He didn’t answer. He couldn’t look at her eyes, so he turned away from her altogether and faced the darkening sea.
Finally, he said, “You can quit that job. Tonight, if you want. You don’t have to go in. Just call and say you quit. I made … I made good money this trip.”
“Running drugs.”
“No, no. Fishing. A big party. Big spenders.”
“Bob,” she said, and she sighed. “I just don’t … I don’t believe you, Bob.” She looked at his broad back, a wall, and shook her head slowly.
“Well … what if I did, what if I did do something that was illegal … and got away with it? What the hell difference, what would that make different, to you, I mean?”
“I’d think you were stupid,” she said. “And lucky. For once in your life. No, I don’t know what difference it’d make, really.”
“Well, let’s say I did, okay? Let’s say I came out with a lot of money. Not a whole lot, but enough to let you quit that fucking job. Would you? Quit the job?”
She was silent for a moment, and he turned back around and faced her.
“Well?” he asked.
“No. No, I wouldn’t quit.”
“Why not?”
“Because … because it’s drug money, Bob. It’s not like winning the state lottery or something, for God’s sake. It’s drug money.” She tilted her head up at him and examined his large, dark face. “This is what I mean, about not knowing you anymore. No, you keep your drug money. Buy yourself a new car with it, if you want. Anything. But don’t buy anything for me with it, or for the children. Just don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can throw it in the ocean. I don’t want it touching me or my children, that’s all.”
“Why, for Christ’s sake? What’s the big deal it’s illegal? Lots of things are illegal and we do them.”
“Like what?”
He hesitated a second. “Well, you know. Little things. Drinking and driving. You know what I mean. And what about Eddie, for Christ’s sake? You think he wasn’t doing anything illegal? And Ave? You didn’t seem to mind it when what Eddie or Ave did ended up benefiting you.”
“They’re not you, Bob. And Eddie’s dead. Ave’s in jail. But even if that wasn’t true, even if they were still out there, still getting away with it, like you think you just did, it’d be the same. Look at me, Bob. I’m not crying. Not anymore. And I’m not yelling. Not that anymore, either. I’m just saying. I’m not upset, and I’m not angry. I’m just saying.”
“Saying what, for Christ’s sake? You don’t love me anymore? Is that what you’re saying? I’m too stupid, or … or I’m too illegal, or … or immoral? Or what?”
“No. Not that, none of that. Something else. It’s more complicated.” She seemed genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know … something worse, maybe.”
“What could be worse?”
“To love you and not know you, I guess. That’d be worse. For me.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Elaine! You know me.”
“No. Not anymore. And I don’t know why, if it’s because you’ve changed who you are since we left New Hampshire, or because things have happened to you since then. Bad things. Things I didn’t even know were happening, some of them. All I’m sure of is I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“You know me.”
She smiled. “I’m going to be late for work. Let me have the keys. We can talk later if you want.”
He gave her the keys. “I hate that fucking job. More than you can ever imagine. That you have to do that.”
“I hate it too, Bob. More than you can ever imagine. But it’s legal. And right now, it’s the only job we’ve got.” She turned and started toward the car.
“Elaine! What … what can I do?”
She kept walking.
“Do you want to go back to New Hampshire?” he called out. “Is that what you want?”
She stopped, turned and said, “Yes. Yes, I do.” Then she opened the car door and got in. A few seconds later, she was gone, and it was dark. Slowly, Bob crossed the yard and went inside to his children.
Elaine came home at one-fifteen, stopping only for a moment in the living room, as if to give Bob a chance to look up from the David Letterman show and ask her to sit down, have a cup of tea, talk things over. He didn’t. All he did was glance at her when she came through the door and then look back at the TV screen as she crossed the room. She called from the kids’ bedroom, “ ’Night, Bob,” and he answered, “’Night,” and that was it. They no longer slept together.
He watched the TV screen inattentively, as if instead it were watching him, until the National Anthem was played at two-thirty and programming ceased. A half hour later, he realized that the blue eye in front of him was dead, and he reached over and flicked it off. With the lights on, he lay back on the sofa and tried to sleep. He squirmed and bent and unbent himself, but his body felt like a sack of nails to him, painful in any position, until finally he gave up trying, sat and smoked cigarettes, finished all the beer in the refrigerator and read People magazine twice, until it disgusted him, and he threw it on the floor. All those happy, pretty, successful people—he hated them because he knew they didn’t really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in that way made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren’t people, he fumed, they’re photographs.
At six, he heard the baby wake, burble and yap to himself a few minutes and then cry to have his diapers changed. Bob rose slowly from the couch, got the bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator and headed down the hallway toward the children’s room. Elaine appeared at the door, crossed the hallway silently, as if alone there, and went into the bathroom, closing the door tightly behind her. As he entered the bedroom, softly gray in the predawn light, he heard the splash of the shower behind him. Ruthie and Emma, accustomed to their brother’s morning howl and the sounds of a parent tending to him, slept on, grabbing at the last, fat hour of sleep before they themselves had to get up.
