Continental Drift

Selling Out

1

Casual observers on the causeway, people in loaded vans and station wagons with out-of-state number plates driving the tail end of Interstate 95 south from Miami to where the turnpike dwindles to Route 1 and stutter-steps across the Keys to Key West, American families looking out open car windows toward Florida Bay, suede gray above the mud flats, greenish-blue where channels cut intricate pathways in and around the tiny, mangrove-covered keys that dot the bay from the causeway to the Everglades, observers who are kids wearing Disney World tee shirts and quarreling in back over who gets to use the Walkman, dads and moms in Bermuda shorts, tank tops and rubber thong sandals, sunburnt Dad, his Budweiser hat pushed back on his head, wishing he could take time to stop by the side of the road and fish from the shore till dark, and Mom, with her new Ray-Ban sunglasses on, catching her reflection in the side mirror and turning quickly away from the aging, worried face she sees trying to hide behind the movie-star glasses, these people in an expensive hurry to have fun before heading back to their sad, workaday, clock-driven lives in Cleveland, Birmingham and Bridgeport, their lives of high-tech retraining programs, day-long prowls through suburban malls to stock the house the bank keeps threatening to take away, lives with life insurance, dog food and kitty litter, lawn mowers, orthodonture, special ed and school-desegregation programs, lives that on the outside seem stable, rational, desirable, but on the inside persist in feeling strangely fragile, out of control, compulsive and boring — people with such lives look north from the causeway as they pass beyond Islamorada and Upper Matecumbe Key over open water toward Moray and Lower Matecumbe Keys, and they see the Belinda Blue in the distance heading full speed across the basin from Twin Key Bank, a charter fishing boat, a converted trawler glistening white and pale blue in the midday sun, her stubby bow breaking the still water of the flats into crystalline spray, men in bill caps holding beer cans and fishing rods and chatting animatedly on the afterdeck, a tall, suntanned man in white tee shirt and captain’s hat up on the bridge at the wheel bringing the boat smoothly off the basin into Indian Key Channel, and the people in the car, kids and Dad and Mom, all think the same thing: That man up there on the bridge of the fine white and blue boat should be me. I should feel the sea breeze in my hair, the sun on my arms, the flow of the boat through the soft Florida waters beneath me. I should have the rich Northern fishermen on the deck below grateful to me for my knowledge and experience and the reliability of my craft. I should be that man, who is free, who owns his own life simply because he knows whether to use live or dead shrimp for bait, jigs or flies, and where the bonefish feed, he knows where the basin narrows to a channel deep enough to bring his boat lunging in without touching its deepwater keel against the mudded bottom, he knows at sunup whether a squall will blow in from the northwest before noon, and he’s been able to trade his knowledge for power and control over his own life. His knowledge is worth something. Not like the knowledge we own, we who look enviously out the windows of our cars. To us, our knowledge is worth nothing, is merely private information, the names and histories of our family relations, our secret fears and fantasies, our personalities observed obliquely from the inside. We exchange our knowledge for mere survival, while that suntanned man in the captain’s hat up on the bridge of the Belinda Blue — out of Moray Key, Florida, it says on the transom — that man rises above mere survival like a gull lifting from the sea, like the thought of a poet soaring toward the sun. Oh, Lord, wouldn’t that be a wonderful life! we think. But we do not say it, not exactly. Mom says, ^“I read where all those fishermen now are smuggling drugs. Because of the recession and all.” And Dad says, “When I was a kid up in Saginaw, all I wanted was one of those boats. Not like that one, more a cabin cruiser type. You can buy a damned house, what one of those things costs these days.” And the kids say, “Why are we going to Key West anyway? What’s there? What’ll we do there? Why can’t we go out on a fishing boat instead?”

2

Moray Key, a slender, half-mile tuft of tree-topped coral cut from the tail of Upper Matecumbe Key in 1955 by Hurricane Janet, is located on the northwest side of where three narrow channels converge. Shell Key Channel leads northeasterly into the trout and redfish grounds at the Everglades end of Florida Bay; the second, Race Channel, loops off to the western end of Florida Bay, where the bonefish and snook cruise the shallows and huge jewfish hide in the rocky deeps; the third, Teatable Key Channel, leads southwesterly under a Route 1 bridge with a twenty-foot clearance at high tide to the open sea, across Hawk’s Channel to the reef and beyond, where the bottom drops off to depths of four and six hundred feet and rises again ten and a half nautical miles away at the Hump, where the blue marlin lie waiting, where tarpon, blackfin tuna and swordfish feed.

Moray Key, then, is a judicious place for Avery Boone to have begun his career as a fisherman. He studied the charts, talked long into the nights in bars in Islamorada and Marathon with the old hands, hired an experienced mate and explored the waters on his own, until he had memorized the channels, lights, reefs, currents and fishing grounds. His boat, the Belinda Blue, though slow and with a four-foot draft, was large and simple enough for him to take parties of four and six north into the bay, where he could fish either from the channels or, with the dinghy, on the flats; and she was enough of a deepwater boat that, once fitted with outriggers, depth sounder and fifty-channel receiver, she could be pushed as far out as the Hump and beyond. The Belinda Blue, however, compared to the flashy, fast, sports-fishing thoroughbreds that galloped to the Hump in less than an hour and returned before noon with record-breaking marlin and swordfish aboard, was a slow mule of a boat, so Ave had quickly specialized in taking amateurs, weekend fishermen from the North, families on daily outings, into the bay, leaving the deepwater fishing, the tournaments, leaving the big money, to the men whose boats were designed for nothing else.

He didn’t care. Ave was making a living now doing what he had always regarded as recreation, and he was doing it in year-round sunshine among people he liked and admired, fishermen, bartenders, small-time drug dealers, young women whose entire wardrobes consisted of string bikinis, designer jeans and men’s dress shirts, people who’d never worked more than part-time or not at all but who managed to keep a little cocaine or grass around and always had enough money and time to sit up late drinking tequila sunrises and listening to Jimmy Buffett tapes.

When some Miami-based developers built a forty-unit condominium complex overlooking the marina, Ave bought a unit on the second floor, above the pool and with a view of the Clam Shack below and the boats bobbing in their slips beyond. The directors of the Marathon branch of the Florida National Bank thought he was a good risk, and the Belinda Blue, appraised generously at $75,000, served as collateral. Then, one night a few months later, he met the girl named Honduras at a party aboard a sixty-foot sailing yacht owned by a Philadelphia dentist who spent his winters cruising the Caribbean with attractively tanned young male and female companions he picked up in ports like Montego Bay, Negril, Freeport and Nassau. The second Honduras saw Ave’s lean, handsome face and sandy hair, she knew his sign was Sagittarius, and ended up staying at his new condominium for several days, until the dentist in a pique left for Grand Cayman without her.

She stayed on with Ave, and a week later he bought the van, with which, as he told the directors of the bank in Marathon, he expected to supply fresh fish from the bay to restaurants up on Key Largo and Islamorada and south in Marathon. At Honduras’s urging, however, he had the van carpeted and upholstered throughout and installed a water bed and a quadraphonic stereo system, and never carried any fish anywhere, although he and Honduras started taking off for weekends in Miami and out to Key West, where Honduras had a number of friends with no visible source of income, ex-lovers and acquaintances who hung around glossy waterfront bars and lived in furnished apartments. Many of them played musical instruments and had more than a passing acquaintance with the technical vocabulary of the film and recording industries, which impressed Avery Boone from New Hampshire. He decided he was circulating on the fringes of show business.

His life had got expensive. But soon he was learning from his new friends how, with the Belinda Blue and his knowledge of the intricate maze of channels crisscrossing Florida Bay, he could afford that life. He risked several nighttime runs from Moray Key across to Flamingo City, loaded to the gunwales with bales of Colombia marijuana taken off a Panamanian freighter a few miles off Alligator Light, and cleared enough cash to start thinking about buying another boat, a high-speed 31-foot Tiara 3100, maybe, with twin 205-horsepower OMC Sea Drive engines, fitted with outriggers, a flying bridge and fighting chairs, a Loran C navigational unit and an extra fuel tank for occasional long-distance runs to places like Grand Cayman, the Bahamas, West Palm Beach, a boat that would let him fish the big tournaments from Pensacola to Nassau while someone else chugged in and out of Florida Bay in the Belinda Blue, lugging day-trippers and kids and dads with Christmas-present rods and reels to fish the flats, providing the business with a small but steady income and, when Ave came back in the Tiara from Grand Cayman, Nassau and West Palm Beach with plenty of cash but no fish to show for his efforts, providing a cover.

The second the Belinda Blue touches the pier at the Moray Key Marina, Bob Dubois jumps ashore, leaving the fishermen behind him. They look up from the afterdeck, and he’s gone. “Where’d the sucker go? Hey, Cap, where’re you off to so fast?” They look around in confusion. What now? They’ve caught twenty-six fish, sea trout and redfish, had one hell of a fine morning out there on the bay, got exactly what they paid for, but they’re not sure what comes next. And the fact that just as they docked at the marina the captain of the boat took off, just jumped ashore and disappeared, leaves them confused and slightly irritated.

The Jamaican mate says, “You wan’ keep dese fish, mon?” He wraps the last of the rods and reels in oilcloth and lays it in the locker atop the others. “Can filet dem if you want.”

There are four fishermen, friends and relations from Columbia, Missouri, partners in an insurance company. Two are sons-in-law, the older two are brothers, all four are red-faced, with fat pink bodies, loud voices. They’ve finished their three-day convention stay in Miami and have come out to the Keys in a rented car for a few days of “R and R,” which means drinking and fishing and calculating their combined financial conquests made during the convention — a couple of real estate packages in Louisville and a chemical manufacturing company trying to get started in Arkansas. They laugh and plan and count, and they remind Bob Dubois of his brother Eddie. The ease with which they hurtle through financial abstractions brings back to Bob Eddie’s hectoring lectures, his impatience and condescension, and Bob has found himself treating his clients the same way he usually ended up treating his brother, with sullenness, feigned inattention, partial deafness — as if he were out on the bay this morning for his own private amusement and the fat men in shorts, Hawaiian shirts and bill caps were keeping him from it. Naturally, since the men have hired him, his mate and the Belinda Blue, not vice versa, they condescend to him from an even greater height than they might otherwise, calling him “Cap” and referring to the Belinda Blue as “the tub,” and when their lines snarl on the reels or tangle with one another, simply handing Bob or his mate the rod and reaching into the cooler for another cold Budweiser.

It’s been a hard morning for Bob Dubois, then. Hard, too, for his mate, Tyrone, a knotty, dark brown Jamaican with a dense beard and finger-length dreadlocks. Tyrone is in his late thirties, has spent his entire adult life crewing for charter fishing boats on the Keys, the last three years working for Avery Boone, and it’s he more than anyone else who taught Ave, and now Ave’s old friend from the North, Bob Dubois, how and where to fish these waters. As a teenager, Tyrone fled a migrant work camp in the cane fields west of Miami and drifted across the Everglades and down the Keys, putting to good use everything he’d learned as a boy working for white American yachtsmen back in Port Antonio. Ave’s dependence on Tyrone’s knowledge, and now Bob’s, is like that of the Americans back in Jamaica; it gives Tyrone power in a world in which he is otherwise powerless.

One of the sons-in-law laughs and slaps Tyrone on his bare back. “You betcha goddamn ass we want them fish, boy! We earned them suckers.”

“Paid for ’em too,” the other son-in-law adds.

The older men, brothers, fathers of the brides, have stepped free of the boat and are waiting on the pier. One of them announces, “I’m gonna get me a real drink. An al-co-hol-ic beverage. See you boys over there at the restaurant,” he says, and he and his brother head down the pier toward the Clam Shack.

When they reach the wobbly screened door of the place, they notice Bob a few feet away about to get into his car, and the older of the two, who wears mirror sunglasses which he no doubt fancies make him look like a state trooper, stops and hails Bob. “Hey, good buddy, you runnin’ out on us?” The younger brother, eager for his drink, has continued into the restaurant.

“No,” Bob says.

“Well, then, whyn’t you sit down and have a drink with us. Tell us some fish stories.” His glasses glint in the noonday sun. The man is portly and soft-fleshed, but he moves and makes faces like a man who thinks he is lean, hard-muscled and a little mean-tempered. Everything he says and does has a trace of sarcasm to it. “ ’Course, you don’t have to sit down with us if you don’t want to. That ain’t part of the deal.”

“No. I just … I got to get on.” Bob opens the door of his green station wagon. Four hours earlier, up on the bridge of the Belinda Blue, alone, bringing the boat out of the marina at dawn and breaking the still, milky waters of the bay, he was at peace, a rock of a man, smooth-grained, balanced, centered. He was in charge, he was the captain, and for a few moments he knew he’d earned that right, which only added to his pleasure at finding himself up on the bridge, the waters spread before him newly familiar, the boat an old, trusted ally and the smell of the sea in the morning breeze filling him like a particularly cheering childhood dream, a dream of flying over the cold, gray surface of the Catamount River, of leaping from the hill above the mills, the brick smokestacks and tenements, gliding across the river to the high, ancient glacial moraine on the other side, and once on the other side, still soaring, over pine trees now, toward the mountains. He’d come down here to Moray Key and after three months of hard work under Ave’s and Tyrone’s tutelage, he’d made himself into a fisherman, not the best, not even as good as Ave, but good enough, which was something to admire, he knew, and every morning when he had occasion to take the Belinda Blue out of her slip and gunned her into the bay, he enjoyed a few moments of admiring himself. He felt like granite then, warmed by the rising sun.

Now, however, he feels crumpled and torn, papery, subject to puffs and gusts from any direction. It’s no one’s fault. He can’t blame the man in front of him or the man’s brother or the sons-in-law. They’re nobody and everybody, the kind of people every man has to deal with to get through his day, just four more insensitive men, self-centered and arrogant and carrying wallets stuffed with credit cards and traveler’s checks that they use to buy themselves their own kind of pleasure, a few hours at a time.

“Up to you, Cap,” the man says. “You want any of them fish for yourself? My son-in-law’s got your nigger gutting and filleting ’em right now. Too many for us.”

“Well … thanks, no. You keep ’em.” Now, that was stupid, he thinks, and he’s grateful Elaine is not here to hear him say it. There’s fifty dollars’ worth of fish that’s going to be tossed out, she’d say, while we buy hamburger at the A & P for two dollars a pound.

“You sure? We can’t cook ’em in our motel rooms, Cap.”

“No, thanks,” Bob says. “I’m sick of fish.”

“Are you, now? I’d say you’re in the wrong business, then, Cap. What would you say?” The man swings open the door of the restaurant and takes a step inside.

