Continental Drift

Making a Killing

1

Bob drives, and Elaine, seated beside him, holds the road map in her lap, and the two of them keep their eyes away from the horizons and close to the road ahead and the buildings and land abutting the road. They avert their gaze from the flat monotony of the central Florida landscape, the palmettos and citrus groves and truck farms. They ignore, they do not even notice, the absence of what Bob would call “real trees.” They look right through, as if it were invisible, the glut of McDonald’s and Burger Kings, Kentucky Fried Chickens and Pizza Huts, a long, straight tunnel of franchises broken intermittently by storefront loan companies and paved lots crammed with glistening Corvettes, T-Birds, Camaros and Trans Ams, and beyond the car dealers, surrounded by chain-link fences, automobile graveyards, vast and disordered, dreary, colorless and indestructible. On the outskirts of every town they pass through are the miles of trailer parks laid out in grids, like the orange groves beyond them, with a geometric precision determined by the logic of ledgers instead of the logic of land, water and sky. And after the trailer parks, as the car nears another town, they pass tracts of pastel-colored cinder-block bungalows strung along cul-de-sacs and interconnected, one-lane capillaries paved with crushed limestone — instant, isolated neighborhoods, suburbs of the suburbs, reflecting not the inhabitants’ needs so much as the builders’ and landowners’ greed. And then into the towns themselves, De Land, Sanford, Altamonte Springs, they lumber down Route 4 from Daytona, the U-Haul swaying from side to side behind the car like a patient, cumbersome beast of burden, and the tracts and housing developments get replaced by high white cube-shaped structures stuffed with tiny apartments laid out so that all the windows face other windows and all the exits empty onto parking lots. Bob and Elaine cannot see, nor would you point out to them, the endless barrage of billboards, neon signs, flapping plastic banners and flags, arrows, and huge, profiled fingers pointing at them through the windshield, shrilling at them to Buy, buy, buy me now! Instead, they see gauzy wedges of pale green, yellow and pink, and now and then dots and slashes of red, orange and lavender — abstract forms and fields of color that, once seen, get translated into rough notions about efficiency, cleanliness and convenience, and these notions comfort them. For they have done a terrible and frightening thing: they have traded one life for another, and this new life is now the only one they have.

The white people they see in the towns, in cars and alongside the roads and streets resemble the people of New Hampshire, except that they wear brightly colored clothing and their skins are tanned. But for the first time in their lives, Bob and Elaine Dubois see many people of color. Hundreds of them, thousands! Not the one or two they have seen before, noticed without comment just this week, in fact, waiting on their table in a Stuckey’s outside Raleigh, North Carolina, or pumping gas into their car on the New Jersey Turnpike. (They missed seeing them in the Bronx because Bob was so afraid of losing his way as he passed through New York City that he made Elaine watch the signs for I-95 and shout out the turns while he watched out for the cars, trucks and buses beside, behind and in front of them, the U-Haul in the rearview mirror, the bumps and potholes in the road.) Back in Catamount, there was the bald, muscular black man who ran the rug-cleaning company, and there was the tall, good-looking guy in the three-piece suit that Bob saw once in Concord, the capital, a man who was probably a lawyer working for one of the agencies housed in the Federal Building, a man he’d mentioned several times to Elaine, but she had never seen him herself. Way back, when Bob was in the service, there were many young black men and even a few black sergeants, but for Bob, who was only a kid and hung out with the kids from Maine and New Hampshire, the blacks he saw then were abstractions called niggers that frightened him the same way whorehouses in Boston and gambling in the barracks frightened him — he didn’t know the rules, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself by asking, so he kept away, kept entirely to people like himself, learned how to fix oil burners, got stationed in New England despite the war and hitchhiked home on his leaves to visit his parents and his girlfriend Elaine and lie to his buddies in the taverns.

It was still possible at the time this story takes place, the late 1970s, to grow up in America without having known a single black person well enough to learn his or her name, without having seen a black person, except on television or from a great distance, even when that person happened to be standing right next to you in line at the bank or in a cafeteria or on a bus. Bob Dubois and his wife Elaine grew up that way. But now, suddenly, as they near Oleander Park, Florida, their new home, after having sold their house in New Hampshire, after Bob’s having quit his job, after having sold everything they could sell, even Bob’s beloved Boston whaler, after having said and waved goodbye forever to everything familiar, known, understood, they come up against and are forced to see many people of color, more of them, or so it seems, than there are white people. They see them working in gangs in the orange groves, riding in the backs of trucks, mowing lawns, striding along the highways and sidewalks, and though Bob and Elaine are safely removed from these people, protected from direct contact by their car and all their possessions and by each other, the people of color seem up close and inescapably real, as if they are suddenly banging on the windshield, yanking at the door handles, climbing over the roof and hood and shouting to one another, “Yo, man! Come on an’ check out the white folks!”

These black- and brown-skinned people, the American blacks in the department stores and supermarkets, the Jamaicans and Haitians in the fields, the Cubans in the filling stations — these working people, who got here first, belong here, not Bob and Elaine Dubois and their daughters Ruthie and Emma. It’s Bob and his family who are the newcomers at the Florida trough, and Bob is embarrassed by his lateness. He feels ugly in his winter-gray skin, ashamed of his wife’s plain looks and his children’s skinny arms and legs, he feels poor and ignorant in his noisy, dented station wagon and orange rented trailer with all their possessions jammed inside, the furniture and clothing they couldn’t or wouldn’t sell in their yard sale or through their classified ad in the Catamount Patriot. He feels embarrassed — that is, exposed, revealed to the world for what he is — and perhaps for the first time in his life, his entire body fills with fear.

Elaine looks quickly over at him and nervously, as if she has been reading his thoughts, says, “All those black people working in the fields and everything, they’re not really Americans, right?”

Bob says nothing, just keeps on driving.

She adds, “I’ve read they’re from Cuba and those kinds of places.”

For a moment they are silent. Then Bob says in a low voice, “Thank God for Eddie.”

“Yeah,” she says, reaching for the road map.

2

Elaine hates the way Eddie talks. “He has a foul mouth,” she says.

Bob, his head and both hands in the refrigerator reaching for more beer, turns and looks at her. Didn’t the man find them this trailer they bought on Lake Grassey, didn’t he give them an almost new Sony portable television as a house present, which the kids are happily watching in the back bedroom instead of hanging around in the kitchen and living room, whining and bothering the grownups, who want to talk business because tomorrow is Bob’s first day on the job, a job that his brother Eddie, for Christ’s sake, gave him? Is she unhappy here? They haven’t been in Florida a week, and already she wants to go home? This is home now.

“It’s just the way he talks, that’s all,” Bob explains. He whispers his words to her — Eddie and Sarah are sitting silently in the living room not ten feet away, smoking cigarettes and looking in opposite directions, Eddie at one end of the couch peering out the open screened door at the packed-dirt yard, the pink trailer across the lane, then the marsh and, beneath the soft purple shadows of dusk, the dark blue surface of Lake Grassey. Sarah, her long, thin legs crossed at the ankles, looks out the window beside her at the pale blue exterior of the trailer next door and examines it as if it were a picture of a trailer instead of the real thing.

“Eddie has a good heart,” Bob whispers. “It’s just he’s still a kid in some ways. He talks the way we did when we were kids—’fuckin’ this, ‘fuckin’ that’—that’s all. You know.” He holds three cans of Schlitz in one hand and swings the refrigerator door shut with the other.

“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.”

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 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.

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 the 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.”

Bob presses his brother for details on how, exactly, and when he will be transformed from employee to partner, from being a man who merely sells things to one who both buys and sells things, but Eddie, like a badly schooled priest explaining the mass, grows vague and dogmatic, until finally, since Bob persists, Eddie reminds him that it all comes down to trust in him, personal trust. Faith. Belief. After all, they are brothers, aren’t they, and if you can’t have faith in your brother, who can you have faith in? Strangers?

This morning, a cool, early March morning, Bob does have faith in his brother and in his brother’s system as well, his system for beating the system. After all, Bob now has a house for his family, even if it is a trailer, which at first made him feel slightly ashamed, but after a few weeks he began to look around and saw that the only people who did not live in trailers seemed to be either the kind of people he has always envied, doctors, lawyers, successful businessmen, or the kind of people he has always felt superior to, the poor whites (“crackers,” he has learned to call them), the blacks and the foreigners, Cubans mostly, but also Haitians, Jamaicans and other West Indians, though he hasn’t yet learned to tell them apart from the black Americans. He feels normal, which pleases him. His daughter Ruthie has been enrolled in school in Oleander Park, and they have figured out the school bus schedule so that every morning he is able to drink his second cup of coffee and watch her from the kitchen window as she walks down Tangelo Lane between the facing rows of trailers to the highway, where she stands with the other children from the park waiting for the bus. When the bus has picked up the children, Bob drains his cup, places it in the sink, kisses his wife goodbye, checks in the kids’ bedroom to say goodbye to Emma, if she’s awake, and leaves for work. An old ritual in a new place has been established, making the place seem familiar.

Though he works from nine to nine, and it’s dark by the time he gets home, it’s also true that the work is not difficult or especially tiring, so that when he does come home from the store he has more energy than when he got home from work in Catamount. He came home in darkness there too, at least from November till April he did. Exhausted, he usually emptied a couple of king-sized cans of Schlitz, ate supper, and fell asleep in front of the television set, only to be wakened by Elaine at nine to kiss the girls before they went to bed. He barely had enough energy or interest in his life or hers to stay awake with his wife, unless they were watching a television show that amused him. Then, finally, she would grow sleepy herself, and bored, and around eleven the two of them would climb the stairs to bed, where once or twice a week they made love, happily enough but lethargically, and fell asleep.

