Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  Honduras answers the door. She swings it open and stands there on one foot, like a stork resting, except that she’s not resting, she’s been painting her toenails and has hopped on her right foot from the low, blond sofa over to the door, afraid the shag rug will mess the wet paint on the toes of the left. She’s got a cigarette clamped between her lips and a tiny maroon-tipped brush in one hand.

  “Oh, hi, Bob,” she says, her lips not moving, the cigarette bobbing up and down as she speaks. “C’mon in.” She turns and hops back to the couch and puts the cigarette into a conch shell and resumes painting toenails. She’s wearing a man’s pale blue dress shirt, Ave’s, and tight cut-off jeans with raggedy Daisy Mae cuffs. The gold hoops on her wrists clank against one another as she lovingly lays down the paint. “Jesus, I hate doing this,” she says, but she does it with delicate, slow, affectionate swishes, licking her lips each time she completes a swirl on one toe and moves on to the next. “What brings you out on a night like this?”

  Bob doesn’t answer. He’s entered the room, closed the door behind him and is looking around him, as if it’s the first time he’s been here, though he’s been here many times, has sat at the table in the dining area off the kitchen drinking beer and talking into the night with Ave, has peered out all the windows, even bedroom windows, and admired the view of the marina, the boats tied up there, the channel and the bay beyond, has listened to the thump of the jukebox in the bar below, has used the bathroom at two in the morning before leaving to drive home to Elaine, asleep alone on the sofa in the dilapidated yellow trailer five miles away on Upper Matecumbe Key. He has said to himself, though he does not now remember it, that he would be content with an apartment like this, larger, of course, with bedrooms for the kids, and maybe two baths instead of one, but no fancier.

  Honduras looks up, peers at Bob through frizzy red hair, her hand poised over the little toe of her right foot. “Ave’s not here,” she says. “Left with Tyrone this afternoon, for the Caymans, I think. Won’t be back till … Thursday? Yeah, Thursday, I think.”

  Bob sits down slowly, like an old man, in the low easy chair opposite the sofa. “Got a cigarette? I left mine in the car. Or home.”

  “Sure.” She tosses him a pack of Marlboro Lights. “You okay? You’re looking kind of strung out. Want a joint?”

  “A joint? Okay, sure.”

  “Right there, in the box on the table next to you,” she says, going back to her painting.

  Bob lifts the cover of the small brass box, takes out a joint and lights it up, inhaling deeply. “Nice.”

  “Sure.”

  They are silent for a few moments while Bob smokes and Honduras paints, until finally she sticks her bare legs out in front of her and admires the maroon nails from a distance.

  Bob says, “Want some?” and he extends the butt end of the joint to her.

  “Thanks.” She plucks it from his fingertips and finishes it off. “Good shit, right?” “Good shit.”

  “So, big man, what’s up? You are a big man, you know that?”

  “Yeah.” He’s silent for a second, and then says, “Well, I’m kinda curious. How do you get this stuff? I might like some for myself. You know?”

  Honduras tosses her head back and laughs, and here things start happening too fast for Bob later to recall clearly and in order. It’s not that he’s not paying attention (if anything, he’s paying too much attention). It’s that he has no conscious plan, no intent—which is to say that he’s got no connection between his past and his future, none in mind, that is. When one gives oneself over to forces larger than one’s self, like history, say, or God, or the unconscious, it’s easy to lose track of the sequence of events. One’s narrative life disappears.