“I’d say you’re right,” Bob answers, and he slides into his car and slams the door shut. Now, he thinks, let’s hope this sonofabitch starts. He turns the key in the ignition, and the engine kicks over easily and catches. Thank Christ for something.

The Chevy wagon shudders and rattles slowly away from the marina, passes out of the parking lot and cuts behind the blond, three-story apartment building and pool, and Bob looks automatically up and sees Ave Boone standing on his tiny terrace overhead, shirtless in cut-off jeans, a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other. Champagne-colored fiberglass drapes swell through the sliding glass doors behind Ave, and behind those drapes, Bob knows, the girl Honduras lies naked or nearly naked on the king-sized bed, her wet belly cooling under the slow-turning overhead fan. It’s a little past noon, Ave and his girlfriend have been awake for maybe an hour, and they’ve probably fucked twice, made each other gin and tonics, smoked a couple of cigarettes and listened to a new Willie Nelson tape, and now Ave has come out for a bit of air and sunshine before he showers, shaves, dresses, has lunch at the Clam Shack and strolls down the pier to his Tiara, which he’s named Angel Blue, after a famous movie star, he explained to Bob.

He’ll hose down the decks, check the fuel tanks, and when Tyrone has finished filleting the two dozen fish caught by the insurance men from Missouri and has cleaned up the Belinda Blue_, he and Ave will leave Moray Key, heading south by Teatable Key Channel under the bridge, southeasterly to the reef and then west, across open sea toward the Bahamas, Andros Island, Nassau. Bob has asked him why he makes these trips with only Tyrone aboard, and Ave has explained that he is “getting into gambling a little lately.” He wrapped his arm around Bob’s shoulder and added, “Also, pardner, I’m getting to know a lot of the big-time fishermen over there. I’m trying to get a shot on American Sportsman, that TV show. Maybe take Jerry Lewis or Kenny Rogers out for marlin. You got to know the right people for a shot like that. Publicity like that, pal, you’re set for life.”

It makes sense, as do most of Ave’s easy, confident explanations of behavior that, to Bob, is often puzzling. What he, Bob Dubois, does every day of the week — take out in the Belinda Blue whoever will pay him for it, and when there’s no one to pay him for it, hang around the marina waiting for customers, putter around the boat, clean and oil tackle, study and memorize charts, drink beer and gossip with the other idle fishermen — that makes sense. But what Avery Boone does every day of the week — sleep till noon, play with Honduras and her friends, disappear on the Angel Blue with Tyrone every few days for a day and a night and sometimes more — that frequently does not make sense. Not to Bob. A man likes to be able to explain the things in his life that puzzle him, because if he can’t, he may have to accept his wife’s explanations for them, which in this case means that Bob would have to accept Elaine’s often-voiced, worried explanation of Ave’s behavior. “He’s in the drug business, Bob, don’t you realize that? Can’t you see the obvious, for heaven’s sake?”

Bob lifts one hand from the steering wheel and flips a wave at Ave on the terrace above. Ave makes a signal for him to stop, and Bob brakes the car and gets out. The sun is behind Ave’s head, and Bob visors his eyes with the flat of his hand. “What’s up?”

“You have a party this morning?”

“Yeah. Four guys.”

“How was it?”

“Okay. Buncha trout and redfish from out by Twin Key Bank.”

“No bonefish?”

“They wanted stuff they could land. You know.”

“Assholes.”

“Yeah.”

Ave takes a sip from his drink. “We gotta talk soon, Bob,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’ve been going out — what — three, four half days a week, maybe a full day now and then?”

“Yeah. Now and then.”

“This time of year, we should be booked solid three weeks in advance, seven days a week.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s the recession, I guess,” Bob says in a low voice. “The fucking Arabs.”

“How’re you making it, buddy?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Dollar-wise.”

“Oh, okay,” Bob says. “Fine, actually. Listen, I gotta get home. Ruthie’s been sick.”

“Okay, sure. We’ll talk, though, right?”

“Yeah, sure. We’ll talk,” Bob says, and he slides back into the car, closes the door and slowly drives away, out the sandy, unpaved lane toward the highway, past the piles of steel rods and mesh, cinder blocks, sand and building materials stacked for the second condominium building. The developers from Miami have plans for a half-dozen buildings, forty apartments to a building, and a shopping center, a much improved and enlarged marina and restaurant, a nightclub, a nine-hole golf course, until the entire island has been stripped and laid out, covered over from the bay to the gulf with buildings, pavement and small plots of cropped grass kept fresh and minty green by slowly turning sprinklers.

Bob turns left onto Route 1, crosses the bridge onto Upper Matecumbe, and a few miles down the road, just south of Islamorada, turns right onto a bumpy dirt road not much wider than a path. He drives through clumps of shrubby saw palmetto trees and bitterbrush for a quarter mile, to a clearing near the water, where he parks his car in front of one of three rusting, flaking house trailers situated on cinder blocks in no discernible relation to one another or the landscape. All three trailers have tall, wobbly-looking rooftop television antennas with guy wires staked to the ground. Scattered around the trailers are several rusted car chassis, old tires, tossed-out kitchen appliances, children’s toys and bicycles, a broken picnic table, a dinghy on sawhorses with a huge, ragged hole in it, a baby carriage with three wheels.

When Bob gets out of his car, a mangy German shepherd tied on a short rope to a cinder block under one corner of the trailer across the road stands and barks ferociously. Leaning down, Bob picks up a small chunk of coral rock and tosses it feebly in the direction of the dog, and the animal slinks back to the trailer and crawls underneath it.

A paunchy, middle-aged woman sitting on the stoop of the third trailer drawls, “Don’t let ol’ Horace catch you doin’ like that, Bob. He’d as soon you tossed rocks at his wife instead of his dog.” She’s wearing a wavy ash-blond wig, a pink cotton halter, and aqua shorts that cut into the flesh of her thighs. She’s smoking a cigarette and sits spread-legged, her elbows on her knees, a king-sized can of Colt 45 on the step next to her. “Hot,” she says. “Ain’t it.”

“Yeah, for January.”

“Inside, I mean. Wait’ll you go in. Elaine and the girls, all of ’em, they went swimming up the beach early, so your place’s been closed up all morning.”

Bob thinks, That’s good; he’ll be alone. He can drink a cold beer, maybe make himself a sandwich and take a nap. The trailer is small, thirty-three by ten feet, with one bedroom in the back and a closet-sized cubicle off it for Bob junior, or Robbie, as they’ve started calling him. Bob and Elaine sleep in the living room on a convertible sofa, and from the foot of the sofa, when it’s pulled into a bed, Bob can reach over the kitchen counter and open the refrigerator, turn on the propane stove, run water in the sink.

“She say when they was coming back?” Bob asks the woman, whose name is Allie Hubbell. She’s divorced, makes her living selling beadwork and shell jewelry to tourist shops along the Keys, lives alone and sometimes reminds Bob of his old New Hampshire girlfriend, Doris Cleeve, although Allie is about ten years older and, according to Elaine, may be a lesbian. “Why else would a nice, attractive woman her age live like that, all alone?” Elaine said impatiently, as if offering him a self-evident truth. Lots of reasons, Bob wanted to answer, but he didn’t say anything, because he was thinking of Doris Cleeve.

Bob doesn’t know why Allie brings back to his mind the image of Doris, sharp memories of those brief, heated visits to her dingy, small flat above Irwin’s bar in Catamount, unless it’s because, to him, both women seem to be waiting for another kind of life to come to them. Their good-natured passivity pleases Bob, and he almost envies them for it, as if it were a kind of wisdom they possess. This mixture in him of pleasure and near-envy was what lay behind his sexual attraction to Doris, and it works on him as well with Allie. It’s an easy attraction to resist (though he’s never resisted it), for there’s almost no erotic power to it, none of the deep, frightening curiosity that fed his hunger for Marguerite, none of the wonderful fear that the woman might expose him to depths and sides of himself that he does not know exist.

“No, she didn’t say when she’d be back, but probably not till late, what with the heat and all. Horace give ’em a ride up,” Allie says.

“Hah,” Bob says. “Nice of him.”

Allie smiles knowingly. “You don’t hafta worry none about Horace. He talks big and makes lotsa noise when it comes to women, but that’s all. Besides,” she says, “you and Horace ain’t in the same league. You got class, he’s … well, you know.”

“Yeah. He’s the kinda guy who calls this junkyard of his a trailer park,” Bob says, sweeping his hand in a half circle around him. “Some park.”

Allie has removed her wig and placed it on the step next to her can of beer, where it looks like a sleeping, long-haired pet. “Thing’s hot, like wearing one of them ski hats.” Her hair is cut short, is straight and black, streaked with gray.

“You got good hair, Allie. You oughta let people see it.”

“Think so?” She brushes the nape of her neck with one hand, reaches for the beer with the other. “Makes me look older’n I already am, is what I think.”

“Naw. Makes you look more sophisticated.”

“Think so, eh? Sophisticated.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bob says, backing away from his door and stepping to the ground. “Horace and his wife around?” he asks, peering over at the battered, junk-crowded trailer across the lane. The dog has crawled out from under the trailer again, and with his snout between his front paws, watches Bob carefully. The air is still, and the saw palmetto trees droop in the heat. Beyond Allie’s trailer, the pale limestone ledge of the key drops off directly into the water, where, from the shore to nearly a quarter mile out, coral heads emerge at low tide, dripping and alive with sea urchins and hermit crabs. The tide is coming in now, but the water rises slowly, without waves, like a bathtub being filled, and one by one the dark clumps of coral get swallowed by a tepid, dark green sea. In the distance along the southern horizon, gray-topped cumulus clouds heap up against the sky and promise rain by nightfall.

Allie flicks her cigarette butt onto the sand in front of her, then runs her fingers through her short hair, loosening and lifting it. “No, they both went out this morning, when Horace give your wife and kids a ride to the beach. Ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”

Bob has crossed the lane from his trailer and has approached to within a few feet of Allie, when he stops short, crosses his arms over his chest and says, “You remind me of an old girlfriend of mine. A real nice woman, she was. Probably still is.”

“That so? From up north?”

“Yeah. New Hampshire.”

“Your wife knows about her, this woman you’re comparing me to, this old girlfriend of yours?”

“No, she never knew. It wasn’t a real big thing anyhow.”

“But you’re telling me about her now. Because I remind you of her.” Allie has large, sad, dark blue eyes that turn down at the corners, a narrow-browed Irish face with tight mouth, long jaw, pale skin. “Did she look like me, or what?”

“No, nothing like you at all. I don’t know, it’s just something about the way you talk, how you’re so relaxed and easy, maybe. Actually, you’re both kind of sexy in the same way,” he blurts. “It’s hard to describe,” he adds, almost as an apology, wondering suddenly if she is in fact, as Elaine wants to believe she is, a lesbian, wondering if therefore she finds his compliments offensive, because after all, he tells himself, he’s not propositioning her or anything, he’s not asking her to fuck him, he’s just complimenting her, that’s all, which he is sure doesn’t happen to her every day, since she’s not what most men would ordinarily think of as attractive or sexy. Still, to him, she is sexy. So why not tell her so? Even if she is a lesbian. Hell, it’s better that way; it’s better if she’s a lesbian.

Allie’s eyes are wide open now, her breathing is tight and quick, and leaning forward toward Bob, her hands clasped to her knees, she says, “Well, I think you’re pretty sexy yourself, mister. If you want to know the truth.”

“You do?” Bob smiles.

Allie stands up and looks around the yard with care, at the faded gray trailer next to hers, over at Bob’s salt-pitted, lemon-yellow trailer, into the trees and shrubs and out along the sandy lane. A pair of egrets with gray bodies and rust-colored heads and serpentine necks, eyes like agates, legs like bamboo stalks, stroll watchfully along the shore. Allie says, “You want to come inside, Bob?”

“What?”

“You want to come inside awhile? With me?”

Suddenly he understands what he’s done, and at first he’s ashamed of himself. He’s not surprised, however, by anything that’s happened, by anything he’s said or she’s said, and he’s not surprised that now she’s inviting him inside so he can fuck her. But he feels the way he did an hour ago, when he brought in the Belinda Blue and ran for his car, though he cannot fully explain to himself why he feels that way — like a liar and a fool, a man who has ruined his own life and has no one to blame but himself.

A moment before, talking to Allie about Doris Cleeve, flirting a little, sure, and curious, he’d felt good, a normal man chatting up the woman across the way, nothing serious, nothing dangerous to either of them, certainly nothing cruel. But now he’s got to say no to her, and he’s never said no to a woman before. He asked for something, and now he’s received it, and it’s turned out to be undesirable to him. The problem lies in asking in the first place, he suddenly realizes. Not that he can’t imagine fucking Allie Hubbell; he could do it if he had to. But he knows, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he’s supposed to want to fuck her, and her in particular. Jesus, he thinks, if you can control what a man wants, you can control everything he does. “Listen, Allie, I … I’m really sorry. I better go on home, okay?” He turns and steps away, looking back over his shoulder, as if a little afraid of her.

“Yeah,” she says. “See you later.” She sits back down on the stoop, places her elbows on her knees again and watches Bob make his retreat.