Since arriving in Florida, however, he helps put the girls to bed, often reading them a story, and then sits in the kitchen with his wife, talking intently to her, listening to her descriptions of her day’s events and encounters and telling her his. Even later, after they have made love, which they do more frequently now, they go on talking. All the trivia of their daily lives seem strangely significant to them — the route taken by the bus into downtown Oleander Park several miles away, the funny woman in pink hot pants at the supermarket, the cortisone cream Elaine bought at the drugstore for Emma’s rash; and on Bob’s part, the trouble he has understanding what old George Dill is saying to him but how it’s getting easier every day, so that now he not only understands George almost all the time, but he also understands the Cubans and the Haitians pretty well too, at least most of the time, and only when they speak English, of course, and so long as they know the name of what they want; and the kids with phony ID’s from the base that he can spot before they cross the parking lot by the careful, self-conscious way they walk, as if they think they’re on stage; and a long, rambling phone call from Eddie, half drunk at four in the afternoon, checking on the day’s receipts before he floats a check for a part of a tract of marshland out near a town called Yeehaw Junction (Bob swears that’s what Eddie said) that he and “some very big guys from Miami” plan to drain and cut into house lots and have a half-dozen cinder-block houses going up by the end of summer that they’ll sell by fall to generate enough cash both to pay off the note for the original purchase and get started on a second half-dozen houses, which by Christmas will have generated enough cash to finance a shopping center right there in Yeehaw Junction, a report whose coherence makes Bob feel that he really is beginning to grasp the way the system works, both the big system and Eddie’s smaller one, which feeling gives Bob, for the first time, the belief that before long he, too, will have a new, large house with a pool out on Crump Road near the yacht club and a big new air-conditioned car, a Mercedes, maybe, not an Eldorado like Eddie’s, and his kids, too, will learn how to ride horses English style and go to summer camp in New Hampshire.

He thinks, as he pulls his Chevy wagon into the lot in front of the liquor store, that tonight he’ll tell Elaine about that mist he saw rising from the lake on the way to work, how beautiful it was, and how it made him want to buy a canoe or maybe a small rowboat or another Boston whaler to replace the one he sold in New Hampshire, so he can go fishing for bass one Sunday morning soon while she and the kids are at mass.

Eddie’s store, located near where the old Seaboard Coastline Railroad tracks lean in and run alongside the highway for a few miles, is named Friendly Spirits Liquor Store, the words in gold gothic letters painted across the single plate-glass window in front. It’s a small white cinder-block building with a flat roof, which faces the highway and is hugged on three sides by citrus groves. Across the highway from the store squats a housing development for the families of enlisted men stationed at the air base, a gray, barracks-like complex of a dozen two-story buildings, parking lots and treeless, packed-dirt yards owned by the government and built by local contractors, one of whom happened to have been Eddie Dubois, who briefly established himself on paper as a painting contractor, then jobbed out the work to some students from the community college who’d advertised in the paper for house-painting work. Somewhere along the tangled line of contract negotiations and bidding for the construction of the housing project, Eddie came out with title to a house lot chopped out of the fields across the road, and with that in hand, he borrowed the money to build and stock his store, after which he absorbed his painting company into Friendly Spirits Enterprises, Inc.

Turning off Route 17, Bob notices, parked at the rear of the lot next to the Dempster-Dumpster, a red Plymouth Duster with a black woman and man sitting inside. Bob parks his car in front by the entrance, where Eddie instructed him always to park (so that he’d never seem to be without a customer), and sits at the wheel for a moment studying the couple in the Duster. On the seat next to him, inside a small canvas Barnett Bank money bag, is three hundred dollars in cash and rolled coins.

If they want the money, he decides, they can have it. All they’ve got to do is ask, and it’s theirs. He’s relieved that the gun is inside the store, on the shelf below the cash register. Defying Eddie’s instructions, Bob decided in the beginning not to carry the gun back and forth with him. Elaine pleaded with him to leave it at the store, made him picture Ruthie or Emma dead of accidentally inflicted gunshot wounds, and he said, “Okay, fine, you’re right. Just don’t mention it to Eddie, okay?” And then, having tucked it way in the back of the shelf beneath the counter, he forgot about the gun, until now, when he realizes that if he had the gun in his glove compartment, as Eddie expected him to, and if the black man and woman in the Plymouth got out of their car and strolled over to his car, he’d have to get out the gun, and when they yanked open his door and told him to give them the money bag or they’d blow his head off, he’d have to open fire, maybe hitting the man in the chest before the woman shot him in the face, killing him instantly. She’d take the money and drive away, leaving her partner lying on the parking lot, bleeding heavily and dying before the police got there to surmise that Bob got killed fending off an attempted robbery by a lone bandit.

Then he realizes that the Duster is parked next to the back door of the store. They must have broken in! There must be at least four of them, and waiting inside the store are three huge black guys, Jamaicans, probably, with machetes (he’s heard Jamaicans are particularly vicious, especially when they smoke that strong Jamaican ganja), and as soon as he unlocks the front door and shuts off the alarm, he’ll be a dead man, lying by the door in a pool of his own blood while the Jamaicans bring in the van they’ve rented for the occasion and empty the stockroom. Around ten, someone from the project across the highway will come in, a lonely housewife with three kids home from school with the chicken pox, and looking for a pint of vodka to get her through a lousy day, she’ll find instead the body of a white man hacked insanely to pieces.

Bob shudders. What the hell should he do? Make a dash for the front door, lock it behind him as soon as he’s inside, go for the gun under the counter and come out blasting? Or turn his car around and drive off, have a cup of coffee in town and check back later, after they’ve cleared out all the stock they can carry? Or pretend that nothing is wrong, as they clearly want him to do?

He decides to leave. Putting the key back into the ignition, he starts the engine as quietly as possible, but also does it casually, as if he has forgotten something at home and has to return for it. But when he pushes the gearshift from park to reverse gear, it stops, blocked, refusing to engage reverse — it’s happened before, twice last week, and to free the gear he has to step outside and climb onto the front bumper and rock the car violently while someone else jiggles the gearshift. He’s sweating, and casting a glance toward the Duster, he sees that the black man, dressed in a dark suit, has got out of the car and is coming toward him. Frantically now, Bob shoves at the gearshift, whispering, “Come on, you sonofabitch, come on, come on!” while the black man, like a dark cloud, draws closer to his car.

Suddenly he’s at the closed window on the passenger’s side, rapping on the glass, and Bob turns and sees the round, dark brown face of the stock clerk, George Dill, an intense, worried cast to his eyes, with new, deep lines crinkling his broad forehead.

Swinging open the door, the black man peers inside at Bob and utters a string of words. Bob, who can’t understand the words, stares wildly at the man, open-mouthed and sweating.

“I thought … I thought …” Bob says, and George interrupts, blurting out the same string of incomprehensible words.

“George, I … I didn’t recognize you …” Bob tells him. “The suit …”

Shutting off the engine, he pockets the key, picks up the money bag and steps from the car. He forces a smile onto his face and shows it, over the roof of the car, to George. “Whaddaya all dressed up for, George, a funeral?” He notices then that the woman in the Duster has got out of the car on the driver’s side and is walking quickly across the lot toward them. She’s a tall, slender woman, darker than George, wearing high heels and a long black chiffon dress, and on her head a broad-brimmed black hat. She’s attractively made up, with lipstick and bright red earrings and necklace, and she’s calling Bob’s name, “Mister Dubois,” in a friendly, familiar way, as if she knows him, though he is sure he’s never seen her before. He would have remembered, he knows, because she’s extremely pretty, with a wide, pleasant face and the kind of slender but sexy body, like Sarah’s, that he’s been thinking about a lot lately.

“Yes?” he says, smiling easily, as the woman comes around the front of his car and stands before him. She’s nearly as tall as he, he notices with pleasure, and she’s about his age, though he thought at first that she was younger, still a girl.

“Let me explain. Daddy’s all upset, Mister Dubois.”

Bob looks over at the old man and sees that the fellow is peering off toward the orange groves. The dark, pin-striped three-piece suit he’s wearing is way too large and hangs loosely around his bent body. He’s hatless, and Bob notices for the first time that, except for a thin belt of matted gray hair, George is completely bald. His shining brown head looks fragile, like a ripe plum.

“George,” Bob calls to him in a cheery voice. “Where’s your hat? I’ve never seen you without that Miami Dolphins cap of yours.”

The old man doesn’t respond.

“Mister Dubois,” the woman says in a low voice. “I’m his daughter, I’m Marguerite Dill. He lives with me.”

“Is he okay? Is something wrong?” Bob is serious now. He understands that he doesn’t understand, but he knows that no one will hurt him for it.

Carefully, in her soft, warm Southern voice, the woman explains to Bob that her father’s only brother died last night, and her father has taken the death badly. Except for her, the old man has no one else, not around here anyhow, because she brought him down here from Macon, Georgia, five years ago, when her mama died. “Since he was a young man,” she says, “he’s needed somebody to take care of him.” The brother, who lived in Macon, loved him, but he had his own family to take care of, so it was only right that her daddy come to Oleander Park to live with her. Now she is taking him back up to Macon for the funeral, which means that he won’t be able to come in to work for the rest of the week. She knew he’d understand, but her daddy insisted on coming over this morning to explain it to Bob himself. “He likes you very much, Mister Dubois, and he likes his job here. I told him I’d phone you and explain, but he insisted, he just kept on saying he wanted to face you himself, about his brother and all … but he’s in a kind of a shock, and he has trouble talking right normally, he gets all nervous and forgetful, you may have noticed that … but especially now, with his brother and all …”

“Oh, damn, I’m really sorry,” Bob says. “That’s okay, he can take all the time he needs. Tell him … Hey, George,” he calls, and he walks around the woman and comes up behind the old man, putting an arm around his sagging shoulders. “Hey, listen, George, I’m awful sorry about your brother.”

George turns his face up to Bob’s. “Thank you, Mistah Bob.”

“No problem. About your job, I mean. We need you, sure, but we can get along for a week or so without you. You just go on up there to Georgia and … just do whatever you have to do, George.”

“I will. You is the one man in the worl’ can understand,” George says. “’Cause of you an’ your brother Mistah Eddie.”

“Right, you’re right. I do know how you must feel, George, so you just take off as much time as you feel you need, and when you come back to work, why, you just show up here at the store, and your job’ll be waiting for you.” Bob gives the old man’s narrow, slumped shoulders a hearty hug.

“Thank you, Mister Dubois,” the woman says. “Come on now, Daddy, we best be going now.” Taking the old man by an elbow, she leads him toward the car.

“Are you driving up to Georgia?” Bob asks.

“Yes.”

“Well … drive carefully, then.”

“Thank you, I will.” She leads her father around to the passenger’s side and opens the door for him.

Bob takes a few steps toward them. “That your car?”

She looks up. “Yes.”

“Nice car. V-eight or six?”

“It’s a V-eight.”

“Burns a lot of gas, I bet.”

She smiles and opens the door on the driver’s side. Then, without answering him, she slides into the car and closes the door.

