Russell Banks - Continental Drift

“Knew what?” Bob asks, because what the hell could she know from that piece of information, except the facts, and why does she keep calling him “man,” and where does she get off talking all the time in front of Ave and him when they haven’t seen each other for over three years and obviously have a lot to talk about, and why does Ave just kind of smile and lean back with his hands folded behind his head and watch the girl rattle on, as if he thought she was the most interesting person he’s ever met, although Bob does have to admit that she is sexy, with that huge pile of orange curly hair bushing out from a tiny face, and high cheekbones and tight wide mouth, flared nostrils and pale green eyes and shapely breasts, braless and pointing good-naturedly from behind a tie-dyed tee shirt, and tanned, muscular legs, tight and smooth, practically leaping out at him from dark green gym shorts, which she wears without underpants, so that when she sits cross-legged on the sofa, as she is now, Bob can see light brown pubic hairs and a neat little vertical roll of vaginal fat, which of course excites him sexually and makes him pay much closer attention to what she is saying than he might otherwise pay.

The kids, Emma and Ruthie, seem to be fond of Honduras, and though Emma was only a baby when Avery left New Hampshire on the Belinda Blue , and Ruthie only pretends to remember him, they both treat him as if he were a favorite uncle, which is as he prefers it and the model he adheres to anyhow, expressing eager interest in Ruthie’s schoolyard adventures and Emma’s toys, while Honduras rattles on in the living room with Bob, telling him, as people in their late teens and early twenties are wont to do, what kind of person she really is, something Bob feels incapable of doing, so that her doing it, telling him that she’s the kind of person who can’t stand dishonesty in a lover, the kind of person who loves to travel, the kind of person who thinks a lover should not have to tell everything he or she knows about him- or herself, the kind of person who believes in privacy, the kind of person who needs to have a sense of belonging somewhere, the kind of person who thinks everyone should be encouraged to discover the life he or she was meant to live, all subjects of interest to Bob — love, truth, destiny — nevertheless, her talking this way finally irritates him, and he says so. “You’re too young to know anything about yourself,” he says. “If you got any brains at all, you’d know the only thing you can know about yourself is nothing, which is what it’s taken me till now to find out,” a pronouncement that Honduras says is “Far out, Bob, that’s really very far out, you are really a very together person,” she says. “No shit, a really very together person.” And so when she asks if it’s okay to smoke a joint, he says sure, why not, and when she lights up and passes him the joint, he takes a long hit, and when Avery strolls loosely into the room, passes him the joint, which Avery smokes the rest of the way down, causing Honduras to roll another joint for her and Bob, and when that’s gone, Bob lays his head back on the couch next to Honduras’s head, looks over at her green eyes, her long, blond lashes and dark eyebrows, and he smiles and says, “I really like you, Honduras,” to which she responds by sitting up perkily and poking him on the point of his doggy nose with a fingertip, because she knows that this is not the time to encourage Bob Dubois, not with his two little girls in the back bedroom watching TV and his old friend and her lover Avery Boone rummaging through the kitchen in search of something to eat and Bob’s wife and new baby in the hospital waiting for Bob to get there before the end of visiting hours…. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to go to the hospital, isn’t that what you said when you came in? Or is that what those people told us, the fat guy and his funny wife, what’s their name?”

Bob says Skeeter, and they all laugh, but then he remembers his promise to Elaine and his new son, so he gratefully accepts Honduras’s offer to baby-sit while he and Avery go to the hospital, an offer made, Honduras says, only because she knows she’ll see the new baby and meet Bob’s wife tomorrow when they come home from the hospital.

“All the pieces in this puzzle,” she says, “are falling together.” She looks up appealingly at the two men, who stand side by side at the door, and she spins on her butt, leans back on the arm of the couch, spreads her legs provocatively toward them and throws her head back, exposing her long white throat to them. “When you see Elaine,” she says, “you tell her that I’m taking care of the girls and the house for her till she gets back. Tell her I love her and her new baby, and I love her daughters too, and I love her husband too. Tell her … oh, you’ll know what to tell her,” she says, suddenly laughing. “ Incredible ,” she says. “Really in credible. ”

Bob leaves first, feeling a little dizzy, and Avery follows, though once outside, Avery takes the lead, and they are soon inside his van, heading north toward Winter Haven on Route 17. This is an experience, riding in a customized van, new to Bob, and to his surprise, he finds that he enjoys it. It’s a rather deliberately sensual experience, what with the carpeting, the padded swivel seats, the flicking lights of the dash and the CB scanner, the lush throb of an Earth, Wind & Fire tape on the stereo. “This is something ,” Bob says. “Really something ”.

He gives the directions, telling Avery where to turn right and left, and then, because the easy parts are coming more easily than he’d expected, Bob decides to try the hard part and tell Avery the truth about his life, so he says to him, “Ave, a lot’s happened to me lately. I’m in trouble, but you got to hear me out. There’s nobody else I can talk to.”

Avery nods silently; it’s an old ritual, he knows: you don’t say anything, not when the speech and its subject have been formally announced like this. You just nod and shut up and listen.

“Okay, first off,” Bob says, “a few months ago, I went and shot a nigger, a guy trying to rob the store, Eddie’s store. That’s one piece of information.”

Ave purses his lips and lets out a long, low-toned whistle.

“Then you oughta know that for the last six months or so, I been sleeping with a woman, a girlfriend, I guess you’d call her, not a ‘lover,’ really. And she’s a black woman. A nurse,” he adds.

“A black woman. No shit.”

“Yeah. But that’s not really the important thing about her. Anyhow, I blew the relationship today, I was kind of breaking it off with her, you know, because of the new baby and all, and I was feeling guilty and complicated about the whole thing, but I just wanted to pull back a little, to ease up while I thought things out …”

Avery interrupts to ask if Bob is in love with this woman, “this black woman,” and Bob says yes, he is in love with her, but he doesn’t know how much he’s willing to give up for that. But the real problems aren’t there, he goes on. The real problems grow out of this robbery somehow, when he shot one of the guys and let the other guy escape and then unexpectedly spotted him this afternoon, or thought he spotted him, the guy who escaped, with Marguerite …

“The black woman? Your girlfriend?”

Right, Bob says, repeating her name so he won’t have to keep going through this “black woman” business, which is starting to irritate him, though he’s not sure why. He plows on with his story, telling Avery about his having chased Cornrow to the bar and the confrontation there and the one in Marguerite’s living room, his sudden realization that he was likely to kill somebody for no good reason and his decision to deliver the gun to Eddie, since it was his gun anyhow, and then his decision, when Eddie insisted on his keeping the gun at the store, to quit his job.