Russell Banks - Continental Drift

With fastidious care, as if writing out a shopping list, Bob itemizes what he must do now. He must, of course, call the police, who will rule Eddie’s death a suicide and will have the body placed with a local mortician. Then Bob will call Sarah in Connecticut and tell her what has happened and place himself at her service for the next few days. Her parents’ address must be inside the house somewhere. He will give her the note that he found on the car seat next to Eddie’s body, still apparently unopened, as if Bob had not read it, since, after all, though it was unsealed, it did have Sarah’s name written on the envelope, and he should not have read it. The note, back inside the envelope, is in Bob’s shirt pocket, and no doubt the police will want to read Eddie’s last words, neatly typed, to his wife: I’m a failure . Three short words that must have taken Eddie an hour to compose, and when he had them down on the white sheet of paper, they must have made the rest easy, Bob thought when he first read them. That was when Bob started making his list of things to do, for he thought, I’m not a failure.

After he has talked with Sarah and knows how long he’ll have to stay here in Winter Haven and how much of the funeral he has to arrange himself, he will call Elaine. He’ll apologize for everything and tell her she’s right about everything, and she won’t have to take the job at the Rusty Scupper, because he’s going to take an evening job himself, pumping gas, maybe, or tending bar, anything to bring in the money they will need to pay for Ruthie’s doctors and the rent and food and maybe some new clothes for spring, and who knows, they might be able to put a few bucks away and save enough for a down payment on a new trailer or possibly even one of those three-bedroom condominium apartments going up at the marina, though of course that probably will be a little too steep for them, as the price, he’s heard, is over a hundred thousand dollars for the large places, ninety-five for the smaller units. He’ll tell her what he plans to tell Ave: if Ave, who has plenty of cash, will loan him the money to buy the rest of the Belinda Blue, he will then be able to keep all the profits, instead of the one-fourth he keeps now, and will be able to pay Ave back in a couple of years, maybe even sooner. The way it is now, he’ll never be able to buy more of the boat than the one-quarter share of it he bought with the money they realized last October from the sale of the trailer in Oleander Park. Ave will be grateful for the idea. He probably never expected that Bob would not be able to make enough from his share of the boat to buy more than that share. Right from the start, the night Robbie was born, Ave said that what he wanted was for Bob to own and operate the Belinda Blue while he owned and operated a second boat. Bob will admit to Elaine that yes, he knows Ave owns and operates that second boat to smuggle marijuana and cocaine, but that’s no concern of his. He himself would certainly never do such a thing, nor would Ave want him to. It’s safer for Ave anyhow if Bob keeps straight and the Belinda Blue never carries anything but fat, half-drunk fishermen out into the bay for bonefish. If Ave wants to sneak drugs into Florida from the Bahamas or the Caymans or off freighters from Colombia, that’s his business. Those risks are his, not Bob’s.

After he has talked about this plan with Elaine, then Bob will call Ave himself, and he is sure Ave will like the plan and will want to draw up the papers immediately. Bob is amazed that he didn’t think of this before, back when he and Ave first talked about going into business together. Bob has decided that he and Ave will also have to talk about Elaine, and he knows that during that particular discussion, which will concern Elaine’s confession to Bob and will therefore oblige Bob to confess to Ave his somewhat complicated and delayed reactions to it, he will reveal that, as one aspect of those complications, he made love to Ave’s girlfriend Honduras. This will clear the air, Bob believes, at last, and then they will stand on an equal footing once again, just like they did years ago, for Ave will own one boat, Bob will own the other, they will split the profits of the fishing business, and both of them will have slept with the other man’s woman once, a thing done in the past and completely forgiven now. Bob knows he’ll never make love to Honduras again, especially after the way she treated him the one time he did make love to her. He’ll be friendly with her, all right, but cool.

Then, finally, when he has finished talking with Ave, Bob will go through his brother’s papers and will try to put the poor man’s affairs in order as best he can. He’ll approach all the problems and tasks, meet everyone’s needs, in a perfectly rational way, be the man everyone can count on, Sarah, Jessica, the police, even Eddie’s creditors. He’ll leave the weeping to the others, let them be sad, frightened, angry, hurt or relieved; he will be calm, logical, competent. At times like this, he thinks, a man has to know how to take charge.

Of course, nothing works out as Bob planned. He finds himself weeping in front of the police, for the sight of his brother’s body as they lift it onto a wheeled stretcher suddenly fills him with a strange, overwhelming pity that he has never felt before. In a flash, he realizes that Eddie is totally powerless now; a glowing red bed of coals has become a bag of waters. A spirit that shouted at Bob, that beat on him and prodded and directed him, scolded and shamed him for thirty-one years, has been miraculously transformed into a typed note that claims only absence for itself.

It’s a terrible thing, Bob thinks. To go from being something to being nothing! A terrible thing for a man to endure — to be nothing after having been something. And for the first time, Bob pities his older brother, and his pity instantly releases him, so that when he weeps aloud for Eddie, in sorrow, of course, like any brother, but, more crucially, with pity as well, he weeps for himself, in joy. And as he weeps, he trembles, torn by the contending emotions that are called grief — pity and sudden potency, sorrow and joy, the horrified, abandoned child, bereft and frightened, and the exhilarated man, powerful and self-admiring.

He has trouble speaking to the police officer in charge, and as a result instantly forgets the name of the funeral home the officer recommends to him and to which Bob agrees they should send the body, so that, a few minutes later, when he is speaking on the telephone to Sarah, his brother’s widow, he is unable to tell her where they have taken Eddie’s body.

“You asshole,” she says, and she quickly apologizes but then begins to speak to him as if he were an adolescent boy. She tells him that she’ll fly down this afternoon and for him not to bother picking her up at Orlando, she can get out to the house on her own. “Just leave everything the way it is,” she instructs him. “And don’t let anybody inside the house. No lawyers, no bankers, no accountants, no nothing,” she says. “You stay there and watch TV or whatever you want, but don’t touch anything and don’t let anyone into the house. Jesus, what a fucking mess, excuse my French. Did he leave a letter or a note or anything around?”

Bob says yes, there was a note.

“What’s it say?”

He pulls out the envelope and reads the note to her, slowly, as if reading it for the first time.

Sarah laughs. “I guess the hell he was a failure. Took him long enough to admit it, though.”

“Sarah, for God’s sake! How can you say stuff like that? The man’s dead now. You’ve changed, Sarah.”

She is silent for a second, then says, “No, I haven’t changed. You just never paid attention in the first place. Just like him. I’m sorry he’s dead, of course I’m sorry he’s dead, but our marriage went down the tubes years and years ago, whether you wanted to see it or not. So I can’t pretend to be the grieving widow. Frankly, I’m pissed. I’d feel a lot sorrier for him if it had been a car accident and he was drunk and hit a pole or something. But Eddie was a bastard. You know that as well as anyone. And he was a sad bastard, a pathetic little boy of a man, and I always knew that. And you did too. No, I feel sorrier for Jessie than anyone else, because now she has to live with the fact that her daddy killed himself because he felt sorry for himself. Because he thought he was a goddamned failure.”