  Here’s what he will recall later of this evening’s events, in a sequence obtained by logic rather than memory. First, Bob and Honduras smoked another joint together. Then she told him, again, the story of how she got her name, which led to a brief discussion of Ave’s travels in the Angel Blue with Tyrone James, who is a Jamaican, like the man who gave Honduras her name, though not a full-blooded Arawak Indian, as that man was. Bob said, “What the fuck’s a Arawak Indian? I never heard of them. I know Abenaki, I know Apache. And then you got your Comanches, your Iroquois, your Algonquins, and so on. But I never heard of Arawak.” She explained that they were the descendants of the Indians who were in the Caribbean when Columbus discovered America, and they were tall, good-looking, fierce Indians who smoked a lot of grass and lived up in the hills of the bigger islands like Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti. And they practiced voodoo, she told Bob. “Wow,” Bob said. “That’s really far out.” Her lover, the Arawak from Jamaica, had taken her to some voodoo ceremonies in the hills. “It was really amazing,” she said. Bob believed her. “That’s how I first got into herb,” she said. “Moving it, I mean.” She explained that the Arawaks in the hills of Jamaica grew the strongest, heaviest ganja on the island, and she got top dollar for it from rich Americans in Montego Bay, which is where and how she met the dentist from Philadelphia with the sailboat who brought her over to the Keys. And then she met Ave. “And you know the rest,” she said brightly. “No,” Bob said, “not really.” But by then he’d forgotten what he had asked her in the first place, something to do with Ave and the Angel Blue, something to do with Tyrone. He remembers deciding that it couldn’t have been very important, when suddenly Honduras asked him if he wanted to do a little coke. He said, “Sure, why not?” and she jumped up, drew the curtains closed, went into the bedroom and returned with a small vial. Bob remembers being excited and a little frightened, and he was relieved when he realized that he wasn’t going to have to inject the cocaine into his arm, that he could kneel down next to the glass coffee table opposite Honduras and imitate her as she rolled a fifty-dollar bill into a tube and sucked a two-inch line of the white powder into her nostril. He didn’t want to admit he hadn’t done this before, so he was glad that the procedure was simple enough that he could appear to be a practiced user. He waited for her to finish and sit back onto the sofa, and then he reached for her fifty. “You realize,” he said as he picked it up and tightened the roll, “I’m flat broke.” She smiled benevolently, and he went to work. Then, when he had sat back on the floor with his legs crossed under him, she said, “Broke is bad, big man,” and he said, “Baa-a-ad.” She laughed. It appears that at this point Bob started quizzing Honduras about voodoo, because he remembers challenging her to prove she knew how to perform a voodoo ceremony. “C’mon, prove it. And don’t just stick some pins in a doll and say some mumbo-jumbo and tell me it’s over. I know there’s more to it than that, or else people wouldn’t be so uptight about it, and it wouldn’t be such a big secret and all. It’s something black people know about, Haitians and stuff. Comes from Africa,” he said, smiling. “You ain’t black,” he said. “You white as rice. I bet I know more about voodoo than you,” he teased, and she got up and started dancing around the room, a combination of hula dance and bunny hop, which, to Bob, was very sexy. “Bum-diddy-bum, bum-diddy-bum!” she chanted as she danced, her lips pouty and full, eyes half-closed, hands stroking her belly and thighs. The next thing Bob remembers saying is, “Let’s fuck,” and the next thing he remembers doing is fucking. It was in the bed, he knows, with the lights on, he thinks, and both of them stark naked. He swears he did it three times in quick succession and that she giggled throughout the third. When it was over, at least for him it was over, she prodded and poked at him, trying for a fourth, and he rolled away from her, saying, “Oh, Jesus, Honduras, you’re crazy. Enough is enough.” She laughed, like a spoiled, defiant child, and said, “C’mon, let’s see you get it up again. I bet you can’t.” He said, “You’re right, I can’t. You’d hafta do voodoo to get me up again. Otherwise you just gotta let nature take its course.” She jumped out of the bed and yanked on her shorts and shirt, and grabbing up his clothes, bunching them into a bundle, made for the door. “I’ll show you some voodoo! I need your clothes, that’s all,�
