Russell Banks - Continental Drift

“Yeah.”

Ave takes a sip from his drink. “We gotta talk soon, Bob,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’ve been going out — what — three, four half days a week, maybe a full day now and then?”

“Yeah. Now and then.”

“This time of year, we should be booked solid three weeks in advance, seven days a week.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s the recession, I guess,” Bob says in a low voice. “The fucking Arabs.”

“How’re you making it, buddy?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Dollar-wise.”

“Oh, okay,” Bob says. “Fine, actually. Listen, I gotta get home. Ruthie’s been sick.”

“Okay, sure. We’ll talk, though, right?”

“Yeah, sure. We’ll talk,” Bob says, and he slides back into the car, closes the door and slowly drives away, out the sandy, unpaved lane toward the highway, past the piles of steel rods and mesh, cinder blocks, sand and building materials stacked for the second condominium building. The developers from Miami have plans for a half-dozen buildings, forty apartments to a building, and a shopping center, a much improved and enlarged marina and restaurant, a nightclub, a nine-hole golf course, until the entire island has been stripped and laid out, covered over from the bay to the gulf with buildings, pavement and small plots of cropped grass kept fresh and minty green by slowly turning sprinklers.

Bob turns left onto Route 1, crosses the bridge onto Upper Matecumbe, and a few miles down the road, just south of Islamorada, turns right onto a bumpy dirt road not much wider than a path. He drives through clumps of shrubby saw palmetto trees and bitterbrush for a quarter mile, to a clearing near the water, where he parks his car in front of one of three rusting, flaking house trailers situated on cinder blocks in no discernible relation to one another or the landscape. All three trailers have tall, wobbly-looking rooftop television antennas with guy wires staked to the ground. Scattered around the trailers are several rusted car chassis, old tires, tossed-out kitchen appliances, children’s toys and bicycles, a broken picnic table, a dinghy on sawhorses with a huge, ragged hole in it, a baby carriage with three wheels.

When Bob gets out of his car, a mangy German shepherd tied on a short rope to a cinder block under one corner of the trailer across the road stands and barks ferociously. Leaning down, Bob picks up a small chunk of coral rock and tosses it feebly in the direction of the dog, and the animal slinks back to the trailer and crawls underneath it.

A paunchy, middle-aged woman sitting on the stoop of the third trailer drawls, “Don’t let ol’ Horace catch you doin’ like that, Bob. He’d as soon you tossed rocks at his wife instead of his dog.” She’s wearing a wavy ash-blond wig, a pink cotton halter, and aqua shorts that cut into the flesh of her thighs. She’s smoking a cigarette and sits spread-legged, her elbows on her knees, a king-sized can of Colt 45 on the step next to her. “Hot,” she says. “Ain’t it.”

“Yeah, for January.”

“Inside, I mean. Wait’ll you go in. Elaine and the girls, all of ’em, they went swimming up the beach early, so your place’s been closed up all morning.”

Bob thinks, That’s good; he’ll be alone. He can drink a cold beer, maybe make himself a sandwich and take a nap. The trailer is small, thirty-three by ten feet, with one bedroom in the back and a closet-sized cubicle off it for Bob junior, or Robbie, as they’ve started calling him. Bob and Elaine sleep in the living room on a convertible sofa, and from the foot of the sofa, when it’s pulled into a bed, Bob can reach over the kitchen counter and open the refrigerator, turn on the propane stove, run water in the sink.

“She say when they was coming back?” Bob asks the woman, whose name is Allie Hubbell. She’s divorced, makes her living selling beadwork and shell jewelry to tourist shops along the Keys, lives alone and sometimes reminds Bob of his old New Hampshire girlfriend, Doris Cleeve, although Allie is about ten years older and, according to Elaine, may be a lesbian. “Why else would a nice, attractive woman her age live like that, all alone?” Elaine said impatiently, as if offering him a self-evident truth. Lots of reasons, Bob wanted to answer, but he didn’t say anything, because he was thinking of Doris Cleeve.

Bob doesn’t know why Allie brings back to his mind the image of Doris, sharp memories of those brief, heated visits to her dingy, small flat above Irwin’s bar in Catamount, unless it’s because, to him, both women seem to be waiting for another kind of life to come to them. Their good-natured passivity pleases Bob, and he almost envies them for it, as if it were a kind of wisdom they possess. This mixture in him of pleasure and near-envy was what lay behind his sexual attraction to Doris, and it works on him as well with Allie. It’s an easy attraction to resist (though he’s never resisted it), for there’s almost no erotic power to it, none of the deep, frightening curiosity that fed his hunger for Marguerite, none of the wonderful fear that the woman might expose him to depths and sides of himself that he does not know exist.

“No, she didn’t say when she’d be back, but probably not till late, what with the heat and all. Horace give ’em a ride up,” Allie says.

“Hah,” Bob says. “Nice of him.”

Allie smiles knowingly. “You don’t hafta worry none about Horace. He talks big and makes lotsa noise when it comes to women, but that’s all. Besides,” she says, “you and Horace ain’t in the same league. You got class, he’s … well, you know.”

“Yeah. He’s the kinda guy who calls this junkyard of his a trailer park,” Bob says, sweeping his hand in a half circle around him. “Some park.”

Allie has removed her wig and placed it on the step next to her can of beer, where it looks like a sleeping, long-haired pet. “Thing’s hot, like wearing one of them ski hats.” Her hair is cut short, is straight and black, streaked with gray.

“You got good hair, Allie. You oughta let people see it.”

“Think so?” She brushes the nape of her neck with one hand, reaches for the beer with the other. “Makes me look older’n I already am, is what I think.”

“Naw. Makes you look more sophisticated.”

“Think so, eh? Sophisticated.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bob says, backing away from his door and stepping to the ground. “Horace and his wife around?” he asks, peering over at the battered, junk-crowded trailer across the lane. The dog has crawled out from under the trailer again, and with his snout between his front paws, watches Bob carefully. The air is still, and the saw palmetto trees droop in the heat. Beyond Allie’s trailer, the pale limestone ledge of the key drops off directly into the water, where, from the shore to nearly a quarter mile out, coral heads emerge at low tide, dripping and alive with sea urchins and hermit crabs. The tide is coming in now, but the water rises slowly, without waves, like a bathtub being filled, and one by one the dark clumps of coral get swallowed by a tepid, dark green sea. In the distance along the southern horizon, gray-topped cumulus clouds heap up against the sky and promise rain by nightfall.

Allie flicks her cigarette butt onto the sand in front of her, then runs her fingers through her short hair, loosening and lifting it. “No, they both went out this morning, when Horace give your wife and kids a ride to the beach. Ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”

Bob has crossed the lane from his trailer and has approached to within a few feet of Allie, when he stops short, crosses his arms over his chest and says, “You remind me of an old girlfriend of mine. A real nice woman, she was. Probably still is.”