Continental Drift

A Man’s Man

1

Bob Dubois’s first call, after treatment at the Winter Haven Hospital overlooking lovely Lake Martha, is to his brother Eddie. It’s one thirty-five in the morning, he’s shot and killed a man, been rushed in a wailing ambulance through the night, had twenty-seven slivers of glass removed from his flesh and a pint of pink antiseptic daubed over half his torso, and now, in bloodstained shirt and pants, as he stands in the lobby of the emergency ward of the hospital, two car-crash victims hurtling past on rubber-wheeled stretchers, a drunken middle-aged black man with stab wounds in his bicep arguing with the nurse at the admitting desk, a white teenaged mother and pimply-faced father sitting warily in straight-backed chairs while their baby undergoes tests to determine the extent of internal damage caused by the beating they gave her, Bob calls his brother Eddie, and all Eddie wants to know is how the hell the other nigger got away.

“Whaddaya mean he ran out the back while you were calling the cops? Why didn’t you bring the bastard out front by the phone, just keep him covered?”

“Look, the kid shit his pants, he was so scared. He stunk. I didn’t want to get near him. I don’t know, I just didn’t think he had it in him to try anything, not after the way he was scared.”

“You shoulda shot the fucker in the knees. Then called the cops.”

“Christ, Eddie, he was only a kid. Maybe fifteen or so. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I was a little rattled, y’ know. What the hell do you want? I mean, I never shot a guy before. I never even got shot at before. I mean, the guy’s standing there with a fucking twenty-gauge aimed at my head. I’m lucky I’m alive. You woulda had a heart attack.”

“I woulda shot both niggers.”

Both men are silent for a few seconds. Then Eddie says, “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I hate those bastards. Fucking coons sit around taking welfare while we work our asses off, and then they come around with their fucking shotguns telling us to give ’em all our money. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“No, you did good, kid. I’m proud of ya. No shit. You swacked a nigger and saved the day’s take.”

“Well, I’d already made the deposit anyhow,” Bob explains. “There wasn’t any money there. The register was empty.”

Eddie doesn’t quite understand. What was Bob doing at the store, then, if he’d already made the deposit?

“I … well, I went out with someone, for a couple of drinks. Friend of mine. Then the transmission, the throw-out bearing, I think it is, got jammed. You know, like it does. So I went into the store to call Elaine or somebody to come get me.”

“Oh, yeah? You getting a little on the side, kid?”

“Oh, no, no, nothing like that. A friend of mine, guy I know.” He can’t use the story about the Budweiser salesman on Eddie.

“Sure, sure. I don’t give a shit you’re ripping off a piece of poon now and then. Just don’t do it on my time, okay? You get all the pussy you want on your own time, but I ain’t paying you to wet your dick, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s at the store right now?”

“Cops. State and local.”

“Okay, I’ll get right out there,” he says. “You, you go on home and get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. Is the place a mess?”

“Yeah. Lots of broken bottles. I got cut….”

“Okay, I’ll be there in the morning too. Don’t clean up until the insurance guys get there. You understand. It’s better for a big claim if the place looks like it got hit by a shit storm.”

They say goodbye and hang up, and for several minutes Bob stands by the phone trembling, as waves of rage, fatigue, horror and regret run through him, one hard upon the other, until he can no longer distinguish between them. He barely knows what part of the country he’s in, and he no longer remembers why he came here, why he left the place where he knew who he was, knew what he felt and why, knew how he felt about the people he lived with — his wife and children, his friends, his boss, his girlfriend, all of them living in the place where all the people were white and spoke the same kind of English and wanted the same things from life and knew more or less how to get them.

For the first time since he came to Florida, he lets himself say to himself that he has made a terrible mistake. He should have endured the sad frustration of his life, should have been patient and waited, because it would have passed, probably once Christmas had passed, and in a few years he would have got ahead, he would have been promoted at the oil company, maybe even ended up with a desk job as a supervisor or an estimator for new work. He would still own his house on Butterick Street, his boat, the dining room set they sold for one hundred dollars in the yard sale. He’d still be able to fuck Doris Cleeve when he got a little depressed or bored, and he’d know exactly how she felt about him and how he felt about her. He wouldn’t worry if his prick was too small because he was a white man. He wouldn’t worry about how well or badly he made love, because Doris always got wet right away and sucked him right into her with obvious excitement and joy. Good old Doris Cleeve. And he wouldn’t have to think about the yellow-skinned black man lying in his own blood with a fist-sized hole in his face where his mouth and all his pretty teeth used to be, or the boy huddled in his shit against a cinder-block wall begging him not to kill him, or Eddie wondering why the hell he didn’t kill him. He wouldn’t be the man he has become, and then the man he has become would be free to go on and be someone else, some guy Bob Dubois would never miss knowing anyhow, some nervous, unsure liquor store clerk who tried and failed to make love to a pretty black woman and then almost got himself killed and had to shoot a robber because the man was black and he was not and as a result did not have the wit to talk his way out of it, when, if the robber had been white, Bob would have explained easily and nothing bad would have happened to the sad-eyed liquor store clerk working for his older, smarter brother while his wife gets more and more pregnant and life gets daily more complicated and difficult and all he can think about in the face of it is how can he redeem himself as a lover with the black woman he failed to make love to successfully. This man is not the sort of man Bob Dubois would want to know if Bob Dubois were the same man he was six months ago.

Looking around at the strangers in the waiting room, the nurses and attendants and the occasional intern passing through, Bob suddenly feels lost to himself, as if the man he once was has been destroyed and replaced by someone he can’t recognize. It makes no difference what he does now, Bob decides. He can walk out the door to the breezy night, to the smell of magnolia and honeysuckle, to the anonymous cars passing by on their sleepy turns toward home, empty buses hissing to a stop to pick up late-night stragglers after the bars have closed, card games shut down, tempers and passions cooled enough to take back to living rooms and bedrooms — he can walk out to that world and join it, and with no one the wiser, drift on out to Highway 17, hitch a ride north as far as Atlanta, where, along about Wednesday, the police will pick him up for vagrancy. He pictures himself slumped in the back of the police car, two thick-necked young cops in front on the other side of an iron mesh barrier smoking cigarettes and talking in low Southern voices about bets they’ve placed on the All Star game this weekend. Bob doesn’t know what sport the All Stars play, or where the game is being held. He barely knows what city he’s in, what season it is (late spring, early fall, tropical midwinter?), or how he got the cuts and slashes on his neck and the backs of his arms, so that when at the police station the desk sergeant asks him about the cuts, he makes up a story, tells him he got rolled by a couple of black kids in Macon who cut him with their razors for the fun of it, and he’s believed, booked and taken to a highway work camp near Woodbine to spend thirty days cutting and burning kudzu alongside Interstate 95. After that, when he’s released, he rides with a friend from the work camp, a pickpocket who steals a car five miles from the camp, to Nashville, where the friend says they can both get work as bartenders … or he talks a local peanut farmer into hiring him as a fork-lift operator at the warehouse … or he phones his wife in Oleander Park, Florida, and tries to explain what happened to him, so that she will borrow a car from a neighbor and will pick him up and drive him home to where he used to live, with her and their two daughters and unborn son.

He tries to explain to Elaine what has made him feel that it no longer makes any difference what he does. He tries and tries, first on the telephone from the hospital and then, beside her, in the car driving home. But he fails. First she understands too quickly and feels sorry for him; then she can’t understand at all and feels inadequate and guilty; and finally she pretends to understand and says she has felt the same way herself. It’s how it was that night in New Hampshire, little more than six months ago, when he came home weeping and they decided to move to Florida. In New Hampshire, he could weep like a child and cry, “I want … I want …” and she could respond by saying, “A new life! A fresh start! Florida!” and it didn’t matter that she didn’t understand him, or that she understood him too easily and therefore not at all. He could dream his way back to life, could make love to her and fall asleep with a smile on his face and wake the next morning believing that what he was about to do would make a difference in his life and in the lives of his wife and children. Their lives would soon be better than they had been, not because of chance or dumb luck or just rewards handed down from heaven, but because he, Bob Dubois, had decided to leave his old life behind and pack up and head south. Everything was going to be different, and better. That, most of all. Better.

Now, however, when he cries to his wife, “I want … I want …” there is nothing she can say to make him forget that she can’t understand him at all or else thinks she understands him all too well. Consequently, his mind turns to the woman Marguerite Dill, whose love for him, if he can acquire it, will make him different from the man he is, the man who cries, “I want … I want …” Men do that to women, use them to remake themselves, just as women do it to men. Men and women seek the love of the Other so that the old, cracked and shabby self can be left behind, like a sloughed-off snakeskin, and a new self brought forward, clean, shining, glistening wetly with promise and talents the old self never owned. When you seek to acquire the love of someone who resembles you, in gender, temperament, culture or physical type, you do so for love of those aspects of yourself, gender, temperament, culture, etc.; but when you seek the love of someone different from you, you do it to be rid of yourself. And so Bob, who more than anything desires to be rid of himself, falls to contemplating the love of a Southern black woman and the kind of Northern white man it will make of him.

Once again, he decides that he no longer loves his wife. He’s not sure what the implications of that decision are, but he hopes they don’t mean separation and divorce, breaking up the family. He’s not ready for that, and even so, she, more the Catholic than he, would not permit it, no matter what the cost. They no longer quarrel, he and Elaine; that scratchy period passed the day he decided Marguerite was only a passing fancy. Since then, his days and nights with his wife and children have been peaceful, if somewhat boring. Since then, he has not had to fuss with himself to rub out the guilt he felt in the company of his children, who wanted to know, did he still love Mommy? Now, however, he fears that the nasty and exhausting quarrelsomeness that plagued them for several months in the spring will return and will quickly escalate, until he’s forced to make an impossible choice between his love for his children and his love for a woman not their mother. Bob’s no psychologist, but he knows how things go.

On the other hand, he believes that the kind of man he will become, by virtue of his acquiring Marguerite’s love, is the kind of man who can locate with ease the excluded middle between his love for his children and his love for a woman not their mother. The man is handsome, of course, and sexy and good-humored; he’s not rich, not yet, but some men don’t have to be rich in order to seem it; he’s kind and gentle, tender to women, children and animals, without being sentimental, however, because, after all, he’s a “man’s man” as well; he’s a stern yet jocular father to his children, and he can take care of his wife too, can assume a custodial role in her life, honoring and attending to all her needs, even her sexual needs, while at the same time making plans to leave the house later, after he’s satisfied her sexual needs, to drive in his Lancia convertible across the towns of central Florida in the humid summer night to meet his beloved where she waits for him, seated elegantly at a table for two in the small back room of a restaurant that overlooks a dark, star-dappled lake, where the sound of small waves lapping tawny sands and the seductive smell of orange blossoms fill the night air. That’s the kind of man Marguerite would love.

He is seated on the edge of a short, wide dock. He’s wearing dark blue swimming trunks and a yellow life vest, his feet tucked into water skis and his hands grasping a bar attached to a tow rope which in turn is attached to Eddie’s new boat. Late afternoon sunlight glitters off the lake in sheets and planes, and the still air ripples in the heat, distorting the tall, dense, gray-green live oaks and cypress trees along the grassy shore. From where Bob is seated, the shoreline loops and spreads gradually into an approximate O three miles wide and long. They are on the grounds of the Lakes Region Yacht and Country Club, he, Elaine, Ruthie and Emma having been admitted at the gate earlier as guests of Edward Dubois, and after meeting Eddie, Sarah and Jessica at the clubhouse bar, where the grownups drank mint juleps on the terrace under a Cinzano umbrella, they strolled across the clipped, pale green lawns from the clubhouse and marina to one of the half-dozen small, secluded coves on the club grounds where there are picnic tables, fireplaces, boat landings and short, shallow beaches. It’s a Sunday, Eddie’s thirty-third birthday.