�� she said, laughing. “What?” Bob cried. “Gimme my stuff!” “Nope. Gonna do some hex work with ’em. Gonna get your peter up.” “Aw, c’mon,” he begged. “Gimme my clothes.” He got out of bed and started toward her, his limp penis swinging heavily between his legs. “I got to get outa here anyhow.” She slammed the door in his face. “Hey,” he said. He caught sight of himself in the dresser mirror, a stranger’s body, a pale trunk and legs with red arms, neck and face. There were pimples on his shoulders, a dark mole under his right arm, hairy thighs and knobby knees. He wanted to cover himself, grab a blanket off the bed, tear down a curtain, anything, just get that pathetic naked pink and white thing covered and out of sight. “Hey, let’s have the clothes,” he said sternly, and he pulled on the doorknob, which came off in his hand, the door still closed. “What the fuck?” he said, examining the doorknob, and he heard Honduras laughing on the other side. “Ha ha ha! You see? Voodoo!” “Shit,” Bob said. He hollered this time. “C’mon, open the fucking door and gimme my clothes!” He slid the doorknob back onto the stem, and bearing down and twisting it at the same time, managed to turn the knob and open the door, and he saw Honduras slipping out the farther door to the terrace, closing it behind her. He searched the living room, found no clothes, went to the front door, opened it an inch and peeked out, but she was gone. “Sonofabitch,” he whispered, and closed the door. He crossed the room and looked out the window on the far side. When he saw her down there on the pier, he cranked open the window and called, “Hey, Honduras!” He remembers her face in the dim light from the Clam Shack as she looked up at him, a joyful, young face, childlike almost, but frightening to him, as if, in her, curiosity were stronger than fear. He turned away and raced back through the bedroom to the bathroom and wrenched a towel off the rack. Tying it around his waist, he stepped out the door to the terrace and quickly walked to the stairs and down. By the time he had rounded the building and could see the boats tied up in their slips, like horses in their stalls, Honduras had started the engine of the Belinda Blue. He recognized the cough and chug and the steady, slow throb of the old Chrysler, and he started running. When he reached the slip, the boat was ten feet out. Honduras waved down at him from the bridge. “You sonofabitch! Pull that boat back in!” Bob snapped at her. “No way. Gonna put a spell on you! Gonna do some voodoo on you! Gonna put you in my pow-wah!” she said. Bob hissed at her, “Give me back my clothes, goddammit!” She threw back her head and laughed. “Try an’ get ’em!” Bob stepped swiftly to his right and ran the length of the neighboring slip, a narrow walkway off the central pier between the slip of the Belinda Blue and the slip for the Angel Blue. He reached the end of the walkway, and when he jumped, Honduras gunned the engine, and the boat churned water, lurched away, leaving open space instead of deck for Bob to come down in. He came up sputtering, slapping at the water with fury, and then lay back and treaded water and watched the Belinda Blue, her running lights on, cut south and head toward the bridge. He saw the shrimpers in the glow of their lanterns scramble to yank up their dip nets as the boat approached them, then it passed under and charged beyond, heading down the channel in deep water toward the open sea. He remembers that, and he remembers swimming slowly back to the pier, climbing up, naked, then climbing back down for the towel, wringing it out and wrapping it around himself again and padding along the pier toward the Clam Shack. He returned to the apartment and took a pair of Ave’s designer jeans and a Mexican shirt from his closet and left. He closed the door behind him and started praying that he had been stupid and distracted enough to have left the keys in the car ignition. The keys are there. He says, “Thank God for something,” starts the motor, backs out of the lot and eases away from Moray Key, heading home.

