out from under the cash register and is running wild-eyed toward the door, car keys in hand.

The highway is clogged with cars at this hour, but by weaving between lanes and cutting into openings as they appear in the stop-and-go traffic, Bob is able to get in sight of Marguerite’s red Duster by the time it reaches Eagle Lake, a few miles south of Winter Haven. He falls in line three cars behind hers, turns left onto Route 655 north, bypassing downtown Winter Haven and heading toward Auburndale. He’s never been to her house and knows nothing of the town, so he’s careful not to lose her. At the same time, keeping two and sometimes three cars between them, he’s careful not to be seen by her.

His mind is a stream of thoughts and emotions suddenly thawed and flowing, a gushing, ice-cold torrent that mixes fear for her safety, anger for her having betrayed him, disgust with himself, desire for Eddie’s approval, rage at the boy who wanted his friend to shoot him with a shotgun, and a strangely impersonal, generalized desire for a clarifying act of revenge. If you ask him what offense or crime he wants avenged, he won’t be able to say, but even so, the desire is there, powerful, implacable, righteous and cruel. He will shoot that boy with the fancy hairdo, and he’ll do it in front of Marguerite Dill, too. In front of her father. He’ll just walk up and pull the gun out of his belt and fire point-blank at the kid’s chest. Then he’ll turn around and walk away, maybe call the police and tell them he caught the guy who tried to rob the store last summer, maybe call Eddie and tell him, maybe call Elaine and tell her. Maybe do nothing, just drive on back to the store and open it up again till nine and then go home and see his daughters and go to the hospital and visit his wife and new son — it doesn’t matter what he does afterwards, as long as he has done it, done the one thing that right now needs doing more than any other thing needs doing, which is shooting his gun at the black kid in Marguerite’s car. The knowledge rides high in his chest, bracketed and bolted there like a steel block, an ingot of desire around which the rest of his body and mind and all the time he has left to live and all the time he has lived so far have been organized and ordered. It’s the absolute clarity of the desire that makes it irresistible to him, and now that he’s engaged it, committed himself to its satisfaction, he can’t turn back. He’s in the wind now, in a kind of free-fall, a rushing, exhilarating plummet toward the very ground of his life.

The traffic has diminished somewhat, and they have entered the town of Auburndale, bumped across the railroad tracks that pass through the center of town, driven past the rows of citrus warehouses, on to the outskirts, where the narrow side streets are faced by small, shabby bungalows with low porches, where the streets are dusty and cluttered, yards are packed dirt, slash pine and locust trees are scrawny and tired-looking, and where all the people on the sidewalks and sitting on porch steps and driving home in their cars are black.

Unexpectedly, Marguerite turns left off Polk City Road, and just as the car between her Duster and Bob’s station wagon reaches the intersection, the light turns red, and Bob has to stop. He cranes his neck and watches her reach the end of the block, cross and drive on. Then, about halfway down the second block, her car pulls off the street into a driveway by a small brick house with metal awnings over the windows. He draws his shirt out of his pants and covers the gun handle, and when the light changes, turns left.

By the time he reaches the driveway where Marguerite parked her car, the kid has left. Marguerite is on the cinder-block steps unlocking the door, while behind her, George hugs a grocery bag. Bob peers down the sidewalk past Marguerite’s house and spots the kid jogging along about a block away. Slowing his car in front of Marguerite’s, Bob turns to his right and catches a glimpse of her surprised gaze. Then he passes her and accelerates. She watches after him, one hand shielding her eyes from the dusty yellow glare of the low sun, then shaking her head as if disbelieving her eyes, goes inside.

At the corner, Bob catches up to the kid, who, when the car draws abreast of him, turns, and for the first time, Bob sees the boy’s face up close, and yes, it is the same one, it’s Cornrow, only he’s older than Bob thought, in his twenties, maybe his late twenties, or at least he looks older now, out here on the streets, than he did cowering in the stockroom three months ago. Bob knows it’s the same person. There’s no way he could be mistaken. He recognizes the hair, of course, but also the skin color, the high cheekbones and almost Oriental eyes, the wide, loose mouth and receding chin, and the way he wears his shirt unbuttoned to expose his brown, hairless chest, and his bony frame and the jumpy lope of his stride. He knows this person. He’s had his image burned into his memory, and there’s no way on earth he would not recognize him instantly.