Last week, when Bob and his family were invited by Sarah to come to the club and help celebrate the day, Bob instructed Elaine to find out what they should give Eddie for a birthday present. “The sonofabitch’s already got everything he needs,” he muttered. Elaine asked her sister-in-law what Eddie needed. Sarah suggested they get him something to go with her gift to him.

“What is your gift?” Elaine asked. They were talking on the telephone, Elaine standing in her kitchen, Sarah lying in coconut oil next to her pool. Bob sat on the couch in front of the TV watching the New York Yankees, in a late season game, thrash the Red Sox, who once again had betrayed him in August after having seduced him, almost against his will, in May.

“Fucking Reggie,” he grumbled, taking a quick pull on his beer. “I hate the way he struts. Look at the bastard, like a goddamn rooster.”

Sarah spoke slowly, almost coyly, though Elaine couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t simply come right out and tell her what she’d bought for her husband’s birthday. “You’ll never guess what it is,” she said. “I’m almost ashamed of myself, and I know I’ll be sorry later.”

“Well, what should we get him to go with it?” Elaine asked, her voice cooling. “Whatever it is.”

Sarah giggled. “Seat cushions.”

“What?”

“Seat cushions.”

“Seat cushions? Like, for sitting on? For a couch?”

“No, no, silly. For a boat!”

“A boat? You bought him a boat? Another one?”

Bob groaned, “Jee-sus H. Christ! Another fucking boat!” and Elaine shushed him with the flat of her hand, and he went back to staring at the TV screen, hating Reggie Jackson with renewed fury.

“Oh, it’s real cute, he’s gonna love it,” Sarah said. “Wait’ll you see it. He’s been talking about this one in particular for months, and he’s dropped a few hints, but I know he doesn’t think I’ll go out and do it, actually go out on my own and buy him a twelve-thousand-dollar boat.”

“Twelve thousand dollars!” Elaine gasped.

Bob looked up from the TV screen and stared at his wife as if he suddenly felt sick and wanted sympathy.

“Where’d you get that kind of money, Sarah? Won’t he be mad when he finds out? I mean, I can’t imagine …”

“Oh, Eddie’s been putting money into an account in my name for a long time, in several accounts, actually, and I never touch it, even though he tells me I should go ahead and spend it when I want to and not let it sit there where anybody who wants to can see it. It’s some kind of tax thing. I never understand that sort of thing. Anyhow, he’d rather have me buy things with the money than leave it in the bank like that. Jewelry and stuff. I don’t know how he’ll feel about me spending money on a boat, though. But as long as it’s in my name, I think it’s all right. I checked with his accountant, and he said it was okay, though I hope he didn’t tell Eddie — I really want to surprise him. He’s been so worried the last few weeks. Actually, since the robbery, though I don’t think that’s what’s got him down.”

Cushions, then.

Bob stopped one morning at Wiggins Boat Yard and Marina in Winter Haven, where Sarah had bought Eddie’s boat, and bought four large, square, unsinkable cushions, rust-colored, to match the boat, a Regal Empress 190XL, a twenty-foot-long, arrow-shaped speedboat with a 150-horsepower Johnson motor and a top speed of over forty-five miles per hour. Bob lugged the set of cushions in a large, gift-wrapped box from the car out to the terrace behind the clubhouse and then across the rolling lawns to the picnic grounds by the shore, where Sarah had arranged to have sandwiches, beer for the adults and lemonade for the kids, birthday cake and ice cream sent down from the clubhouse, and where Eddie, who had received his gift earlier that morning and had been playing with it ever since, had tied his new boat. When Bob saw the vehicle sitting low and sleek in the water, saw its abundance of chrome and curved glass and glistening deck, saw the snug interior fitted out like a sports car, he set the box of cushions on the ground by the picnic table and stood awkwardly in front of it, as if to hide it from sight, and wished he had bought something like a Swiss army knife instead.

Later, after eating the sandwiches and drinking several Heinekens, and after Eddie had blown out the candles on his cake (eleven of them, one for each three years, Sarah explained), Elaine presented the box to him, with her apologies. “It’s not much, Eddie,” she said, lifting it with difficulty to the front of her huge belly and passing it over the table to him.

Bob looked out at the lake and let his gaze fall on the new boat tied to the dock, where it moved on the rippling water like a thoroughbred racehorse trembling in a shifting breeze.

Eddie tore open the box like a child, then beamed happily at the sight of the cushions inside. “Hey! Thanks, Elaine! Bob! Thanks a lot. This’s great. Look, honey, cushions! They match the boat,” he said, genuinely pleased. He’d figured on renting cushions today at the marina, he said, or hauling over the small yellow cushions from his old boat, which would have been okay, he explained, but not perfect. “And everything should be perfect on a maiden voyage, right, Bob?”

“Right. Perfect.”

Now, as if to atone for his feeble gift, Bob agrees to water-ski behind Eddie’s new boat, while his wife and sister-in-law watch from the shore and his daughters and niece, hugged by life vests and seated on the new cushions, watch from the boat. He’s never skied on water before; in fact, he’s never skied on any kind of surface, despite having been raised where people drive from cities hundreds of miles away just so they can spend a few hours careening down mountains on slats strapped to their feet.

With the motor burbling and spitting behind the boat, Eddie looks back at Bob and asks if he’s ready. Sitting next to her father in the cockpit, Jessica, looking sadly like a plucked chicken in her purple tank suit, seems profoundly bored. Emma stares at the gauges on the glittering dashboard in front of her, while Ruthie examines the tow rope where it’s clipped to the swivel at the stern, follows its coiled, half-submerged length to the dock, fifteen feet away, where it’s attached to a short bar that her father, grim-faced, extends chest-high in front of him and clings to with both hands.

“Be careful, Daddy,” Ruthie says.

Eddie laughs and revs the motor. Emma delightedly follows the needle on the tachometer with her index finger, and Jessica peers off to her right, as if at a photographer specializing in preadolescent girls. She skied first, expertly circling the lake twice, then on the second pass letting go of the rope twenty or thirty feet from the landing dock and sinking slowly into the water, rising again and languidly floating the skis to shore ahead of her. She had looked good to Bob out there, swooping from one side of the wake to the other, riding over the waves and sending a high, white fantail behind her. It looked easy.

Eddie agreed. “But not as easy as it looks,” he warned. “Don’t get pissed if you fuck it up at first.” He offered some basic instruction, assured Bob that he’d start off slowly and told him to be sure to let go of the tow rope when he went down; he’d come back and pick him up right away.

“What do you mean, ‘when’? ‘If’ I go down is what,” Bob corrected him.

“Yeah, sure,” Eddie said, grinning.

The skis feel comfortable to him, like rubber slippers. He nods to Eddie that he’s ready and lifts the rope from the water, flicking it like reins on a horse.

Eddie guns the motor, the stern squats and the bow lifts, and the boat leaps forward, instantly straightening the rope, yanking Bob from the dock into the water. He sinks like a stone, then suddenly rises, standing, the skis rushing over the skin of the lake, and he’s doing it, he’s water-skiing! Eddie, glancing back, grins and raises his fist and cheers. Ruthie claps her hands with joy, and Emma follows, and even Jessica seems pleased.

As he whizzes away from shore, Bob lets go of the tow bar with one hand and waves triumphantly. He draws the rope to him, tests its tautness, then lets it back out, feels the water pounding against his feet, the wind in his face, and discovers that he can shift his weight on the skis and move himself to the left or right of the boat. On and on they go, straight out toward the middle of the lake, faster and still faster, and Bob feels wonderful. He decides to imitate his niece and cross the wake, and a second later the water is smacking loudly against the bottoms of the skis, but he holds on, keeps his legs bent slightly at the knees, his back straight, his arms outstretched, and he’s over, way out on the starboard side, almost parallel to the boat, as if he were racing with it. He knows he is grinning foolishly, but he doesn’t care. He’s happier at this moment than he has been in months, happier than he can remember having been for years, mindless and moving fast and barely in control, concentrating mightily on all the quickly shifting elements — water, boat, towline, skis, feet, legs, back and arms — creating and sustaining a balanced tension between them that surrounds him like an ether and brings him wholly to life.

Soon they have circled the lake and are making a pass by the dock. Bob can see Sarah, tall in her white jogging suit, standing on the dock, behind her Elaine, large and lumpy in pink maternity shorts and smock, seated at the picnic table. Eddie cuts back a bit and slows slightly, but Bob waves for him to go on, take another turn, so Eddie hits the throttle, and as they pass the dock, Bob leans to his right and skids over the waves to the left of the boat, swinging closer and closer to the dock. The skis bump over the water as if over rutted ice, pounding loudly against it, and Eddie, looking quickly over his shoulder, sees the danger and turns the boat slightly shoreward and increases speed to straighten the line and get Bob back behind the boat and away from the dock. But it’s too late. Bob’s headed straight for the dock now. Sarah sees what’s happening, knows what’s about to happen, and her hand goes to her mouth and she starts backing quickly off the dock toward the safety of the land. Elaine gets awkwardly but rapidly to her feet and rushes forward.

“Let go!” Eddie shouts. “Leggo the fuckin’ rope!”

Bob sees the collision that he cannot avoid. He sees his body, wet and nearly naked, smashed against the wooden dock, and suddenly his knees buckle, the skis dive nose-first into the water, and then his feet are free, he’s underwater, still holding to the rope, being ripped through the water and to the surface again, while Eddie screams back, “Leggo! Leggo! Leggo, you dumb asshole!”

The boat is roaring away from the dock now, hauling Bob behind it, banging his body against the rock-hard water. Eddie, with one hand on the wheel, has stood up and is gesturing wildly at Bob to let go of the rope. Bob can’t hear anything but the roar of the water and the boat, can’t feel anything except the pounding against his body, as if he were being kicked by a dozen boots at once. He rolls his body on its side, trying to escape the pounding. His hands seem frozen to the tow bar, and he can’t let go, he can’t pry his own fingers loose, until, at last, Eddie cuts the motor, and the boat slows and stops, the rope coils and sinks, and Bob releases the bar, rolls over onto his back and, arms loose, legs dangling, head lolling back, waves washing over his body, he floats like a dead fish, a large white carp.

Eddie turns the boat and slowly approaches him. “You stupid sonofabitch!” he screams. “Why the fuck didn’t you let go the rope? You coulda got killed!”

Bob grabs the gunwale and says nothing, just holds on.

“You all right?” Eddie asks. The children are gray-faced, and Ruthie has jammed her thumb into her mouth.

“Why … why the fuck … didn’t you kill … the motor?”

“I couldn’t, you asshole! You were s’posed to let go the rope, I kept waiting for you to let go, that’s why!”

“You … bastard. You … coulda killed me.”

“Me!” Eddie screams, his eyes bugging out. “Me? Me? I coulda killed you?”

“I forgot … I forgot to let go. I couldn’t think. It was the first time. You coulda killed me,” Bob says again. “Help me get into the boat,” he says grimly, raising a hand from the water. “You’re a real bastard, Eddie. No shit.”

Eddie turns away and tells Jessica to pull in the towline. She stands and draws the rope quickly in, dumping it in a snarl behind the seat. Reaching down, Eddie grabs a rust-colored seat cushion and tosses it into the water. “Here,” he says. “Ride that to shore, you stupid sonofabitch. I coulda killed you,” he sneers. “I shoulda just kept on going, till you finally figured out to let go the fucking rope. But I probably woulda run out of gas first, you stupid asshole. You can ride your goddamned cushion home.” He hits the throttle, and the boat churns the water, turns, and heads roaring toward shore.

Bob watches it get smaller, sees his daughters looking back in fearful confusion, and when the waves subside, he paddles to the bobbing cushion and grabs onto it. Then, shoving it out in front of him, he kicks his legs and starts moving slowly in the direction of the dock and picnic grounds and his family.

