Russell Banks - Continental Drift

“Sonofabitch! There’s not any goddamn thing wrong with Ruthie that some steady discipline wouldn’t cure!” Bob smacks the flat of his hand against the counter, and his face tightens and reddens. “You never tell her to cut out that damned thumb-sucking. You just sit around whispering with her about how rotten everything is, and then I come home, and I have to be the bad guy. You tell that fancy counselor down to the school that? It’s no fucking wonder she’s acting retarded!”

“Emotionally disturbed.”

“Emotionally disturbed, then!” He bats the words back. “I can tell you about ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m goddamned disturbed that you go around my back the way you do. The way you always have, too. And you know what the hell I’m talking about, so don’t give me that look. And now with this job business. Jesus H. Christ! And Horace! Horace, that fat pig, that slimy, woman-sniffing pig. I know what that guy’s interested in, don’t worry. And you do too.”

“You sound crazy. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t know what’s important to you anymore, like I used to,” Elaine says sadly. “And I don’t know what you mean, going around behind your back. I’ve never gone around behind your back. I was just waiting until I could tell you, and we don’t talk much any …”

“Like hell!” he shouts into her face. “You know what I’m talking about. You know. You got a memory. You know.”

“No, I don’t.” She backs away from him toward the stove.

He raises and slowly extends his fist toward her. He howls. He howls like a trapped beast, and with both hands he clears the counter of bowls, dishes, kitchen implements, clock.

Elaine’s face has gone all to white, her eyes are wide with fear, and she can’t speak. From the rear of the trailer, the cries of her son start up and rise, and suddenly Elaine finds words and says, “Bob, the baby! The baby!”

But it doesn’t matter what she says, for he can no longer hear her or the baby. He lurches around the tiny, cluttered room like a blindfolded deaf man, sweeping tables and shelves clear, knocking over chairs, sending the television set crashing to the floor, the clock-radio and pole lamp beside the sofa, the floor lamp next to the easy chair, kicking at magazines, jars, ashtrays as they fall.

“Stop! Stop this!” Elaine shrieks at him. “You son of a bitch! You’re wrecking my house!”

For a split second, Bob looks over at his wife, and then, as if what he’s seen has compounded his rage, he turns on the chairs and tables, and grunting, tips onto its stiff, flat back the tattered green sofa. Elaine grabs his sleeve with both hands, and when he swings away from her grasp, her face stiffens, for suddenly she is afraid of him, of his size and force, as if he were of an utterly different species than she and her children, a huge, coarse-bodied beast with a thick hide, like a buffalo or rhinoceros, and berserk, rampaging, maddened, as if by the stings of a thousand bees.

Eyes widened, mouth open and dry, hands in tight little fists against her belly, Elaine slips by him and darts down the hall to the back of the trailer, where her baby is, while Bob continues smashing through the trailer, moving like a storm from the living room into the kitchen, then back along the narrow hallway to the bathroom, where he rips the tin medicine cabinet from the wall and kicks over the rubbish can, yanks the contents of the linen closet to the floor, and then moves on to the bedroom at the end, and when he lurches through the door, he stops, panting, enormous in the small door frame, a giant looking down on tiny beds, dolls, stuffed animals and picture puzzles, building blocks, books and pictures, articles of clothing. He hears sniffling and looks up and sees his wife in the corner of the alcove beyond, behind the crib, with the baby in her arms. And he sees that she expects him to keep on coming, and then he sees what she sees, and he stops.

Bob hears Emma at the screened door off the living room asking in a high, scared voice if she can come inside, and the sounds of Ruthie, poor Ruthie, crying quietly behind her younger sister.

Turning, Bob shuffles slowly back through the wreckage to the front door and lets Emma come inside and then Ruthie, who, as she passes, removes her thumb from her mouth. Neither girl looks at her father.

“Mama?” Emma cries, and Bob hears Elaine call from the back room, “Here! I’m back here with Robbie!” and the two girls run toward her.

He steps outside. The trees are still dripping from the afternoon rain, and shallow puddles glisten white as milk in the yard and roadway ruts. The clouds have passed over the Keys toward the mainland, and the eastern sky, deepening into dark blue as night comes on, pulls from the horizon a large, dark orange half-moon, as if delivering it from old smoke and volcanic ash.

As soon as Bob has driven away, his red-dotted taillights disappearing around the far bend in the road, a man emerges from the trailer across the road. He’s a middle-aged man with a beer belly tightly encased in a sleeveless undershirt, barefoot with skinny legs sticking out below khaki trousers cut off at the knees. He stands in the middle of the road, snaps his fingers for his dog, which emerges obediently from under the trailer, and looks cautiously in the direction taken by Bob’s car and then over toward Bob’s darkened, now silent trailer.

Allie Hubbell, too, has come outside and stands in her yard, peering into the darkness of the road where Bob has gone. “Horace? That you?” she calls to the man.

“Yeah.”

“Some kinda ruckus.”

“I’d say so.”

“She all right, do y’ know?”

“Sonofabitch can do what he wants to his own stuff, but he better not ruin anything of mine, I’ll tell ya,” he says.

“You think we better check on Elaine?”

“Elaine?”

“Yeah. Maybe just to check, you know?”

“Naw,” he says, rubbing his grizzled chin. “You don’t wanta go buttin’ into other people’s fights. Sonofabitch better not’ve banged up any of my stuff, though, I’ll tell ya. I had some kids there once that punched a buncha holes in the walls one night when they was drunk.”

“Maybe we better just go on over and check on Elaine, make sure she’s okay.” Allie takes a step off the grass onto the road.

“Naw. She can always call the cops on the bastard if she’s scared of him. Besides, he ain’t the type to shoot or cut anybody. He might knock her around a little, but he ain’t the violent type.”

“You think so?”

“Oh, yeah,” Horace says, and he turns and starts heading back to his own trailer. “Men can tell these things about each other,” he says. “He’s harmless. Just screwed up is all. See you later,” he says, and goes inside.

Allie stands by the road for several moments, arms crossed below her breasts, hands cupping her elbows. Then she turns and slowly walks back to her trailer, where she sits down on the stoop and smokes a cigarette and watches Bob’s trailer until the lights come on inside it. Then she stands, opens the door and goes in.

6

By the time Bob crosses from Upper Matecumbe to Moray Key, it’s dark, and the shrimpers are already out, dozens of them leaning over the rail of the catwalk along the bridge, men, women and children with lanterns hung from the catwalk and long-handled dip nets stuck down into the channel. Bob drives by barely noticing them and does not remember that a few hours earlier he was planning to join the shrimpers tonight. Without intending it, without particularly desiring it, almost without being aware of it, he has momentarily severed the connection between his past and his future. During this moment and the several that will immediately follow, Bob is floating free of time, a man without memories and without plans, like an infant, conscious only of the immediate present. If you stop him and ask where he is going on this tropical winter’s eve, he’ll blink and look down the hood of his car at the piles of sand, cinder block and steel, and recognizing the marina and the apartment building beside it and the Clam Shack, he’ll say, “To Moray Key.” If, when he parks the car in the lot behind the apartment building, you ask him where on the key he’s going, he’ll blink again, and noting that his car is next to Avery Boone’s van, he’ll say, “To Ave’s.” And if, as he climbs the narrow iron stairs to the second floor and pauses on the terrace before Ave’s door and raises his hand to knock, you ask him what business he has with his old friend and new partner Avery Boone on this lovely, breezy, moonlit evening, he’ll blink a third time, hold his hand in the air and say, “Why, no business at all.”