Continental Drift

The relief and pleasure he took from the conviction lasted only a few seconds, however. As he started toward his car, he put the folded newspapers under his left arm and shoved both hands deep into his pants pockets and with his left hand instantly felt the money, a packet of bills a half-inch thick. There it was, blood money, uncounted, forgotten, invisible for whole hours at a time, then suddenly reappearing, linking everything back together again, closing and welding fast the split in his life, so that his dreams and his daily life were one thing again. It’s horrible, horrible! he thought, and he almost cried out, and he withdrew his hand as if he had touched a cold, dry serpent there.

He wandered in and out of the trailer all the rest of the afternoon, unable to leave the place, unable to sit down and make his home there, a ghostly figure who repeatedly appeared in the yard and then stood at the threshold outside the screened door for a few moments, until finally the woman and children inside felt his presence and looked up at him, and he turned away and went back to the road again. Up the lane to the highway he walked, then back, past the trailers to the water, where gulls and terns poked between chunks of coral and blond, almost translucent crabs scrambled in the shallows for shelter. A car driven by Horace came and went, and all the while Bob kept his back to the man. Around five-thirty, Allie Hubbell came home from the crafts shops in Key Largo, walking in from the bus stop on the highway, and. Bob kept his back to her too. She stood a moment on her stoop, watching him, and not until she had lit a cigarette and gone inside did he turn slowly back toward his own trailer. He stopped next to his car, got in, sat behind the wheel awhile, got out, walked to the water again, resumed peering at the horizon. The sky was low, zinc gray and smooth, like sheet metal. A steady southeast wind blew, keeping the water choppy and dark as old, cold coffee.

Finally, Elaine came out on the steps and called his name. He turned and faced her.

“You want supper?” she shouted into the wind.

He shook his head no and turned away from her, and she went quickly inside, closing both doors against the wind.

A little later, when it was nearly dark, Elaine came out again, this time wearing a pink cardigan sweater buttoned to the throat to cover her bare shoulders and the low neckline of the short black dress she wore for work. Wobbling on high heels in the sand, she came up to Bob and asked him for the car keys.

“I’m sick of taking the bus,” she said. “I hate being seen like this five nights a week, and you don’t like anybody from up there giving me a ride home, remember?”

“What’d you do last night?” he said. As if he’d asked an idle question, he pursed his lips and watched a crab at his feet scuttle to the water.

She studied his profile for a second, then said, “Sunday and Monday I’m off, Bob. Remember? I spent the evening at home, talking to the police.”

“This Tuesday?”

“Yes, this is Tuesday. What did you do last night?”

He didn’t answer.

“I said, ‘What did you do last night?’ “

“You know what I did. Where I was,” he said in a thick, sullen voice.

“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t. All I know is you left here early Sunday in the car and you drove back into the yard this morning, and that’s all I know. That’s it. Oh, yes, I know the police met you this morning at Moray Key as you came off the boat. Because they said they would, and if you hadn’t been there, they would have been back here. And I know they thought for a while you were involved with Ave’s drug business, because they said they did. Maybe they still think it. But really, in the end, that’s everything I know about you lately. You, though, you know everything about me. What I do every minute of my life. No surprises. Nothing to sneak up and hit you on the head when you’re not looking. If you told me right now this minute that for the last two days you were smuggling heroin or cocaine or whatever, guns, anything, I’d just say, ‘Oh, so that’s the kind of man he is.’ You could tell me you had a girlfriend in Miami or someplace and spent the last two days in bed with her, and I’d say the same thing. Because I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what kind of man you are, Bob. That’s the truth. You understand that? Somehow it wouldn’t seem so awful to me, so hard to take, if you didn’t know what kind of woman I am. But you do. You know me. And it’s not fair. And it’s hard. Hard. This is not like it used to be with us. And I don’t know where it went from being fair to being unfair. Because I never knew that’s what it was between us, fair. I only knew it after it was gone, after it had been unfair a long time. A long time now. And you know it. Don’t you?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t look at her eyes, so he turned away from her altogether and faced the darkening sea.