Continental Drift (10 page)

“Yeah, I know, I know. I just don’t want the girls to have to hear it, that’s all….”

“
For Christ’s sake, Elaine
!” he hisses, and he places the cans of beer on the counter, as if to free his hands. He stares at her, willing her to be silent, to be happy, to be proud of him, to love his brother
and his brother’s wife and child. To be grateful. “We’ll talk later,” he says, and returns to the living room.

Elaine goes on peeling the potatoes. It’s nearly dark, and the kitchen, facing east, settles into shadow first. Crossing the room to the light switch by the door, she comes to stand at the threshold, where she watches and listens to the others, who are staring at an object placed in the middle of the coffee table. Surrounded by empty beer cans and ashtrays, cigarette packs and butane lighters, the Sunday newspaper and a copy of
People
, settled in the midst of the clutter but organizing and diminishing it, lies a large, dark blue pistol. Sarah, her legs still crossed, stares at the gun as if it were a small, dead, slightly repulsive animal. Eddie looks at it proudly, as if he has just killed it, and Bob looks at it with confusion, as if he has been asked to skin it.

Eddie reaches into the side pocket of his seersucker jacket and draws out a small green package of bullets and places the box on the table next to the pistol. “You’ll want these,” he says. Eddie, who people sometimes say resembles the actor Steve McQueen, snaps his curly blond head to attention and, with his lips pursed, studies his younger brother’s face for a second.

“Is it loaded?” Elaine asks from the doorway.

“Not now,” Eddie answers. “But it will be tomorrow.”

From the sofa, Sarah glances quickly up at Elaine, fails to catch her eye and goes back to the staring out the window at the side of the trailer next door. “I don’t know why you need a gun,” she says to the window.

“You mean you don’t know why Bob needs a gun,” Eddie says cheerfully. “Me you know.” He grins up at Elaine, still standing in the doorway, and pats his jacket under his left arm.

“Are you carrying a gun? Right now?” Elaine asks. “Here?”

“Sure.”

Bob reaches over and plucks the pistol off the table, turns it over in his hand and examines it carefully. He releases the magazine, slaps it back, hefts the gun in his right hand. He studies the hand with the gun in it, as if memorizing it.

“Why do you have to carry a gun?” Elaine asks.

In a swift, unbroken motion, a practiced move, Eddie lifts his butt from the couch, darts his right hand into his back trousers pocket, brings forth his wallet and flips it open, revealing an inch-thick stack of bills. “
That’s
why, honey. I’m in business here, seven fucking days a week I’m in business, and a lot of what I do gets done in cash, or else I wouldn’t be in business very long. You understand,” he says, winking at Bob.

“I guess so,” Bob says. “You mean because of taxes and so on?”

“Yeah … yeah, that, sure. There’s a lot of stuff I have to keep off the books. Your fuckin’ salary, for instance. Which is all to your advantage, you understand; all it saves me is bookkeeping. But there’s a lot more things I gotta worry about that you don’t hafta even think about, like deliveries, for instance, and working with the fucking trade unions trying to get that new store over in Lakeland set up and built …” he says. “All you got to worry about for now is selling booze across the counter, keeping the shelves stocked, putting in your weekly orders and making your nightly deposits at the bank. I take care of the rest.”

“So why does Bob need a gun?” Elaine asks.

The others, even Sarah, look at her as if she is simple minded. “Elaine, honey,” Eddie says, smiling. “You are not in Catamount, Cow Hampshire, anymore, sweetie.”

“Don’t call me sweetie. Please.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry.”

“Things are different here, Elaine,” Bob says.

“You bet your ass things are different here. We got niggers with guns and razors here,” Eddie says, suddenly serious. “We got Cubans who cut your balls off. We got Haitians with their fucking voodoo sacrifices and Jamaicans with machetes as long as your fucking arm. We got dark-skinned crazies of all kinds, all hopped up on their fucking pot and cocaine, riding around in brand-new Mercedes-Benzes without enough pocket money to put gas in the tanks. We got Colombians, for Christ’s sake, with fucking
machine guns
!”