Standing in the middle of the parking lot, Bob watches the woman and her father leave, turn left at the highway and head north. And though it’s not the first time since leaving New Hampshire that he’s thought of Doris Cleeve, it’s the first time he’s missed her.

4

What kind of man is Bob Dubois, who, although married, keeps for himself the secret privilege of sleeping with women other than his wife? A more sophisticated man than Bob would instantly recognize the lie, and if the lie persisted, if it refused to get itself corrected, would name it a symptom, and before too long, the marriage might be dissolved. But for men like Bob Dubois, it’s different.

For Bob, the facts are these: he loves his wife; he loves other women too, but not as much as he loves his wife; if he betrays his wife by sleeping with other women, and she does not discover it, then he has not been cruel to her. And, naturally, he does not want to be cruel to her, for, as said, he loves his wife. Also, he knows that the facts are the same for her, that if she sleeps with other men and he does not discover it, so long as she loves him as deeply as he loves her, then she has not been cruel to him. And he knows she does not want to be cruel to him. Of course, everything changes if he discovers it. As with Ave.

It’s a very painful and delicate balance, and one cannot be neurotic and hold it, because it depends for its sustenance on a willingness to endure mutual suspicion, jealousy, watchfulness and now and then a deliberate averting of one’s gaze when one’s mate has been careless with evidence of transgression. It might be said that acceptance of these facts is immoral or, at best, self-destructive, but it’s better said that acceptance of these facts indicates a mature realism, especially among people for whom the continuation of marriage has a higher priority in life than establishing one’s personal integrity, higher even than believing in the personal integrity of one’s mate, and higher, too, than the utter luxury of making public a private truth. Privacy, the secret knowledge of oneself, is, for the poor and the ignorant, that is, for most of the people in this world, what publicity often is for the rich and the educated. It’s their best available way to keep their lives from disappearing into meaninglessness.

For this reason, even though his wife has recently learned that she is pregnant with their third child, Bob does not feel particularly guilty or even secretive, but merely private, when, in the presence of Marguerite Dill, he imagines and longs to be making love to her and says and does everything he can think of to make that possible.

He learned of Elaine’s pregnancy before George Dill returned from his brother’s funeral in Macon, and for a few days he forgot about the man’s lovely daughter and spent his hours at the store lost in fantasies focused on the future exploits of his son, for he knew the child would be a son. He had never heard of a man fathering two daughters and then a third, though he knew, of course, that it sometimes happens, the way any kind of bad luck sometimes happens. But when it has never happened to someone you know personally, you have difficulty believing it will happen to you. Thus, until the day George returned, accompanied by his daughter, Bob used his long, boring hours at the store to imagine his life with a son. And though his imaginings were common and sentimental — his son fishing from the bow of the boat, his son playing baseball, hockey and basketball, his son winning the spelling bee — many of the details through which he visualized these scenes were sufficiently vivid and personal for him to remember details and episodes from his own childhood that he had forgotten.

He caught glimpses of himself as someone else, as perhaps his own father might have seen him. He saw his hair, at first wavy and blond and then, by the time he started school, straight and chestnut brown, like Ruthie’s. He saw the fear and sheer envy in his blue eyes of his father’s great, iron-hard size, the wonder of it, his awestruck gaze when, at his father’s urging, he punched the man in the tightened belly with all his force, and the man went on laughing until the boy hurt his hand and had to stop, which only made the man laugh all the harder. And he saw the terrible tremble of his lips when his father told him that to teach him to swim he and Uncle Richard were going to toss him from the dock into the lake, which they did, and indeed he did learn to swim that day, gasping and spitting water, slashing at it as if it were a beast, until he got his body close enough to the shore to feel the pebbly bottom against his feet. And then he saw his bizarre grin as he scrambled back to the dock and full speed ran its length, his skinny arms pinwheeling, and threw his body into the water himself, over and over again, slashing his way back to shore, rushing to the dock and racing to the end of it and tossing himself into the water, until finally the men stopped laughing at him and walked back to the women at the picnic table in the pine grove. And gradually Bob began to see his unborn son as he had never seen himself, for he saw the boy as pretty and frightened and sad. This confused him somewhat, muddled his fantasies, because he did not know what he should do to keep his son from being like that, from being like him, pretty and frightened and sad. Bob knew his own father had loved him and that he had been a kind, gentle, good-humored man, and with his son, Bob would have no choice but to try to be the same man his father had been with him. Any other kind of man, any other kind of father, was unimaginable to him.

The morning George Dill returns to work, he comes accompanied by his daughter. Bob has already opened the store and is sweeping the floor with a push broom, when he looks up and sees the tomato red Plymouth drive into the lot, Marguerite at the wheel. Her father, wearing his usual blue cap, white short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers, looks small and fragile next to the woman, as if he were her child and she were driving him to school. Bob quickly puts the broom behind the stockroom door and walks to the cash register, pulls out his pen and order book and bends over the book, dropping deeply into the intricacies of the retail liquor business.

The woman enters first, wearing a nurse’s uniform with a light, pale blue cardigan sweater over it. “Well,” Bob says, “you’re safely back. That’s good.”

“We are.” She smiles lightly. Her dark brown face shows her fatigue. She has ashen circles under her eyes, and when she smiles, the skin over her high cheekbones tightens.

“I’ve missed you, George,” Bob says heartily. “You never realize how much you need someone until they take a vacation. ’Course, I know this wasn’t a vacation.”

“No, Mistah Bob, it weren’t no vacation. Dead and buried and resurrected and up in the Kingdom of Heaven now …” George says, his voice trailing off, his gaze starting to wander across the store.

“Daddy wants to come back to work right off, Mister Dubois. He’s not really … right yet, you know, but I thought, if it was fine with you, that it would be good for him to come back to work, maybe get his mind off his brother that way.” She ends her sentences with a lilt, a slight upturning of tone, so that she seems to be asking a question, a question that Bob feels compelled to hasten to answer.

“Oh, yes, sure, of course. I understand. Beautiful. Let him get right back to work. Be good for him. George,” he says, “the broom’s back by the stockroom door. You might’s well take over where you left off.”

The woman watches her father hurry off, her expression an odd mixture, odd to Bob, of relief and irritation. Bob has never seen an attractive black woman up close before. That is, he’s never really looked into her eyes, never studied the curve of her lips and let his gaze fall along her long, tense throat. He’s never allowed himself the pleasure, never subjected himself to the threat, of her beauty. In the past, whenever he’s happened to find himself standing next to an attractive young black woman in line at the supermarket, for instance, or facing one of the two black women tellers at the bank in town or a customer, a housewife from the project asking for a six-pack of Colt 45, he’s either dimmed his gaze or else has turned away altogether, embarrassed and frightened.

He hasn’t been aware of that, of course, until now, when he unexpectedly finds himself staring at Marguerite, examining her boldly but nonetheless innocently, for at last his curiosity has overcome his fear and at this moment, but only for this moment, he has not yet made himself sufficiently familiar with her darkness to begin to long only for her, to touch and hold her, lick and kiss her, to lie down and fuck her and her alone and not just any tall, slender, attractive black-skinned woman, which is the way it has been until this moment, impersonal, abstract, pornographic and racist. Here I am on a white shag carpet fucking a beautiful black woman, me, Bob Dubois, for God’s sake, pale and hairy, muscles tensed, cock swollen, red, stiff, while the beautiful, smooth-skinned black woman shakes her round buttocks in my face and peers back at me and offers me some more of her marijuana cigarette.

George has started sweeping in the far corner of the store, out of sight beyond the head-high shelves of gallon jugs of cheap wine, and the woman turns back to Bob. “I think I’ll be picking him up and leaving him off for a while,” she says thoughtfully, biting her lower lip with large, widely spaced upper teeth. “He’s still not … like he was yet. I’m a little worried about his getting the right bus home and all, you know? And getting off at the right stop? You know?”

“Oh, sure, sure, I understand. I mean, it’s a hell of a shock to his whole system, probably.” Bob feels himself stumbling after the words he wants to say. He wants to be both suave and consoling, as reassuring as he is seductive, but he knows he sounds instead like a man who’s busy and hasn’t quite heard what’s been told to him.

“So … you’re a nurse,” he finally says. Her hair, cut in a short, loose Afro, is black and shiny and prematurely flecked with gray.

“Yes, I work for three doctors, out at the Westway Clinic.”

“Ah,” Bob says, as if gaining an insight.

“You know it? You live out there in Auburndale?”

“No, no. It’s just … that’s a nice job, a nurse in a clinic. Better than a hospital, right?”

“Better hours. But that’s about all,” she says. Then, “You got a nice smile, you know that?”

“Ah,” Bob says again. Suddenly he asks her, “Are you married? I mean, George never mentions a son-in-law. Only you. He talks about you a lot. So I wondered …” Her skin is clear, unblemished and roan-colored, dark brown with a slight reddish tinge brought forward, Bob notices, by lipstick and the makeup on her cheeks. She’s wearing perfume, lilac, and when he sniffs for more of it, he looks at her nose, broad, symmetrical, functional. A true nose, he thinks. Not a large, pointy, phony nose like his, not a dog’s nose. Elaine’s nose he hasn’t looked at for years, although he used to wonder at it, because it was so perfectly shaped, or so it seemed to him then — slightly curved, short and narrow, giving to her small face the look of a fierce bird, like a falcon or hawk — but now he can’t recall it. His memory is only of having paid attention to something that has disappeared, swallowed by her eyes, so that now, when he looks at his wife’s face or remembers it, all he sees is the center of her eyes, as if her face has somehow gradually become invisible without his ever having noticed until after it was gone, lost to him, he is sure, forever.

Marguerite answers his question as directly as he asked it, as if she is used to having white men she barely knows ask her if she is married. She was, she tells him, but not now, not for over five years. Her husband was in the air force and stationed here at Shure. “But,” she says, shrugging, “that didn’t work out so good. But I liked it here, and I had a better job than the one I used to have in Macon, so I stayed. And the next year my mama died and Daddy came down.”

“It doesn’t make sense, your being alone,” Bob says with great seriousness.

She laughs. “Yes, it does, Mister Dubois …”

“Bob.”

“Okay, Bob. Yes, it does make sense! A lot of sense.” Then, turning to leave, she smiles and says, “Besides, I’m not alone, you know.”

“You’re not? I thought …” He doesn’t know what he thought.

