Continental Drift

Bob isn’t sure he’ll be able to learn much about money while standing behind a counter selling whiskey and beer to servicemen — the store is located on Route 17, halfway between Winter Haven and Shure air base — keeping inventory, stocking shelves, unloading delivery trucks and crushing and stuffing the empty cartons into a Dempster-Dumpster out back, but Eddie reassures him that one morning he’s going to wake up and everything will be clear to him. It happened that way to him, Eddie says, only he was just a kid when it happened, one year out of high school and working in the Thom McAn’s shoe store in Catamount, wondering how come he was selling shoes instead of buying or making them, because it seemed to him, he tells Bob, that the people who were buying shoes and the people who were making shoes had a lot more money than the people who were only selling shoes. That’s when it all came clear to him.

“What came clear?” Bob asks. He’s begun to fear that maybe Elaine is right, that Eddie is a little crazy—“off the beam,” is how she likes to put it — which makes Bob picture his brother as a cartoon character walking happily on air while the rest of them cling terrified to a tree trunk laid between two cliffs across a bottomless chasm.

“It came to me that money is what makes the world go round. Like I said. I know, I know, everybody with a mouth says it, but most people don’t really believe it, which is why they don’t really understand it. You have to believe something before you can understand it. Anyhow, that’s why most people end up ignoring the facts, and the most important fact is that the guys with most of the money are always doing at least two of the only three things you can do in this life, which happen to be making things, selling things and buying things. The really big guys, your Rockefellers, your Fords, your Du Ponts, they do all three. Because that’s all you can do in life anyhow, three things. If you do at least two of those things, and one of them happens to be selling, then your ass is golden. Simple. It came to me when I was eighteen, and it’s been my guiding light ever since. My philosophy of life. My religion. I buy things and I sell things. All you ever done, up to now, is buy things. And the only way that takes you is downhill. Sure, you sold your time and your skills when you were fixing people’s broken furnaces in the middle of the fucking night in the middle of the fucking winter, but in the real world, the world that money makes go round, time and skills, brother, are not things. A trade is not a thing. So I buy land and I buy booze, which, as you know, are things, and then I sell them for more than I paid for them, and then I take the difference and buy some more land and some more booze, and maybe I build a couple houses too, which I sell, and so on up the hill, all the way to pig heaven. That’s the only way to beat the system, kid.”

“What is?” What in hell is this man talking about? Bob wonders.

“You make things and you sell them, or else you buy things and you sell them. Which means that you can never really work for someone else. You always got to work for yourself.”

“Well, I work for you.”

“Hey. No, you don’t, Bob. Only temporary. Only until you catch hold of the system. Then we’re partners. Then you’ll be out there making yourself a fucking killing, man. A killing.”

Bob presses his brother for details on how, exactly, and when he will be transformed from employee to partner, from being a man who merely sells things to one who both buys and sells things, but Eddie, like a badly schooled priest explaining the mass, grows vague and dogmatic, until finally, since Bob persists, Eddie reminds him that it all comes down to trust in him, personal trust. Faith. Belief. After all, they are brothers, aren’t they, and if you can’t have faith in your brother, who can you have faith in? Strangers?