Russell Banks: Continental Drift

Reaching forward, the salesman places one hand on Bob’s shoulder. “You’ll have to do this tomorrow,” he says firmly.

Bob wrenches his shoulder away from the man’s hand, but the man ignores the gesture and simply walks off. “Hey!” Bob calls. “Hey, pal! You know what?”

The man stops and turns warily back.

“You know what? I don’t want your damn Sears and Roebuck ice skates! Your twenty-dollar specials! I want something better than that! Custom-made, maybe.”

“We’re closed,” the man says in a low voice.

“Better. I want something better .”

“I’m sorry,” the man says, and again he turns away.

Bob looks at the bald spot on the back of the man’s head. Bald as a baby’s behind, he thinks, and suddenly he remembers deciding never to strike his wife and children, remembers it as if it were a precise fall of light or an odor, when instead it was a complex, clearly defined event that occurred one Sunday afternoon two summers ago, when he and Elaine took Ruthie and Emma out fishing on Lake Sunapee.

Bob had pictured the day differently: a family outing in which Dad teaches the older child to fish; he catches a half-dozen small-mouth bass and she catches a perch or sunfish and is excited and grateful; Mom looks on proudly; Baby coos and plays with her fat fingers. But instead, the bass weren’t biting and the mosquitoes were, Ruthie thought fishing was a pointless activity and Elaine had to struggle to keep Emma, barely two that summer and downright annoyed with the project, from falling out of the boat. Though the sun was hot and the lake windless and still, they’d all dressed as if for a cool, breezy day on the water. By ten o’clock in the morning, after less than a half hour of it, they were sweating and wrinkled inside long-sleeved shirts, trousers, caps and jackets. First Bob and then Ruthie stripped to their tee shirts and jeans. A little later, Elaine pulled off her jacket and jersey and sat in the stern in bra and Bermuda shorts, and keeping an eye out for passersby, took off all Emma’s clothing.

Finally, Bob gave up trying to fish, and to everyone’s relief, started to pack his gear in. He raised anchor and after five or six tries, got the motor started and headed the boat toward shore. All the way in, he sat in the stern and studied his family, their bodies: Ruthie’s stalk-like neck and large, dark, blossomy head, her narrow back and arms like twigs, her knobby knees, hard legs and long, bony feet — the body of a thoroughbred filly, it seemed to him, long and awkward now, a little brittle, but filled with promise of beauty, grace and power; and Emma’s cherubic pink roundness, her smooth lumps of flesh, all spheres, moons and fruit, and creases where they joined, and her hair, blond and silky, laid over her crown in thin, spiraling loops — to Bob, she had the nearly shapeless, compressed body of a puppy, foolishly good-natured, utterly unconscious of its fragility; and Elaine’s short, compact body, her muscular arms and freckled shoulders, her breasts, firm and, for a small woman, large and succulent-looking, her straight back and flat belly, her sturdy, lightly haired legs — Bob thought of the burro that carried Jesus into Jerusalem, a white one, large-eyed and sweet-tempered, diligent, patient, hardy and humble, but pretty too, a slightly glamorous version of an anciently rudimentary type.

All the way in to shore, Ruthie, seated forward near the bow, looked impatiently toward land, as the pine and spruce trees grew larger and more detailed and familiar, while Emma, her naked ass in the air, scrambled about on the flat bottom of the boat, and Elaine, eyes jammed shut, shoved her face, shoulders and chest toward the glow of the sun, until finally the boat scraped the gravelly bottom, and Ruthie jumped out and drew the bow onto land. Elaine scooped up Emma and stepped gingerly to shore and set the naked child on the grass.

Suddenly alone, Bob sat in the stern of the boat, and for an instant he saw these three female bodies in all their transience and fragility, their awful availability to pain and destruction. He was terrified for them, and he swore to himself that he would never strike their bodies, that he would never raise his stony male bulk and iron-hard strength against them. Then, at the same instant, he felt bubbling from deep within his chest a dark hatred for the very vulnerability he was swearing never to offend. He despised it.

Bob studies the bald spot on the back of the salesman’s head. There’s tissue, thin, pink skin, then eggshell bone, then fleshy brain, he thinks. And that’s it. That’s all there is between everything and nothing. “I’m sorry,” he says in a low voice. “Hey, really, I’m sorry, pal. There’s nothing wrong with Sears, you understand. Nothing. I like Sears. Shop here all the time. It’s just … it’s just that …”

The salesman has disappeared behind a tepee of skis stacked on their ends and has started to close out his register.

Bob’s face twists on its axis, a big, square-faced man writhing on the pole of his own pain. He lets his hands flop uselessly at his sides. “I want … I want … I want …” This isn’t going right; everything’s coming out wrong. He’s supposed to be talking nicely to this salesman, conning him, getting a good buy, a floor model with scuffs selling for wholesale, the way Eddie always gets things for his kid, one-third off and just as good as new, better, even, because new costs too much. Why can’t he make this salesman like him?

From beyond the skis, the man calls, “They’re locking the doors now!”

Bob says nothing, just stands there as if he were a mannequin.

The salesman peeks around the skis and sees Bob hasn’t left yet. “Come back tomorrow if you want skates!” he shouts, as if he thinks Bob is hard of hearing or maybe simple-minded.

“Tomorrow?” Slowly Bob’s face breaks into a grin, and he laughs, once. “Hah! Tomorrow, It’ll be the same tomorrow,” he says. Still grinning, he takes a step forward, as if to explain. “What I want is …”

“Look, you better get outa here or I’ll hafta call the manager.”

Bob stops, and quietly, somberly, he says, “I’m sorry. I just … I’m sorry.” Turning, he slowly walks away, plods past the copper-toned refrigerators and stoves, the pastel-colored washers and dryers, and up the stairs to street level. A janitor jangling a huge ring of keys lets him out to the sidewalk, where it’s snowing heavily. No one else is on the sidewalks, though cars occasionally pass sloppily by on Main Street. Jamming his hands into his jacket pockets, Bob lowers his head against the flying snow and quickly walks the two blocks to his car on Depot Street.

He stands on the slippery sidewalk next to his station wagon, now a long white mound, and stares at the bar across the street, studies the small red neon sign flashing Irwin’s name at him like a beacon through the falling snow, then gazes up at the darkened blank windows of Doris’s apartment. His bear-like head droops, and glancing at the salt-covered pickup truck, cold and empty, still parked in front of his car, as if deserted in an old war, he looks down Depot Street toward the cannery and the river, and then back up Depot Street to Main. This is his whole world. He knows every square inch of its surface. For a second he studies the candy canes dangling from the lampposts, when all of a sudden, without a thought of it, he doubles up his right fist and holds it out in front of him, as if he were holding a hammer, or as if it were a hammer itself. His left hand remains in his jacket pocket, relaxed and warm, but his right hand is a fist raised against and extended toward the night, and he brings it heel-first swiftly down, smashing it against the windshield on the passenger’s side. The blow shatters the outer layer of glass and sends silvery cobwebs across the windshield, the force of the blow spraying the snow in fantails, clearing the windshield instantly. Again, he brings the heel of his fist down, and again, until he has filled the windshield entirely with spiderwebs of broken glass. Then he attacks the side windows, and the snow shudders and falls like a heavy curtain to the street. First he hits the front window on the passenger’s side, then the back, then the rear window, until he has worked his way around to the other side of the station wagon, where he makes his way forward to the driver’s window, pounding as he goes, as if trying to free a child trapped inside.