Continental Drift (37 page)

Elaine is home, and the screened door slaps shut behind her, opens again and slams as each of the girls follows her inside. “Oh, Jesus, Bob!” Elaine cries. “You left the stove on!” She rushes to the stove, grabs at a smoking pan, yelps in pain, snatches a potholder and takes the pan off the stove. She tosses it into the sink and turns on the water, shouting to the girls, “Open the windows! Get the windows open!” The pan hisses and smolders in the sink, while Emma and Ruthie race through the trailer opening windows. Elaine turns off the stove, shifts the baby around from her hip, where he’s been riding, terrified and silent, and begins to comfort him. “There, there, honey, everything’s okay now, everything’s okay.”

Then the girls are back, Ruthie sucking intently on her thumb, her younger sister prowling through the refrigerator. “I’m hungry, Mama. I want somethin’ t’ eat,” she whines. Ruthie stands off to one side of Bob, works her thumb and drifts into a dreamy-eyed state that in recent weeks has come to be characteristic, though Bob has not seen that yet. To him, her thumb-sucking and dazed expression and silence are merely embarrassing and somewhat irritating, and he treats her behavior as if she were doing these things on purpose, just to antagonize him.

Elaine says quietly, “Ruthie, please, take your thumb out.” Then, to Bob, who has swung his legs off the couch, planted his feet on the linoleum-covered floor and squared to face her: “You could die that way, Bob, falling asleep with a pan on the stove. Asphyxiated in your sleep. It’s lucky I came home when I did….”

“I forgot. I was warming up some hash, you know? And I was tired, so I just lay down for a minute, and then, pop, I was gone.”

“You got up early,” she says, wiping off the baby’s mouth with her fingertips.

“I get up early every day. I don’t know why I’m so tired lately, though.” He stretches and yawns, as if to back his claim.

“It’s not like you’re overworked,” she says, adjusting Robbie’s diaper.

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Sure.”

“It’s just that the ‘fishing business’ is not exactly booming these days.” She always says it that way, with quotes around the phrase, and Bob cringes when she utters the words, as if she were drawing her fingernails across a blackboard. He knows what she means, knows that she fully intends for him to cringe and feel guilty, she desires it, because she’s angry at him, she’s angry for his having quit the job at Eddie’s liquor store and joining up with Ave, for having sold their mobile home and put the money into the Belinda Blue, buying 25 percent of the boat and splitting profits and costs with Ave, three parts to Ave, one part to Bob, though, as Ave says, anytime Bob wants, he can buy the whole thing and keep all the profits, which, Elaine knows, would not get them out of this ramshackle trailer at the end of a dirt road at the edge of a tiny town filled with tourists and fishermen. She is angry, and she has long days and nights when she is depressed. She is lonely, overworked, without money, she hasn’t lost the weight she gained during the pregnancy, and both she and Bob know that everything, all of it, is Bob’s fault.

His tee shirt is sopping wet, and his hair is plastered against his head. “We all oughta go out on the boat,” he announces. “You know? Just go out for the rest of the day and fish a little and cool off, like we used to, the whole family. Remember those trips we used to take up to Sunapee in the whaler? What do you say, honey?”

“Not interested.” She gets up, walks past him with Robbie and disappears behind him, returning a few seconds later without the baby. “He should sleep till supper now. He took a lot of sun,” she says to no one in particular, as she begins trying to clean out the burned pan. “I don’t think I can save this….”

“How come you’re not interested in us going out on the boat for the afternoon? This is more fun?” Bob asks. He spreads his arms and peers around at the dim interior of the tiny trailer. In a corner of
the crowded living room, Ruthie and Emma are seated on plastic mesh folding chairs in front of the television set that Eddie gave them a year ago, watching a soap opera,
General Hospital
.

“Tell you what,” Elaine says, not looking up. “You take the kids out for the afternoon.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you go out on the boat. Leave me here for the afternoon, alone.”

“Wha …?”

“You watch out Emma doesn’t fall overboard and drown, though,” she goes on. “And keep Ruthie from getting too much sunburn, and change Robbie’s diapers and make sure he gets his bottle on time. You be the one to make sure the kids don’t stick themselves with fishhooks. You do that, and I’ll take a cool shower, read a magazine, sit out by the water and watch the seagulls. How’s that sound?”