3

It’s hot and stuffy inside the trailer, and in Bob’s dream he’s aboard an airplane, a long, narrow commercial jet. He’s seated alone, somewhere near the middle, with seats on both sides, and the interior of the plane is hot and moist, almost as if he were underwater. He struggles with the overhead controls, trying to turn on the fan, but nothing happens, and he gives up. There’s no evidence of a crew, no attendants and no other passengers. He’s waiting for takeoff, he knows, though there’s no reason he should know this, no particular indications of it. He looks out the rain-obscured window along the wing to the engines, which are silent, cold. Suddenly it comes to him — everyone’s abandoned this plane for another, the crew, the attendants, all the other passengers. This plane has mechanical problems, faulty wiring, a fuel leak, trouble with the hydraulic systems, and in fact it may blow up any second. No wonder they swapped it for another. He smells smoke. Sweating, terrified, he struggles to get out of his seat, to flee the plane and join the others. But he can’t get out of his seat. It holds him down, hugs him around the waist, where he’s clamped by a seat belt. He laughs at his own stupidity and unhooks the seat belt, tries to rise, but as before, he can’t move. The smell of smoke is stronger now, almost like burned wiring. He knows the plane is about to explode. He wrestles the belt loose a second time and lurches away from his seat, but he still can’t get free of it. He calls out for help, Help! Help! He fiddles with the belt buckle, twists and yanks at it, zips down his fly, feels his penis, a prick, erect, large, and a flash of pride and relief passes through him, when he remembers that he’s got to forget his prick, he’s got to get out of this plane before it explodes and tears him into a thousand bits of flesh and bone. He lets go of his penis, pats it back into his underpants and zips up his fly. Calmly, rationally, he unlocks the seat belt, and it comes free. The smoke and heat are now dense, heavy, dark, and he gropes his way forward, feeling his way along the aisle between the seats, when he is aware that, as he passes each row of seats, he’s patting people on the shoulder, a man, a woman, another man, all of them dressed in Sunday suits and dresses, the men with neckties, the women with hats. He’s in church, St. Peter’s in Catamount, and it’s a funeral service. He sees the white coffin in front of the altar, the lid raised, and as he nears, he knows that he will look in, and he’ll see his mother’s face, her dead face. He can’t imagine what she will look like. He did not look into the coffin when they had the funeral in Catamount, though he pretended to. He just dipped his head and kept his eyes closed. But this time he will look, as he’s very curious now, and also he knows that everyone wants him to look — his brother Eddie, who wasn’t afraid of looking, and his father, who died the year before his mother did but was given a closed-casket service, closed because of his wife’s wishes, for she insisted she did not want her memory of the man alive tainted by the sight of him dead. Elaine wants him to look into the coffin too. She’s right behind him in line, prodding him, nudging him on, saying, Go on, Bob, you can do it. You should do it. He smells smoke again, a foul, acidic smell, an electrical fire somewhere, he knows, probably in the coffin, in the wiring of his mother’s body, put there by the undertakers, the Webb Brothers that Eddie insisted on hiring for the job. Fire! he shouts, and he grabs at the font to the right of the coffin, lifts it and empties the water into the coffin, pours holy water over the maze of smoldering wires and wheels, cables, shafts and belts, putting out the fire and saving everyone on the plane. His father comes forward and pats him on the shoulder. Good work, Bob, he says in his gruff voice. Eddie comes up behind him and catches him by the elbow. Way to go, kid. Way to go. Elaine and the girls and little Robbie look up at him from their seats, their eyes wide with love and gratitude, their small, delicate bodies strapped tightly into their seats. There’s still a foul, wet, smoky smell coming from the coffin, and Bob reaches out and brings down the top of the coffin with a bang.

Elaine is home, and the screened door slaps shut behind her, opens again and slams as each of the girls follows her inside. “Oh, Jesus, Bob!” Elaine cries. “You left the stove on!” She rushes to the stove, grabs at a smoking pan, yelps in pain, snatches a potholder and takes the pan off the stove. She tosses it into the sink and turns on the water, shouting to the girls, “Open the windows! Get the windows open!” The pan hisses and smolders in the sink, while Emma and Ruthie race through the trailer opening windows. Elaine turns off the stove, shifts the baby around from her hip, where he’s been riding, terrified and silent, and begins to comfort him. “There, there, honey, everything’s okay now, everything’s okay.”

Then the girls are back, Ruthie sucking intently on her thumb, her younger sister prowling through the refrigerator. “I’m hungry, Mama. I want somethin’ t’ eat,” she whines. Ruthie stands off to one side of Bob, works her thumb and drifts into a dreamy-eyed state that in recent weeks has come to be characteristic, though Bob has not seen that yet. To him, her thumb-sucking and dazed expression and silence are merely embarrassing and somewhat irritating, and he treats her behavior as if she were doing these things on purpose, just to antagonize him.

Elaine says quietly, “Ruthie, please, take your thumb out.” Then, to Bob, who has swung his legs off the couch, planted his feet on the linoleum-covered floor and squared to face her: “You could die that way, Bob, falling asleep with a pan on the stove. Asphyxiated in your sleep. It’s lucky I came home when I did….”

“I forgot. I was warming up some hash, you know? And I was tired, so I just lay down for a minute, and then, pop, I was gone.”

“You got up early,” she says, wiping off the baby’s mouth with her fingertips.

“I get up early every day. I don’t know why I’m so tired lately, though.” He stretches and yawns, as if to back his claim.

“It’s not like you’re overworked,” she says, adjusting Robbie’s diaper.

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Sure.”

“It’s just that the ‘fishing business’ is not exactly booming these days.” She always says it that way, with quotes around the phrase, and Bob cringes when she utters the words, as if she were drawing her fingernails across a blackboard. He knows what she means, knows that she fully intends for him to cringe and feel guilty, she desires it, because she’s angry at him, she’s angry for his having quit the job at Eddie’s liquor store and joining up with Ave, for having sold their mobile home and put the money into the Belinda Blue, buying 25 percent of the boat and splitting profits and costs with Ave, three parts to Ave, one part to Bob, though, as Ave says, anytime Bob wants, he can buy the whole thing and keep all the profits, which, Elaine knows, would not get them out of this ramshackle trailer at the end of a dirt road at the edge of a tiny town filled with tourists and fishermen. She is angry, and she has long days and nights when she is depressed. She is lonely, overworked, without money, she hasn’t lost the weight she gained during the pregnancy, and both she and Bob know that everything, all of it, is Bob’s fault.

His tee shirt is sopping wet, and his hair is plastered against his head. “We all oughta go out on the boat,” he announces. “You know? Just go out for the rest of the day and fish a little and cool off, like we used to, the whole family. Remember those trips we used to take up to Sunapee in the whaler? What do you say, honey?”

“Not interested.” She gets up, walks past him with Robbie and disappears behind him, returning a few seconds later without the baby. “He should sleep till supper now. He took a lot of sun,” she says to no one in particular, as she begins trying to clean out the burned pan. “I don’t think I can save this….”

“How come you’re not interested in us going out on the boat for the afternoon? This is more fun?” Bob asks. He spreads his arms and peers around at the dim interior of the tiny trailer. In a corner of the crowded living room, Ruthie and Emma are seated on plastic mesh folding chairs in front of the television set that Eddie gave them a year ago, watching a soap opera, General Hospital.

“Tell you what,” Elaine says, not looking up. “You take the kids out for the afternoon.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you go out on the boat. Leave me here for the afternoon, alone.”

“Wha …?”

“You watch out Emma doesn’t fall overboard and drown, though,” she goes on. “And keep Ruthie from getting too much sunburn, and change Robbie’s diapers and make sure he gets his bottle on time. You be the one to make sure the kids don’t stick themselves with fishhooks. You do that, and I’ll take a cool shower, read a magazine, sit out by the water and watch the seagulls. How’s that sound?”

“C’mon, Elaine. I mean, I got to run the boat, you know that. I mean, I can’t run the boat and watch the kids at the same time. We should all go out together,” he says. Why does she always have to make these things complicated? Why can’t she just say, “Fine, let’s go,” or “No, thanks, I’m too tired,” or something? It should be that simple. Instead, she’s coming on all sarcastic, suggesting absurd, impossible alternatives, and Bob is feeling guilty.

He stands and walks to the screened door and looks out at the yard, sand with bits and patches of witchgrass scattered through it. Across the road, Allie is still seated on her stoop, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. She’s got her wig on again, and it makes her look younger, just as she said. Bob thinks, I should have gone ahead and fucked her. Then he thinks, It’s a good thing I didn’t. I could’ve, but I didn’t, and he walks to the refrigerator for a beer.

“I’m just trying to come up with something to make you and the kids happy,” he says. “That’s all I’m doing. It’s not like I’m trying to think of ways to make you more miserable than you already are. So for Christ’s sake, please stop acting like I’m some kind of bastard, will you?”

She scrubs furiously at the blackened pan, her face twisted and red and sweating from the effort. “God damn. You really ruined this pan.”

“The hell with it. Throw it out.” He pops the top of the can of Schlitz and takes a long gulp.

“Sure, I’ll throw it out. Just like everything else when it breaks or won’t work anymore. Only we can’t afford to replace anything now when we throw them out, so after a while there won’t be anything to throw out,” she says. Frantically, she scrubs at the pan in the sink. “Just toss it out with the garbage! Easy! Except that next time I want a saucepan to cook supper in or maybe just to heat up the baby’s bottle, I won’t have any!”

Bob moves away from her, backs to the door, pushes it open with one hand and steps outside. “I’ll be back in a while,” he says softly.

“Fine.”

“Anything you want in Islamorada?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Thought I’d buy me a dip net for shrimp. The shrimp’re running out by the bridge. All you got to do is stand there and scoop ’em up. Maybe I’ll get nets for all of us, you know? So we can go out there on the bridge below Moray Key after dark tonight.”

“Fine.”

“You kids want to come up to Islamorada with me?” he calls.

They don’t answer. Ruthie leans forward and turns up the volume on the television.

“Hey, I’ll buy you a new pan,” Bob says to Elaine. “Ave’s got a charge at the tackle shop up there, and they got pots and pans and stuff like that.”

She stops scrubbing for a second and stares at him outside in the yard a few feet beyond the door. He’s still a large man to her, muscular and brown and kindly-looking, a bearish man. His face is open and sad and confused. “Bob,” she says in a low, even voice. “You still have to pay for it. You can charge your shrimp nets and your pots and pans or anything you want, but you still have to pay for it.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. Things’ll pick up soon,” he says. “I promise.” He turns abruptly, walks to his car and gets in, finishes off the beer and tosses the empty can onto the floor. Starting the engine, he looks over at Allie Hubbell and raises his hand in a short wave.

Allie grabs her can of beer, takes a sip, replaces it at her side. She doesn’t wave back.

Bob drops the car into gear and moves slowly away from the trailer, turns around in Horace’s driveway, causing the German shepherd to come barking out from under the trailer, and leaves.

4

The dream bothers Bob. It feels like a rash across his belly beneath his shirt, so that he rubs against it when he least expects to, in the car idling at a stop sign as he emerges from the road and prepares to turn north on Route 1, at the roadside grocery store where he stops to pick up another can of Schlitz, out on the highway again, when he looks to his right and sees rain clouds roiling up in the southeast.

He remembers not so much the dream as the emotions it carried, conflicting emotions that Bob can’t imagine resolved: shame and pride; solitude, desertion, being left behind — a child’s horrified view of these conditions — and social acceptance, the security of rite and family affection; fear of death, pure terror of it, and an uncontrollable longing to confront it, an obsessive curiosity, almost. The images come and go — his mother’s hands crossed on her chest in the coffin, his father’s glad hand clapped on his suited shoulder, Elaine nudging him from behind, saying, Go on, Bob, you can do it, you should do it, and the abandoned, sweltering airplane, the smoke, the holy water from the font splashing into the coffin. But somehow the images from the dream are mixed with his memories of the actual people and events they shadow. He remembers the spring night his father came home after work at the tannery and sat in his easy chair and picked up the Catamount Patriot and saw a picture of his son and discovered that Bob had been selected to the all-state high school hockey team, just as Eddie had been the year before. The local sportswriter had coined the phrase “The Granite Skates” for Bob and Eddie when they had played together that year, and the headline read: SECOND GRANITE SKATE ALL-STATE ICEMAN. His father said nothing to commemorate the event, Bob now recalls. He ignored it completely, until finally at supper Bob asked him if he’d seen the paper yet, and the man nodded and smiled across the table, and Bob smiled back. That was all. Eddie was gone by then — had been working ten months at Thom McAn’s, had his own apartment on Depot Street above Irwin’s bar and in a year would leave for Florida — or there might have been an animated, prideful discussion of the award, backslapping and jokes, fantasies and teasing, which would have left: Bob feeling sated instead of somehow disappointed and then embarrassed by his disappointment, even ashamed of it.

In everything his father did and said, there seemed to be one lesson: life is grudging in what it gives, so take whatever it gives as if that’s all you’re ever going to get. A dog finding a tossed-out bone doesn’t celebrate; it simply sets to gnawing, before the bone gets yanked away. Bob knew his father had a secret, fantasied version of things that was different, that often, after everyone had gone to bed, he’d sit in the living room half-drunk, playing “Destiny’s Darling” on the phonograph, but that was the man’s weakness, not his strength. Bob understood his father’s weakness; it was his strength that left him confused.

His mother he viewed as all weakness, all fantasy and delusion, a vessel filled with a resigned optimism that she used to make her passivity and helplessness coherent to herself. There was, of course, God’s will, and, too, there was a blessedness, a magical election, that she believed her sons possessed — at least until incontrovertible evidence proved otherwise, and even then, there was always the possibility that God had long-range plans that just hadn’t been revealed yet. She knew her boys were destined to be rich and famous, and she suspected that one of the reasons (there were doubtless many) God had made her poor and obscure was to help make her sons rich and famous, a kind of trade-off. In the end, she treated Bob’s and Eddie’s few accomplishments and honors exactly as her husband treated them, as if they were to be expected. She would smile and nod approvingly, as if to say, See, God’s looking after you, just like I said He would.

Neither parent, then, treated the boys’ futures as something the boys themselves had any control over. And when you come right down to it, Bob thinks, as he drives north on Route 1 into Islamorada, they were both right. That’s what Eddie’s finding out, and because it’s coming late, it’s coming hard. He’s been lucky, that’s all, which is the basic difference between his life so far and mine, Bob decides. It’s not intelligence or hard work or courage. It’s luck. And luck can’t last a lifetime, unless you die young.

On the north side of Islamorada, a half mile before the bridge that crosses to Windley Key, Bob turns off at the Whale Harbor Tackle Shop, a long, low building on the bay that’s more a general store than a tackle shop, with a marina and boatyard behind it. There are only a few cars in the lot, and Bob parks deliberately behind a white Chrysler convertible with the top down. He gets out of his car and strolls around it and for a few seconds admires the Chrysler, standing next to it while he finishes off the can of Schlitz, rubbing his tee-shirted belly and examining the rolled and pleated red leather upholstery, which smells like nothing but itself and reminds Bob of polished wood, Irish tweed, gleaming brass. Glancing at his own face in the tear-shaped outside mirror, Bob suddenly sees himself as he must look from inside the store, a man in work clothes guzzling beer and drooling over someone else’s luck. Abruptly, he turns and heads inside, pitching the empty can into the trash barrel by the door as he enters.

He wishes he’d taken his captain’s hat with him when he left home, as he believes he’s treated with more respect here with the properly crumpled captain’s hat on his head than he is without it. The hat ordinarily embarrasses him, especially when he’s not running the Belinda Blue, and off the boat he usually bends it and stuffs it into his back pocket. The hat had been sort of a joke anyhow, a present given to him by Ave one night over beers at the Clam Shack after Bob had gotten his commercial license. He sensed that somehow Ave was mocking him with the hat, or maybe Honduras was, he couldn’t be sure, so he accepted it with mixed feelings and wore it reluctantly after that, as if it were merely and strictly part of the uniform that men with his job were supposed to wear.