2

The night Elaine went into labor and had the baby, Bob was with Marguerite at the Hundred Lakes Motel. It was a Thursday, October 16, and the baby, a boy weighing six pounds fourteen ounces and named Robert Raymond Dubois, Jr., was born three weeks ahead of schedule and, despite Elaine’s rapid weight gain in the last few weeks, had shown no signs of arriving prematurely, and so Bob, as he had for months, treated the forthcoming birth of his third child as an event in the distant future, almost as if it were an event in someone else’s life.

For Elaine, of course, the baby was already an active member of the family and had been since late May, when she first felt him kick against her ribs from inside. But it’s often this way, that the mother and father regard the birth of their child as taking place at dates months apart, especially after the birth of the first child and almost always when the mother and the father have made their life together one thing and their lives apart different and separate things, which has been increasingly true of Bob and Elaine since Bob discovered Marguerite Dill and, more emphatically, since the robbery.

At eight-fifteen that night, Bob telephones Elaine from the store to say that he’ll be home late, he’s going out for a drink with the Budweiser salesman. Business is light tonight anyhow, it’s a Thursday, so he may even close the store a little early. He’ll be home before midnight, he assures her, while outside in the parking lot, Marguerite waits for him in her car, the motor running, windows open to the cool fall night, tape deck playing Isaac Hayes.

Elaine whines briefly and in a thin voice, but after all, Bob, unlike most husbands, always calls her when he’s going to be late, and he’s seldom late more than once a week, and besides, he has no other friends, and, she reasons, a man needs friends, especially a man who has become, as Bob has, such a loner. Go ahead, she tells him, and have a good time, she had planned on going to bed early anyhow, she wasn’t feeling too great today. She probably shouldn’t have tried to do all the housecleaning in one day. She’s already in bed, or at least on it, with her swollen feet up, her huge belly looming in front of her, her bulging slacks unzipped at the sides to ease her thick, soft flesh. Across from the bed on the dresser, the Sony jabbers in Spanish. She flicked it on just as the phone rang and hasn’t found her program yet.

At nine-oh-eight, she chuckles at one of Gary Coleman’s smart-aleck remarks on Diff’rent Strokes, feels the first, light contraction and suddenly turns serious, because she recognizes it immediately, does not for a second confuse it with indigestion or heartburn or just her imagination. Elaine knows her body, can read all its signals accurately, and she has been through this twice before and recently enough to have retained a clear, physical memory of it. She knows at once that she’s going to have her baby tonight. Picking up the phone next to the bed, she dials the liquor store, praying silently that her husband won’t have left yet.

The phone in the store rings an even dozen times, then stops. Bob is already at the Hundred Lakes Motel, smoking marijuana for the first time in his life. He mentioned to Marguerite the last time they were together like this that she might relax if she got drunk enough, and she suggested they get high together sometime. Did she mean marijuana? Grass?

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, yeah, why not smoke a little grass? It can’t hurt you, can it?”

She was surprised he’d never tried it, she even thought it was cute, or so she said, and she promised him she’d bring a couple of joints with her the next time they went out.

Now, in the darkness of the room (which she seems to prefer, though he just once would like to leave the lights on when they are naked, but he still can’t figure out how to propose it without sounding slightly perverse), Marguerite lights the joint and sucks the smoke into her lungs noisily and passes it to Bob.

He tries to hold it casually, almost drops it, quickly recovers and inhales deeply. He likes the sucking noise she makes when she smokes, likes the odor, likes the way his thoughts suddenly soften and liquefy. His skin feels crisp and tingly, but everything enclosed by his skin feels densely soft and warm. Like oatmeal, he thinks. He giggles and tells her what he was thinking.

“More like grits,” she says. “With gravy.”

“Pancakes with hot maple syrup,” he suggests.

She says, “No, more like hushpuppies. I feel like a hushpuppy.”

“Ah,” he exclaims, he has it now. “Corned beef and cabbage.”

She laughs a long time, or what seems like a long time. “Chitlins!”

“Yorkshire pudding, that’s it exactly!”

“Nope. It’s rice an’ field peas!”

“Baked beans … with molasses and salt pork.”

“Beaten biscuits. You ain’t never had no beaten biscuits, I bet. Sometime I got to make you some. With red gravy on ’em.”

“Boiled lobster!” Bob says he feels like a boiled lobster, red and hard on the outside, sweet and meaty on the inside. “Um-m-m,” he says, smacking his lips. “There’s nothing as good as that sweet, white, lobster meat sucked out of the hard, red claw and dipped in melted butter.”

They are silent for a few seconds, and then their hands touch, and they lie down beside one another and place mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet against mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet, and then he moves into her, swiftly and easily.

At nine thirty-five, Elaine’s water breaks. Too early, she thinks. Too soon. This is going to be a quick one, not like the others, and the contractions, now about five minutes apart, are heavy and deep, as if her uterus were a giant fist opening and closing. The pain is cold, not hot, and comes in waves, but it’s not as strong as when the others were born, she thinks, at least not as strong as she remembers. But they were big babies, and Emma was ten days late, and this baby is going to be early and probably small. Another girl, she decides. Oh, Jesus, not another girl, though it’ll be easier if it’s a girl. Easier and nicer. Except for Bob. Where the hell is he? The bastard. Oh, Bob, you bastard, where the hell are you? She grunts and turns to the phone and dials the number of her friend Ellen Skeeter, who, thank God, answers right away.

They shower together, and for the first time Bob sees Marguerite’s naked body, long, dark brown and shining, like polished sandalwood. He soaps her slick back and buttocks, rubs her shoulders and neck with one hand, her ass and the back of her thighs with the other, and when, like a strung bow, she arches backwards and spreads her thighs, he slides his hand into her from behind, one finger, then two, then three, and she gasps, leans forward and lays her weight against the tile wall of the shower, lets the warm water splash over her soapy back, gush between her buttocks and down his stiff, pumping arm. Shoving her ass against him, she drives his fingers deeper and deeper into her body, until her cunt is sucking at his hand, reaching for it and grabbing, letting go, then reaching and grabbing again, farther in each time, snapping and letting go, over and over, deeper and deeper, and then she’s swirling his thick fingers around inside her, twitching them, whirling her ass in wet circles, and soon she starts to moan, low and steady, and flailing one hand back around in search of his prick, finding it, she pulls away from his fingers and jams his prick in, and he grabs onto her thrashing hips and rides, rides, rides, while the water splashes warmly over their faces, shoulders, chests and bellies.

By ten-eighteen, when Elaine arrives at the emergency room of the Winter Haven Hospital and is met by her doctor, swiftly examined and rushed upstairs to a delivery room, she’s deeply into hard labor, and her cervix has dilated sufficiently that the doctor, a gaunt, red-eyed, rumpled Mississippian named Tucker Beacham, escorts her stretcher to obstetrics himself, in case he has to deliver the baby in the hallway. Ellen Skeeter, frightened and excited, joggles along behind the two, calling out to her friend, “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, honey, your chil’ren goin’ be fine. Soon’s I get you taken care of, honey, I’ll call home an’ tell Ronnie to stay right there at your place tonight. Ronnie’ll take good care of the chil’ren till Bob gets home, honey, an’ he’ll tell Bob everything, so don’t you fret, now.”

In the parking lot by the store, Bob kisses Marguerite softly on the lips, says he loves her more and more every day, and steps from her car. “Wait a second,” he says, closing her car door. “Wait till I make sure I can get my car into gear.” He slides into his car, starts the motor and drops the car into reverse. It makes a clunking noise, but it goes in. “Okay, it’s fine,” he says happily. “I don’t need you no mo’ for nuthin. Not for nuthin!” he says, laughing.

She smiles out the open window of her car and purses her lips at him. “You will soon, honey. Jus’ wait.” Then she spins the wheel and drives off.

Slowly, Bob draws out a cigarette and lights it, inhaling the smoke the way he inhaled the grass, tamping it down into the furthest recesses of his lungs. Grass is great, he announces to himself. Switching on the radio, he fiddles with the tuner until he finds a country and western station, and for a few seconds he listens to Kenny Rogers and Dottie West sing “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.”

Abruptly, he cuts them off and flips the tuner down the band, until he picks up the rumbling, wet voice of Barry White. Then he backs the car, cuts the wheel, and slowly, smoothly, oozing sexy confidence like ol’ Barry himself, Bob Dubois drives onto the highway, turns left and heads on down the road to home.

At eleven-twelve, Bob’s son is born, tiny, cheesy and blue, and because this is the first time Elaine has seen one of her children born — with Ruthie and Emma, she exhausted herself in labor, and the pain grew so great that finally she asked to be knocked out with gas — she believes the baby is born dead, and she starts to sob uncontrollably.

Dr. Beacham grins behind his mask. “You got yourself a baby boy, Miz Dubois,” he says, handing the baby to the nurse. “Now,” he says, patting her still large belly, “let’s see if we can get the rest out as easy as he come out.”

“It’s okay?” she asks in a plaintive voice. “It’s alive?”

“Sure is. Soon’s we get him a little cleaned up, he’s all yours. Now, let’s bear down hard one more time,” he says softly.

“It’s a boy, then,” Elaine says. “And he’s alive!” She wants to see him, to hold him to her breasts, to examine him all over, his mouth, nose, ears and eyes, his tiny fingers and toes, and his penis, oh, especially his penis! It’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to her — to have a male body, a body with a penis on it, emerge from her female body! It seems beyond belief, almost nonsensical. In a sensible world, females would give birth to females, and males would give birth to males. How can this funny miracle be?

She does what she’s told and pushes her abdomen down and out, and when the placenta is driven from her, it feels like a wonderfully liberating bowel movement, and she almost laughs aloud. Then she reaches her arms toward the nurse, who places the baby boy on Elaine’s stomach with its tiny red face facing hers, and suddenly Elaine is weeping with love for this blind, wet infant, this sweet chaos lying limp as earth on her belly, this incredible, terrifying, godlike innocence.

At eleven-thirty, Bob drives into his yard and parks the car, gets out and strolls slowly in the moonlight across the dew-wet plot between the driveway and the trailer. He hitches up his pants, unlocks the door and walks inside, and stops short in the doorway when he sees Ronnie Skeeter spread out on the couch, the Sony flickering on the coffee table before him. Ronnie’s huge body takes up nearly the whole couch. Though it’s a cool evening, and all he’s wearing is a Dairy Queen tee shirt and Scotch-plaid Bermuda shorts, Ronnie, as usual, is sweating ripely. He’s sprawled from the center of the couch on out to the ends, his meaty arms flung over the back of the couch, his huge beer gut, like a weighty sack of flour, billowing out in front of him and swooping smoothly down to his pinched crotch, where enormous red legs merge like turnpike ramps.

He looks up brightly as Bob enters. “Hidie, Bob!” he says. “Elaine ain’t here. She …”

“What’s going on?” Bob interrupts, sensing disaster. “Where’re the kids?”

“Oh, they’re jus’ fine. Sleepin’ like bugs in a rug.” Ronnie goes back to watching Johnny Carson, his message delivered. With the flat of one hand, he rubs the top of his blond crew cut, patting it affectionately, as if it were a pet.

“Where’s Elaine? What’s going on?”

Ronnie looks back slowly, reluctantly. It’s hard to watch the Johnny Carson show when you keep tuning out. You miss a lot of the jokes because you don’t know exactly who Johnny’s guest is or what Johnny or Ed said last. He tells Bob that his wife Ellen took Bob’s wife Elaine to the hospital.

“Hospital! Why?”

“Well, if I was to guess, Bob, I’d say it was so she could have her baby.”

“Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Jesus H. Christ! When, Ronnie? When did she go?”

“Couple hours ago. Hey, listen, I hope you don’t mind I drank a couple of your Colt 45’s. I didn’t want to leave the kiddies here alone and get some from home.”