“I got my daddy!” she calls from the door. Then, to the old man, “Bye, honey! I’ll pick you up at five, okay? You remember, now, y’ hear?” And then she is gone, leaving Bob Dubois standing at the cash register, his heart thumping, head abuzz, hands, he suddenly notices, wet with sweat.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Bob looks forward to seeing Marguerite twice, in the morning when she brings her father to work and again in the late afternoon when she picks him up. She could more easily drop the old man off in the morning, and later, sitting in her car outside, signal with the horn for him to come out, but she doesn’t. She gets out of the car and comes into the store and talks with Bob. Bob believes she does this because she is falling in love with him. He believes this because he thinks he is falling in love with her, and just as his days have now taken on an unexpected yet longed-for significance, at least his Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays have, so, too, he believes, have her days, once tedious and bland as boiled potatoes, now come to seem intense, shapely, piquant.

At home, Bob merely waits for time to pass. He withdraws from his nightly conversations with Elaine, leaves off, or treats as a chore, reading stories to the girls before they go to bed, and usually ends up falling asleep on the couch before the eleven o’clock news comes on. Naturally, Elaine resents and then quickly fears the change in him, for she does not attribute it to anything other than to the change in her, that is, to her pregnancy, which, she thinks, has made her more sensitive than usual, more demanding and more easily hurt.

So she tries to avoid criticizing Bob for depriving her and the girls of his attention, and really, that is all he’s guilty of so far, so why should he be criticized? He’s working sixty and seventy hours a week at a demeaning, boring job that he was led to expect would be something quite different from what it’s turned out to be, he’s cut himself off from everything that’s familiar to him — landscape, manners, friends — and except for Eddie, around whom he’s never able to rest, he has no one he can simply enjoy himself with, no one to go out for pizza and beers with, no one to go fishing with, no one to go with him on a Sunday morning to Chain-O’-Lakes Park in Winter Haven, where the Red Sox hold their spring training rites and play their exhibition games, where, if he got out there before they went north in late April, he could get, he told her, Carl Yastrzemski’s, Jim Rice’s and Freddie Lynn’s autographs for their son, because someday, he said to her, those guys will be dead and buried and Bob junior won’t believe that his dad saw them in the flesh and actually had a conversation with them.

Elaine feels sorry for her husband. She suggests hiring a babysitter and going out together to the Okie Doke, a dance club she’s heard about from one of the wives she’s befriended at the park, a woman named Ellen Skeeter, but Bob says, “Naw, that’s just one of those cracker joints where the music’s too loud and everybody gets drunk and ends up stomping on your feet if you try to dance or picking a fight with you on the way to the men’s room.”

So she urges him to take a Sunday and pack a lunch and drive with her and the girls to New Smyrna Beach on the coast, but he sighs and says, “Just what I need after a hard week, a day spent in the car fighting the traffic, with the kids fussing in back, a bunch of sandy sandwiches in the sun, and a sunburn to boot. Besides, this time of year the beaches are jammed with all those noisy Canucks who couldn’t afford to come down in January and February. God save me from the Frenchmen. It’s the same kind as used to drive us nuts in July at Old Orchard Beach in Maine.”

Well, maybe he could go fishing with Eddie one Sunday, take a ride in the boat he’s always bragging about, learn how to water ski, since Eddie’s so eager to teach him.

“Fuck Eddie,” Bob grunts, leaning forward on the couch to switch channels on the Sony.

Naturally, then, though neither of them intends or desires it, Bob and Elaine fall to quarreling. At first it’s a snarl and countersnarl, followed by a sullen silence that fades in an hour or two. But then her insecurity and attempts to please him, colliding almost nightly with his desire to be left alone with his fantasies and depression, make him feel entrapped as well, a feeling that makes him act like a man who thinks his guilt is being exploited, even though he believes that he has done nothing to feel guilty for, which only increases his resentment. Confused and angry, he lashes out at her, until she, too, is confused and angry. Weeks go by marked only by their quarrels and the silent, solitary periods in between, a sad time for them, since neither of them knows what is happening to them or how to stop it.

Until finally, one morning in late May, following a particularly vicious argument the night before, a shouting, name-calling fight that began when Bob arrived home from work without the half gallon of milk she’d called and asked him to bring, and he’d stomped to the refrigerator for a beer and found none there, which meant she’d been drinking his beer in the afternoon with her fat friend from Georgia, the redhead whose name he refused to remember because he hated her voice. They’d gone to sleep shuddering with rage and the knowledge that they both were becoming ugly people.

The next morning, Elaine, as usual, wakes first, showers and dresses quickly and wakes the girls. An hour later, showered, shaved, barefoot and wearing a clean pair of khaki pants and a tee shirt, Bob enters the kitchen, passes the girls at the table and Elaine at the sink without acknowledging them, as if the three are familiar bits of furniture, two chairs and a pole lamp reliably in their accustomed places. He opens the refrigerator door and studies its foggy interior, settles finally on tomato juice and closes the door. He has to step around his wife to get a glass from the cupboard, and as he passes her, he looks down at her high, rounded belly.

“Morning,” he says in a low voice.

“Good morning,” she answers, and she looks at her children as if for approval. Wasn’t Mommy polite to Daddy?

Squinting, Emma watches her father carefully. Her puffy, round face is covered with purple jelly. White underpants and a tank top cling to her sausage-like body, making her look more like a miniaturized sumo wrestler than a Caucasian female child. Ruthie, opposite her at the table, ignores her father altogether. Dressed for school in clean corduroy jeans and a striped short-sleeved jersey, she pretends to read the advertising on the back of the Count Chocula box.

“Hi, kids,” Bob says, pouring himself a glass of juice.

Emma continues squinting up at him, as if he were the sun, while Ruthie seems to go on reading about adult daily nutrition requirements.

Bob puts his face next to Emma’s and, grinning, bugs his eyes out. “What’re you so serious about, Flowerpot?”

When the child lets a tentative smile creep over her thin lips, Bob stands up, tousles her thin hair with one hand and empties the glass of juice into his mouth. Then, to Ruthie: “Hey, don’t you say good morning to your father?”

Slowly, like peeling back a gummed sticker, Ruthie removes her gaze from the cereal box and looks into her father’s eyes. Then she looks down, almost shyly. “Hi, Daddy.”

“You want breakfast?” Elaine asks him.

“Sure. Whatcha got?” He’s at the stove, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Eggs, if you want. Bacon’s all gone.” She squeezes the words from her mouth like tiny, dry seeds.

“Fine.” Pushing open the screened door, Bob steps outside and, coffee cup in hand, strolls barefoot from the trailer across the driveway and gets the Ledger from the box. Opening it to the sports section, he checks out last night’s major league baseball scores.

“Sonofabitch. They’re on a tear,” he says as he enters. “They do this every fucking spring. Go on a tear and get me all lathered up, then blow it in August to the fucking Yankees.” He sits at the table next to Emma and spreads out the paper.

“You swear too easy.”

“Huh?” He takes a sip of coffee and goes on reading.

“You swear too easy. I wish you wouldn’t.” She stands with her back to the sink, holding one egg in each hand, as if about to juggle them.

“Do you still love Mommy?” Ruthie suddenly asks, somber, unafraid, but deeply interested in his answer. Emma looks up and watches his face. Elaine too. They all watch him. What’s going on? Have they made some kind of bet on it?

“What’re you telling her?” Bob asks Elaine.

“Not a thing. She asked me the same question. Before you came out.”

“And what did you say?”

She looks at the eggs in her hands and taps them lightly against one another. “I said I don’t know.”

Bob glares at his wife, then turns to his daughter. “Why do you want to know a thing like that, Ruthie?”

“I heard you and Mommy yelling last night. You woke me up.”

Bob closes the newspaper and crosses his arms in front of him. “Aw, honey, I’m sorry about all that. Of course I still love Mommy.”

“How come you said you didn’t?”

Bob looks at Elaine, who turns away and cracks first one egg into the skillet, then the other. He feels emptied out, a metal drum. He doesn’t want this. No man wants this.

His daughters wait for his answer. He looks down at Emma beside him. What can she know? “Did we wake you up too, Flowerpot?”

Nervously, Emma opens and closes her hands, squeezing jelly between her fingers.

“How come you said you don’t love Mommy anymore?” Ruthie repeats.

“Well, honey, it’s like … sometimes grownups say things they don’t mean. That’s all. They get a little mad about one thing, and then they act real mad about another. It’s like when we first moved here, some of the kids at school were mean to you, and now they’re your friends. They didn’t mean it.”

“But it’s different. They’re not s’posed to love me. You, you’re s’posed to love Mommy. What did you get mad for?”

Elaine turns away from the stove and waits for his answer.

“You still love Daddy,” Ruthie says to her mother. It’s an announcement, but it wants confirmation.

“Yes,” Elaine says. “I love Daddy.” She turns back to the stove.

“What did you get mad for?” Ruthie asks him again.

Bob sighs and looks at his wife, as if for guidance, but she’s holding her back to him. “I … I don’t know, honey. I don’t know why I got mad last night. It was late, and I was tired, and worried. In a bad mood, that’s all. Now eat your breakfast and let me read the paper, okay?” He smiles wearily, and the child returns her gaze, brow furrowed, to the cereal box.

He reads the Red Sox box score, notes with pleasure that Yaz went three for four with two doubles and Torrez pitched seven innings and struck out five. “Sonofabitch. Yaz is forty and he’s playing like a kid. I love that sonofabitch.”

“Will you please watch your language!” Elaine says, hands planted on hips. “This is a whole new habit of yours, this swearing all the time.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says. He takes another sip of his coffee, and to win back her favor, smacks his lips noisily. “Good coffee.”

“Thanks,” she grunts. “Here’s your eggs.”

He breaks the yolks with the tip of his fork and rubs a piece of toast through them; it’s the way he has eaten eggs all his life. If by accident he were served eggs well-done, he’d try to break the yolks, and failing, he’d react with confusion. They wouldn’t be actual eggs to him. They’d be vegetables or cheese or fish. Eggs run and make a lovely mess that you can clean up with a piece of buttered toast.

“I can’t believe Yaz,” he says, still poring over the paper. “He’s almost ten years older than me, but he’s playing like a kid. If I tried to do what I did as a kid, I’d break my ass.” When Bob was a kid, large and fast and tireless, he was a graceful bear sweeping the puck away from a three-on-one rush to his goal, skating the length of the rink alone, long, graceful, powerful strides, with the puck swirling ahead of him across the blue line, where he ducks to one side and fakes the defenseman, cuts to the other, jerking the puck along as if it were attached to his stick by a piece of string, charging the net, driving the puck with the force of his rush a half foot above the ice over the goalie’s desperate slash, and as he glides past the goal, he watches the puck smack against the net, watches it drop softly to the ice, watches the goalie angrily whack his stick against the ice, and Bob smiles, skates slowly, smoothly, back to his end of the ice, barely out of breath.

