Russell Banks - Continental Drift

For a second, as Bob turns off Highway 27 a few miles south of Oleander Park, he forgets why he’s done this, why he’s left his home and family at four in the morning and driven north across Florida for five hours. He knows where he is and recognizes the roads, marshy lakes, trailer parks, palmettos, orange groves, recognizes the acrid smell of the citrus-processing plants, the signs pointing with excitement to Cypress Gardens, the Water Skiing Hall of Fame, Disney World, recognizes on his left the Lake Grassey trailer park and back on Tangelo Lane the blue trailer he owned for close to a year, and recognizes the white cinder-block building out on Route 7 where he worked and where he shot one black man and chased after the other. The windows are covered with sheets of plywood now, the store blinded and abandoned by the side of the road. He sees the road to Auburndale, where Marguerite Dill and her father live, and his chest suddenly fills with a mixture of shame, nostalgia and longing that momentarily frightens and confuses him. Then he recognizes the turnoff to the country club, and he remembers Eddie’s birthday party, the way he saw himself then, poor, stupid, clumsy and inept.

Finally, as he approaches Eddie’s house, low and dark, with an acre of lime-green lawn in front, a plain of slate-gray lake behind it, he remembers why he has come here. He’s come to provide aid and comfort to his elder brother, simply to be present in the man’s time of troubles. He knows there’s little he can do or say, but he believes that his presence will be helpful, that together they will be able to remember who they are and will in that way be able to withstand the awful pressures of the moment. He believes, too, that Eddie will help him as much as he will help Eddie.

Bob is not angry anymore, and he’s not worried. He knows Eddie will be all right as soon as he sees his younger brother’s face, sees that Bob has raced through the Florida night and cold, gray, rainy morning to be at his side, to be family, the Granite Skates, the two of them against the rest of the world. They’ll hug each other, Eddie will gruffly welcome him in, and they’ll sit down, maybe at the huge dining room table, where they’ll drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and discuss possible solutions to these problems, both their problems, and now and then they’ll remember something amusing or touching from their childhood, and they’ll laugh a little.

Bob will tell Eddie about Ave and about Honduras, and maybe he’ll tell him about what happened years ago between Ave and Elaine and how it still bothers him. He’ll tell him about his money problems and about Ruthie’s emotional problems, and he’ll let his brother know what a fool he was last night. He’ll tell about Marguerite, too, at last, and what she meant to him and how confused loving her became for him because she was black. Everything will be made clear in the telling.

He’ll admit that Ave fooled him, though not deliberately, into thinking he could make good money by selling his trailer in Oleander Park and buying into the Belinda Blue . They’ll curse the Republicans and the Democrats, Reagan and Carter, and blame the recession and the Arabs for the falloff in the tourist trade. Bob will even tell his brother about Doris Cleeve back in Catamount and the night he saw his life there for what it was and decided to trade it for another. And he’ll tell Eddie how his feelings toward Elaine have changed, how, even though she does nothing wrong that he can point to, she still manages to make him feel guilty all the time, which he never used to feel, even when he was now and then sleeping with Doris Cleeve, an act no better or worse than fucking Honduras last night or falling for Marguerite last summer. He’s no different from the way he’s always been, he’ll say to Eddie, and yet now he goes around feeling guilty all the time, especially toward Elaine and the kids.

Eddie will understand, and there’s probably a lot of it that Eddie will be able to explain away. And by the same token, there’s probably a lot in Eddie’s life that’s just as confusing to him, things that Bob will be able to explain for him. Bob will know what to say when Eddie tells him how he got himself into debt to people he never should have borrowed money from. He’ll know how to reassure his brother that he did everything a man could to make Sarah happy and that her desertion of him now is an act that should never be forgiven. Bob will tell him not to worry about losing his daughter, you never lose your children, no matter what. They eventually discover the truth about you, and they come back, he’ll say. Bob will tell Eddie he can start over. He’s only thirty-three years old, a young man, and he’s smart and energetic. His epilepsy will get better as soon as the pressure on his daily life has eased.

They’ll come up with a plan, two plans, one for Eddie and one for Bob, and by God, then they’ll crack open a bottle of Scotch or maybe Canadian Club, and they’ll drink the sonofabitch dry, talking about the old days, remembering their parents, growing up in Catamount, the house they were raised in, the winter days they skipped school together and played hockey with the American Legion guys down on the river, the way their father used to snore, the way their mother constantly nagged them to go to church early with her and then, when they did, told them to go to late mass on their own because they made her so nervous with their fooling around and whispering that she was too distracted to pray. They’ll remember everything together!

Parking the car before the closed garage door, Bob gets out and runs under the rain across the lawn to the front entrance and pushes the doorbell. A new pink Lincoln driven by a woman wearing a pink pillbox hat and veil sloshes past and turns into the driveway of the pink stucco house next door. The garage door lifts automatically, and the pale car slides into the darkness, and the door descends.

Bob pushes the brass button again. Maybe he’s asleep, Bob thinks, and he holds the button in until it sounds angry to him, or worried.

He pushes the doorbell a third time, with no response from beyond the thick oak door, and it occurs to Bob that Eddie may have driven into town or gone to his office early, though he’s not sure Eddie even has an office anymore, or a car. The liquor store is closed, the store in Lakeland never even opened, his birthday boat is gone, either sold or repossessed, and Eddie said that the house was about to go too.

Stepping from the doorway into the rain again, Bob jogs across the lawn and around his car to the garage. He tries the door, and discovering that it’s locked, hunches his shoulders against the downpour, steps to the side of the building and peers through the small, dark window there. The first bay, where Sarah used to park her Celica, is empty, but in the gloom beyond it, Bob sees Eddie’s white Eldorado, which looks unexpectedly huge and vulgar to him. He recalls the white Chrysler he thought Ted Williams owned. Eddie, he thinks, doesn’t really have much class. Then he sees his brother inside the car, his curly blond head laid back on the headrest as if he were sleeping. The windows are all up, the doors closed, and rags have been jammed along the bottom of the garage door. Putting his ear close to the pane of glass, blocking his other ear against the sound of the spattering rain, Bob hears the motor running, and only then does he see the hose that leads from the tailpipe over the fender and through the rear corner window, and the tape sealing the opening around it, and he knows that he’s come too late, his brother is dead.

Bob’s hand is bleeding; he cut it when he smashed the window with his fist. Eddie’s body is lying on the cement floor of the garage, the wide, two-bay door is open, and Bob stands beside it, sucking in the fresh, moist air, while the rain splashes down on the driveway before him, on the dark green roof and hood of his old Chevy wagon, on the thick, freshly cropped lawn and, beyond the lawn, the road and the fenced-in meadow and, in the distance, the scattered, silver-gray shapes of Brahma cattle grazing beneath tall, spreading live oak trees. Bob squints and makes out strips of Spanish moss dangling from the branches of the trees, and he thinks, What a stupid place to die. So far from home, so far from ice and snow, dark blue spruce trees, maple and birch trees and granite hills, so far from small, redbrick milltowns huddled in narrow river valleys and old white colonial houses and triple-decker wooden tenement houses, and churches with tall spires — so far from what’s real. And for the first time since he left New Hampshire, Bob believes that he will never return there, that somehow, as much for him as for Eddie, it’s too late.