“No, no, fine, fine.” Bob opens the door to leave, then abruptly turns back. “She went to the hospital?”

Ronnie answers without looking away from the TV screen. “Yeah. Couple hours ago.”

“Alone?” Bob feels his blood wash down his body. His face is stiff and white, a hardened plaster mask, and his hands are shaking. Alone? Oh, not alone. Please, not alone. Oh, my sweet Jesus, what an awful thing to happen. That poor woman. Alone.

“Naw. Ellen drove her. She tried to get you, Elaine did. But you was out, I guess.”

“Yeah, right. With a friend. From work. Had a couple of beers. You know.”

“Right. Well, she’s in the hospital….”

Bob turns to leave again. “What hospital? Winter Haven?”

“Yeah, that’d be the closest one. Same as the one you went when the niggers cut you.” Ronnie leans forward, grunting with the effort, and adjusts the sound. His broad forehead is slick with sweat. “You … you oughta get yourself one of them remotes. I got me one, and they’re real nice.”

“Oh, Jesus, what if she already had the baby! I better phone the hospital. Right?”

“Suit yourself.”

That won’t change anything, Bob thinks. What’s done is done. If she’s had the baby, his calling won’t help her; and if she hasn’t had the baby yet, she’s probably stuck away in a room without a phone. “No, I’ll go right over now. If she calls, Ronnie, or if your wife calls, say I’m on my way, okay?”

“Sure enough. Hey, I might tap me a couple more Colts, if it’s all right with you.”

“Sure, sure, help yourself. Take all you want. And thanks for watching the kids. I’ll call you from the hospital, soon’s I know what’s happening.”

“Suit yourself,” he says, working himself free of the couch, his eyes already moving toward the refrigerator. “I’ll just sleep here on the couch till you get back. I don’t have to work till tomorrow noon. Friday’s night’s busy, after the movies let out and all, so I stay late an’ don’t go in till noon.”

Bob doesn’t hear him. He’s already out the door and running for his car. As he runs, he punches his fist against his thigh, curses himself through clenched teeth. If he could beat himself up, he would. If he could slap himself around, punch himself in the stomach, throw himself to the ground and stomp on his back, kick himself in the kidneys, break his ribs, he would. But he can’t. Elaine needs him, so he can’t punish himself yet. But he will, goddammit, he will.

Bob pushes open the door from the hallway and enters the nearly dark room, walks carefully past the other beds, two of them with women sleeping in them, one empty, to the bed at the end, and as Dr. Beacham promised, Elaine is there, all in white, like an angel, or at least a saint, covered with a sheet and wearing a cotton nightie, her face washed and smooth, her damp hair pulled back by a pair of Ruthie’s white plastic barrettes. She’s lying slightly propped on pillows, peacefully asleep.

Stopping beside the bed, Bob stares down at his wife, looks down the length of her body to where the baby was and on to her feet. Her left: hand dangles from the bed, as if pointing to the floor, and her thin wrist, circled with a plastic cord and name tag, is like a child’s, and to Bob, at this moment, tells everything. Her slender white wrist carries to him the long, sadly relentless tale of her strength, her patience and her trust. It tells him what he’s been shutting out for months, perhaps for years. Purely and simply, it tells him about the woman’s goodness.

His jumbled thoughts and feelings suddenly clarify and separate, and he realizes in a rush that this is what he loves in her. And this is what he’s been denying himself, keeping it from himself so that he could go on thinking he didn’t love her, so that he could go on trying to love a different woman, a woman he thinks is probably not good, or at least she’s a woman whose goodness he’s incapable of seeing, as he sees Elaine’s goodness now, simply by looking down at her wrist.

Shame washes over him, and he feels suddenly cold. He knows, for this brief moment, what he’s done, and the knowledge makes him feel naked. To keep his options open, a man has kept himself from loving his own wife. This is a terrible sin. It’s the kind of sin, worse than a crime, that Satan loves more than a crime, because it breeds on itself and generates more sin. Because of the nature of his sin, it’s been impossible for Bob to see goodness in Marguerite or Doris or anyone else he might like to love. Yet until now, to keep his options open, he’s been willing, he’s even been eager, to trade off the years it took him to lose sight of Elaine, all the years of living with her day in and out, eating, working, sleeping with her, night after night, season after season, until she finally became invisible and he no longer knew what she looked like, until her voice became as familiar and lost to his ears as his own is, until, when he wished to see her, truly see who this woman was, he could only look into the exact center of her eyes and see the exact center of his own eyes looking back and know that he still had not seen her — until finally, now, years and years later, after what he’s done to her tonight, and perhaps only because of what he’s done to her tonight, Bob is able, when Satan isn’t looking, to glance at the woman’s thin wrist and at last see the woman’s goodness, which is the very thing, the only thing, a man can truly, endlessly, passionately love.

Her eyes flutter open, and she smiles. “Hi, honey.”

Bob can’t speak. He pats her shoulder, then leans over and gently kisses her on the lips.

She brushes his cheeks with her fingertips and whispers, “The baby’s a boy, Bob. It’s a boy.”

He nods. He knows, he knows.

“Have you seen him? He’s real pretty.”

He shakes his head no, turns away from her face and lays his head on her breast.

Tenderly, she runs her fingers through his hair.

“I … I’m sorry,” he says in a muffled voice. “I … I’m sorry I wasn’t able to … to help.”

She smiles and says that she knows he’s sorry, but he shouldn’t feel guilty, the baby came early and quick. “It was real easy,” she says. “Not like the girls. I almost had him in the car on the way over. Poor Ellen, she thought she’d have to deliver him herself.” She laughs, and he laughs a little too.

He stands and clears his face with his fists, like a child, and they smile at one another. “A boy, huh?”

“Yep,” she says proudly.

“Bob junior?”

“Bob junior.”

“Wow. A son.”

“Going to grow up and be just like his daddy,” she says sweetly.

A shade passes over Bob’s face. “No.”

“Oh, come on, honey. Be happy.”

“I am, I am. I just … no, I’m happy, really. A son!”

She tells him he can see his son in the morning, the nurse will bring him in early so she can feed him, and if Bob wears a face mask, he can see him and maybe hold him too. Then she asks about the girls.

Ellen Skeeter’s going back to Oleander Park to be with them now, he tells her, and she said she’d stay all night and get Ruthie off to school in the morning, if he wants, which he does, because he plans to sleep out in the waiting room tonight. “Thank God for Ellen and Ronnie,” he says.

She smiles and tells him to go on home and get some sleep and come back early tomorrow. “You’re going to be busy the next few days,” she tells him. “I’m on vacation, me and little Bob, but you and the girls, you got to take care of business as usual, you know.”

He understands. She’s right. She’s always right. He does have a lot to do in the next few days. He kisses her lightly, pats her wrist gently and backs from the room.

3

Late the next afternoon, George Dill spots his daughter’s car as it lurches out of traffic into the parking lot of the liquor store and pulls up by the Dempster-Dumpster in back, and he shuffles forward to the front door, waves good night to Bob and starts out.

“Hey, George!” Bob calls from the register. “Isn’t Marguerite coming in?”

“No, sah, Mistah Bob, she tol’ me this mornin’ she gon’ be in a hurry tonight, so I better be ready.” The old man nods emphatically, as if agreeing with himself, and his Miami Dolphins cap slides forward on his bald head.

“Really?” Bob says. He didn’t see her this morning. He was at the hospital, viewing his son and namesake, and got to the store later than usual; by then Marguerite had already dropped her father off and gone on to the clinic. He wasn’t able to tell her, as he’d planned, that he would not be able to see her anymore.

Bob steps around the counter and peers back through the side window at her car. He can’t quite see who’s inside, though it is clear to him that there is someone other than Marguerite inside the car. A man, evidently. In the front passenger’s seat. A black man.

“George, tell Marguerite I need to speak with her about something, will you? Tell her it’s important. It’ll only take a minute.” He returns to the cash register and starts totaling the day’s sales.

Seconds later, Marguerite appears at the door, opens it and sticks her head in. She’s wearing her nurse’s uniform, looking tired and a little perturbed. “I can’t talk now, honey. I gotta rush. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“No. It has to be now.”

She doesn’t understand.

“Come inside and close the door.”

“Only a minute?”

“Yeah. Only a minute.”

She steps inside and lets the door close behind her, then walks carefully across the floor to the register. “Is somethin’ wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. But … but Elaine, she had her baby last night. Our baby. She had a boy.”

Marguerite’s face breaks into a quick smile, a flash that catches itself and turns serious again. “That’s real nice, Bob. A boy. Is she okay and all, Elaine?”

“Yeah, she’s fine, fine. But … well, listen, she had the baby when I … when I was with you last night. I got home, and … well, you know.”

“Oh.”

Bob looks down at the cash register keys and drums his fingertips nervously across them, as if trying to type out a message.

“You couldn’a known she was gonna have the baby, honey. Those things happen on their own. The baby don’t know or care what his daddy’s doing at the time.” She tries a faint smile.

“Yeah, well, I know that. But even so, I naturally did a whole lot of thinking last night … and this morning. I thought a lot about the way things have been going for me.”

“Uh-huh.” She crosses her arms over her breasts and takes one step backwards.

“Yeah, well, I decided we shouldn’t see each other anymore, Marguerite.” There. It’s said. He looks into her eyes hopefully, but they narrow and harden.

She swallows with difficulty, then speaks in a dry, high voice. “You feeling guilty is all. With the new baby and all. And you not being there last night, being with me and all …”

“Well, yeah, of course I’m feeling guilty!” he snaps. “I should, for Christ’s sake. Guilt’s important, you know. It tells you when you’ve done something wrong. And what I’ve been doing lately is wrong. Wrong.”

“No, it ain’t. It just makes you feel all guilty inside, especially right now, with the new baby and all. That don’t mean it’s wrong, Bob. We got to talk this over. We can’t just walk off like this.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “There’s nothing to talk over.”

As if she hasn’t heard him, she brightens slightly and says, “Yeah, we got to do some talking, honey, that’s all. Maybe we take a break, and you just take care of your wife and babies for a while, and don’t worry about me none for a while. Don’t worry about nothing for a while. Then we can do some talking later on.”

“Listen, we can’t.”

She looks into his blue eyes steadily. “You just don’t know what kind of woman I am, do you?”

“Well …”

“And I guess I don’t know what kind of man you are, either.” She extends her right hand toward him, and her eyes fill, and quickly she blinks to cover it and withdraws her hand. “I hafta run,” she says. “I got to work tonight.” She turns abruptly and starts for the door.

“Marguerite.”

She stops but doesn’t turn around. “What you want?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

She leaves at once, yanking the door shut behind her. He stands at the register, staring after her, and when the car passes, he sees the man in the passenger’s seat, sees him clearly. It’s a young man, slumped down in the seat and facing away from Bob and toward Marguerite, who is looking straight ahead. The man has his arm out the open window and is wearing a light blue shirt with geometric designs crisscrossing the billowy sleeve. His hair, Bob sees, is plaited in tiny cornrows from front to back, from forehead to nape of neck, neat, tightly rolled tubes laid parallel to one another and raised against the dark brown skin of his scalp like thick black welts. It’s the kid! It’s Cornrow!

My God, Bob thinks, she knows him, she’s known him all along, and now she’s brought him here! No wonder she was in such a hurry and didn’t want to come into the store! She must have known he was the same kid who tried to rob the store.

No, she couldn’t, he decides. She couldn’t have known. It’s just an awful coincidence. She’s just giving the kid a ride home or something, they all know each other anyhow, and she’s just giving him a ride home.

But she doesn’t know the kid is a killer, then, a thief. She can’t! Or she wouldn’t be giving him a ride home. She’s in danger, but she doesn’t know it. By now Bob has got the.38 out from under the cash register and is running wild-eyed toward the door, car keys in hand.