“Y’know,” he says to Elaine, “I’m really sorry we didn’t get down here for spring training. I’d have loved to watch the Sox work out, over there at Chain-O’-Lakes Park, over there in Winter Haven. It’s only a couple miles. Now,” he says, lowering his voice, “now they’ve all gone north, it’s all up north. I used to go to Fenway with my dad once in a while when I was a kid. I haven’t been to Fenway in years….”

“We were here in time. You could’ve watched them play.”

“Well, yeah, I know. But we were still getting settled and all.” He looks up from the newspaper and peers out the window above the sink at the flat roof of the trailer next to theirs and the tops of the palm trees and the bright blue sky beyond, and he says, “It’s hard, I sort of didn’t believe they were here. In Florida, I mean. I’ve known it all my life, the Red Sox do spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, and here I am living ten miles away, only I can’t picture it, so I just sit around, like I always did, waiting for them to come home to Fenway and begin the season. Only, when they do begin the season, here I am in Florida. It’s strange. I probably would’ve got Yaz’s autograph. It’s real easy in spring training to get to talk to the players and all. They walk right over to the fence and talk to you.”

“I know,” she says.

Ruthie comes up next to him and says, “Bye, Daddy,” and purses her lips for a kiss.

Instead of kissing her, he stands and says, “Wait a minute. I’ll walk out to the bus stop with you.”

Surprised and pleased, she claps her hands together, then flips one hand for him to hold. Together, they step out the door into the bright sunlight, and holding hands, cross the yard and driveway to the paved lane, where, looking back at his station wagon, he notices once again his New Hampshire number plates and says aloud to himself, “Jesus, I’ve got to get Florida plates before they pick me up for it.”

The car looks peculiar to him. He’s owned it for almost three years and has only got five more payments to mail north to the Catamount Trust, at which point, as he’s said to Elaine many times, he knows the transmission will go. But this morning, as he walks past the car with his daughter and moves down the lane to the highway, he turns and studies the car and wonders why it looks so strange to him, as if it has been cut out of a black-and-white snapshot and pasted onto a color picture of pink hibiscus and bougainvillea, green patches of grass, pale blue mobile home, dark green star-shaped thatch palm behind the trailer, citrus groves beyond the crisp, cloudless blue sky above. He’s walking backwards, barefoot, sucking on his upper lip and no longer holding his daughter’s hand.

“What’re you looking at?” she asks, peering over her shoulder.

“Oh, nothing. The car. The house.”

“We should get a new car.”

“You think so, eh?”

“Yeah. A red one. To go with the new house.” Ruthie skips ahead of him, ponytail flying, and he turns from the car and walks quickly to catch up.

“Yeah!” he calls after her. “A new car to go with a new house to go with a new job! A whole new life!”

She slows and waits for him, and when he catches up, he takes her hand again, and they walk on in silence to where the school bus stops at the side of the highway.

By the time he returns to the kitchen, he’s sweating, and his tee shirt has large wet circles under the arms. The kitchen is empty; he assumes Elaine has taken Emma to the bathroom to wash her face, hands and arms before putting her outside to play. He checks his watch, eight twenty-three, and dropping his weight onto his chair, leans over to finish reading the paper.

“Aw, Jesus,” he says, looking with disgust at the purple smears and globs of jelly on the paper. “Jesus H. Christ,” he murmurs. He stands quickly and grabs the newspaper at the sides, as if to lift it, but then, looking down on it from above, he notices for the first time a photograph in the center of the page opposite the box scores. It’s a wirephoto of a base runner sliding headfirst, sliding into second, Bob thinks, or possibly third, though he knows right off that it’s Carl Yastrzemski, number eight, doing the sliding. It’s Yaz at forty, stretching a long single into a double by running ninety feet full speed and hurling his body against the ground, diving and stretching his arms for the base as he twists his body hard to the right to avoid the tag, spikes, shinbones and knees of the second baseman.

For several seconds Bob studies the picture, then, in a violent move, his face stiffens and he crumples the entire newspaper into a large, loose bundle, pushes, crushes and crumples it again and again, until he’s made a dense, crinkly ball of it. He steps around the table and opens the cupboard under the sink, tosses the ball into the plastic trash bucket and closes the cupboard door.

Facing away from the kitchen, through the living room to the hall beyond, he hears Emma’s angry cry, almost a howl, as her mother rubs the child’s cheeks and chin, arms, hands and belly, with a rough, wet washcloth, and he hears Elaine order the child to be still, hold still, it’ll be over in a minute if you’ll only hold still and stop squirming.

Bob knows he loves the woman properly. And he loves the children properly too, though he’s never had to ask himself that one, thank God. Those are facts, though, and a man has to give himself over to the facts of the life he finds himself living, no matter how he’s living it.

He walks quietly back through the trailer to the bedroom he shares with his wife, to get ready for work.

5

Nevertheless. Bob is obsessed with Marguerite Dill, who is not at all as he imagines and supposes her to be. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say here who or what she is, exactly, and probably beside the point as well, except to observe that Bob knows very little of what it is to be a woman, nothing at all of what it is to be black. He’s honest and intelligent enough to admit this and behave accordingly, but like most white men, he’s not imaginative enough to believe that being a woman is extremely different from being a man and being black extremely different from being white. If pushed, and he has been pushed now and then, at least by Elaine, he’d go only so far as to concede that the differences are probably no greater than those between child and adult, and because he bears within him the child he once was, and the child he once was carried within him the seed of the man he would someday become, then understanding between the two is an easily arranged affair of one’s attention. To understand your children, you attend to the child in you; and all your children have to do, if they wish to understand you, is project themselves twenty or thirty years into the future. Therefore, to imagine Elaine and Doris and now Marguerite, the three women who in recent years have mattered most to him, all Bob has had to do is pay attention to the woman in himself. It’s harder in the case of Marguerite, but all the more interesting to him for that, because with her he has to pay attention to the black man in himself as well.

When Bob talks to his wife, he is thinking about Marguerite. When he looks at his wife’s reddish hair, pale skin, rounding body, he thinks of Marguerite’s hair, skin, body — but not to the disadvantage of either woman. It’s just that hair, anyone’s, reminds him of Marguerite’s hair; skin, if he happens to notice it, reminds him of Marguerite’s skin; and breasts, belly, thighs and so on, remind him of Marguerite’s. Which aspects, of course, he’s never actually seen and therefore must imagine, relying for components on the occasional Playboy and Penthouse black centerfold he’s seen.

Elaine tells her new friends at the trailer park and her sister-in-law Sarah that Bob is distracted, preoccupied, worried, and she adds that she’s concerned. But in fact she’s more than concerned. She’s frightened. She believes he doesn’t love her anymore. And to make matters worse, she believes that it’s because she is pregnant. The sad truth of the matter, however, is that Bob often forgets she is pregnant, and when he remembers, it’s as if he’s remembering something that was true long ago.

His obsession with Marguerite has become his sole companion. He talks to it, argues with it, admires and respects it, gives it all the attention and time he can steal from his family and job. He’s almost grateful that he has no friends here and that his job, where he’s often alone for hours at a time, blocks him off from the voices and needs of his wife and children. Though he is not aware of it, he has recently taken up humming a tuneless tune, hour after hour, whenever someone else is within hearing range. As soon as that person, George Dill or Elaine or one of the kids, leaves his proximity or closes the door between them, he ceases humming and lets his obsession loose, as if it were a dog wanting exercise, to leap and run about the room, dart out the door and gallop in wild circles in the parking lot and across the marshy fields, until it’s almost lost from sight, where it wheels about and comes racing happily back to him, leaps into his arms and licks his face with joy.

Months pass, and little changes. Elaine’s body has gone on swelling steadily, and Emma, knowing something threatening is going to happen, has become sullen and withdrawn, not exactly a behavior problem, but not pleasant to be around, either, and Ruthie has complained increasingly of school, even feigning sickness to stay home, until it turns out that she has what’s called a learning disability, which, the school nurse tells Elaine, and Elaine reports to Bob, may be merely emotional or she may be slightly dyslexic. Time will tell, but not to worry, many children pass through phases like this, especially when adjusting to a new environment. But if it persists into the second grade, when reading is essential for learning, special instruction will be necessary. Bob barely hears the report, for he’s suffering from a learning disability of his own, a disability fed and encouraged by his Monday, Wednesday and Friday visits from Marguerite, which have become part of her weekly routine too, possibly rationalized as, but nonetheless essential to, her caring for her father, a man who drifts through his days as lost in his private past as Bob is lost in his private future.

Bob and Marguerite have become close friends. They gossip together. She tells stories about the three doctors she works for, calls them Winkum, Blinkum and Nod, a lecher, a crook and a lazy man. He counters with complaints about his brother, his job, his boring family life, and then one morning remembers Ruthie’s learning disability and shoves it into the conversation so as to elicit Marguerite’s professional opinion, which turns out to confirm the school nurse’s opinion, a fact that impresses Bob with Marguerite’s intelligence and education.

Now, for the first time, Marguerite seems genuinely curious about Bob’s wife and children. They’ve talked of many things before this, often matters of considerable intimacy, at least for Bob, such as when and how his parents died, which parent he resembles more, and how he is both different from and very much like his brother Eddie. She even asked him once if he had played any sports in school, which Bob took as a clear indication of her interest in his body, and as a result, he went into elaborate detail about the kind of body you needed if you were going to excel as a defenseman in hockey. “Lots of endurance,” he told her. “You gotta have lots of endurance. And big bones, it’s good to have big bones and flat muscles. You can’t have one of those muscle-man bodies, you know the type, muscles like grapefruit glued to skinny bones. ’cause you really get banged around, playing hockey. You go into the corner, digging for the puck, some big guy’ll come at you full tilt and lay a body check on you that slams you into the boards, and it’s legal, all legal, so you gotta keep on playing. No time to lie there and clear your head and check for broken bones. I still skate,” he told her, lying. “Leastways I did till I left New Hampshire. Pickup games, you understand, nothing organized. I’m still in shape for it all right, but I don’t have the wind anymore. Cigarettes,” he said ruefully, lighting one up.

