Continental Drift (12 page)

Turning off Route 17, Bob notices, parked at the rear of the lot next to the Dempster-Dumpster, a red Plymouth Duster with a black woman and man sitting inside. Bob parks his car in front by the entrance, where Eddie instructed him always to park (so that he’d never seem to be without a customer), and sits at the wheel for a moment studying the couple in the Duster. On the seat next to him, inside a small canvas Barnett Bank money bag, is three hundred dollars in cash and rolled coins.

If they want the money, he decides, they can have it. All they’ve got to do is ask, and it’s theirs. He’s relieved that the gun is inside the store, on the shelf below the cash register. Defying Eddie’s instructions, Bob decided in the beginning not to carry the gun back and forth with him. Elaine pleaded with him to leave it at the store, made him picture Ruthie or Emma dead of accidentally inflicted gunshot wounds, and he said, “Okay, fine, you’re right. Just don’t mention it to Eddie, okay?” And then, having tucked it way in the back of the shelf beneath the counter, he forgot about the gun, until now, when he realizes that if he had the gun in his glove compartment, as Eddie expected him to, and if the black man and woman in the Plymouth got out of their car and strolled over to his car, he’d have to get out the gun, and when they yanked open his door and told him to give them the money bag or they’d blow his head off, he’d have to open fire, maybe hitting the man in the chest before the woman shot him in the face, killing him instantly. She’d take the money and drive away, leaving her partner lying on the parking lot, bleeding heavily and dying before the police got there to surmise that Bob got killed fending off an attempted robbery by a lone bandit.

Then he realizes that the Duster is parked next to the back door of the store. They must have broken in! There must be at least four of them, and waiting inside the store are three huge black guys, Jamaicans, probably, with machetes (he’s heard Jamaicans are particularly vicious, especially when they smoke that strong Jamaican ganja), and
as soon as he unlocks the front door and shuts off the alarm, he’ll be a dead man, lying by the door in a pool of his own blood while the Jamaicans bring in the van they’ve rented for the occasion and empty the stockroom. Around ten, someone from the project across the highway will come in, a lonely housewife with three kids home from school with the chicken pox, and looking for a pint of vodka to get her through a lousy day, she’ll find instead the body of a white man hacked insanely to pieces.

Bob shudders. What the hell should he do? Make a dash for the front door, lock it behind him as soon as he’s inside, go for the gun under the counter and come out blasting? Or turn his car around and drive off, have a cup of coffee in town and check back later, after they’ve cleared out all the stock they can carry? Or pretend that nothing is wrong, as they clearly want him to do?

He decides to leave. Putting the key back into the ignition, he starts the engine as quietly as possible, but also does it casually, as if he has forgotten something at home and has to return for it. But when he pushes the gearshift from park to reverse gear, it stops, blocked, refusing to engage reverse—it’s happened before, twice last week, and to free the gear he has to step outside and climb onto the front bumper and rock the car violently while someone else jiggles the gearshift. He’s sweating, and casting a glance toward the Duster, he sees that the black man, dressed in a dark suit, has got out of the car and is coming toward him. Frantically now, Bob shoves at the gearshift, whispering, “Come on, you sonofabitch, come on, come on!” while the black man, like a dark cloud, draws closer to his car.

Suddenly he’s at the closed window on the passenger’s side, rapping on the glass, and Bob turns and sees the round, dark brown face of the stock clerk, George Dill, an intense, worried cast to his eyes, with new, deep lines crinkling his broad forehead.

Swinging open the door, the black man peers inside at Bob and utters a string of words. Bob, who can’t understand the words, stares wildly at the man, open-mouthed and sweating.

“I thought … I thought …” Bob says, and George interrupts, blurting out the same string of incomprehensible words.

“George, I … I didn’t recognize you …” Bob tells him. “The suit …”

Shutting off the engine, he pockets the key, picks up the money bag and steps from the car. He forces a smile onto his face and shows it, over the roof of the car, to George. “Whaddaya all dressed up for, George, a funeral?” He notices then that the woman in the Duster has got out of the car on the driver’s side and is walking quickly across the lot toward them. She’s a tall, slender woman, darker than George, wearing high heels and a long black chiffon dress, and on her head a broad-brimmed black hat. She’s attractively made up, with lipstick and bright red earrings and necklace, and she’s calling Bob’s name, “Mister Dubois,” in a friendly, familiar way, as if she knows him, though he is sure he’s never seen her before. He would have remembered, he knows, because she’s extremely pretty, with a wide, pleasant face and the kind of slender but sexy body, like Sarah’s, that he’s been thinking about a lot lately.