Inside, beyond the high rows of canned goods, picnic supplies, beachware, past the racks of suntan lotion, the beer and soft drink coolers and the bins and shelves of household goods, Bob passes over into the serious side of the store, the tackle shop, where on both sides of a long glass counter there are pyramids and cones of fishing rods, shelves and tall displays of hand-tied flies, plugs, jiggers and lures, line, weights, knives and reels, with repair equipment and worktables behind the counter and huge color photographs on the walls of record-breaking marlin, tuna and bonefish, game fish held up dead to the camera by their captors.

Behind the cash register at the far end of the counter, a tall, thick-bodied man, taller and thicker than Bob, is talking with great force to the balding man who runs the place, a wiry, pale-faced man in his forties nicknamed Tippy, as if he were a Keys “character,” an old conch, which does not suit him at all, for he is an essentially humorless, shrewd businessman who by his looks and manner could as easily be running a lumberyard in Toledo as this place. The tall man talking to Tippy, lecturing him, it seems, looks familiar to Bob, though all he can see of him is the back of his sandy-gray head, his broad back, tanned neck and arms. Tippy is listening intently, nodding in agreement, while the man plows on, gesturing with his hands, his low, slightly nasal voice rising and falling rhythmically with his hands. The man is wearing a white bill cap and aviator sunglasses, a white polo shirt that’s old and baggy enough to surround his ample stomach without pointing to it, floppy GI-style work pants with huge pockets, and smudged white tennis shoes.

Instantly, Bob decides that this is the man who owns the Chrysler convertible outside. Though there are a half-dozen others in the store who also might be said to own the car, it’s only this man, at least as far as Bob Dubois is concerned, who is capable of owning it, who deserves to own it. If that white car in the lot is Bob’s idea of a proper grownup’s car, then this man in front of him is his idea of a proper grownup.

For years, Bob was one of those people who believe that there are two kinds of people, children and adults, and that they are like two different species. Then, when he himself became an adult and learned that the child in him had not only refused to die or disappear, but in fact seemed to be refusing to let the adult have his way, and when he saw that was true not only of him but of everyone else he knew as well — his wife, his brother, his friends, even his own mother and father — Bob reluctantly, sadly, with increasing loneliness, came to believe that there are no such things as adults after all, only children who try and usually fail to imitate adults. People are more or less adult-like, that’s all.

Except, that is, for the man in front of him. For the first time since he himself was a child, Bob Dubois believes that he is looking at a full-fledged adult, and it’s as if he has stumbled onto a saint or an angel right here in the Whale Harbor Tackle Shop in Islamorada, Florida, a saint having an animated discussion with sober, businesslike Tippy — no, not really a discussion, because the saint’s doing all the talking. Tippy just nods and listens and nods again, and it’s as if the saint is telling Tippy how the world looks from his miraculously elevated position.

The saint swings his arms in tandem, clearly explaining a particular kind of cast, low, close to the water, snaking the line in under mangrove roots for bonefish. His large, gray-haired head and deeply tanned face seem to have an aura swirling around them as he speaks, as if he were either not really present or were more profoundly present than anyone else. His size, larger than a large man’s, and the swiftness of his gestures, the pure, muscular clarity of his motions and his crisp, good-humored, rapid-fire speech — everything about him that Bob can see and hear manifests the kind of superiority and self-assurance that only saints, or what Bob used to think of as adults, possess.

Bob moves a few feet closer along the counter, so he can hear what Tippy is privileged to hear. The saint glances to his left, sees Bob and goes on talking as if he has not seen Bob at all. Filled with wonder, afraid he will cry out, Bob says to himself, hopes he says it only to himself, for he cannot be sure, My God, it’s Ted Williams!

Ted Williams turns to him. Bob has said it aloud. “I’m … I’m didn’t mean interrupt …” Bob stumbles. His tongue feels like a hand, his hands like tongues.

Tippy looks at Bob as if he’s just discovered a counterfeit bill in the cash register. “Want help, mister?” he asks, folding his arms over his chest to make it clear that his question is only a question, not an offer.

Ted Williams peers down through the glass counter at the black and silver reels on the shelf and seems to be examining them for flaws rather than for possible purchase. He purses his lips and falls to whistling a tuneless tune.

Bob says, “I’m sorry … I mean, excuse me, but you’re Ted Williams, and … I didn’t mean to interrupt …”

Ted Williams looks up from the reels, casts a quick glance at Bob and nods, just a swift, impersonal dip and tug of his massive head, and returns to the reels, waiting, obviously, for Bob to get his business done and move away.

But Bob takes a step closer. “Mr. Williams, I’m from New Hampshire. The Red Sox … I’m a Red Sox … I mean, I love the Red Sox, Mr. Williams, since I’m a boy. And my father, him too, he loved the Red Sox, we all did. My father, he … he saw you play, down in Fenway, he’s dead now, he told me about it, and I saw you on television, when I was a kid, you know….” Bob’s mouth is dry, and he’s gulping for air. What’s the matter with me? This is crazy, he thinks. He’s only a man, just a human being like the rest of us. Visions of his father flood Bob’s mind, and he feels his eyes fill, and suddenly he’s afraid that he’s going to start weeping right here in front of Ted Williams. What’s happening to me? He clamps both hands onto the counter and steadies himself. He asks it again, What’s happening to me? And he sees his father’s face, sad and pinched, a cigarette held between his teeth, his lips pulled back as if in a snarl, while the man tightens the nuts on the front wheel of Bob’s bicycle. Bob says to Ted Williams, “My father wanted me to see you play, but he couldn’t. I couldn’t, I mean. I miss my father a lot, you know? I … I know it sounds foolish, but … well, that’s all,” he says, stopping himself. “I’m sorry, Mr. Williams.”

Ted Williams, without looking up, says, “No problem.”

Suddenly, Bob is running from the store in flight, bumping customers and knocking over displays, as if he’s stolen something. Outside, the sky is dark and low, and rain is pouring down. Bob splashes through puddles to his car, and when he gets in, discovers that he left the windows open. The seats are soaked. When he leans over and cranks up the window on the passenger’s side, he sees a small, white-haired woman inside the Chrysler convertible, her face angry and impatient as she draws the top down against the windshield bar and wrenches it closed.

Slowly, Bob closes the window next to him. He lays his head against the wet seat back and shuts his eyes. “Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Why, why, why? What’s the answer?” He watches his breath cloud over the windshield and window glass, while the rain pours down outside. When he can no longer see the world outside the car, he closes his eyes again and rests, like an animal momentarily hidden from its pursuers.

5

Elaine asks over her shoulder from the stove, “You get what you wanted?”

The girls, still posted in front of the television set, are watching a puppet who lives in a garbage can holler at a man in a bird suit. Bob takes up a position at the kitchen counter on the living room side and leans over it as if it were a fence. “I just saw Ted Williams,” he announces.

“Oh. Did you get what you wanted? You know, the nets for the shrimp. I managed to save the pan. Shrimp would be nice. A change.”

“Yeah. I mean, no, I … I guess I got so excited and all, seeing Ted Williams like that, alive. You know? Ted Williams! I mean, I knew he was alive, and I knew he had a place around here, in Islamorada, but I never expected to actually walk up on him like that. It’s really amazing to me. You probably can’t understand that.”

“No,” she says in a flat voice, and it’s clear to Bob that she doesn’t want to, either.

But he goes on. “Ted Williams is like a god to me, ever since I was a kid. My father took me once to Fenway Park down in Boston, and it was really to see Ted Williams play. He was old then, Ted Williams, I mean, not my father, and about to retire. Old for a ballplayer. Anyhow, we got there and got seats out behind the third baseline so we could see him better. He played left field. And then it turned out he didn’t play that day, I think they put Yastrzemski in, who was only a kid then, just come up from Pawtucket or someplace. Williams was sick or something. My father, he was more pissed off than I was, I think, and he bitched and moaned about it all the way home, and that was the only time we ever went to a ball game together. Whenever I asked to go again, he’d say, ‘Remember last time we drove all the way down to Boston and Williams didn’t even play.’ And then, the next year, I think it was, Williams retired, and from then on left field belonged to Yaz. I really should’ve gotten Yaz’s autograph last spring up in Winter Haven. Actually, I should’ve gotten Ted Williams’ autograph today….”

“Bob,” Elaine says, interrupting him. “We have to talk.” She turns and faces him, holding a wooden spoon in her hand as if about to wave it at him to make her point.

“Yeah?” He whips out his cigarettes and lights one, and his hands are trembling. “Everybody seems to want to have a fucking talk with me these days.” Then, without his knowing how or why, his voice has changed pitch and tone, and he’s shouting at her. “Ave wants to talk to me! You want to talk to me! Anybody else around here wants to talk to me?” he barks, turning to the children, who look up startled, confused.

“Bob, for heaven’s sake …”

“I can’t even come in here and get a little excited about seeing my goddamned childhood hero, a man who’s a fucking god to me, without bringing me down for it!”

“All I said was …”

“All you said was, ^‘I want to have a talk with you,’ in that damned accusing way of yours, as if I was a fucking little kid, like you’re going to tell me what’s what and how it’s all my fault! I know already what you got to say to me.”

She folds her arms over her breasts. “What, then? You tell me.”

“I know. I know.”

“What?”

He spins and walks toward the door, stops, and without looking at her, says, “You want to tell me what I already know. You want to tell me what shit this all is. Shit. This … this whole damned life.”

“Is it? You feel that way about it?”

He remains silent for a second. “Yeah. It’s shit. All of it, shit, shit, shit. And now you want to tell me how it’s all my fault,” he says in a low, cold voice. “You like doing that, telling me how it’s all my fault.”

“Is it?”

“No! No, goddamn it! It’s not all my fault!” He’s bellowing again, glaring at her from the door. “It’s shit, all right, but it’s not my fault!”

“Bob, the girls! Please! You’ll wake the baby.”

“Send ’em outside. We’ll get this settled now, once and for all, dammit!”

“Send them outside yourself,” she answers. “They’re your children too, remember.”

“Ruthie, Emma! Get outside for a while and play in the yard or something. Me and Mommy got to talk about something private.”

The girls whine and argue that the show’s not over yet, they don’t want to go outside, it’s raining. They turn back to the screen, and Ruthie slides her thumb into her mouth.

“Take your damned thumb out of your mouth!” Bob shouts. “And get the hell outside when I tell you to! It’s not raining now.”

Quickly, they obey, careful not to touch him as they pass him at the door.

Elaine turns down the burner on the stove and sits heavily at the kitchen table. She crosses her legs and lights a cigarette, waiting. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Whose fault is it?”

“How the fuck should I know? I’m not a genius. You think you know, though. You’re the fucking genius. You think it’s all my fault because we’re broke all the time and living like niggers in a shack in the middle of nowhere, eating goddamned macaroni and cheese out of a goddamned no-name box.” He looks scornfully over at the saucepan on the stove. “You could use a little more imagination, you know. You didn’t show much interest when I brought up getting some shrimp tonight. I could’ve gotten ten or fifteen pounds of shrimp easy, the way they’re running, and we could freeze what we didn’t eat right off, or we could sell some. The catwalks along the bridges are crowded these nights with people using a little imagination.”

“You forgot to get the nets,” she says, “because you saw an old retired baseball player.”

“Well, you didn’t want me to go out shrimping anyhow. All you do is bring me down about things I get excited about. You, you never get excited about anything anymore. All you do is mope around here with a long face.” He crosses to the television set and snaps it off. “I hate that fucking thing!”

“Bob, you can’t hear yourself, or you’d shut up. Can you listen to me for a minute?”

“Gimme a beer.”

Elaine gets up and opens the refrigerator and passes a can of Schlitz over the counter, as if she were a waitress and he a customer. Then she stands at the counter, both hands grasping the edge of it, and says to him, “Now, you listen to me for a few minutes. I know you’re working hard, as hard as anyone can. And I know you’re worried and scared. Like I am. And you’re right, it’s true, this life is shit,” she says, and the word “shit,” because he’s never heard her say it before, sounds to Bob so powerfully derogatory in her mouth that he shudders. To Bob, Elaine has made the term suddenly so strong that he instinctively wants to defend this life, his life, against it. But he’s too late. He has said it himself, and now, with her saying it, he sees the word and his life as one thing, as waste, excrement, offal, as a secret, dirty thing that should be hidden or buried, as a thing to be ashamed of.

His mind is flitting wildly about, a maddened bird in a cage, pursued by a word that repels him but that cannot be denied, and he hears only bits of what Elaine is telling him, for, having no sense of the impact of her use of the word, believing she was merely quoting him, reassuring him, she thought, Elaine goes on to tell him what she knows he does not want to hear. She tells him that their daughter Ruthie is ill, “emotionally disturbed,” the counselor at school said, and that she’s going to have to start getting twice weekly treatment at the mental health clinic in Marathon, which will cost money, not a lot of money, but because they’re poor, more money than they have, which is no money at all, so she, Elaine, has decided to take a job in Islamorada. In fact, she accepted the job this morning, waiting on tables at the Rusty Scupper five nights a week. “I know,” she says rapidly, trying to stave off the explosion, “I know I should’ve talked it out with you first, but it had to be done, Bob, and I just saw the sign this morning when I took the girls to the beach…. No, that’s not true. I asked Horace next door if he knew of any jobs, when he took us up to the beach, and he told me about it, and I just went in and asked about the job and got it offered to me, so I took it. And I know I should’ve told you about Ruthie when the school called, but it was only yesterday, and it seemed so hard a thing to tell you, Bob, because of all you have to worry about, and the way you’ve been lately, kind of distant and lost in your own thoughts and depressed and all. I just wanted to wait till I had a way to pay for it before I told you about it, so it wouldn’t seem so bad.”

“Sonofabitch! There’s not any goddamn thing wrong with Ruthie that some steady discipline wouldn’t cure!” Bob smacks the flat of his hand against the counter, and his face tightens and reddens. “You never tell her to cut out that damned thumb-sucking. You just sit around whispering with her about how rotten everything is, and then I come home, and I have to be the bad guy. You tell that fancy counselor down to the school that? It’s no fucking wonder she’s acting retarded!”

“Emotionally disturbed.”

“Emotionally disturbed, then!” He bats the words back. “I can tell you about ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m goddamned disturbed that you go around my back the way you do. The way you always have, too. And you know what the hell I’m talking about, so don’t give me that look. And now with this job business. Jesus H. Christ! And Horace! Horace, that fat pig, that slimy, woman-sniffing pig. I know what that guy’s interested in, don’t worry. And you do too.”

