Russell Banks - Continental Drift

To Bob, the three females seemed to be glancing toward the man, as if angry at him, whereas the man, like the baby, seemed to be looking straight out at the world. “Who’re you guys mad at?” Bob asked. “You all look so mad.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said slowly. “I think … I think everybody’s worried. That’s why Robbie’s smiling. He’s not worried yet. He’s only a baby.”

“Well, what’re we worried about?” Bob asked. “The way all you guys are looking at me, you must think I’m the one who made you worry or something.” He laughed, but it was thin.

“No. We’re just worried, that’s all. About things. School and stuff, and supper. Stuff like that …”

“You’re not mad at me, then?”

“No,” Ruthie pronounced.

“I’ll make another picture later,” Emma said, and grabbing the sheet of paper, she started for the trailer. “One that shows us happy. Like Robbie.” Ruthie turned and followed, her sweater, held by one sleeve, dragging the ground behind her.

“That’s all right,” Bob said. “This one’s fine. I like this one fine.”

Then he, too, entered the trailer. He told Elaine he was going up to Islamorada for the evening papers, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and went out again.

“Take the girls with you!” Elaine called through the screened door.

“They don’t want to go,” he said, and kept moving.

Elaine turned to her daughters, both already in front of the TV, watching a soap opera. “Don’t you want to go to the store with Daddy?”

“No,” Ruthie said without turning.

“Emma?”

“Nope.”

Robbie was crying loudly now from the bedroom. “Ruthie, go change your brother’s diapers and bring him out here.”

Ruthie didn’t respond.

“Ruth! You heard me!”

In silence, the girl got up, her eyes fixed on the TV screen, and edged backwards from the room.

“For God’s sake, move! The baby’s crying and wet!” She slammed the iron back and forth over the wrinkled blouse, muttering to herself as she worked, “This family … this damned family. The way we ignore everyone around here …”

Ruthie returned carrying Robbie and deposited him like a teddy bear in the plastic playpen in the center of the room. Unable to sit yet, he immediately collapsed into a reddening heap. By the time Ruthie had returned to her seat on the floor in front of the TV, the baby was howling.

Elaine stood at the ironing board and watched him. Ruthie sucked her thumb and stared at the doctor and nurse making love on leather upholstered furniture in the doctor’s paneled, book-lined office. Emma leaned forward and turned up the volume.

At the Whale Harbor Tackle Shop, Bob went down the row of newspaper-dispensing racks and bought the two Miami papers and the Marathon paper, and standing outside the store, leafed quickly through all three. There was nothing about the Haitians in any of them.

Maybe it never happened, he let himself think. Maybe it was a nightmare, some kind of hallucination, a craziness worse than anything I’ve ever experienced before. Is that possible? he wondered. Nothing else seemed real to him now. And for a moment at least, the split made it easy for him to believe that the part of his life which now seemed most vivid and clear to him — the trip over to New Providence, the long wait in the bay and then the arrival of the Haitians in the dinghy with Tyrone, the trip back across the straits, the sudden storm off Sunny Isles, the arrival of the coast guard cutter, and finally that awful moment when the Haitians leaped into the sea — all that might well have been experienced by Bob on a different plane of reality than the plane where everything else was taking place: Elaine and the children, home, groceries, laundry, television, a can of Schlitz from the refrigerator, work, the Belinda Blue , Ave, Ave’s arrest, Tyrone’s arrest, Honduras’s disappearance, the seizure of the boats. These things made sense. They weren’t all happy things, but they could be lived with somehow. Even the particular terrible consequences of Ave’s arrest, that is, Bob’s sudden unemployment, seemed likely, bland, vague and conditional to him, of a piece somehow with Elaine’s familiar complaints about money, his irritation and embarrassment at his wife’s having to work nights as a waitress, his anxiety over Ruthie’s deepening strangeness, his ongoing disappointment and bewildered surprise at his own inadequacy.

Could it be? Could the strong part of his life be dream and the weak part real? If so, then he was just crazy, that’s all. Crazy. A quiet kind of madman who lived his dreams and dreamed his life. Most people were a little like that anyhow, especially people whose lives, like Bob’s, were ordinary and, despite the ordinariness, gave them constant trouble. Maybe, just possibly, the awful pressures that Bob’s ordinary life had placed on him, the difficulty, for him, of living an ordinary life well, had finally made him crazy. Most men, he was sure, lived such a life easily: they worked and saved, they took care of their wives and children, who were grateful and respectful for it, and their days and nights passed cheerfully by, until finally they were gray-haired and a little fat and semiretired and spent the winters in Florida with the wife, fishing, watching baseball on TV, waiting for the kids and grandkids to come down for the holidays. But a few men, like Bob, despite their being just as intelligent, dutiful and orderly as the others, turned their ordinary lives into early disasters and never knew why. That can make a man crazy, Bob thought.

For a second, he thought of going inside the store, just in case Ted Williams was there again. He peered across the parking lot, looking for Ted’s white Chrysler, then remembered his mistake regarding the Chrysler and said to himself, See, I am crazy! What I imagine, what I remember and what I actually experience get all mixed together, and I can’t tell the difference. He was now sure that he had dreamed the death of the Haitians.

The relief and pleasure he took from the conviction lasted only a few seconds, however. As he started toward his car, he put the folded newspapers under his left arm and shoved both hands deep into his pants pockets and with his left hand instantly felt the money, a packet of bills a half-inch thick. There it was, blood money, uncounted, forgotten, invisible for whole hours at a time, then suddenly reappearing, linking everything back together again, closing and welding fast the split in his life, so that his dreams and his daily life were one thing again. It’s horrible, horrible! he thought, and he almost cried out, and he withdrew his hand as if he had touched a cold, dry serpent there.

He wandered in and out of the trailer all the rest of the afternoon, unable to leave the place, unable to sit down and make his home there, a ghostly figure who repeatedly appeared in the yard and then stood at the threshold outside the screened door for a few moments, until finally the woman and children inside felt his presence and looked up at him, and he turned away and went back to the road again. Up the lane to the highway he walked, then back, past the trailers to the water, where gulls and terns poked between chunks of coral and blond, almost translucent crabs scrambled in the shallows for shelter. A car driven by Horace came and went, and all the while Bob kept his back to the man. Around five-thirty, Allie Hubbell came home from the crafts shops in Key Largo, walking in from the bus stop on the highway, and. Bob kept his back to her too. She stood a moment on her stoop, watching him, and not until she had lit a cigarette and gone inside did he turn slowly back toward his own trailer. He stopped next to his car, got in, sat behind the wheel awhile, got out, walked to the water again, resumed peering at the horizon. The sky was low, zinc gray and smooth, like sheet metal. A steady southeast wind blew, keeping the water choppy and dark as old, cold coffee.