“Yes?” he says, smiling easily, as the woman comes around the front of his car and stands before him. She’s nearly as tall as he, he notices with pleasure, and she’s about his age, though he thought at first that she was younger, still a girl.

“Let me explain. Daddy’s all upset, Mister Dubois.”

Bob looks over at the old man and sees that the fellow is peering off toward the orange groves. The dark, pin-striped three-piece suit he’s wearing is way too large and hangs loosely around his bent body. He’s hatless, and Bob notices for the first time that, except for a thin belt of matted gray hair, George is completely bald. His shining brown head looks fragile, like a ripe plum.

“George,” Bob calls to him in a cheery voice. “Where’s your hat? I’ve never seen you without that Miami Dolphins cap of yours.”

The old man doesn’t respond.

“Mister Dubois,” the woman says in a low voice. “I’m his daughter, I’m Marguerite Dill. He lives with me.”

“Is he okay? Is something wrong?” Bob is serious now. He understands that he doesn’t understand, but he knows that no one will hurt him for it.

Carefully, in her soft, warm Southern voice, the woman explains to Bob that her father’s only brother died last night, and her father has taken the death badly. Except for her, the old man has no one else, not around here anyhow, because she brought him down here from Macon, Georgia, five years ago, when her mama died. “Since he was a young man,” she says, “he’s needed somebody to take care of him.” The brother, who lived in Macon, loved him, but he had his own family to take care of, so it was only right that her daddy come to Oleander Park to live with her. Now she is taking him back up to Macon for the funeral, which means that he won’t be able to come in to work for the rest of the week. She knew he’d understand, but her daddy insisted on coming over this morning to explain it to Bob himself. “He likes you very much, Mister Dubois, and he likes his job here. I told him I’d phone you and explain, but he insisted, he just kept on saying he wanted to face you himself, about his brother and all … but he’s in a kind of a shock, and he has trouble talking right normally, he gets all nervous and forgetful, you may have noticed that … but especially now, with his brother and all …”

“Oh, damn, I’m really sorry,” Bob says. “That’s okay, he can take all the time he needs. Tell him … Hey, George,” he calls, and he walks around the woman and comes up behind the old man, putting an arm around his sagging shoulders. “Hey, listen, George, I’m awful sorry about your brother.”

George turns his face up to Bob’s. “Thank you, Mistah Bob.”

“No problem. About your job, I mean. We need you, sure, but we can get along for a week or so without you. You just go on up there to Georgia and … just do whatever you have to do, George.”

“I will. You is the one man in the worl’ can understand,” George says. “’Cause of you an’ your brother Mistah Eddie.”

“Right, you’re right. I do know how you must feel, George, so you just take off as much time as you feel you need, and when you
come back to work, why, you just show up here at the store, and your job’ll be waiting for you.” Bob gives the old man’s narrow, slumped shoulders a hearty hug.

“Thank you, Mister Dubois,” the woman says. “Come on now, Daddy, we best be going now.” Taking the old man by an elbow, she leads him toward the car.

“Are you driving up to Georgia?” Bob asks.

“Yes.”

“Well … drive carefully, then.”

“Thank you, I will.” She leads her father around to the passenger’s side and opens the door for him.

Bob takes a few steps toward them. “That your car?”

She looks up. “Yes.”

“Nice car. V-eight or six?”

“It’s a V-eight.”

“Burns a lot of gas, I bet.”

She smiles and opens the door on the driver’s side. Then, without answering him, she slides into the car and closes the door.

Standing in the middle of the parking lot, Bob watches the woman and her father leave, turn left at the highway and head north. And though it’s not the first time since leaving New Hampshire that he’s thought of Doris Cleeve, it’s the first time he’s missed her.