“You sound crazy. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t know what’s important to you anymore, like I used to,” Elaine says sadly. “And I don’t know what you mean, going around behind your back. I’ve never gone around behind your back. I was just waiting until I could tell you, and we don’t talk much any …”

“Like hell!” he shouts into her face. “You know what I’m talking about. You know. You got a memory. You know.”

“No, I don’t.” She backs away from him toward the stove.

He raises and slowly extends his fist toward her. He howls. He howls like a trapped beast, and with both hands he clears the counter of bowls, dishes, kitchen implements, clock.

Elaine’s face has gone all to white, her eyes are wide with fear, and she can’t speak. From the rear of the trailer, the cries of her son start up and rise, and suddenly Elaine finds words and says, “Bob, the baby! The baby!”

But it doesn’t matter what she says, for he can no longer hear her or the baby. He lurches around the tiny, cluttered room like a blindfolded deaf man, sweeping tables and shelves clear, knocking over chairs, sending the television set crashing to the floor, the clock-radio and pole lamp beside the sofa, the floor lamp next to the easy chair, kicking at magazines, jars, ashtrays as they fall.

“Stop! Stop this!” Elaine shrieks at him. “You son of a bitch! You’re wrecking my house!”

For a split second, Bob looks over at his wife, and then, as if what he’s seen has compounded his rage, he turns on the chairs and tables, and grunting, tips onto its stiff, flat back the tattered green sofa. Elaine grabs his sleeve with both hands, and when he swings away from her grasp, her face stiffens, for suddenly she is afraid of him, of his size and force, as if he were of an utterly different species than she and her children, a huge, coarse-bodied beast with a thick hide, like a buffalo or rhinoceros, and berserk, rampaging, maddened, as if by the stings of a thousand bees.

Eyes widened, mouth open and dry, hands in tight little fists against her belly, Elaine slips by him and darts down the hall to the back of the trailer, where her baby is, while Bob continues smashing through the trailer, moving like a storm from the living room into the kitchen, then back along the narrow hallway to the bathroom, where he rips the tin medicine cabinet from the wall and kicks over the rubbish can, yanks the contents of the linen closet to the floor, and then moves on to the bedroom at the end, and when he lurches through the door, he stops, panting, enormous in the small door frame, a giant looking down on tiny beds, dolls, stuffed animals and picture puzzles, building blocks, books and pictures, articles of clothing. He hears sniffling and looks up and sees his wife in the corner of the alcove beyond, behind the crib, with the baby in her arms. And he sees that she expects him to keep on coming, and then he sees what she sees, and he stops.

Bob hears Emma at the screened door off the living room asking in a high, scared voice if she can come inside, and the sounds of Ruthie, poor Ruthie, crying quietly behind her younger sister.

Turning, Bob shuffles slowly back through the wreckage to the front door and lets Emma come inside and then Ruthie, who, as she passes, removes her thumb from her mouth. Neither girl looks at her father.

“Mama?” Emma cries, and Bob hears Elaine call from the back room, “Here! I’m back here with Robbie!” and the two girls run toward her.

He steps outside. The trees are still dripping from the afternoon rain, and shallow puddles glisten white as milk in the yard and roadway ruts. The clouds have passed over the Keys toward the mainland, and the eastern sky, deepening into dark blue as night comes on, pulls from the horizon a large, dark orange half-moon, as if delivering it from old smoke and volcanic ash.

As soon as Bob has driven away, his red-dotted taillights disappearing around the far bend in the road, a man emerges from the trailer across the road. He’s a middle-aged man with a beer belly tightly encased in a sleeveless undershirt, barefoot with skinny legs sticking out below khaki trousers cut off at the knees. He stands in the middle of the road, snaps his fingers for his dog, which emerges obediently from under the trailer, and looks cautiously in the direction taken by Bob’s car and then over toward Bob’s darkened, now silent trailer.

Allie Hubbell, too, has come outside and stands in her yard, peering into the darkness of the road where Bob has gone. “Horace? That you?” she calls to the man.

“Yeah.”

“Some kinda ruckus.”

“I’d say so.”

“She all right, do y’ know?”

“Sonofabitch can do what he wants to his own stuff, but he better not ruin anything of mine, I’ll tell ya,” he says.

“You think we better check on Elaine?”

“Elaine?”

“Yeah. Maybe just to check, you know?”

“Naw,” he says, rubbing his grizzled chin. “You don’t wanta go buttin’ into other people’s fights. Sonofabitch better not’ve banged up any of my stuff, though, I’ll tell ya. I had some kids there once that punched a buncha holes in the walls one night when they was drunk.”

“Maybe we better just go on over and check on Elaine, make sure she’s okay.” Allie takes a step off the grass onto the road.

“Naw. She can always call the cops on the bastard if she’s scared of him. Besides, he ain’t the type to shoot or cut anybody. He might knock her around a little, but he ain’t the violent type.”

“You think so?”

“Oh, yeah,” Horace says, and he turns and starts heading back to his own trailer. “Men can tell these things about each other,” he says. “He’s harmless. Just screwed up is all. See you later,” he says, and goes inside.

Allie stands by the road for several moments, arms crossed below her breasts, hands cupping her elbows. Then she turns and slowly walks back to her trailer, where she sits down on the stoop and smokes a cigarette and watches Bob’s trailer until the lights come on inside it. Then she stands, opens the door and goes in.

6

By the time Bob crosses from Upper Matecumbe to Moray Key, it’s dark, and the shrimpers are already out, dozens of them leaning over the rail of the catwalk along the bridge, men, women and children with lanterns hung from the catwalk and long-handled dip nets stuck down into the channel. Bob drives by barely noticing them and does not remember that a few hours earlier he was planning to join the shrimpers tonight. Without intending it, without particularly desiring it, almost without being aware of it, he has momentarily severed the connection between his past and his future. During this moment and the several that will immediately follow, Bob is floating free of time, a man without memories and without plans, like an infant, conscious only of the immediate present. If you stop him and ask where he is going on this tropical winter’s eve, he’ll blink and look down the hood of his car at the piles of sand, cinder block and steel, and recognizing the marina and the apartment building beside it and the Clam Shack, he’ll say, “To Moray Key.” If, when he parks the car in the lot behind the apartment building, you ask him where on the key he’s going, he’ll blink again, and noting that his car is next to Avery Boone’s van, he’ll say, “To Ave’s.” And if, as he climbs the narrow iron stairs to the second floor and pauses on the terrace before Ave’s door and raises his hand to knock, you ask him what business he has with his old friend and new partner Avery Boone on this lovely, breezy, moonlit evening, he’ll blink a third time, hold his hand in the air and say, “Why, no business at all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A joint? Okay, sure.”

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

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

“Sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

“No.”

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

“What’s it say?”

She’s silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s good.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No shit. The Kid, eh?”

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

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

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

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

“Sure. Anything.”

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

“Oh, Jesus, Eddie. What’s happening?”

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

“Sure, Eddie. But Jesus …”

“Anyhow, I figured maybe since now you’re in business for yourself … you know what I mean … well, I figured you could come up with enough fast cash to help me out a little. We can work a deal, keep it off the books, maybe cut you in on the business up here as part of the payback. It’s okay to talk, isn’t it? I mean, your phone is okay, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. My phone … oh, sure.”

“Good. I’m not so sure about mine, you understand, so be cool. Right?”

“Right. Cool. Who … ah … who’d be listening in?”

“Doesn’t matter. Interested parties, okay? You got me?”

“Yeah.”

“So, whaddaya think? Can you help me out, like you said?”

“God, Eddie. I … I’m fucking broke, you know that.”

There is a silence on the other end. Bob hears his brother light a cigarette and inhale deeply.

“I mean, I’d do anything I could, I will, I will do anything I can, but Jesus, Eddie, I’m even more broke than ever. Even worse than up there. I don’t have a pot to piss in, like they say,” he says, forcing a laugh.

Eddie says nothing, so Bob goes on. “I suppose you’ve tried everything else….”

“Everything.”

“God, Eddie, I’m really sorry. I mean, maybe I can dig up a couple hundred someplace,” he says, thinking of Ave’s return from the Caymans on Thursday.

“A couple hundred bucks! Whew! That’s really something, kid. Look, let’s talk straight, Bob. Okay? I know what you and your pal Boone are doing down there. Okay? You understand what I’m saying? I mean, I know. I’ve known Boone since he was a kid, and I know you too. So I know, okay?”

“Well, yeah, but you’re wrong. I’m not … I’m pretty much on my own, and I only get a quarter of what we make with the boat, you know? Which is almost a quarter of nothing, the way it’s been going.”

“Bullshit,” Eddie says in a low voice.

“Aw, c’mon, Eddie. I’m fucking broke!”

“Yeah. You and the Pope. Look, kid, we gotta talk. I think I get the picture, we can’t talk on the phone, right? So we gotta talk in person. What do you say I drive down to Miami, we meet there for a drink and lunch tomorrow, say, and we talk. In private. I understand how it is right now, on the phone, I mean. I can call you tomorrow from a pay phone, and we can arrange to meet in Miami around one.”

“No, Eddie. No big meetings in Miami. I’m telling you the truth. No bullshit, I’m really broke. Busted. Flat. You don’t understand that; you never did understand that. I’ll do anything I can to help you, you’re my brother, for Christ’s sake, but I’m fucking broke!” he shouts.

“Yeah. Sure. I hear you.”

“No. No, you don’t, you bastard. You never did hear me. You don’t hear me now, and you never heard me in your life.”

Eddie is silent a second, then, in a hoarse voice, “I heard you a lot more’n you got any idea. Maybe I didn’t show it much, but I heard you. I know it’s been tough on you, but it’s tough for me. I got real problems, Bob. Even my epilepsy, it’s been coming back lately, like when I was a kid.”

“Jesus, Eddie. You see a doctor?”

“Yeah, sure. He give me some fucking pills and said go take a vacation. But that’s not important, the epilepsy. Not compared to the other stuff.” He is silent for a second. Then, “For Christ’s sake, Bob, I’m asking. You got that? I’m asking.”

“Eddie, goddammit, you’re always asking. You’ve been asking since the beginning. You make it look like you’re giving, but all you’re doing is asking. I’m sorry about the epilepsy and all your problems. But I got lots of problems too, and you’re one of the fucking reasons why. You say you’re giving me a big job, a chance of a lifetime, you say you’re gonna make me rich, but really all you’re doing is asking, you’re using me to work for nothing, to be your loyal clerk, your fucking nigger, while you add up all the profits and take ’em home to buy another fucking boat with. Listen, man, I learned something that year up in Oleander Park. I’m a little slow, I know, but eventually I learn, and I learned not to listen to you when you say you’re giving. I tune out now when you start saying you got just what I need, because it’s going to turn out instead to be just what you need.”

“Bob, listen. For Christ’s sake, Bob. You got burnt, I know, and I’m sorry. I … I thought things would be better for you. And that stupid stuff about the gun and all, I didn’t understand that stuff, I admit it. Shit, I still don’t understand. But it don’t matter. Things like that don’t matter anymore.”

“Fuck they don’t matter. They mattered then, they matter now. You think I’m a bozo.”

“No, Bob. Aw, shit … listen … I’m …” he stammers, and then his voice breaks, and he’s weeping. “I … I’m really gone now, Bob. This is no shit, this is how it comes out. Lemme give it to you straight, okay?” He stops weeping and gathers himself together. “Sarah and Jessie … she left me, just took the kid and left. She went back up north to her parents in Connecticut. It’s all gone now, Bob. All of it. The boat, that’s a fucking laugh! Gone. The store, the new store over in Lakeland? Forget it. All I got is what I got in my pockets, Bob. And the house. But I only got that for a few more days is all. Then it’s gone too. And then I’m gone, right along behind. You understand me? If I can’t come up with the money, I’ll be gone too. Repossessed, just like the fucking house and the boat and the store and everything. You didn’t know that, probably. There’s people can repossess people.”

Bob hears the man, he understands what he’s saying and feels a great wave of pity and fear for him, but he also feels a counterwave of anger that keeps on sweeping in from the opposite side, neutralizing his pity and fear, making him cold, quiet, withdrawn, as if he were idly watching a TV soap opera. “How much money you talking about?”

“A lot. A fucking lot.”

“How much?”

“I thought you said you was broke.”

“I did, I am. Dead stone broke. How much?”

“Hundred and thirty thousand.”

“A hundred and thirty thousand bucks you need! And you think maybe I can help you out!”

“I hoped, that’s all. I just figured you and Ave were into some big bucks now, with the boat and all. I hear things. I figured you’d be able to put a hand on some large cash, that’s all. You know?”

Bob is laughing, a high-pitched, rolling, derisive laugh that goes on and on, like a train whistle.

Then Eddie clicks off, and all Bob hears now is the dial tone and his own subsiding laughter.

Elaine watches him from the sofa bed, her upper body propped on one elbow. She’s been watching him throughout. When Bob sees her, he stops laughing altogether and realizes that he’s naked, standing at the kitchen counter with the telephone receiver in his hand.

“What’s happened?” she asks calmly.

Bob scratches his head and puts the receiver back on the hook. “I guess … well, I guess the bottom’s dropped out. For Eddie.”

“He thinks you can help him?”

“He thinks I’m smuggling dope.”

“Ave is. Why not you?”

“You want me to? That what you’re telling me now?”

“No. I mean, why shouldn’t Eddie think you’re doing it too? He’s right to think Ave’s doing it. That’s all,” she says in a thin, watery voice, as if deeply tired and a little bored, and she lays her head on the pillow, rolls over and leaves her back to him. “Shut off the light soon,” she says, “I have to get up early in the morning. You obviously don’t.”

“Yeah. Sure.” He reaches over and flicks off the light. But he doesn’t come to bed. He stands at the counter as before, thinking about his brother Eddie. His anger has left him now, like a storm blown out to sea. The horizon is dark and turbulent, but here, directly overhead, it’s clear skies and sweet breezes.

“He’s alone now,” Bob says in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. “Sarah and Jessica left him. And he’s got the epilepsy again.” He reaches over in the dark and grabs Elaine’s foot and shakes it. “It’s really bad for him, Elaine. He’s scared.”

“Talk about this tomorrow. I’m exhausted. Now let me sleep. This has not been an easy night for me, you know.”

He lets go of her foot and walks over to the chair next to the TV and sits down, the plastic netting cold against his naked buttocks and back. Eddie the man deserves everything he gets, Bob thinks, but Eddie the boy, the boy that’s still in him, doesn’t deserve to be alone, to lose everything he ever wanted and worked for, to be deserted by his only brother. It’s hard for Bob, though, to see the boy in his older brother; he has to struggle to see him. He knows he’s there, but Bob has to will himself to remember Eddie as a boy and to look back and down on him from where he stands now, a grown man looking down on a nervous, wildly energetic, towheaded boy, and ruffling the kid’s hair, give him an easy pat on the shoulder and say, “Go on, kid, try it anyhow. If you screw it up, you can always try again, until you finally get it. Don’t worry, kid, you got all the time in the world.”

