Continental Drift

As for Bob, they do not believe that he is as his friend and business partner Avery Boone insists, that is, innocent of the charges they have placed against Boone himself, which charges result from Ave’s attempt the night before to deliver three-quarters of a pound of uncut cocaine to a man employed by the Federal Narcotics Commission. They do not believe that anyone, especially a man with a boat, can rub as closely to Ave’s business as Bob has and not also be profiting from it. There is no clean evidence that links Bob to Ave’s drug smuggling and sales, however, just as there is nothing and no one to tie the girl who calls herself Honduras to the trade, so both Bob and Honduras are let go. With Ave’s van, like both his boats, now impounded and his condominium instantly repossessed by the bank, Honduras packs her duffel and hitches down Route 1 to Key West, where by the following sunset she has moved into a beach house owned by a screenwriter who spends his winters on the Keys bonefishing and phoning his wife up in Michigan every few days to report on his loneliness. Unable to make bail, Ave mopes in jail in Marathon. Bob, reluctantly, goes home.

Bob lays the newspaper down on the kitchen table. There is a photograph above the article, and he studies it for a moment as if trying to memorize every element of the picture, as if preparing to draw a copy for himself. With his fingertip he traces the dark line between the white beach and the gray sea, from the upper right corner diagonally across to the lower left. Then he traces the outline of the black body lying face down on the beach, a woman, her arms folded under her chest, the soles of her bare feet facing the camera.

“Awful, isn’t it?” Elaine says, looking over his shoulder from the sink, where she stands, eggy plate in hand, cleaning the breakfast dishes while Robbie takes his morning nap. The girls have left for school. Bob has been home for a day and a night now, since being released by the police, but he has not slept. He’s reading this morning’s newspaper for the fifth or sixth time, smoking his third pack of cigarettes since walking in the door yesterday at ten, bleary-eyed, limp-limbed and, for the most part, silent.

He didn’t have to tell her about Ave. She’d already been informed by the police the previous evening, when, after arresting him in a bar in Key Largo, they’d raided Ave’s apartment, detained Honduras, impounded the Angel Blue and gone looking for Bob, Tyrone and the Belinda Blue. Confident that Bob was in no way involved in Ave’s smuggling and drug selling, Elaine nonetheless was terrified for him. She repeated to the police what Bob had told her, that he’d gone to New Providence in the Bahamas to take a large party of French Canadians out tarpon fishing and would return the next morning. When the police had finally seemed to believe her and had driven off, she got down on her knees right there in the living room and prayed straight out that Bob had not unknowingly allowed the Belinda Blue to carry drugs for Ave. Bob was capable of that, she knew. He’s not stupid, she thought, and he’s not naive about Ave’s business, not anymore, but even so, she knew that his capacity to behave as if he were both was great. His arrival home, then, relieved her, as if a terrible and likely disaster had been barely but wholly avoided.

His behavior afterwards confused her, however, and then it began to frighten her. He went out around noon and bought copies of all the newspapers he could find, the Miami Herald, the Marathon Keynoter, the Key West Citizen, examined each one carefully, and apparently not finding what he was searching for, tossed them all into the trash can under the sink. Elaine assumed he was looking for accounts of Ave’s arrest.

“It won’t be in the papers till tomorrow,” she told him. “Or tonight at the earliest. If then. They don’t write about those things anymore, they’re so common.”

“What things?” he snapped. He had turned on the radio and was spinning the dial rapidly past music, stopping for a few seconds whenever he found a news broadcast, then, when it turned out to be a weather or sports report, moving impatiently on.

“You know. Drugs. Except when it’s millions of dollars’ worth. Ave’s not one of those big-time drug dealers, I’m sure. Which means he’ll probably have to go to jail. It’s always the big guys who get off, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s awful, though,” she said, her voice going tender. “I know how you must feel. I feel it too.”

“About what?”

“Ave. Him going to jail.”

“Yeah. He’ll do okay, though. A couple of years, maybe.”

“But then he’ll have to start all over again,” she said. “With nothing.” She stood behind him, her hands lightly kneading his taut shoulders, while he went on fiddling with the radio. “Why don’t you try to sleep? You must be exhausted after all this. Otherwise, you won’t be able to stay awake tonight when I’m at work….”