Continental Drift полностью

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.