Ruthie lay curled away from Bob, facing the wall, her thumb jammed into her mouth; Emma, in the other bed, slept on her belly, arms and legs splayed, as if swimming underwater. In the crib, which was squeezed between the dresser and the back wall of the small, crowded room, Robbie lay flat on his back, scowling and red with discomfort, until suddenly he saw Bob towering over the crib and ceased to cry.
Bob handed him the bottle, and while the baby noisily sucked at it, proceeded to strip away the sopped, plastic-lined paper diaper. When he had the baby’s bottom naked, he stopped for a moment and thought, almost amazed, as if seeing it for the first time, My God, he has a penis. Just like me. An ordinary, circumcised penis. A doctored tube coming out of his digestive tract, that’s all. It was contracted and short, shrunken to little more than thimble-sized from the cold and sudden exposure to the air. Below it swelled the testicles in their tight pouch, like the breast of a tiny, pink bird. There was no mystery, no power, no sin, no guilt. Just biology. It was terrifying for that, and for an instant, wonderful.
“Oh, Robbie,” Bob whispered.
The baby, large blue eyes peering over the cloudy bottle, looked up at his father, and though his lips and cheeks yanked furiously at the rubber nipple, the baby seemed to be smiling. Bob returned his son’s gaze for a moment, then began to examine his own hands, huge against the infant’s tiny, smooth torso, legs and feet. They were coarse hands, scratched and hairy across the tops, with thick veins zigzagging over the surface like blue bolts of lightning, and suddenly his hands looked like weapons to Bob, weapons with wills of their own, like stones that could hurl themselves, and he hauled them out of the crib and jammed them into his pockets.
Once again, his left hand felt the money, but this time, instead of pulling away from it, the hand grabbed onto the packet and held it for a long moment. “Robbie,” Bob whispered. “Robbie, your father is a terrible man. Look what he’s ended up doing,” he said, and his voice sounded like a cold wind raiding a shutt
er. “Just look at it.”
The baby gurgled and smiled, kicked his bare feet in the air. Across the room, Ruthie twisted in her sleep, while Emma, blinking open one eye, saw her father and instantly dove back into sleep as if into deep, warm waters.
With his hands still stuffed into his pockets, Bob slouched from the room, peering back over his shoulder as he went out. He passed down the hallway, the bathroom door still closed, and left the trailer. Outside, the air was cool and almost still, as a thin, low fog drifted off the sea and caught against the Keys, shrouding the islands in a soft, silvery mist. He could hear the water lap against the shore, as if speaking to it, but he couldn’t see the water at all.
He got into his car, and with the headlights on, drove slowly, not much faster than if he’d walked, over to Islamorada, where once again he bought newspapers. In the parking lot, inside the car, he unfolded the Miami Herald and spread it over his lap and read, for the first time, the article about the drowning of the fifteen Haitians.
15 HAITIANS DROWN OFF SUNNY ISLES
MIAMI, Feb. 12 (UPI)—Fifteen Haitians, mostly women and children, drowned this morning in choppy waters off Sunny Isles just north of here after being forced into rough seas by the captain of what Coast Guard officials said was probably an American fishing boat engaged in smuggling Haitians into Florida. The unidentified boat escaped into the darkness while crew members of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Cape Current attempted to save the Haitians.
Immigration authorities said it was one of the worst such incidents recorded since the waves of immigrants from the impoverished Caribbean country began heading for the United States 10 years ago. Gov. Bob Graham called it “a human tragedy which has been waiting to happen,” and said he would press the Federal Government to work with Haiti to stop the flight to these shores.
In Miami, a Coast Guard spokesman said of the drownings, “It’s just such a tragedy,” adding, “It’s subhuman, what some of these smugglers will do for a few dollars.” When the fishing boat was first hailed by the Cape Current at 2:30 this morning, it was a half mile off the beach at Sunny Isles. According to the Coast Guard spokesman, the captain of the fishing boat frightened the Haitians off his boat by firing a gun into the air.
The Haitians, most of whom apparently could not swim, drowned in the six-foot chop almost immediately. It’s thought that several of them may have made it to the beach. Authorities are urging anyone who may have survived the tragedy to come forward and help identify the individuals who abandoned them to the sea.
The bodies of five men, six women and four children were taken to the Dade County morgue. A spokesman for the Medical Examiner’s office said that autopsies would be performed and that attempts would be made to identify them. “Then,” said the spokesman, “the bodies will have to be disposed of in some respectable and tasteful fashion. I don’t quite know how we’re going to do that yet.”
Bob’s chest tightened into a fist, then opened and emptied, and he wept, sitting in the shadows inside his car, surrounded by a milk-white fog, in a parking lot on an island in a sea, lifetimes and whole continents away from where none of this could have happened to him.