The highway is clogged with cars at this hour, but by weaving between lanes and cutting into openings as they appear in the stop-and-go traffic, Bob is able to get in sight of Marguerite’s red Duster by the time it reaches Eagle Lake, a few miles south of Winter Haven. He falls in line three cars behind hers, turns left onto Route 655 north, bypassing downtown Winter Haven and heading toward Auburndale. He’s never been to her house and knows nothing of the town, so he’s careful not to lose her. At the same time, keeping two and sometimes three cars between them, he’s careful not to be seen by her.

His mind is a stream of thoughts and emotions suddenly thawed and flowing, a gushing, ice-cold torrent that mixes fear for her safety, anger for her having betrayed him, disgust with himself, desire for Eddie’s approval, rage at the boy who wanted his friend to shoot him with a shotgun, and a strangely impersonal, generalized desire for a clarifying act of revenge. If you ask him what offense or crime he wants avenged, he won’t be able to say, but even so, the desire is there, powerful, implacable, righteous and cruel. He will shoot that boy with the fancy hairdo, and he’ll do it in front of Marguerite Dill, too. In front of her father. He’ll just walk up and pull the gun out of his belt and fire point-blank at the kid’s chest. Then he’ll turn around and walk away, maybe call the police and tell them he caught the guy who tried to rob the store last summer, maybe call Eddie and tell him, maybe call Elaine and tell her. Maybe do nothing, just drive on back to the store and open it up again till nine and then go home and see his daughters and go to the hospital and visit his wife and new son — it doesn’t matter what he does afterwards, as long as he has done it, done the one thing that right now needs doing more than any other thing needs doing, which is shooting his gun at the black kid in Marguerite’s car. The knowledge rides high in his chest, bracketed and bolted there like a steel block, an ingot of desire around which the rest of his body and mind and all the time he has left to live and all the time he has lived so far have been organized and ordered. It’s the absolute clarity of the desire that makes it irresistible to him, and now that he’s engaged it, committed himself to its satisfaction, he can’t turn back. He’s in the wind now, in a kind of free-fall, a rushing, exhilarating plummet toward the very ground of his life.

The traffic has diminished somewhat, and they have entered the town of Auburndale, bumped across the railroad tracks that pass through the center of town, driven past the rows of citrus warehouses, on to the outskirts, where the narrow side streets are faced by small, shabby bungalows with low porches, where the streets are dusty and cluttered, yards are packed dirt, slash pine and locust trees are scrawny and tired-looking, and where all the people on the sidewalks and sitting on porch steps and driving home in their cars are black.

Unexpectedly, Marguerite turns left off Polk City Road, and just as the car between her Duster and Bob’s station wagon reaches the intersection, the light turns red, and Bob has to stop. He cranes his neck and watches her reach the end of the block, cross and drive on. Then, about halfway down the second block, her car pulls off the street into a driveway by a small brick house with metal awnings over the windows. He draws his shirt out of his pants and covers the gun handle, and when the light changes, turns left.

By the time he reaches the driveway where Marguerite parked her car, the kid has left. Marguerite is on the cinder-block steps unlocking the door, while behind her, George hugs a grocery bag. Bob peers down the sidewalk past Marguerite’s house and spots the kid jogging along about a block away. Slowing his car in front of Marguerite’s, Bob turns to his right and catches a glimpse of her surprised gaze. Then he passes her and accelerates. She watches after him, one hand shielding her eyes from the dusty yellow glare of the low sun, then shaking her head as if disbelieving her eyes, goes inside.

At the corner, Bob catches up to the kid, who, when the car draws abreast of him, turns, and for the first time, Bob sees the boy’s face up close, and yes, it is the same one, it’s Cornrow, only he’s older than Bob thought, in his twenties, maybe his late twenties, or at least he looks older now, out here on the streets, than he did cowering in the stockroom three months ago. Bob knows it’s the same person. There’s no way he could be mistaken. He recognizes the hair, of course, but also the skin color, the high cheekbones and almost Oriental eyes, the wide, loose mouth and receding chin, and the way he wears his shirt unbuttoned to expose his brown, hairless chest, and his bony frame and the jumpy lope of his stride. He knows this person. He’s had his image burned into his memory, and there’s no way on earth he would not recognize him instantly.

Bob leans over to the passenger’s side and calls out the open window. “Hey! You! Come here!” He reaches under his shirt and grabs the handle of the gun.

Cornrow stoops a little and peers inside, sees Bob’s twisted face and breaks into a run. He streaks down the sidewalk, passes a market and a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet and darts to the right into a bar.

Dropping the car into first gear, Bob guns the motor and jumps it into the traffic, yanks the wheel and pulls over in front of the same bar. A few people passing by on the sidewalk, startled, stop and watch the white man leap from his car and rush through the door to the bar.

Inside, it’s suddenly dark, and Bob sees only a long counter on the right with human shapes leaning against it and a line of narrow booths along the other side. A small crowd of people is gathered at the rear, and somewhere back there the blat of a television set cuts across the thick noise of a half-dozen male conversations.

Bob stands at the end of the bar, still by the door, next to a pair of middle-aged men silently studying their bottles of beer, and looks down the length of the bar, searching the unknown faces for the known one. But they’re all strangers, old men and young men, a few fat women, all of them ignoring him, going on with their quiet conversations as if they hadn’t noticed the sudden appearance of a breathless white man.

The bartender, a gaunt, extremely tall man with an Afro and wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt, tan Bermuda shorts and red jogging shoes, strolls slowly toward Bob. The customers follow the bartender with their eyes and watch Bob by watching the other man, who leans across the counter and says, as if he knows Bob from somewhere else, “How’re you doin’ today, mister?”

Bob tries to see around the bartender and over the heads of the customers near the bar to the crowd standing at the back. “I’m looking for a kid, he just ran in here.” His eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and he can make out the faces in the rear now. None of them is the face he’s looking for; all of them, the dozen expressionless black and brown male faces looking back at him, are interchangeable.

The bartender puts a toothpick into his mouth. “Ain’t no kid jus’ run in here. No so’s I’d notice. You sure?”

“Yeah, I saw him. I followed him. He came in a few seconds ahead of me. He’s here,” Bob declares.

The man looks silently down at Bob. Then he says, “You a cop, mister? I gotta see some ID.”

“A cop?”

“Yeah.” He switches the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “ ’cause if you ain’t, you probably oughta look somewheres else. If you is, you welcome to look around all you like,” he says, sweeping a long arm over the bar. “But I gotta see me some ID.”

Bob slips his hand under his shirt and rests it against the gun. Now everyone in the bar seems to be staring at him. A wall of large, dark faces peers down the bar at his blue eyes, his peach-colored skin, his brown hair, his long, pointed nose. “Is there a back door?” he asks the bartender. He suddenly hates his own voice, high and thin, effeminate, he thinks, and his clipped, flat, Yankee accent.

“Yes, there is a back door.” The bartender studies him for a second, then smiles wittily. “Maybe you the fire inspector?”

“No, no. I’m just looking for this kid, see, he ran …”

“Ain’t no such kid run in here, no such kid as I seen, anyhow,” he interrupts. Then abruptly he turns away from Bob and walks back down the length of the bar, and everyone else goes back to drinks and conversations.

Startled, suddenly alone again, Bob takes a step backwards, and as if watching himself from a spot located in a high corner of the room, he sees himself pull the gun from under his shirt. Holding the gun in the air next to his head, he aims it at the ceiling. At once, the bar drops into silence, except for the television in the rear, where Dan Rather intones the news. A few men say, “Hey!” and “What the fuck?” and then they see Bob and go silent, waiting. The pair of middle-aged men in front and a few others step back. Everyone watches him, and he watches himself, as if he has just turned into a writhing serpent.

Bob backs to the door and stops. “Kid!” he yells into the stunned crowd. “I know you’re here! You’re safe now, but not for long! I’m going to get you, kid!” he bellows. “I’m going to get you!” Then he backs through the door to the sidewalk, jams the gun into his belt and runs for his car, leaving everyone in the bar shaken but with something strange to tell about and wonder at for days.

In minutes, Bob pulls up in front of Marguerite’s house. He steps quickly from his car, flings the door shut, strides up the steps and raps loudly on the door. When old George opens the door, Bob walks past him and in. George slowly closes the door behind him, and Marguerite, barefoot, her white uniform unbuttoned at the throat, emerges from the kitchen.

“I thought that was you,” she says flatly. “What you doin’ way over here?”

“Howdy, Mistah Bob,” George says from behind him. “Sit down, sit down, make yourself to home.”

Bob waves the old man away with the back of his hand, and George steps from the room quickly and purposefully, a man with better things to do than hover around a white man he has no particular fondness for.

“I followed you from the store,” Bob announces. He says it as if it were an accusation.

“Yes?”

“I saw who was in your car when you left the store.”

“Did you now? Fancy that.” She pads back to the kitchen and yanks open the refrigerator door. From the grocery bag set on a small, oilcloth-covered table, she pulls out lettuce, tomatoes, frozen lemonade, bologna, and places them one by one in the refrigerator.

“I recognized the kid in your car.”

Marguerite turns and squints her eyes at him. Then she shakes her head slowly from side to side and goes back to putting away her groceries. “That kid,” she says, “is as old as you.”

“Yeah, sure. And I suppose you don’t know how I happen to be able to recognize him.”

“No. And frankly, mister, I don’t know as I care much about all that. I don’t particularly like the way you talking to me. What you got on your mind, anyhow? You didn’t come all the way over here just to tell me you think you know who I give a ride home to. Whyn’t you just let me know what you got on your little mind and stop all this dancing round the subject. All of a sudden you sounding a little too cute to me.”

“That kid in the car. You know ’im?”

“What’s it to you? Who you think you is, my husband?” She takes a step toward him. “What the hell you think you doing? One minute you whining about how you gotta not see me no more ’cause of your wife had a baby, and then you come running in here and start to asking me all about someone I give a ride home to, like you own me or something? Listen, mister, you can just take it somewheres else.” She turns away and folds the emptied bag, folds it carefully, meticulously, along the edges, and slides it between the refrigerator and the stove. “I don’t know,” she says in a low voice, as if to herself. “I just don’t know anymore.” She hides her face from him and stares out the kitchen window, at the back of another small brick house.

“I’m gonna tell you who that kid is,” Bob says. “And I know he’s a kid. He’s no more than twenty or twenty-one — I seen him up close. That kid is the same one who tried to rob the store and got away while I was calling the cops. That kid is the one I shoulda shot, not the other guy. That kid wanted me dead, the other guy didn’t. The kid kept telling the other guy, the guy with the shotgun at my head, to go on and blow me away! Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? That sonofabitch was laughing at the idea of me dead! He kept trying to get the other guy to pull the trigger. The only reason I’m alive now is because the guy with the gun had enough brains or decency or whatever not to pull the trigger. But when I didn’t pull the trigger, when I left that kid lying there in his own shit on the floor, crying like a baby, begging me not to kill him, he turned around and ran away. You know the story. So I end up looking like I don’t have any brains, or else too much decency, which amounts to the same thing nowadays. No. I want that kid.”

She is squinting into his face as if trying to understand a man speaking a language she’s never learned.

“I want that kid,” he says quietly, a child selecting a teddy bear from a shelf crowded with teddy bears.

“You crazy, Bob.”

“I want that kid. He wanted me dead. Now I want him dead. If not dead, then scared shitless and in jail.”

“Yeah, well, that guy in my car ain’t the kid you want. You crazy, is what I think. Now get outa here,” she says, and she brushes past him into the living room, crosses to the front door and opens it. “That guy in my car is husband to my cousin.”

“He’s a thief. Probably a killer.”

“The guys who robbed your store was from New York anyhow,” she says. “Read the papers. You know, when it comes right down to it, Bob, you just like every other white man.”