Elaine doesn’t understand that. All she can see is Eddie the man, and the man she sees is childish, selfish, cruel, manipulative and shallow, a man who mistreats his wife and daughter and doesn’t deserve their love, a man who manipulated and deceived his younger brother and therefore doesn’t deserve his loyalty and support now, a man who made big money fast and easy and shouldn’t complain when he loses it just as fast and just as easy.

Bob gets up from the chair, and his back sticks to it as he rises.

He reaches out in the dark for the phone, realizes he can’t see to dial, and switches on the kitchen light, then dials his brother’s number. He lets it ring a half-dozen times, ten, twelve. No answer.

8

It’s raining when Bob arrives in Oleander Park, a steady, heavy rain from low clouds, and it’s cold. He’s got the heater of the old Chevy on, and the dry smell of it reminds him of driving in New Hampshire on cold, wet spring mornings along slick highways, stomach growling from too many cigarettes, too much Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in paper cups, heading out from Catamount alone like this, early in the morning like this, to fix somebody’s oil burner. In those days, he knows now, he was constantly depressed and, to avoid the fact, had gone to some secret place deep inside himself, where he went over again and again the trivial details of his life, as if fingering the beads on a rosary, rehearsing, always rehearsing, how he’ll fix the porch steps, how he’ll clean out the cellar this weekend, how he’ll stop tonight on the way home for a few beers at Irwin’s, how he’ll clean his fishing gear this week so he can go out the first day of trout season — filling his mind with scrupulous visions of the actions that most people do automatically and without anticipation, living his life as a constant, slow-motion preview of coming attractions in which the boring, linking, low points are in fact the crucial scenes of the movie.

For a second, as Bob turns off Highway 27 a few miles south of Oleander Park, he forgets why he’s done this, why he’s left his home and family at four in the morning and driven north across Florida for five hours. He knows where he is and recognizes the roads, marshy lakes, trailer parks, palmettos, orange groves, recognizes the acrid smell of the citrus-processing plants, the signs pointing with excitement to Cypress Gardens, the Water Skiing Hall of Fame, Disney World, recognizes on his left the Lake Grassey trailer park and back on Tangelo Lane the blue trailer he owned for close to a year, and recognizes the white cinder-block building out on Route 7 where he worked and where he shot one black man and chased after the other. The windows are covered with sheets of plywood now, the store blinded and abandoned by the side of the road. He sees the road to Auburndale, where Marguerite Dill and her father live, and his chest suddenly fills with a mixture of shame, nostalgia and longing that momentarily frightens and confuses him. Then he recognizes the turnoff to the country club, and he remembers Eddie’s birthday party, the way he saw himself then, poor, stupid, clumsy and inept.

Finally, as he approaches Eddie’s house, low and dark, with an acre of lime-green lawn in front, a plain of slate-gray lake behind it, he remembers why he has come here. He’s come to provide aid and comfort to his elder brother, simply to be present in the man’s time of troubles. He knows there’s little he can do or say, but he believes that his presence will be helpful, that together they will be able to remember who they are and will in that way be able to withstand the awful pressures of the moment. He believes, too, that Eddie will help him as much as he will help Eddie.

Bob is not angry anymore, and he’s not worried. He knows Eddie will be all right as soon as he sees his younger brother’s face, sees that Bob has raced through the Florida night and cold, gray, rainy morning to be at his side, to be family, the Granite Skates, the two of them against the rest of the world. They’ll hug each other, Eddie will gruffly welcome him in, and they’ll sit down, maybe at the huge dining room table, where they’ll drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and discuss possible solutions to these problems, both their problems, and now and then they’ll remember something amusing or touching from their childhood, and they’ll laugh a little.

Bob will tell Eddie about Ave and about Honduras, and maybe he’ll tell him about what happened years ago between Ave and Elaine and how it still bothers him. He’ll tell him about his money problems and about Ruthie’s emotional problems, and he’ll let his brother know what a fool he was last night. He’ll tell about Marguerite, too, at last, and what she meant to him and how confused loving her became for him because she was black. Everything will be made clear in the telling.

He’ll admit that Ave fooled him, though not deliberately, into thinking he could make good money by selling his trailer in Oleander Park and buying into the Belinda Blue. They’ll curse the Republicans and the Democrats, Reagan and Carter, and blame the recession and the Arabs for the falloff in the tourist trade. Bob will even tell his brother about Doris Cleeve back in Catamount and the night he saw his life there for what it was and decided to trade it for another. And he’ll tell Eddie how his feelings toward Elaine have changed, how, even though she does nothing wrong that he can point to, she still manages to make him feel guilty all the time, which he never used to feel, even when he was now and then sleeping with Doris Cleeve, an act no better or worse than fucking Honduras last night or falling for Marguerite last summer. He’s no different from the way he’s always been, he’ll say to Eddie, and yet now he goes around feeling guilty all the time, especially toward Elaine and the kids.

Eddie will understand, and there’s probably a lot of it that Eddie will be able to explain away. And by the same token, there’s probably a lot in Eddie’s life that’s just as confusing to him, things that Bob will be able to explain for him. Bob will know what to say when Eddie tells him how he got himself into debt to people he never should have borrowed money from. He’ll know how to reassure his brother that he did everything a man could to make Sarah happy and that her desertion of him now is an act that should never be forgiven. Bob will tell him not to worry about losing his daughter, you never lose your children, no matter what. They eventually discover the truth about you, and they come back, he’ll say. Bob will tell Eddie he can start over. He’s only thirty-three years old, a young man, and he’s smart and energetic. His epilepsy will get better as soon as the pressure on his daily life has eased.

They’ll come up with a plan, two plans, one for Eddie and one for Bob, and by God, then they’ll crack open a bottle of Scotch or maybe Canadian Club, and they’ll drink the sonofabitch dry, talking about the old days, remembering their parents, growing up in Catamount, the house they were raised in, the winter days they skipped school together and played hockey with the American Legion guys down on the river, the way their father used to snore, the way their mother constantly nagged them to go to church early with her and then, when they did, told them to go to late mass on their own because they made her so nervous with their fooling around and whispering that she was too distracted to pray. They’ll remember everything together!

Parking the car before the closed garage door, Bob gets out and runs under the rain across the lawn to the front entrance and pushes the doorbell. A new pink Lincoln driven by a woman wearing a pink pillbox hat and veil sloshes past and turns into the driveway of the pink stucco house next door. The garage door lifts automatically, and the pale car slides into the darkness, and the door descends.

Bob pushes the brass button again. Maybe he’s asleep, Bob thinks, and he holds the button in until it sounds angry to him, or worried.

He pushes the doorbell a third time, with no response from beyond the thick oak door, and it occurs to Bob that Eddie may have driven into town or gone to his office early, though he’s not sure Eddie even has an office anymore, or a car. The liquor store is closed, the store in Lakeland never even opened, his birthday boat is gone, either sold or repossessed, and Eddie said that the house was about to go too.

Stepping from the doorway into the rain again, Bob jogs across the lawn and around his car to the garage. He tries the door, and discovering that it’s locked, hunches his shoulders against the downpour, steps to the side of the building and peers through the small, dark window there. The first bay, where Sarah used to park her Celica, is empty, but in the gloom beyond it, Bob sees Eddie’s white Eldorado, which looks unexpectedly huge and vulgar to him. He recalls the white Chrysler he thought Ted Williams owned. Eddie, he thinks, doesn’t really have much class. Then he sees his brother inside the car, his curly blond head laid back on the headrest as if he were sleeping. The windows are all up, the doors closed, and rags have been jammed along the bottom of the garage door. Putting his ear close to the pane of glass, blocking his other ear against the sound of the spattering rain, Bob hears the motor running, and only then does he see the hose that leads from the tailpipe over the fender and through the rear corner window, and the tape sealing the opening around it, and he knows that he’s come too late, his brother is dead.

Bob’s hand is bleeding; he cut it when he smashed the window with his fist. Eddie’s body is lying on the cement floor of the garage, the wide, two-bay door is open, and Bob stands beside it, sucking in the fresh, moist air, while the rain splashes down on the driveway before him, on the dark green roof and hood of his old Chevy wagon, on the thick, freshly cropped lawn and, beyond the lawn, the road and the fenced-in meadow and, in the distance, the scattered, silver-gray shapes of Brahma cattle grazing beneath tall, spreading live oak trees. Bob squints and makes out strips of Spanish moss dangling from the branches of the trees, and he thinks, What a stupid place to die. So far from home, so far from ice and snow, dark blue spruce trees, maple and birch trees and granite hills, so far from small, redbrick milltowns huddled in narrow river valleys and old white colonial houses and triple-decker wooden tenement houses, and churches with tall spires — so far from what’s real. And for the first time since he left New Hampshire, Bob believes that he will never return there, that somehow, as much for him as for Eddie, it’s too late.

With fastidious care, as if writing out a shopping list, Bob itemizes what he must do now. He must, of course, call the police, who will rule Eddie’s death a suicide and will have the body placed with a local mortician. Then Bob will call Sarah in Connecticut and tell her what has happened and place himself at her service for the next few days. Her parents’ address must be inside the house somewhere. He will give her the note that he found on the car seat next to Eddie’s body, still apparently unopened, as if Bob had not read it, since, after all, though it was unsealed, it did have Sarah’s name written on the envelope, and he should not have read it. The note, back inside the envelope, is in Bob’s shirt pocket, and no doubt the police will want to read Eddie’s last words, neatly typed, to his wife: I’m a failure. Three short words that must have taken Eddie an hour to compose, and when he had them down on the white sheet of paper, they must have made the rest easy, Bob thought when he first read them. That was when Bob started making his list of things to do, for he thought, I’m not a failure.

After he has talked with Sarah and knows how long he’ll have to stay here in Winter Haven and how much of the funeral he has to arrange himself, he will call Elaine. He’ll apologize for everything and tell her she’s right about everything, and she won’t have to take the job at the Rusty Scupper, because he’s going to take an evening job himself, pumping gas, maybe, or tending bar, anything to bring in the money they will need to pay for Ruthie’s doctors and the rent and food and maybe some new clothes for spring, and who knows, they might be able to put a few bucks away and save enough for a down payment on a new trailer or possibly even one of those three-bedroom condominium apartments going up at the marina, though of course that probably will be a little too steep for them, as the price, he’s heard, is over a hundred thousand dollars for the large places, ninety-five for the smaller units. He’ll tell her what he plans to tell Ave: if Ave, who has plenty of cash, will loan him the money to buy the rest of the Belinda Blue, he will then be able to keep all the profits, instead of the one-fourth he keeps now, and will be able to pay Ave back in a couple of years, maybe even sooner. The way it is now, he’ll never be able to buy more of the boat than the one-quarter share of it he bought with the money they realized last October from the sale of the trailer in Oleander Park. Ave will be grateful for the idea. He probably never expected that Bob would not be able to make enough from his share of the boat to buy more than that share. Right from the start, the night Robbie was born, Ave said that what he wanted was for Bob to own and operate the Belinda Blue while he owned and operated a second boat. Bob will admit to Elaine that yes, he knows Ave owns and operates that second boat to smuggle marijuana and cocaine, but that’s no concern of his. He himself would certainly never do such a thing, nor would Ave want him to. It’s safer for Ave anyhow if Bob keeps straight and the Belinda Blue never carries anything but fat, half-drunk fishermen out into the bay for bonefish. If Ave wants to sneak drugs into Florida from the Bahamas or the Caymans or off freighters from Colombia, that’s his business. Those risks are his, not Bob’s.

After he has talked about this plan with Elaine, then Bob will call Ave himself, and he is sure Ave will like the plan and will want to draw up the papers immediately. Bob is amazed that he didn’t think of this before, back when he and Ave first talked about going into business together. Bob has decided that he and Ave will also have to talk about Elaine, and he knows that during that particular discussion, which will concern Elaine’s confession to Bob and will therefore oblige Bob to confess to Ave his somewhat complicated and delayed reactions to it, he will reveal that, as one aspect of those complications, he made love to Ave’s girlfriend Honduras. This will clear the air, Bob believes, at last, and then they will stand on an equal footing once again, just like they did years ago, for Ave will own one boat, Bob will own the other, they will split the profits of the fishing business, and both of them will have slept with the other man’s woman once, a thing done in the past and completely forgiven now. Bob knows he’ll never make love to Honduras again, especially after the way she treated him the one time he did make love to her. He’ll be friendly with her, all right, but cool.

Then, finally, when he has finished talking with Ave, Bob will go through his brother’s papers and will try to put the poor man’s affairs in order as best he can. He’ll approach all the problems and tasks, meet everyone’s needs, in a perfectly rational way, be the man everyone can count on, Sarah, Jessica, the police, even Eddie’s creditors. He’ll leave the weeping to the others, let them be sad, frightened, angry, hurt or relieved; he will be calm, logical, competent. At times like this, he thinks, a man has to know how to take charge.

Of course, nothing works out as Bob planned. He finds himself weeping in front of the police, for the sight of his brother’s body as they lift it onto a wheeled stretcher suddenly fills him with a strange, overwhelming pity that he has never felt before. In a flash, he realizes that Eddie is totally powerless now; a glowing red bed of coals has become a bag of waters. A spirit that shouted at Bob, that beat on him and prodded and directed him, scolded and shamed him for thirty-one years, has been miraculously transformed into a typed note that claims only absence for itself.

It’s a terrible thing, Bob thinks. To go from being something to being nothing! A terrible thing for a man to endure — to be nothing after having been something. And for the first time, Bob pities his older brother, and his pity instantly releases him, so that when he weeps aloud for Eddie, in sorrow, of course, like any brother, but, more crucially, with pity as well, he weeps for himself, in joy. And as he weeps, he trembles, torn by the contending emotions that are called grief — pity and sudden potency, sorrow and joy, the horrified, abandoned child, bereft and frightened, and the exhilarated man, powerful and self-admiring.

He has trouble speaking to the police officer in charge, and as a result instantly forgets the name of the funeral home the officer recommends to him and to which Bob agrees they should send the body, so that, a few minutes later, when he is speaking on the telephone to Sarah, his brother’s widow, he is unable to tell her where they have taken Eddie’s body.