“C’mon, Elaine. I mean, I got to run the boat, you know that. I mean, I can’t run the boat and watch the kids at the same time. We should all go out together,” he says. Why does she always have to make these things complicated? Why can’t she just say, “Fine, let’s go,” or “No, thanks, I’m too tired,” or something? It should be that simple. Instead, she’s coming on all sarcastic, suggesting absurd, impossible alternatives, and Bob is feeling guilty.

He stands and walks to the screened door and looks out at the yard, sand with bits and patches of witchgrass scattered through it. Across the road, Allie is still seated on her stoop, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. She’s got her wig on again, and it makes her look younger, just as she said. Bob thinks, I should have gone ahead and fucked her. Then he thinks, It’s a good thing I didn’t. I could’ve, but I didn’t, and he walks to the refrigerator for a beer.

“I’m just trying to come up with something to make you and the kids happy,” he says. “That’s all I’m doing. It’s not like I’m trying to think of ways to make you more miserable than you already are. So for Christ’s sake, please stop acting like I’m some kind of bastard, will you?”

She scrubs furiously at the blackened pan, her face twisted and red and sweating from the effort. “God damn. You really ruined this pan.”

“The hell with it. Throw it out.” He pops the top of the can of Schlitz and takes a long gulp.

“Sure, I’ll throw it out. Just like everything else when it breaks or won’t work anymore. Only we can’t afford to replace anything now when we throw them out, so after a while there won’t be anything to throw out,” she says. Frantically, she scrubs at the pan in the sink. “Just toss it out with the garbage! Easy! Except that next time I want a saucepan to cook supper in or maybe just to heat up the baby’s bottle, I won’t have any!”

Bob moves away from her, backs to the door, pushes it open with one hand and steps outside. “I’ll be back in a while,” he says softly.

“Fine.”

“Anything you want in Islamorada?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Thought I’d buy me a dip net for shrimp. The shrimp’re running out by the bridge. All you got to do is stand there and scoop ’em up. Maybe I’ll get nets for all of us, you know? So we can go out there on the bridge below Moray Key after dark tonight.”

“Fine.”

“You kids want to come up to Islamorada with me?” he calls.

They don’t answer. Ruthie leans forward and turns up the volume on the television.

“Hey, I’ll buy you a new pan,” Bob says to Elaine. “Ave’s got a charge at the tackle shop up there, and they got pots and pans and stuff like that.”

She stops scrubbing for a second and stares at him outside in the yard a few feet beyond the door. He’s still a large man to her, muscular and brown and kindly-looking, a bearish man. His face is open and sad and confused. “Bob,” she says in a low, even voice. “You still have to pay for it. You can charge your shrimp nets and your pots and pans or anything you want, but you still have to pay for it.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. Things’ll pick up soon,” he says. “I promise.” He turns abruptly, walks to his car and gets in, finishes off the beer and tosses the empty can onto the floor. Starting the engine, he looks over at Allie Hubbell and raises his hand in a short wave.

Allie grabs her can of beer, takes a sip, replaces it at her side. She doesn’t wave back.

Bob drops the car into gear and moves slowly away from the trailer, turns around in Horace’s driveway, causing the German shepherd to come barking out from under the trailer, and leaves.

The dream bothers Bob. It feels like a rash across his belly beneath his shirt, so that he rubs against it when he least expects to, in the car idling at a stop sign as he emerges from the road and prepares to turn north on Route 1, at the roadside grocery store where he stops to pick up another can of Schlitz, out on the highway again, when he looks to his right and sees rain clouds roiling up in the southeast.

