Continental Drift

Vanise turned away from us and strolled toward the door as if she were going to a dance. Then they were gone. The boy, who was stepping into manhood sooner than he was ready, was gone. The girl and her baby were gone. The money was gone. We remained, and the small children, they remained. The storm was over. Under the house the chickens fluttered and scratched. Aubin had dry wood he would give us if we promised to repay him quickly, but we could not go there, not yet. We would stay hungry a little longer, and perhaps by evening some of our own wood would be dry enough to burn. Then we would kill a chicken and cook it and eat it.

Making a Killing

1

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