“You asshole,” she says, and she quickly apologizes but then begins to speak to him as if he were an adolescent boy. She tells him that she’ll fly down this afternoon and for him not to bother picking her up at Orlando, she can get out to the house on her own. “Just leave everything the way it is,” she instructs him. “And don’t let anybody inside the house. No lawyers, no bankers, no accountants, no nothing,” she says. “You stay there and watch TV or whatever you want, but don’t touch anything and don’t let anyone into the house. Jesus, what a fucking mess, excuse my French. Did he leave a letter or a note or anything around?”

Bob says yes, there was a note.

“What’s it say?”

He pulls out the envelope and reads the note to her, slowly, as if reading it for the first time.

Sarah laughs. “I guess the hell he was a failure. Took him long enough to admit it, though.”

“Sarah, for God’s sake! How can you say stuff like that? The man’s dead now. You’ve changed, Sarah.”

She is silent for a second, then says, “No, I haven’t changed. You just never paid attention in the first place. Just like him. I’m sorry he’s dead, of course I’m sorry he’s dead, but our marriage went down the tubes years and years ago, whether you wanted to see it or not. So I can’t pretend to be the grieving widow. Frankly, I’m pissed. I’d feel a lot sorrier for him if it had been a car accident and he was drunk and hit a pole or something. But Eddie was a bastard. You know that as well as anyone. And he was a sad bastard, a pathetic little boy of a man, and I always knew that. And you did too. No, I feel sorrier for Jessie than anyone else, because now she has to live with the fact that her daddy killed himself because he felt sorry for himself. Because he thought he was a goddamned failure.”

“Shit, Sarah, let’s not talk like this, not right now. Okay? He’s my brother. I’ve lost my brother. Let me … let me just be …”

“I’ve lost a husband,” she cuts in. “And Jessie’s lost a father. I’ve got a right.”

“Yeah, I know. I know. But let’s not argue about what kind of man he was, or how we ought to be feeling. Plenty of time for that later. It doesn’t matter right now what kind of man Eddie was. He’s a dead man is what matters. You know?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“I’ll … I’ll get the name of the funeral home they took him to. I’m sorry about that, it was just that I was kind of upset right at that moment and all and wasn’t paying the right kind of attention. I’ll take care of things here, till you get here, I mean.”

“No,” she says. “Just stay in the house, and don’t do anything, you hear? Don’t let anyone in, either. Things are more complicated than you know. Eddie got everything screwed up, so it’s not gonna be easy to untangle things. The bastard.”

“Sarah, he tried. Eddie tried. For Christ’s sake, I know a little bit.”

“Bob,” she says sweetly, “you only know a little. I know a lot.”

Bob tries to argue with her, not to prove her wrong, just to soften her feelings somewhat, but he can’t get over the wall of authority she’s put up between them: she knows the truth, has always known the truth, and he knows almost nothing.

He does know, however, that his wife Elaine, unlike his brother’s wife Sarah, will not treat him and Eddie in such a hard, self-centered way, and he’s right, for when he calls her and tells her about Eddie’s death, she is indeed properly dismayed and feels deep pity for both Bob and Eddie, which pleases him and fills his heart with renewed affection for her. But not for long. When he tells her what he planned to tell her, that he will take an evening job himself, as soon as he gets back down from Oleander Park, which may be a few days, since he has to run things up here, she responds coldly and says only that she can make more money as a waitress in one night than he can pumping gas part time for a week. And when he unfolds to her his plan to borrow enough money from Ave to buy the remaining three-quarters of the Belinda Blue from Ave, she laughs outright. “For God’s sake, Bob, now you sound just like Eddie,” she says, as if she were talking to a child and the consequences of his acts could in no serious way affect her life, only his.

When Bob Dubois is confused, he often responds by becoming angry, and now both his sister-in-law and his wife have confused him, so he slams down the phone and stalks out of Eddie’s kitchen, a large, shadowy room cluttered with dirty dishes, glasses, pots and pans, piles of dirty laundry, unread mail and newspapers, the room smelling of old garbage and burned cooking, and heads for Eddie’s liquor cabinet below the wet bar in the living room. The shades are drawn here, and the room is dim and sedately gray. Bob pours himself a double shot of Canadian Club and tosses it back in two gulps.

Refilling the glass, he eases himself down into the large, L-shaped, wine-colored sofa, picks up the phone from the table next to it and dials his old friend Avery Boone.

It’s Honduras who answers. Bob does not want to talk to any more women. He speaks to her as if she were a receptionist. “Ave, please.” She recognizes his voice and laughs, that same, high-pitched, mocking laugh she threw at him from the boat last night. “Let me speak to Ave, please,” he repeats.

“I got some stuff of yours here, Bob. Pair of pants, tee shirt, shoes and socks. Even a pair of underpants. All nice and clean, freshly washed and dried and pressed. Got your wallet here too. You were right, honey, you are broke.”

Bob says, “Just put my stuff on the boat.” The wallet he needs only because his driver’s license is inside it; the money in his pocket now is what’s left of a twenty-dollar bill he took from Elaine’s purse before leaving this morning. He’s suddenly afraid he won’t have enough money to get home on. Maybe he can borrow some money from Sarah when she gets in from Connecticut this afternoon. Oh, Christ, he thinks, I don’t have enough money to buy a damned newspaper when I want to. I have to live like a goddamned kid, begging and borrowing money I can’t pay back from the grownups, who all happen to be women now.

“Where’s Ave?” he asks.

“You know, honey. Still out on the boat with Tyrone.”

“Tell him when he gets in that I have to talk with him, so he should call me right away.”

“Now, don’t you go carrying any tales back to him. You were just as bad as me, you know.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I won’t say anything. But last night was it, girl. Never again. You understand?”

She laughs and says, “Of course,” as if she does not believe him, though it’s not clear to Bob if that’s because she thinks she’s irresistible or he is. He decides it’s because she thinks she’s irresistible, which means he’ll have to be on his guard from now on. Bob understands men; it’s women who confuse him and make him angry, which he is, once again, and so once again he slams down the receiver and knocks back the Canadian Club.

The room is gray and damp and smells to Bob of the death of men and of their debts. Everywhere he looks he sees something that reminds him of male helplessness and ineptitude — the framed pictures of Jessica on horseback, on water skis, in her Holy Communion dress, pictures of a girl gone north to Connecticut with her mother because her father, the fool who snapped the pictures, was too loud, too selfishly obsessed with becoming rich, too insensitive to anyone’s pain but his own. And the room itself, with its department store decorations, huge, ornately framed pictures of New England villages and covered bridges in autumn hung above the long, low sofas and marble-topped tables, the pale green wall-to-wall carpeting, the neo-colonial wet bar with thirty different kinds of liqueurs underneath, everything in the room expensive, ready-made, impersonal — Bob sees it clearly now, all for show.

All for nothing, Bob thinks. His brother’s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because they were empty. But he never believed that it would all come to this, to nothing. Actually, he had envied his brother’s show, had thought that the appearance of confidence, knowledge, wealth and power would somehow over the years demand or create the reality, and Eddie would in fact be confident, knowledgeable, powerful and wealthy. Bob thought that was how you became those things. You created an outer man you could admire, and then after a time, over years, the inner man gave in to the pressure of the outer and fell into line, and from then on, the two marched in step together, like brothers. And when one died, the other died with him.

But here is Bob, living on alone, and if he feels more like a child than a man, it’s the women who make him feel that way, he thinks, his wife, his sister-in-law, his friend’s girlfriend. What he believes he needs to induce these women to make him feel like the grown man he’s become is money, and he has none, or sex, and after last night with Honduras, he hasn’t much of that, either. Since the birth of Robbie last fall, a shadow has fallen between Bob and Elaine, so that they rarely make love now, and when they do, it’s perfunctory and routine, a polite form of exchange. Elaine grew fat during the pregnancy and stayed thick in the hips and belly afterwards and started to speak of her body as if it were not hers but belonged instead to a pathetic, neglected, insecure friend. Anything that pointed to its existence distressed her, and sex most emphatically pointed to the existence of her body. And for Bob, the birth of his son has resulted, oddly, in his feeling outnumbered and alienated from his entire family — the three children and mother became one unit, and he became a solitary, outriding, secondary unit, like a comet passing accidentally through their solar system and moving on into deep space alone. That is not the kind of man who strolls through his house feeling sexy.

Bob remembers that the last time he felt truly sexy, which is to say, the last time he felt like an adult male instead of a boy inside an outsized body, was with Marguerite, before he went out there with the gun, of course. If only he could see her now, tall and mocha-colored, with her soft, Southern voice licking him all over, if only he could lie with her in a darkened room and tell her about Eddie and how strange the idea of going on alone without him makes him feel, then he would be able to understand it all, Eddie’s death and life and the suicide that’s made one the expression of the other. He would be able in the telling to learn how he is different from Eddie, as one man is different from another and not as a child is different from an adult.

But it’s too late now for him to talk to Marguerite. He ruined that possibility the last time he saw her, that afternoon in October when he nearly went crazy with a gun in his hand. She hates him now, Bob is sure. She probably hates all white men now, he thinks, and then he winces, for he is once again thinking of them both in terms of color, which he cannot seem to avoid doing, even though every time he does it, he loses sight of her face and voice and almost forgets her name. It’s not that he believes there is anything morally wrong with this; it’s that he’s genuinely frustrated, feels deprived, experiences a loss when it happens.

Maybe if he called her on the telephone and chatted for a few minutes about trivial things, for old time’s sake, say, just to catch up, say, he would be able to read her voice well enough to know whether, if he asked her to meet him, she would say yes, sure, why not? He will not ask her to meet him if she is going to say no. Then it would be like talking to all the other women he’s talked to this morning, and it’s specifically to counter the effect of those conversations that he is deciding now to call Marguerite Dill.

He can’t remember her number and has to look it up in the telephone book in the kitchen, which he finally locates under a stack of old newspapers on the table. It’s almost twelve-thirty, he notices, and a weekday. She won’t be home. He says this to himself with relief, which surprises him. But then she answers the phone, says, “Hello?” and he’s so glad to hear her voice, so thrilled by its familiar, buttery tone, that he cannot speak.

She repeats, “Hello?”

He opens his mouth, wets his lips with his tongue, but says nothing.

“Who’s there? Hello?”

“Marguerite, it’s me, Bob. I …”

She’s warm and quick, a kind, friendly, intelligent woman who takes the initiative in the conversation, as if she knows that to do otherwise would threaten Bob and make the conversation difficult. She asks him questions, where has he been living since he left the store, what kind of work has he been doing, how is his family, and she succeeds in conveying with the form and tone of her questions the clear impression that she now regards him as a dear, old friend.

Bob responds as he must, as a dear, old friend. “Well, I was in town … and I wanted to say hello. My brother … Eddie, he died.”

Marguerite is shocked, saddened, full of pity for everyone. “You must feel awful!” she exclaims. “Daddy’s going to be sad to hear this. He was right fond of your brother, you know. He hated leaving him when the store closed up,” she says, adding, “That’s how come you managed to catch me now. I come home at lunchtime to check on Daddy, ’cause he’s here alone now. He’s fine,” she says, as if Bob has asked after the old man.

“Good, that’s good. Give him my regards. Listen, Marguerite, I really wanted to talk to you … to apologize for … well, for the way I acted there, back in October, you know. I … I was under a lot of pressure, a hell of a lot of pressure, and, well, I guess I kinda lost it for a while, you know?”

She is sweet and forgiving. He needn’t apologize, she understands, though maybe she didn’t really understand it all as well then. But what with the new baby coming, and what with his troubles with Eddie and the store, after that robbery … which reminds her, she says, her voice brightening. “You remember that man, husband of my cousin, the one you chased over here?”

“Yeah, listen, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I want to apologize to you about, that more than anything else. I mean …”

“No, no, no! You were right about him! That one, he’s a bad man, all right. He got himself arrested by the police up in North Carolina about a month ago. My cousin told me all about it. Robbing a liquor store, just like he was robbing yours, and turned out he told the police up there everything.”

Bob is dumbfounded. “What? What do you mean?”

“Leon, that’s his name, Leon Stokes, he admitted robbing a whole bunch of liquor stores, including yours, most of them in Florida and Georgia. They found some drugs in his car, and I guess they made some kinda deal with him on who sold him the stuff or something, because he’s in jail now. But only for a couple years for robbing the liquor store in North Carolina, because he had to witness at a couple other big drug trials up there and in New York. So you were right.”

“I was right?”

“Sure were, honey. Right as rain. It’s me who ought to be apologizing.”

“I was right? That doesn’t make sense. I was wrong.”

“Nope. You had the man, all right. Leon Stokes. I had no idea, you understand. I was just giving him a lift over to Auburndale, where he said he had some friends who were putting him up a while. If I’d have known, well …”

“No, no, you don’t understand,” Bob says. “I was wrong! It doesn’t matter that I was right about the guy; I was acting crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing, you know? I mean, Jesus, Marguerite, I could’ve shot the guy, and I didn’t even know it was the guy.”

“Yeah, and you would’ve done a lot of people a favor, probably, if you had shot him.”

“No, listen, you don’t understand. Listen, I really do need to talk with you. Can we get together, can we meet someplace? After you get off from work?”

There is a long silence, and finally Marguerite says in a quiet, steady voice, “I don’t think we should meet, Bob.”

“What? Why?”

“Bob, it’s over now between us. Right?”

“Well, yeah, sure.”

“There’s no sense firing it all up again. It was nice and … and interesting for a while, and we’re friends now and all. But we shouldn’t see each other anymore. Besides, I got a man now, and he wouldn’t like it….”

“Aw, Christ!” Bob bawls. “Jesus H. Christ! You got a man now. I suppose a black man.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.” Her voice has gone cold.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing at all. Look, I’m just … I’m disappointed, that’s all. I’m sorry. I wanted to talk with you, see, about stuff. Eddie and all, I guess, and oh, Jesus, what the hell does it matter? I’m really sorry for everything. You … you’re fine, you’re wonderful. Don’t worry, I won’t come around or call you anymore or anything. Don’t worry, I understand. Well, look,” he says, changing gears, “I got to go now, I gotta arrange Eddie’s funeral and all, and his wife is flying down from Connecticut….”

“I’m real sorry about your brother, Bob.”

“Yeah, well, I guess he was a lot worse off than anybody thought. Look, I got to go. It’s been good talking to you.”

“I’m real sorry, Bob.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Goodbye,” she says, and quickly hangs up. He holds the dead receiver in his hand for several minutes, then places it slowly back in its cradle. The blood on his hands has dried to a dark brown map.