What kind of man is Bob Dubois, who, although married, keeps for himself the secret privilege of sleeping with women other than his wife? A more sophisticated man than Bob would instantly recognize the lie, and if the lie persisted, if it refused to get itself corrected, would name it a symptom, and before too long, the marriage might be dissolved. But for men like Bob Dubois, it’s different.

For Bob, the facts are these: he loves his wife; he loves other women too, but not as much as he loves his wife; if he betrays his wife
by sleeping with other women, and she does not discover it, then he has not been cruel to her. And, naturally, he does not want to be cruel to her, for, as said, he loves his wife. Also, he knows that the facts are the same for her, that if she sleeps with other men and he does not discover it, so long as she loves him as deeply as he loves her, then she has not been cruel to him. And he knows she does not want to be cruel to him. Of course, everything changes if he discovers it. As with Ave.

It’s a very painful and delicate balance, and one cannot be neurotic and hold it, because it depends for its sustenance on a willingness to endure mutual suspicion, jealousy, watchfulness and now and then a deliberate averting of one’s gaze when one’s mate has been careless with evidence of transgression. It might be said that acceptance of these facts is immoral or, at best, self-destructive, but it’s better said that acceptance of these facts indicates a mature realism, especially among people for whom the continuation of marriage has a higher priority in life than establishing one’s personal integrity, higher even than believing in the personal integrity of one’s mate, and higher, too, than the utter luxury of making public a private truth. Privacy, the secret knowledge of oneself, is, for the poor and the ignorant, that is, for most of the people in this world, what publicity often is for the rich and the educated. It’s their best available way to keep their lives from disappearing into meaninglessness.

For this reason, even though his wife has recently learned that she is pregnant with their third child, Bob does not feel particularly guilty or even secretive, but merely private, when, in the presence of Marguerite Dill, he imagines and longs to be making love to her and says and does everything he can think of to make that possible.

He learned of Elaine’s pregnancy before George Dill returned from his brother’s funeral in Macon, and for a few days he forgot about the man’s lovely daughter and spent his hours at the store lost in fantasies focused on the future exploits of his son, for he knew the child would be a son. He had never heard of a man fathering two daughters and then a third, though he knew, of course, that it sometimes
happens, the way any kind of bad luck sometimes happens. But when it has never happened to someone you know personally, you have difficulty believing it will happen to you. Thus, until the day George returned, accompanied by his daughter, Bob used his long, boring hours at the store to imagine his life with a son. And though his imaginings were common and sentimental—his son fishing from the bow of the boat, his son playing baseball, hockey and basketball, his son winning the spelling bee—many of the details through which he visualized these scenes were sufficiently vivid and personal for him to remember details and episodes from his own childhood that he had forgotten.

He caught glimpses of himself as someone else, as perhaps his own father might have seen him. He saw his hair, at first wavy and blond and then, by the time he started school, straight and chestnut brown, like Ruthie’s. He saw the fear and sheer envy in his blue eyes of his father’s great, iron-hard size, the wonder of it, his awestruck gaze when, at his father’s urging, he punched the man in the tightened belly with all his force, and the man went on laughing until the boy hurt his hand and had to stop, which only made the man laugh all the harder. And he saw the terrible tremble of his lips when his father told him that to teach him to swim he and Uncle Richard were going to toss him from the dock into the lake, which they did, and indeed he did learn to swim that day, gasping and spitting water, slashing at it as if it were a beast, until he got his body close enough to the shore to feel the pebbly bottom against his feet. And then he saw his bizarre grin as he scrambled back to the dock and full speed ran its length, his skinny arms pinwheeling, and threw his body into the water himself, over and over again, slashing his way back to shore, rushing to the dock and racing to the end of it and tossing himself into the water, until finally the men stopped laughing at him and walked back to the women at the picnic table in the pine grove. And gradually Bob began to see his unborn son as he had never seen himself, for he saw the boy as pretty and frightened and sad. This confused him somewhat, muddled his fantasies, because he did not know what
he should do to keep his son from being like that, from being like him, pretty and frightened and sad. Bob knew his own father had loved him and that he had been a kind, gentle, good-humored man, and with his son, Bob would have no choice but to try to be the same man his father had been with him. Any other kind of man, any other kind of father, was unimaginable to him.