Marguerite asks him what his wife is like. She’s genuinely curious; his answer will help her understand what she herself is like. Her father is in the stockroom, cutting cartons and stacking them into neat bundles. He knows she’s here and it’s past quitting time, but he’s grown accustomed to her chats with his boss, which leave him standing in the background, pulling at his earlobe and waiting, like a bored child, for her to finish whatever obscure adult business she’s up to.

“Well, first off, Elaine’s a lovely lady,” Bob says. “Very much the mother,” he adds, leaning forward with both hands on the top of the cash register, as if it were a lecturn.

“And you, are you very much the father?”

Bob looks intently into her eyes, drops his gaze for a second and says in a low voice, “No. No, not really. And I got no excuses, either. It’s just … it’s just that I’m all the time too worried about myself. She’s not like that. Elaine. She doesn’t worry about herself all the time, like I do, so she’s free to think about other people, the kids, mainly, and me. It’s not selfishness, I don’t think. It’s different. I’m not really selfish. I’m just all the time worried about myself….”

“Why don’t you stop worrying about yourself so much, then?”

“It’s not like that. You can’t just decide and do it, or else you end up worrying about that too, and you’re right back where you started from. It just has to happen. You just have to be born a better person that I happen to be, that’s all.”

“Oh, come on, you’re not a bad person. You’re really not.”

“Not bad, maybe. But not good, either. See, you, you’re good. You think about your father and worry about him more than you worry about yourself. Like Elaine does. Me, I worry so much about whether I’m any good or not, or what I ought to do or shouldn’t ought to do, or whether I’m smart enough or work hard enough, all those things, that there’s never much room in my head for anyone else’s problems. Even somebody like my brother Eddie, for instance, who, even though he’s selfish, really selfish, and I’m not like that … still, he’s a good man, because in the end he doesn’t worry about himself too much. I don’t know, it’s a kind of vanity, you know? What I’ve got. I mean, Eddie’s free to be good. I’m not, almost. He’s more the father than I am, and more the husband too. More the brother, even. He sees somebody’s got a problem, and he tries to solve it, even though he’s selfish, which only means that he won’t solve it if the solution is going to hurt him somehow, and most solutions won’t do that, you know. Especially if you’ve got some money, like Eddie does. But me, I don’t even notice it that somebody’s got a problem, not even when it’s staring me in the face. I don’t know what makes me this way, but it’s the way I am, and I can’t stop being the way I am just by wanting to. Any more than Eddie can, or Elaine, or even you, can stop being the way you are just because you want to. If you want to.”

“I suppose,” Marguerite says, stretching wearily. “It’s hot out there. Nice in here.”

“You got air in that car, though.”

“Yeah. But it’s getting from here to there that bothers me.” She laughs. “That’s the trouble with air-conditioning. Nobody missed it till after they got it. Anyhow, when that thing in my car starts up, all it blows out at first is more hot air. It’s worse’n a heater.”

Bob watches the woman carefully, as if she were prey. “Are you … are you going straight home from here?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I got to fix supper for Daddy.”

“Then? Then what?”

“Then … nothing, I guess. No big date. No nothing.” She smiles with slight embarrassment, as if coming up empty-handed.

“Don’t you have any boyfriends?”

“Nope.” With a sudden movement, she stabs at her hair with stiffened fingers. “No boyfriends. You never heard me mention none, did you?”

“Well, I wondered. You know, since you’re so good-looking and all, and single. But I never asked before, because I figured you’d just say yes.”

She smiles. Her teeth are large and gapped. To Bob, they’re sexy, forthright, passionate teeth. “And you didn’t want to hear me say so?”

“Right.” He smiles back.

“What about you, mister?”

“Well. I’m married, you know,” he says, suddenly serious.

“Yeah. But that don’t stop people.”

“I’ll tell you the truth.”

“Uh-huh. You tell me the truth.”

“I have … I did have a girlfriend. In New Hampshire. A nice woman, though. I used to see her once in a while. No big thing, though. We weren’t in love or anything. You know. Just friends.”

“Uh-huh. Just friends. What about your wife? Did she know about this friend of yours?”

“Jesus, no! No. It was just a once-in-a-while thing, me and Doris. That was her name, Doris.”

“Uh-huh. Doris. Well,” she says, “I’ve got to get Daddy and go home.”

“Is your house air-conditioned?”

“I got me one unit in the living room, and it cools the rest of the house down pretty good, except when I’m cooking or there’s a whole lot of people in the house. But it’s fine for me and Daddy.” She looks toward the back of the store, as if in search of her father, who sits in the stockroom on a crate, waiting for her call.

“Ah, listen, Marguerite, I’d like to go out for a drink with you sometime. Would that be okay with you?” He exhales slowly.

Screwing up her face, as if trying to remember his name, she studies his eyes for a few seconds. “You sure? I mean, there’s places we could go. Over in Winter Haven or up in Lakeland. You’re married, you know. In case you’ve forgotten.” She pauses. “And we’d stick out.”

Bob takes shallow breaths quickly and his voice comes out higher than he’d like. “Of course I’m sure. Just go out for a few drinks, you know, some night after I close the store.”

“You know what you’re doing,” she informs him.

“Oh, yeah. No problem. I could pick you up at your house, if you wanted, or we could meet someplace.”

She is silent for a second, then smiles and pats his hand. “Tell you what. I’ll pick you up here at the store some night. My car’s got air, remember? That ol’ thing of yours, that’s a Yankee car.” She smiles warmly and calls her father.

Folding his arms across his chest, Bob steps back from the register, as if he’s just completed a big sale. He leans against the shelf behind him and watches the woman and her father head for the door. Just as she reaches to open it, Bob calls to her, “How about tonight? I close at nine.”

Without looking back, she says, “I don’t know,” opens the door and steps into the heat.

At seven, she calls him, and sounding slightly frightened, speaking more rapidly than usual, she says that she’ll meet him at nine, then hurriedly, as if late for another appointment, gets off the phone.

Bob immediately calls Elaine at home and tells her he’s made a new friend, a Budweiser salesman from Lakeland, who’s asked him out for a drink after work, so he’ll be home a little later than usual tonight.

This relieves Elaine. A new friend is what Bob needs. Someone to brag to, someone he can talk fishing and sports with, someone he can complain freely to, especially about Eddie, because she knows he won’t complain about Eddie to her, no matter how much Eddie, that bastard Eddie, bothers him.

Three times in the next three weeks Bob and Marguerite drive out in her car for drinks at the Barnacle in Winter Haven. That first night, when they returned to the store, Bob leaned over from the passenger’s side and kissed her on the cheek, nicely, then got out and waved good night. The second time she drove him back from the Barnacle, they sat in her car for a few minutes talking about the stupidity of one of the doctors she worked for at the clinic, and Bob reached over and kissed Marguerite full on the mouth in midsentence, passionately ground his mouth against hers, and she let him slip his tongue between her big teeth and on into her mouth. The third time, they sat in the car making out like teenagers for nearly an hour, before Bob finally pulled himself free, zipped his pants and stumbled from her car to his. They didn’t go to the Barnacle after that; they drove straight to the Hundred Lakes Motel out on Highway 17 north of Winter Haven.

Compared to most men his age, Bob has made love to few women, so if he no longer thinks of himself as inexperienced, it’s mainly because of the frequency with which he has made love over the years. He lost his virginity when he was seventeen in the back seat of Avery Boone’s Packard when he and Ave crashed a beer party at a New England College coed dormitory, and by pretending to be sophomores from Dartmouth, talked a pair of beer-drunk freshman girls from Fairfield, Connecticut, into leaving the party and driving to Lake Sunapee with them.

“Older wimmen!” they hollered afterwards, all the way home to Catamount. It had been Avery’s idea, so he did most of the hollering, but Bob gleefully shivered with excitement for hours.

The next summer, Bob joined the air force to avoid being drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam to be killed, and the fear of venereal disease, embarrassment for his ignorance and a country boy’s shyness kept him celibate for most of the next four years, until, home on leave, he took Elaine Gagnon to the drive-in theater in Concord and promised to marry her. She had just graduated from high school, and when her mother died that same month, thought originally of going to hairdressing school down in Manchester, to get away from everything, she said. But she fell in love with Bob Dubois, who had been a senior at Bishop Grenier and a hockey star when she had been a withdrawn, insecure, plain-looking freshman whose father had disappeared years before and whose mother worked on the line down at the cannery. Elaine counted herself lucky to be able to stay in Catamount and wait for Bob to be discharged from the air force so she could marry him and take care of his house, have his babies, wash his clothes, cook his food, laugh at his jokes, share his anger, and comfort and reassure him, and in return obtain for herself the family she never had and always felt she both needed and deserved. She got a job in bookkeeping at the cannery, and they did it the first time in the bedroom she had shared with her mother in the tiny apartment over Maxfield’s Hardware Store on Green Street, and both Bob and Elaine thought it was the most exciting thing they had ever done. So they did it again, and then they did it as often as they could, which, for the next two years, until Bob had saved enough money for a down payment on the house on Butterick Street and they could get married, was only once or twice a week, usually on Saturday nights at her place. He was living with his parents then. After they got married, they did it four and five nights a week.

Despite this clearly focused attention, over the next four years Bob fucked five women other than his wife, all of them customers of Abenaki Oil Company, one time each. He had a hard time distinguishing between making love on the run to these women, covering their shoulders and arms with oil burner soot, and masturbating. He felt a similar kind and quantity of guilt for both. Even while doing it, he felt stupid and young, adolescent again, the way he used to feel when he was in the air force. He’d wake up in his barracks bed and remember that the night before he’d spent several sleepless hours contemplating deliciously obscene fantasies while masturbating slowly into a handkerchief or sock. He’d look in his shaving mirror, and he’d see the weakness in his eyes, and he’d loathe himself for about a half hour.

In his late twenties, he stopped masturbating, which was no easier for him than quitting smoking would have been, and stopped responding warmly to the flirtatious words and looks of lonely women with broken oil burners, and he concentrated all his sexual attentions on Elaine, which for a while pleased him, made him feel strong, disciplined, clean. Then one night he learned from Elaine that she had slept with his best friend, Avery Boone. The announcement came a week after Avery had sailed south on the inland waterway in his converted Grand Banks trawler, the boat Bob had helped salvage and redesign and that he’d use freely for several years fishing out of Portsmouth, alone on some days and with Ave and anyone else who wanted to come along when the bluefish were running.