“Don’t give me that shit! Don’t! I know who the hell tried to rob me! I know who the hell tried to get me killed! And I know who I saw in your car. I saw him just a minute ago, too, at the bottom of your street, and I called to him, and he took off running. Naturally. He knows who the hell he is, and he knows who I am, too. It’s you who doesn’t know who’s who. Not me.”

“You just now called out to him?”

“Yeah, I followed him to the end of the block.”

“What’d you say to him?”

“Nuthin. I just hollered for him to come over to the car, and he saw me and recognized me and took off running. He ducked into a bar, and I ran in after him, but the guy in the bar covered for him, they all covered for him….”

“You hollered for him to come over to your car? What for? If you so sure he’s the one robbed your store, whyn’t you call a cop? Tell me that. Whyn’t you just ask me his name and then call the cops to come pick him up so you can identify him down to the police station?”

Bob looks stonily into Marguerite’s brown eyes for a few seconds. Then he sighs heavily, and as if he’s taken off a mask, his gaze softens. “Oh, God,” he says. “Oh, God damn everything. I fucked it up. I fucked it all up, didn’t I? Everything. Everything. All of it. Done.”

Marguerite is still standing firmly by the open door, like a guard. If she’s seen his face shift or heard his words, she shows no signs of it. “You looking like a crazy white man, you come down here, and you drive up and holler for a black man to come over to your car like that, and he takes a look at you and runs off, and you wonder why? You worse’n crazy. You dumb.”

“I fucked it all up.” He drops his weight onto the sofa, and leaning his head back, closes his eyes. “That’s it. Everything. Done.”

“What’d you plan on saying to him? That woulda been a real interesting conversation.”

“Nuthin.”

“So what’d you call out to him for, then?”

Slowly, Bob lifts his shirtfront, then drops it.

Marguerite’s face, at the sight of the gun in his belt, doesn’t so much drop as slide warily to the side. “Oh-h-h,” she moans, a sound signifying both pain and insight, as if the name for the mysterious cause of the pain came to her only at the moment of feeling it.

George enters the room from a back bedroom, and Marguerite rushes to him, leaving the front door open and unattended. “Daddy,” she says, “you get on back now. We almost finished, you gonna have your supper soon. Just you go on back and watch some more TV till we done.”

The old man peers across the room at Bob, then up into his daughter’s face. “Somethin’ wrong out here?” he asks in a firm voice. “I heard you gettin’ upset,” he says to Marguerite.

“Nothing, Daddy, nothing. Now go on back.”

George looks coldly at Bob. “I know you got yourself a gun there, Mistah Bob. You got it under your shirt there. I seen it. Seen it when you come in. I sure don’t want nobody gettin’ shot now, and I know you is a good man, and you don’t want nobody gettin’ shot neither, no matter how mad you gets at ’em at the moment. Come tomorrow, Mistah Bob, things’ll cool down some and you won’t be so mad. You don’t want to shoot no one, Mistah Bob. Marguerite, now, she makes her mistakes, sure, but she’s a good woman. And she loves you, Mistah Bob, really loves you. Tol’ me all about it. You don’t hafta worry none about that. I can tell you, she been good to you right from the beginnin’. Ain’t no one else come round here. She been good to you right from the start, so you got no call to get mad.”

“Bob,” Marguerite says coolly. “Go home, Bob. Just go home.”

Bob looks from the woman’s face to her father’s, then back again. “Don’t be afraid,” Bob tells them. “I’ll go.”

“We not afraid of you, Mistah Bob. We jus’ worried ’bout you, that’s all.”

“No, I’ll go. I’ll go.”

He stands, looks down in shame, and leaves.

Marguerite closes the door behind him, quickly locks it and does not look out the window after him. Instead, she walks immediately to the kitchen and commences preparing supper. She and her father never speak of the event again, not to each other and not to anyone else. There’s nothing to say about it to each other that is not already fully understood, so they remain silent about it, almost as if it never happened.

4

Bob lifts his shirtfront with one hand and pulls out the gun with the other, releases the loaded magazine and lays the gun and magazine down on the glass table in front of Eddie. Eddie looks at the gun, then up at his brother’s somber face, lowers his gaze to the gun again, then moves it back to the Wall Street Journal on his lap.

“You wanna drink, Bob?” he asks without looking up. He’s wearing salmon-pink trousers and a cranberry-red short-sleeved shirt and white Italian loafers, sockless. On the tile floor next to his chair is a ceramic pitcher half-filled with gin and tonic. “Sarah!” he barks. “Bring a glass!”

“No, forget it. No drink.” Bob lets himself down slowly into the redwood chair opposite Eddie, who continues to read his paper, or pretends to read it.

Sarah appears at the sliding glass doors of the living room, spots Bob, smiles and crosses the patio to him. “Bob! It’s wonderful about the baby! A boy! Congratulations!”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Great about the kid. Congratulations.” He looks pointedly at his watch.

“Thanks.”

“I was over at the hospital this afternoon,” Sarah reports, “to bring some presents and all, and I saw him, and he’s just adorable, Bob! Adorable. I’m glad it was a boy. After all the girls in this family.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“You want a drink, Bob? Let me bring a glass; Eddie’s got himself a pitcher of gin over there. His nightly dose. I’m sure he’ll share some with you.” She’s suddenly serious again, and she and Eddie exchange looks, quick, superficially wounding slashes, before she gushes on. “And Elaine, she just looks marvelous! Marvelous!”

“Sarah,” Eddie growls, “Bob don’t want a drink.”

Sarah glares at her husband, then, glancing over the low table in front of him, sees the handgun and magazine, and steps away. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, suddenly confused. She looks down at Bob. “Are you all right, Bob?”

“Yes, fine,” he says. Then, “No. No, I’m not fine, Sarah,” he says, staring straight ahead at his brother, who continues to look at the paper in his lap as if he were intently reading it.

“Sarah, leave us the fuck alone,” Eddie says.

Turning quickly, she strides from the patio and disappears into the house. Behind Eddie, the pool glimmers in the twilight, and a thatch of palmettos beyond the pool, in a parody of a postcard, raises a silhouette against an orange- and lavender-streaked sky. Folding the paper in half, Eddie slaps it onto the table next to the gun and says, “Too fuckin’ dark to read anyhow.”

Bob says nothing.

Eddie grunts and leans down to the pitcher beside him and refills his glass. “Okay, let’s hear it. Let’s hear why you’re here on a Friday night at seven thirty-five instead of at the store. I know it ain’t because your wife had a baby last night, because you’re here, where I live, not at the hospital, where your wife and new kid are. And you’re not at home, where you and your other two kids live. So there must be some other, some very fucking good, some really extraordinary reason why you’re here and not at the store. Right?” He speaks through clenched teeth, his blue eyes cold and angry. “And I suppose that when you plopped that gun in front of me, like it was catshit or something, I suppose that has something to do with why you’re here and not at the store on a fucking Friday night, where you could be selling a thousand bucks’ worth of booze for me, which right now happens to be very important to me and therefore in the long run should be very important to you too, asshole, since your livelihood depends very much on my livelihood.”

“Don’t call me an asshole anymore, Eddie.”

“‘Don’t call me an asshole, Eddie,’” he says, mocking him. He’s speaking more and more rapidly now, his face red with anger. “I really love it, Bob — no shit, I really love it. The way you go around with a long face all the time, like you got worries or some kinda hair across your ass, when all you got to do, for Christ’s sake, all you got to do is get up in the morning and get to work on time and come home and drink beer in front of the fucking TV screen till you get sleepy and then go fuck your wife for fifteen minutes and pop off to sleep. I really love it. You come in here like you got fucking troubles, and I’m supposed to sit here and hold your hand and listen sympathetically and say, ‘Aw, Bob, it must be tough out there at the store, having to think about keeping a gun around in case the niggers want to rob you again. Gee, it really must be a burden on you.’”

“No, Eddie, that’s not it. It’s just, I gotta keep the gun away from me. That’s all.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t hafta understand. It doesn’t matter. It’s like I’m afraid of heights, that’s all, so you stay away from heights when you’re scared of ’em. It’s not a burden to me, like you said. And I’m not complaining about my life or anything. The job’s fine. It’s just, I got to keep the gun away from me.”

“That so?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, Bob, let me tell you something, okay?” His voice is calmer now, and his face has returned to its normal shade of parchment brown. “I got problems, Bob. Real problems. Not like this candy-ass shit you’re talking about. I mean, what the fuck do I care about you gotta keep a gun away from yourself? What do I care you’re scared of heights? Save that shit for your wife when she gets outa the hospital. Save it for a shrink. I gotta run a business. I gotta do a certain volume every week, week after week, or one of these mornings you’re gonna find me sleeping in the trunk of my car and my car’ll be in Tampa Bay. I mean it. You, all you gotta think about is taking care of your mouth, your prick and your asshole. Me, I gotta come up with a certain amount of money every fucking week, Bob, or I won’t have any mouth, prick or asshole to worry about. You understand what I’m telling you?”

Darkness has fallen on them like an attitude. The two men sit across the round, glass-topped table from each other and watch each other gradually get absorbed by the darkness, as if they are backing away in opposite directions, and their words to one another drift aimlessly into space, unheard, unattended, unconnected.

“Is it because of the guys you’re working with in these housing projects?”

“Your trouble is you think all I do is sit around counting my money and playing with my toys, like that boat. You think the difference between us is that you’re unlucky and smart and I’m lucky and stupid, so you mope around all the time feeling sorry for yourself and pissed off at me. Well, let me tell you, Bob, I’m not lucky. And I’m not stupid. And you’re not unlucky. And you’re not that fucking smart. Things are a hell of a lot different from what you think they are.”

“I’m not really complaining about the gun, Eddie. I just figured I could leave it with you, since you owned it anyhow, and take my chances down at the store, you know?”

“If I don’t come up with a very definite amount of cash every fucking week, the next week after that I hafta come up with twice as much again, and so on down the line, until the only way I can meet my fucking obligations is go out and rob a fucking bank. Do you think Sarah understands any of this? Do you? Fucking broad. She thinks money comes from heaven. She thinks credit cards are money, for Christ’s sake. You think I can go to a bank with this and take out a loan? Everything’s paper, Bob. Everything.”

“See, if I don’t keep that gun away from me, I’m afraid I’ll end up shooting someone. Not someone robbing the store, but someone else, a stranger, maybe. I don’t trust myself anymore. I think I may be a little crazy or something. I don’t know how it’s happened, but I think sometimes I lose control of myself. Especially when it comes to women, you know? I get so pissed off at the world, so angry, that I’m liable to kill somebody by accident if I don’t keep that gun away from me. It’s not women, really, but they’ve got something to do with it. Somehow.”

“I’ve worked hard for this. For over fifteen years I’ve been working hard. I got an ulcer. Did you know I got an ulcer? My ass is bleeding too. Did you know that? I’m thirty-three years old, and I got holes in my stomach and a bleeding asshole. And now my epilepsy is coming back. I had two fucking seizures this month. First in five years. You figure it out.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody, see. I didn’t want to kill that nigger that robbed the store. I don’t know even how I did it. Or why. I knew, the second time I shot at him, that he wasn’t going to kill me anymore. I’d already at least winged him. I knew that. The worst he was going to do by then was get the hell out of there. But I killed him anyhow.”

“I’m not pissed at you, Bob. I just got a lot to worry about lately. I hate my fucking wife. I wish she’d just get herself royally fucked, have a hundred orgasms, and run off with the tennis pro or somebody. I don’t even like my kid anymore. All she does is sit up there in her room getting stoned and listening to records of guys with safety pins stuck in their cheeks. I don’t know why the hell I’m even doing this, working this hard. I should be like you.”

“It’s probably only a temporary hard time, Eddie. It’ll pass. It’s probably the recession. You know, from the energy crisis and the fucking Arabs and all, and fucking Carter. It’ll pass. You just gotta hold on to what you got for a while.”