“Oh, come on, Eddie, you’re going to send them back to New Hampshire scared out of their wits. It’s not that bad,” Sarah says. “Honest.” She unfolds her legs and takes a slow sip of her beer. “It’s not like Miami,” she adds, stretching her arms overhead and arching her back like a cat. She’s wearing a beige pantsuit that accentuates her tan and the long angularity of her body. Bob once saw her naked and was surprised at how closely her body resembled an adolescent boy’s body, long, tight, smooth, with tiny breasts, like white circles on her chest. He was also surprised by how attractive he found her body. It was in his and Elaine’s own bedroom in Catamount one hot summer afternoon a few years earlier, when Eddie, Sarah and Jessica had come up for a week in June to visit them and examine summer camps in New Hampshire for Jessica. Because of the unusual heat, Bob came home from work earlier than usual, and finding the house empty, guessed everyone had gone to the lake for a swim. When he strolled into his bedroom he caught Sarah there, naked, sitting on the edge of the bed painting her toenails. She looked up as he entered and made no attempt to hide herself from him. Her dark hair, cut short, was wet and brushed back like a swimmer’s, and to Bob she looked so clean and precise, so apparent and without mystery or guile, that he felt a great longing to make love to her, which surprised and frightened him and sent him back down the hall and rapidly down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, he turned, looked up and waited, as if he expected Sarah to appear there. After a few seconds, he took a long pull on his beer, swallowed and hollered, “Hey, I’m sorry, Sarah. I thought nobody was home!”

“That’s okay,” she called. “Everyone’s gone swimming. I stayed home to take a nap and a shower. I’m sure I’ll end up feeling better than they will.”

“Yeah,” he said. He knew from the music in her voice that if he went back up the stairs and entered the bedroom, took off his clothes and started kissing her along her throat, she would not even pretend to stop him, and afterwards she would never say a word about it to him or anyone else. That is the moment he remembers now whenever
he looks straight at Sarah. He still can’t decide whether his decision to sit in his chair in the living room until Sarah was dressed and cheerfully downstairs was the right decision, for, like most people, Bob finds it difficult to know right from wrong. He relies on taboos and circumstances to control his behavior, to make him a “good man,” so that on those infrequent occasions when neither taboo nor circumstance prohibits him from satisfying an appetite and he does not satisfy that appetite or even attempt to do so, he does not know what to think of himself. He doesn’t know if he has been a good man or merely a stupid or scared man. Most people, like Bob, unchurched since childhood, now and then reach that point of not knowing whether they’ve been good, stupid or scared, and the anxiety it provokes obliges them to cease wondering as soon as possible and bury the question, as a dog buries a bone, marking it and promising to themselves that they will return to the bone later, when they have the time and energy to gnaw, a promise never kept, of course, and rarely meant to be kept. One of the more attractive aspects of Bob’s character, however, is his reluctance to bury these bones, his willingness to go on gnawing into the night, alone and silent, turning it over and upside down, persisting until finally it is white and dry and, in certain lights, a little ghastly. His memory is cluttered with these bones, like a medieval church basement, and it gives to his manner and bearing a kind of melancholy that attracts people who are more educated or refined than he is.

Turning away from Sarah, Bob asks his brother, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this gun? I haven’t shot a handgun since the service.”

Eddie laughs. “I don’t give a flying fuck what you do with it, so long’s you keep it with you when you’re at the store. The niggers know you got a gun in the store, believe me, they know, they get the word out. Leastways the niggers in this town do, because they all know each other. Then on a Friday night when they’re out looking for easy cash, they’ll keep on moving down the line. You’ll never have to use it. Just keep it with you when you go back and forth to the bank, and under the counter by the cash register the rest of the time,
and if some nigger’s stupid enough to want to knock off the place, you blow the sonofabitch away. Like I said, I got a license.”

“I don’t like it,” Elaine says. She walks abruptly back to the kitchen.

“Who the hell does?” Eddie calls after her. “But what the Christ are you supposed to do? Some guy comes in, says, ‘If you have a minute, Mister White Motherfucker, give me what’s in the cash drawer, as I happen to have a chance for some excellent cocaine tonight and I’m a little low, and besides, I’m two payments behind on my BMW,’ so you say, ‘Certainly, sir, Mister Colored Gentleman, and would you like a case of cognac to go with that?’ Come on, Elaine. You blow the bastard away!”

“What if he blows
you away
!” Elaine yells back.

Eddie is silent for a minute.

“Elaine,” Bob says. He keeps looking at the gun.

“We’ve had this same damned argument a hundred times,” Sarah says in a weary voice. “He won’t listen. He thinks he’s God.”