An hour later, he was sitting at the kitchen table, and he read the article again, studied the photograph accompanying it, read and studied as if decoding a secret message from an ally, while the girls ate breakfast in silence and gathered lunches in paper sacks and milk money for school, and Elaine in housecoat and slippers, without uttering a word, made breakfast for them all, served it and cleaned up afterwards, and the baby, on his belly in the playpen in the living room, watched.
Finally, the girls have left for school, Elaine has put Robbie back into his crib for his morning nap, and she stands at the sink, her hands in soapy water, and she looks up from the dishes every now and then at her husband bent over the newspaper.
“Awful, isn’t it?” she says, her flat, expressionless voice cracking the silence.
Bob’s face comes up as if from the bottom of the sea, white, bloated and whiskery, eyes like holes, mouth a bloodless slash, thin and drawn down, his long chin trembling.
“What is it, Bob?” she cries.
He shakes his head slowly from side to side, a sea beast shedding water in a fine spray, and opens his mouth to speak, but cannot.
“Oh, God, what’s the matter?” Elaine rushes over to him. She holds his cold face and says again, “Bob, what’s the matter?” She looks down at the newspaper, then back at his face. “I know, the poor Haitians. I read it when you first came in…. I was … I was looking for Ave. There wasn’t anything….” She makes her gaze drive down into her husband’s, and she sees through films, membranes, veils, curtains, doors, walls, all the way into the secret man at the center.
She knows now. She knows what he has done. She knows at last who he is. She pulls back in horror. Then an instant passes, and she comes quickly forward and cradles his head against her breast. “Oh, my God, Bob. My God.”
Suddenly, she pushes him violently away from her. His body flops back against the chair, and he says, “I … I don’t … I can’t …”
“Shut up! Just shut up! Don’t say anything!” Slowly, as if afraid she will break, she moves to the other side of the table and sits down opposite him. In silence, they sit there, staring at each other, husband and wife and the third person their marriage has made of them and who, at this moment, stands before them, a monster.
By noon, they have decided what to do. It comes out slowly, without argument or discussion, sentence by sentence, cell by cell, like a healing. First Bob quietly announces, “We should leave here.” Then, after several minutes, Elaine says they should go back to New Hampshire, where Bob has a trade and can find work.
A little while later, Bob says they should pack up and leave now, as soon as possible, before they spend all their money here in Florida. Elaine agrees. She should quit her job now, pick up her pay this afternoon and take from the bank the few hundred dollars they have left in the checking account.
For a long time, they say nothing more, until Elaine says that the money Bob took from the Haitians should not leave Florida with them. “It’s worse than drug money,” she says.
“No. You’re right. I don’t know what I should do with it, though. I can’t turn it in to the police. It’s a lot of money, though,” he adds.
They are silent for a while, then Elaine says, “Shouldn’t you give it over to Ave somehow? That’s where it belongs. It’s evil money. Or what’s-his-name, Tyrone.”
“No, what I should do is give it back to the Haitians. If I could figure out how.”
For the first time, as they make their plans, they are speaking of “should” and “should not,” and they do it stiffly, awkwardly, for these are words that make it difficult to mingle fantasy with hope. The sentences fit clumsily in their mouths and stumble over tongue, teeth and lips, as if either the words and grammar or the mouths were not their own. But Bob and Elaine struggle on, for they know now that this is the only way a new life can be made. And they must make a new life; the old one has died and is rotting. They are living on a corpse that has begun to stink.
They can’t afford to rent a U-Haul, so they decide to pack and carry north only their clothes, bedding, linens and kitchenware. They will leave the rest of their belongings—except for the baby’s crib and playpen, which can be tied to the roof of the car—in exchange for the rent they’ll owe for not giving a month’s notice to Horace. “Should we tell him what we’re doing?” Bob asks.
Elaine says, “No. We shouldn’t tell anyone. Once he sees the stuff we’ve left, he’ll be happy we’re gone.”
By the time the girls come home from school, Bob and Elaine have begun packing in earnest. When Ruthie and Emma learn that they are moving back to New Hampshire, and Daddy will get his old job back, and they’ll find a nice place to live, just like they used to have, the girls are visibly pleased, even Ruthie, and immediately they go to work packing their favorite toys, dolls, games and b
ooks into the boxes that Elaine brought back when she went out to close the bank account and pick up her paycheck at the Rusty Scupper.
For supper, because all the dishes, pots and pans have been wrapped and closed into boxes, Bob takes everyone out to McDonald’s in Key Largo, and though he still cannot eat—the very sight of the Big Macs and fries makes him suddenly nauseous—Bob enjoys his family’s pleasure in a way he has not for months. Their fussing and noisy delight, their impatience, their innocent, shining faces, make for him a world that, for once, is sufficient unto itself.
On the short drive back to the trailer, rain starts to fall, large, swollen drops that spatter against the windshield. Bob flips on the wipers and defogger and lights a cigarette. He’s thinking intently and has said nothing since leaving McDonald’s.
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