Russell Banks: Continental Drift

Across the street, Pearl, one forearm curled protectively over her large chest, has stepped outside to the sidewalk. “Bob?” she calls. “That you?” Her voice is uncharacteristically small and frightened. She keeps the door behind her open, one hand on it in case she has to retreat quickly.

Bob stops himself and peers through the falling snow to the woman across the street. “Yeah. It’s me.”

“You okay, Bob?” She lets go of the door and it closes slowly.

Bob sighs heavily and lets his hands fall to his sides. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

“You want someone to drive you home, Bob? You had a few too many?”

“No, I’m okay. I’m not drunk,” he says. “Just pissed.”

Pearl watches him silently and carefully, as if he were a dangerous animal with a leg in a trap.

“ Pissed !” he says with a laugh.

“What’re you doing?”

He laughs again, a hard, humorless laugh. “What am I doing? That’s a good question.” Then, suddenly serious, he says, “You don’t understand, Pearl. No one knows what I mean. About anything. No one.”

“You okay? You want me to get one of the boys inside to drive you home?”

Yes, yes, he’s okay, and no, he doesn’t need anyone to drive him home, he knows the way. He waves her off, as if she were foolish, and gets into the car and starts the motor. As soon as he turns the ignition key, the windshield wipers, still switched on, come to life and clatter bumpily across the shattered windshield glass. Ignoring the noise, Bob drops the car into gear, backs slowly uphill away from the pickup, then pulls out to the street and heads down the hill toward the river, where he turns left toward home.

Pearl shakes her head and walks back inside to the bar. She’s seen this kind of explosion a hundred times before, not usually this early on a Friday night, though, and never with Bob Dubois doing the exploding. But he wasn’t really exploding, she thinks, blowing out of control like some of those guys do when they’ve been drinking and talking mean for hours, suddenly getting physical and smashing everything in sight. No, the way he walked around his car, pounding and breaking the windows one after the other, was methodical and almost calm. He said he wasn’t drunk, and except for the fact that he was breaking the windows of his own car, he didn’t seem to be drunk. It was strange. It’s the quiet ones, she thinks. They’re the guys you have to watch. But she’s never thought of Bob Dubois as the quiet type. He’s a gregarious man, by and large, generally cheerful and talkative, a man with an eye for the women, she thinks, a man who can please women, too, because he talks one way, kind of reckless and sexy, and behaves another, polite and restrained, so that the woman is left free to get a little excited without being afraid of leading him on too fast, and that way, in the end, when she decides to invite him upstairs for a drink or whatever, she thinks that she has made the decision freely. She thinks it’s her decision, not his.

Two of the side windows are shattered completely, the others merely cracked. Hundreds of tiny cubes and chunks of glass lie scattered across the seats and floor. Silvery nebulae spattered over the windshield and rear window and the remaining side windows obscure Bob’s vision as he drives, and a cold, snowy wind blows through the car, swirling around his face and chilling his bare hands. He clutches the steering wheel as if afraid he will fall over. To keep the car from slipping and skidding on the slick surface of the streets, he feathers the brake and gas pedal. Between the top of the dashboard and the windshield the wind steadily builds a small, powdery ridge of snow that the heater can’t melt. It’s dark, except for occasional streetlights, and no cars pass him either way. Bob feels he’s riding in a horse-drawn wagon somewhere in Siberia, as if he were being carted late at night from one prison to another. That’s how he pictures himself, a passive man, inert and shackled, huddled in straw against the cold and snow in the back of an open cart clattering over icy ruts behind a sick old horse. The horse is driven by a pair of stone-faced guards, brutal-looking men who speak an unknown language in grumbling voices, who seem not to know the name of the man they are hauling, or his crime. The guards, though peasants, are specialists in transporting prisoners from one place of confinement to another. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these silent, impassive transporters with their wagons and tired old horses, men whose ultimate purpose is to keep the prisoners moving, keep them in transit from one cold, isolated place to another, so that at no time will all the prisoners have to be accommodated, housed, fed.

The snow, dry and light, flutters to the earth from a low, dark blue sky, blanketing the roadway and muffling the blows of the horse’s hooves against the layers of ice and hardened snow beneath, hushing the creak of the wheels of the cart and cushioning the ride through the town. Silver strings of smoke curl upward from chimneys to the sky. Now and then, light from a window peers across a soft gray yard to the road, but there are no signs that the inhabitants of the town know or care that a new prisoner has arrived. Dubois wants to stand in the back of the cart, to raise his fists and shout, “I’m here ! I’m … here !” but the chains on his wrists and ankles hold him down, forcing him to turn in on himself, as if to warm his cold body before a tiny, carefully tended fire located at the center of his chest.

3

When Bob Dubois enters the house, his wife Elaine is sitting in the living room on the couch watching Hart to Hart on TV. She’s wearing her flannel nightgown, pink quilted housecoat, and slippers shaped like pink acrylic mounds, and in her hair, large blue plastic curlers. She doesn’t look up when her husband enters but goes on watching TV as if she were still alone.

Quietly, Bob shuts the outside door behind him, locks it, shucks his coat and cap and tosses them onto a basket of dirty laundry in the front hall, then walks slowly into the living room, where he drops his body like a sack of potatoes into the slipcovered armchair. It, like the couch, is aimed at the television set, a large console color set placed against the wall opposite the rest of the furniture in the room. To the left of the TV is a skinny, gaudily decorated Christmas tree, its lights going on and off like channel markers. At the base of the tree a half-dozen brightly wrapped packages have been arranged with care, spread out from the trunk of the tree so as to give the impression of plenitude.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Bob says in a low voice, apologizing to the TV screen. His face is red and puffy, his blue eyes are still wet and his nose is running freely. With shoulders slumped forward and hands hanging limply between his legs like pendulums, the man looks like a thrashed and deserted dog.

Sitting back stiffly but still watching Mr. and Mrs. Hart get dressed for a party, Elaine says, “Did you get the skates?” It’s an accusation, not a question. She’s a small woman, almost tiny, with a handsome head, especially in profile. Her sharp Roman nose and crisp chin clarify a face that’s otherwise ordinary and vague, made so by Elaine herself, because, despite what everyone has told her, she doesn’t think she’s especially pretty and works at hiding her face from other people’s scrutiny.

Silent for a few seconds, Bob finally says, “No. I didn’t get the fucking skates.”

“Oh,” she answers, and then, without looking away from the TV, she touches her hair curlers, as if suddenly frightened, strokes the several strands of reddish-brown hair that lick the nape of her neck, quickly lowers her hands and locks them around her knees. “So, where’d you go? Since work.”