As if to himself, Bob says quietly, “I don’t want to shoot anybody. Christ, I don’t even like hunting.” He’s a fisherman, not a hunter. When they were boys, both he and Eddie tried to enjoy deer hunting with their father. Eddie, after a few years, gave it up, because of the scarcity of deer and the difficulty of killing one, but Bob continued to go out year after year with the old man and his cronies, although whenever one of them shot a deer and bloodied the snow with the carcass, he found himself slightly sickened. In New Hampshire, most men who hunt deer do it in groups of three and four, driving pickups and four-wheel-drive vehicles to the end of a dirt road and as far into the woods as the vehicle will go. Then they walk all day through the snowy woods in the cold, sipping at a bottle of Canadian Club every now and then, when finally one of them catches a glimpse of a terrified buck darting uphill through chokecherry and birch and starts blasting away, until it leaps, somersaults and collapses in a heap. Then the other hunters gather around and talk while the man guts his deer. Later, with the carcass of the deer lashed to the front fender of
the pickup, they stop at a roadhouse and buy drinks all around and finally arrive home, tired, drunk and very happy—except for Bob, whose only pleasure came from having got through another season without being obliged to take a shot at a deer.

Fishing, however, for Bob, is a solitary, carefully organized, slow and nearly silent activity. He loves the buoyancy of the boat when, a half hour before dawn, he first steps into it, the lap of the waves against the gunwales, the trajectory and sweet hum of the line going out and its geometry, the point-to-point-to-point relations it draws from his hand to the world above the waterline to the world below. Since childhood, he’s fished with bait, hand-tied flies and lures along hundreds of the streams, rivers and ponds of New Hampshire. In canoes, borrowed boats, rented boats, and finally his own Boston whaler, he’s fished most of the state’s larger lakes and the bays along the coast, even fishing out at sea in Avery Boone’s trawler, miles beyond the Isles of Shoals in search of bluefish in July. Sometimes he’s left New Hampshire waters for salmon in Maine and Quebec, and on a few occasions he’s found himself, his car parked beside the road, surfcasting in moonlight on the sandy beaches of Cape Cod. Since childhood, fishing has satisfied his need to be alone and in the natural world at the same time, his deep, extremely conscious need for the presence of his own thoughts coming to him in his own voice, which rarely happens in the presence of other people, his need for order and, perhaps his most tangled need, his need for competence. Hunting for deer, the only hunting he knows about, denies all those; to him, it’s social, chaotic and impossible to feel competent at. When his father died, it was with great relief that he sold both his and the old man’s rifles to a gun dealer in Keene.

“Don’t be a pansy, Bob,” Eddie says. “And anyhow, it’s not like you’re going to have to shoot anybody. Just so long as the bastards know you got a gun, they’ll leave you alone. That’s all. It’s like dealing with the fucking Russians. The second those suckers think you’re not ready for them, ready and able to nuke their eyes out, you’re a dead man. You got to let these people know you’re serious, Bob.”

“Yeah,” Bob says quietly. Then, smiling, “I’m just not sure I am serious.”

“Sure you are,” Eddie says, and he gets up from the sofa, stretches and heads for the kitchen. “Hey, Elaine, sweetie, when’s supper, for Christ’s sake? I’m so hungry my stomach feels like it’s got a hard-on.”

“Eddie, please,” she says. “Your mouth. The children.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says, nuzzling her neck until she draws her shoulder up and pushes his face away.

“Eddie, please, I’m trying to peel potatoes!” she says, and laughs.

Eddie pats her on the ass and opens the refrigerator for more beer. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he sings. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Central Florida is cratered with small, shallow, smooth-shored lakes, mile-wide potholes in the limestone subsoil scattered from Gainesville in the north to Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades in the south. For thousands of years, water has eroded the soil from below as much as from above, until finally the simple weight of the land can no longer be supported, and one morning an entire meadow disappears, leaving in its place a pond, which, as the months go by, grows larger, as if it were eating the land that surrounds it, becoming at last a fairly large, nameless lake with a temporarily stabilized shoreline. In a few years, the ecology of the neighborhood will have accepted the lake’s presence, and if human beings have been living in the area, they, too, will have accepted and adjusted to the presence of the lake, will have forgotten the recent date of its arrival, will name it and treat and think of it as if it has been there since prehistory. In time, the lake will appear on maps, and roads and streets will circle the lake and bypass it, towns and neighborhoods will be laid out along its shores, water will be pumped from it to irrigate the citrus groves and fields, to flush the
toilets and sprinkle the lawns and wash the cars, and if the lake is large enough, a marina will open for business on one shore, and soon motorboats will draw girls in bathing suits over its sparkling surface on skis, while the water table drops half a foot a year. Then, late one night, in the middle of a marshy field across town and well in sight of a housing complex still under construction, a cow will break through the ground, and attempting to escape from the widening hole, will drown. By morning, half a hundred square yards of land will be under water. Mothers will instruct their children to stay away from it, as if it were alive and warm-blooded, but even so, the children will come out to the edge of the hole and stare at it, exchanging risk for wonder, tossing sticks and small chunks of limestone into the water, their tight, high voices crossing through the morning air like swallows.