He remembers not so much the dream as the emotions it carried, conflicting emotions that Bob can’t imagine resolved: shame and pride; solitude, desertion, being left behind—a child’s horrified view of these conditions—and social acceptance, the security of rite and family affection; fear of death, pure terror of it, and an uncontrollable longing to confront it, an obsessive curiosity, almost. The images come and go—his mother’s hands crossed on her chest in the coffin, his father’s glad hand clapped on his suited shoulder, Elaine nudging him from behind, saying, Go on, Bob, you can do it, you
should
do it, and the abandoned, sweltering airplane, the smoke, the holy water from the font splashing into the coffin. But somehow the images from the dream are mixed with his memories of the actual people and events they shadow. He remembers the spring night his father came home after work at the tannery and sat in his easy chair and picked up the
Catamount Patriot
and saw a picture of his son and discovered
that Bob had been selected to the all-state high school hockey team, just as Eddie had been the year before. The local sportswriter had coined the phrase “The Granite Skates” for Bob and Eddie when they had played together that year, and the headline read:
SECOND GRANITE SKATE ALL-STATE ICEMAN
. His father said nothing to commemorate the event, Bob now recalls. He ignored it completely, until finally at supper Bob asked him if he’d seen the paper yet, and the man nodded and smiled across the table, and Bob smiled back. That was all. Eddie was gone by then—had been working ten months at Thom McAn’s, had his own apartment on Depot Street above Irwin’s bar and in a year would leave for Florida—or there might have been an animated, prideful discussion of the award, backslapping and jokes, fantasies and teasing, which would have left: Bob feeling sated instead of somehow disappointed and then embarrassed by his disappointment, even ashamed of it.

In everything his father did and said, there seemed to be one lesson: life is grudging in what it gives, so take whatever it gives as if that’s all you’re ever going to get. A dog finding a tossed-out bone doesn’t celebrate; it simply sets to gnawing, before the bone gets yanked away. Bob knew his father had a secret, fantasied version of things that was different, that often, after everyone had gone to bed, he’d sit in the living room half-drunk, playing “Destiny’s Darling” on the phonograph, but that was the man’s weakness, not his strength. Bob understood his father’s weakness; it was his strength that left him confused.

His mother he viewed as all weakness, all fantasy and delusion, a vessel filled with a resigned optimism that she used to make her passivity and helplessness coherent to herself. There was, of course, God’s will, and, too, there was a blessedness, a magical election, that she believed her sons possessed—at least until incontrovertible evidence proved otherwise, and even then, there was always the possibility that God had long-range plans that just hadn’t been revealed yet. She knew her boys were destined to be rich and famous, and she suspected that one of the reasons (there were doubtless many) God had made
her poor and obscure was to help make her sons rich and famous, a kind of trade-off. In the end, she treated Bob’s and Eddie’s few accomplishments and honors exactly as her husband treated them, as if they were to be expected. She would smile and nod approvingly, as if to say, See, God’s looking after you, just like I said He would.

Neither parent, then, treated the boys’ futures as something the boys themselves had any control over. And when you come right down to it, Bob thinks, as he drives north on Route 1 into Islamorada, they were both right. That’s what Eddie’s finding out, and because it’s coming late, it’s coming hard. He’s been lucky, that’s all, which is the basic difference between his life so far and mine, Bob decides. It’s not intelligence or hard work or courage. It’s luck. And luck can’t last a lifetime, unless you die young.

On the north side of Islamorada, a half mile before the bridge that crosses to Windley Key, Bob turns off at the Whale Harbor Tackle Shop, a long, low building on the bay that’s more a general store than a tackle shop, with a marina and boatyard behind it. There are only a few cars in the lot, and Bob parks deliberately behind a white Chrysler convertible with the top down. He gets out of his car and strolls around it and for a few seconds admires the Chrysler, standing next to it while he finishes off the can of Schlitz, rubbing his tee-shirted belly and examining the rolled and pleated red leather upholstery, which smells like nothing but itself and reminds Bob of polished wood, Irish tweed, gleaming brass. Glancing at his own face in the tear-shaped outside mirror, Bob suddenly sees himself as he must look from inside the store, a man in work clothes guzzling beer and drooling over someone else’s luck. Abruptly, he turns and heads inside, pitching the empty can into the trash barrel by the door as he enters.

He wishes he’d taken his captain’s hat with him when he left home, as he believes he’s treated with more respect here with the properly crumpled captain’s hat on his head than he is without it. The hat ordinarily embarrasses him, especially when he’s not running the Belinda Blue, and off the boat he usually bends it and stuffs it into
his back pocket. The hat had been sort of a joke anyhow, a present given to him by Ave one night over beers at the Clam Shack after Bob had gotten his commercial license. He sensed that somehow Ave was mocking him with the hat, or maybe Honduras was, he couldn’t be sure, so he accepted it with mixed feelings and wore it reluctantly after that, as if it were merely and strictly part of the uniform that men with his job were supposed to wear.