With Ave gone, Elaine had felt free to confess what had been bearing down on her conscience like a stone, what she had confessed to three different priests and what all three had urged her to confess to her husband, which is that one day when Bob was out on the boat, the Belinda Blue, gone alone for mackerel, Avery had come over to the house, and they had got drunk together and had ended up in bed together. Avery had been horrified afterwards, as had she, and made her promise never to tell Bob, it would destroy their friendship, which was more important to Ave than anything else, except, of course, Bob’s relationship with Elaine.

Bob had taken the news stoically, grimly, and when she was through confessing, he told her he understood her crime, but he couldn’t understand Ave’s. Several times over the next few years, Ave wrote from Moray Key, Florida, where he’d established himself as a charter fisherman, but Bob never answered, and then all they heard from Ave was an annual Christmas card, signed with his full name, first and last, as if to admonish his friend for his silence.

Bob had not forgotten Avery Boone, but he figured he had forgiven him. Elaine’s obvious faithfulness and her shame for her one aberration helped him forgive his old pal, but so did his own affair with Doris Cleeve, which started shortly after Elaine’s confession and continued haphazardly until the week before Bob and his family left Catamount for good. He never even said goodbye to Doris Cleeve, never even told her he was leaving.

And that’s it, the entire sexual experience of Bob Dubois. On the face of it, it’s not much, but in a way, Bob made up for his paucity of actual experience by thinking about sex constantly and, for the most part, clearly. His good fortune, and perhaps hers, is that he enjoyed sex with his wife and she enjoyed it with him, so that despite his constantly thinking about sex (remembering past encounters fondly, visualizing future couplings with unusual vividness) and his use of an unexpected, if somewhat naive, gift for narrative, his thoughts rarely turned in on themselves, where they could easily have bred feelings of deprivation, self-pity and resentment. But all that, of course, was before he met and fell in love with Marguerite Dill.

They enter, Marguerite first, Bob holding the door open for her, and commence kissing in the middle of the room. Bob thinks that maybe he’d like to have the lights on, but he can’t figure out how to say so without sounding a little weird, so he lets it go and continues kissing her and fondling her long body. She’s wearing designer jeans and a gray tee shirt that advertises Disney World with the head of Mickey Mouse, whose black ears spread like a diva’s breastplate across her large, round breasts.

She’s very passionate, he thinks, as she bites, sucks, licks his face and lightly moans. Stepping her back to the bed, where she kicks off her sandals, he lays her down and proceeds to draw her jeans off, first one leg, then the other, and then her panties, while she shrugs her way out of her tee shirt and unsnaps her bra.

Standing, Bob unbuckles unzips, unbuttons and unties his own clothing, until he, too, is naked, and hugely erect, he knows, for he can feel the weight of his cock swaying in front of him, out there in the breeze and spray like a bowsprit, and as he comes forward onto her, his mouth reaching in the darkness for her mouth, his hands reaching for her breasts, he has a quick vision of himself as a white boat, a skiff or maybe a flat-bottomed Boston whaler, sliding easily onto the hot golden sands of a tropical beach, with dark, lush jungle ahead of him, the burning sun and endless blue sky above, and behind him, the sea, surging, lifting and shoving him up and forward onto the New World.

“Go easy,” she whispers. “I’m not ready.” She holds him by the shoulders, spreads her legs and grinds her pelvis and groin against his, while he goes on kissing her along the neck, down and across her shoulders, until her moans and the heavy thrust and rub of her groin start to get to him, and he makes his first attempt to enter her.

“Easy, easy,” she warns. He’s gentle, but persistent, a man knocking lightly at a locked door, determined to wake his lover and not her maid. Wetting his fingers with spit, he reaches down and strokes her lightly with his fingertips. She arches her spine first toward him, then away, and lifting her pelvis, she opens like a flower to him. Again, he drops down and moves to enter, but again he finds himself ejected.

“Wait, wait. Kiss me. Please kiss me.”

He kisses her, starting at her face and ears, tangling his fingers in her dense hair, then down along her neck to her breasts, where he feathers her large, erect nipples lightly with his tongue, while she twists beneath him and coos with evident pleasure. Moving his mouth off her breasts to her belly, he draws his hands to her breasts and strokes her nipples with precise care, drifting with tongue, teeth and lips downward, over her hips, along the inside of her thighs, and when she spreads her thighs, he moves his mouth quickly against her cunt, prods and probes it with his tongue, until he knows its shapes, and begins licking hungrily, noisily, with gentle precision, his heavy arms laid across her belly, his fingertips fluttering over her breasts. She has brought her naked feet together, sole against sole, and when he starts to run his prick slowly against her feet, she moves them away, as if frightened. A third time, lifting his weight onto his elbows, he attempts to enter her. A third time, he fails.

“I want to make love to you, Marguerite.”

“You are. You are. Do what you were doing. Do that.”

He lowers his mouth to her breasts and moves quickly down her body. Soon she is quivering beneath him, and after a few moments, she lifts her pelvis against him, shudders and says, “Ah-h-h!” In seconds, she has drawn him up and forward, has turned him onto his back and has buried her face in his groin, licking and sucking on his penis. Almost before he knows it is happening, it has already happened, and she leaves him for the bathroom, where he hears from behind the closed door the sound of water running.

By the time she returns, he has got under the covers of the bed. She joins him there, and wrapping her long arms around his body, she snuggles against him and says, “That was wonderful. Real nice.”

“Yeah,” he says. “No, it really was.”

“I’m sorry. I guess … I guess I’m sort of nervous and all. You know?”

“Oh, yeah, well, I didn’t even notice. I mean, that’s okay. It was really great. No kidding. You’ve got a beautiful body,” he says softly, though he hasn’t actually seen it yet, except for a glimpse as she flicked on the bathroom light and quickly closed the door behind her, a flash of brown buttock and back.

“Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself.”

6

A half hour later they leave the motel and drive back to Oleander Park, chatting about the Boston Red Sox, promising each other that next spring they’ll have to go to some of the exhibition games together, since, to their mutual surprise and pleasure, they both happen to be Boston fans, or so they insist.

They kiss goodbye passionately, and she says, “I love you.” Bob steps from her car and, once outside, says, “Me too.”

But when she has gone, and he has got into his own car and has started the motor, he drops into deep confusion. What happened? What did he expect to happen? What did he want? What did he get? What did he give? As he asks the questions, one by one, he realizes that he can’t answer any of them, not a one, and consequently he does not know how he should feel now. Happy? Sated? Disappointed? Ashamed? Angry? Proud?

The only thing he does know, he tells himself, is that he loves her. Yes, he, Bob Dubois of Catamount, New Hampshire, has fallen in love with Marguerite Dill of Auburndale, Florida, by way of Macon, Georgia, where she was a Southern black woman married to a Southern black man. This means, of course, that he no longer is in love with his wife Elaine. Or so he insists.

When he moves the gearshift lever, it jams, refuses to slide into reverse. He jiggles it, wrenches it, sneaks up on it and flips it, but nothing works. He checks his watch. Ten forty-five. The only way he can get the car into gear now is to have someone sit inside the car and jiggle the shift lever while he jumps up and down on the front bumper. The highway is deserted and dark, and across the street at the housing project, everyone’s inside watching TV.

He shuts off the motor and gets out of the car, slamming the door shut. “Shit,” he says aloud, thinking of the five-mile walk ahead of him. “Shit, shit, shit.” It means walking in darkness along the gravelly shoulder of Highway 17, past Lake Louise and the moss-shrouded cypress trees and tall pines, then south on 520 past the marshes to Lake Grassey and home, unless he can talk someone into coming out here to the store at this hour to help him free the transmission. He’d call a garage, but that would cost him twenty-five bucks at least, and he spent his last few dollars on the motel room, insisting on it, despite Marguerite’s polite suggestion that they split the cost.

Who can he call? Who does he know in this place? His brother Eddie would tell him to call a cab and then would tell him where he could buy a Chrysler Cordoba demonstrator with only 3,500 miles on it for two grand off list. A steal. Elaine would borrow a car and drive out eagerly, but she’d come with one of her friends from the trailer park, probably Ellen Skeeter, that nervous, redheaded Georgian with the sudden, loud laugh and the three-hundred-pound husband named Ron who works at the Dairy Queen in Cypress Gardens. And Elaine would wake the girls and bring them too. A big production. Lots of talk. He doesn’t want lots of talk tonight. Not now.

His brother or his wife, then. Or Marguerite. Yes, he can call Marguerite. She should be nearly home by now. Auburndale’s not that far. Unless she didn’t go straight home. Unless she stopped off for a nightcap at a bar on a corner a few blocks before her house, a dim, smoky tavern filled with black men and black women and soul music on the jukebox, and she’ll meet and drink and talk black talk with a guy she knows from the neighborhood, a tall, slim, good-looking guy named Steve or Otis, with a pencil-thin mustache and long black eyelashes, and she’ll leave with the guy and go back to his apartment, smoke some marijuana and have wild, Negro sex with him. Afterwards, they’ll lie back on his purple satin sheets, and she’ll fondle his huge prick and wonder why on earth she tried to make it with the liquor store clerk when, any time she wanted, she could have this. The guy will shrug and say, “Beats me, baby. Everybody know honkies got small dicks.”

He unlocks the door and enters the store, stopping at the threshold to flick the switch for the light over the cash register, so he can read the telephone book. Locating the name M. Dill, he starts to dial the number, when he hears a soft male voice behind him. “Hang up the phone.”

He glances over his shoulder and sees two black men, one a few feet behind him and carrying what appears to be a shotgun, the other standing in the shadows over by the door, locking it.

Bob hangs up the phone.

“Hit the light,” the man with the shotgun tells the other. He’s young, in his early twenties, and the other is even younger. They’re both wearing nylon shirts with silver-and-black geometric patterns flashing over them, tight double-knit bell-bottomed slacks, and jogging shoes.

“What do you want to kill the lights for, man? We gotta see.”

“Hit the fucking light. We got enough light from the sign.” The man with the shotgun speaks in a slow, patient manner, as if worried about being misunderstood. The light goes out, and the store drops back into soft, gloomy semidarkness. “Now, what you got to do,” he says to Bob, “is let us make your deposit for you tonight. You understand me?”