“Yeah.” They are silent for a moment, and then Eddie says, “If you leave that gun here, Bob, I’m just gonna hafta haul it back in to the store tomorrow morning and put it right back where it was.”

“I got to keep that gun away from me.”

“The gun stays at the store.”

Bob looks down at the table and tries to make out the shape of the gun, but it’s too dark now. “No, I got to stay away from the gun. At least for a while. I’m too shaky these days.”

“The gun stays at the store.”

Bob says nothing, shifts his position in the chair, then says, “Well, I guess I quit.”

Eddie remains silent for a few seconds. Finally, he sighs and says, “Okay. Fine. Quit. Just fucking quit.”

“I mean it, Eddie. I quit.”

“Yeah, I hear you. You can pick up your pay tomorrow after noon at my office downtown. My secretary’ll have it ready for you by three. Don’t even come in to work tomorrow. I’ll get a temporary for a few days. By Wednesday I’ll have a replacement full time out there. That’s the least of my worries right now, replacing you.”

Bob stands up and faces his brother’s lumpy shape in the chair below him. “Okay, then. No hard feelings?”

“No. No hard feelings. I think you’re an asshole, of course. Worse, actually. Since you got a new baby and no job and probably no savings. But no, Bob, no hard feelings.”

“I’ll get another job. I can do lotsa stuff.”

“Yeah. Jobs’re falling outa trees around here.”

“Listen, I’m sorry.”

Eddie doesn’t respond, and Bob takes a step away. “I mean it, Eddie,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Eddie says, his voice coming from the darkness. “You’re not sorry. You’re glad.”

“Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

“Yeah.”

Bob leaves, walking through the living room to the carpeted front hall, out the huge oaken door and down the long flagstone walkway to the street. As he walks, he listens for the sound of the gun, but it doesn’t come. It’s not until he reaches his car and has got in and slammed the door that he realizes he has been listening for the gun, and then he realizes why, for he knows that if his brother can’t find his way out of this maze he’s built, he will put the barrel of the gun into his mouth and pull the trigger and blow off the top of his head.

Bob turns the ignition key, starts the motor, and drives away.

5

The girls are fine, he tells Elaine, fine, and as soon as he gets off the phone, he’s going home to tuck them into bed. Then he’ll drive out to the hospital to see her and the baby again. Where is he right now? At a pay phone. On the way home from work, he lies. He didn’t call her from work, he explains, because … well, because he didn’t realize how late it was until he got halfway home. So he pulled off the road at the first pay phone he saw and called her to tell her he’d be a little later getting over to the hospital than he’d said this morning. It’s been a real busy day, he explains. Yes, he, too, is grateful to Ellen and Ronnie Skeeter. They couldn’t have done this without them. Yes, he promises that he’ll do something nice for them. Maybe bring home some kind of fancy expensive liqueur from the store, she suggests. Galliano, maybe, or Kahlúa. Okay, sure, why not? He can buy it with his discount, she points out, and that way it won’t cost any more than a regular bottle of whiskey would. Right, right, he says, cringing as he talks, drawing his body into itself, shrinking it away from the rapidly expanding world of lies he’s created. He feels himself being squeezed small and pressed against an invisible wall, until he has begun to imagine his body moving through that wall and becoming invisible itself, leaving behind nothing but lies, leaving behind the life of another man, the one who calls home to check on his kids, while this other Bob, off on his crazy mission to Auburndale with the gun and then to Eddie’s in Oleander Park, forgets all about his kids, forgets that he is the father of three children, two of whom are at home in the care of kindly neighbors; he’s left in the visible world the life of a man who has a job in his brother’s liquor store, when the man who’s just become invisible has no job at all, has in fact quit his job without a second’s hesitation or fear and has no regrets or second thoughts; he’s left out there in the real world an invented, unreal man who’s dutiful, prudent, custodial, faithful and even-tempered, while here in the invisible world, where Bob now lives, he’s feckless, reckless, irresponsible, faithless and irrational — so that the invented man, the one everyone but Bob believes exists, is the father of the real man, who is the man no one but Bob knows exists, the man who is a boy.

He pulls off Route 17, and before he’s halfway down the lane to the trailer, he sees the van that’s parked in front of it, a large, metallic-green Chevy van with mag wheels and one-way mirror glass on the side and rear windows, and his first assumption is that it belongs to a friend of the Skeeters. But when he draws abreast of the van and sees the lettering on the driver’s door, Moray Key Charters, he knows the van belongs to Avery Boone.

This information should astonish Bob, since he hasn’t heard from Avery in almost a year, and then only by means of a Christmas card mailed to him in New Hampshire. Bob never answered the card, not, however, because he was still angry with Avery for what happened between him and Elaine (that, after all, was a long time ago, and both parties felt properly ashamed of themselves immediately afterwards, and who knows, maybe in some unconscious way Bob wanted it to happen, especially that first summer after Ave and Bob finished rebuilding the trawler, and Bob, as if to repay himself for all the work he did on Ave’s boat, treated the boat pretty much as if it were his own and went out on it almost every weekend, frequently alone). But the sight of Avery’s van parked on the grass outside his trailer doesn’t surprise Bob in the least. That is, the sudden appearance of Avery Boone doesn’t surprise the invisible man, Bob Dubois, though it would indeed astonish and unsettle the visible one, the invented man. The invisible version of Bob Dubois, the one who is feckless, reckless, irresponsible, and so forth, that man finds it perfectly natural that Avery should show up at this moment in his life, both natural and desirable, because, with Avery as with no one else, Bob can tell the truth and in that way can make the visible and the invisible man one.

Avery hasn’t come alone, he’s brought a girl with him, the two of them driving south from a month-long visit to New Hampshire, “to see the leaves turn color,” Avery explains, an annual phenomenon that in Avery’s three-year absence from New England has taken on mystical significance, like a total eclipse of the sun or the return of a long-gone comet, a significance reinforced by the reaction of the girl, who, as a native Floridian, has never seen the leaves go from green almost overnight to scarlet, gold, purple and orange and then for weeks hold their color crisply, cleanly, as if at the peak of health instead of the verge of death, and who, as a young woman in her early twenties with a somewhat mystical turn of mind anyhow, believes that in the 1840s in a previous incarnation she lived in Concord, New Hampshire, where she was the mistress of Franklin Pierce, U.S. senator, general in the Mexican War and fourteenth President of the United States. She first learned this from a Ouija board, but many events and signs have confirmed it since. Her belief regarding her previous existence has lent enormous significance to this trip with her “lover,” as she calls Avery, to his home town and state and has caused her to elicit from her lover any information regarding his present existence and actual past that he is willing to give, for she is convinced that an apparently coincidental connection with a man from New Hampshire, from a town not twenty-five miles from where Franklin Pierce was born and first practiced law, is no coincidence at all, but is in fact part of a cosmic plan intended to connect her past and future selves through the agency of this present self, if only she allows herself to read the signs properly. Avery Boone, she now realizes, is the most important sign, as well as the vehicle for her actual, physical return to New Hampshire, where there was, she reports to Bob, a “rush of signs,” including Bob Dubois himself, whose name came up often in this visit as she and Avery drove along in the van late at night, and Avery rambled on about his childhood and adolescence and young manhood, all shared with a person named Bob Dubois. When, after much prodding, Avery confessed to having had a falling out with Bob, the girl, whose name is Honduras (not her real name, of course, which is Joan Greenberg — the name Honduras, she says, was given to her when she was sixteen by her first lover, who happened to be a full-blooded Arawak Indian from the hills of Jamaica), convinced Avery that he should take this occasion to visit his old friend Bob Dubois in Catamount, to reestablish their bond, which would be good for their karma, she pointed out, and when they learned that Bob and his family had moved to Florida, well, she just knew, oh, yes, man, she knew.

“Knew what?” Bob asks, because what the hell could she know from that piece of information, except the facts, and why does she keep calling him “man,” and where does she get off talking all the time in front of Ave and him when they haven’t seen each other for over three years and obviously have a lot to talk about, and why does Ave just kind of smile and lean back with his hands folded behind his head and watch the girl rattle on, as if he thought she was the most interesting person he’s ever met, although Bob does have to admit that she is sexy, with that huge pile of orange curly hair bushing out from a tiny face, and high cheekbones and tight wide mouth, flared nostrils and pale green eyes and shapely breasts, braless and pointing good-naturedly from behind a tie-dyed tee shirt, and tanned, muscular legs, tight and smooth, practically leaping out at him from dark green gym shorts, which she wears without underpants, so that when she sits cross-legged on the sofa, as she is now, Bob can see light brown pubic hairs and a neat little vertical roll of vaginal fat, which of course excites him sexually and makes him pay much closer attention to what she is saying than he might otherwise pay.

The kids, Emma and Ruthie, seem to be fond of Honduras, and though Emma was only a baby when Avery left New Hampshire on the Belinda Blue, and Ruthie only pretends to remember him, they both treat him as if he were a favorite uncle, which is as he prefers it and the model he adheres to anyhow, expressing eager interest in Ruthie’s schoolyard adventures and Emma’s toys, while Honduras rattles on in the living room with Bob, telling him, as people in their late teens and early twenties are wont to do, what kind of person she really is, something Bob feels incapable of doing, so that her doing it, telling him that she’s the kind of person who can’t stand dishonesty in a lover, the kind of person who loves to travel, the kind of person who thinks a lover should not have to tell everything he or she knows about him- or herself, the kind of person who believes in privacy, the kind of person who needs to have a sense of belonging somewhere, the kind of person who thinks everyone should be encouraged to discover the life he or she was meant to live, all subjects of interest to Bob — love, truth, destiny — nevertheless, her talking this way finally irritates him, and he says so. “You’re too young to know anything about yourself,” he says. “If you got any brains at all, you’d know the only thing you can know about yourself is nothing, which is what it’s taken me till now to find out,” a pronouncement that Honduras says is “Far out, Bob, that’s really very far out, you are really a very together person,” she says. “No shit, a really very together person.” And so when she asks if it’s okay to smoke a joint, he says sure, why not, and when she lights up and passes him the joint, he takes a long hit, and when Avery strolls loosely into the room, passes him the joint, which Avery smokes the rest of the way down, causing Honduras to roll another joint for her and Bob, and when that’s gone, Bob lays his head back on the couch next to Honduras’s head, looks over at her green eyes, her long, blond lashes and dark eyebrows, and he smiles and says, “I really like you, Honduras,” to which she responds by sitting up perkily and poking him on the point of his doggy nose with a fingertip, because she knows that this is not the time to encourage Bob Dubois, not with his two little girls in the back bedroom watching TV and his old friend and her lover Avery Boone rummaging through the kitchen in search of something to eat and Bob’s wife and new baby in the hospital waiting for Bob to get there before the end of visiting hours…. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to go to the hospital, isn’t that what you said when you came in? Or is that what those people told us, the fat guy and his funny wife, what’s their name?”

Bob says Skeeter, and they all laugh, but then he remembers his promise to Elaine and his new son, so he gratefully accepts Honduras’s offer to baby-sit while he and Avery go to the hospital, an offer made, Honduras says, only because she knows she’ll see the new baby and meet Bob’s wife tomorrow when they come home from the hospital.

“All the pieces in this puzzle,” she says, “are falling together.” She looks up appealingly at the two men, who stand side by side at the door, and she spins on her butt, leans back on the arm of the couch, spreads her legs provocatively toward them and throws her head back, exposing her long white throat to them. “When you see Elaine,” she says, “you tell her that I’m taking care of the girls and the house for her till she gets back. Tell her I love her and her new baby, and I love her daughters too, and I love her husband too. Tell her … oh, you’ll know what to tell her,” she says, suddenly laughing. “Incredible,” she says. “Really in credible.”

