Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Bob leans over to the passenger’s side and calls out the open window. “ Hey! You ! Come here!” He reaches under his shirt and grabs the handle of the gun.

Cornrow stoops a little and peers inside, sees Bob’s twisted face and breaks into a run. He streaks down the sidewalk, passes a market and a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet and darts to the right into a bar.

Dropping the car into first gear, Bob guns the motor and jumps it into the traffic, yanks the wheel and pulls over in front of the same bar. A few people passing by on the sidewalk, startled, stop and watch the white man leap from his car and rush through the door to the bar.

Inside, it’s suddenly dark, and Bob sees only a long counter on the right with human shapes leaning against it and a line of narrow booths along the other side. A small crowd of people is gathered at the rear, and somewhere back there the blat of a television set cuts across the thick noise of a half-dozen male conversations.

Bob stands at the end of the bar, still by the door, next to a pair of middle-aged men silently studying their bottles of beer, and looks down the length of the bar, searching the unknown faces for the known one. But they’re all strangers, old men and young men, a few fat women, all of them ignoring him, going on with their quiet conversations as if they hadn’t noticed the sudden appearance of a breathless white man.

The bartender, a gaunt, extremely tall man with an Afro and wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt, tan Bermuda shorts and red jogging shoes, strolls slowly toward Bob. The customers follow the bartender with their eyes and watch Bob by watching the other man, who leans across the counter and says, as if he knows Bob from somewhere else, “How’re you doin’ today, mister?”

Bob tries to see around the bartender and over the heads of the customers near the bar to the crowd standing at the back. “I’m looking for a kid, he just ran in here.” His eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and he can make out the faces in the rear now. None of them is the face he’s looking for; all of them, the dozen expressionless black and brown male faces looking back at him, are interchangeable.

The bartender puts a toothpick into his mouth. “Ain’t no kid jus’ run in here. No so’s I’d notice. You sure?”

“Yeah, I saw him. I followed him. He came in a few seconds ahead of me. He’s here,” Bob declares.

The man looks silently down at Bob. Then he says, “You a cop, mister? I gotta see some ID.”

“A cop?”

“Yeah.” He switches the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “ ’cause if you ain’t, you probably oughta look somewheres else. If you is, you welcome to look around all you like,” he says, sweeping a long arm over the bar. “But I gotta see me some ID.”

Bob slips his hand under his shirt and rests it against the gun. Now everyone in the bar seems to be staring at him. A wall of large, dark faces peers down the bar at his blue eyes, his peach-colored skin, his brown hair, his long, pointed nose. “Is there a back door?” he asks the bartender. He suddenly hates his own voice, high and thin, effeminate, he thinks, and his clipped, flat, Yankee accent.

“Yes, there is a back door.” The bartender studies him for a second, then smiles wittily. “Maybe you the fire inspector?”

“No, no. I’m just looking for this kid, see, he ran …”

“Ain’t no such kid run in here, no such kid as I seen, anyhow,” he interrupts. Then abruptly he turns away from Bob and walks back down the length of the bar, and everyone else goes back to drinks and conversations.

Startled, suddenly alone again, Bob takes a step backwards, and as if watching himself from a spot located in a high corner of the room, he sees himself pull the gun from under his shirt. Holding the gun in the air next to his head, he aims it at the ceiling. At once, the bar drops into silence, except for the television in the rear, where Dan Rather intones the news. A few men say, “Hey!” and “What the fuck?” and then they see Bob and go silent, waiting. The pair of middle-aged men in front and a few others step back. Everyone watches him, and he watches himself, as if he has just turned into a writhing serpent.

Bob backs to the door and stops. “ Kid !” he yells into the stunned crowd. “I know you’re here! You’re safe now, but not for long! I’m going to get you, kid!” he bellows. “I’m going to get you!” Then he backs through the door to the sidewalk, jams the gun into his belt and runs for his car, leaving everyone in the bar shaken but with something strange to tell about and wonder at for days.

In minutes, Bob pulls up in front of Marguerite’s house. He steps quickly from his car, flings the door shut, strides up the steps and raps loudly on the door. When old George opens the door, Bob walks past him and in. George slowly closes the door behind him, and Marguerite, barefoot, her white uniform unbuttoned at the throat, emerges from the kitchen.

“I thought that was you,” she says flatly. “What you doin’ way over here?”

“Howdy, Mistah Bob,” George says from behind him. “Sit down, sit down, make yourself to home.”

Bob waves the old man away with the back of his hand, and George steps from the room quickly and purposefully, a man with better things to do than hover around a white man he has no particular fondness for.

“I followed you from the store,” Bob announces. He says it as if it were an accusation.

“Yes?”

“I saw who was in your car when you left the store.”

“Did you now? Fancy that.” She pads back to the kitchen and yanks open the refrigerator door. From the grocery bag set on a small, oilcloth-covered table, she pulls out lettuce, tomatoes, frozen lemonade, bologna, and places them one by one in the refrigerator.

“I recognized the kid in your car.”

Marguerite turns and squints her eyes at him. Then she shakes her head slowly from side to side and goes back to putting away her groceries. “That kid,” she says, “is as old as you.”

“Yeah, sure. And I suppose you don’t know how I happen to be able to recognize him.”

“No. And frankly, mister, I don’t know as I care much about all that. I don’t particularly like the way you talking to me. What you got on your mind, anyhow? You didn’t come all the way over here just to tell me you think you know who I give a ride home to. Whyn’t you just let me know what you got on your little mind and stop all this dancing round the subject. All of a sudden you sounding a little too cute to me.”

“That kid in the car. You know ’im?”

“What’s it to you? Who you think you is, my husband?” She takes a step toward him. “What the hell you think you doing? One minute you whining about how you gotta not see me no more ’cause of your wife had a baby, and then you come running in here and start to asking me all about someone I give a ride home to, like you own me or something? Listen, mister, you can just take it somewheres else.” She turns away and folds the emptied bag, folds it carefully, meticulously, along the edges, and slides it between the refrigerator and the stove. “I don’t know,” she says in a low voice, as if to herself. “I just don’t know anymore.” She hides her face from him and stares out the kitchen window, at the back of another small brick house.

“I’m gonna tell you who that kid is,” Bob says. “And I know he’s a kid. He’s no more than twenty or twenty-one — I seen him up close. That kid is the same one who tried to rob the store and got away while I was calling the cops. That kid is the one I shoulda shot, not the other guy. That kid wanted me dead, the other guy didn’t. The kid kept telling the other guy, the guy with the shotgun at my head, to go on and blow me away! Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? That sonofabitch was laughing at the idea of me dead! He kept trying to get the other guy to pull the trigger. The only reason I’m alive now is because the guy with the gun had enough brains or decency or whatever not to pull the trigger. But when I didn’t pull the trigger, when I left that kid lying there in his own shit on the floor, crying like a baby, begging me not to kill him, he turned around and ran away. You know the story. So I end up looking like I don’t have any brains, or else too much decency, which amounts to the same thing nowadays. No. I want that kid.”