Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  “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.”

  3

  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 ye
ars, 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.

  It’s not until Bob has been in Oleander Park for over a full month, however, that he is able to look out his car window on the way to work one morning and for the first time actually see these lakes that surround him. It’s as if, a passenger on a bus, he has been reading a book for hours, and closing the book, looks around and realizes that he’s in a bus station in a strange city surrounded by strangers. He thought he was alone, that the privacy of his dream was his waking reality as well, and suddenly he sees that the wall around him, made for him by his fears and anxieties, is very close to him indeed, and stretching beyond that wall for miles and miles, all the way to the horizon, is a brand-new world.

  He is driving to work one cool morning, past the Cypress Gardens airport, and turning his gaze away from it toward Lake Eloise on his right, he observes for the first time a golden haze lifting slowly in thick swirls from the surface of the lake and drifting toward the trees along the far shore, bald cypress and locust and live oak trees with liana vines and Spanish moss drooping like memories from the branches, and he is struck by the soft, warm ease of the scene, and he wants to enter that scene.

  Bob Dubois is a sensual man—that is, most of his deeper responses to his presence in the world make themselves known to his body before moving eventually on to his mind, a condition he learned early in life to trust and respect. If he were more articulate, more like his older brother, perhaps, and words did not so often feel like a tasteless paste in his mouth, he would probably, like most people, mistrust the information regarding the world that gets brought to him by means of his body’s delight, or else he would hold the world so revealed in contempt. But he’s not like Eddie, he’s not like most people, and consequently, a beautiful sound makes him want to listen more closely, a beautiful meal makes him hungry when he wasn’t, a beautiful woman makes him tumescent, and the sight of a morning haze rising off a still, dark lake makes him want to row a small, flat-bottomed boat quietly along the shore, to raise the dripping oars every now and then and cast a line among the knobby cypress roots for bass. His desires, then, reveal the world to him. His fears and anxieties, his aversions, obscure it.

  Until this morning, he has not arrived at work feeling happy. Each day has brought a new disappointment, disillusionment or the kind of frustration you have to lie about to keep from blaming on anyone but yourself, because if you do blame it on anyone but yourself, you will be very angry at that person. And Bob cannot afford to be very angry at his brother Eddie; he is too dependent on him.

  He works twelve hours a day, six days a week, and except for the part-time stock clerk, a black man in his late sixties named George Dill, he is alone in the store. Though he’s paid in cash, with no taxes or other deductions taken out, his weekly pay is only twenty-five dollars more than it was in Catamount. Eddie calls him his future partner, though, and has promised Bob that when the new store is open, Bob will be running both stores and will be paid a share of the profits—assuming, Eddie tells him carefully, he demonstrates a knack for this kind of business, which of course Eddie is sure he possesses, because, after all, isn’t he one of the Dubois brothers, and haven’t the Dubois brothers always been able to do whatever they set out to do?

  Bob’s main problem in life, Eddie tells him, is that he’s never set his goals high enough. Until now, that is. “You got no experience at anything except fixing fucking oil burners.” He told this to Bob one noontime when he happened to drop by the store, and Bob, after having worked at the store for ten days, took the opportunity to complain lightly about the utter boredom of the job. “That’s because you’re not learning anything,” Eddie said. “And the reason you’re not learning anything is because your goals are too low. All you want to do is learn how to do a simple job, which you have done, and now you’re bored. What you got to do is learn about what you want to know about, which should be money. You don’t know anything about money, honey, and money-honey is what makes the world go round, so if you want to go around with it, you better learn a little about money-honey, brother of mine, or your ass will be brass and somebody else’s golden.”

  Bob isn’t sure he’ll be able to learn much about money while standing behind a counter selling whiskey and beer to servicemen—the store is located on Route 17, halfway between Winter Haven and Shure air base—keeping inventory, stocking shelves, unloading delivery trucks and crushing and stuffing the empty cartons into a Dempster-Dumpster out back, but Eddie reassures him that one morning he’s going to wake up and everything will be clear to him. It happened that way to him, Eddie says, only he was just a kid when it happened, one year out of high school and working in the Thom McAn’s shoe store in Catamount, wondering how come he was selling shoes instead of buying or making them, because it seemed to him, he tells Bob, that the people who were buying shoes and the people who were making shoes had a lot more money than the people who were only selling shoes. That’s when it all came clear to him.

  “What came clear?” Bob asks. He’s begun to fear that maybe Elaine is right, that Eddie is a little crazy—“off the beam,” is how she likes to put it—which makes Bob picture his brother as a cartoon character walking happily on air while the rest of them cling terrified to a tree trunk laid between two cliffs across a bottomless chasm.

  “It came to me that money is what makes the world go round. Like I said. I know, I know, everybody with a mouth says it, but most people don’t really believe it, which is why they don’t really understand it. You have to believe something before you can understand it. Anyhow, that’s why most people end up ignoring the facts, and the most important fact is that the guys with most of the money are always doing at least two of the only three things you can do in this life, which happen to be making things, selling things and buying things. The really big guys, your Rockefellers, your Fords, your Du Ponts, they do all three. Because that’s all you can do in life anyhow, three things. If you do at least two of those things, and one of them happens to be selling, then your ass is golden. Simple. It came to me when I was eighteen, and it’s been my guiding light ever since. My philosophy of life. My religion. I buy things and I sell things. All you ever done, up to now, is buy things. And the only way that takes you is downhill. Sure, you sold your time and your skills when you were fixing people’s broken furnaces in the middle of the fucking night in the middle of the fucking winter, but in the real world, the world that money makes go round, time and skills, brother, are not things. A trade is not a thing. So I buy land and I buy booze, which, as you know, are things, and then I sell them for more than I paid for them, and then I take the difference and buy some more land and some more booze, and maybe I build a couple houses too, which I sell, and so on up th
e hill, all the way to pig heaven. That’s the only way to beat the system, kid.”

  “What is?” What in hell is this man talking about? Bob wonders.

  “You make things and you sell them, or else you buy things and you sell them. Which means that you can never really work for someone else. You always got to work for yourself.”

  “Well, I work for you.”

  “Hey. No, you don’t, Bob. Only temporary. Only until you catch hold of the system. Then we’re partners. Then you’ll be out there making yourself a fucking killing, man. A killing.”