Bob nods his head up and down, but doesn’t move the rest of his body. His feet feel bolted through to the floor, his arms bound to his sides. His heart is pounding like a pile driver, but his blood is congealed in the veins, thick and heavy, moving like cold syrup, sluggishly, reluctantly, against the frantic, terrified beat of his heart.

The man with the shotgun regards Bob quizzically. “Did you hear me, man? We going to make your deposit for you tonight.” The man has delicate, small, excellent teeth, and his skin is a yellowish color, the dimly golden shade of a pair of Italian loafers Bob was thinking of buying as soon as he got paid.

“I …” Bob carefully clears his throat. “I already made the deposit tonight. Earlier.”

The man with the shotgun motions with his head for the other man to come forward. This one’s chinless, with skin the color of brown glass, and his head is covered with tiny plaited cornrows laid in parallel strips from his forehead back to the nape of his neck, an elaborate hairdo that, to Bob, looks more like a skullcap than hair.

“Look, man,” the first one says to Bob. “Just open the fucking register, don’t be cute, and nobody gets hurt. We in a big hurry, so if you cute, motherfucker, we just going to blow you away. Now gimme the fucking money. All of it. Checks and all.”

“I really did. I already made the deposit. Early, at nine.”

“Blow ’im away,” the younger man says. His hands open and close quickly, as if he’d like to get them around Bob’s throat. “Go on, blow the sucker off. I hate the sucker already. I hate the way he looks.” He laughs suddenly. “I hate ’im!”

“Shut up. Get busy and find us a case of Scotch, a case of Dewar’s. I’ll take care of …”

“Fuck ’im, fuck the pig! Just blow off his fucking head!”

“Look, I’m telling the truth. I came in to make a phone call. My car …”

“Oh, man, you are so fucking stupid!” The man lifts the barrel of the shotgun and places it lightly against Bob’s chest. It’s a twenty-gauge pump with a choke, Bob notices. He looks down the long black barrel to the man at the other end. The safety is off, and the man is handling the gun firmly, but with ease. He is familiar with the gun. The stock is buried snugly under his right arm, and his right hand curls around the trigger guard, index finger laid against the trigger, while his left hand carries the weight of the gun.

The man with the cornrows has taken a step away and is watching his partner excitedly. “Do it! Go on, do the motherfucker! We can get the money without him.”

“Shut the fuck up and get the Scotch.”

“Listen, I’ll give you whatever you want, everything in the store. I don’t give a shit, it’s not my store. I’ll help you load up, even. But the register’s empty. You gotta believe me. I already made the deposit, and then I went out with my … with my girlfriend for a while, and then my transmission got jammed, it does that a lot, so I came in just to make a phone call, that’s all. We closed up at nine.”

“You’re closing now, man. We seen you closing up, which is why we come in here. But I don’t want to argue with you, white man, I just want to stop a minute in my travels, get me some change and a case of Dewar’s, and keep moving. But you making it hard for me. We in a hurry. You understand me?” He pokes Bob’s chest with the muzzle of the gun.

“Yeah, sure, okay, fine.”

He’ll kill me if I argue, Bob decides. The information comes to him like the rule of a game he has been struggling to understand.

“Here, look,” Bob says, waving an arm in the direction of the cash register. “See, cash drawer’s wide open. Empty. Nothing. You want my watch? It’s a fucking Timex, but you’re welcome to it.” He peels off his watch and slaps it onto the counter, smashing the crystal. “Here’s my wallet. Empty too. Not even any fucking credit cards. I just work here! I’m a peon, a clerk, a nobody!”

Holding the gun level with Bob’s chest, the man steps carefully around the counter and looks down its length at the cash register. “Gimme the bag. You know, the night deposit bag. I don’t want your fucking tin watch, man, so don’t get so excited. Just gimme the bag.” Glancing toward the back of the store, he calls to his partner. “You got that case of Dewar’s? Hurry the fuck up, man!”

“It’s too dark. Ask the guy where the fuck it is.”

“In the stockroom in back,” Bob says in a low, almost confidential voice. He and the man with the shotgun, the man who will kill him, are alike, Bob thinks. They’re different from the man with the crazy hairdo and the wild eyes. “No shit, mister, I really did already make the deposit tonight. I left the store at nine because I had to meet a girl.” Bob wants to tell him that his girlfriend is black, that she lives in a black neighborhood and knows lots of black people, and even though she’s a nurse, she comes from a poor family. “My girlfriend …” he starts.

“I don’t give a fuck about you, man! Or your girlfriend! Just gimme the bag!”

“Forget it!” the other man hollers. “I found it. Dewar’s.” Then, after a few seconds, he says, “Shit! Empty. These’re just empty cases here, man. Ask whitebread where the fuck the Dewar’s is. Do you got to have Dewar’s? There’s some other kinds here on the shelfs. I could fill one of these empty cases with one of these kinds.”

“Look in the fucking stockroom!” the man shouts, angry now. “And hurry the fuck up!”

“It’s dark back here, man. I can’t see no Dewar’s, I can’t see nothing.”

“Where’s the light switch for the stockroom?” the man asks Bob.

“On the wall on the right, by the door.”

The man relays the information. Then he raises the shotgun and aims it directly at Bob’s forehead. He says, “I’m going to blow your fucking head all over that wall behind you.” His voice is as cold and calm as the ground. “I’m going to splash your fucking brains, you white sonofabitch, unless you get me that money bag right now.”

“All right, all right. Relax. I’ll get it.” Bob moves slowly to his left, keeping his eyes on the muzzle of the shotgun, as if planning to duck when it goes off. “I’ll get it.” He reaches under the counter by the cash register, gropes around, finds the gun and flicks the safety off with his thumb. He draws it slowly out, inch by inch, thinking, in a howl, Oh Jesus, Elaine, my poor babies, I’m going to die now. The man is going to kill me because I lied. But I had to lie, he wouldn’t believe me when I told the truth and he was going to kill me for that. So I lied. And now I’m going to die for lying. The man will kill me, and maybe I’ll kill him too. Oh, Elaine, oh, my babies, oh, Jesus, I love you, Elaine, I don’t love the nigger girl, I never did, I just love you, Elaine, you and my babies. I’m a good man.

He half faces the silhouetted figure of the man cradling the shotgun. Crouched over the pistol, as if shielding it from rain, Bob squeezes the trigger, hears the explosion, hears Silhouette’s roar of pain, then hears the deeper explosion as the shotgun goes off, hears glass behind him shatter, and suddenly notices the sweet taste of gin on his mouth, all over his face, or blood, he can’t tell, because it’s warm like blood and he’s never tasted warm gin, but there’s no pain, just a numbness in the hand that fired the.38 and a ringing in his ears, broken suddenly by the sound of the shotgun firing again, and at the same time there’s a yellow flash near the door, and smoke and the smell of gunpowder and burning cardboard and the clatter of broken glass above and behind him. Then silence, except for the slosh and trickle of liquor spilling from broken bottles down the shelves to the floor. He hears a noise from the stockroom — Cornrow bumping against cases in the dark — and from the front of the store, the sound of the door latch, Silhouette trying to unlock the door. Bob stands and holds the.38 out in front of him with both hands, the way he’s seen it done on TV. He aims through the rear sight and fires. Sihouette grunts and gurgles and slams against the door. The shotgun falls, and then the man falls too.

Bob races alongside the counter and darts across to the back of the store next to the open stockroom door, where he presses against the wall and listens to Cornrow on the other side struggling in the dark to escape, bumping walls, smacking against head-high stacks of beer, knocking over George Dill’s broom, panting, pushing, groping for an opening in the unpainted cinder-block wall, until, finally, there’s silence. Then Bob hears it. First a whimper, then the awful bawl of a child. And he smells it. Human shit.

He steps through the doorway, flicks on the overhead light and sees the shuddering boy huddled on the floor against the far wall, inches from the back door. The boy looks up, eyes wet, large mouth loosely open, his whole body trembling in terror. He looks around him and sees how close he is to the door, sees that one push on the crash bar would open it. Escape. Freedom. Gone from him now. “Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me!” he blubbers. “Let me go, please let me go! I didn’t do nothin’, honest. Please, mister, don’t kill me!”

Bob holds the gun out in front of him with both hands and aims it at the boy’s head. “You black sonofabitch. I oughta blow you away.”

“Aw-w-w!” the kid bawls.

“You’re disgusting.” Bob lowers the gun. He wrinkles his nose. “You stink like shit too.” He takes a step backwards. “Whew! Jesus H. Christ! You just lie there, shitpants. Lie there and stink. I don’t want your smell near me. And don’t move a muscle, or I’ll blow your fucking brains out. I’ll do you the same favor you wanted to do me.”

Slowly, Bob backs out to the counter and picks up the telephone, and laying the gun flat on the counter, punches the number for the police. “This’s Bob Dubois out at Friendly Spirits on Route 17,” he declares. “D-u-b-o-i-s. Yeah, Dubois. Spelled like that. I know, I know. Yeah, listen, I just shot a guy trying to rob the place. Friendly Spirits. Route 17. Yeah, and I got his buddy too. Got ’im right here. No, no, just one of ’em, the other guy shit his pants. Yeah. The other guy? I don’t know, I might’ve killed the guy. Yeah, Friendly Spirits. On Route 17, opposite the housing project south of the base.”

Hanging up the telephone, Bob walks with a bouncy step back to the stockroom, and when he enters the room, he sees at once that the back door lies wide open, and the boy has fled. Bob stands there, shocked, looking at the wet spot against the wall where the boy lay, then at the open door, then at the parking lot beyond.

Exhaling slowly, he suddenly, and to his surprise, feels relieved, and when he looks down at his hand and the heavy gun in it, discovers that he’s bleeding. His white short-sleeved shirt is spattered with blood, and the back of his neck and arms are laced with tiny glass cuts. They aren’t painful, but Bob knows that bits of glass are still embedded in his flesh, so he’s careful to avoid touching them.

When he checks on the man he shot, he sees immediately that the man is dead, shot twice, once in the shoulder and once in the mouth. The crumpled body lies like an island in a large, spreading puddle of blood. Suddenly nauseous, Bob jogs his way back through the store to the stockroom, then out the open door to the parking lot, where he glances at the robbers’ car, a dull, pale blue Dodge Charger with battered New York plates, and vomits onto the asphalt.

When the police arrive, he is seated cross-legged on the counter next to the cash register with his gun laid beside him, feeling giddy and swilling on a bottle of Dewar’s while light skeins of blood run down his back and arms.