He stands, studies the wreckage that surrounds him, and walks slowly through the living room to the front door, opens it and walks outside, leaving the door wide open behind him. It’s still raining, a dense, straight, windless rain from a low, overhanging sky. Bob wants to keep going, but he doesn’t know where to go. He wants to get into his car and back it slowly down the driveway to the road, turn and head out of here, light out of Florida altogether. But to where? He can’t go back to New Hampshire, and there are no new places anymore, none that he can imagine, and if he heads south again, back to Miami and the Keys, it’ll be as if he’s gone in a circle. He turns and returns to Eddie’s house and slowly, methodically, starts cleaning up the mess his brother has left behind.

9

Bob is seated aft in the Angel Blue in one of the fighting chairs, swiveling it idly from side to side. Ave emerges from the galley carrying two king-sized cans of Schlitz. “Here you go,” he says, handing one of the cans to Bob.

It’s dark, the boat is tied up in her slip in the marina next to the Belinda Blue, and there’s a three-quarter moon in the eastern sky, scraps of silver cloud drifting across its face. A pair of pelicans perched on a piling near the bow of the Belinda Blue seem to watch the two men. The boats rock gently in the still water, and along the pier here and there a man and a woman or sometimes several men and several women sit aboard their boats and talk and drink. Behind them, at the end of the pier, the jukebox in the Clam Shack is playing a Kenny Rogers song about a gambler.

“Sorry I couldn’t see you yesterday or sooner today,” Ave says as he eases into the other fighting chair. He’s barefoot, wearing shorts and a zippered nylon jacket. His long reddish hair fluffs out from his head like an aureole, and the pale hairs on his tanned legs and the backs of his hands shine in the moonlight like straw. He puts his feet out and rests them on the gunwale and lights a cigarette, offering the pack to Bob.

“No, thanks.” Bob is dressed, as usual, in chinos and white tee shirt, and tonight he’s got his captain’s hat on. He takes a sip of beer. “No, that’s okay. I had a lot to do anyhow the last couple of days, with the funeral and all. And then I had a party of six this morning to take out. This’s the first chance I’ve had to sit still for more’n ten minutes.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t get back till real late last night. And then I had some business to take care of today, so, yeah, me too,” Ave says. He studies the pelicans a second, as if aiming a weapon at their long, drooping heads. “You know how I feel about Eddie, Bob. I’m real sorry. Whew! Incredible, isn’t it? Who’d have figured it? You know?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, who’d have figured ol’ Fast Eddie would take the fucking pipe?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s … ah, there’s no way it was accidental or something, is there? I mean, he was epileptic, I remember, and funny things happen sometimes.”

Bob snorts. “No way. I found the body, his body. He was having them, seizures, quite a lot lately, but no, this was his own doing, his decision.”

“Jesus. I just can’t believe it. You know? There’s no way it coulda been fixed up? You know, arranged. He was playing with some pretty heavy dudes up there, and maybe …”

“No. They did an autopsy.”

“Incredible, man. Just fucking incredible. Ol’ Fast Eddie, always running around yakking and laughing his head off, a million theories. Good hockey player, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Incredible, though. I just can’t figure it.”

“Well, Eddie wasn’t what he seemed, that’s all. And it took something like this, I guess, to let us know that.”

“Yeah.” Ave takes another slug from his Schlitz. “A lot of people aren’t what they seem. You know?”

“Yeah.”

The men are silent for a moment, and then Ave says, “Honduras told me you fucked her the other night.”

Bob says nothing, looks down at the top of the can of Schlitz as if lowering his head to pray. “Honduras told you that?”

“Yeah. True?”

Bob is silent, and then he says, “Well, Ave, what if I said no? What if I said I drove over here the other night looking for you, and you weren’t here, so she gave me some grass and some coke and then came on to me, only I turned her down? What if I said that?”

“You saying that’s what happened?”

“Jesus H. Christ, Ave. If I did fuck her, why would she turn around and tell you? It only makes sense for her to claim I fucked her if instead what I did was turn her down. She’d hafta be pretty pissed at me, wouldn’t she?”

Ave scratches his pointed chin. “She’s a strange girl, lots of weirdness there. But she doesn’t fuck my friends. Not while she’s fucking me, anyhow. She knows that. And my friends, they don’t fuck her, either. They’re supposed to know that. Did you fuck her, Bob?”

Bob says, “I’m going to tell you the truth. And then I’m going to ask you a hard question that I expect you to answer with the truth. Fair?”

Ave looks over at his friend, who is staring upward, the fighting chair tilted back, at the night sky, a wash of stars overhead. “Yeah. Fair.”

“No. I didn’t fuck Honduras,” Bob says, still looking at the dark blue sky. “Did you fuck Elaine?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Did you fuck Elaine?’ ”

“Jesus Christ, Bob! Why do you ask a thing like that?”

“She told me you fucked her. That’s why. Four years ago, back in Catamount. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it was last night, you know?”

“Women are crazy, man,” Ave says. He exhales noisily. “Crazy.”

Bob sips slowly from his beer and watches Ave over the top of the can. “Did you?”

Ave says, “Listen, I like Elaine a lot. A whole lot. But if she says I fucked her, she’s lying.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. We … okay, we talked about it once, you know, kind of flirting with the idea. I guess I’d had a few too many, and maybe she had too, I don’t know, it was a long time ago. I don’t know where you were.”

“Out on the boat. Fishing. I remember where I was. I was a couple miles off the Isles of Shoals outside Portsmouth. It was summer, late July, early August, the bluefish were running, and you had some kinda excuse for staying home.”

“Okay, okay, I don’t remember what it was. But anyhow, she didn’t exactly come on to me, but it was sort of clear that if I made a move … well, she’d respond in kind. But honest to God, Bob, I said no. Hey, she’s a good-looking woman, but no way I was going to fuck my buddy’s wife.”

“So why’d she tell me you did?”

“Beats the shit out of me! Women are crazy, man! Like Honduras. I mean, why’d she tell me you fucked her?”

“I didn’t,” Bob says quietly.

“I know you didn’t, man! But why’d she say you did?”

“She was pissed at me for turning her down, I guess.”

“Well,” Ave says, “there you go.”

“I guess so,” Bob says, and he sighs. “I guess so.”

For a while, the men say nothing. Fireflies dart past them and go out, and the pelicans shift their weight, turn and watch a boat on the opposite side of the pier. Bob says, “Ave, I have got to make more money than I’m making.”

“No shit. I’m glad you noticed.” Ave gets up from his chair. “ ’Nother beer?”

“Yeah.” He collapses the empty can and hands it to Ave, who heads forward to the galley. When he returns and passes Bob a fresh can, cold and solid as ice, Bob says, “I’m stuck in a fucking rut, Ave. My wheels are spinning. I can’t make enough from my share of the Belinda Blue to live on, let alone save up a few bucks every month so I can buy a larger share so I can make enough money to live on. It’s what you call a vicious circle. And it’s making me crazy, it’s making Elaine crazy — for Christ’s sake, she’s gone and taken a job working nights at the Rusty Scupper up in Islamorada. I just dropped her off there a while ago. Hafta pick her up at one.”

“Jesus. What about the kids?”

“Baby-sitter. Tonight. Woman across the way. Otherwise, me.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s worse. Ruthie, she’s got … she’s got some problems, emotional problems, and now the school says she’s got to get some kinda special treatments at the mental health clinic down in Marathon, and who the fuck can afford Blue Cross these days? I used to have a great health insurance plan when I was fixing oil burners, but working for yourself like this, you know, you just say forget it, I’ll take my chances.”

“Yeah. I don’t have any health insurance.”

“You don’t have any kids, either. That’s really what I’m talking about. I got to make more money.”

Ave says, “Well, Bob, there’s ways.”

“Yeah, I know. But I got kids and a wife, like I said. I can’t take the kinda chances you take. Anyhow, what I’ve been thinking is, there’s a way I can get a bigger share of the boat, which would let me keep a bigger share of the profits. But I need you to help me.”

Ave listens carefully, like a bank director, as Bob unfolds his plan: Ave will loan Bob forty-five thousand dollars, which Bob will then pay over to Ave for the rest of the boat, and then, with Bob’s increased share of the profits, he will pay Ave back, say, a minimum of five thousand a year, or whatever Ave thinks is right, with interest, which should also be whatever Ave thinks is right. Bob will pay for all repairs and maintenance, operating costs and so on, everything associated with the Belinda Blue, just as if she were his own boat.

“It would be your own boat,” Ave points out. “That’s the trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

Ave sighs heavily. “I owe a lotta money, Bob. A shitload. And the Belinda Blue’s my collateral. I can’t sell her without paying off the bank what I owe. They got the title. For the apartment they got it. If I hadda come up with that kinda money, to buy the title back, plus loan you forty-five more, I’d be talking close to a hundred grand. More, maybe. I haven’t checked lately what I owe on the apartment. And even if I could come up with that kinda money, look where I’d come out. You’d own the Belinda Blue for a total of sixty grand, and I’d be out fifty grand minimum plus my three-quarters of the profits she turns, which ain’t much, I know, but it makes a difference.”

“Well, there’d be five thousand a year, plus interest …”

“You don’t call that money, do you?”

Bob sinks lower into his chair. “Shit,” he says. “I thought you owned the boat outright. I didn’t know …”

“No, man! The bank’s got me by the nuts. Just like everyone else around here. Why the hell do you think everyone with a boat is running dope, for Christ’s sake? It’s not to live good, pal. It’s just to live. It all ends up going back to the banks. I couldn’t run anything with the Belinda Blue, she’s too fucking slow, so I hadda borrow money to buy a boat fast enough to make enough money to pay back the money I borrowed in the first place. That fifteen grand you gave me for your share of the Belinda Blue, man, that gave me the down payment for the Angel Blue. You talk about vicious circles. We’re all in one. Circles inside of circles.”

Bob lights a cigarette, inhales deeply and slouches further down in his chair. “How come the bank let you sell off one-fourth of the boat, if you’d gone and borrowed against it? I never dealt with any bank, I just dealt with you. I got that bill of sale you wrote out, that’s all.”

Ave gets up from his chair and stands at the stern, looking over at the broad bow of the Belinda Blue rocking lightly in the water. Then, his back to Bob, he says, “I suppose you could get me into a heap of trouble with that bill of sale.”

“Jesus.” Bob feels himself falling backwards and down, as if down a well. In front of him and inside a small circle of blue light is Avery Boone’s back, getting smaller and more distant, while he himself descends faster and faster and waits for the crash when he hits the bottom, for that’s all that’s left to him now, a backwards plummet and then a crash, and then nothing. It’s over. He’s ruined everything, he’s lost everything, he’s given away everything. There was the house in Catamount and the Boston whaler, their furniture, shabby and mostly secondhand, but theirs, and his job at Abenaki Oil and promises of an eventual office job there — there was a life, and because it was under his control, it was his life; and then he traded a big part of that life for one with more promises and less control, but even so, it felt much of the time like his life, for there was still a part of it that he controlled; and then he made another trade, giving away control for promises again, property for dreams, each step of the way, until he’s ended up tonight with nothing but promises, dreams and fantasies left to trade with. And no takers.

He’s run his life backwards, from what should have been the end to what should have been the beginning. He’s reached the end too soon, at thirty-one, and has nowhere else to go. You could say he shouldn’t have listened to Eddie, he shouldn’t have listened to Avery Boone, he shouldn’t have trusted these men, his brother and his best friend, men whose lives, though slightly more complicated than Bob’s, were no more in control than his, and you’d be right. You wouldn’t get any argument from Bob Dubois, not now, not tonight aboard the Angel Blue in Moray Key. He knows, however, that even if he hadn’t followed his older brother to Oleander Park and hadn’t followed Ave on down to the Keys, if instead he’d struck out for Arizona or California, where he knew no one, a stranger in a new world, he’d still end up one night just as he is now, his life a useless, valueless jumble of broken plans, frustrated ambitions, empty dreams. He’d end up with nothing to trade on.

It’s not bad luck, Bob knows, life’s not that irrational an arrangement of forces; and though he’s no genius, it’s not plain stupidity, either, for too many stupid people get on in the world. It’s dreams. And especially the dream of the new life, the dream of starting over. The more a man trades off his known life, the one in front of him that came to him by birth and the accidents and happenstance of youth, the more of that he trades for dreams of a new life, the less power he has. Bob Dubois believes this now. But he’s fallen to a dark, cold place where the walls are sheer and slick, and all the exits have been sealed. He’s alone. He’s going to have to live here, if he’s going to live at all. This is how a good man loses his goodness.

Ave turns and faces him. Someone aboard a ketch a few slips down is running a blender, making margaritas. “I can get you some quick money,” he says. “Not a shitload, but enough. Enough to pay for Ruthie’s shrink or whatever.”

Bob speaks in a low, thick voice. “Not drugs. No. I still got kids. I can’t afford to lose. Like you can.”

“Who can afford to lose? Nobody can. Anyhow, no, not dope. Haitians.”

“Haitians?”

“From the Bahamas. Five, six hundred a head, whatever the market bears. It’s easy. You just drop them off along the beach someplace — Key Largo, North Miami, they don’t give a shit. You can load up with ten or twenty of them over at New Providence, drop them off before daylight and be home by breakfast. Tyrone knows the lingo. He can set it up for you. All you do is drive the boat. And what you make is yours, less the twenty-five percent or whatever you work out with Tyrone. Look, I owe you, Bob.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you do. A lotta people owe me. I’m starting to see that.”

“You can always do dope, you know. The money’s bigger, and the work’s steadier. I mean, you run outa Haitians after a couple trips and have to wait till some more come over or save up the money for the ticket. Same with the Cubans from Mariel. But there’s always a market for coke and grass, and there’s always somebody looking for a boat to take it to the marketplace. It’s riskier, of course. They got a lot more guys out there from Customs than they do from Immigration.”

Bob cracks open his can of Schlitz and takes a long swallow from it. “I dunno, it’s not the risk. Though that’s part of it. I just don’t like dealing with drugs somehow. I’m still a country boy at heart, I guess.”

Ave steps forward and slaps his old friend on the shoulder and grins. “You sure are, you ol’ sonofabitch. A goddamn New Hampshire country boy!” Then he starts to laugh, and Bob joins him, lightly at first, then merely smiling, as if Ave has told a filthy joke he doesn’t quite get.

After a few seconds, Ave stops laughing and takes a swig from his beer, wipes his chin with the back of his hand and says, “Whew! It really is funny, though, when you think about it.”

“Yeah? What, exactly?”

“Oh, shit, man, you know. The two of us, a coupla hicks outa the hills of New Hampshire, ending up like this. Running coke from Colombia and niggers from Haiti. It’s fucking incredible.” “Yeah. Incredible.” “I mean, who’d have thought it?” “Yeah. Who’d have thought it.”

“I mean, you,” Ave says, pointing a finger at Bob, and he starts to laugh again. “The Granite Skate! You!”