Bob leaves first, feeling a little dizzy, and Avery follows, though once outside, Avery takes the lead, and they are soon inside his van, heading north toward Winter Haven on Route 17. This is an experience, riding in a customized van, new to Bob, and to his surprise, he finds that he enjoys it. It’s a rather deliberately sensual experience, what with the carpeting, the padded swivel seats, the flicking lights of the dash and the CB scanner, the lush throb of an Earth, Wind & Fire tape on the stereo. “This is something,” Bob says. “Really something”.

He gives the directions, telling Avery where to turn right and left, and then, because the easy parts are coming more easily than he’d expected, Bob decides to try the hard part and tell Avery the truth about his life, so he says to him, “Ave, a lot’s happened to me lately. I’m in trouble, but you got to hear me out. There’s nobody else I can talk to.”

Avery nods silently; it’s an old ritual, he knows: you don’t say anything, not when the speech and its subject have been formally announced like this. You just nod and shut up and listen.

“Okay, first off,” Bob says, “a few months ago, I went and shot a nigger, a guy trying to rob the store, Eddie’s store. That’s one piece of information.”

Ave purses his lips and lets out a long, low-toned whistle.

“Then you oughta know that for the last six months or so, I been sleeping with a woman, a girlfriend, I guess you’d call her, not a ‘lover,’ really. And she’s a black woman. A nurse,” he adds.

“A black woman. No shit.”

“Yeah. But that’s not really the important thing about her. Anyhow, I blew the relationship today, I was kind of breaking it off with her, you know, because of the new baby and all, and I was feeling guilty and complicated about the whole thing, but I just wanted to pull back a little, to ease up while I thought things out …”

Avery interrupts to ask if Bob is in love with this woman, “this black woman,” and Bob says yes, he is in love with her, but he doesn’t know how much he’s willing to give up for that. But the real problems aren’t there, he goes on. The real problems grow out of this robbery somehow, when he shot one of the guys and let the other guy escape and then unexpectedly spotted him this afternoon, or thought he spotted him, the guy who escaped, with Marguerite …

“The black woman? Your girlfriend?”

Right, Bob says, repeating her name so he won’t have to keep going through this “black woman” business, which is starting to irritate him, though he’s not sure why. He plows on with his story, telling Avery about his having chased Cornrow to the bar and the confrontation there and the one in Marguerite’s living room, his sudden realization that he was likely to kill somebody for no good reason and his decision to deliver the gun to Eddie, since it was his gun anyhow, and then his decision, when Eddie insisted on his keeping the gun at the store, to quit his job.

He doesn’t know what’s happening, he tells Avery. He’s a changed man somehow. Maybe it doesn’t show, but inside, he’s a changed man, Bob insists, and it all started last winter, just before Christmas, when out of the blue he got himself turned around one night and ended up taking a hard, honest look at himself and his life, and what he saw made him so angry that he ended up punching the shit out of his car, which was lucky, he realizes now, because it could just as easily have been a perfect stranger he was punching, or Elaine, say.

“You took a hard look at yourself and your life and didn’t like what you saw? So you decided to come down here and work for Eddie? Ol’ Fast Eddie,” Avery says, smiling and shaking his head slowly from side to side.

“Well, you know Eddie,” Bob says, and he explains how he was led to expect that his brother would be making him a partner in his business here, liquor stores and real estate development. “And some other stuff he’s got his fingers in. Shopping centers. I don’t know.”

“Eddie’s a dealer, all right. A real horse trader. This place is made for him. Or he’s made for it.”

No, Bob says. Not true. And he tells about Eddie’s fears of being killed, his involvement, Bob is sure, with the Mafia, “or somebody a whole hell of a lot like the Mafia, somebody he owes a lot of money to. And if he can’t pay it back on time, he says he’ll end up in the back of his car in Tampa Bay.”

Avery is impressed. And his quick advice to Bob is to stay clear of his brother altogether. He tells him that he quit his job just in time, because if Eddie goes, so long as Bob is working for him Bob will go too, especially if he’s running around with a gun on him. “You don’t have a chance to explain much to these guys, Bob. They are definitely not your Catamount Savings and Loan types. What they are is very serious businessmen who enforce verbal promises by having big, ugly guys from Providence and New Jersey fly down just to break your arms and legs very slowly. I shit you not. I’ve been down here three years now, and I’ve seen a lot and heard a lot more, especially being down on the Keys, and there’s two things you end up getting killed for down here, real estate and drugs, and that’s because those are the two things you can make a killing at here. You can be a millionaire overnight, but you can get dead overnight too.”

Bob points to the turnoff for the hospital, and Avery wheels the large, glistening vehicle smoothly off the ramp, turns left at the stop sign, then pulls into the hospital parking lot and stops.

“What about you?” Bob asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, how are you making it down here? You’re obviously doing okay,” he adds, gesturing to the car that surrounds them.

Avery slings one arm over the back of his chair and faces his friend. “Hey, Bob. I haven’t changed, not inside, not out. You may have changed, but I haven’t.”

Bob studies him for a few seconds. True, he hasn’t changed, Bob decides. Physically he’s the same, a little heavier, maybe, but only through the face and neck, and that’s natural enough when a man hits his thirties, especially if he’s a drinker. No, he’s the same man he was three years ago — as tall as Bob, but because of his smaller head and face, narrow shoulders and hips, seeming even taller; his hair is still reddish blond, though perhaps a shade or two lighter from the year-round sunshine and a few inches longer in back and over the ears, but that’s the style now, especially here in Florida, and in fact Bob has been thinking of letting his hair grow out some too; Ave’s blue eyes are still narrow, nearsighted, squinty, with a fan of crinkles in each corner, and his teeth still buck out slightly in front, making his face look perpetually adolescent, almost mischievous; his freckled pale skin looks as freshly sunburnt now in October as it did summers when he was a kid, peeling and pink across his nose and forehead no matter how much time he spent in the sun and no matter what precautions he took, hats, lotions, sun shields. No, it’s the same Avery Boone he’s always known, at least outside it’s the same man, and that’s usually an indication that inside he’s the same as well, that he’s just as good-natured and easygoing as he always was, just as lazy, just as easily amused and easily bored as when he was a kid, just as loyal and affectionate, but just as detached and impenetrable too, just as honest as he was, yet just as dishonest, just as careless with his life, as if it meant nothing to him, and just as careful not to risk it for anything less than a sure thing.

“I don’t guess you have changed,” Bob says somberly. “You get by okay with just the boat, taking out groups and stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a good life?”

“A good life.”

“The old Belinda Blue, eh? She worked out fine down here? That old Maine trawler?”

“Yeah. She’s a beautiful boat. Solid. Slow, but solid.”

“You still running that old Chrysler diesel?”

“Yep.”

“Living aboard, like you planned?”

“Not so much now as before. I got an apartment with Honduras. It’s easier that way, with two of us. It gets a little crowded aboard, and whenever I hadda take her out, I hadda move Honduras out first, or else she’d hafta come along as mate, and that’s not really her idea of a good time, going fishing with a bunch of fat, half-drunk, middle-aged salesmen from Cleveland.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You like that boat, don’t you, Bob.”

“Belinda Blue? Jesus, yeah. Man, I still lie back some nights and rerun whole days I spent on that boat, out beyond the Isles of Shoals, down around Newburyport and Plum Island, that time I took her all the way through the canal to the south side of the Cape and cruised back around Hyannis and Truro and Provincetown home across the bay to Portsmouth … I guess that’s about as happy as I’ve ever been, days and nights I spent on that boat. It’s hard to say why, but that boat gave me a feeling that I owned myself. You know? I’d get a few miles out, and all of a sudden, my whole world was that boat. And I had it under control. I could take care of it, and it could take care of me. It’s hard to explain. You probably understand.”

“Yeah, sure I do,” Avery says. “It’s that, having complete control of your whole world. Trouble is, my whole world has expanded a little since then. I mean, I’ve got me a condo now, and this van, and I’m thinking of buying another boat, one real different from Belinda Blue, though, a sport fisherman that can go out after big game and get back before dark. Ol’ Blue’s good for taking parties out in the bay and out along the Pine Islands and so on, you know, for small stuff and maybe for some bonefishing, but it can’t handle the really heavy stuff, marlin, swordfish, the tournament fishing, where for a guy like me the big money is.”

Bob glances at his watch and curses, opens the van door and jumps down to the pavement. “We’re late,” he says. “Visiting hours was over half an hour ago! Elaine’s gonna be pissed!”

Avery follows him across the parking lot, assuring him as they trot along that she’ll understand, Elaine always understands how when the two of them get together they forget all about time, and she’ll especially understand now, since they haven’t seen each other in over three years and all. “We’ll just talk the nurse into letting us by,” he says, but Bob does not hear him. He’s suddenly flooded with his knowledge of Avery’s having made love to Elaine, and coupled to that knowledge, piercing it, is his realization that Avery doesn’t know about Elaine’s confession, which means that they can never talk about it, he and Avery, and so can never get it behind them. The way it is now, Avery himself would have to confess having fucked Bob’s wife, and then Bob would have to pretend to be surprised, enraged, hurt, all over again.

As they enter the hospital lobby, half-lit and nearly deserted, Bob finds himself unexpectedly wishing that Elaine had never told him about her having slept with Avery. But then, he thinks, he would never have known who she was. It’s a terrible thing, to know someone else’s secrets, but it’s the only way you can know someone. It’s hard to say beforehand which is more to be avoided, knowing another person’s secrets or knowing no one at all.

The nurse at the information desk by the elevators says no. They cannot go up to the maternity ward at this hour. And no, they cannot go to the nursery and see Mr. Dubois’s son. Avery smiles at the gray-faced woman, lightly touches her shoulder, which she retrieves swiftly. He tells her how far he’s come, that he’s the baby’s godfather, but no, it’s still no.

“Forget it, Ave,” Bob says, and turns away. “We’ll come over first thing in the morning. I’m not ready tonight to tell her about the job anyhow. You know, about quitting Eddie and all. I hafta figure out how to tell her the bad news,” he says, scuffling along, head down, hands in pockets.

Avery comes up behind him and drapes one long arm over his friend’s shoulders. “Look, Bob,” he says, “why don’t we come in together tomorrow morning real early, and we’ll go take a look at your new son and make sure he looks like you and not the milkman, right?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Okay. And then we’ll go visit your lovely young wife, and instead of giving her some bad news, let’s give her some good news.”

“Yeah, sure. Like what?”

“Okay. Here’s the deal. Tell her you’re gonna work with me, down in the Keys. Tell her you’re gonna run Belinda Blue for me.”

They stop walking and face each other. “You serious?” Bob says, too surprised by the idea to know if it’s a good one.

“Sure, I’m serious. I didn’t think of it till a minute ago, but that doesn’t mean I’m not serious. I’ll go ahead and buy this Tiara 2700 I’ve been looking at all summer, and I’ll run that, while you run ol’ Blue. Actually, if you want, you can buy into her, and we’ll split whatever profits she makes. That’s probably the best way to go. You buy into her, and we split according to how much you own. Fifty fifty, seventy-five twenty-five, or whatever you can afford. Deal?”

“Oh, God,” Bob says, “I got to think about this. I got to think about it. It’s really a sudden development, you know. I mean, it’s a hell of a long ways from where I was a year ago, you know. I got to think on it.”

They walk slowly across the parking lot toward Avery’s van, passing in and out of pale circles of light, two tall young men, dear friends, as close as brothers, as close as lovers, and neither. Avery’s arm is flung over Bob’s shoulder, and as they walk he explains exactly how Bob’s moving to Moray Key and running the Belinda Blue will not only save his life and the lives of his wife and three children, but will turn out to be the best time the two of them, he and Bob, will have had since they were kids.

“Yeah,” Bob says.

“And not only that,” Avery says. “We’ll get rich.”

“Yeah.”