  7

  When Bob arrives home, Elaine is sleeping. He steps barefoot through the door, wearing Ave’s clothes, which are too tight on him and pinch at the crotch, waist and shoulders, and his hair is still wet. He has prepared an explanation: he and Ave got to drinking and wrestling out on the pier, and he fell in. But Elaine asks no questions. She stirs as he enters, opens her eyes when he snaps on the kitchen light, turns away from him and says nothing.

  Bob goes to the bathroom, returns and notices suddenly that all the signs of his earlier rampage have been eliminated, as if it never happened. If anything, the house looks neater, less cluttered and more ordered than it did before, and for a second he allows himself to think of his fury as if it were a rational and deliberate thing, a painful but necessary kind of housecleaning. He checks, and he notes with approval that the pole lamp, which he always hated, has been thrown out. The television set looks unbroken. Stripping off Ave’s shirt and jeans, he flicks off the light in the kitchen and slides naked into bed, his back to his wife’s back.

  “You see the message by the phone?” she asks in a low, cold voice.

  “No.”

  She says nothing, just lifts and drops her heavy hips to make herself more comfortable in the lumpy bed.

  “What’s it say?”

  She’s silent.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Elaine, what’s the message?”

  She yanks on the covers and draws them over her bare shoulder.

  Bob sighs heavily, gets out of bed and crosses to the counter where the telephone is located. Reaching out in the dark to the wall, he switches on the light again and plucks from under the telephone the sheet of lined paper and reads, Call Eddie. He says whenever you come in and it’s urgent. As easily as if he heard her speaking aloud, Bob can read and hear in Elaine’s swift, tiny handwriting the woman’s anger and detachment. She just wants to be left alone now. She doesn’t care what he does, whom he sees, what he feels, as long as he leaves her alone. If, in return, she has to leave her husband to his own dreamy devices and illusions, leave him to his own messy life, if that’s the price of her survival, then she will pay it. Her priorities are both clear and powerful, as if determined not so much by her mind as by the chemistry of her body. Bob, she has said to herself over and over tonight, can go fuck himself. And she means it.

  The phone rings a long time before Eddie answers, and when Bob hears his slurry voice, he thinks he’s wakened his brother and cringes in anticipation of Eddie’s grumpiness and sarcasm. “Sorry I woke you up, but Elaine said to call no matter when I got in….”

  “No problem, no problem. I was just … sitting around anyhow,” Eddie says.

  Bob looks over at the kitchen clock. Three-forty. Maybe Eddie’s drunk, he thinks. “That’s good. So … what’s up?”

  “Well, how you doing down there? Everything okay?”

  “Okay, I guess. You know, it’s … risky.”

  Eddie blats a hard, single laugh. “Risky! Yeah, but that’s the only way to go, right? Right?”

  “I guess. So, listen, what’s up? How’s Sarah and Jessica? Everyone okay?”

  “Oh, sure, sure, great, just great. Everyone’s fine.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah, things’re okay here, not great, you know, not like I was hoping … but you win some, you lose some, right?” “Right.”

  “Well, you know, I haven’t heard anything from you guys in a while, not since you left, except for the Christmas card, which was nice. Thanks. But, you know, I was just sitting around here wondering how you guys’re doing down there. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, we’re doing okay. Not as much business as I’d like, not as many customers as I’d kinda hoped for, but we’re surviving. Barely. But we’re doing it.”

  Eddie laughs again, that same sharp, flat laugh of disbelief. “I bet!”

  “No, it’s nice here. Real pretty, you know, and the fishing’s real good. Hey, I saw Ted Williams today. Can you believe that? He lives around here, in Islamorada.”

  “No shit. The Kid, eh?”

  “Yeah. In real life. He looks real good too.”

  “Yeah.” Eddie pauses. “Well, listen, Bob, the reason I called you, I got to ask you something.”

  Bob is sil
ent a second, and he realizes that he hasn’t been listening to his brother at all and that the man is speaking in a way that’s almost unrecognizable to him—no foul language, no bragging, no fast talk, no sarcasm. Something’s wrong. “What’s the matter, Eddie?”

  “Well, I got a problem up here. A problem I thought maybe you could help me out with, you know?”

  “Sure. Anything.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m in a little trouble here. I told you about it a little last October, when you and me talked and you decided to quit the store and so on. You remember.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Eddie. What’s happening?”

  “Nothing. Nothing yet. Don’t worry none about it. I still got everything under control. You know me, kid. I don’t give a rat’s ass about a little trouble now and then. You expect it, the game I play. But I got to deal with some people here I owe money to. I really do have to come up with the bucks now … well, yeah, let’s just say I got to come up with the bucks. You understand? I’m not the kinda guy who asks for help when he doesn’t need it. Right? Especially from my kid brother. Right?”